I'm new, some short information about myself

[AlexanderVeganTheist]

The experiment will certainly work, but the result is irrelevant -- it doesn't give you any information as to whether there is or isn't an external force, because it can be equally explained either way. There certainly is an internal one that can make you experience anything you imagine. This is the kind of spiritual experience Sam Harris talks about sometimes.

I guess to an extent claiming that the source of the feeling is external is just interpretation, however it does feel like that to me. If I for example feel understood to an extent and depth I never could have imagined, or in other words I was emotionally overwhelmed by, surprised in a sense, that makes it in my opinion unlikely it's just coming out of myself. It seems almost contradictory to overwhelm yourself like that. If it's coming from a being with a higher capacity of emotion than myself, it can overwhelm me. My souls emotional capacity stretched and grew by the experience. Your own capacity can not overwhelm yourself, since your own capacity can't be greater than your own capacity. If it's new feelings that come to me, they weren't in myself before. That's just a colloquial clue it might actually come from an outside source, it isn't real evidence or anything.

If the feeling motivates somebody to become a better person, then that's great. If Jesus (AJ) has taught people to be better, and shown them methods that inspire them, that's great too. If they're really promoting veganism, they seem like good people.
People who lie to make money and extort followers usually don't promote inconvenient practices like that, but rather pander to whatever the people were already predisposed to do and encourage their hedonism, giving them loopholes and vicarious redemption to absolve their guilt.

Yeah, it's great there's none of that stuff in it. It's all self-responsibility, dealing with painful truths (about your own unloving desires for instance), seeing truth about yourself and confronting your facade about yourself. A relationship with God is painful like that, it's less painful than just simmering in your own unloving emotions, but it's painful nonetheless, but also very rewarding. Compare the process of Gods love confronting an unloving desire in you with pulling a splinter out of your skin: for a short time it's more painful than just letting it sit, but there's a great feeling of relief afterwards, and letting it sit just pushes the problem ahead in time, where it will create all sorts of problems.

They definitely do promote veganism.

He seems harmless. Maybe in a few years we'll hear of a mass suicide... but I don't think so. Maybe his followers will go the way of the Seventh Day Adventists (hopefully not the Davidians), and we'll see a long lasting and growing group promoting more compassionate living.
It would be good it he stays away from the endorsements of faith healing, but that may be too much to hope for. Although he was saying he couldn't do it yet... so there may be something to respect there.

IMO the chances of a mass suicide are zero. Mary and AJ are completely against suicide. They also focus on the importance of free will and self-responsibility, they don't want people to just do what they say.

With regards to instantaneous healing, I guess only time will tell if that's true, I believe it should be possible.

[Jebus]

Alexander. I hope you are spreading this message at religious forums as well. It doesn't do much here as we are a bunch of skeptics, but I really think AJ could hit a cord with a lot of religious people, especially Christians.

[AlexanderVeganTheist]

Well, I don't really see myself as religious, as you could tell from my previous posts. It is far too personal and individual what I'm doing. There's no group activities, congregation or rituals. It's about a personal voyage of discovery and growth in love. It's a method, rather than a set of beliefs. Although I do also accept some beliefs on faith I guess, but my definition of faith isn't "blind faith" as in, believing something completely without evidence. In my usage of it, it is believing something based on insufficient evidence, but extrapolating from the little evidence you do have of things you do know for sure.

There's faith involved, and you follow a supreme being, and I think that that's what makes up a religion. But I guess it doesn't really matter.

If you don't believe that there is sufficient evidence, why do you believe anyway?

Okay, that's a matter of definition then, regarding religion, it doesn't really matter, although people have more negative connotations of group behavior with religion than just with spiritual belief, in my opinion.

Regarding faith, let's take as an example the belief that the afterlife before becoming at one with God (in frictionless harmony with the laws of the universe) consists of 7 spheres, where the 7th sphere is the sphere where the transformation or the 'new birth' takes place, and you can then access the higher spheres...
I don't have sufficient evidence to believe that claim is true on its own. I do however have evidence that there exists a spirit world. My own experiences while asleep seem to correspond to descriptions of the spirit world in channeled messages. Looking at channeled messages in video form (also on the Divine Truth channel), I find it hard to imagine the person is just making it up, I don't think the brains are that powerful. For example a literary writer might take a couple of months or even years to work out a personality of a character. A medium just becomes a different person, with a complete biography, instantly. The same happens in people with multiple personality disorder, though more or less involuntarily. Young children see spirits much more easily, as evidenced in so called imaginary friends. I also have experienced spirits talking to me, and influencing my behavior. So I do have some evidence spirits exist and the spirit world is real, extrapolating from that, since the 7 spheres below the celestial spheres are mentioned in all kinds of different sources of channeled material, I decide to believe that, in other words ascribe a high probability to its truth.

