The 'Proof' Christians Don't Talk About

[Tonus]

Now, I'm going to be honest and concede that I too thought god spoke to me in numbers. I thought I was getting confirmation or condemnation based on what numbers I was or wasn't seeing.

This is going to sound odd coming from a former JW, since they place a lot of emphasis on numbers and especially dates. But they also were very adamant about not being superstitious, at least not in the traditional ways. While they agree that there is significance to numbers like three and seven and 666, they believe that it's only a symbolic significance. So if a JW gets ticket number 666 in a raffle, he or she may joke about it, but is not concerned. And I don't recall any JW who was any more superstitious than your average person, but I know many who were notably less so.

For us, the "proof" of god was really just a preponderance of evidence, and that evidence was simply events that we interpreted as such. That plus the usual urban legends that always occurred to people at least twice removed ("so-and-so told me that her sister's friend saw a ghostly protector walking with some JWs and she became a convert!"). I think we sometimes underestimate the effect of hearing so many of those types of stories, and how easy it is for people who want to believe them to fail to consider how weak they really are. And that makes them very reliable to those whose resolve is strengthened by them.

There are also the ephiphanies, the sudden transcendent feeling that a person gets and which we can interpret any number of ways. It's almost random the way we assign meaning to such occasions, but once we do we can believe pretty strongly. I think that most people live under at least a few heavy blankets of confirmation bias, and religion can be one of those.