Bruce Gerencser has up a thoughtful post about ‘feeling’ god’s presence and, since it goes to something I’ve thought about quite a bit through the years (though I can’t recall writing about it recently), it might be time to reprise the subject.
I now know that “feeling” God is as real as other emotional experiences I have had in my life. God need not be real for me to “feel” Him/Her/It. Practitioners of non-Christian religions can share similar experiences of “feeling” their God or being overwhelmed emotionally. Feeling such things are a part of our DNA. Sadly, Evangelicals think that their “feeling” God is objectively true, and all others are false; that there is a BIG difference between “feeling” God and the emotional experiences humans have through relationships and interactions with the natural world.
Well said. Talk to a devout believer, and he or she will invariably tell you they feel god inside them, et cetera, and they don’t care a hoot what anybody wants to say about it.
They are fooling themselves. Yes, there is a real emotional experience; No, it’s not due to the action of an Invisible Friend.
Bishop John Spong speaks often about “religionless religion.” He got the idea from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who got it sometime after John Dewey discussed the idea to death in A Common Faith. Dewey probably got the idea from his colleague Georges Santayana, and it was probably an old idea before he tripped over it.
The basic insight is a commonplace. Have you ever left church and heard somebody say something like, “What a fine sermon! I could feel God’s presence!”? As different as they are, people leave Protestant and Catholic churches saying the same thing, and Mormon Temples, and Jewish Synagogues, and Muslim Mosques, and Indian Sweatlodges. People who practice transcendental meditation will say things like, “I really connected with the Universal Mind.”
That is, people whose religions, whose beliefs, put them at each other’s throats describe nearly identical religious experiences of oneness with an Invisible Friend. How can that be?
Neurologists have got going on it, and have learned that the religious experience is accompanied by an excitation of the same portion of the brain as the psilocybin in peyote buttons acts upon. The architecture and iconography of religious structures are merely enculturated triggers for the religious experience — similar to the chemical action of psilocybin. Regular attendance at a place of worship causes devotees to associate the symbols, the artwork, the iconography with the religious experience and … Voila!
It’s all about the buzz. The buzz is real, but the rest is baloney.