I have supernatural experiences nearly every night. I just call them dreams and nightmares.

Texaggie7nine said:

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bmks270 said:

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mesocosm said:

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Thaddeus73 said:

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Most people are reluctant, I think, to talk about an experience they had that they can't explain. So I'll start.

Once, after confession, I was saying my penance in a mostly empty church, when all of a sudden, out of the blue, I smelled roses, a lot of roses. After a second or 2, it went away. Nobody else was sitting anywhere close to me.

Anybody else have some supernatural experiences?

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There are no supernatural experiences. Magic isn't real. There is no easter bunny

It's all brain chemistry

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So, what brain chemistry determines if some one has a hellish experience or a heavenly experience?

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DMT

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Was wondering when you would chime in with this... you didn't disappoint :-)

mesocosm said:

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Thaddeus73 said:

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Most people are reluctant, I think, to talk about an experience they had that they can't explain. So I'll start.

Once, after confession, I was saying my penance in a mostly empty church, when all of a sudden, out of the blue, I smelled roses, a lot of roses. After a second or 2, it went away. Nobody else was sitting anywhere close to me.

Anybody else have some supernatural experiences?

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There are no supernatural experiences. Magic isn't real. There is no easter bunny

It's all brain chemistry

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Predictable imperialist response :-)

cav14 said:

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I have supernatural experiences nearly every night. I just call them dreams and nightmares.

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Umm.. that actually sounds 'natural'... but ok!

Materialism can be proven WRONG by the standards of materialism itself.

See my post on page 1.
Also read a good summary of Aquinas proofs.

You are an embodied spirit.
Ghosts (disembodied spirits who did not cross the light) exist.
The preternatural exists (angels / demons).
God exists.

Deal with it, friend-o, and live by the Logos

I do have brain chemistry, which allows me to think about math, history, geography, spelling, etc.

But supernatural experiences are so very much different..they aren't "thinking." Instead, they are supernatural events that I cannot explain rationally...

I've experienced a few of these. Here is the first one:

I grew up in a Baptist Church, but by 16 was walking a very non-Christian path. During college, I would read my bible sometimes, but was really struggling with belief. There was one particular passage that I read many times and it was just bothering me. One weekend I went home to visit mom and dad and on Sunday morning we went to Church together. The preacher was giving his opening comments about the sermon and just stopped and said "before we get started everyone flip over to ... for a minute". It was exactly the passage I had been stuck on. He read it and spent about 2 minutes talking about it. Then, it was back to his planned lesson.

Kothmann5 said:

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My wife has had supernatural experiences many times over the last 8 years. It started when she was trying to come up with a song to teach her Sunday School class the 23 Psalm. She was laying in bed one night and was mediating on the words to the 23 Psalm, and suddenly, she was in the kingdom realm having fellowship with the Lord Jesus. She was totally blown away by it. Over the last 8 years she continues to lay in bed at night and meditate on scripture and has had many many additional encounters with the Lord Jesus. He has told her numerous things that have come to pass.

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Is meditating on scripture basically just repeating it over and over? Asking seriously because I don't know much about meditation, and this sounds like something that would be good for me.

Quote:

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She sometimes gets frustrated about never having any such "God" experience and I tell hear that is because God knows you don't need it. My faith was weak. That's why I needed it. So, it's not because I'm greater than others, but because I'm weaker.

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This helps me tremendously because I've never had such an experience and sometimes wonder why not.

suburban cowboy said:

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I suffered from some bad symptoms after a TBI last year. About 4 months of brokenness and little faith. Christmas Eve I humbly broke down on my knees and prayed for healing and peace. I woke up Christmas morning with my primary symptoms gone. I was healed in what I believe was a Christmas miracle gifted to me by God our Father.

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This reminds me of the closest thing I can think of to a miracle.

My niece got hit by a pickup as she crossed the street in front of her high school early one morning. She flew about 20 feet and landed in the only patch of grass in the area between the street and the sidewalk. Broke her lag and severe TBI.

She was in a coma for a couple of weeks...I can't remember exactly how long. But one day her doc camed to check on her and was giving his prognosis to her parent - it could be weeks or even months before she might wake up, but definitely a long time and she would not be out of the hospital in time to graduate with her class.

The next day she woke up. And every other prognosis that she got from that point on, she obliterated.

She walked with her class and is in her senior year of college right now, about to graduate with a degree in Psychology with an emphasis on art/creative therapy.

Oh yeah, and she is quite the artist. A class assignment she was given for her art class the year before all this happened was to draw a picture that represented her greatest fear. This picture that she drew was a VERY detailed drawing of a hospital room with all of the machines and monitors and IV drips, all that stuff. The thing is she had NEVER been inside a hospital room like that in her life. She MIGHT have seen something like that on TV but she didn't watch TV or movies (non-musicals anyway) so it would have been just a brief glimpse and the drawing was amazingly detailed.

If you're curious about meditation in general, I think that r/streamentry has the best online resources for this, though many posters there are generally allergic to faith. Loving-kindness meditation is the closest to what prayer should end up feeling (imo) like though they are different in many other ways. There is a value to repetition in what is prayed that protestants are sometimes allergic to, but that's a more in depth discussion. Bear in mind that the evil one knows how to use our mind and especially our imagination against us and that this can occur when one truly begins to pray. Spiritual experience is tricky/dangerous territory for the unguided person. Um...take it from me.

