I guess you're talking to me, right? It can be a foreign language. But it doesn't necessarily have to be. For all I know it wasn't. The tongues thing was the least of the experience. For me anyway. It was all about being imbued with the Holy Spirit.
Yeah. I was just curious. Obviously I'm pretty skeptical that it was something super natural, but if it's what gives you strength and drive then good deal.
Basically, I stopped presuming there was a god and I started allowing for the possibility that gods aren't real.
It could have been a lot of things. First of all, different people have higher expressions of the VMAT2 gene, which predisposes people to mystical/spiritual experiences. Second, just because you have a legitimate spiritual experience doesn't mean that it is a true experience. I've experienced the exact same thing you did when I was in a charismatic youth group in high school. I've come to learn that, for me, it was bullsh#t social pressure mixed in with a very authentic spiritual experience that got twisted around into meeting a certain expectation set forth. Thirdly, the human brain has a lot of different sections with different priorities, and certain things can hijack that sh#t into some seriously wild self-delusions. That's three things in a list of dozens that could have contributed to that experience.
If God is not real, no. You did not waste your time praying. Prayer is at least a form of meditation that encourages healthy brain tissue development, lowers stress, and connects us with an idea of something bigger than us that we can belong to.
You mean things like missing data and gaps in knowledge of scientific theories and such.
I usually don't like to say never either but your analogies fall quite shy of the mark. Humans hadn't been been trying to solve those things (flight, moon travel, computers and info in your pocket) for over 2000 to 4000 years before finally finding the answer. I'm thinking as long and hard as God and the source of life has been sought, talked about and studied, that the chances are pretty good that living humans will likely never have all the answers. We're pretty close to having the scientific explanation locked up but that still doesn't answer the first cause question. If we were meant to know that in a scientific factual way, we likely already would.
Fair enough. For me, there is no possibility that anything could happen that will make me doubt what I experienced was not real. But it only works for me. I can tell people about it (and I've probably done this too much). But unless they experience something similar, it just isn't likely to be persuasive. So I guess it is what it is.
I've written three drafts of responses to this and deleted them all. I'm not writing #5, so #4 will have to do.Fair enough. For me, there is no possibility that anything could happen that will make me doubt what I experienced was not real. But it only works for me. I can tell people about it (and I've probably done this too much). But unless they experience something similar, it just isn't likely to be persuasive. So I guess it is what it is.:
Yes. And Im not afraid to admit that I dont know. In fact there are times I do believe there is one true creator, but where my views differ from Christians is I dont think this creator really cares all that much about his creation. I think there is life on other planets, universes and galaxies. And we are just a VERY small part of this "Gods" creation. And other times I think Im FOS with that line of thinking.
This is pretty much how I feel. I know God exists. And I think Christianity mostly has it right. But I can't say that I know that other religions are incorrect. I mean, nearly every religion more or less claims to have a monopoly on God, and claims to be the one true religion. And that can't be the case. Who knows--maybe God has communicated with different people, races, nations, etc. in different manners throughout the course of mankind's history. This seems likely to me.
