![\"547050_healingoftheblindman\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/363\/2015\/02\/547050_healingoftheblindman.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cThe LORD has not given you a heart to know, nor eyes to see, nor ears to hear\u201d<\/span> We recently had the Mormon missionaries over to our house for dinner.\u00a0 My wife is Mormon, and feeding the missionaries is something Mormons<\/a> are expected to do.\u00a0 And my wife and I enjoy it, because we were both missionaries at one time, and we like returning the favor.\u00a0 It is the practice of the missionaries to leave a spiritual message with the family after dinner.\u00a0 Usually, the message is innocuous enough.\u00a0 However, this time, there seemed to me to be a lot of \u201cbeware the Devil\u201d in the message and it got my hackles up.\u00a0 And somehow it turned into a debate about \u201cmiracles\u201d \u2014 by which the missionaries meant things like God answering your prayer to find your phone.\u00a0 I was a little antagonistic and not the best host, I admit.\u00a0 The missionaries maintained their composure, but one of them concluded (somewhat passive aggressively, I think) by advising us that we would see the same miracles if we looked at the world \u201cwith spiritual eyes\u201d \u2014 the implication being that I was \u201cspiritually blind\u201d.<\/p>\n This comment reminded me of something that Ian Corrigan wrote recently,<\/a> in response to the controversy over whether \u201catheist Pagan\u201d is an oxymoron<\/a>.\u00a0 One thing in particular that Ian wrote stood out to me, because I hear it a lot from theistic Pagans: the idea that atheists are like \u201ctone-deaf\u201d people.\u00a0 Ian wrote:<\/p>\n \u201cAtheism arises naturally in certain minds, and enters others by conviction. I associate it with other human specifics such as tone-deafness. Even tone-deaf people can participate in music by well-planned charts and by experience. Thus I\u2019m willing to assume that folks who simply don\u2019t perceive the spiritual intelligences of nature (or who have rationalized that perception away) can participate in religion to their own benefit.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I have heard this kind of statement\u00a0from many theists (mono- and poly-).\u00a0 I believe it is often intended (as I\u2019m sure it was in Ian\u2019s case), not as an insult, but actually as an attempt to defuse conflict.\u00a0 But, I can tell you, I am a little insulted, as such\u00a0statements imply that atheists are\u00a0constitutionally incapable of seeing what is there to be seen. \u00a0In fact, I think it\u2019s inaccurate to assume that atheists don\u2019t see what theists do. \u00a0My Goddess may be blind<\/a>, but I am not.<\/p>\n Atheists have religious experiences too<\/strong><\/p>\n Having said that, I think many atheists \u2014 including atheist Pagans \u2014 unwittingly play into this misperception when they make their case on the basis of reason and scientific evidence alone.\u00a0 What this leaves out is personal, subjective experience \u2014 as John Beckett recently observed in his essay \u201cReligion and Smart People\u201d<\/a>.\u00a0 And as a result, theists (mono- and poly-) feel like they have a corner on religious experience.\u00a0 Personally, I would find many atheists\u2019 arguments much more<\/em> persuasive, not less, if they started, not with science, but with their own personal experience.\u00a0 Listening to many atheists, one would think they\u2019ve never had a religious experience in their lives.\u00a0 This may be true in some cases, but it is absolutely not true for many other atheists.\u00a0 In fact \u2014 and some theists may find this shocking \u2014 some atheists have had experiences which are very similar, if not identical, to those of theists<\/em> \u2014 they have just come to different conclusions about those experiences.<\/p>\n I am speaking from personal experience, here.\u00a0 I used to be a theist, albeit of the mono- variety.\u00a0 Some of my most profound religious experiences occurred when I was Mormon.\u00a0 I even had an experience of being saved by Jesus<\/a>.\u00a0 One experience in particular that stands out to me occurred during my 2-year mission in Brazil.\u00a0 It followed a period of feeling directionless in my mission and a lot of praying.\u00a0 It\u2019s difficult to describe, but as I walked down a cobblestone street in northeast Brazil one hot day, the world around me seemed to change, while also staying the same.\u00a0 I was still in the present, but I felt like I was somehow also simultaneously back in 1st century Palestine as an early Christian missionary.\u00a0 It sounds absurd, but the verisimilitude of the experience was so profound that I was reduced to tears when it finally passed.\u00a0 I picked this experience to share because of its specifically Christian character.