Introduction

I remember the birth of my daughter in very similar terms, particularly her looking right into my face and then turning her head to look up at her father who was standing beside us. A magical moment.But why compare it to any other magical moment? Discovering God was for me a very big moment indeed after years of not believing. Staggering, breath-taking.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I was sent to church as a child but learned just about nothing. I had the familiar experience of becoming an atheist as a teenager, from which most people never return to belief. But thirty years later I did become a believer, a real believer, amazed and awed as I saw God as real for the first time.I wouldn't call such a magical moment "just" a magical moment. You can call your experience of the birth of your son spiritual if you like.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I'm not interested in justifying my experience to you. I told it truthfully, you've distorted what I said.

The thing is, you aren't in a position to make the comparison since you would of course admit you've never had a "religious HSE."I'm not going to deny that atheists have spiritual experiences, but I would deny that they are the same as an experience of the reality of God. The apprehension that God is in fact real is, well, it's a real experience, it's not something a person would say who'd had perhaps an amazing experience revealing some kind of great truth but that couldn't be described as knowing God is real. You can say it's not really God, although you have no way of knowing that, but you can't claim it's the same kind of experience atheists have who would never describe ANY experience as knowing that God is real. (There's a video at You Tube of a pastor talking about a big revival he was part of in Saskatchewan, Canada in the 70s, and I remember one incident he described -- I'm not sure how far into the video -- [I found it -- about 25:35] of a young man suddenly carrying on about how "God is real" which he had just experienced. The discovery bowled him over you could say. It's not an experience an atheist would describe, unless it ended his atheism. I guess you can persist in assuming it had nothing to do with God, but you can't very well deny that whatever it is, the person experiencing it strongly believed he'd just discovered God's reality, and that no atheist would carry on in that way.).The distortion I had in mind was your suggestion that I somehow engineered my own experience of belief, perhaps by having learned in church about eternal life and the eternal punishment of Hell. You sarcastically mocked the experience as "miraculous" given your assumption that having had some experience of religion as a child I merely went back to it as an adult. But as I remember it there was very little effect from my early church experience. And as a matter of fact I did not deny your wonderful experience of the birth of your son. That's why I described my own experience of childbirth.I suppose I must have "known" about eternal life and Hell, but very possibly not from my experience of church as a child since it was a liberal church and they don't like to talk about Hell; and I don't recall thinking much about either during the period when I was becoming a Christian; it took a while even to get the message about salvation, what it is and how it happens to a person.What interested me was God Himself, thinking about Him in Himself, I was fascinated with the idea and reality of God, and I'd say that's still true. It's also odd that you would seem not to know about all the people who convert to a religion without the slightest knowledge of that religion in advance. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The Quran and the Bible contradict each other so both can't be true. There is such a thing as false spiritual experiences. But I don't have any desire to argue with you about them.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.