Weird Happenings...

[Brother Jeff]

I don't really believe any longer in gods or in supernatural realms but... over the years many strange things have happened to me and to those I love that have no easy explanations apart from the supernatural... 

 

I'll start with stuff that has happened to me. When I was a teenager, not long before I got "saved", my bedroom was a scary place at night. There were frequently knocks on the walls when I was almost asleep that would wake me up again. my bed shook for no apparent reason, and I could feel something walking around me on the bed. I also saw apparitions on the walls, such as a 19th Century British Navy captain. I don't know how I recognized the uniform at that age, but I did. The apparition's mouth would move, but of course there was no sound, so I have no idea what he was saying. Shortly after I got "saved", the music minister of my church came over and prayed in my bedroom. The strange activity stopped! Was it really the power of prayer, or was it because I had stopped drinking and using drugs so the symptoms of my then undiagnosed bipolar disorder calmed down?

 

My mother owned a very successful travel agency for about 20 years. The building it was in I swear was haunted. It never felt "right" when I was in there, and my sister shared that same feeling. When I was there working late at night, I could sometimes hear work going on in the front office -- papers shuffling, unintelligible voices speaking, etc. And the weirdest thing was that the phone in my office would often ring incessantly, but when I answered it nobody was there. This went on for a while and it was extremely annoying. I was a very religious Christian at the time, so I decided to pray and do spiritual warfare, and when I commanded the ringing to stop in the name of Jesus, it did!  The power of prayer, or what? I have no idea, but it has me wondering to this day, and that was more than 20 years ago.

 

My mother has had weird experiences too. One of her good friends who was a brief romantic interest when they were teenagers died, and my mother got a phone call from him... after he had died! The timing is not in dispute and there seems to be no rational explanation other than an actual communication from the recently deceased.  

 

My mother is also certain that she has been in communication with deceased relatives. She claims that they visit her frequently. I think it's her vivid imagination along with her supernatural beliefs (she believes strongly in God but is not religious about it), but who knows??

 

Anyway, there are others experiences I could share, but that's a good start.

 

Thoughts? Thanks and Glory!  

[♦ Fuego ♦]

I think there are a lot of things we just don't know yet. When I was a believer, I experienced power zipping through me, and my hands shook in the classic fashion (Quakers and Shakers both got their names from this phenonmenon), and I attributed that to the spirit of god at the time. Now...I don't know what it was. I also felt intense heat come from the ceiling, and another lady I'd always seen fanning herself was doing this again and looking at me. I understood why she did this then. Other times I heard god speak to me. Once was in prayer, asking seriously if I should marry a particular woman. I heard a clear "No."  I stopped and said something like "I've never got a response before, so if you don't mind I'd like to ask that again. Should I.." "NO!" Very clear and in the room with me. I've wondered sometimes if my dad had been upstairs and said something through the old vent system, but it didn't seem like it and he never said anything about it. I heard the same voice give me clear information about a church girl that was sleeping with her boyfriend. The same voice also commanded me once to not be mean to a silly clown lady at church who was bugging me.

 

Friends of mine have an apparition that shows up once in a while. They call her the Green Fairy. All they ever see is the end of her long green dress as it disappears around a corner. Other times a young boy showed up and would just be there looking at them. After a visit from some friends with kids, the boy apparently started showing up at their house instead.

 

My sister used to see people at the end of her bed when she was young. My bro thought she might be on drugs (late 60s), but she was too young for that. I slept in her room once and saw her music box ballerina dancing and then a brilliant light like an old photon torpedo came out of it at me and I screamed bloody murder, so everyone came in to see what was wrong. I told them about the ballerina and my sis said "It doesn't move". That's all I recall at the moment.

[Ellinas]

I have no answers.  But then, from my standpoint, that is the point of all that is weird.

 

I will assume that the experiences you describe were not the result of your bipolar disorder.  You are better able to judge than I as to whether that is a possibility, or even a likelihood.  Presumably, you are reasonably satisfied that your disorder had little or no part in these matters.

 

I start from the premise that the supernatural does not exist.  That may surprise you given that I've made no secret of having a concept of deity and of accepting the idea that death is not the end of life - which may be termed a "spiritual" form of reality.  Nevertheless, I maintain that "supernatural" is nonsense.  There may be any amount of unexplained stuff beyond the bounds of current scientific knowledge - but that does not make it anything other than "natural".  It's just unexplained.

