Christian Overconfidence

[Oscar_Kipling]

Why?  Why should I remain Christian?  If my faith is truly just the result of an unjustified overconfidence in dogma wouldn’t I objectively be better if eating a bullet?

okay...I mean far be it from me to tell you to continue living a life that you don't feel is worth living, but personally I think that leading what I assume is a pretty happy and fulfilling life as Christian is better for you , your friends & family, whoever would find your partially beheaded corpse and have to scrape your brains off the walls, heck and even the realtor who would then have to try to sell your suicide house than it would be if you create a shotgun Pollock because you realized Christianity was just one of many mostly made up things that people mostly made up. Unlike you I do see why my life is worth living even if there is no God and I see no value in someone eating a bullet because they found out that something they really value isn't true...call me crazy I guess. So yeah I'd rather you be wrong and alive than correct and dead since those were the only options...If there was another option where you could not believe in God and still find value and fulfillment in your life that would be fine too.


Also to be clear my initial post wasn't about overconfidence leading to Christian faith, it was more about Christianity having built in propositions that can lead one to overconfidence or an inability to properly calibrate their confidence in things like the interpretation and proper application of prescriptions drawn from the bible or revelation. For instance the Idea that the husband should be the leader of the household could lead to less than optimal outcomes when a person is extremely confident in what that means and how it should be applied in a marriage even if their interpretation is off even by the standards of the internal logic of Christianity...it may be difficult for a person to understand and accept that they are wrong especially when the social/familial evidences that they are wrong could also be construed as "the world" or the unrighteous or sinful nature of those around them rejecting a godly way of life.....something along those lines.

Last thing, I think you said you essentially had a supernatural expirience that lead you to the faith, that may actually be an example of overconfidence in an expirience that may be better explained by something else but I don't know.....I would be delighted if you would tell me about your supernatural experiences if you don't mind me poking at them with a stick.

[Athanasius]

Unlike you I do see why my life is worth living even if there is no God...

I don't know about you or RK, but if this life is the end in itself, then I wouldn't be particularly interested in meaning-making. It's interesting that the social element is appealed to, but even there it can be the source and cause of great suffering. To invent meaning for oneself where no meaning otherwise exists seems like an insane exercise in justification. This life isn't all that great, so why bother, or why not check out when one wants?

My family can attend my funeral or I can attend theirs. Either way, we both die eventually. That's catastrophically fatalistic thinking, but why embrace freedom? Why endure anxiety? Why put up with sickness and taxes for the next new burger from McDonalds? Sometimes it's suggested that religious people are religious because it's more comfortable than facing the cold reality of existence, but as soon as that cold reality is faced we're told about relationships and meaning, embracing freedom, and curiosity. Who cares if it's for nought?

[ProDeo]

I am confident Ath will answer for himself.

Me, I (in 1974) had 2 overwhelming experiences with God in ~30 minutes and thereafter never again. It made me an instant believer in God, it was not even a choice, I just knew from that moment on, a life changing experience. Anno 2020 I believe that Christianity (in the person of Christ) and the very basics of it, in its purest form (by far) is the most convincing religion of all.

Thanks for your reply, this is very interesting because it really is one of the things that I've always found problematic about Christianity. Outside of the idea that I've never encountered a compelling explanation of why every man woman and child throughout all time hasn't gotten one of these experiences, I feel that in some way that expirience might have given you confidence in interpretations of scripture and how they can and should apply to reality that isn't actually justified by the expirience except in that it was supernatural. That is just my inclination though, do you mind telling me a bit more about your expirience and whether or not you put any effort into considering how confident you should be in your beliefs and what steps you take if you do?

Alright, here is my testimony.

The year is 1974, the month is June. Life smiled at me, good job, about to marry my fiance in December, my country (Holland) was doing extremely well in the world soccer championship in West Germany when suddenly out the blue I developed a phobia resulting in panic attacks that became worse and worse while the weeks and months passed.

