₦airaland Forum

LordReed:
I am of the opinion that nothing has been definitively shown to exist outside of the material world, observable or not.

BTW please answer the question, how did you know you were in the presence of the divine?

How about if the tools to arrive at the definitive evidence for something existing outside of the parameters of the material world are insufficient? Does the fact that something cannot be identified definitively by a particular method of identification negate the existence of that thing?

I knew I was in the presence of something divine because I felt my Ego(the self I and everyone was familiar with) crumble in that atmosphere of worship and something inside me, sort of an inner self, takeover and I felt that this second self was purer than my Ego and unconcerned about worldly needs and pleasures and this second self acknowledged the existence and presence of the divine, and this acknowledgement brought me to tears.

Ranchhoddas:
Chemicals in your brain made you believe?

You got goosebumps. The same thing I get when I listen to Zion's Daughter by Boney M.

Did you not realize your finitude in the grand scheme of things before attending the Experience?
What did you think you where before then?

You'd snap out of it soon.
Bookmark this comment.

Chemicals in the brain also produce the feeling of love and empathy. Does the fact the these feelings arise as a result of chemicals in the brain disprove the presence and profoundness of the love a mother has for her child even though one can't prove materially that the feeling of love exists?

I listen to music a lot. I've never felt that way before. And I've already described the way I felt. It's very different from the sensation I get when I listen to my best soulful songs.

When I was staunchly an atheist I didn't believe in the existence of anything divide and transcendent outside the scope of the material world and I certainly didn't consider myself inferior to it. This changed after my experience.

LordReed:
Interesting? So how did you know you were in the presence of the divine? You saw it?

Are you of the opinion that there is nothing that exists outside the domain of the observable material world?

HardMirror:
all i can do is smile here. What made u cry? What exactly did u experience? Even Michael jackson's songs can make people cry. Good music can make u feel moved. It does not mean shit. So you were there worshipping a god u claimed was everything bad right? What has changed really? Has god become good and reasonable? What were the specifics that made u drop christianity before and how has this changed?

I didn't cry because i was just emotional. Part of the reason I cried, I think, was the acknowledgement of my finitude and relative insignificance in the presence of the divine presence I was basking in. It was the crumbling of my ego; of that part of myself that felt it was all there was to me. It was the stripping away of the flesh-aspect of myself; the part of myself that was interested in worldly pursuits, and the identification of a deeper, purer part of myself that felt more real than the part of me I was familiar with.

There are many ways to approach the old testament stories. You could take them literally or you could engage with them as myths. Even if you take them literally you can't tell which of the stories are fact or which of them are a representation of the culture and perspectives of the people and how they represented and dramatized the metaphysical experiences they had. So on the question of how I see the God of the bible now, I can't really say since I don't know whether the stories about God were literal truths, a projection unto the idea of the God the cultures and perspectives of the people at the time or just stories used to represent and dramatize the divine and metaphysical experiences of the people of the time.

NPComplete:
Nice story. Good for u. Not an atheist myself so I have no dog in this fight. From what I can read, u are in love. U will like to believe in Christianity so as to complete your relationship. Good. After u marry her and spend more time devoted to the religion lets see if u are still this mushy. Good luck to u as u search for the truth. Whether u choose to become an atheist again, a deist or just irreligious or remain christian or even convert to these New Age religions, I just hope u find peace with yourself and that whatever stance u choose in the future u are able to back it up with evidence.

By the way, anyone notice how nobody has claimed he was not a true atheist yet? If it was a reversed story now Christians will rush here and scream their favorite No-true-Scottsman fallacy.

I don't see how anything I wrote indicated that the reason I dumped atheism was to complete my relationship with my partner. We aren't married yet but she has always been comfortable with my atheism. She isn't even religious herself, she just loves music and attending this sort of shows. She'd have urged me to accompany her to a Davido concert the same way she urged me to accompany her to Xperience. Both of us usually attend events together and according to her she feels better when I'm by her side in this sort of public occasions. Plus I'd provide her with a free ride home since her car was currently under repair.

I hope we all find truth and peace.

CAPSLOCKED:
I TELL YOU WITH ALL CONFIDENCE THAT WHAT YOU FELT WASN'T SPECIAL, OR IN ANYWAY POINTS TO THE DIRECTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF A SUPREME DEITY, WHO COINCIDENTALLY IS THE CHRISTIAN GOD YOU WERE TAUGHT ABOUT AS A LITTLE CHRISTIAN CHILD.

LISTENING TO GOSPEL SONGS MAKE SOME CHRISTIANS CRY, JUST THE SAME WAY WATCHING TITANIC MADE BILLIONS OF PEOPLE CRY.
SOME OF US CRIED WHENEVER RONALDINHO CRIED. SOME OF US CRY WHENEVER RONALDO CRIES. SOME OF US CRY WHENEVER DRUG-ADDICTED GOOD FOR NOTHING BOYS LIKE LIL WAYNE AND MIGOS HIT THE STAGE.

