Perusing last night I came across this comment. It is amazingly simple to the observer, then why so complex to the user? This one is overripe with easy explanations.
Yes, I believe in God with all of my heart! When I was 13, my Dad got a new job in Illinois. We moved from Colorado and the house we moved in to was possessed by a demon! We lived with that evil all through my high school years. It was terrifying and yes, heaven and hell are very real. We were delivered from that demon when I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior! I rebuked it out of our home and our lives in the Name of Jesus and we never had any more problems after that!
I accepted Christ in 1996. In 1998, I had two angel encounters in the city of Denver, Colorado (USA), and in 2012 I stopped breathing due to anaphylactic shock, but God saved me by the power of the Holy Spirit and put me back in my body! I wrote a book about all of this, which is published on Amazon, called “One Man’s Very Strange Supernatural Life.” I email free copies of my eBook to anyone who wants one!
I just wrote about the day I stopped breathing and came back to life in a post titled “My Lazarus Moment.”
I used to hate Christians and I did not want anything to do with God. I used to party and drink heavily, but the Lord Jesus rescued me from all of that!
Grace and peace to you! May God bless you and reveal Himself to you in new and mighty ways!
“That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Brief Analysis?
- Trauma of a move at 13 and moving into a strange house and willing to try anything to fit in
- Do Demons live in Illinois ?
- Neurological compromise, astral projection, asphyxiation,
- Mixing youth and adulthood experiences, near death, drinking, god to the rescue (appears more than once) and I have received none? I thought god was everywhere… This person is unstable
- There are no angels in Colorado
- Existential death anxiety
- Others?
TheCommonAtheist 
Certainly there are lots of reasonable explanations. Of course there is no doubt that this person has interpreted events in a particular way and to them, what they believe is all true and real. There was a student I had in class who would sometimes come to my office and chat and I came to find out that she believed quite strongly in God. I don’t usually try to get into discussions with students about religion, but she was very much into Arab culture and so I was surprised to find that she was a very devout Christian (to the point where she refused to wear shorts because it was immodest and always wore jeans). So we started talking about her beliefs. She wasn’t very knowledgeable about the Bible not surprisingly, but she still defended it…also not surprisingly. What was surprising though was that her belief in God was because she had these occasional experiences where she said she would “see colors”. She describe the experience to me and it certainly sounded extraordinary. She felt that God was speaking to her in some way and this is what convinced her that she needed to have a relationship with God. I decided to do a little research about this experience and found out that it associated with a rare kind of epileptic seizure. Interestingly a lot of seizures have some weird neurological effects and they all aren’t lying on the floor having intense spasms. Some are quite peaceful from a physical point of view.
I thought about telling her, but then decided against it. What I read indicated that they weren’t very dangerous and from her account they had only happened a couple times in her life. She was a happy girl, extremely creative and an excellent artist. Who am I to take that away…especially when unasked? More than that I wondered if she would believe me even if I told her.
As you point out here, big changes, drugs, sleep deprivation, are all reasons we might have visions of something. In talking to Victoria there is good reason to believe that many figures from the past who claim to have had religious revelations may have had epilepsy or other neurological disorders. It certainly makes a better explanation than what such people claim is true. I think though really all we can do to combat such experiences from defining reality for others is through education about how our brains actually work, so that when we have these experiences we learn to be skeptical ourselves.
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Looking to natural causes first would be a good first step. With the web you can almost always find like scenarios and pretty good explanations, but not looking is an acquiescence to the masses easy explanations. That is god
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True…but I think from the perspective of a 13 year old…and keep in mind this person seems to have been 13 before the internet, we might feel like we had looked for explanations….but likely that look was in the wrong places. WIthout being presented with different points of view, with perhaps defaulting to the authority of our parents, or even friends who are religious, we are likely going to reach the wrong conclusion. If you have parents who believe that the supernatural is real, then this is as much as a part of the world as a squirrel.
I would also argue that the supernatural is not always the easiest explanation. It’s just a fictional one, and fictions can be deeply complex. That’s what apologists do. The problem with fiction is that it is going to disconnect with reality so you have to do some good story telling to make it all fit together. In fact I would argue that apologists (even if they don’t do it consciously) try to add to the complexity so that people are more likely to get lost in the logical chain of arguments and have their cognitive biases exploited. It’s not easy to dissect an apologist argument for it’s lack of logic….largely I think it’s because we focus on the end, when it’s usually a false premise at the beginning that starts what might be a very logical chain. The example I always give is: All A are B, all B are C, so therefore all A are C. This is a logical chain and symbolically there is nothing wrong with these statements, but as soon as we started putting things in there for the symbols of A, B, and C then the veracity of the claim becomes vary important.
Once one is aware of the logical tricks that are used it is easy to spot them again, but when you’re 13 awareness of logical fallacies and cognitive biases are completely foreign and once you start to form those beliefs, the dopamine release makes you less likely to look elsewhere for answers.
