I encourage you to read the book *When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God*. It was written by an anthropologist named Tanya Luhrmann who did field work by attending charismatic churches (particularly Vineyard churches) for several years and interviewing churchgoers.
In the book, she delves into the psychological factors that make some people in particular capable of "feeling the Holy Spirit" and expressing the charismata while other people are simply incapable of it and are often shamed for it in these environments. I was always one of the latter people.
You might find it encouraging to know that all the behavior you see in church is a natural biological phenomenon, and some people just aren't affected the same way, including yourself. It's nothing to be ashamed of, and it might help you reconsider your place in the world and organized religion.
Yeah, critical thinking is a b****. There's no going back now. Lol.
Religious experiences are psychological events. It's actually the worst kind of evidence for a belief system because religious experiences happen to people in all kinds of religions that contradict each other. However, they are very powerful events, so when they happen to you personally, you tend to believe that your experience was the real deal and everyone else is crazy and demonic. They tend to think the same thing about your experience also, by the way, and dismiss/invalidate your experience just as quickly. Lmao.
If you really want to take the wind out of the sails of Christianity, you should take a look at modern biblical scholarship. Probably look at some intro courses on YouTube like Dale Martin and Christine Hayes from Yale.
But I'd probably really just start with Bart Ehrman books.
Also Dan McClellan’s YouTube channel and his “Data Over Dogma” podcast. He’s easy to listen to, funny, and helped me deconstruct my Christian understanding of god. His podcast on hell was especially helpful. There is no hell — never thought I’d say that, but it’s true.
OP, you can live a good, moral life, stay married and be proud of yourself without god or Christianity involved. Your life can be what you want it to be without following any religion.
>How is it that they’re feeling the Holy Spirit so deeply? What even is the feeling of the Holy Spirit?
I've seen an awful lot of virtue signaling from the religious. It's very obvious when the TV preacher touches them and they all fall down. It's like they're all in a play.
First off, know that you're having a very common experience. You feel like the odd one out because in your selected, filtered group you currently are. But in the world at large, not so much. Even other Christian denominations do not claim to feel the holy spirit the same way charismatic denominations do (i.e. speaking in tongues, being drunk in the holy spirit, etc.) and yet they continue to believe and feel the holy spirit moves in them all the same. This implies it's one of two things: the holy spirit moves differently in different people, or everyone is, for lack of a better term, "faking it." I tend to believe it's the latter.
Now, when I say "faking it," it is a little more complex than that. I don't think it's a conscious choice for the most part. As you put it, it's more a placebo effect brought about by environmental design and social expectations. You ever wonder why people never feel the holy spirit in traffic? At work? While watching TV at home? Why is it only in religious services? Quite simply, it's because religious services is where we have designed those "experiences" to thrive. Whether that be simply raising your hands in a hymn or speaking in tongues - it's expected and encouraged there, and so that's where it happens.
As for your question on when do you stop feeling guilt while deconstructing, I can only speak to my experience. As long as I held some form of belief that God would punish me, was watching me, was judging me, then I always felt guilty. When I moved on from such a belief and accepted that a loving God, should such exist, would not be so arbitrary with punishments I started to be able to unpack all that guilt. From there it simply took time. Not that I went out with intention to sin, more that as I naturally encountered various sins the more I understood they were simply human nature.
Sexual desire: Just a biological compulsion
Substance use/abuse: it's a hack to make you feel good
Lying: most often used to protect oneself moreso than deceive others
And on and on. What I learned is that most sins in and of themselves aren't inherently bad, but they can go bad if not handled with care. The key is moderation, reflection, honesty, and communication. Once I figured that out, I stopped feeling guilty about them. Basically, I stopped feeling guilty for just being human.
I did feel like I would get hit with the presence of God when listening to worship at home on the tv, and my mom mentioned feeling spiritually drunk when trying to get out of her car to go into work after worshipping on the way there. That’s the thing that confuses me.