It was on Saturday September 28 about 18:00 I came up to a point I realized nobody could help me, probably the most frightening moment in my life, totally lost and helpless. On the very same moment a thought crossed my mind, what about God? probably due to my Christian upbringing. And while I expected nothing I went to the bedroom, kneel down and said, God if You exist help me. Not a very devout prayer, quite insulting. But the words had not left my mouth and then it happened. There are no words to describe, at best I was baptized in love, a love not from this Earth, so intense and pure while knowing it was God, it completely cleansed my soul, I never felt better in my life.

And I was sitting there on a chair in the bedroom wondering what just happened to me. And I did not understand. 5-10 minutes past and I still did not understand. But I decided the least I could do was to thank God, the part that He existed that was already clear to me. And so I kneel down again to thank Him and then it happened again, the same overwhelming purifying love was my experience again. And it made me an instant believer (not a Christian that came later), there was simply no defense.

Fast forward to today, I am not a very good believer, I question everything, looking for the big picture, as science is looking for the theory of all I am looking for an answer on all the questions I have. I have researched my 2 experiences, did I fool myself?, does medical science mentioned comparable cases with rational explanations? None of that.

And I am so glad God gave me the second experience, knowing myself I would have rationalized the first one to death, time and increasing knowledge are ingredients for fading memories. I realized that 35 years after, when my faith was crumbling. But of course God knew on beforehand what was needed so He in His mercy gave me two. And 2 of such experiences in half an hour (and never after) is just too much, even for my critical brain that wants to understand everything.

[Oscar_Kipling]

This is an image you've painted.

It's not as if sophistication is insulation against basic errors, or that the unsophisticated are assuredly lost to basic errors. We wouldn't claim that philosophers are beyond error. I think the kinds of things you're getting at speak towards a failure of teaching, destructive social mimetics (e.g. around COVID measures or Trump), propagandizing, and any number of other social phenomena. These are issues for everyone, and if it's a problem, then it's a problem for all: a person must navigate existence and should they fail in their responsibility their position is precarious indeed.

Well I have been called the Thomas Kinkade of idiosyncratic punctuation and run on sentences lol.

You're right to point out that I misspoke, I didn't mean to say that sophistication is perfect insulation, but still I think we both can agree that it is insulation. You can still freeze even with a triple fat goose on, however it will probably be useful to get you out of some chilly situations that would otherwise prove fatal. I think that a sophisticated theologian will actually avoid some of the common quagmires of a naïve interpretation of this or that bible verse, but might end up in the sort of traps that only sophisticated Christians can find themselves in, sort of  like how you will probably catch a crab in a crab-trap but not in years long dark-web cryptocurrency based black market FBI honey-pot sting operation. All that to say that yes humans are vulnerable to a great many thinking/perception/reasoning failures, but it still seems like a failure of the bible itself as an effective mechanism for transmitting supernatural wisdom that it takes a degree of sophistication to avoid many of the very common and very widespread Christian misconceptions like the whole "they mad, I must be right fallacy". I do not look at the bible and think that it is an extraordinarily well optimized teaching tool, or and especially elegant information transmission device, or that it is even a book that has basic error correction features...its honestly kind of a mess and lends itself to misinterpretation at least as often if not more than it does provide clear concise nibbles of useful information. When that is combined with the idea that its literally a compendium of all of the stuff God wants humans to know in order to live a life worth living and an afterlife that isn't torment it seems like an accident waiting to happen, actually it seems like a series of accidents that have frequently happened throughout history and continue to happen with no end in sight.

I'm mostly thinking about God through non-religious language. People will talk pejoratively about God the old man in the sky, for example, but how do you talk pejoratively about other propositions, like the being we refer to as God pre-existed our very reality. Or, the being we refer to as God is of such alien intelligence that revelation is a necessity of communication. Obviously, this isn't perfect language and if God is indeed the creator of everything we are and know then there's surely a more appropriate way to relate to God. But, I suppose I'm digging at the reality that familiarity breeds contempt, and if we take a step back and use something other than theological language to think about God, then we arrive at something much less worthy of

I'm personally partial to "Sky Daddy" which is kinda snarky but also pretty accurate imo. I mean usually when we want you talk about things that are well outside of our scale we use math or other scientific terminology, If I have a problem with theological terminology is that it is sometimes, and sometimes by design nebulous. Anyway what I Actually meant was that I genuinely do not understand why you think that "any communication between God and God's creation will be revelation necessarily as God's creation would be otherwise unable to comprehend God" Like i'm not sure what you mean or why it seems obvious to you.

