Tag: religious experience

Special Guest Appearance by Jesus

Question from Kamil:

Hello! Thanks for your reply on the Pam Reynolds NDE case, it made sense. My next question fits with other ones, that is the validity of Jesus. I have noticed in a few NDEs that when people have negative experiences that they may be in darkness or in torment when they call out to Jesus, and they claim a light appears and rescues them. Then, there are a few testimonies of seeing Jesus by non-Christians like Afshin Javid who was in a prison in Malaysia when he was meditating, felt he was being killed by djinns, and called out to Allah (no answer) then to Jesus and he says a bright light appeared telling him it was “the light and the way” and that it was Jesus Christ. He still cries when he tells this testimony. Then there was another Muslim lady who claimed she had gallbladder issues, called out to Jesus in the hospital, a light appeared and then the gallbladder stones were gone after inspection. Finally, Nasir Siddiki had severe shingles and almost died. One night, he woke up in his hospital bed to a bright light reporting to be Jesus, this light gave him information on the bible he had not known about, and the next day after showering he was fully cured. Would you say all these people describing Jesus as “light” in different situations (NDEs, meditation, life threatening events) shows consistency and gives Jesus a possibility of really showing himself?



Answer by SmartLX:

Funny you should ask about these two Kamil. I’ve done an article on Afshin Javid, and an article on Nasir Siddiki, and a third article when someone asked about both of them together.

The full analyses are linked above but to summarise very quickly, Javid’s experience was exclusively personal and had no bearing on the outside world, and there’s no evidence that Siddiki was ever as sick as he claimed (and shingles really leave marks).

There’s always a possibility that Jesus really did appear to one or both of these men, because it’s impossible to rule it out. To actually make it worth believing that it happened, however, evidence is needed and yet absent. The threshold of knowing something didn’t happen is not right on the same spot as the threshold of believing it did; there’s a lot of space in between.

Faith Healing and Holy Feelings

Question from Jesper:
Hi, I really hope you guys can help me with this. I’ve been talking to some Christians from a local Christian youth group. They told me their reasons why they were Christians, I was a bit unsure of what to say to them, and I’d hoped you guys can give me some rebuttals to these arguments.

1. One that they all pointed out was faith healing. For example one had his hand injured at one time, then 5 others came to him and asked if they could pray for him, afterwards he could no longer feel the pain. Another guy came with the story about a 10 year old who had broken his legs, I don’t know for how long they had been broken. But after a prayer he no longer needed his crutches to walk.

2. The second one I heard was that millions of people around the world had felt and experienced God.

Hope you guys can give me some rebuttals for them, that would be most appreciated.

Answer by SmartLX:
For starters, the reasons they’ve given you are not actually the reasons why they’re Christians, or at least #1 isn’t. They were already in the youth group when they prayed for the guy’s hand, and you don’t join a group like that unless you already believe. Chances are they learned about the “millions of people” while in the group as well. This is stuff they use to convince others, but it’s not what convinced them in the first place; all it did was reassure them that they were right. I don’t think they’ve really told you anything at all about their own journeys to faith, so it’s still something you could pursue with them.

Anyway, let’s look at faith healing first.

Pain fades if the issue causing it is resolved or mitigated, regardless of whether it’s resolved by medicine, painkillers or the body itself. All pain that isn’t chronic goes away at some stage. If the guy’s hand pain went away too quickly for ordinary bodily functions to explain, it’s possible that the communal prayer session had a hypnotic and/or a placebo effect. Same with the leg guy; if pain was the only reason he walked with crutches, he might not need them after convincing himself he’d received divine relief.

Pain is highly subjective, given that it’s nothing more than a feeling. Not until 2011 were scientists hopeful of finding a reliable method to measure the amount of pain a person is in without being told, and there’s been little or no news since then. Therefore, any medical recovery which boils down to pain relief literally cannot be proven to any decent standard. It’s not really evidence for anything, especially when it’s part of an undocumented anecdote.

More generally, faith healing and specifically the healing power of prayer have not shown any significant beneficial effect, and can in fact be harmful. In one major study, patients who knew they were receiving prayers did worse than either those not receiving prayers or those receiving prayers unknowingly, perhaps because they felt there was pressure on them to “perform”. A well-known study which did support faith healing turned out to be co-authored by a man posing as a doctor.

All too regularly there are reports of people, mainly children, dying of treatable illnesses because they received prayers instead of treatment. If faith healing is real, God’s selection criteria suck. And if you’re not supposed to rely on it in place of real medicine, then what is it for?

Finally, most of the devastating sarcasm in Tim Minchin’s wonderful song Thank You God can be applied to any faith healing anecdote, including these two.

As for the second claim, I can sum up my response by adding a few words to it: Millions of people around the world have felt and experienced what they believed to be God. This feeling or experience can be anything from a full in-person conversation with God incarnate on the chair opposite them…to a voice in your head…to an inexplicable feeling of power or happiness…to practically nothing, remembered later as more than it was. The possible natural causes for each of these experiences are countless, which is probably why there are so many of them.

Another reason why they seem so common is that people only talk about them when they happen. If people mentioned every time they had prayed and not had a religious experience, the times when something did happen would seem like a drop in the ocean. Think about it: if a billion Christians each prayed three times a day, that’d be a trillion prayers a year, and that might not be too far off the actual number. A few million strange experiences hardly register on that scale.

One more point is the fact that these experiences can apparently be caused by mutually exclusive gods. Tribesmen all over the world have extraordinary experiences while dancing and praying around campfires, with and without the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Hindus have ceremonies where they put themselves into trances to be possessed temporarily by gods like Shiva. If only one true god is really causing these feelings and experiences, why is he/she/it using them so often to convince people that rival gods are real?