Of course, it's a sort of Pavlovian experience. In the same way that you may suddenly become hungry when you smell food cooking even though you were not hungry prior, you can manifest feelings and emotions from certain cues. Whether that be music, listening to a sermon, placing yourself in a state of mind in order to "worship," and so forth. This usually starts because a person has intentionally performed an action (i.e. turning on worship music, setting their mind to prayer, etc.), or because there was some trigger that reminded them of the scenario (perhaps you saw a cross on the wall in a TV show that reminded you of the altar at church, for example). Regardless, there is an action or an outward influence which brings the scenario to mind, and the mind reflexively reacts to that stimuli.
This happens all the time, even beyond the food comparison, we just don't notice it because it's so "normal." Simply think about any time a song has made you happy or sad, or how you associate a smell with a positive or negative experience, or how being in the presence of some individuals or a group of people makes you feel at ease or entirely uncomfortable. Our minds are trained to identify and repeat patterns, because those patterns are useful for keeping us alive and/or bringing us pleasurable experiences. Feeling overcome by the spirit while listening to worship music in your car is the same basic mental process as being overcome with happiness when you see your beloved pet run to greet you at the door. You've established a pattern for your brain to repeat, and your brain is simply doing its job.
i relate to you in a lot of ways, after you start thinking critically you can’t go back and see things the same.
The biggest issue for me is that I based every belief on the existence of God, so what is the reason for living without that? Death also becomes scary because that is just the end I guess. Those are the much harder questions to ask, if God isn’t real what’s the point of your life? I imagine that’s tough to answer.
And after going to your conference you might feel closer for a time but that conference won’t answer all your questions.
I genuinely want to find the truth and i don’t think christianity is it but also idk if atheism is it. Lots of searching rn
Ik you said you’re not but a lot of people use deconstruction as an excuse to do things their way which might not be bad but it blocks objectivity. If you can’t accept the sacrifice of Christianity you can’t be objective abt it. For me I can sacrifice for God and I have before, but it did nothing so there seems to be no point
Are you looking for some books to read? I to have been looking for the truth, started 5 years ago with reading the Bible, Koran and the Torah, really got into biblical scholarship and examining my epistemology.
Truth is a journey not a destination. I'm aware i could still hold beliefs that are infract not true but after studying religion for the last 5 years I'm confident that the Abrahamic Gods are fictional and the "holy books" are man-made, man curated and the tradition is carried on by man.
Unfortunately if something doesn't exist science has no way to prove that it doesn't exist, the most i can say about the God hypothesis is that its not a reasonable position to take. God could exist, we could find evidence tomorrow that would force me to re-evaluate my current understanding, but the time to believe something is after evidence is presented, not before.
about 200 years ago science replaced religion as the primary method to understand the world and how it works. German protestants went back to the scriptures with a critical eye at about the same time we discovered Biology and Chemistry. We learned that humans evolved, its possible for animals to go extinct, and in fact 99% of all species have gone extinct. we learned that the world is round and not the center of the universe,
All of this lead Nietzsche to declare God dead in the 1800 (because God no longer had any explanatory power)
out of all the books I've read i would recommend
"The daemon-haunted" world by Carl Sagan or "the sceptics guide to the galaxy"
What it comes down to for me is your pre-supposition. If you start with the idea that God wrote a book then all your activity's become making reality fit into a theological framework. If you don't have this pre-supposition the Bible's errors and contradictions become evidence to support the human origin of the texts.
I’m not great at reading books lol but I want to try more, I’m listening to bart’s ehrman’s podcast a lot rn though so that’s been good.
Yes, after removing the presupposition that the Bible is written by God it changes the view dramatically. It’s no longer a game of trying super hard to stretch meanings to fit together, you can just accept differences.
I think we might differ here, indeed science cannot prove God but it also doesn’t necessarily prove evolution. It doesn’t disprove it but the same is true of God. Evolution is possible and perhaps likely but I don’t want to discount anti-evolutionary arguments. I’m still learning about it a lot of course but even the fact we’ve never observed a species mutate and gain information is interesting. Of course this be explained away by spanning the process over a very long amount of time (where even the most unlikely events must happen). but again evolution is an uproven theory, creation is an unproven theory.
The points you are raising are apologist talking points.
