The need to believe?

[mordant]

Thank you for your reply, CL. Yea, I've gone around and around in my mind about this. At the time, I was struggling with my grandmother's death, and perhaps it was based on wishful thinking, those ''feelings'' that I had...and I felt it was the Holy Spirit. I had googled other people's experiences with such things, and they were all pretty similar. Maybe it's okay to not always be certain of everything, even as an atheist, I couldn't be certain that my views were right. They were just my views. Just like theists have their views. And so on. I admire that you have stayed true to your faith, even when you might doubt, too. I imagine we all doubt from time to time.

Google around a bit more and you'll learn about the "god spot" which is an area of the brain which, when stimulated with an electrode, produces compelling, transcendent, positive feelings of a Presence. Stimulate a slightly different spot and you get foreboding, negative feelings of a malignant Presence. There are also ways to access this via meditation and other life experiences. And this is just the beginning of personal subjective experiences you can have that make you feel watched / watched over, have out of body perceptions, and the like. Knowing that these things are possible, that you were under stress and experiencing terrible loss and grief, and that you are a person who leads so to speak with your emotions in some situations, and it seems that there are very plausible and documented reasons for your experience which at least render god(s) unnecessary to explain it.

None of this is a criticism in any way, it is simply to point out that there are multiple naturalistic explanations for your experience and that "the holy spirit" is far from the only hypothesis that fits the facts. Also, "the holy spirit" is not a falsifiable hypothesis, where the others at least potentially are.

Finally, and more generally, personal subjective experiences, no matter how impressive or real they may be when experienced, cannot serve as objective empirical confirmation of anything, unless potentially if it's part of what I call a shared reality with others. For example my wife and stepson are in the house with me as I write this, that is my impression, and I'm quite sure that if I dragged a random stranger in off the street into my house, that person would see my wife and stepson also. When I'm out in public with either of them, every random person I encounter sees them too. That's shared reality. That's confirming. Something that no one but you can perceive is inherently unconfirmed in ways that matter to whether you should consider it anything more than a construct of your mind.

Lest you think I'm hyper-rational and have no personal experience with this: I mentioned somewhere in another thread I think that my stepson has a weird affinity for ghost hunts. As a high school graduation gift we took him to a ghost hunt and stayed up all night doing that sort of thing in a creepy old house. All three of us witnessed some things we definitely have no explanation for, although I have some theories which we actually went back to test and could not reproduce the experience (as is so often true of these things, approach it with a critical eye and there's nothing to actually see and people around you don't reinforce what you're supposed to see). It is tempting, particularly for my wife, to assume the backstory for all this that is implicitly provided by the ghost hunting outfit that ran the thing, but the bottom line is that even with a shared experience you have to consider the very real possibility of mass hysteria and suggestibility and that naturalistic explanations are far more likely to be true.

As an atheist there are things I don't know and things I can't explain, in fact, the set of things I don't understand and which I acknowledge that I don't understand is greater than when I was under the sway of the false certitude of Christianity. It is to be expected. I just try not to feel any urgency to explain things I am not sure about any old way I can just to say there's an explanation.

Just some general thoughts on the topic, for what they are worth to you.