Re: the stupidest Bible story -- BLATANT COPYING

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Mark Nutter) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bob Crowley) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> 
> > I may as well get personal here.  
> 
> That's fine, but are you conscious of how much you are tailoring your
> story to make it a "better" testimony of God?
> 
> Before I look at your story, though, I want to talk, up front, about
> what it would mean for you if you were to find that God is not real. 
> I don't know if you've seriously considered that possibility, but what
> would it mean if you found that God was not real after all?

It would be disappointing, but not a huge problem.  I'd still have to
get up to go to work tomorrow, I'd probably join a few clubs, eat, and
do the other things I have to do.  It would be disappointing mainly in
the sense that it would mean that "justice" is futile.  Men change
their own laws at the drop of a hat, with "backdating" just one of the
techniques.  And we know that a lot of murders are unsolved, official
torturers never or very rarely seem to get caught.  I think that would
be the biggest disappointment.
> 
> First of all, it would mean that all the help you've gotten so far
> hasn't come from God, it has come from people.  People are real, and
> it's people you really need, for help and for your plain ol' social
> needs, especially when life is going against you.  You don't lose
> anything if you find out God is just a myth; rather, you see more
> clearly where it is that the real answers lie and where the real help
> is coming from.  That's a good thing, not a loss.

No problem - that is why God and Paul and all the others told us to
meet together.  Man is a social animal by design, although he has the
ability to set himself apart for a while, whereas dogs for example are
sociable and are only apart from their owners,or the pack, when
circumstances force them to be.
> 
> I say this because I sense that part of your reason for telling your
> stories in public is that you still aren't entirely satisfied with
> what you are getting from your religion, and are seeking to bolster
> your faith by defending it publicly to others.  If that's the case, I
> would suggest that the reason even your new religion is not entirely
> satisfactory is because you are expecting "people+God" and all you are
> getting is "people"--which is good, the best there is in fact, but it
> disappoints you because you still expect the "+God" part.

You're probably right.  And I'll tell you a couple of reasons.  Now I
am a Catholic which means I accept the business of the Pope's
leadership, or shepherding.  On the business of hte contraceptive
pill, which I believe was God's "idea" given through human means, just
as "space travel" is His idea, in that He planned all along that Man
should do these things sooner or later, He cannot even convince His
own magisterium to implement His own policy.  What would you say about
a business owner who could not get his own manager to implement one of
his own important policies?

Secondly the business of "Papal Infallibility" is a load of tripe as
far as I am concerned.  The promise of Christ to Peter was that what
he bound and loosed would be reflected in Heaven.   That is if the
Pope excommunicates someone, that person is locked out of heaven,
regardless of the person's worth.  We have a Mother Mary McKillop who
is currently going through the process of beatification.  Now if she
becomes a "saint" she will be Australian's first.  Yet at one stage
she herself was excommunicated by the church, for the most trivial of
reasons.  An infallible church just would not make those sort of
stupid mistakes.  Moreover while that policy stands there will never
be church unity.

How many millions of dollars do yo think get spent on Bible colleges,
seminaries, etc. churning out theology degrees, etc.  Billions a year?
 yet despite all this you will hardly hear a word about church unity. 
I don't know if you have noticed, but the only places outside Europe
which are Protestant are those countries where Europeans have taken
over from the native peoples - North America, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa (?).  The Catholic religion gained a stronghold in South
America, despite a more mixed racial makeup and in the Phillippines. 
However where there was already a strong religion with well developed
"theology" eg. Islam, Hinduism, Shintoism, Buddhism, the church has
not made much of an inroad at all.

The reason - suppose a Christian goes to a Hindu or a Moslem or a
Buddhist with any education.  We claim we have the "truth".  If he or
she has any brains, he or she will laugh, and say "You've got the
truth!  Don't give me that.  You can't even agree amongst yourselves
what the truth is!"

On a more personal level, there has been a lot of frustration.  On the
other hand I have had personal experiences, and so have a lot of other
people.  But as a witness these are largely useless.