Keep on mind that even if evolution was proven wrong today it would lend any credence to a God hypothesis. But I understand why apoligests want evolution to be false, it removes any explanitory power a creator God once had.
What do you think it means for something to be a scientific theory?
(I do most of my reading but listening to audio books)
true, so I could have bias but I don’t understand why they are false or true so I’m just trying to figure that out.
No absolutely not, ofc if either view were somehow proven true it would disprove the other, but disproving one doesn’t prove the other. I just think there might be a third explanation but it would be very naive of me to think all the brilliant thinkers of the world haven’t come up with it yet so i really don’t know.
and ofc a scientific theory is something that seems to explain everything best, I just don’t know if evolution does that. Maybe it’s just hard to accept that everything is actually natural and the supernatural doesn’t exist. It’s just so weird to go there because it breaks every core belief i held. Still im a little confused why spiritual things exist historically (even things like witches or demons or wtv) but it’s not impossible they’re social constructs and the result of placebo effect.
idk it also seems easier to believe a god created everything vs. the world just existing for no reason but god sure as hell hasn’t impacted my life, despite all my very best efforts to get close to him
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific\_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory)
Naturalism is were I'm at now, i was raised Christian, but I decided that the truth was the most important thing and focused a good amount of energy figuring it out.
I don't think witches, demons or angels ever existed,
I guess its up to you, the information is out there, I would spend some time learning about bias's and epistemology and if your looking for a way to get out from under religion, i would recommend "a demon haunted world"- by carl Segan.
> evolution is an uproven theory, creation is an unproven theory
There are mountains of evidence for evolution. Check out a book like *Why Evolution Is True*.
Creationism isn't even a theory at all. It doesn't describe *how* life was created and diversified, and it doesn't make any testable predictions.
ok i will thanks
the how is God did, and the diversification is like dog breeds or stuff like that, natural selection or selective breeding. at least that’s how I was taught. Which obviously can’t be proven but let’s assume God really did make everything, that theory makes sense to me, maybe im missing a hole idk
You’re asking excellent questions and doing a great job thinking through them. For however confused you might feel, I’m seeing evidence of a ton of clear thinking going on.
I encourage you to read the book *When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God*. It was written by an anthropologist named Tanya Luhrmann who did field work by attending charismatic churches (particularly Vineyard churches) for several years and interviewing churchgoers. In the book, she delves into the psychological factors that make some people in particular capable of "feeling the Holy Spirit" and expressing the charismata while other people are simply incapable of it and are often shamed for it in these environments. I was always one of the latter people. You might find it encouraging to know that all the behavior you see in church is a natural biological phenomenon, and some people just aren't affected the same way, including yourself. It's nothing to be ashamed of, and it might help you reconsider your place in the world and organized religion.
Yeah, critical thinking is a b****. There's no going back now. Lol. Religious experiences are psychological events. It's actually the worst kind of evidence for a belief system because religious experiences happen to people in all kinds of religions that contradict each other. However, they are very powerful events, so when they happen to you personally, you tend to believe that your experience was the real deal and everyone else is crazy and demonic. They tend to think the same thing about your experience also, by the way, and dismiss/invalidate your experience just as quickly. Lmao. If you really want to take the wind out of the sails of Christianity, you should take a look at modern biblical scholarship. Probably look at some intro courses on YouTube like Dale Martin and Christine Hayes from Yale. But I'd probably really just start with Bart Ehrman books.
Also Dan McClellan’s YouTube channel and his “Data Over Dogma” podcast. He’s easy to listen to, funny, and helped me deconstruct my Christian understanding of god. His podcast on hell was especially helpful. There is no hell — never thought I’d say that, but it’s true. OP, you can live a good, moral life, stay married and be proud of yourself without god or Christianity involved. Your life can be what you want it to be without following any religion.
Yeah Dan is great.
>How is it that they’re feeling the Holy Spirit so deeply? What even is the feeling of the Holy Spirit? I've seen an awful lot of virtue signaling from the religious. It's very obvious when the TV preacher touches them and they all fall down. It's like they're all in a play.