 

Your experiences come within that ambit.  At the very least, they were real in the sense that any experience is real; but what actually gave rise to those experiences...  I could speculate, but I do not know.

 

My clearest experience of the unusual takes the form of a precognitive dream; I've also had some experience of apparent telepathy.  Objectively real phenomena?  Well, I have no explanation for them; neither am I inclined to explain them away.  Such experiences are what they are - glimpses into the oddity of our universe.

 

One thing I would say.  Prayers for things to stop do not take any effect from an interventionist deity.  Occult rituals or a simple statement aimed at projecting one's own intentions would have had the same effect, I believe.  It raises the question of to what extent the experiences were matters of perception, and the answer to the phenomena an act of manipulation of that perception.  I can only leave you to puzzle over that one.

[Orbit]

Yes, Jeff you had the answer. It stopped because you stopped drugging/drinking which exacerbated your bipolar illness. The mind is a powerful thing. There's nothing under the bed.

[Guest Furball]

I always wondered how those paranormal investigators got those little recorders to play back those voice responses. The emf detectors going off and all that makes it seem like it is all real stuff. I guess on t.v. though things can be edited in later. 

 

Anyone seen any ufo's?

[Leo]

I am dubious about the paranormal recorders.

However, and this will surprise some on here who know me to be pretty naturalistic:

There is a hypothesis -- I'm being extremely generous to use that word -- called magnetic resonance theory or similar names. What it states is that during a particularly traumatic event a magnetic impression gets left in the area, and discharges in the manner it was imprinted -- hence the "tape loop" effect you hear about where the same event happens over and over. There's no known relationship between an electrical charge and an impression like that without an encoder / decoder. So if this has merit, big if, what's the encoder / decoder?

The argument for the charge / discharge is that people claim you "feed it," woo word for for generate an electrostatic charge for the opposite polarity, I guess, and so it's alleged to be an answer for how people reacting to the impression cause the impression to react, what you hear about with people saying they get scared it gets aggressive or whatever.

But I don't think we generate enough electricity. We do enough to be measured by instruments that medical people have, but not by normal current and voltometers.

I do have an explanation for the demons, if you have been feeling paralyzed and sensed evil in the room: sleep paralysis and your mind trying to wake up.

But I'm with you: there's a lot I don't know. I've come home, and She has been praying or doing some other spiritual activity, I walked in, didn't know it at the time but could FEEL Her radiating. That is how I describe it. It's similar to what I feel if a bunch of people are outside admiring the moon. I being blind can't see the moon, but people are all enthralled, and just giving something off that can't be measured, not even with the electrode end of a AAA battery tester -- yes I've tried that on people a couple times and they didn't know something touched their back. I was just curious.

So, whatever it is, magnetic or otherwise, I can feel that. That radiating some people do.

How do you explain phenomena like this? The Wife, when really tired, can "suck" the energy out of a streetlight. She will pass one by, it goes dim, She walks away from it and it comes back on. It goes dim: that doesn't mean it's burning out, it means the power source was cut. These are, or were, sodium lights that it happened to mostly, according to the research I did on the subject, though nobody else I have ever known displays this phenomenon. And I cannot even speak to it firsthand since I can't see, I take Her and our daughter's word for it.

A lot of biology people don't believe any of the magnetic hypotheses, and maybe it's just an inept attempt by some of us to try and explain some of this stuff. Not even explain it, but propose maybe that is the cause.

Its major hole from an electronics standpoint is what would be the encoder / decoder? Electricity isn't enough, you have to have something to interpret the signal when it is recorded and played back, as it were, so that different people experience the same or similar experience, a lady in a dress walking by, for instance.

Of course, lots of these are visual, which is probably why I've missed them.

But what is it I feel if a woman is radiating in that way? It is a turn-on, for me at least,but it's not by itself sexual. And the times it's shocked me were when I couldn't chalk it up to suggestion -- I had no idea walking into the house that She was spiritually engaged at the time.

I've been around someone who was meditating before and she didn't radiate like that. So it's got to be something different.My guess it's just something we don't know yet.

I'm curious as all get-out what it is, though.