YOU KNOW WHY? HUMANS ARE VERY EMOTIONAL BEINGS WHO SOMETIMES LET THEIR FRAGILE EMOTIONS RULE THEM.

AGAIN, LET ME REMIND YOU WITH ALL CONFIDENCE THAT WHAT YOU FELT WHEN THE GOSPEL CHOIR GUY SANG WASN'T SPECIAL OR DIVINE, OR IN ANYWAY POINTS TO THE DIRECTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF A SUPREME DEITY, WHO COINCIDENTALLY IS THE CHRISTIAN GOD YOU WERE TAUGHT ABOUT AS A LITTLE CHRISTIAN CHILD.

I don't think the experience I had during that moment of worship equates with any of the examples you raised. Like I stated in my first post, it wasn't just me being all emotional. Thinking back I think part of the reason I cried was the acknowledgement of my finitude and relative insignificance in the presence of the divine presence I was basking in. It was the crumbling of my ego; of that part of myself that felt it was all there was to me. It was the stripping away of the flesh-aspect of myself; the part of myself that was interested in worldly pursuits, and the identification of a deeper, purer part of myself that felt more real that this flesh-aspect.

And I find it odd that you keep using the phrase "with all confidence" to preface all your assertions. This is the sort of intellectual arrogance that I had when I was an atheist. The sort of delusion of knowledge that deceives you into thinking that you have all the answers to every question, until an experience humbles you and you realize how ignorant you have been.

HardMirror:
Ok. Read. You are an emotional person. Now that you believe in god, has it changed all the things you observed as wrong with christianity?

I'm an empathic person. I wouldn't consider myself emotional. Before Xperience, I had never cried while singing any song. I cried as I result of the profundity of the experience I had while worshiping God. Like I tried my best to illustrate I had issues with atheism beforehand, the experience I had was the final straw and it confirmed few of the things I was agnostic about.

My new found belief has made me perceive Christianity in a different light. As with every enterprise that involves human input and supervision, of course its bound to have its errors and shortcomings. But yet there are aspects of Christianity that reveal deep truths about the actual nature of our reality, truths that atheism, by its nature, would never unravel.

I had been a christian all my life until I became an atheist 4 years ago. I started gravitating towards atheism when I began to examine the bible objectively, nesting my examination in empirical facts about the world established from reliable scientific fields. I realized that evidence from cosmology, anthropology, history, physics and evolutionary biology, were at odds with the claims of the bible. I also identified the contradictions and inconsistencies within the bible. I realized that there was no way that the claims of the bible could be true given its conspicuous errors and unscientific assertions. Another turning point in my transformation from a christian to an atheist came when I actually studied the origins of Christianity. It became clear to me from my research that a lot of what I thought belonged exclusively to Christianity was actually gotten from other sources. The creation story in the bible was derived from older middle-eastern texts that preceded Judaism, same with flood story. I realized that a significant chunk of new testament theology was derived from the pagan culture surrounding the legalization of Christianity during Constantine's era. There was also the shocking fact that what we currently consider de-facto Christian doctrine was contrived by men who acted under the instruction of a very occultic roman empire.
Books that were deemed okay by those control were incorporated into the christian canon while those that weren't deemed okay were de-canonized. What's wasn't clear to me was the criteria for deeming a book qualified to be incorporated in the canon. Going by the information contained in the books that weren't included in the canon it became apparent that this process was done to occlude important knowledge and to condition Christians to see the world in a particular way.

I also studied the progression of Christianity throughout history and I noticed how pernicious it had been and how it's doctrines had been used to justify wars and other atrocities committed against human beings. Most notably the crusades, the inquisitions, slavery and racial subjugation as a derivative. I felt that there was no way that a religion which had caused the deaths of millions of people could be inspired by the God of creation.

The final nail in the coffin for me was when I observed the character of the God in the old testament. He not only was misogynistic, sexiest and racist but he was also blood thirsty, heartless, and possessed the emotional strength of an ordinary human; he was bad-tempered, capricious and murderously splenetic. I felt that this being whatever it was was just concocted by men as it expressed traits common to man. I afterwards dumped Christianity and became an atheist.

At first, seeing the world trough the lens of atheism felt liberating. I felt a certain freedom I had never felt before. I could now do things that were proscribed by Christianity. Gradually I felt my conscience grow soft and my moral compass become defective. This didn't mean that I became a bad person, it was just that I didn't feel under any obligation to something higher than myself( you can call this God or the divine) to live a life you'd consider moral. Of course this is no argument against atheism. Christians commit immoral acts all the time and so do atheists. But in my case I felt my previous religious belief gave me more of a reason to live a moral life than atheism did. I know empathy plays a role in keeping humans from committing harm against other people. But as history and the psychological literature on the subject has shown, empathy can easily be suppressed by environmental factors, and humans possess different levels of empathy. The reason my previous religious belief provided as to why living a moral life was essential wasn't rooted in the escape of hell and the attainment of a heaven after death. No. Even as a christian my beliefs were more sophisticated than the fear and reward dynamic of hell and heaven. As a christian the reason I felt living a moral life was essential was because of how that impacted my spiritual experience. The more moral I was, the more profound my spiritual experiences.