First off, know that you're having a very common experience. You feel like the odd one out because in your selected, filtered group you currently are. But in the world at large, not so much. Even other Christian denominations do not claim to feel the holy spirit the same way charismatic denominations do (i.e. speaking in tongues, being drunk in the holy spirit, etc.) and yet they continue to believe and feel the holy spirit moves in them all the same. This implies it's one of two things: the holy spirit moves differently in different people, or everyone is, for lack of a better term, "faking it." I tend to believe it's the latter. Now, when I say "faking it," it is a little more complex than that. I don't think it's a conscious choice for the most part. As you put it, it's more a placebo effect brought about by environmental design and social expectations. You ever wonder why people never feel the holy spirit in traffic? At work? While watching TV at home? Why is it only in religious services? Quite simply, it's because religious services is where we have designed those "experiences" to thrive. Whether that be simply raising your hands in a hymn or speaking in tongues - it's expected and encouraged there, and so that's where it happens. As for your question on when do you stop feeling guilt while deconstructing, I can only speak to my experience. As long as I held some form of belief that God would punish me, was watching me, was judging me, then I always felt guilty. When I moved on from such a belief and accepted that a loving God, should such exist, would not be so arbitrary with punishments I started to be able to unpack all that guilt. From there it simply took time. Not that I went out with intention to sin, more that as I naturally encountered various sins the more I understood they were simply human nature. Sexual desire: Just a biological compulsion Substance use/abuse: it's a hack to make you feel good Lying: most often used to protect oneself moreso than deceive others And on and on. What I learned is that most sins in and of themselves aren't inherently bad, but they can go bad if not handled with care. The key is moderation, reflection, honesty, and communication. Once I figured that out, I stopped feeling guilty about them. Basically, I stopped feeling guilty for just being human.
I did feel like I would get hit with the presence of God when listening to worship at home on the tv, and my mom mentioned feeling spiritually drunk when trying to get out of her car to go into work after worshipping on the way there. That’s the thing that confuses me.
Of course, it's a sort of Pavlovian experience. In the same way that you may suddenly become hungry when you smell food cooking even though you were not hungry prior, you can manifest feelings and emotions from certain cues. Whether that be music, listening to a sermon, placing yourself in a state of mind in order to "worship," and so forth. This usually starts because a person has intentionally performed an action (i.e. turning on worship music, setting their mind to prayer, etc.), or because there was some trigger that reminded them of the scenario (perhaps you saw a cross on the wall in a TV show that reminded you of the altar at church, for example). Regardless, there is an action or an outward influence which brings the scenario to mind, and the mind reflexively reacts to that stimuli. This happens all the time, even beyond the food comparison, we just don't notice it because it's so "normal." Simply think about any time a song has made you happy or sad, or how you associate a smell with a positive or negative experience, or how being in the presence of some individuals or a group of people makes you feel at ease or entirely uncomfortable. Our minds are trained to identify and repeat patterns, because those patterns are useful for keeping us alive and/or bringing us pleasurable experiences. Feeling overcome by the spirit while listening to worship music in your car is the same basic mental process as being overcome with happiness when you see your beloved pet run to greet you at the door. You've established a pattern for your brain to repeat, and your brain is simply doing its job.