What I meant by insufficient evidence, is that it's not conclusive. There could be other possibilities and explanations. Faith, in a way, is jumping to conclusions. It has all kinds of benefits to have faith. For example if I ascribe a probability that something is true as higher than 50%, it can be useful to act as if I know it's true, even though I could doubt it. Doubt is a very crippling emotion, it causes inaction and is often used as an excuse for inaction. Because of fear, we want to know for certain in advance and don't want to act on a possibility or even a high probability of truth. This is why I dislike skepticism. Yes we can doubt an outside world exists, to take doubt and skepticism to it's extreme, but everybody acts as if an outside world exists anyway, so what's the point of doubting anyway? I could think my experiences with God and my own soul and spirit people actually are actually all just conjured up in the brain, and I do allow my doubts with regard to that, I really do, but it's a choice to go along with the belief, and not be crippled by doubt. I can decide to make choices based on probability, while at the same time admitting there is room for doubt, rather than just sitting in doubt all the time.
So that is what faith is to me, extrapolation based on probability.

I only finished my first year of university philosophy, which I passed with good grades. I decided that philosophy as an academic subject, the way it was taught, was too destructive, skeptical in a Pyrrhic sense, and in the end nihilistic, for me to continue it. Also the second year would entail a tremendous amount of reading, in which I wasn't interested. Philosophy should be a practice, not a study of dusty old books. I also felt at the time I'd discovered enough of a moral compass, and metaphysical truths, that I didn't want to deal with all the agnostic and skeptical and shoulder-shrugging stuff that happens in philosophy.

Ah, I see. How long ago did this happen?

I started my first year in 2010, then became psychotic at the end of the year, was at home for about 2 years, playing a lot of poker, and then went back to finish a few courses and get the diploma for the first year. So I finished the last couple of courses when I'd already discovered AJ and the Divine Truth.

Let's just first answer that question honestly, verbally. What are your emotions about that hypothetical question?

Well, I guess I would want to, yes.

Well, that could be the case. You're inclined to go into intellectual analysis mode, rather than allow the feeling experiment.

I can do both. I don't really think that turning off my mind and basing this truth solely on emotions is a good idea. I could believe anything that way, if I wanted to through confirmation bias.

The strength and depth of the experience, when it has been a true longing, convinced me that it wasn't just me feeling whatever I wanted to feel, but that the feelings were coming from an outside source, a source greater than me.

Ah.

How long did it take you after you began wondering to feel these emotions and become convinced?

I'll answer this question in the next post, perhaps in a few hours OK?

[AlexanderVeganTheist]

Alexander. I hope you are spreading this message at religious forums as well. It doesn't do much here as we are a bunch of skeptics, but I really think AJ could hit a cord with a lot of religious people, especially Christians.

Interesting you should say that. Most Christians are so invested in the Bible being wholly infallible, that they wouldn't even recognize Jesus if he showed up at their door, so to speak. My experience with divulging this information to Christians has been that they'll just quote the Bible with a "beware of deceivers" quote. They're not open to considering the Christian vicarious redemption teaching isn't true, they're not open to believing that Jesus is/was just a man (even though many of the pre council of Nicea christians did believe that), and so on... What also doesn't help is that there are quite a few disingenuous media reports about AJ. I also believe spirits can greatly influence people in fear, to have less than rational responses to being confronted with this information. So most people (christians and non-christians alike) react much more irrationally than you guys have so far at this forum <3 Anyway, I'll be back in a few. Peace,

[brimstoneSalad]

I guess to an extent claiming that the source of the feeling is external is just interpretation, however it does feel like that to me.

It can't feel like that, because there's no way to distinguish it. Although FMRI can and does show how these things work in the brain, and can show that the process of being overwhelmed by love looks the same as the process of being overwhelmed by anger or any other emotion (also generated internally).

If I for example feel understood to an extent and depth I never could have imagined, or in other words I was emotionally overwhelmed by, surprised in a sense, that makes it in my opinion unlikely it's just coming out of myself.

Quite the contrary, we surprise and overwhelm ourselves all of the time as a matter of course in life. This most often occurs with being overwhelmed by love e.g. for a child. Or when falling in love, being overwhelmed by those emotions. We're also overwhelmed by anger and jealousy.

This is just a fact of neurological function. Your brain and mind isn't just one thing, wherein it knows itself fully; it's made of many disparate parts that work together in an often haphazard manner, but also with checks and balances. Even within a single region of the physical brain, many mental sub-processes can be running.

What you're talking about is the rational part, of which you're largely conscious, being overwhelmed by the emotional part (which is more primitive, and drives you). This is very normal in life, for many emotions.

In the case of young children, they are constantly overwhelmed because their rational capacities to handle their own emotions are not well developed yet. This often also happens in teenagers, due to hormones increasing emotional responses beyond the capacity for the young mind to handle "My life is over!"; they aren't just being dramatic, they really feel that way, because they've been overwhelmed.

It seems almost contradictory to overwhelm yourself like that.

It would be if your brain/mind were one perfect fully self aware rational machine. But it's not. It's multiple pieces working together and communicating. This is not you overwhelming yourself in full, but the emotional part of your brain (normally in check) overwhelming the rational part of your brain (where "you" may feel like you exists as a consciousness).