\u00a0 Now that I am Pagan, and an atheist Pagan at that, what do I do with this experience and others like it?\u00a0 Do I discard them as mere fantasies or delusions?\u00a0 Do I \u201crationalize them away\u201d, as Ian said.\u00a0 No, absolutely not.\u00a0 They remain some of the most important experiences of my life.\u00a0 I just understand them differently than I did at the time.<\/p>\n Bringing it down to earth<\/strong><\/p>\n I know some polytheistic Pagans who will balk at the suggestion that I, or any atheistic Pagan, has had religious experiences similar to their own.\u00a0 I myself wondered about this until I began reading responses to Galina Krasskova\u2019s \u201cDevotional Polytheist Meme\u201d<\/a> project.\u00a0 Last year, Krasskova invited fellow polytheists to respond to certain questions about the nature of their interaction with their gods, questions like \u201cWhat are some of the ways that you communicate with the divinities?\u201d and \u201cWhat does it feel like when\u00a0one receives inspiration from the divinities?\u201d \u00a0<\/span>A lot of Krasskova\u2019s own writing about her god is what I would call \u201cpoetic\u201d or even \u201chyperbolic\u201d<\/a>,\u00a0which\u00a0can be an effective way\u00a0to convey the feeling of powerful spiritual\u00a0experiences. \u00a0Consider the beautiful passage below:<\/p>\n \u201cHe breaks open the head. All Gods do, I suspect. They wind Their way into our hearts, They seep into the fissures in our minds, They expand. They fracture us. They break us down. I have been a thousand broken shards lying in a glittering pile at His feet. I have been an anguished scream echoing in a heart too weary to loose its pain. I have been on fire, joyous, a madwoman dancing, leaping through the charnel House of a dozen savage worlds.\u201d <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u2018Most of the hard polytheists I know have a habit of talking about our communication with gods in very literal ways. \u201cAphrodite asked me to buy her flowers.\u201d \u201cOdin told me I needed to find a new job.\u201d The exact behind-the-scenes mechanics of this vary widely person to person, and I think there is a general sense that the mechanism is not so important. If you are talking to someone who doesn\u2019t believe all this, they want to know precisely what level of implausibility are you claiming, so it is super important to them that you clearly differentiate between, \u201cI had a full-sensory waking vision of Apollo, where I literally heard-with-my-ears him speaking the words, \u2018It is time for you to move to Chicago.\u2019 \u201d and \u201cI have been looking for a new apartment, and when I looked at the listings for Chicago, I strongly felt the hard-to-define feeling that I associate with Apollo, along with a feeling of urgency I had not previously had with regard to this move.\u201d Basically, they want to know whether you are a Grade-A Nutter, or just someone who bizarrely chooses to interpret normal life situations in some kind of weird religious context.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The varieties of religious experience<\/strong><\/p>\n Which is why I really appreciated Krasskova\u2019s and others\u2019 responses to her \u201cDevotional Polytheist Meme\u201d<\/a>.\u00a0 For the most part, the responses were very down-to-earth.\u00a0 In fact, I was surprised how relatable they were.\u00a0 And the more I read, the more familiar they sounded:<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026 I think most of us with consistent devotion, possess the capacity to communicate in some way. It just may not be hearing Them in conversation or visions. Maybe instead, it\u2019s a quiet knowing. Maybe it\u2019s three or four omens following one after another that gives you the answer you were seeking, maybe it\u2019s an inner sense of connection. Communication can occur in many ways.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, I usually just talk to Them. I pray regularly but i also converse throughout the day. I try to spend regular time, consistently, at my shrines praying and meditating.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI talk to them, sometimes out loud, sometimes silently in my head. I rarely get any kind of clear response, but I feel listened to. Sometimes I get an emotional impression of a response to something I\u2019ve said. \u2026 Sometimes a random thing will catch my eye and symbolically communicate a message to me \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOccasionally, I\u2019ll get an idea that doesn\u2019t feel like it is my idea, and often it feels much more certain than I generally am about my own ideas. Sometimes I am puzzling over a problem and the answer comes to me suddenly, but the internal monologue doesn\u2019t sound like it is my idea. \u2026 Sometimes there is a sudden idea that isn\u2019t obviously not-mine when taken out of context, but it is about a deity or in response to a direct question to a deity, so I tend to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it is<\/em> from that deity unless there is something suspicious about it.