I was 12 or 13 or so and experience a vision wherein a bunch of stuff happened, I saw some things, and I met Jesus, he hugged me, and so on. That was quite weird at the time, because when it happened, at that moment, I was crying profusely, and at the time couldn't figure out why. These days, I know more about the crying and wonder why I was hugged. So, it was quite an emotionally impacting thing.

Ha, you really did mean that you met Jesus...'ve found most people dont mean that as literally as you do, neat! could you tell me a bit more about the expirience, like were you just riding your donkey to damascus when all of a sudden, or were you in church or had you just been given a heroic dose of dissociative drugs and carted into surgery...iow what was the context? why were you crying, i'm thinking its sort of like Beatlemania or Beiber fever but with Jesus, but please do tell me what you have come to believe about your tears in this personal expirience?

[Oscar_Kipling]

I don't know about you or RK, but if this life is the end in itself, then I wouldn't be particularly interested in meaning-making. It's interesting that the social element is appealed to, but even there it can be the source and cause of great suffering. To invent meaning for oneself where no meaning otherwise exists seems like an insane exercise in justification. This life isn't all that great, so why bother, or why not check out when one wants?

Weird, I'm actually rather fond of it, I mean I don't know if it shines through but I'm wildly entertained by myself. In some sense I can agree that meaning making is somewhat pointless but not merely for the futility of it but because I actually enjoy stuff, I love sweets and more than anything I like making stuff...and this is something I've though a lot about, the why and for what, but really I just like doing it. If no one paid me for it I would do it, if I was the only man on earth I'd make stuff, meaning or not my constitution is such that I derive pleasure and satisfaction from making things so seeking something deeper is akin to asking why do I find pleasure pleasing. Eating, Sex, walking, music, pointless conversations on the internet , oh and jokes I love jokes, I don't think any of that is meaning but I like it all, I like it all so much that I do things that I don't particularly like so that I can do more of it. I also agree that a person has every right to check out when they want, I just still have stuff I'd like to do so, you know. I don't think this is the long and short of my existence but if it was it would make sense to me, other animals are doing something very similar, biology is a hell of a drug. I mean we can talk more about this if you like but suicides are pretty common so maybe you would of yourself but I don't think that is like the default .   

My family can attend my funeral or I can attend theirs. Either way, we both die eventually. That's catastrophically fatalistic thinking, but why embrace freedom? Why endure anxiety? Why put up with sickness and taxes for the next new burger from McDonalds? Sometimes it's suggested that religious people are religious because it's more comfortable than facing the cold reality of existence, but as soon as that cold reality is faced we're told about relationships and meaning, embracing freedom, and curiosity. Who cares if it's for nought?

haha I'd never say anything so pat and lazy as that especially since one of the main reasons for being religious is that you guys actually believe it. I too understand that when i'm dead, how my family feels will not affect me, but I'm not dead so the thought does affect me and I happen to have emotions and those thoughts bring about icky ones. I can definitely imagine my life being in such a state that I wouldn't want to do it anymore and in that situation I can imagine that I might only hesitate due to biological drive to continue living or perhaps the fear that it might not actually be the end or the fear that it may actually be the end, idk and I'm not champing t the bit to find out. I must admit that I think it would be a huge waste if someone killed themselves because they stopped believing in god when they could continue believing and perhaps make me a burger or write a story or be a sex partner....but ultimately if you would rather be dead then I'll take your word for it, just do me the solid of taking mine for it that I actually like stuff and could list it for days.



Also Mcdonalds? step your food game up, I mean  actually like their garbage from time to time, but exploring food is something you could do for as long as you live and you'd scarcely have to repeat yourself.

[journeyman]

Is that from the bible, it sounds bibly?