I love this thread!

Redstone said:

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Materialism can be proven WRONG by the standards of materialism itself.

See my post on page 1.
Also read a good summary of Aquinas proofs.

You are an embodied spirit.
Ghosts (disembodied spirits who did not cross the light) exist.
The preternatural exists (angels / demons).
God exists.

Deal with it, friend-o, and live by the Logos

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Aquilanas proofs fall well short.

You could disprove materialism by its own standards and yet it's never been done. In a world with a camera in every pocket angels, demons and ghosts are nowhere to be found. Faith healers are powerless and the gods of men hold no sway over certain diseases which conquer everyone.

If such things are show us, it's easier than ever to record what happens to individuals.

Nothing has ever come from nothing. Therefore, an un-caused cause exists.

Please detail how this is a weak proof?

No one claims something came from nothing. No one. So you've established nothing contested. That something uncaused exists doesn't demonstrate a god anymore than an uncaused universe or some aspect of it.

That is the effective claim in my reading of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett ("naturalistic accounts"). Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems pretty clear to me this is the effective claim, even as I know many atheists criticize these three. Second, an uncaused cause is very literally God by the definition of the term. How could it work otherwise?

I've never once seen any of those three claim that ever. Got a citation?

You are basically just arguing from ignorance, I don't know what the origin is so it must be god. This argument was once used for the diversity complexity and creatures uniquely suited to extreme habitats found in life on earth. What else could it be? Then we discovered evolution.

There could be certain aspects or laws of the universe that are eternal. And some research has been done on what could cause a Big Bang. No definitive answer is found but it's far from implausible. Guessing it was a god is anything but a proof.

And frankly I have some sympathy for a deist position, I landed there for a while after abandoning Christianity, the teleological argument is the strongest argument for a god. The first mover just makes you stop looking at the beginning because god did it and for whatever reason he's an exception to the need for causes. And this whatever reason is no stronger than any other you could apply to the universe itself.

The chasm between deism and theism is enormous. Using first cause as an argument for YHWH seems silly to me. Or in the same breath as talking about ghosts and angels.

I think I fairly characterize Dennett, probably the most formidable of the materialists. This is a decent overview.
https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/Minds_Public_Discourse.pdf

I'm willing to return to these points when not on mobile, but a strong challenge to materialists, because the responses are so unsatisfactory, is the uncaused cause point. All things came from something. Positing God at the origin from this replicable fact is best following the logic of materialism itself.

Nothing in that link seemed to support your claim of something from nothing. Quote exactly what you thought was stating that.

And again, it's an argument from ignorance. There was no satisfactory answer to the argument for god from complex life before evolution, was that a proof of god that disappeared or was it never a proof at all. An honest seeker of truth must accept unknowns for what they are and not force answers we can't demonstrate. This is very little trouble for a material worldview. No more than you not knowing why god isn't contingent or why he laid out the universe a certain way, or what the hell outside of time even means.

Your last sentence could once be said about the complexity of life on earth, you see that right?

A healthy discussion between Agrad08 and Redstone on ghosts and ghoulish creatures is like listening to an epic episode of Coast to Coast.

u know from personal experiences, unexplainable illogical events happen that can only be explained by evil forces.

Yes. All the Time.

i cannot bring myself to debate with Redstone anymore. How can one take seriously a debate with a characature?

Forgot about this, sorry, but I can dip in periodically.

Since Heisenberg and Schroedinger undermined the materiality of matter, an honest materialist seeker of truth must accept - no "forcing" answers here, as I'm just raising one specific point now - that a pressing question exists for the materialist worldview.

Premise: in the materialist view, by those standards, nothing has ever come from nothing. This is IMO a fair summation of materialism - there was something.
Then: IMO by the standards of this view, we can fairly conclude that - as of yet, and especially after more physics research - there was never nothing.
Could this something bring itself into existence? Not by the standards and assumptions of materialism.
Why? Because to do so it would have to exist before it existed.
Therefore, something else had to bring it to existence.
St. Aquinas says this being all men call God.

You may call this unfair in various ways, as you have, but is this not a stronger argument for Something than the materialist "not force answers we can't demonstrate?"

I just think it is clearly stronger.

I have had so many supernatural experiences I don't know which one to pick. I am so certain of the supernatural realm that I don't feel the need to try to defend my position. When others challenge my view, I just say that I know what I know and don't feel the need to convince them.

A mechanistic, materialist view is, in my opinion, harder to defend that a supernatural perspective.

At the end of the day, philosophy and theology are espousing claims. Claims about where morality came from, what is good and evil, what is the purpose of life, etc.

Secular philosophy like consequentialism ring hollow as an ends justify the means moral approach. Kantian ethics try to explicitly divorce morality from its religious roots (to bring morality to all), but all it does is wind up reinforcing what the ten commandments was about with maxims like follow the golden rule, and be honest. Virtue ethics hints at something deeper, and I think that's why Paul mentions them and Thomas Aquinas latch on it.

Science and religion are not opposites. Science is the how, morality is the why. We can all die, visit God, and have him tell us 'well how do you think I did it? Atheists throw their hands up at this view, saying why include God in your worldview if all of your views can stand without a god creating them? And I say that they can't. We are dust. Life is a miracle, the extreme complexity of the creation is undervalued in a godless worldview.