I really don't know where to start. I was a serious Christian when I turned 19, I think. (Of course I have heard since I am not sure of the exact date of my conversion, then I must not be really saved). I went to a spirit-filled church for five years and to other denominations before that. I stayed in the spirit-filled church because my pastor was, or is, a "prophet", or had a prophetic type gift. I was going through really hard times (emotionally). No one knew my personal life in that church at all, yet somehow he came straight to me on several different occasions to tell me things so accurate and so precise, that I was going through, that it had to be real. The things that he would prophesy were not generalized like you see from a fake fortune teller.
I became very involved in Christianity and knew it had to be real, or I would not see these "gifts of the spirit" in operation.
I have been healed of things miraculously and knew that for those things to happen, there must be a God.
I have seen demon-possessed people speaking in tongues... and these people were for real. I mean there was no faking this stuff. I have actually seen someone thrown around on a floor and jerked in such a manner that their body could not have done that! I knew this person all of my life, knew them to be of sound mind, and watched their body twisted in really unnatural ways. This person could not have been faking. Freaky voices would come out of her and would say things about other people that only those other people knew at the time. She spoke in other languages and she only knows English. There were other people that knew some of these other languages and that is why everyone was so shocked that it would come out of her mouth.
I would normally think, "well I guess anything can be faked," but I know this person, and she is not the type to fake, to want attention, or anything of the sort. She was disabled in her body (her mind completely sound, however), so I know she could not have contorted her body in the weird ways, and slung it around on the floor, or flipped herself over and over all around the church. These things would only happen to her when we would go to church, or watch a movie like that Mel Gibson movie that had to do with Christ.
Everyone was really taken aback by this.
So here is the problem, I have found tons of contradictions in the Bible, only some have been answered enough to suffice.
The rest I have yet to find an answer for. After coming to this site I've found more contradictions or errors that I did not even know about.
I'm not sure what to do about all of this, so I simply don't go to church. It's hard to sit there with all of these questions, knowing no one will take the time to answer them, and when they do, the answers are not sufficient.
I normally, by now, would have concluded Christianity as false. However, after seeing all of these supernatural things, I can not say it is false, either.
I am here because I know there are a lot of Christians out there that have seen the same things, and experienced them as real—not as a hoax or what have you. I am hoping there are some ex-Christians on here that wouldn't mind emailing me if they have had the same experiences and could help bring some sort of light to the subject.
Sandra
jnutz629 at yahoo dot com
These letters were published between January 2001 and February 2010. To view recent posts, go to The Main Blog at ExChristian.Net
6 comments:
Welcome Sandra.
First off, I'm not going to tell you that you didn't experience what you experienced or that the people involved were fakers or con artists. That would be arrogant and presumptuous; after all I wasn't there.
I, myself, have experienced things that I can't easily explain. And I know many people who have related stories to me that were likewise improbable yet were sincerely presented as absolute fact.
I honestly don't think there's anybody who has never experienced something that didn't quite make sense to them- some more than others, naturally. But all this shows us is that the world we live in is far more complex than it seems and there is a lot about it that we simply haven't figured out yet.
I think the question you need to ask yourself is, could there be any other explanation for what you've experienced? Keep in mind that you don't actually need to figure out what the right explanation is, just recognize whether or not one could exist.
One of the things religious leaders and "true believers" love to do is to assign divine origens to improbable circumstances. After 9/11 people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson tried to say that god had caused the catastrophe to happen to punish America for tolerating feminism and homosexuality. If your favorite keepsake gets lost, thats the devil's handiwork. If the home team wins the big game, that's the lord's doing.
It sounds as though you've already started questioning christianity. Now you're having to decide whether the evidence you've experienced is credible enough outweigh the contradictions and incongruities of scripture. My best advise to you is to take your time, don't hurry, look at everything and keep and open mind.
Dear Sandra, phenomena such as you describe kept me in christianity longer than I would have stayed in otherwise. Eventually I decided that miracles are attested in many religions, so...:
1. maybe there are powers of the human body and brain that we have yet to understand, and these capacities are unleashed more effectively in religious enthusiasm - or other high-energy situations - than in normal life
2. maybe there's some deity out there common to all the religions. if all the religions have different doctrines but similar miracles, maybe the doctrine is a human attempt to understand a divine reality beyond all of us
3. maybe they're fake or delusion
??? I never thought the idea that Satan inspires non-christian miracles as counterfeits is testable at all, so I forgot about that argument
I'm interested in what you say about the speaking actual languages in "tongues." You say people you knew identified the speech as other languages but you didn't know the foreign languages yourself. I find this is ALWAYS true when I hear such accounts. The witness never tells me s/he understood speech in a language unknown to the person speaking in tongues. It's ALWAYS someone else who identifies the language.
Can you specify more about the evidence that the tongue-speaker spoke an identified language? This is an important point. What can you do to trace the evidence and verify it?
Hi Sandra,
Welcome to ex-c. Like you, I have struggled with understanding the supernatural since I left christianity.
But I have come to realize that the fact that I can't explain something doesn't make it from god or from the devil.
The stuff you saw is often faked. Another explanation is mental illness. And yet another way to see it is that we still don't know what that is, but science will eventually explain it.
Learning to live with unknowns is a big part of the ex-christian experience. We find freedom when we realize that we, as a race, have not and probably never will reach the pinacle of knowledge. Plain and simple, there are things we don't know.
Hi Sandra,
I hope the following webpage should answer some of the questions with regards to the "supernatural" events.
http://www.dicksutphen.com/html/battlemind.html
These events are not unique to christianity alone, and a lot of them have a logical explanation.