> False expectations have a way of dulling your appreciation for what
> you do receive.  Look back over your life, and the needs you've felt,
> and the satisfaction you've experienced.  I believe you'll find that
> most of the time, most of the satisfaction has come in and through the
> people you've been involved with--in their encouragement, in the
> stories they tell you, in the fact that they just accept you and care
> for you.  The "something more" you've been looking for isn't some
> invisible, inaudible, intangible deity, it's people.  Sure, they're
> imperfect, but so are you.  We're all in this together, and what we
> need most is each other.

There hasn't been much encouragement in some ways.

> 
> Ok, so first of all, you were motivated by personal desires and some
> kind of inner sense of what it was you wanted to find.  You skirt
> around any detailed description of how much Christian influence you
> received from family, friends, associates, media, books, and so on,
> but apparently there was enough to make you "a Christian *without*
> real conviction" some time prior to age 28, since you are careful to
> qualify your conversion at 28 as being the first time you became a
> Christian "by real conviction."  If you lacked "real conviction" in
> your earlier Christian experience, it is likely that you were simply
> responding to social pressure to be, or at least behave as, a
> Christian.  I'd say it's a safe guess you had a lot of social input
> telling you that Christianity was, at the very least, the way to "find
> God," long before you ever seriously considered converting.

IN one way what difference does it make why I became a Christian.  Did
you learn to swim because your mates had a good time down at the local
pool, (I assume you do swim), or because it is handy if you fall out
of a boat, or because swimming is good exercise, or especially good
for asthmatics, or whatever.  The reason doesn't matter much.  Christ
called Peter from His boat, struck Paul blind, and offered salvation
to a suicidal jailer.  The end result was the same in each case,
conversion to Christ.

> 
> 
> Here you "play up" the lack of door-to-door evangelism by Catholics or
> Protestants, as though to try and emphasize that no human influenced
> your thinking about Christianity.  But if you said, "No human ever
> spoke to me about Christianity, or wrote anything about Christianity
> that I ever read," that would be a lie, wouldn't it?  You actually had
> quite a lot of information about Christianity from people around you,
> people you liked and admired and whose respect and fellowship you
> cared about, I dare say, and you were thinking about the things you'd
> heard.  You felt an attraction to the people who believed, but you
> want to tailor your story to better support the idea that God himself
> was pulling you to him, and so you emphasize the fact that one
> particular avenue of evangelism was *not* used, and you describe your
> attraction to the church in terms of a mysterious "something" that was
> "pulling" you in that direction.
> 
> So far your story is very similar to stories told by most converts to
> most religions.  You felt a social need, you lived in an environment
> that emphasized one particular religion as the answer to that need,
> you felt drawn to the people who believed in that religion, and you
> try to tell the story of your conversion in a way that makes it all
> sound like people actually had nothing to do with it, and it was all
> some supernatural experience of "God's call" (or Allah's or whoever's,
> depending on which religion the convert has converted to).
> 
Partly because atheism did not satisfy.  If an atheist is doing well
financially, in no particular danger, has a steady girlfriend, a
wonderful sex life, and so on, he is hardly likely to turn to Christ. 
On the other hand if he is in jail on false charges, which have cost
him all his friendships, his money, his reputation, etc. he may well
find atheism is not much help after all.  On the other hand, although
the Communists were cruel and stupid, they were also quite often
heroic during the early days of their struggle.  However they had the
advantage of popular sympathy amongst certain classes of their people.

I cannot describe "God's call" because I think it varies from person
to person.

> 
> Ok, so you felt attracted to the church, but some part of your mind
> resisted, which set up an internal tension and conflict, which spilled
> into your everyday life as "a lot of trouble," both for yourself and
> for others.  You had great hopes that your first conversion would
> satisfy the need you felt, that you described in your paragraphs
> above, but it didn't.  And of course, you can hardly tell your
> Christian friends, or even admit to yourself, that God had failed to
> satisfy your needs!  So the tension and conflict both intensify, and
> go "underground"--you feel them, but you can't admit, even to
> yourself, that the real reason you have this conflict/tension is that
> the religion you converted to didn't really do the job.  You felt that
> perhaps the Catholic Church might do a better job than Protestantism
> did, but part of your mind still resisted, and you needed some kind of
> "bang" to justify making another drastic change.
> 

The hardest part is "letting go" of your ego, and trying to forget
your own plans and "place in the sun".  Thomas Merton, otherwise doing
quite well at school, college, was given a rather blunt ultimatum
"Give it all up."