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The internet is still too new for some of the older believers. My dad is 84, and he feels obligated to share chain letters on fb. He reads the fake news feeds and shares them with everyone. Never has occurred to him the web could be used for research. Funny. He is a great guy but this whole info Boom is just a mystery to him. He’d never think to question faith.
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Yeah the amount of old people that have been scammed by the internet is astounding. Perhaps for them they think that the internet is no different from any other institution they’ve leaned on over the years. The internet is definitely not the library or world news tonight with Peter Jennings. Of course it could be used in this way, but you have to work for it a bit. As easy as the internet makes it to be in touch with information, in a way we have to do more of the heavy lifting in discerning good information from bad.
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Count my own mother as one of those elderly innocents scammed, and on Facebook no less. Surprise, surprise. Her most shocking experience was a gentleman pretending to be from German heritage — like our ancestors — living in rural Texas somewhere, BUT was an “engineer” on one of those huge, massive ocean freighters. This “romance” was created and nurtured over a 2-3 month period, by him of course. My Mom fell pretty hard for him — he was an exceptional romantic in his emails and YouTube music video selections “just for her.”
When I PUSHED Mom to make him commit to an actual face-to-face meet in a public location, there was always some excuse, some event preventing him from making it. As I kept Mom pushing for this, he then had a 3-month summer contract out to Asia and the Philippine, South China Seas. Suddenly one very traumatic day Mom informed me that his ocean-freighter had been attacked, boarded, and the pirates were DEMANDING ransoms for their lives! Hahahahaha!!! Guess who he was asking for immediate wiring of money… for “his life”… and Mom’s love-of-her-life???? 😒
I pushed Mom to ask him for more and more details about the hijacking, but he refused to divulge them. I told her to tell him in order to “save” his life we required those specific details! The following day his Facebook profile vanished. A week later Mom found him again on Facebook under a different name, but the exact same pictures. 😄
Ahh, the lure, snarring, and exploitation of the VIRTUAL world. It is still very prevalent in the religious mind and culture too, isn’t it? 😉
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Holy moly!! What would’ve happened had you not been there? I think I know the answer. It is amazing how much attachment we can garner from mere written words. Even from a stranger. The desire to connect leaves us wide open in the gullibility factor of human needs. A family member es going through divorce. Nothing she could say would change his mind. I told her to write him a letter. He returned and abandoned the other girl. The power of writing exceeds nearly every other mode of communication.
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“The power of writing exceeds nearly every other mode of communication.”
Agreed. I do think it is different for everyone relative to circumstances, experiences, and how easily or difficult we allow stimuli to trigger our dopamine releases — the natural drug of happiness, ecstacy, and others that say sugar triggers when consumed. Hey! Isn’t that a song? From the Riverdale Carnival?
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The amount of scams perpetrated on social media are many and not always for many…some are ideologically motivated to get you to believe in a certain political or ideological viewpoint.
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Oh MAN is that ever true! Case and point?
Well, everyone knows the one right now. I think Mueller might soon have TOO MANY flipping and cooperating with him and the investigation that he may have to say, “I hear ya, I HEAR YA! Please take a number from the red-dispenser and take a seat.” Meanwhile, the auditorium is so packed with seated “officials” it is standing room only. 😉 😛
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Just a question, Swarn, what would you say to my experiences under the influence of LSD in the 1960s when I was 18 or 19? They gave me a view of life that is totally non-christian, and slightly buddhist. I left this vision of reality, twice, and twice could have ended this incarnation and accepted new ones, but both times I chose to continue this one.
These experiences have informed my life philosophy. They have led me to what I call a spiritual atheism. If you really wanted to, you could call it a “religion for one,” because it involves my belief that what I experienced was real. Those experiences were real, for me, and nothing any scientist could say to explain them away would have any effect on me. Nothing any organized religion could say to change them to a view of the supernatural would have any effect on me. They are real memories of real experiences.
Would you care to comment?
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I listen to Sam Harris quite a bit, and he would probably say the same thing as you have right here. What he would say (although I also meditate I can’t claim to have had any special experiences yet) is that what LSD did for him was to make him aware of other states of consciousness. I personally don’t think spirituality has to be tied to religion at all. I mean if your LSD experience had you staring at a tree and thinking it was the most beautiful thing in the entire world, that experience is real, it doesn’t mean that the tree actually is the most beautiful tree in the whole world, but the fact that you found such beauty in a tree is something to celebrate in my opinion. But this is different than seeing visions of angels or demons. I know a friend who tried LSD and saw the colors of autumn leaves drip down as if they were liquid. She describes the experience as deeply spiritual. She was moved by the way her brain processed the colors…but she in no way thinks colors really drip down the leaves of trees. Nevertheless her mind was open to different experiences of consciousness. The fact that there is much more information to objects than what we take in is not in doubt, and that drugs might give us more information than what we normally take in, is not surprising. But the way in which we experience even hallucinations depends on what are mindset prior to those experiences because this impacts how we understand them afterwards, or even who helps us understand them afterwards.
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Ah, that last part is the real kicker. My previous mindset, before these experiences, was one person–one life. I had probably heard the word reincarnation bandied about, given the changing zeitgeist of the time, but it was not something I had explored at the time. Of course, I did later, I had no choice. Nowadays it is firmly entrenched in my philosophy.
