Back in Scotland, just before my family moved to Canada, the missionaries who were working in our area had an interesting experience relating to your second question. Not directly an answer, but an indication of how things can go very wrong if cultural influences are not taken into account.Chap wrote: ↑Sun Sep 25, 2022 8:03 amMay I ask, please:
1. What is it about an experience that makes you classify it as a 'spiritual experience'?
2. How different do you think that experience might have been if you had been brought up in a family that practised a different religion?
3. How different do you think that experience might have been if you had been brought up in a family that was confidently and calmly atheist?
They were teaching a family who had recently arrived in Scotland from some part of India. The family were fluent in English. Arguably they spoke better English than I did, having been taught "BBC English" in the then Indian version of the English educational system. I mention this so that it is clear that the parents of family did not misunderstand what they were being asked by the missionaries.
After their second visit to the Indian family, the missionaries dropped in to tell us what had happened, and why they were not going back to these heathens.
At the end of the first visit, the missionaries has told the family that they must ask god if "these things were not true" (Moroni 10:4), and that god would give them a burning in their bosom to confirm the truth of the missionaries' teaching.
When they went back, the father told them that they (the missionaries) were fake, and that god had given them no such sign.
On further inquiry it turned out that the family asked god - by making food offerings and burning incense at their family shrine, and by meditating. They even proudly showed the missionaries their shrine. As you might imagine, they did not take kindly to being told by the "Elders" that they were doing it all wrong, and that that was not how god operated.