Yes, It's from the Bible. Jn.7:17, Isa.58:6-11 and much more explain it perfectly.

You want to explain this a little more? perhaps provide an example?

1Jn.3:20 explains it nicely. I didn't think about it for a it as a "Christian".

[Oscar_Kipling]

Alright, here is my testimony.

The year is 1974, the month is June. Life smiled at me, good job, about to marry my fiance in December, my country (Holland) was doing extremely well in the world soccer championship in West Germany when suddenly out the blue I developed a phobia resulting in panic attacks that became worse and worse while the weeks and months passed.

It was on Saturday September 28 about 18:00 I came up to a point I realized nobody could help me, probably the most frightening moment in my life, totally lost and helpless. On the very same moment a thought crossed my mind, what about God? probably due to my Christian upbringing. And while I expected nothing I went to the bedroom, kneel down and said, God if You exist help me. Not a very devout prayer, quite insulting. But the words had not left my mouth and then it happened. There are no words to describe, at best I was baptized in love, a love not from this Earth, so intense and pure while knowing it was God, it completely cleansed my soul, I never felt better in my life.

And I was sitting there on a chair in the bedroom wondering what just happened to me. And I did not understand. 5-10 minutes past and I still did not understand. But I decided the least I could do was to thank God, the part that He existed that was already clear to me. And so I kneel down again to thank Him and then it happened again, the same overwhelming purifying love was my experience again. And it made me an instant believer (not a Christian that came later), there was simply no defense.

Fast forward to today, I am not a very good believer, I question everything, looking for the big picture, as science is looking for the theory of all I am looking for an answer on all the questions I have. I have researched my 2 experiences, did I fool myself?, does medical science mentioned comparable cases with rational explanations? None of that.

And I am so glad God gave me the second experience, knowing myself I would have rationalized the first one to death, time and increasing knowledge are ingredients for fading memories. I realized that 35 years after, when my faith was crumbling. But of course God knew on beforehand what was needed so He in His mercy gave me two. And 2 of such experiences in half an hour (and never after) is just too much, even for my critical brain that wants to understand everything.

Thanks for sharing your testimony, I do have a few questions. Did you ever get a medical diagnosis for you phobia/panic attack situation? Did you marry your fiancée? Did Holland win the series against Germany? When you say that you realized that no one could help you what do you mean, like were all of your doctors telling you that they couldn't help you and no one else could either? How did you know that your soul was cleansed, also what does that mean? You haven't found any instances of similar cases in medical science? if not what do you think it would mean if you did find similar cases? What caused your crisis of faith 35 years later and how did you overcome it? Why couldn't the same non-supernatural phenomena be responsible for 2 experiences spaced 30 minutes apart?

[Oscar_Kipling]

Is that from the bible, it sounds bibly?

Yes, It's from the Bible. Jn.7:17, Isa.58:6-11 and much more explain it perfectly.

You want to explain this a little more? perhaps provide an example?

1Jn.3:20 explains it nicely. I didn't think about it for a it as a "Christian".

well, thanks.

[RabbiKnife]

Why?  Why should I remain Christian?  If my faith is truly just the result of an unjustified overconfidence in dogma wouldn’t I objectively be better if eating a bullet?

okay...I mean far be it from me to tell you to continue living a life that you don't feel is worth living, but personally I think that leading what I assume is a pretty happy and fulfilling life as Christian is better for you , your friends & family, whoever would find your partially beheaded corpse and have to scrape your brains off the walls, heck and even the realtor who would then have to try to sell your suicide house than it would be if you create a shotgun Pollock because you realized Christianity was just one of many mostly made up things that people mostly made up. Unlike you I do see why my life is worth living even if there is no God and I see no value in someone eating a bullet because they found out that something they really value isn't true...call me crazy I guess. So yeah I'd rather you be wrong and alive than correct and dead since those were the only options...If there was another option where you could not believe in God and still find value and fulfillment in your life that would be fine too.