A Moment of Clarity?

Question from Chris:
I’m an atheist and have been all my life but I went to church with my girlfriend who is also an atheist to watch her sister and her husband give a talk at the church her mum and dad run.

But I had a weird moment of clarity were I felt that I was loved and everything was going to be ok. I wasn’t thinking about anything so it wasnt an emotional feeling it just randomly happened, its something I’ve never felt before and it’s made me question my ideas on religion. Got any advice for me??

Answer by SmartLX:
What you had sounds like a textbook “religious experience”, if not an exotic one. No visions of holy figures, no voices in your head, just a sudden good feeling. It may be unexplained, but it’s not inexplicable.

I’m sure your girlfriend’s sister would want you to think God snuck up and hit you with a joygasm. That would be a more credible explanation if similar episodes of “religious ecstasy” weren’t common to churches of every denomination, as well as other religions entirely. If it were really a god handing them out without any further information, wouldn’t he restrict them to members of whichever subgroup was “right”, or at least to his own religion?

You were lucky enough to get yours spontaneously, but people usually have to work for them. Buddhists and members of other Asian religions meditate for years to get closer to the divine, and experience that feeling of peace. In the Philippines people get themselves temporarily crucified to feel closer to Jesus, or to atone for their sins. American televangelists and megachurch pastors tailor their services to create an emotional journey for their audience, culminating in an explosion of joy and praise (sometimes accompanied by fainting, speaking in tongues, faith “healing” and other shenanigans).

So, why did it come so easily to you? My guess is based on one of the only things I know about you: you’ve been an atheist all your life. Perhaps you’ve never been to that kind of enthusiastic, charismatic church before, and never been surrounded by a crowd of people so fixated on the words of someone preaching worship. Never mind the crowd, maybe you’ve just never been subjected to flat-out proselytising as a captive audience member long enough for it to have an emotional impact. If you weren’t concentrating, it could have hit you as if from nowhere. A church service can be a powerful thing, no doubt about it, though probably not for the reasons churchies would like to think.

Whatever caused your “moment of clarity”, it was at least based on something true. You are loved, I’m sure, by your girlfriend and probably by many others. A sense of optimism for the future is justified even if it flows from that alone.

Tackling Testimony

Question from Michael:
Hello I was wondering what your thoughts on this conversion story. I am an atheist, and for some reason this one is a headscratcher for me. I on a whim in a effort to appease a family member of mine and to be open minded watched the Its a new day Christian show. And they had a Muslim who converted to christianity and I first I thought big whoop, and then he got into his story and I honestly don’t have a really good reply for what he is claiming he did. Some of it is to me, obvious woo woo on par with things like being abducted by aliens, but some of it is well beyond my abilities at explaining things.

The closet thing I found in his own words to what he said on the tv show was these links

http://canadianchristianity.com/faith/iranian-muslim-encounters-living-word/

Another thing that was said on the show was that he went to Bangladesh and healed people in the name of Jesus and if he didn’t heal them he would have been killed by the people there. I at first thought of Peter Popoff and Benny Hinn and later people like Kathlyn Kulman. But still I would like to know what you guys think.

Thanks.

Answer by SmartLX:
I found his testimony on YouTube, where he says most of what you describe.

While it’s nice to be able to explain stories like Javid’s, and I’ll try to help with this, you are not obligated to explain away every story you’re told. Javid’s testimony is entirely unsupported except by appeals to Javid’s own character, and Javid makes money from people who believe it. If some evidence showed up, then there’d really be something to explain.

As you say, there’s plenty of woo in the account of his textbook “religious experience” in prison. The bulk of it, even if it’s true from his perspective, consists of him alone in his cell speaking to Jesus, a Muslim demon and primarily himself for weeks on end. It honestly sounds like a prolonged psychotic episode.

Notice that the “djinn” appears to him exactly as described in Islam, but Jesus’ words and behaviour match his Christian depiction perfectly. A New Testament demon or a Muslim version of Jesus might have been a surprise, but to Javid the two characters were as if ripped straight from two mutually exclusive texts. It’s like a comic book one-shot crossover where Superman fights a T-800 Terminator. (That happened, actually.)

The one other mortal in the story is the man who amazingly knew to give him a Bible – after he asked for one, possibly loudly enough that word got out into the prison population that a Good Book might calm the fanatic. As for the language aspect, firstly the man now speaks English so he learned it at some point, probably in prison since there was English reading material there, and secondly it wasn’t his first Bible so he might have projected it (probably badly) from memory.

The story of faith healing on pain of death (which isn’t in the linked video) does not give me pause even if he really was in that situation. Faith healers are extraordinarily effective in a way; while there’s no sign of any real healing, the sheer faith they generate is incredible. After a concert-scale faith healing by Oral Roberts or Benny Hinn, the genuinely sick and desperate people in the audience will go away unhealed, brokenhearted (or just plain broke) but convinced that a few people up the front received miracles. If Americans, Britons and Australians can be taken in by these performances, why should the Bangladeshi be any different? The ones with the guns just had to think someone was healed.

It’s worth pointing out to whoever pointed you to Javid’s story that Javid himself doesn’t expect anyone to be directly converted by his testimony. (Here’s the moment in Part 2 when he says just that. He challenges people to pray instead.) It’s funny, in light of this, that It’s a New Day had him on for this very purpose. (Hear the hosts talk about it in the promo.) Just spreading the Word doesn’t make it stick.