Religious Experiences?

hello...

i've been talking to a few christian friends recently about the existence or non-existence of god, and thus far the only big issue i've come up against is that of religious experience.
after awhile of logical debate, it usually turns to rather vague mention of stories of demonic possession or hearing the voice of god, and so on. one friend recently told me that while at a retreat, a christian friend of hers experienced some sort of demonic possession and found bruising down her arms come morning, and felt grips on her during the night. the idea of miraculous healing is another concept which could follow.

i'm generally at a loss when it comes to this sort of thing. any comments, theories, or any sort of intelligence which i clearly lack that can help me out in this area?


peace,
sophia

 

Well, I usually can't explain that to myself without going into either:

a) mind-over-matter type stuff, where the sufferer inflicts the wounds, or heals them, with their minds

or

b) the whole quantum-physics type deal. I donno, maybe somethin in a parallell universe is happenin, an it's manifestin itself in this one

 

well the placebo effect has been proven over and over again, and for people with minor healings, it can be extremely important. just look at hypnosis; it's possible to suggest and convince entire groups of people that they're experiencing another state of being. obviously the placebo effect can't restore lost limbs or anything, but it can make people break through pain barriers and do things they couldn't before, like move their arms where they couldn't before, or take a few steps, and so on.

people have gone and questioned those who claim to have experienced miraculous healings on christian tv shows, and after the hysteria dies down, days, weeks, the person is back to how they were at the start; none of the healings show to be permanent or proven healed by physicians. i watched a really interesting documentary on that a few months ago..

also, it has been shown in studies that stimulating the limbic area of the brain produces "God-like" sensations, including feelings of ecstasy, of being at one with the universe, and a sense of the presence of God. [cited]

now, i'm still at a loss when it comes to claims of physical contact with the supernatural; how can this be explained logically? bruising down the arms, feeling grips in the night, is the person deluded or lying, doing it to themselves, i can't seem to find any information on the subject.

peace,
sophia

 

Consider sleeping disorders, and read about lucid dreams (dreams where the person is half-awake, they can even seem to have some control over these types of dreams when having them, and the dreams seem very realistic).

 

*bump*

 

I have taunted Satan for 20 years to no avail. If he does exist, he's either hiding, chicken, or being sneaky, cuz I ain't had my challenge answered yet. I have seen some amazing stuff, though. I have had precognitive dreams, around 6 or so since I was about seven, very vivid, detailed, and exactly what I later saw for real.

I have also been to the funeral of a coworker's wife where quite the coincidence occured.

I used to work with a fellow who's wife died of lung cancer, though she was a nurse who never smoked. After she passed on, he raised their two daughters as a single dad. It was about a year from her diagnosis until she was gone. Around a month before she passed on she told him that she was going to
send him some kind of a sign. He is a very honest, family-oriented, devout Catholic, and I honestly cannot see him lying about something this serious. Then, from her hospital bed a week before she passed on, she told him she knew what the sign would be....lightning. I have only been to one funeral in my life, hers, and it was scheduled for 1 P.M., one Saturday, at a local Catholic Church. As we arrived it was pouring rain out, really hard, the sky was completely filled by very thick, very low overcast clouds, and it made midday as dark as if it was dusk. We sat down, got settled in, and then boom, thunder, and the lights in the church went out for a couple of minutes. My friend told me that when the thunder struck, he immediately looked at his watch and, by coincidence, it was 1 o'clock on the dot. After the funeral was over we came out to find there wasn't a cloud in the sky; I looked in every direction. Everything was soaked and dripping, yet the sun was shining, making the roads reflect a blinding glare.

 

People can do many things when they're asleep, because that's a really odd mental state to be in. There are documented cases of people walking around and eating in their sleep. There is a disorder where people just can't shut off their muscles at night, and end up thrashing around, or banging their head against the wall. There were even a couple people who murdered or attempted to murder someone while they were asleep. One guy drove across town, killed his stepfather, and wounded his stepmother, all while he was asleep. I would not consider anything experienced in the sleep state as a "good point." If your arm's being sqeezed by satan while you're awake, that's a different matter, but in sleep anything can seem real.

 

that's a very good point, freaker. after all, why would these experiences seem to all come during the night, and not when you're walking around during the day doing your regular errands? it's like the whole hollywood ghosts-only-come-out-at-night kind of thing.

thanks

peace,
sophia

 

The brain's experience of dreams and the brain's experience of conscious activity have no difference whatsoever.

Scientists have observed that the same area of your brain is working during your time awake as during your time dreaming. The same synapses are firing, the same neurological processes going through. The brain does not differentiate between our dream state and awake state.

Also, it is possible to say that we are shapers of our own reality, our brain being the looking glass, seeing what we've designed it to see.

Who is to say we are not powerful enough to manifest such beliefs into realities, if we can manifest entire worlds within our sleep?

 

that's a very good and interesting point, but too far-fetched to be used as a counter in an argument. i understand your point, though, that the subconscious mind is extremely powerful and still very little understood.

peace,
sophia

 

Take a peek into modern Quantum Physics, neurophysics.... Check out the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? It's got a website, whatthebleep.com. I highly recommend it. See whatcha get from it.

 

religious experienecs are like ufo sightings and bigfoot sightings... theyre just something people make up.
i dont believe in possession a bit... ive tried my damned hardest to get satan to enter my soul and control me but he still hasnt came.
im still waiting for his voice in my head.
kind of like when god talks to george bush, or when god talked to hitler... or god talks to pat robertson... pft, bullshit.

 

burn: yeah, i actually heard of that movie a week or so ago; to be honest, at first i thought it looked pretty cheeseball, but i have a poster sticky tacked to my wall here and i think that when it comes to town i'll check it out.

heh..
yeah... and what gets me is these people who claim that they felt god's presence, or heard god speak to them, or (in another thread here somewhere) recieved a vision of the cross... well, how do they argue with another thousand people around the world who heard shiva, zeus, muhammad, etc, speak to them, or who recieved visions of symbols relating to other religions?
there's nothing to say to claims like this; how can people all over the world be recieving contrary messages pointing to completely different religions?

peace,
sophia

 

Life is a dream and you are the dreamer....you can have any kind of dream you want. If talking to demons, wrestling with the devil etc... is what you want then so be it....maybe there is something that you need to learn from the experience, some problem deep in your psyche. It is all psychological, even though that does not make it any less ´real' for the person who is experiencing it. Repression and manifestation are the same thing. The occultist refuses to accept 'the world' as theirs because to do so would be to admit the thing they are most in fear of- their own selves.

thanks for the above to Art Kleps
"Millbrook- the true history of the early days of the psychedelic revolution"