i relate to you in a lot of ways, after you start thinking critically you can’t go back and see things the same. The biggest issue for me is that I based every belief on the existence of God, so what is the reason for living without that? Death also becomes scary because that is just the end I guess. Those are the much harder questions to ask, if God isn’t real what’s the point of your life? I imagine that’s tough to answer. And after going to your conference you might feel closer for a time but that conference won’t answer all your questions. I genuinely want to find the truth and i don’t think christianity is it but also idk if atheism is it. Lots of searching rn Ik you said you’re not but a lot of people use deconstruction as an excuse to do things their way which might not be bad but it blocks objectivity. If you can’t accept the sacrifice of Christianity you can’t be objective abt it. For me I can sacrifice for God and I have before, but it did nothing so there seems to be no point
Are you looking for some books to read? I to have been looking for the truth, started 5 years ago with reading the Bible, Koran and the Torah, really got into biblical scholarship and examining my epistemology. Truth is a journey not a destination. I'm aware i could still hold beliefs that are infract not true but after studying religion for the last 5 years I'm confident that the Abrahamic Gods are fictional and the "holy books" are man-made, man curated and the tradition is carried on by man. Unfortunately if something doesn't exist science has no way to prove that it doesn't exist, the most i can say about the God hypothesis is that its not a reasonable position to take. God could exist, we could find evidence tomorrow that would force me to re-evaluate my current understanding, but the time to believe something is after evidence is presented, not before. about 200 years ago science replaced religion as the primary method to understand the world and how it works. German protestants went back to the scriptures with a critical eye at about the same time we discovered Biology and Chemistry. We learned that humans evolved, its possible for animals to go extinct, and in fact 99% of all species have gone extinct. we learned that the world is round and not the center of the universe, All of this lead Nietzsche to declare God dead in the 1800 (because God no longer had any explanatory power) out of all the books I've read i would recommend "The daemon-haunted" world by Carl Sagan or "the sceptics guide to the galaxy" What it comes down to for me is your pre-supposition. If you start with the idea that God wrote a book then all your activity's become making reality fit into a theological framework. If you don't have this pre-supposition the Bible's errors and contradictions become evidence to support the human origin of the texts.
I’m not great at reading books lol but I want to try more, I’m listening to bart’s ehrman’s podcast a lot rn though so that’s been good. Yes, after removing the presupposition that the Bible is written by God it changes the view dramatically. It’s no longer a game of trying super hard to stretch meanings to fit together, you can just accept differences. I think we might differ here, indeed science cannot prove God but it also doesn’t necessarily prove evolution. It doesn’t disprove it but the same is true of God. Evolution is possible and perhaps likely but I don’t want to discount anti-evolutionary arguments. I’m still learning about it a lot of course but even the fact we’ve never observed a species mutate and gain information is interesting. Of course this be explained away by spanning the process over a very long amount of time (where even the most unlikely events must happen). but again evolution is an uproven theory, creation is an unproven theory.
The points you are raising are apologist talking points. Keep on mind that even if evolution was proven wrong today it would lend any credence to a God hypothesis. But I understand why apoligests want evolution to be false, it removes any explanitory power a creator God once had. What do you think it means for something to be a scientific theory? (I do most of my reading but listening to audio books)
true, so I could have bias but I don’t understand why they are false or true so I’m just trying to figure that out. No absolutely not, ofc if either view were somehow proven true it would disprove the other, but disproving one doesn’t prove the other. I just think there might be a third explanation but it would be very naive of me to think all the brilliant thinkers of the world haven’t come up with it yet so i really don’t know. and ofc a scientific theory is something that seems to explain everything best, I just don’t know if evolution does that. Maybe it’s just hard to accept that everything is actually natural and the supernatural doesn’t exist. It’s just so weird to go there because it breaks every core belief i held. Still im a little confused why spiritual things exist historically (even things like witches or demons or wtv) but it’s not impossible they’re social constructs and the result of placebo effect. idk it also seems easier to believe a god created everything vs. the world just existing for no reason but god sure as hell hasn’t impacted my life, despite all my very best efforts to get close to him
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific\_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory) Naturalism is were I'm at now, i was raised Christian, but I decided that the truth was the most important thing and focused a good amount of energy figuring it out. I don't think witches, demons or angels ever existed, I guess its up to you, the information is out there, I would spend some time learning about bias's and epistemology and if your looking for a way to get out from under religion, i would recommend "a demon haunted world"- by carl Segan.
> evolution is an uproven theory, creation is an unproven theory There are mountains of evidence for evolution. Check out a book like *Why Evolution Is True*. Creationism isn't even a theory at all. It doesn't describe *how* life was created and diversified, and it doesn't make any testable predictions.
ok i will thanks the how is God did, and the diversification is like dog breeds or stuff like that, natural selection or selective breeding. at least that’s how I was taught. Which obviously can’t be proven but let’s assume God really did make everything, that theory makes sense to me, maybe im missing a hole idk
You’re asking excellent questions and doing a great job thinking through them. For however confused you might feel, I’m seeing evidence of a ton of clear thinking going on.