Also to be clear my initial post wasn't about overconfidence leading to Christian faith, it was more about Christianity having built in propositions that can lead one to overconfidence or an inability to properly calibrate their confidence in things like the interpretation and proper application of prescriptions drawn from the bible or revelation. For instance the Idea that the husband should be the leader of the household could lead to less than optimal outcomes when a person is extremely confident in what that means and how it should be applied in a marriage even if their interpretation is off even by the standards of the internal logic of Christianity...it may be difficult for a person to understand and accept that they are wrong especially when the social/familial evidences that they are wrong could also be construed as "the world" or the unrighteous or sinful nature of those around them rejecting a godly way of life.....something along those lines.

Last thing, I think you said you essentially had a supernatural expirience that lead you to the faith, that may actually be an example of overconfidence in an expirience that may be better explained by something else but I don't know.....I would be delighted if you would tell me about your supernatural experiences if you don't mind me poking at them with a stick.

I’ve never had a supernaturally experience.  No visions, no dreams, no voices, no miraculous events.  Just boring rational faith that I find compelling but them I’m probably just overconfident of my faith.

If this is all there is to life, I want none of it.  So your epistemological argument just doesn’t satisfy.  For me, outside of my metaphysical relationship with God, even temporal relationships with other humans are only so much chaff.

Life desiring the intimacy of sex with my wife but getting the underwear section if the Sears catalogue instead…

[Athanasius]

All that to say that yes humans are vulnerable to a great many thinking/perception/reasoning failures, but it still seems like a failure of the bible itself as an effective mechanism for transmitting supernatural wisdom that it takes a degree of sophistication to avoid many of the very common and very widespread Christian misconceptions like the whole "they mad, I must be right fallacy".

It takes a degree of understanding, sure. Is that sophistication, or a basic task demanded of all? Any communication requires interpretation, and we'd have a very thick book if the Bible needed to explicitly spell things out like, "just because you're hated doesn't mean you're right". Human understanding is still human understanding, and as you've been pointing out, humans are subject to their biases, upbringing, perspectives, and life experiences. If you're looking at the Bible as a book that trumps this because of its content then I'd struggle to see that as a reasonable expectation.

I do not look at the bible and think that it is an extraordinarily well optimized teaching tool, or and especially elegant information transmission device, or that it is even a book that has basic error correction features...its honestly kind of a mess and lends itself to misinterpretation at least as often if not more than it does provide clear concise nibbles of useful information.

I don't know what you mean by "basic error correction features". Do you have an example of a book that does? Any book can be misinterpreted, let alone a collection of books. Although, these days I've heard that misinterpretation doesn't exist given the privileged position of the reader. But anyway, of course, ~66 books collated over ~millennia, the product of human work even if divinely inspired, isn't going to be an easy read.

I'm personally partial to "Sky Daddy" which is kinda snarky but also pretty accurate imo. I mean usually when we want you talk about things that are well outside of our scale we use math or other scientific terminology, If I have a problem with theological terminology is that it is sometimes, and sometimes by design nebulous. Anyway what I Actually meant was that I genuinely do not understand why you think that "any communication between God and God's creation will be revelation necessarily as God's creation would be otherwise unable to comprehend God" Like i'm not sure what you mean or why it seems obvious to you.

You could maybe think of it analogically, like communicating with an ant, or maybe AI when we get to that point (human explanations of being human will be revelatory to the AI). God is beyond our understanding necessarily, and so, by default, when God tells us about God that is revelation. Do you think, if God exists, that we'd be able to commune with God one-to-one? Or would we continue to be subject to our own human limitations? Would it be understandable of misunderstandings happened? If people misunderstood? If they approached a text and didn't quite get it right?

Ha, you really did mean that you met Jesus...'ve found most people dont mean that as literally as you do, neat! could you tell me a bit more about the expirience, like were you just riding your donkey to damascus when all of a sudden, or were you in church or had you just been given a heroic dose of dissociative drugs and carted into surgery...iow what was the context? why were you crying, i'm thinking its sort of like Beatlemania or Beiber fever but with Jesus, but please do tell me what you have come to believe about your tears in this personal expirience?