On the question of meaning of life which I have always regarded as a every serious and important question, atheism seemed to offer mostly hedonistic or pessimistic answers. Replies from most atheists to this question was usually something like: "The point of life is to be happy and do what you enjoy" or that life was has no objective meaning. We are all just biological products of evolution and one day we will die and that's that. We come from nothing and we will go to nothing." Now I'm not saying that if an answer to the question of the meaning of life is hedonistic or pessimistic then the answer is false. But in my opinion these replies seemed so thoughtless and empty. The idea that happiness and pleasure were the aims to which humans should pursue revealed the selfishness and moral poverty that inspired the hedonistic perspective. The idea that everything is meaningless and we are just bags of flesh that will die and decay revealed the deep antihumanism and crippling nihilism that colored the pessimistic perspective.

There was another faction of atheists that referred to themselves as secular humanists. Although their answer to the question of the meaning of life was nested in a hedonistic and pessimistic world view, it was tempered with the responsibility of making the world a better place and helping humans in need while still being in it. Secular humanism was very attractive to me because I'm a very empathic person, but the more I immersed myself this ideology I soon realized that its primary tenet was also the massage that Christianity preached. Love.

I also regarded secular humanism as not being a very logically consistent perspective to have. If striving for happiness or pleasure along with shouldering the responsibility of helping your fellow humans is what life is about, outside the purview of the existence of the divine, then a serious contradiction arises when the things that make one happy don't make the lives of humans better. Take for instance a natural sexual sadist. Sexually sadistic individuals derive pleasure and happiness from harming others. How does a sexual sadist who is a secular humanist reconcile these two contradicting motivations? The mistake of secular humanists is that they erroneously assume that everyone is empathic and hence should want to care for other humans. But this isn't the case.
Conversely there have been lots of unemphatic and sadistic people who when the call to humanism was nested in a moral obligation to the divine, they selflessly cared for other humans and forwent their immoral impulses.

I attended xperience13 because my partner asked me to. She pleaded that I attend with her and out of love and respect for her wishes I did. This wasn't the only reason however. I felt a certain nostalgia about attending the event as I used to before I became an atheist and since lots of talented artists were billed to perform, I attended.
I wasn't especially thrilled with the occasion, especially with the intermittent prayers for Nigeria that were made under the foolish assumption that prayer was the solution to Nigeria's problems, until Nathaniel Bassey performed. His performance was the straw that broke the camel's back.

As an atheist, despite the condescending conviction that my beliefs were fact-proof, I always felt that something was missing. I felt that I wasn't in alignment with a crucial segment of my life. An important portion of the puzzle of my life always seemed to be absent. I never knew what it was but I always felt that it wasn't present. It's interesting to note that when I was a christian I never felt this way. Atheism mired evolutionists and anthropologists have opined that we humans have a natural desire to ascribe reverence to something outside of ourselves. Sort of like a gene that predisposes us to being religious. I don't disagree with this. What I disagree with it is the extrapolation derived from this observation along with the purported origin for it. Unlike the evolutionists I don't think we evolved this traits as a result of random processes of natural selection. I also don't think that the fact that this is a product of natural selection means that the existence of God or the divine isn't an objective reality.

What if it is an objective reality? What if the need humans have to ascribe their creation and being and the creation of the natural world to a divine creator is proof that the divine exists?
Our emotional systems seen very attuned to profound states of meaning. And it seems like the most profound states usually involve either actions and experiences motivated my love or moments of religious worship. When Nathaniel Bassey raised those worship songs and I sang along, I experienced an emotional state that I hadn't experienced before. I cried like a child. In that unique moment of worship, I felt true meaning. I felt all my flesh-like lusts and impulses crumble in submission to something inside me that felt purer and more real than my physical body. I felt I was in the presence of a divine presence greater than myself and I felt my experience was real and true.

It's only a very arrogant person that would say that he understands everything about the nature of reality. Only a very close-minded person would reject the existence of the metaphysical or the divine given the mountain of documentations on the subject throughout history. Now you may say that these documentations are myths. But who is to say that myths aren't dramatization of experienced truths?

Maybe the God of the Bible didn't create the world and maybe Jesus isn't the direct son of God. I don't know the answers to these questions. But what I'm am certain of is that lots of truths are incorporated within Christianity and through participating in worship and in implementing core christian principles, these truths can be revealed.

Atheists are fond of throwing away the baby with the bath water. They, just like I did, observe errors in the bible and then discount everything else about Christianity on the basis of these errors. I think the materialism that atheism is nested in is insufficient to unravel deep truths about life and the true nature of our world.