As for staring at trees while stoned, it ws not the tree that caught my attention so much as the ants that were travelling up and down in the runnels or gorges of the bark of the tree. All I can say about the tree was it was deciduous, and the bark was made of high ridges and low valleys, so-to-speak. The ants avoided the ridges, and exvlusively used the valleys to travel. What exactly they were doing, I cannot say, they did not seem to be carrying anything either direction, but the&y were being so very industrious all that travelling could not have been for a vacation. Yeah, things were always amazing on acid, the details were so much clearer. But still, there was always some mystery hidden from view.
But there was also danger just split-seconds away. Life is such a fragile thing, yet it is the greatest thing in the cosmos.
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Well I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I would say that if drugs or sleep deprivation were causing people to only believe in reincarnation this would be relatively harmless over believing there are supernatural forces of good and evil battling it out with humans as their pawns. What follows from a philosophy of reincarnation over a fundamentalist Christian mindset are quite different.
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I am not recommending anyone believe in reincarnation just because I believe in it, anything I say is just for me because I believe it. However, I would recommend checking it out and making up your own mind about it, and about many other things. The idea of reincarnation is older than the belief in rebirth, and actually the belief in rebirth is a bastardization of reincarnation. But that is another story.
As for what follows from a belief in reincarnation, an argument could be made that reincarnation would make christianity easier to believe, but I am not about to go there. I want no part of that path.
Meanwhile, I will shortly be going back to your first reply to me. I missed a couple of things you said that I would like to comment on. I’m not sure what position on the thread such a comment will show up in, but it is intended to follow my first reply, if you aren’t totally lost yet, lol.
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Other states of consciousness is one way to put it, the words I use are very similar, levels of consciousness. The difference as I see is that we are still in the same state of consciousness–what is knowable while alive on earth–but we are able to consider more things as possible in contrast to someone who can only see certain things as possible. These “levels of consciousness” are based on experiences, and our understanding of those experiences. Mr. Harris may mean exactly the same thing, and the difference is a matter of semantics, I cannot talk for him. It is probably not important.
And yes, definitely, spirituality does not have to be religious. Think of the phrase “team spirit” which speaks to a feeling of togetherness in people who are associated closely together. Teammates can be of many religions or non-religions, but still they feel the spirit that groups them together. That is spirituality in a very basic form. Yet, for many people, spirituality is only about religion. Atheists are not allowed to have spirit, or to be spiritual. But what else is new…
One last thing, drugs are not responsible for giving us anything we cannot know without them. They may make these insights more possible, and more believable, but really they are just vehicles to experiencing what is already there, but undiscovered. At least this is how I understand reality to be, “IMO!”
Again I state, don’t take anything I say or write to be truth for anyone but me. We are all different, with different experiences, and different understandings of those experiences. Experience allows us to see what is there to be seen, but we do not all see the same thing the same way. I have my way, you have yours…
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There are no angels in Colorado because the Make My Day law saw them all get shot in the first 36hrs of the bill passing.
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Any excuse will do. Once the gun is purchased all the scenarios pass through the head and illusions of saving mankind in a grandiose gun battle, when a warning would’ve sufficed. But hey, who am I to say no more killing?
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“Do Demons live in Illinois ?” Oh, absolutely. This is a 100% true statement. In case you’re wondering, cause very few know this, Illinois was founded by demons, well, three demons and two witches, but we rarely talk about them. They’re very shy and want to maintain their anonymity. Any way, The real reason the Cubs took 108 years to win a World Series is because the Illinois demons were pissed off at them. It wasn’t until the citizens of Chicago sacrificed about…oh, let’s say 67, infant Christians to them that they lifted the curse. They often haunt houses, nunneries, and bagel shops just for kicks. Now, you could doubt all this, but, if you do, you’re wrong. Thanks. $Amen$
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WP has definitive connections to the Chicago demonics. Just chatting with one now…
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An excellent TEDx video I used in my 2016 Mind and Matter blog-post regarding how the “divine experience” can be skillfully taught, practiced, and acquired by most anyone on Earth in any region of Earth. If I may Jim…
And of course, too much of something can often lead to addiction, delusional behaviors, religiosity, and/or social-familial deterioration or destruction. The human brain is quite the malleable organ if it is subjected to constant training, imaginations, and reinforcing orthodoxy — or in other words, surrounded by a Theater of Dramatic Riveting Performance… more simply, the Placebo-effect.
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Thanks. As always
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Why, these things don’t happen to me. Where do I address my complaint?
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All complaints will be dealt with a circular, ambiguous, contradictory motion at the moveable goalpost on jesus’ actual birthday…and year
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This looks like no desire to address my complaints
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Are you saying Jonbenet wasn’t an angel? How cruel! 😀
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Metaphorically. She was referred to as an angel, but like religion she was always shown in the best lighting, dress, energy, and propaganda. She was a human girl, if I recall, and they are all unworthy to approach the altar
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