If it's coming from a being with a higher capacity of emotion than myself, it can overwhelm me. My souls emotional capacity stretched and grew by the experience. Your own capacity can not overwhelm yourself, since your own capacity can't be greater than your own capacity.

Your emotional capacity was just larger than you thought it was, or larger than you were accustomed too -- and larger than your rational mind can keep in check (or you allowed it to overwhelm you by turning off your rational mind and letting it in).

If you want to call the emotional areas of your brain another being, that's fine. This other being, which is flesh and blood, and exists inside of your head as another squishy bit of brain -- does that qualify?

The connections between these areas can certainly be strengthened. That's how the brain works in its plasticity. You reached out, and you made a connection inside yourself with something you didn't know was there. New nerve connections grow and bridge that gap, strengthening it.

If it's new feelings that come to me, they weren't in myself before.

The potential was there, you just weren't aware of it.

IMO the chances of a mass suicide are zero. Mary and AJ are completely against suicide. They also focus on the importance of free will and self-responsibility, they don't want people to just do what they say.

It's never zero. But I would believe the chances are very low.

[AlexanderVeganTheist]

Let's just first answer that question honestly, verbally. What are your emotions about that hypothetical question?

Well, I guess I would want to, yes.

Well, that could be the case. You're inclined to go into intellectual analysis mode, rather than allow the feeling experiment.

I can do both. I don't really think that turning off my mind and basing this truth solely on emotions is a good idea. I could believe anything that way, if I wanted to through confirmation bias.

The strength and depth of the experience, when it has been a true longing, convinced me that it wasn't just me feeling whatever I wanted to feel, but that the feelings were coming from an outside source, a source greater than me.

Ah.

How long did it take you after you began wondering to feel these emotions and become convinced?

Good question. If I remember correctly, it took quite some time (a few weeks perhaps) before I actually decided to undertake the experiment myself. At first I was just listening to that particular interview over and over, and an anti-AJ documentary to keep it 'balanced'. I then decided that that documentary really did not seem realistic, and started watching different videos from the Divine Truth channel too. When I first decided, what if it's true, there's really this love available to me? I think I received it for a couple of seconds. And then shut it down again. It was unlike anything I had experienced before. I still have not experienced it longer than a few seconds, perhaps a few minutes here and there, but there are reports of people experiencing it for hours even. One goal one could have by following the path to God is to be able to experience it all the time, to have a 24/7 personal loving relationship with our creator. I'm very far away from that. The way I see the inflow of that love now is that it is overwhelming and confronts false beliefs and unloving emotions. The inflow of that love is so dependent on my will, or you could say God respects my free will so much, that if there's anything unloving or untrue that I want to hold on to, it cannot flow. I really need to surrender to the feeling. We (people) usually have a lot of resistance to feeling grief and pain, that we don't allow it. So I'm involved in a gradual process of becoming more humble and more allowing of all my emotions.

So what happened for me was that I received Gods love a number of times, little 'drops' here and there, and then I didn't feel it for quite a long time... It's hard to remember properly, but it's only quite recently (this year) that I've increased my longing and started confronting unloving emotions that I was resistant to earlier.

The first couple of times, the inflow might only confront emotions that we don't have so much resistance to, for example the first time I received it consciously, I was open to the idea that my atheism might be incorrect, so the love could flow. If I want to receive any of Gods love at this time, I usually have to go through pretty rough feelings, such as feelings from my early childhood and feelings relating to unloving sexuality. I often want to keep my composure, and have a "not now, that's too intense for now" feeling going on. So I'm not truthfully longing a lot of the time... The desire has to be stronger than any other desire, such as a desire to be in denial of feelings within you. God respects if your will is to be in denial of something, he sees: "well you think (say the words, have the thoughts) you want it, but you want to hold on to this false emotion more strongly (even though you may not be aware of that), so I have to respect that and can't operate on you."
But the good thing is, the roughness of the emotions that you will release decreases as your will to release them grows. It's our resistance to them that causes the painfulness. We need to allow ourselves to be washed away from our false (emotional) beliefs.

Anyway, I hope this helps... I could do the "material brain" reduction on all of this, but I don't see why I would.

[AlexanderVeganTheist]

Just to let you all know, I'm out of town for a few days...

[brimstoneSalad]

Just to let you all know, I'm out of town for a few days...

Thanks for the note. I look forward to your replies when you get back. You're the most interesting theist we've ever had here, and probably the smartest and most rational too.
Hope you have a good trip!

[Thewhovianathogwarts]

Finally! Thank you! A THEIST! (There's a space. Stupid English. Making antonyms so similar!)

[AlexanderVeganTheist]

Just to let you all know, I'm out of town for a few days...

Thanks for the note. I look forward to your replies when you get back. You're the most interesting theist we've ever had here, and probably the smartest and most rational too.
Hope you have a good trip!

Thanks a lot, I had a nice couple of days in a hostel in the woods.. Nice to be away from computers and in nature for a while... I'll try to respond to the threads where we have an open discussion, but I want to give good answers, and that takes some time to think and type out properly, so I don't know when that will happen... I'll do my best!