Nothing exciting I'm afraid, I simply went to sleep the night before. I was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years later, so you could possibly tie it into that. I also struggle with gender dysphoria, and it was getting much worse around that time. My parents were also somewhat distant emotionally, so there's that, too. I didn't exactly ask, "why?"

As for the tears, see gender dysphoria (I'm sure you can imagine the dynamics of this within a church context), and also regrets and mistakes in the years between then and now. Anyway, that's life. The embrace itself is I think something along the lines of what Brennan Manning and others have said: that God loves us as we are and not as we should be. I find that difficult.

[Athanasius]

Weird, I'm actually rather fond of it, I mean I don't know if it shines through but I'm wildly entertained by myself. In some sense I can agree that meaning making is somewhat pointless but not merely for the futility of it but because I actually enjoy stuff, I love sweets and more than anything I like making stuff...and this is something I've though a lot about, the why and for what, but really I just like doing it. If no one paid me for it I would do it, if I was the only man on earth I'd make stuff, meaning or not my constitution is such that I derive pleasure and satisfaction from making things so seeking something deeper is akin to asking why do I find pleasure pleasing. Eating, Sex, walking, music, pointless conversations on the internet , oh and jokes I love jokes, I don't think any of that is meaning but I like it all, I like it all so much that I do things that I don't particularly like so that I can do more of it. I also agree that a person has every right to check out when they want, I just still have stuff I'd like to do so, you know. I don't think this is the long and short of my existence but if it was it would make sense to me, other animals are doing something very similar, biology is a hell of a drug. I mean we can talk more about this if you like but suicides are pretty common so maybe you would of yourself but I don't think that is like the default .

I don't think many people kill themselves because they think life is meaningless. Well, it wasn't the case for me, anyway.

haha I'd never say anything so pat and lazy as that especially since one of the main reasons for being religious is that you guys actually believe it. I too understand that when i'm dead, how my family feels will not affect me, but I'm not dead so the thought does affect me and I happen to have emotions and those thoughts bring about icky ones. I can definitely imagine my life being in such a state that I wouldn't want to do it anymore and in that situation I can imagine that I might only hesitate due to biological drive to continue living or perhaps the fear that it might not actually be the end or the fear that it may actually be the end, idk and I'm not champing t the bit to find out. I must admit that I think it would be a huge waste if someone killed themselves because they stopped believing in god when they could continue believing and perhaps make me a burger or write a story or be a sex partner....but ultimately if you would rather be dead then I'll take your word for it, just do me the solid of taking mine for it that I actually like stuff and could list it for days.

It would be a waste of what, exactly? Do you perceive any conflict between this idea of meaning-making and your OP about Christian overconfidence?

Also Mcdonalds? step your food game up, I mean  actually like their garbage from time to time, but exploring food is something you could do for as long as you live and you'd scarcely have to repeat yourself.

The point was that in a universe that lacks meaning inherently, there is no difference between the most delicious hamburger and a quarter pounder with cheese. It's all reduced, in the end. What do you make of that biological drive to keep going when you claim to know that there's no greater meaning 'out there'? Or maybe you do, and the drive to continue doing the things you love is evidence of that? Word and act and all the rest.

[Oscar_Kipling]

I’ve never had a supernaturally experience.  No visions, no dreams, no voices, no miraculous events.  Just boring rational faith that I find compelling but them I’m probably just overconfident of my faith.

If this is all there is to life, I want none of it.  So your epistemological argument just doesn’t satisfy.  For me, outside of my metaphysical relationship with God, even temporal relationships with other humans are only so much chaff.

Life desiring the intimacy of sex with my wife but getting the underwear section if the Sears catalogue instead…

right, looks like I had you mixed up with someone else, my mistake. Well, hey if that is how you feel then that is how you feel. I guess having never experienced a metaphysical relationship with God the regular ole non-supernatural stuff like sex and Sears and cabbage and sunsets haven't been turned into comparatively bitter ash in my mouth by the singular expirience of knowing God.