[RogueScholar]

Somebody would have to have a deep understanding of electromagnetism before making so called magnetic claims. Electricity and magnetism are in fact two manifestations of the same phenomenon. This hypothesis would have to make robust predictions that can be replicated and quantified in a controlled setting. Time and time again, folks state they have these incredible experiences and intuitions that fail to pan out when examined in a controlled setting.

[Ravenstar]

We are electrochemical beings… but I think we don't know enough yet of how we interact with other energy and matter to make any kind of workable hypothesis to examine.

[RogueScholar]

Electromagnetism is exceptionally well explained at this point however. It is so well explained, a college student taking a sequence of general physics can expect to spend an entire semester covering waves and electromagnetism.

[Brother Jeff]

I think there are a lot of things we just don't know yet. When I was a believer, I experienced power zipping through me, and my hands shook in the classic fashion (Quakers and Shakers both got their names from this phenonmenon), and I attributed that to the spirit of god at the time. Now...I don't know what it was. I also felt intense heat come from the ceiling, and another lady I'd always seen fanning herself was doing this again and looking at me. I understood why she did this then. Other times I heard god speak to me. Once was in prayer, asking seriously if I should marry a particular woman. I heard a clear "No."  I stopped and said something like "I've never got a response before, so if you don't mind I'd like to ask that again. Should I.." "NO!" Very clear and in the room with me. I've wondered sometimes if my dad had been upstairs and said something through the old vent system, but it didn't seem like it and he never said anything about it. I heard the same voice give me clear information about a church girl that was sleeping with her boyfriend. The same voice also commanded me once to not be mean to a silly clown lady at church who was bugging me.

 

Friends of mine have an apparition that shows up once in a while. They call her the Green Fairy. All they ever see is the end of her long green dress as it disappears around a corner. Other times a young boy showed up and would just be there looking at them. After a visit from some friends with kids, the boy apparently started showing up at their house instead.

 

My sister used to see people at the end of her bed when she was young. My bro thought she might be on drugs (late 60s), but she was too young for that. I slept in her room once and saw her music box ballerina dancing and then a brilliant light like an old photon torpedo came out of it at me and I screamed bloody murder, so everyone came in to see what was wrong. I told them about the ballerina and my sis said "It doesn't move". That's all I recall at the moment.

 

When I was probably around five years old, I woke up at least once to see a beautiful young woman sitting at the foot of my bed. I didn't know her, but I felt no fear at all. I just turned over and went back to sleep. When I was a teenager, I had a Star Trek calendar hanging on the wall. The photo that month was a starship orbiting a planet. I looked at it one night, and I noticed that the planet was spinning and the ship was moving. Very weird, but I think the fact that I was stoned out of my mind at the time might explain that one...

[Brother Jeff]

I have no answers.  But then, from my standpoint, that is the point of all that is weird.

 

I will assume that the experiences you describe were not the result of your bipolar disorder.  You are better able to judge than I as to whether that is a possibility, or even a likelihood.  Presumably, you are reasonably satisfied that your disorder had little or no part in these matters.

 

I start from the premise that the supernatural does not exist.  That may surprise you given that I've made no secret of having a concept of deity and of accepting the idea that death is not the end of life - which may be termed a "spiritual" form of reality.  Nevertheless, I maintain that "supernatural" is nonsense.  There may be any amount of unexplained stuff beyond the bounds of current scientific knowledge - but that does not make it anything other than "natural".  It's just unexplained.

 

Your experiences come within that ambit.  At the very least, they were real in the sense that any experience is real; but what actually gave rise to those experiences...  I could speculate, but I do not know.

 

My clearest experience of the unusual takes the form of a precognitive dream; I've also had some experience of apparent telepathy.  Objectively real phenomena?  Well, I have no explanation for them; neither am I inclined to explain them away.  Such experiences are what they are - glimpses into the oddity of our universe.

 

One thing I would say.  Prayers for things to stop do not take any effect from an interventionist deity.  Occult rituals or a simple statement aimed at projecting one's own intentions would have had the same effect, I believe.  It raises the question of to what extent the experiences were matters of perception, and the answer to the phenomena an act of manipulation of that perception.  I can only leave you to puzzle over that one.

 

I agree with you about the supernatural not existing, and that there is a lot of stuff that our science still can't explain. I had a dream when I was very young about a garage filled with small engines, all running at the same time. Several years later, I was quite the small engine mechanic. Our garage one day was indeed filled with several lawnmowers and at least one edger all running at the same time. And I recalled the dream that I had had years earlier... 

