Thor's Day: Experiencing Jesus

Is that experiment necessary?

By Morris Dean

[Republished with corrections.]

We’re not ready yet to sign up volunteers for the experiment we proposed last week (“Experiencing Jesus: Could we do a scientific experiment?”). But I can tell anyone thinking of volunteering that we weren’t envisioning attaching you to any machines.
    In fact, it became clear to me the same day I posted last week’s column that we’d simply ask you. You’d do whatever our advisers (Kyle Garza, Patrick Sawyer, Robert Regallie) prescribed for experiencing Jesus, and we’d ask you, “Did you experience Jesus?” and “Please describe the experience for us.”
    And we would take your word for it.
    But then I immediately realized, why do an experiment? Why not, rather than question whether people like Kyle and Patrick and Robert actually experience Jesus, we simply took their word for it – and stop imagining that they only imagined that they did. Isn’t that what I’d been doing for years – imagining? Rejecting their claims because they didn’t fit my metaphysics?

In my interchange with Robert on Saturday, he wrote:

When I tried to explain to you how I felt when baptized, I fell short. I don’t believe I have the literary ability to put it into words. Something happens, one’s relationship with the maker of one’s soul is real....I know my relationship with God is real. How do you measure it or prove that it is real?

    And I replied:

Robert, as I indicated in the public reply comment I made to you, I am willing to accept that you really do experience Jesus – I take your word for it. The same as you may not be able to prove that you do, I am not able to prove that you don’t. I am happy to be able to tell you that I only in the last few days (as a result of posting Thursday’s post about the experiment) came to realize that I have no personal investment in what others do or don’t experience when it comes to God or Jesus or anything else supernatural. That is, I am not threatened by other people’s being able to “experience Jesus.”

    I confess that telling him I wasn’t threatened and had "no personal investment" was something like an act of faith – or an “act as if” – on my part. After all, my recent history of verbally attacking religion didn’t seem like that of someone with “no personal investment.”
    Maybe I was in the process of divesting myself of some baggage?
    I went on to tell Robert:

I haven’t experienced Jesus and am okay with not experiencing him. I accept that I just seem not to be one of the people for whom that is possible. No big deal. “It takes all kinds to make a world,” as someone has said. This realization of its being okay for me if others find the supernatural real has been very liberating, and it has dissolved all of my antipathy toward “believers.” Marvelous feeling!

    Sounds like I’d been saved, doesn’t it? Saved from unconstructive negative feelings and actions. Saved from rancor.
    Saved perhaps from the ire of having previously believed that I was one of the people who could experience Jesus, so why wasn’t I experiencing him?

Patrick, even before I heard from Robert, had told me that

there is an actual experience with and of Jesus that can happen outside of a saving relationship with Him. Such an experience is felt and earmarked by joy and peace for a time but fades betraying it wasn’t salvific in nature [emphasis mine].

Grateful for having learned a new word, I told Patrick:

I experience joy and peace almost daily; it would be interesting to be able to compare my experience with the experience of which you speak. If comparable, it would begin to look as though “salvation” is very different things in the eyes of different people.

Ed Rogers’s comment early on the day the column appeared had been the very first feedback received (aside from Kyle’s reaction to my showing him a preview: “OOooooooo I love the idea!”):

How do you prove a feeling is real or not real? To the person having the feeling it is very real but to others it is not...No matter how many times you ask the question it will always be the same answer – you believe or you don’t.

    How many times had I been told that? You believe or you don’t. But I seem to have walked right past it, persisting in my own belief that if you believed [in God], you needed to “be fixed.” (Had I been going to fix what was wrong with people who believed?)

Ed, Chuck Smythe, and I are different in some way from Kyle, Patrick, and Robert.
    Ed has had the experience, and he believes that there is “something outside of ourselves,” but...:

They call it God, and I say I don’t know, because I don’t. It could only be a strong imagination or like, with a radio, people pick up different stations from time to time.
    I do not truck with religions, not because of a religious belief in a god but because religions do much more harm than good. There is no room for doubt within religions, because the believers feel that if they speak out about their religion’s wrongs they will be cast out. Why would anyone want to join a club like that?
    I have been so-called “saved” twice but felt no different after going under the water than before. However, any experiences I had were outside of any church. Although I was not doing any drugs at the time, the experience was not unlike being on a drug.
    My wife Janie has asked me many times why I was baptized. The truth is I wanted to have that feeling again, but it has never happened in a church nor has it happened when I went looking for it. That was when I realized it was not some group experience but a very personal one.
    All religions exploit the feelings of their believers to increase the size of their religion. The experience is part of the way they keep control, by taking credit for giving it to the person who has been saved. Don’t misunderstand, I believe the person had an experience, I just don’t believe that his or her religion had anything to do with it.
    Churches are more like a rehab center where all the drug users come to talk about that great high and look for that next fix. I’ve had the experience two, maybe three times in my life – I just took it for what it was and never got hooked.

    Chuck Smythe doesn’t not believe in Jesus, because  

he was certainly an historical figure. Nor even, exactly, don’t I believe in his divinity. I don’t “believe in” belief itself, at least in the sense the religious use the word....
    Many people, including myself, have had experiences that are wildly beyond the everyday (I’m thinking here about my “transcendent” musical experiences [“In pursuit of ecstasy,” April 8, 2013]). Whether such an experience is “supernatural” or just an unusual emotional state I can’t say. I keep trying to have them, though, because these experiences feel supremely important, and I’d love to understand them. A number of psychologists have tried – I assume you’ve read The Varieties of Religious Experience [by William James]?...What I wonder about is people’s certainty that such experiences are caused by communication from a god. Even in my own case, I know no reason to assume that. Or to deny it.
    If the Christians are right that failure to believe in God will cause you to fry in hell, then of course all this matters more that anything else. It seems implausible to me, but that certainly doesn’t guarantee that it’s wrong. I’ve managed to relax about that only because there is nothing I can do. I can’t simply decide to believe something is true because it might be expedient. It just doesn’t work that way.