[Oscar_Kipling]

It takes a degree of understanding, sure. Is that sophistication, or a basic task demanded of all? Any communication requires interpretation, and we'd have a very thick book if the Bible needed to explicitly spell things out like, "just because you're hated doesn't mean you're right". Human understanding is still human understanding, and as you've been pointing out, humans are subject to their biases, upbringing, perspectives, and life experiences. If you're looking at the Bible as a book that trumps this because of its content then I'd struggle to see that as a reasonable expectation.

Oh, I guess I simply cannot agree on this point. Well, I mean of course I agree that everything that can be communicated requires that the receiver have some prerequisite ability to decode (I guess some concepts of supernatural revelation wouldn't), however I cannot rightly credit the bible with being a highly efficient means of communicating ideas, that is to say efficiency in this case meaning that the encode-transmit-decode chain for relevant information is done in a manner that is least likely to suffer from errors or is constructed to provide the greatest possible chance of being correctly received and construed by humankind. I would argue that its pretty rare that even most christians will argue that the bible does not require theological sophistication to properly understand, or that it requires some manner of revelation to correctly interpret or that one must have a relationship with God to truly grasp the actual meaning. I'd be here all day if I tried to count the number of times I've seen it said about a reading or interpretation of some section of the bible that the interpretation is incorrect because the decoder was unwilling or unable to access or wield some spiritual qualia or quanta that is not optional for correct interpretation. More disturbing than that is that one can be absolutely convinced that they are using their spiritual decoder ring and be completely and utterly wrong, at least it is so according to many Christians i've run across. These faults are especially clear in the realm of apologies as there you can find 50 interpretations of a single verse ranging from fairly mundane to spectacularly intellectually acrobatic and many of them will be mutually exclusive claims all the while none of them ever runs the risk of being confused for a plain reading where the meanings of the words are taken at face value . In my world this is evidence that there is a fault in the encode, the decode or the transmission or all of them. I'm not so in love with the technical aspects of communication that I would claim that it is not communication if there are several ways for a decoded message to be interpreted, languages are like that, but if better fidelity can be achieved with human languages and even better fidelity can be achieved when science is applied then I am at a loss as to why a God couldn't or wouldn't have done what was both possible and advantageous for the stated goal of communicating ideas instead of going for what the bible achieves in practice. The long and short of it is that there are very few metrics by which I would call the Bible a book that is especially good at transmitting information....and even the decoder rings are faulty, if it requires some supernatural phenomena or revelation to be used then it is a shame that its not obvious to the user whether or not they are even using it or using it correctly. If it requires theological sophistication then there are obvious hurdles for most of the population to accumulate let alone apply that knowledge. I just cannot even pretend that this system seems like the best thing that the all singing all dancing god of the universe could come up with even while being hobbled by needing to work with pitiful broken humans, to me it's really unconvincing...like, your point is valid generally speaking but it just doesn't begin to put a dent in the illogic of the Bible being cast as really good at doing what it was created to do by the greatest possible creator of things.

I don't know what you mean by "basic error correction features". Do you have an example of a book that does? Any book can be misinterpreted, let alone a collection of books. Although, these days I've heard that misinterpretation doesn't exist given the privileged position of the reader. But anyway, of course, ~66 books collated over ~millennia, the product of human work even if divinely inspired, isn't going to be an easy read.

In the context of books, Glossaries and appendices are a couple of commonly used methods.

You could maybe think of it analogically, like communicating with an ant, or maybe AI when we get to that point (human explanations of being human will be revelatory to the AI). God is beyond our understanding necessarily, and so, by default, when God tells us about God that is revelation. Do you think, if God exists, that we'd be able to commune with God one-to-one? Or would we continue to be subject to our own human limitations? Would it be understandable of misunderstandings happened? If people misunderstood? If they approached a text and didn't quite get it right?

okay, good analogy I think, it would be pretty difficult to find the right mix of ant chemicals to convey the idea of love to an ant....still mostly because ants most likely have any capacity to understand concepts like love. I think that is all well and good, but its clear that humans can create better communication methods than the bible demonstrates, so why not do that, or if we must stick with the idea that that somehow breaks free will or that humans must progress unimpeded by being taught in a way that is incrementally better to the degree that it is indistinguishable from natural human development over time then I still think that the contemporary portions of the bible should be the absolute greatest examples of what humans were capable of. I do not think the bible is that, but I would be delighted if that is an argument you want to make because it sounds genuinely interesting.

