Personal Experiences with the Divine

[Delta4Embassy]

Thinking of the 'Nearly Died Last Night' thread, if people have personal experiences with the divine I'd like to read them.

When I was little, I was scared of the dark, as most of us are. Growing up being told anything I asked God for might be granted, I asked Him once to take away this fear of mine. And He did. By itself, not that big a deal, most of us mature past such fears, but mine vanished as soon as I asked God to take it away. Stands out in my recollection.

 

[PostmodernProph]

a few years back, I was at a meeting of the church council......someone came in to tell us that a member had been diagnosed with cancer and was going to have surgery the following morning.....over the previous couple of years we had lost several members to cancer and we had become known in the community for a congregation that provided a lot of care and support for cancer victims and their survivors.......we were praying and someone said, "Lord, we are getting tired of having people say we know how to deal with death......this time, let us be known for celebrating life......you said that if we ask for bread, you won't give us stones"......as we were praying the temperature in the room dropped about ten degrees and the hair on my arms stood up......I opened my eyes and it was obvious the other twenty people in the room had experienced it as well......

the next day when she went through surgery they couldn't find any cancer......

 

[Book of Jeremiah]

Thinking of the 'Nearly Died Last Night' thread, if people have personal experiences with the divine I'd like to read them.

When I was little, I was scared of the dark, as most of us are. Growing up being told anything I asked God for might be granted, I asked Him once to take away this fear of mine. And He did. By itself, not that big a deal, most of us mature past such fears, but mine vanished as soon as I asked God to take it away. Stands out in my recollection.

I love that story, Delta! Thank you for sharing that! How wonderful!

 

[Avatar4321]

it's the personal experiences with God that help us know Him

 

[Delta4Embassy]

a few years back, I was at a meeting of the church council......someone came in to tell us that a member had been diagnosed with cancer and was going to have surgery the following morning.....over the previous couple of years we had lost several members to cancer and we had become known in the community for a congregation that provided a lot of care and support for cancer victims and their survivors.......we were praying and someone said, "Lord, we are getting tired of having people say we know how to deal with death......this time, let us be known for celebrating life......you said that if we ask for bread, you won't give us stones"......as we were praying the temperature in the room dropped about ten degrees and the hair on my arms stood up......I opened my eyes and it was obvious the other twenty people in the room had experienced it as well......

the next day when she went through surgery they couldn't find any cancer......

The Force is strong with this one.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

By comparison this one's gonna seem trivial, so to speak...Writing about faith and more precisely lack of it as I do, going over to my Mom's for dinner with brother and his wife we wound up playing 20 Questions after eating. I'd been writing and railing about some of the commandments earlier that day, and from a shuffled deck, the first card in this non-religious game was "The 10 Commandments." I literally stopped and stared dumbstruck trying to come up with a secular explanation but failed.

I understand neuroscience and how when we experience something odd we'll subconsciously link it to things we do understand so we understand the odd thing too, but that only explains so much. I've had firsthand experience enough times to allow for the possibility something more is going on. Vexingly though, God might be so real that it's calmly walking away from the searchlights of our inquiry to keep itself hidden, discrete, and a matter of faith.

I've never seen an angel, had a two-way conversation with God, or anything else 'major' like that, but what's kept me looking for God is that every culture on this planet has religion. There's never been a culture yet that evolved without religion in some sense. If there's nothing real to it that's an awfully strange fiction to come up with out of the blue.

I think then that there's enough to it to not close the book so to speak and keep asking the questions while coming up with better questions.

 

[Avatar4321]

it helps to ask the source your questions

 

[amrchaos]

Hey Delta

Are you sure you're not an agnostic that plays with atheism?

 

[ninja007]

theres no "divine", only the one TRUE GOD.

 

[Darkwind]

Well, she was exquisite and being a young man in My early 20's, I lacked the confidence to remove......er......umm......

Not that kind of divine?

I mean....she WAS to die for...........I'm just sayin....

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Hey Delta

Are you sure you're not an agnostic that plays with atheism?

I'm a Jew by genetics, a humanist by choice, and a confused individual by practice.

The God question is something I think that can be argued convincingly either way by those who're impartial to the answer and more about getting to it than perpetuating dogma. But a good scientist shouldn't deal in absolutes. An atheist says there's no gods, an agnostic says whether gods exist or not they can't be proven or disproven, a theist says a god ro gods do exist but can't prove it.

I say simply our ideas about what god/gods is/are might be wrong. It's a big universe, until we've been everywhere, catalogued everything we shouldn't close the book on the question of god so much as come up with better questions we actually could answer. Simple fact remains we're all going to die and find out (or not) one way or the other. So in the meantime, rather than taking an either/or position, allow for possibilities while attemting to be an asset and not a liability.

 

[Iceweasel]

I have experience physical things related to the illness when family members were passing, without knowing they were in trouble. They lived thousands of miles away. Not so much a divine thing but knowing that there is a part of the universe and life that we cannot normally access.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

I have experience physical things related to the illness when family members were passing, without knowing they were in trouble. They lived thousands of miles away. Not so much a divine thing but knowing that there is a part of the universe and life that we cannot normally access.

Can't help but think of quantum entanglement when family members know each other's in distress and the like though far from each other. I wonder if maybe some of our neurons are entangled with parents and siblings and especially twins that give rise to these perceptions.

 

[sealybobo]

a few years back, I was at a meeting of the church council......someone came in to tell us that a member had been diagnosed with cancer and was going to have surgery the following morning.....over the previous couple of years we had lost several members to cancer and we had become known in the community for a congregation that provided a lot of care and support for cancer victims and their survivors.......we were praying and someone said, "Lord, we are getting tired of having people say we know how to deal with death......this time, let us be known for celebrating life......you said that if we ask for bread, you won't give us stones"......as we were praying the temperature in the room dropped about ten degrees and the hair on my arms stood up......I opened my eyes and it was obvious the other twenty people in the room had experienced it as well......

the next day when she went through surgery they couldn't find any cancer......