    I myself don’t believe in Jesus in the sense that he’s the Son of God, mankind’s Savior, etc. I only admit a theoretical possibility that it might be so. Like Ed and Chuck, I don’t know. But neither do I any longer care, although I did at one time. I am not burdened by any fear of hell, nor any wish for heaven. Isn’t that a sort of salvation?
    When I referred above to the “joy and peace that I experience almost daily,” I was referring to “transcendent experiences” (to quote Chuck) of a humbler, more domestic variety – a profound kinship with Siegfried, for example, loving and caring for him as I let him out and back in, brushing his teeth before bed – often if not always accompanied by a sense of love and respect for his “other-personness”; or the glad heart-leap almost daily felt while watching goldfinches hang onto the thistle feeder – feeling a thankful fullness to be a part of their world in the act of keeping thistle in their feeder; or the rarer voluminous overflowing of heart when experiencing a sense of gratitude for life and its superabundant beauty, typically accompanied by the exuberant sense that I would willingly die the next moment and have no regrets, nothing not experienced.
    And, of course, I have read William James on the varieties of religious experience (referred to above by Chuck). I've quoted James’s book a few times on this blog, and in my post of December 18, 2014 (originally published on January 22, 2012), I characterized myself as being “of a mystical bent”:

About three years ago, I included myself among “others of a mystical bent,” and I even quoted [Rainer Maria] Rilke. Admitting to a mystical bent surprised me as much as quoting Rilke; I hadn’t meant to get into anything like that.
    Maybe I’m ready to try to say what spirituality (or being spiritual) means for me?
    Phrases like reverence for life (Albert Schweitzer), benevolence toward the humblest living creature (Charles Darwin), practice compassion (Dalai Lama), and The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth (Chief Seattle) come to mind.
    What can I say? Dwelling on such concepts in the awareness of nature and of our life on Earth casts a sort of numinous spell over me, a feeling that resonates with William James’s characterization of mystical experience as “a deepened sense of significance.” And, even when I’m not “having the experience,” I try to maintain an abiding sense of the deep significance of things, the deep significance of choices and actions.
    James even excuses my inability to say much about this deep sense: “There is ineffability: the subject of a mystical experience cannot find words to describe it.” [Remember what Robert said, above.]

So, what about the experiment? As conceived, I think it’s a lost cause, scientifically. And Chuck agrees:

Philosophers of science claim as the subject of science the things we can observe, experiment on, and expect others to be able to try the same experiment and get the same result. As Robert pointed out, in the case of subjective experience you can philosophize yourself silly over what is “real”; the element of confirming experiment just isn’t available. One can hook the brain up to electrodes and measure the neurological correlates of a subjective experience (and this has often been done), but that will tell you nothing about whether a subjective event was caused by a god or by a misbehaving neuron. It is for this reason I’ve been dubious about your research proposal. Until you can suggest a reproducible experiment whose results could only be explained by the presence or absence of a god, you have nothing scientific to work with. People have been trying to concoct such an experiment for centuries, with no success that I know of, and I have no reason to think I’m cleverer.

I confess that I don’t think I am either.
     While it is intriguing to speculate, for example, that people who seem capable of believing in Jesus may be somehow genetically different from people who seem incapable of doing so, we are not well situated to undertake biological research into genes that might compel the former to believe in Jesus – or prevent the latter from doing so (somehow inoculating them from being infected?).

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Coda. I shared with Kyle my communication with Robert [quoted above]. Kyle wrote that he found my thoughts interesting, but he doubted that I could possibly have meant it:

Are you suggesting that you are open to the possibility that there is a God, Jesus truly was God incarnate, and He really does commune with people (like me), but He just resigned you over to an inability to experience that fellowship? I.e., that He just made you incapable of experiencing Him, hence you never did when you once thought you were a Christian in your youth?
    If that is the case, you say you’re okay with that?

    I confirmed that it was fine with me, but he still seemed incredulous:

That comes as quite a surprise to me. Let me make sure I understand the full extent of what you are now thinking, though:
    You are comfortable with embracing the idea that God (the Christian God that I always refer to) has not given you the means to properly “connect” with Him: that though He loves and cares for you as an individual and wants you to be in eternal bliss with Him in splendor, that He has made you incapable of accepting Him as your proper and true God and Savior – incapable of confessing you are imperfect and in need of His help in life to be righteous – incapable of admitting that He has more authority over your life than you – all this because He made you this way – which is really to say that He has created you with the end goal in mind that you would be forever separated from Him in Hell, left in eternal torment due to no particular fault of your own volition? Thus, when you die and resign yourself over to the eternal sentient pain of Hell, you will forever be left with the memory that you could not have chosen to surrender your life to His authority and so enter Heaven because He made you incapable of such an act.

    I’m afraid that I was unable to hide my frustration at Kyle’s not taking my word for it:

Ha, Kyle, you almost outdo yourself in florid, flamboyant rhetoric! I could see you delivering that in a Toastmasters “tall tales” contest!
    While I of course do not “embrace” any of the ideas you express in such loving detail (but allow only for the theoretical possibility that the gist of it might be true), it appears that your understanding is, in some sense, correct, although obviously you are not really, truly understanding me at all.
    I have already drafted Thor’s Day’s column, so you will be able to learn more about me in roughly 29.5 hours [this was early Tuesday evening]. Even if I die tonight, the first draft is already scheduled for publication, so you will not be left hanging.

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean