Nightlion wrote:Really? Just one spiritual experience? What did you do with it? Did it scare you and put you off the path? I know that an initial spiritual experience is jolting. You imagine that's as good as it gets. DUMB DUMB DUMB. Add to it the next one. If you are being led and drawn to come unto Christ don't imagine that the initial turn around is the end of the journey.
If you keep the first and continue to humble yourself then another spiritual experience will occur. It is interesting that all doubter explanations premise self delusion. Yet the rarity of spiritual experiences, even with those who have had one or two, dismisses this possibility. Do I have to draw out the logic? If we are capable of producing our own spiritual experiences you would have to expect that we would have many of them even more than we could count like dreams. Yet what people are willing (Darrick excepted) to count for a spiritual experience is EXTREMELY rare.
Does that not dismiss the case of the self inflicted, or self blessed spiritual experience? Well?
It may not be Pickleball to quote yourself but Abbadon needs to realize that just because the doubters pose their queries as querificacious posits saying such things as "don't you think" and "suppose that" they are not the least interested in truth. Else my wonderful logic that flattens them like pancakes would be fielded for further investigations. NO, they ignore it and continue their militancy. Humph!
Abaddon and Buffalo are the same person he might be another poster as well. He knows I know. That's why he was disputing with john on another thread shortly before consigirl suggested a haters vaccine would be better.
Abaddon and Buffalo are the same person he might be another poster as well. He knows I know. That's why he was disputing with john on another thread shortly before consigirl suggested a haters vaccine would be better.
Buffalo wrote:But if you're looking for a vehicle for following Christ, it's hard to think of a worse one than the LDS church. Instead of encouraging members to work in a soup kitchen for the homeless, LDS service typically amounts to raking leaves or cleaning up cemeteries. There's more pressure to do home teaching (which is, 99% of the time, a pretty useless exercise) than there is to do actual compassionate Christian service. And as a charity, the LDS church is pretty stingy with its money. There are far better, more Christ-like churches out there.
There may be other churches that do Christian service better than the LDS, but the LDS church resonates with me. As crazy as that sounds to some here.
Wisdom Seeker wrote:I too have had some real and profound spiritual experiences which can not be explained logically. But to be fair, I must recognize that the spiritual experiences of believers of other faiths must be real and profound also, leaving me to believe that the mind can do this for anyone with any belief.
I rarely discount the spiritual experiences believers of other faiths have. Why should I doubt them when mine was so very similar?
I don't have a good answer for that either. My best bet is to be a good neighbor to all and let the chips fall where they may...in the end.
Abaddon wrote: And in it's own way...it's still very frustrating that I don't have any good answers that would appeal to the logical mind.
Have you considered the possibility that your strong experience was a fluke of your brain?
It's almost trite by now, but have you also wondered why God should endow men with reason but then set things up so that reason doesn't support God?
Considered it was a fluke of my brain? I suppose I give that the barest likelihood.
It's not like I'm prone to the supernatural every day, or every week, or even every year. All I know is I wasn't on drugs, and I wasn't dreaming, but it came in answer to a prayer.
Like consig said, if I had never had that experience, there would be no question of me leaving the LDS church behind and never looking back.
Chap wrote:Why do you call this a 'spiritual' experience? Was it because it was;
1. An experience that involved content that most people would call 'religious', that is, related to Jesus, or Mohammed, the Buddha, or similar.
Or simply because it was;
2. Very impressive in emotional terms.
Or because it
3. Contained information that you did not have at the time, but which later turned out to be true.
Or what?
I guess it falls closest to 2). But that's the thing, I know how I felt looking at my two boys when they were born. I know that I cried and felt love that I didn't think I possessed as I looked at those two helpless creatures.
But those amazing and emotional events pale to what I experienced from what I can only conclude came from God. I don't know why it happened to me, but I felt as confident as I ever had that God existed and God loved me.
If nothing else, it gives me far more hope of life after death than anything I've ever read or heard from the pulpit.