Most alleged miracles can be explained as statistically unlikely occurrences. For example, one child surviving a plane crash that kills two hundred others is not a miracle, just as one person winning the lottery is not. In the absence of any empirical evidence, all other claims can be dismissed as the result of magical thinking, misattribution, credulity, hearsay and anecdote.

Divine intervention claims are mostly made over things we have poor predictive capabilities, for example, weather, sports, health and social/economic interactions. Such claims are rarely made in relation to those things we can accurately predict and test like the motion of celestial bodies, boiling point of water and pull of gravity. Or how about even EVERYONE in the hospital being cured and not just one?

If a god is constantly intervening in the universe it supposedly created, then it is with such ambiguity as to appear completely indistinguishable from normal background chance.

Theists also fail to apportion blame when claims of their particular god’s ‘infinite mercy’ or ‘omnibenevolence’ involve sparing a few lives in a disaster, or recovery from a debilitating disease – all of which their god would ultimately be responsible for inflicting if it existed. See also: Euthyphro dilemma, Confirmation bias, Cherry Picking.

 

[sealybobo]

I have experience physical things related to the illness when family members were passing, without knowing they were in trouble. They lived thousands of miles away. Not so much a divine thing but knowing that there is a part of the universe and life that we cannot normally access.

I'm not religious anymore but this is something that makes me wonder. How does science explain this? But then again, how about all the times when a family member is dying or being raped or tortured for hours and their relatives all sleep right through it.

And how come some dogs can tell their master is coming from 2 miles away but some dogs you can sneak right up on them? What is it that tells that dog the owner is nearing?

 

[Iceweasel]

I'm not religious anymore but this is something that makes me wonder. How does science explain this? But then again, how about all the times when a family member is dying or being raped or tortured for hours and their relatives all sleep right through it.

And how come some dogs can tell their master is coming from 2 miles away but some dogs you can sneak right up on them? What is it that tells that dog the owner is nearing?

I'm not religious anymore either so I don't have to make up answers, I just say I don't know. I don't really want to get into specifics but I had one occurrence of an event that was directly related to a family member at the same time, same area of the body. He was not sick, hadn't spoken to him in years.
It was mathematically possible but off the charts.

I also had another pass and saw something on TV, his name on a credit card right after in a commercial. We have an unusual name and his first was old school, not common at all. It ran briefly during that period and no more. My mom saw it too, I thought I had been hallucinating or something. Again, mathematically possible but....

All I know is I am convinced that there is another dimension to reality that intersects on occasion for some reason. I also believe it is not entirely rare and that's probably why mankind has come up with various religions to explain it.

 

[sealybobo]

I'm not religious anymore but this is something that makes me wonder. How does science explain this? But then again, how about all the times when a family member is dying or being raped or tortured for hours and their relatives all sleep right through it.

And how come some dogs can tell their master is coming from 2 miles away but some dogs you can sneak right up on them? What is it that tells that dog the owner is nearing?

I'm not religious anymore either so I don't have to make up answers, I just say I don't know. I don't really want to get into specifics but I had one occurrence of an event that was directly related to a family member at the same time, same area of the body. He was not sick, hadn't spoken to him in years.
It was mathematically possible but off the charts.

I also had another pass and saw something on TV, his name on a credit card right after in a commercial. We have an unusual name and his first was old school, not common at all. It ran briefly during that period and no more. My mom saw it too, I thought I had been hallucinating or something. Again, mathematically possible but....

All I know is I am convinced that there is another dimension to reality that intersects on occasion for some reason. I also believe it is not entirely rare and that's probably why mankind has come up with various religions to explain it.

When I was a kid I could have sworn the News Anchor talked to me. I'm sure I was dreaming but back then it was so real.

I have a friend he keeps telling me that an angel saved him once. It's such a lame story but it has him convinced.

My friends were sure a ghost was in their home when we were kids. I never saw a ghost.

My little nephew this Saturday was telling me how some fisherman found a mermaid and they have it on film and he showed me on his ipad. Looked pretty real to me. Do I believe in Mermaids?

I think EVERYTHING has a scientific explanation.

 

[Iceweasel]

I think EVERYTHING has a scientific explanation.

OK, Sport. Explain how the universe got here. And don't sidestep it with the big bang. Science doesn't know how it started or how life started. Theories aren't proof.

 

[sealybobo]

I think EVERYTHING has a scientific explanation.

OK, Sport. Explain how the universe got here. And don't sidestep it with the big bang. Science doesn't know how it started or how life started. Theories aren't proof.

Who knows? Do you? To put GOD in the blank is what you guys have always historically done when you can't explain something. Over the centuries we have filled in those gaps where once we thought it was god, science filled in that gap and each time your god gets smaller and smaller.

But no matter how many things we prove aren't god, it's never enough.

The fact that Christians had to make up an unbelievable story and brainwash Christians with it is my proof god is made up.

The fact that Muslims had to make up an unbelievable story and brainwash Muslims with it is my proof god is made up.

The fact the Greek Gods and Mormons did it too.

Without all their lies, what proof do you have? None. So don't ask me how it happened. I admit I don't know. It is you who claims knowledge in something that imo doesn't even exist.

 

[sealybobo]

I think EVERYTHING has a scientific explanation.

OK, Sport. Explain how the universe got here. And don't sidestep it with the big bang. Science doesn't know how it started or how life started. Theories aren't proof.

If I was ancient man and sitting around a camp fire with a bunch of other primitive men, the creation story is what I would come up with .

Unless you believe God talked to people and told them the 7 day story? Come on! Really?