Religious experience anyone?

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18 Dec 2012, 3:35 am

Are you including me?

I am not in any way against the existence of supernatural things. I am against adhering to complicated supernatural explanations that don't sufficiently explain things better than simpler natural explanations do.

ValentineWiggin
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20 Dec 2012, 1:49 am

MCalavera wrote:

+1

The neutral position is one of skepticism until empirical or analytical evidence of a phenomenon is found,
and it hasn't been, yet...unless you count the goosebumps, cold chills, hallucinations, fantasies, and grand delusions of self-importance of our species.

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verlorenModus
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20 Dec 2012, 2:47 am

Oodain wrote:

verlorenModus wrote:

i distrust people who are absolutely against the supernatural as much as i distrust those who take it to the other extreme... i distrust ALL extreme absolutists. they are blind to anything that does not fit their view. i think the multiverse is large enough to contain everything that can be imagined by our puny species. and then some. i think anything is possible. everything that can happen does happen. i think this thread has so far been mostly nothing but pointless bickering between atheist/agnostics and theist/mystics that can be found all over the internet. i think this thread could be much more than that. heres a question for you atheist/agnostics, why the hell are you even in this thread? to troll people over their religious experiences? to proselytize? if you detest this stuff so much, then why are you here? atheist missionaries are the worst... of all people they should know better.
/rant

i do not adhere to any particular faith, but i like elements of most. the one thing i do not like is worship... it seems like slavery to me. you could call me a nay-theist, i believe gods exist but i do not think they deserve adulation and supplication. they are just entities that are a little further along than we are. i would rather learn from them than service them. but such entities tend not to like that... fostering competition and all that. i think the universe is alive but i question whether or not it is a conscious entity. i see us as cells in its vast body. or i could just be a nut.

if it is a part of the natural multiverse then it really isnt supernatural is it?

if gods are only gods because of their advancement will we as people then become gods?

some of these questions carry a philosophical weight and that in turn means that some words like supernatural in relation to philosophy doesnt simply mean godlike figure= supernatural.

i dont think there is any gods as described by any organized religion on earth, nor do i think there are divine beings of any kind.

that said i dont discount the possiblity of beings far beyond us in one way shape or form , i just cant see them as gods, if it exists it's natural and will need to obey the laws of nature, even if they are different from the laws we observe (and how can i discount that possiblity if a multiverse existed?)

perhaps 'supernatural' was a poor choice... i was trying for a word to encompass all religious/mystical/spiritual/and so on.

yes i think we will advance into "gods" eventually... if extinction doesnt get us first. but that isnt necessarily the end of the road...

i did not say godlike figure = supernatural nor did i mean to imply such. again 'supernatural' may have been a poor choice... do you have a better word?

i think our 'gods' and 'religions' may be just distorted views of things that exist... and are beyond our current understanding. i dont think its *just* scientific understanding that we lack. but it is not because we are 'bad' or 'stupid', we are just a young species. we'll learn. or we'll die. such is survival.

MCalavera wrote:

if that is your view, then no, i am not including you. i meant that to be about those who *completely* discount the 'supernatural' (for lack of a better word) in all shapes and forms.

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30 Dec 2012, 1:58 am

MrXxx wrote:

Yes. But don't expect an explanation in a simple forum post to help you understand it.

My personal experiences (and I stress the plural there), are too numerous to list. It's not any one "Aha!" moment, angels singing, or "Come into the light" kind of thing. For me, it's been a great number of very small, almost seemingly insignifiant occurrences that if considered separately would appear to be nothing more than coincidences. Taken all together though, in the context of a lifetime there emerged a decades long pattern, a preponderance of evidence that eventually became far too numerous and significant to deny any longer.

The problem with this though, is that within the context of this thread there is no possible way to convince you or anyone else that it is very real, no illusion, and far beyond scientific explanation. It is something one has to learn and experience for oneself.

Whether anyone else believes me is irrelevant. I know. I lived through it. I experienced it all. Why others have not, isn't for me to determine. I have, and have met many others who also have, exactly the way I did. They know what I mean.

I have no need to convince anyone else of it. It is the kind of thing one has to experience and conclude on their own. No amount of debate or persuasive argument will ever convince anyone that hasn't experienced it for themselves.

And that's about all that's worth telling in this context.

This is one of those few posts in these forums that I hope I had written. When I first read it, my reaction was, "This guy knows."

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30 Dec 2012, 2:22 am

Speaking of possession, there is a discrepancy between that and mental illness, since the latter isn't fixated on abnormal loathing of things considered holy. Some rather well-informed informed religious people will insist that there is still a link between mental illness and one's spiritual life (or lack thereof).

NAKnight
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30 Dec 2012, 10:46 am

@MrXxx,

Well said. Very insightful words and thoughts there.

Best Regards,

Jake

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mitchmaitree
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25 Dec 2016, 4:09 pm

Yes! Let me preface this by saying I left my parent's church at age 13 and became an atheist. I explored transcendental experiences, primarily with LSD, but ended seeking oblivion instead and at age 25 sought recovery through a 12-Step program that suggested I seek God. I didn't know how, and "graduated" to agnostic, allowing for the possibility that God existed despite my lack of experience. I followed Buddhism for a number of years precisely because they didn't tell me what to believe, they told me what practices would lead to my own belief. I attended a Catholic university and studied theology because I wanted to understand what Christians believed and why, because it still made no sense to me. I found that I wanted to believe, but still had no evidence.

At age 39, as a peace worker, I was interviewing refugees in northern Sri Lanka when the war took an unexpected turn. A battle raged outside the compound I was in, and I found myself sitting in the dark listening and wondering why the war was so difficult to end. I received an answer in the form of a vision of an infinite net that stretched out in all directions, which I understood to be God's plan. It was bigger than I could comprehend, and intricate beyond understanding. The words that came to me were, "If there was no war, there would be no peacemakers. Blessed are the peacemakers." And yet I also understood that the war did not exist for the purpose of creating peacemakers, it was far more intricate than that. And that nothing could happen that was not somehow part of God's plan, as far beyond my understanding as that might be.

I'll be honest: this blew my mind. It was not what I believed and not what I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that the war was wrong, and I surely did not want to believe that God allowed all the suffering I saw. And I rebelled. For 12 years, I ran away from peace work and from anything to do with God. I moved to the desert and made artisan cheese. I continued to consider myself an agnostic, even though the truth was I now knew.

The next phase of this journey was my family's encounter with darkness. We entered into a period of "extreme bad luck"-- chronic physical illness that the doctors couldn't explain, accidents, depression, miscarriage, financial setbacks-- any few of which would be bad luck, but all together were just an absurdity. We discovered that we were afflicted by dark spirits. We tried native American (sage etc.) and occult (protections, crystals, etc.) approaches, but they didn't work. It got worse. Eventually we turned to Christ, and some trained deliverance ministers set us free. We could see and feel these things leave us! And the illnesses and accident-proneness are gone.

I am now a student at a seminary. I still don't seem to "feel" God the way others do, but I've seen enough evidence that I believe he's there. I've also begun having visions more regularly, about once a week, give or take, though I don't always understand what they mean and I have no control over when or how often they happen. I used to be a skeptic, but I've seen enough now to be convinced.

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