I don't know what you do or what your circumstances are, but if the
supernatural command came to "give it all up" what would you do?


> 
> Ok, so not only are you under tension from the religious conflict, but
> you are under extreme personal and emotional stress in two of *the*
> most important arenas of a man's life (marriage and work), plus the
> further stress of financially, and, icing on the cake, afflicted with
> depression.  You are quite literally very near to a psychological
> breaking point.
> 
> 
> So you're in a situation where circumstances make it very difficult
> for you to function up to expectations--an additional stress.  Plus,
> you don't mention it, but I doubt you were sleeping well while all
> these things were happening to you, even at home in your own bed, and
> I've been a camp counselor so I *know* you weren't getting good rest
> at the camp.  So add "sleep-deprived" to the list of pressures and
> stresses you were under at the time.
> 
> 
> Considering the stress you were under, you're lucky that's all you
> experienced.  What did you think it was at the time, before the
> Catholic psychiatrist told you a story that put it into a "miraculous"
> context for you?  Did he discuss the symptoms of anxiety attacks with
> you?  Maybe not, if he wanted to frame your experience in a religious
> context.  How much time passed between the time you had the
> experiences, and the time the psychiatrist "explained" them to you as
> miraculous encounters with God?  Was that his initial explanation, or
> did you say something to him first suggesting that you felt God had
> something to do with your experience?

The first time there was some stress, but the second and third times
there was not.  Now in the case of the marquis, I was also half
asleep.  It gets quite hot in summer and the afternoons were drowsy. 
But it still took me by surprise, and I was not imagining it, nor did
I expect "encouragement" from such a quarter.


> 
> What you describe is not really anything outside the range of symptoms
> that extreme stress, such as you describe, can produce in ordinary
> people.  It doesn't even necessarily mean there was anything wrong
> with your mental health--that much stress can produce symptoms even in
> the healthiest and most mentally-well-balanced of individuals.  You
> were in a Christian environment, with serious problems for which you
> wanted Christianity to be the answer, so it's not surprising that you
> subconsciously chose specifically Christian triggers for your
> experiences.
> 
A psychiatrist I see occasionally for depression has also experienced
it (the term "double whammy" is his, not mine).  He has his act
together I assure you.

> 
> Sure, that's inherent in the nature of subjective experiences.  Of
> course, you are trying to tailor your story to suggest that some
> supernatural agent was behind it.  You are too honest to flat out
> declare that God did it, so you refer to it as "whatever it was"
> (*wink*nudge*).  I would have thought that if you went to a
> psychiatrist and mentioned such experiences to him, he would have at
> least informed you of the existence and symptoms of things like
> anxiety attacks, but you make no reference to any such possibilities
> in your account--you refer to the cause of your symptoms as a sentient
> third person who was deliberately concealing himself from you.
> 
> If you think about it, though, you should realize that you were under
> tons of stress and anxiety and very likely physically exhausted as
> well.  You were in a Christian environment--the place where you felt
> you had received the only help and support that you'd gotten--and you
> were facing a crisis of doubt about it which, if you gave in to it,
> would have cut you off from the only source of relief you had
> available to you.  Never mind if it wasn't really doing the job, it
> was still all you had, and now your doubts put even that into
> jeopardy.
> 
> What could be less surprising, at this point, than that your
> subconscious would rebel against that threatened loss, and give you an
> almost literal kick back in the direction of Christianity?  The crisis
> in your faith wasn't so much an ideological or spiritual crisis as it
> was simply that you were emotionally and physically flat out of
> petrol, and you experienced a purely subjective boost that got you
> through the "down time" with your faith still intact.