 

I think bipolar disorder explains some of the weird stuff that has happened to me, but not all of it. 

[Brother Jeff]

I am dubious about the paranormal recorders.

However, and this will surprise some on here who know me to be pretty naturalistic:

There is a hypothesis -- I'm being extremely generous to use that word -- called magnetic resonance theory or similar names. What it states is that during a particularly traumatic event a magnetic impression gets left in the area, and discharges in the manner it was imprinted -- hence the "tape loop" effect you hear about where the same event happens over and over. There's no known relationship between an electrical charge and an impression like that without an encoder / decoder. So if this has merit, big if, what's the encoder / decoder?

The argument for the charge / discharge is that people claim you "feed it," woo word for for generate an electrostatic charge for the opposite polarity, I guess, and so it's alleged to be an answer for how people reacting to the impression cause the impression to react, what you hear about with people saying they get scared it gets aggressive or whatever.

But I don't think we generate enough electricity. We do enough to be measured by instruments that medical people have, but not by normal current and voltometers.

I do have an explanation for the demons, if you have been feeling paralyzed and sensed evil in the room: sleep paralysis and your mind trying to wake up.

But I'm with you: there's a lot I don't know. I've come home, and She has been praying or doing some other spiritual activity, I walked in, didn't know it at the time but could FEEL Her radiating. That is how I describe it. It's similar to what I feel if a bunch of people are outside admiring the moon. I being blind can't see the moon, but people are all enthralled, and just giving something off that can't be measured, not even with the electrode end of a AAA battery tester -- yes I've tried that on people a couple times and they didn't know something touched their back. I was just curious.

So, whatever it is, magnetic or otherwise, I can feel that. That radiating some people do.

How do you explain phenomena like this? The Wife, when really tired, can "suck" the energy out of a streetlight. She will pass one by, it goes dim, She walks away from it and it comes back on. It goes dim: that doesn't mean it's burning out, it means the power source was cut. These are, or were, sodium lights that it happened to mostly, according to the research I did on the subject, though nobody else I have ever known displays this phenomenon. And I cannot even speak to it firsthand since I can't see, I take Her and our daughter's word for it.

A lot of biology people don't believe any of the magnetic hypotheses, and maybe it's just an inept attempt by some of us to try and explain some of this stuff. Not even explain it, but propose maybe that is the cause.

Its major hole from an electronics standpoint is what would be the encoder / decoder? Electricity isn't enough, you have to have something to interpret the signal when it is recorded and played back, as it were, so that different people experience the same or similar experience, a lady in a dress walking by, for instance.

Of course, lots of these are visual, which is probably why I've missed them.

But what is it I feel if a woman is radiating in that way? It is a turn-on, for me at least,but it's not by itself sexual. And the times it's shocked me were when I couldn't chalk it up to suggestion -- I had no idea walking into the house that She was spiritually engaged at the time.

I've been around someone who was meditating before and she didn't radiate like that. So it's got to be something different.My guess it's just something we don't know yet.

I'm curious as all get-out what it is, though.

 

I had a friend years ago who used to be about to radiate energy from himself to me if he laid his hands on me. I have no idea what the energy was or how he did it. When I knew that my beloved 17-year old cat Tasha was very near death, I tried to do the same thing for her. Sad to say, nothing happened and she died shortly thereafter. 

[Brother Jeff]

Yes, Jeff you had the answer. It stopped because you stopped drugging/drinking which exacerbated your bipolar illness. The mind is a powerful thing. There's nothing under the bed.

 

I agree up to a point but some of the weird shit that has happened to me still leaves me scratching my head, and occasionally it makes me wonder if I should reconsider my atheism and rejection of Christianity... but sense usually returns before I go too far off the deep end back into religious belief...

[yunea]

 

I am dubious about the paranormal recorders.

However, and this will surprise some on here who know me to be pretty naturalistic:

There is a hypothesis -- I'm being extremely generous to use that word -- called magnetic resonance theory or similar names. What it states is that during a particularly traumatic event a magnetic impression gets left in the area, and discharges in the manner it was imprinted -- hence the "tape loop" effect you hear about where the same event happens over and over. There's no known relationship between an electrical charge and an impression like that without an encoder / decoder. So if this has merit, big if, what's the encoder / decoder?

