Personal Experience
Offline So I was reading the TEC thread (scary stuff) and it reminded me of a religious experience I had when I was a teenager.
When I was probably 13, my family experienced a series of tragedies that included the deaths of multiple relatives, most of them very young, some of them my friends. My parents were worried about my mental state and so my dad took me to a church where a bunch of church men layed hands on me and prayed in the middle of an empty sanctuary. Just me, like six guys and a bunch of prayer and physical contact. I remember lots of tears and feeling unusual heat coming from their hands on my head and shoulders but not much else. I don't think it ever came up again after that day.
So, touch of God or psychosomatic pressure?
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
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Probably a bunch of sweaty old men with their palms on you, surrounding and breathing hot air down your neck while giving you no personal space.
Sounds kind of creepy to me. I think I would of tried to kick one of them and ran for it. Crying wouldn't be unexpected in that kind of setting either.
:3
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
Weird version of a group hug. Getting your personal space invaded like this is so unsettling it's quite possible you'd have freak-out feelings
that could be interpreted as some sort of involvement from god.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
You were 13? They were a bunch of old, devout, church-goers?
Maybe they were hot and sweaty because you were turning them on.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Either psychosomatic or just freaking out.
And then you repressed it for a while...
Heh, I never got the impression it was an old sweaty man thing. Also, I never repressed it, I just don't think it was convincing evidence for the existence of a God. It just stands out to me because of the TEC converstation.
This instance was the only time I had a physical feeling of something that seemed out of the ordinary. The only other God experiences I ever had involved nightmares about hell.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
I'm not sure about you, but for me, that'd be totally out of the ordinary.
Have you seen the documentary "Marjoe?" It's really quite good. In it, Marjoe explains how he would induce the feeling of the presence of god in church members. It's really quite revealing.
"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers
The brain is an amazing thing isn't it?
"I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them." ~Galileo Galilei
I have felt the healing power only once I cannot comment on the above as I was not involved but I wood not put a child threw that sort of thing a child needs a lot of love and time to come to terms with loss of any kind.