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Some Words on Method

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Out of curiosity, and for my research, since your dedication to your faith, has your feeling of guilt increased or decreased?

 

[My friend relates that he had acquired a very painful and debilitating injury at some point in his life. Shortly after praying to God for forgiveness, he was watching a televangelist program in which the particular details of his injury (which he had been living with for some time) were described by one of the hosts, who then said that if the person just described would pray to God for healing, God was ready to heal the condition. He then prayed to God and made a deal: if God would heal him, he would dedicate the rest of his life to spreading God's word. When he awoke the next day, his pain was entirely gone, and his functionality had been restored.]

 

If I were particularly skeptical about this type of phenomena, I could talk about how with an audience large enough, someone will probably fit their description (someone has to win the lottery), or that the relief of pain falls into a psychosomatic category—it's not like regrowing a limb, for example. But I see no reason to dismiss the possibility either of extra-sensory perception (their describing your condition) or spiritual healing (you no longer having pain). Cross-culturally, these are normal human experiences. There are reports of such occurrences common to all peoples at all times—though people tend to overlay their own religious ideology onto the experience that occurs. This is a jumping to conclusions—not a critical evaluation of the experience itself and a thoughtful appraisal of what can actually be claimed based on that experience. Like I said, many people are not spiritually literate, and so they jump to conclusions. The televangelist group you mention (and you) may very well have access to spiritual forces, but that doesn’t mean that their interpretation of those forces is accurate. The fact that other groups around the world and throughout history with diverse ideologies (one god, many gods, no god) report the same cases (not to mention the fact that the main tenets of Christianity are the result of a demonstrable historical process of myth-making) is strong evidence against accepting their interpretation. Now a reply a Christian that attended one of our Freethinker Union meetings gave was that sometimes what looks like a healing is really just a demon that was causing harm choosing to stop. That’s very convenient, isn’t it? But, besides the fact that this contradicts what Jesus is supposed to have said about the matter (Mark 3:22-30), we are left with the fact that the empirical evidence is exactly the same in their cases as in yours, and it would be special pleading to interpret your claims as different from theirs without evidence that actually warrants distinguishing them.

[Special Pleading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading]

 

“Jesus came from Galilee and was in many ways a typical Galilean prophet, at least as he is portrayed in Mark and Matthew. Exorcisms and healings of the sick were a standard part of the repertoire of other Galilean prophets as well (see Vermez 1973). Galileans were considered by Judeans to be largely ignorant of the fine points of Jewish Law, in part because they retained their provincial identity and resisted the political, economic and cultural dominance of Judea. Many of Jesus' disagreements with the Pharisees (who were very concerned with upholding the Law) were typical of Galilean laxity toward the Law, which was viewed by many Galileans as a vehicle of Judean dominance over Galilee. For this reason, the general Judean attitude towards Galilean prophets was a condescending one, not unlike the attitude that many mainstream Christians today have towards fundamentalist preachers in Appalachia and the rural South.”

 

http://www.drabruzzi.com/jesus_movement.htm

 

Let me tell you a story. A friend of mine studies the out-of-body-experience—another cross-cultural phenomenon. These are the sorts of descriptions we get from people that have out-of-body-experiences: When leaving one's body, one finds oneself in a sort of “extra-physical realm” in which one can both observe and to some degree interact with the physical realm as well as other planes of existence, but also in which one's thoughts and expectations have an immediate effect on one's experience. (Some would say that thoughts directly effect reality in this realm, too, but that here there is a time delay, and in the “astral plane” it is instantaneous.) Have you ever seen the movie What Dreams May Come? It’s very much like that. One also has the opportunity to interact with any number of different types of consciousnesses, some benevolent, some malevolent, etc.

 

Well anyway, my friend has this aunt who is a fundamentalist Christian. He asked her one time why she was, and she told him her story. She said she didn’t use to be. She was raised Christian but never really believed it. But then one night something amazing happened. She woke up and found herself lifting out of her body. She encountered this wonderful being of light, and then she snapped back into her body feeling wonderful and full of wonderful energy. This proved to her two things: 1. There was a God, and 2. Christianity was true. Now notice, neither of these things were present in her actual experience—but she jumps to these conclusions because they are the only context for this experience that she has. A Hindu would come to a very different conclusion from this experience, as would a Buddhist, or a Muslim. They would all probably interpret it in such a way as to reinforce their own perspective, independent of the evidence.

 

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Ben Dench graduated valedictorian of his class from The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in the Spring Semester of 2007 with a B.A. in philosophy (his graduation speech, which received high praise, is available on YouTube). He is currently (more...)
 
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