The argument for the charge / discharge is that people claim you "feed it," woo word for for generate an electrostatic charge for the opposite polarity, I guess, and so it's alleged to be an answer for how people reacting to the impression cause the impression to react, what you hear about with people saying they get scared it gets aggressive or whatever.

But I don't think we generate enough electricity. We do enough to be measured by instruments that medical people have, but not by normal current and voltometers.

I do have an explanation for the demons, if you have been feeling paralyzed and sensed evil in the room: sleep paralysis and your mind trying to wake up.

But I'm with you: there's a lot I don't know. I've come home, and She has been praying or doing some other spiritual activity, I walked in, didn't know it at the time but could FEEL Her radiating. That is how I describe it. It's similar to what I feel if a bunch of people are outside admiring the moon. I being blind can't see the moon, but people are all enthralled, and just giving something off that can't be measured, not even with the electrode end of a AAA battery tester -- yes I've tried that on people a couple times and they didn't know something touched their back. I was just curious.

So, whatever it is, magnetic or otherwise, I can feel that. That radiating some people do.

How do you explain phenomena like this? The Wife, when really tired, can "suck" the energy out of a streetlight. She will pass one by, it goes dim, She walks away from it and it comes back on. It goes dim: that doesn't mean it's burning out, it means the power source was cut. These are, or were, sodium lights that it happened to mostly, according to the research I did on the subject, though nobody else I have ever known displays this phenomenon. And I cannot even speak to it firsthand since I can't see, I take Her and our daughter's word for it.

A lot of biology people don't believe any of the magnetic hypotheses, and maybe it's just an inept attempt by some of us to try and explain some of this stuff. Not even explain it, but propose maybe that is the cause.

Its major hole from an electronics standpoint is what would be the encoder / decoder? Electricity isn't enough, you have to have something to interpret the signal when it is recorded and played back, as it were, so that different people experience the same or similar experience, a lady in a dress walking by, for instance.

Of course, lots of these are visual, which is probably why I've missed them.

But what is it I feel if a woman is radiating in that way? It is a turn-on, for me at least,but it's not by itself sexual. And the times it's shocked me were when I couldn't chalk it up to suggestion -- I had no idea walking into the house that She was spiritually engaged at the time.

I've been around someone who was meditating before and she didn't radiate like that. So it's got to be something different.My guess it's just something we don't know yet.

I'm curious as all get-out what it is, though.

 

I had a friend years ago who used to be about to radiate energy from himself to me if he laid his hands on me. I have no idea what the energy was or how he did it. When I knew that my beloved 17-year old cat Tasha was very near death, I tried to do the same thing for her. Sad to say, nothing happened and she died shortly thereafter.

Humans do have a light electric field that can be measured with a field meter. A physics professor did it on himself in front of a class I attended.

 

I practised a lot of "energy channeling" before deconverting, all it took was high concentration and visualization and I was able to remove small muscle cramps and minor pains, even from people who initially doubted it. That's not proof of anything of course, everyone of those was my friend and the people who felt it the most were the strongest initial believers in it so there's definitely at least partially the effect of the recipient wanting it to work.

 

I've also felt people's 'vibe' the way Leo describes all my life regardless of what I believe in, but much, much more so when I'm stressed out and having lots of anxiety, and not taking my ssri meds right. Someone once thought I developed it to be more aware of what was the situation in my unstable childhood home before anyone spoke a word. I don't know.

[Ellinas]

 

Yes, Jeff you had the answer. It stopped because you stopped drugging/drinking which exacerbated your bipolar illness. The mind is a powerful thing. There's nothing under the bed.

 

I agree up to a point but some of the weird shit that has happened to me still leaves me scratching my head, and occasionally it makes me wonder if I should reconsider my atheism and rejection of Christianity... but sense usually returns before I go too far off the deep end back into religious belief...

 

 

Atheism is a totally different issue to whether or not there are things that we cannot explain.  An atheist may see a ghost (whatever that might be), and a theist deny that such a phenomenon exists (I know someone in this category).

 

Again, acceptance or rejection of Christianity is a totally different issue to being a theist or whether or not there are things that we cannot explain.  There are many non-Christian theists (I metaphorically wave at this point) and Christians may deny any phenomenon that they do not see as explicable in everyday or in biblical terms (the person I mention in the previous paragraph being an example).