Nothing exciting I'm afraid, I simply went to sleep the night before. I was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years later, so you could possibly tie it into that. I also struggle with gender dysphoria, and it was getting much worse around that time. My parents were also somewhat distant emotionally, so there's that, too. I didn't exactly ask, "why?"

As for the tears, see gender dysphoria (I'm sure you can imagine the dynamics of this within a church context), and also regrets and mistakes in the years between then and now. Anyway, that's life. The embrace itself is I think something along the lines of what Brennan Manning and others have said: that God loves us as we are and not as we should be. I find that difficult.

wow, thank you for sharing that. not to be a bugaboo, but what about the actual expirience, it happened in the morning when you woke up, or while you slept? I'm curious about the context you supplied and i appreciate it, but i'm also curious about the actual expirience, like did you bolt up from your bed? Oh how could i forget , what did jesus look like?

[IMINXTC]

Maybe an aside, but NT scripture actually demands revelatory experience and assurance.

"But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if any man does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His" Rm 8:9

"The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children." Rm 8:16

So there is a definite point where the believer enters into a relationship with God as he or she believes the Gospel as it pertains to one's spiritual condition and eternal remedy, namely, the Cross.  Experiences for believers following that initial revelation are varied or do not necessarily happen to all.

Beyond that point, the point of saving faith, the believer is not assured that he or she will know all things or will be able to apprehend every detail of existence aside what Scripture, which he or she is compelled to both trust and fear, clearly teaches.

True salvation gives the believer confidence in the revelations of Scripture. Supreme confidence, whether or not he or she can explain or justify every claim by rationality alone.

Faith is the initial and essential element of both salvation and assurance. Until that first encounter, which Scripture demands, is what is called "darkness."

"But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." Heb 11:6

No human has ever thought his or her way into the intimate experience called salvation, and no human can erase it's claims on the soul.

[ProDeo]

LOL, so many questions, are you a professional journalist? Just kidding.

Thanks for sharing your testimony, I do have a few questions.

A few? I counted 9 

Did you ever get a medical diagnosis for you phobia/panic attack situation?

Yep.

Did you marry your fiancée?

Still are.

Did Holland win the series against Germany?

We lost the final, became vice world champion. We forgave the Germans for WW2 but never for the lost final in 1974 

  When you say that you realized that no one could help you what do you mean, like were all of your doctors telling you that they couldn't help you and no one else could either?

It's more that in those days there was not much knowledge, you did not get the right treatment, unlike nowadays.

How did you know that your soul was cleansed, also what does that mean?

Good question. And hard to answer. Giving you my best shot, after my 2 baptisms in God's love I went (as every Saturday evening) to my fiance and she said, what happened to you? You glow! I must have looked surprised but felt insecure to tell her at that moment, that came later. Secondly, while walking home I realized 3 things, 1) God exists, 2) He is full of love and 3) He is holy. The latter (His holiness) became apparent to me because while walking home in thoughts I suddenly without any rational explanation saw the world with different eyes, as sinful and evil, but not in a judgemental way, on the contrary, I asked God, why me? so why not everybody else? That question was never answered. It was if I was given a glimpse how God looks at His world, with passion and love. I later learned about Christ and His sacrifice fits so well. The feelings slowly faded away and after about 2-3 weeks and it was time to make some choices.

You haven't found any instances of similar cases in medical science? if not what do you think it would mean if you did find similar cases?

I did found similar cases but not in medical science, I found lots of similar testimonies from other people. What they have in common is a changed life afterwards.
 

What caused your crisis of faith 35 years later and how did you overcome it?

I save that for a separate posting.

Why couldn't the same non-supernatural phenomena be responsible for 2 experiences spaced 30 minutes apart?

I don't understand the question, if it is important please rephrase.