I didn’t get brought up in any faith. I experienced, what I thought at the time, religious experiences. I’ve explored Buddhism, Islam and Christianity. I got baptized 20 years ago. I never really believed creation account in Genesis. But the more I read and understood the Bible the more my cognitive Dissonance came into play. Did anyone else feel this too?
The science creationists indulge in is nonsensical but they think it makes total sense. I annoyed them with my incessant questions, corrections and critical thinking towards there science and the Bible. Needless to say I didn’t make many friends but they were polite to me still.
I have since left the faith because of there nonsense claims. I know what I experienced but now I cannot make sense of it without a religious framework. Is this normal? Or am I nuts?
Not all Christians make those particular nonsense claims. I left young earth creationist, literalist / inerrantist fundamentalism, as apparently you did. But I was aware there were other emphases / interpretations of Christianity that were less in opposition to reality / rationality. I just saw them as less crufty, if you wlll, but crufty just the same. The same failed epistemology of religious faith, just better compartmentalized and differently cherry-picked.
What exactly did you experience? Religion is one path to transcendent feelings and peak experiences. It isn’t the only one. If what you’re talking about is ecstatic or peaceful feelings, or a sense of a benign Presence (for example), a particular religious framework is not necessary to explain those things. Most likely whatever you can’t explain absent the approved framing is a specific example of a more generic human experience that Christians have appropriated and taught that they have some sort of monopoly on.
I can’t answer your question without specifics but the odds are you are both normal and sane.
Consider a parallel in romance. Perhaps you are naturally an incurable romantic and place all your hopes and dreams on finding The One. You think you found them and you experience what’s commonly called “falling in love” and what’s more technically known as “cathexis”. You see only their virtues but not their vices.
Then your beloved betrays you and the relationship ends, tearing your soul out in the process. Now you know what you experienced but yet cannot make sense of it now that the romantic framework has been decisively violated.
Well actually you can make sense of it but it requires letting go of some preconceptions about how the world actually works. It requires allowing for human foibles and imperfections, admitting that cathexis isn’t a sustainable mental state, that familiarity breeds contempt, that intimate relationships have numerous forces working against them and it’s a lot of work with no guarantee of total success to sustain such a relationship long term, etc etc. It requires approaching future relationships with a different and more realistic framework. One that does not demand that all must be effortless sweetness and light and must be forever.
Similarly your disillusionment with religion requires you to approach life going forward from a more realistic framework that allows you to admit that all is not as you assumed or thought or wished. While such a change is at first experienced as a loss because bare-metal reality is something more like “nature, red in tooth and claw” and you are more alone in many respects than you hoped to be – still ultimately it’s going to result in more contentment and more moments of happiness if you pursue life realistically rather than borrowing other people’s fantasies.
And if you really want some substitute for the various “highs” of religion so that you can occasionally escape the day to day struggle or mundanity – you can have that via other techniques. There are lots of things to get lost in, to be passionate about, without subscribing to a whole dogmatic system of fantasy.
I experienced what the Buddha called Nirvana, Christians the Holy Spirit and I think Hindus (not too sure) Kundalini. I was overwhelmed with feelings of love, joy, peace. During my meditations this only happened twice but in church 5 times over the 20 years.
The religious framework is all that I have for an explanation. Indeed I do lack a secular explanation for this experience. I found it quite profound in nature.
I had to just Google what cathexis was. I very much wanted to experience what I felt before as well as explain it. I wouldn’t say I was fixated on it to a unhealthy degree. I’m naturally curious and inquisitive individual. When something grabs my attention I dige in head first, hence delving into Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.
I no longer have any truck with organiser religion. From my experience you have to tow the party line and maintain status quo. Using mystery as authority and lean not on your own understanding. That doesn’t work on me, I like to understand things.
Thank you for your reply. It has been most helpful
What I suggest you read up on for a non-religious explanation is peak experiences as defined back in the 1950s by Maslow:
My wife, a lifelong unbeliever, had such an experience while traveling cross-country by train. As home after home passed by her window, as she looked down into back yard after back yard, seeing many vignettes of families seated at dinner tables and so forth, she had a sudden sense of oneness with all humanity. It was euphoric and peaceful and she did not want it to stop; she tried to hold onto it, but it gradually slipped away.
She never saw this as having any supernatural or religious aspect as she had no such orientation or background. As a young girl her mother would sometimes take her to a very staid Unitarian-Universalist church (which is a post-Christian, non-creedal congregation welcoming of any religion or [non]belief) but that was the limited extent of her exposure to religion. So at this point in her life (in her mid 40s) she was not seeking god or even some sort of special experience; it took her completely by surprise. Nothing like it happened to her before or since.
So putting all this together with the small number of times it happened to you – a large number of times during one’s life relative to most people I suspect, other than rare adepts who spend monk-like amounts of time in deep meditation – I would say that what happened to you had nothing inherently to do with religion other than that you were religious at the time, but you assumed religion was involved by mere proximity and coincidence. Also, some religious practices like meditation, non-petitioning prayer, rituals such as the Eucharist or praying a rosary, etc., would in some people be conducive to such experiences.
I’ve also read about the so-called “god spot” in the brain. Sometimes incidental to brain surgery while the patient is awake, stimulating certain spots could create a strong sense of a benign (or malevolent) unseen “presence”, or other aspects of religious-like experiences. Subsequent research has determined that there is no single physical brain structure the is involved in such subjective experiences or sensations; like most brain activity, they are physically distributed. However, recent research (2021) suggests that such experiences may be rooted in neural circuits tied to the periaqueductal gray area of the brainstem.
Eastern religious traditions tend to speak of such “peak experiences” as experiences of “non-duality” which can be found in some degree through sufficiently disciplined meditation practices. It seems reasonable to assume that the normal operation of the brain is to perceive the self as separate and distinct from other selves and for the non-self to be outside the self; this would be necessary for our very survival, normally. But certain practices could shift or blur this distinction. While such experiences can be impressive to the experiencer at the time, and seem to be generally positive, there’s no reason to think mundane experience is abnormal and peak experiences are to be sought after as a normative state. In fact, in the teaching of eastern religions, there is a saying: “first enlightenment, then the laundry”. Meaning, that you need your ego / sense of self to function in the real world, and you can not spend 24 hours a day on the meditation mat. You need to eat and defecate and earn a living and all that sort of thing.
I hope some of this is also helpful to you in reframing your understanding of the very compelling experiences you had.
Well, when I was 9 my mom gave me a children’s storybook bible to read. I already didn’t believe the parts about Adam & Eve or the big flood or the story about Moses. I kept asking my mom if this shit really happened. She swore up and down that it happened and still… I wasn’t buying it. Because the stories were giving me strong fairy tale vibes. So I kept reading and I kept rolling my eyes and thinking “no way did this happen”.
What’s funny is that my biological dad gave me a children’s storybook on the origins of humans that went on about Australopithecus, Homo Erectus, The Neanderthals,and early homo sapiens. He spent years studying anthropology.
Guess which story book I found to be the most compelling? The one my biological father gave me instead. I read it and I thought, this debunks the bible in every way cause Adam & Eve started out as Homo Sapiens. Yes, someone made up the Bible. It’s bullshit, I knew it!!!