 

Nothing that you have described is a challenge to your atheism or a validation of Christianity.

[♦ Fuego ♦]

Yeah, I echo Ellinas. We know today that we have so very much more to learn, and I wouldn't be too surprised if we find out some very surprising things about reality in the next century. Think how far we've come just since the Revolutionary War. Then the advancements we've made in computing since the 80s. 

 

Life has always seemed like a very odd thing to develop. Why isn't there just mass exploding and re-gathering, making stars and planets with the occasional ocean and such. Why does life as we know it even happen? Could completely different concepts of life arise or exist, not just different DNA, but something "other"? And none of that has anything to do with a petulant dude or dudess sitting on a throne or a giant turtle.

[Leo]

Jeff, I agree with Ellinas and Fuego here. None of this proves Christianity. There are plenty of Christian skeptics, for instance, people who doubt contemporary supernatural phenomena. Even among the Pentecostals when I was among them, I wasn't the only one kicking the tires, testing theories people had, entering tongues speak from some gramma dove into Babelfish to see if we could get even an inkling of something back that would prove or at least align with the dominant belief.

It doesn't logically follow that your unknown phenomena would result in your return to Christianity. Most western Christians, even many among the Pentecostals -- the types that weren't dancing in the aisles or shouting, but just observing -- are skeptics of this stuff. So just think about that.

 

Yunea, as to the electrical field, a field simply isn't enough. Lifeless things give off fields. There's an awful lot of unencoded radiostatic noise in the atmosphere all around us.

In order for a field's resonance to be understandable, it has to be explicitly encoded in a way the decoder can understand it. A cassette tape is a perfect example: the recording head encodes a magnetic field onto the tape in such a way that the decoder interprets and outputs the signal. That's not even software in that case, just analog electrical signal. But it's still encoded, a sexed up way of saying "organized in such a way it can get read".

So think of it like this: There are all sorts of lines and patterns in rocks all over the place. Only those that were 'encoded' into the rock deliberately are pictures and writings you as the 'decoder' can understand. Hence we understand the pictures on the ancient cave painting art.

So the part that hangs me up about magnetic resonance theory is the encoder / decoder. Electricity is never enough. There has to be a meaningful way to read / write the results.

Personally I read this spirituality forum as a way to understand other people's experiences. But also, someone might have a write-up about some of these phenomena that could lead to a discovery down the road.

But for the curious, an electrical field or charge is simply not enough. People who tell you it is are selling you short. Even really smart people, but rather ignorant as to how electronics work.

But people inadvertently discover things all the time. So, who knows?

I certainly don't know how to interpret the "vibe" thing. Some biology people I know say it's pheromones. Maybe it is, maybe it's something else, most likely it's a combination of factors.

 

But Jeff, please. Don't leap to the radical conclusion that an unexplained phenomenon results in a reconversion to faith. I could have been the keyboard player at your church, fully cognizant of how to create an otherworldly ethereal sensation via music, while you sang that solo. While you were up there having a God moment, I was sitting there mechanically outputting and musically interpreting the material for you as an accompanist, totally Christian at the time, and completely skeptical that God had anything to do with the results except the nebulous "god uses our talents". And that skepticism sat in the heart of Pentecostalism, and I was far from alone in those circles.

And, I bet, so were you. Tell me you didn't question any alleged miracles, or testimonies, or phenomena people described. Even if, like me in those days, you cracked the Bible to verify a pattern match between it and the alleged experience someone reported, you were a skeptic. The only people I knew who weren't skeptical were the granny dove types who didn't like our probing into the authenticity of things.

So please don't imagine that a misunderstood or not-yet-explained phenomenon automatically should indicate a return to faith. Because if you were again a Christian, certainly if I was again a Christian, I would still be the same kind of skeptical Christian that I was then. The rationale being that there are an awful lot of false flags.

Skepticism is healthy, even Christians do it.

 

But the phenomena you experience? If it's not hurting you, enjoy the feeling. I enjoyed it when my friend came to me in a dream, and I saw he was okay. Do I personally think he was there? No. I don't even have to decide anymore if that was biblical or heresy or what. It was just what it was. And I felt relief to know that he is okay. Of course, as an atheist, I think he's for better or worse in a dreamless sleep. But the experience itself was harmless enough, and I just appreciated that it happened, that was it. Other people who have made some kind of sense out of a spirituality might well have a different interpretation.

But I didn't decide immediately that this meant I should return to faith. Faith doesn't answer that question anyhow: as a Christian I would have been torn between enjoying that experience and its extraBiblical nature, some would say nonBiblical, others out and out heresy.

If I haven't convinced you, Jeff, think about this. What if a Mormon friend of yours had unexplained heartburn? The doctors couldn't figure it out and antacid didn't solve it? And what if he said: "Jeff, I think I'd better return to Mormonism because this might be a burning in the bosom." Now, you were Christian. So as a Christian, you were skeptical of the burning in the bosom claims. You may or may not have followed the skeptical counterapologetic that acknowledged the Mormon burning in the bosom as a combination of the power of suggestion and the pressure to conform. That's not atheist skepticism only: That's Christians who are as atheistic to the Mormon god and Mormon doctrines as you and I are. Even many Pentecostals think it. Again, excluding the older dove population who imagine everything is a "spirit of ..." situation, and probably think it's a spirit doing the activity. I'm talking your run-of-the-mill middle class Pentes though, they follow the atheistic arguments about the Mormon claims.

So just answer yourself the same way you, as a Christian skeptic of the Mormon god and experiences, would have answered that Mormon.

[directionless]

I've had some weird experiences that might cause me to wonder if there is more than metaphysical naturalism, but...

 

The main point I wanted to make is that I no longer care very much about my weird experiences. I used to be obsessed with understanding these experiences. Sometimes I would become so upset about not knowing that I would feel like curling up in a ball somewhere. So it seems like the healthy response to weird experiences is to shrug our shoulders and move on with life. When we become obsessed with the experiences, then it is probably a sign of psychological problems.

[RogueScholar]

I would posit that "weird" experiences, particularly altered states of consciousness have much to offer. Particularly when looking for novel treatments and understanding and developing neuroscience. The evidence is beginning to mount as research restrictions are being lifted and we are seeing how altered cognitive states may be profoundly therapeutic. I am in agreement that when we start to insist these experiences are connected to concepts outside of our ability to study, things can go off the rail.

[Brother Jeff]

Leo, the only weird experience that really give me pause is that the phone in my office stopped ringing when I ordered it to in the name of Jesus. And it never happened again!    How is that explainable apart from something supernatural going on? Otherwise, I can write the other experiences off to mental illness or sleep paralysis or something natural, and those don't bother me enough to give me much pause. 

[directionless]

What I find interesting about my weird experiences is that they aren't answers to prayer (usually). In Brother Jeff's phone ringing experience, God apparently answered his prayer by making the phone stop ringing. (Apparently it stopped the ringing permanently?) My weird experiences are mostly just confusing. If something weird happened and it could somehow be understood in Christian terms then I would use it as evidence that Christianity must be right somehow - maybe it happened in a church, maybe it seemed to be an invisible malicious being like a demon, maybe a bible seemed to open to just the right page, etc. Also in most cases the experience was not enlightening or helpful in solving practical problems that I had. Is that how God interacts with people who are trying to connect with him? - just make some weird things happen?

 

Weird happenings are by definition unpredictable. Science can't study things that are too rare and unpredictable. On the other hand, things that are too rare and unpredictable are also irrelevant to how we live our lives.

[Leo]

So first as an atheist:

You don't know that the phone stopped ringing *because* you ordered it to in the name of Jesus. You only know that it happened *when * you ordered it to stop in the name of Jesus. The concept here is, correlation does not equal causation.

By way of weird example: In America, it gets cold in November. Really cold in some places. And in November in America, millions of people eat turkey dinner in November. So by your thinking, eating turkey dinner increases the likelihood of entering into a cold season. After all, it really only starts to get the coldest after people have eaten turkey dinner by the million. It's not cold in July, and people don't typically eat turkey dinner in July.

 

I know that looks silly, but that's a simple way to understand "correlation does not equal causation".

 

Now, trying to answer this question as a Christian would: You invoke the name of Jesus to order other powers, not electronic devices. So you order demons to go away -- like during possession or something, but there's no promise you can use Jesus' name to stop the rain or stop a phone from ringing.

 

Anyhow, that one is particularly dubious, not just as an atheist, but even lots of Christians would write it off as coincidence.