<\/p>\n \u201cOn two occasions \u2013 both related to initiations \u2013 I have had vivid dreams about gods.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve also had life coincidences line up very neatly after speaking with a deity, and felt like that was my \u201cresponse\u201d.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cReplies come in many forms: Signs \u2026 Silence \u2026 Insight:\u00a0 On rare occasion, I will have a full-blown message pop directly into my head while performing devotions.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI also get ideas, lots of ideas, more ideas of my own than inspiration from outside of myself.\u00a0 And again, discerning one from the other is not always easy, but it\u2019s also not always necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI just kind of talk stuff out.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI talk to them. Divine via tarot, oracles. I scry flames. I listen to my intuition.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026 when I\u2019m well and centred and on top of my practice, I find it quite easy to hear the Gods directly, either in words or clear impressions (sound, flashes of vision, temperature, colour, emotion).\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve had precisely one dream in which a deity has appeared, and perhaps two more that were significant and heavy and clearly carried a message from a God.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c.. the infamous Voices In My Head! To be clear, this is almost never in the form of audio hallucination levels of voice. I don\u2019t hear the gods in any kind of literal sense the vast majority of the time. Rather, when doing a reading, meditating, crafting, driving, walking down the street, having lunch, stopping to smell the roses, and otherwise generally going about with my every day life, I\u2019ll \u201chear\u201d a narrative voice say something mostly-linguistic with a strong side of emote \u2026 The question then, of course, is how do I know it\u2019s not just me talking to myself? Well, sometimes I don\u2019t know that for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, it is a thought that never goes away. \u00a0Like a lead weight\u00a0or the proverbial ribbon tied to a finger that one can\u2019t remove \u00a0until the task is done.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Or consider this from Judith O-Grady\u2019s God-Speaking<\/em>: \u201cI speak to the Gods and They speak to me (if They choose), a process I call \u2018God-Speaking\u2019.\u00a0 Although the process is less like a telephone conversation and more like a series of prickly feelings and insistent near-insights that ends with conviction rather than understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n There were a few mentions that I found of sensory experiences of what seemed to be an immaterial presence or person, but they were far, far more rare than the more mundane kind of communications described above. \u00a0Tenpenny, for example,\u00a0explained, \u201cHow I perceive their responses is kind of confusing, and kind of vague. If I hadn\u2019t had a few really vivid undeniable experiences, all the other experiences combined would not give me sufficient reason to believe that any of it was real.\u201d\u00a0 And I think this is key, to appreciate that religious experiences do not occur in a vacuum; they are always interpreted from within the context of one\u2019s personal history and culture (including atheists\u2019 experiences).\u00a0 Thus, a Christian and a Buddhist and an atheist may have nearly-identical experiences, but one of them will say the saw Jesus and the second will say they saw Buddha and the third will say they saw \u2026 \u201csomething\u201d. \u00a0<\/span>T<\/span>he historically and culturally contingent nature of our religious experiences does not i<\/span>nvalidate them \u2014\u00a0in fact, it is what gives them their meaning for us. \u00a0<\/em>But it may create the illusion that our religious experiences more\u00a0dissimilar\u00a0than they really are.<\/p>\n Being an atheist doesn\u2019t make me deaf to the gods<\/strong><\/p>\n Admittedly, since becoming an atheist, the nature of my spiritual experiences has changed.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t had so many of the kinds of experiences described above since becoming an atheist, but I believe that is only<\/em> because I have not sought them out<\/a>.