What about those times when I felt Gods presence?

[jamesdeanc1]

Over the past year my faith in God declined until a point around 3 months ago when I decided I no longer believed in the Christian god. I was a Christian for 7 years (from the age of 16) and so much of the way I look at the world and the way I interpret things was formed on my knowledge of god and through my faith in god. Viewing the world now from the perspective of a non-believer has been difficult to say the least. One of the questions I keep asking myself is, 'what about all those times when I felt gods presence? What about the times when my prayers were answered?'. I don't doubt that I don't believe in god anymore, but in the back of my mind are all of those times in which something happened which solidified my faith. How do I put to rest those times which still suggest that the presence of god was with me? 

[florduh]

Welcome to the forums!

 

God answered your prayers? All of them? Or was it that some things worked out and you gave credit where it wasn't warranted? What did you pray for? Most Christians pray for a new job, new car, that they or a loved one recover from an illness, for their football team to win, that they find a parking spot at a crowded mall. Whatever it was, does it make sense that the Almighty God would answer YOUR prayer but the kid in the cancer ward suffers and dies? If prayer worked the cancer wards would be empty and there would be peace in the Middle East. Essentially, people may flip a coin and pray that heads comes up, and when it inevitably does they claim their prayer was answered!

 

Your heightened emotional state, stirring up all the brain chemicals and firing synapses left and right, creates an experience. Depending on how one has been taught to think, it may be perceived as the presence of this or that god, contact from a dead relative or a generic mystical/spiritual experience. Other cultures having that same experience will attribute it to the presence of an entirely different god than the one you have in mind. Such feelings and perceptions can be generated in the lab, and they result from many different stimuli. Your context is the key to how you will interpret any experiential aberrations. Sleep paralysis, lucid dreams involving entities entering your bedroom used to be known as visits from incubi and succubi demons, but the fashion today is to frame such things as alien visitation or abduction.

[Vigile]

You felt chemicals in your brain triggered by emotion: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/information-technology/activate-chemicals-gamify-happiness-nicole-lazzaro/

 

Prayer has never been found to show a statistically significant correlation in terms of efficacy other than a positive emotional benefit, no different than a placebo. You think your prayers have been answered because you discount all the times has not. This is a trick our brains play on us. We remember positive hits far more often than we remember negative results. 

[♦ Fuego ♦]

Children invent imaginary friends and hug teddy bears because it is emotionally satisfying enough to suffice for the lack of a real friend. We who used to believe in Jesus recognize that we essentially had an imaginary friend to whom we ascribed love, power, commitment, and of course the imaginary enemies upon whom we laid blame for enticing us into lust and other normal behaviors that the church calls sin. Church re-enforces the seeming reality of the shared imaginary friend, after all who gathers with hundreds of others and sings songs of devotion to someone who isn't even there? Every religion.

 

Your mind gets used to being normal again after lying to itself for years. I was for 30 years a fervent believer, and still find a tendency to fall into the old ruts, but use those as a learning experience of how to grapple with reality instead of seeking a magic answer.

[TABA]

Hi jamesdeanc1, and welcome to our group!

 

Coming to the conclusion that the god you believed in does not exist is obviously a major event, but as others have often pointed out in these forums, deconversion is a process, not an event.  We can testify that the deconverting mind goes through a reprogramming of sorts, and this will surely happen to you in the months ahead.  In my opinion the most successful and happiest deconversions occur when this reprogramming process is allowed to proceed, even helped along.  How can your mind rework itself to support your new world view?  I would suggest by exposing yourself to all the fields of information that are shunned or distorted by fundamentalist religion: science, archaeology, the history of the scriptures, for example.  Hang out here, whether you actively participate or just read along.  In time I predict that you will look back and be amazed at how you could have once believed certain things.  At that point your deconversion will be virtually complete and you will most likely feel that it has all been more than worthwhile.  The fact that you are so young at this point is also in your favor. 

 

Again welcome - we're glad you're here!

 

TABA

[jamesdeanc1]

Hi florduh - thankyou for your response. Still figuring this forum out and it took me a while to figure out how to comment. 

 

 Your response reminded me of a song by Tim Minchin;

 

 

Actually it puts things into perspective- I study psychology so I should probably know how the mind can attribute a simple chemical reaction to a god- but then the experience seemed so real to me and its difficult sometimes to accept that what I perceived as an almighty god healing me, probably was my mind playing tricks. My biggest concern at the moment is that I haven't yet 'come out' to my church friends as a non-believer. I'm a gay man, and I found coming out as gay easier than I have done admitting that I don't believe in god anymore...

[Jeff]

I never felt too much but someone close to me had absolutely amazing experiences (I was always a bit jealous of these) where she would feel god's presence profoundly. These experiences would be very moving and affected her strongly. 

The problem is that after deconverting, she had the exact same experiences when she tried other religions, and also when she tried generic spirituality and some old style earth-based 'witchcraft'. 

 

She now believes in nothing spiritual and considers it to all just be chemicals in the brain or since we can't prove a negative, if there is some unproven spirit realm, it's just all one big mash-up and makes no difference any way since she got the same euphoria no matter what. 

[Nightowl]

I actually have the same question. I am agnostic so I still think there is something beyond our world. But, I don't think Christian God answer your or my prayers because he does not exist because the Bible itself is "fake news"... I am a lucid dreamer so sometimes, I am a little suspicious (can't find a right word to describe).

Think this way. When you do not pray, things still work out. When you pray, things which are supposed to work out will work out. Things which are not supposed to work out never actually work out

[LimitedGrip]

I struggled with this for a while until I realized that the joyous rush I felt when a friend had accepted Christ, was not unlike the feeling I experienced when watching the movie Rudy--yes, i'm a huge sports fan. That's just one of a few examples. Our thoughts and emotions can trigger some interesting effects with the ability to release certain chemicals (dopamine, serotonin, etc.) at conditioned times. 

[Aethelred]

Personally, I found the interpretation of scripture to have a lot in common with how people interpreted the answers to their prayers. In both cases, there was no clear answer, so people would assign meaning onto words or experiences based on what they had heard others say and on what they were comfortable believing.

[whitehorse]

 

Over the past year my faith in God declined until a point around 3 months ago when I decided I no longer believed in the Christian god. I was a Christian for 7 years (from the age of 16) and so much of the way I look at the world and the way I interpret things was formed on my knowledge of god and through my faith in god. Viewing the world now from the perspective of a non-believer has been difficult to say the least. One of the questions I keep asking myself is, 'what about all those times when I felt gods presence? What about the times when my prayers were answered?'. I don't doubt that I don't believe in god anymore, but in the back of my mind are all of those times in which something happened which solidified my faith. How do I put to rest those times which still suggest that the presence of god was with me? 

I still feel those feeling's, but stronger now and more frequently. My theory is that it is bio chemical transference from living organic things around me.

 

I could argue that we are all empathic on some level, and we pick up on other people's chemical signal's. Who knows, maybe all God experiences are just nature connecting to us.