Sorry, but you're wrong.  I know what I experienced, and I also know I
am not the only person.  I would say that if you were able to survey
people around the globe, you would probably find millions who at one
time have had something similar happen to them.

Nor would they have necessarily been under stress at the time.

> 
> 
> Interesting that you would emphasize apparent intelligence and
> communication, since you have not said in your story anything about a
> message being communicated to you.  If you were experiencing a simple
> anxiety attack or related phenomenon, we would expect the experience
> to be mostly sensational--some kind of dramatic, but odd and
> disorienting sensation, almost physical in terms of how you perceive
> it, but with no apparent physical cause, and not really any "message"
> per se, unless it were an anxious fear of some kind.  On the other
> hand, if your experience were driven by subconscious need, we would
> expect you to perceive in your experience some kind of reassurance
> that you should continue in your beliefs and that God would make
> things better for you soon.  Or whatever it would take to convince you
> not to give up the sole source of help and support you had found so
> far (i.e. the people you were with).  An anxiety attack coupled with a
> subconscious imperative could produce both the symptoms and the
> message you report having experienced, however.
> 
I spoke to my pastor after the event, and his opinion was taht he
thought the Lord was encouraging me.  He knew my state of mind, and
what the message did was to clarify His reality.

Now if He can contact me so easily, then what the hell is stopping
from guiding His church more accurately?



> But it's even more interesting that you would omit directly mentioning
> any message in your accounts of receiving the "double whammy,"
> especially when the message is apparently one of the more significant
> aspects of the story for you.  You don't even mention what the quotes
> were that set off these experiences.  No doubt you feel the message
> was highly personal, perhaps even inexpressible to anyone else.  That
> would not be surprising in a message that was actually prompted by
> your own subconscious mind.

I left the messages out because they seem a bit self congratulatory. 
The words under the maquis were "a man after my own heart" which were
the words spoken to Samuel about David.  The second message was "a
little man of great insight and wisdom" referring to the Guard
Captain's attitude to Paul on the ship nearing shipwreck near Malta,
adn the third was a "an intellectual ministry that went around the
world" referring to CS Lewis, who at one stage was an atheist and
free-thinker.  This has caused me a bit of frustration, since I have
no qualifications, but another pastor pointed out Lewis' ministry was
literary as much as anything else.  This could include fiction for
example.  In no case did I expect the messages, and I still struggle
with the last.


> 
> That's your story, of course.  Another way of reporting the same facts
> would be to say that you've had plenty of clues to allow you to
> realize that the evidences and inferences you are relying on are not
> actually all that reliable, and you shouldn't be trusting them.  But
> the real goal driving you is to maintain your relationship with the
> people who are helping and supporting you, so of course the
> reliability of the evidence and inferences is pretty much irrelevant.
> 

I'm not the only one.  AT one stage I also went through a particular
deception called the "Two Witnesses Deception".  Now I believe the
"Two witnesses" in Revelation Chapter 11 are two supernatural beings,
not men.  However for Christians with a lack of self esteem, they make
easy prey for the devil who can get them to believe they are
important.  At one time I went to a cousellor, and he told me I was
the sixth "Witness" he'd seen in about a month.  He wondered what was
going on.  When Christ warned about deception, He was serious.

Granted these deceived Christians all had problems but I also believe
it points to the fact there is a deceiver.  More to the point, by
getting these deceived Christians to "go public" he can heap a great
deal of ridicule on the church proper, and thus do a little more
damage to the cause of Christ.  Everytime a sandwich board walker goes
down the street wearing "The End is Nigh", it reinforces the
stereotype of the Christian "nut".

As a whole I think Catholics are less prone to deception because the
whole outfit is more tightly controlled.  Protestants, with their
"every man for himself" view of scripture, are far more prone to
deceptions, although at the same time they also seem more
enthusiastic.  Monastries and religious orders learned long ago that
they need "spiritual directors" or they run a real risk of spiritual
deception, due to the spiritual depths their members reach.

Bob Crowley.