\u00a0 Mostly now I seek out different kinds of religious experiences, especially experiences of of what I call the \u201csublimity\u201d of nature<\/a> \u2026 because that\u2019s what I feel I need now.\u00a0 I don\u2019t feel like I need that sense of personal\u00a0 intervention from without, so much as a feeling of deeper connection to the world around me.\u00a0 That\u2019s what I look for, and that\u2019s what I find.\u00a0 (Consider Ryan Bell<\/a>, a former pastor who became an atheist after \u201cliving a year without God\u201d, and who, I have little doubt, would become a theist again after \u201cliving a year with <\/em>God\u201d.)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span> But that\u2019s not to say that I am incapable of having other kinds of experiences.\u00a0 In fact, a few weeks ago, I decided to pray for direction, asking \u201cthe Goddess\u201d for help, regarding a dilemma I had been seemingly unable to resolve by myself.\u00a0 I prayed to Her like she was a person, talking to her, and waiting for an answer, in spite of the fact that I don\u2019t believe the Goddess is anything other than the whole material Universe itself, and the fact that I don\u2019t think she \u201chears\u201d prayers or grants wishes.\u00a0 Nevertheless I got an \u201canswer\u201d, and finally found the power to solve my problem.\u00a0 And I wasn\u2019t surprised.\u00a0 It was what I had come to expect from years of being a theist. \u00a0It demonstrates that those kinds of religious experience are not dependent on belief.\u00a0 And it also showed that being an atheist does not make me blind or deaf to the \u201cgods\u201d. Some atheists have had experiences which are very similar, if not identical, to those of theists — they have just come to different conclusions about those experiences. Don’t believe me? Read on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1538,"featured_media":8036,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[411,1276,146,20,923,413,1274,1275,1272,1273,153,1277,173],"class_list":["post-7952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-atheism","tag-atheist","tag-gods","tag-paganism","tag-patheos","tag-religious-experience","tag-spiritual-blindness","tag-spiritual-deafness","tag-spiritual-experience","tag-spiritual-eyes","tag-theism","tag-theist","tag-transcendence"],"yoast_head":"\n
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a>As the author of the essay, \u201cReligious people are wrong (and so are most\u00a0atheists)\u201d<\/a>, recently wrote: \u201cWhen a person finds a state of perfect bliss and contentment after hours spent praying to Jesus, it\u2019s easy to understand how she\u00a0might interpret this as evidence of the divinity of Christ and the truth of Christian doctrine.\u201d\u00a0 But the truth is that \u201cpractitioners of different religions report near-identical experiences despite engaging in wildly different rituals and praying to different gods\u201d.\u00a0 This means that a Christian religious experience can be understood outside of a Christian context.\u00a0 Likewise, any theistic religious experience can also be interpreted as having meaning from an atheistic religious perspective.\u00a0 That is how I now understand the experiences I had while I was a Christian.\u00a0 At the time, they seemed like evidence for the reality of Jesus.\u00a0 Now they seem like evidence for the reality of \u2026 perhaps a dimension of human experience which has not been adequately explained by science, but not all that different from experiences that a Buddhist<\/a> or\u00a0Pagan or an atheist might have.<\/p>\n<\/a>But describing religious experience in such poetic terms can muddy the waters when trying to communicate with someone of a different religious tradition, theistic or non-.\u00a0 It can create the impression (intended or not) that one\u2019s religious experiences are incommensurable, when perhaps they really are not.\u00a0 Similarly, speaking in very literalistic terms about communicating with the gods can be misleading to outsiders when the actual communication was not so literal, as Joshua Tenpenny has explained:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/strong>What I find remarkable about the descriptions of the experiences of the polytheists above is their similarity to the descriptions of divine communication that I have heard from Mormons and other Christians.\u00a0 In fact, I myself have had most, if not all, of these kinds of experiences myself, when I was a Christian: from the \u201cvoice in the head\u201d to dreams to intuitions and synchronistic \u201csigns\u201d. \u00a0And I don\u2019t think I am alone among atheists in this regard. \u00a0Rather than dismissing these experiences as delusions, they remain meaningful to me, even when view from an atheistic interpretive framework.<\/span><\/p>\n
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