It is upto to you to choose which one.
Cya
Skeptic
I know I'm a little late responding to your post, but I hope that you read this.
I can understand your confusion. You don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water so to speak.
The thing is, Sandra, that supernatural happenings have been experienced throughout the world. Tribal members in Africa can be found in trances, countless miracles are attributed to the Hindus, people around the world walk on fire, the dead are raised, Catholics see visions of Mary, etc. etc. You get the point. Being that you are of a Protestant denomination, you have probably doubted that these Catholics are really seeing visions of Mary, but to them it is very real and many of these Catholics are sincere. Have you seen the movie "The Exorcism of Emily Rose"? People around the world report alien abductions and are known by their families and friends to be completely sane and sincere, not typical of a character that would make up some sensationalist claim for fifteen minutes of fame. People of all different faiths have Near death experiences and are changed forever by them. Carl Sagan was a well known Atheist who had a near death experience and saw visions of the Hindu God Vishnu, I believe it was. He was shaken forever by this experience. My best friend had one as well many years ago and was never visited by Jesus. The higher power in his NDE never claimed to be Jesus or the Bible God even though my friend is a long time Southern Baptist.
I was watching Discovery Health channel today and a woman was trapped under ice for over twenty minutes. By the time they got her to the hospital it had been over an hour that she had been dead. Amazingly, this woman was brought back to life. The doctors had NEVER revived someone after so long. The brain begins to undergo irreparable damage after only five minutes of oxygen deprivation. It's true that the brain needs less oxygen in such extreme cold, but over an hour?!? Mankind continually overcomes obstacles and physical restraints. Men and women continue to beat world records.
Patients suffering from mental disorders are quite convinced of their dillusions until they undergo a lobotomy or a series of psychopharmaceuticals and then wonder how they could have ever thought that the visions and voices were real. Perfectly sane people recieving a placebo pill will experience the same effects as someone recieving the real deal. Perfectly sane people will feel the effects of being drunk after drinking non-alcoholic beer in lab studies.
Christians, Jews, Muslims, Aztecs, Hindus, etc. have been inspired by God to do atrocious things but are entirely convinced of the commandment set down by God to do it. If every vision, every voice, every spirit, every angel, every NDE, every physical manifestation, that religious people experience is real, than how do we determine who's right? How do we sift through the conflicting messages of the different religions that all tell us that they have THE WAY?
Sandra, the human brain is a marvelous thing. It is capable of so much more than we realize. How many times have you heard of men and women exerting supernatural strength in times of crisis? How many times have you finished a friend's sentence? How many times have you felt you've been here or there before? How does David Blaine or Chris Angel (magicians) read other's minds when performing tricks? That shit is amazing! How did Chris Angel give the illusion of sticking his arm completely through the middle of a man in front of a crowd of onlookers standing right next to him? Those people will be freaked out FOREVER by that shit not to mention the man that was left shaking by the experience of thinking some dude just stuck his fricken arm through his middle! It sure was real to him.
Everyday, we as a race defy the odds. Things that are common place today were beyond scientific reasoning once. We use only a fragment of our brain! Once scientists believed that life could originate spontaneously, but Louis Pasteur thought otherwise and proved that life begets life. How do we explain the superior intelligence of the Egyptians who had better embalming and preserving techniques than we do today with all of our technology?
There is SO MUCH WE DON'T KNOW!!! We want to attach meaning to something we don't understand, but there is no reason you must believe that what you've seen is anything other than a physical manifestation of what their minds believed. Studies have shown that patients who believe they are going to get well have an overwhelming rate of recovery when compared to people who are negative (and we're not talking about prayer here).
There is a wealth of information at your finger tips Sandra. You obviously own a computer or know someone who does. Who would have ever thought it possible to communicate with others around the world in nanoseconds? Who would have ever thought that we could have access to information that others have fought and died for across the ages? Keep your mind sharp. Don't ever stop learning Sandra! Ever! Ke
Here's something that I don't understand! Is there a God somewhere in the universe that "gets off" or receives a joy if you will, when people jump around the church and shout absuridities?
I mean really think hard about this. A holy spirit that finds joy in people speaking in tongues (making foolish gibberish noises)?
Put yourself in a God's position, lets say you're 10 Billion, no 1 million miles away from earth and you're the keeper of the universe, and you have ways of knowing things everywhere in the universe by way of the holy spirit, would you find joy or gladness in people being in a trance like state and shouting praise God and I love Jesus, when there are little children on the other side of the globe that need food, medical attention, comfort, compassion, yet you prefer to acknowledge people in a church praising you and jumping about like they are defending themselves from a swarm of bees?
I want you to be totally Honest with yourself with these questions, can you honestly believe there exists a God that self-gloating? Is this something you as a God would be proud of?
Those people you saw are reacting out of fear and fright placed in them by who? God? Jesus? Satan? No!! The preacher, they are responding to his power of suggestion and saying it is from a Holy Spirit, yet the Holy Spirit always requires money before it will appear.
Sandra you need to be totally honest with yourself when it comes to religion, you know deep down in all your common sense that those miracles are not really miracles, it's what people want to believe, people want, desire, plead, beg, cast their will, for the Bible to be true, they want that more than life itsself, they will do anything to try to convence someone that the Bible is true, anything, any damned thing! They will even "Lie and cry and perform tricks" just like a circus clown!
Sandra only you know yourself it's all fake and a lie, no one else can convence you otherwise. Be honest with yourself. TC
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