RE: Relapses of a recovering god-aholic
April 3, 2012 at 5:45 pm
(This post was last modified: April 3, 2012 at 5:53 pm by Blanca.)
(April 3, 2012 at 3:57 pm)reverendjeremiah Wrote: but maybe you havent convinced yourself if you have problems sticking with it.
Perhaps you should call yourself a deist instead of an atheist.
I read the wiki article for Diesm and I dont think that fits. It explicitly says a Diest does not believe in supernatural and if anything i'm talking about a supernatural experience.
It's not that I believe in god but that i don't want to let go of this experience. The hard part is that I had the experience while religious and so attributed it to a 'god' but have since realized there is no god. It is a little emotionally confusing. I was just wondering if someone else had found an answer that explained their experience so they could replicate it.
(April 3, 2012 at 4:03 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: I haven't had any experiences that seemed supernatural since I became a skeptic. When I was a Pentecostal in my youth, I did some speaking in tongues, and I had a disturbing experience as a boy that I now think was a night terror of some sort. I think different people are differently prone to have these kinds of experiences. I think a skeptic could be one of those prone people, but I think it would be a struggle for them to become a skeptic in the first place under those circumstances, and of course they would consider hallucinations a likely explanation, unlike a non-skeptic.
Never spoke in tongues but I did have the night terrors. They got really bad when I was in college. Of course I thought I was just getting so close to god that the devil was tempting my resolve. but when I dropped religion all of that just stopped. I was talking to some missionaries from my church a few months ago and I asked them to explain that when i prayed to god my terrors got worse (because god is supposed to banish them if you use that one prayer) and why they are completely gone now that I've left the church and haven't prayed in years. Silence...guess that wasn't in the scripts they were taught. Unfortunately for them I know more about their religion then they do.
(April 3, 2012 at 2:15 pm)Voltair Wrote: I don't have religious experiences in that sense but I still find that I have read/experienced things that could be compared to "spirituality". For example I read the book Tuesdays with Morrie and to be honest that book moved me. It may not be a crazy experience but that experience and others will probably profoundly change my perspectives/attitudes towards life in general.
There is much inspiration/positive experience outside of religion.
Can one be spiritual and atheist? I think Earkhart Tolle is probably a spiritualist.
