Do you agree with me that someone else's spiritual experience is not sufficient justification to change your mind?
Yes for the most part. A minor part of me would be more impressed with certain people than others, like a person who I have known for many years who has always seemed like the last person on Earth who would ever entertain such an idea. But that’s just saying that I would consider it more interesting if it came from certain people, for the most part I think that an internal experience as evidence transmits poorly to other people besides that specific person. That’s not to be confused with my opinion towards different types of people telling me that some event happened.
Well, what if I told you that I'd had an spiritual experience which demonstrated to me in a completely indisputable way that Christianity was not correct? What would your reaction be?
I wouldn’t have a one size fits all reaction/reply, it would depend on a few things, and even then it would be complicated (as far as my GUESS that your experience was real).
I’m a big believer in innate concepts of right & wrong written into our reality, like the angel on one shoulder and devil on another shoulder. I think that even people who lose that sense of morality had it driven/brainwashed out of them (and some at an early enough age that they can’t even remember having normal morals at all). I will need to make an exception for psychopaths and some other rare things too.
Anyway, if someone had a spiritual experience that Christianity was false in the sense that they had an experience that still harmonized with the goodness that (I believe) is written into reality, yet for whatever the reason they interpreted that experience to be a refutation of Christianity, then I would not be opposed to the possibility that it could have been real. I think that God touching someone with an experience can serve other purposes in the world than only convincing a person that Christianity is true (especially considering how Christians say that only God knows how all of the dots connect in reality, and how many things happen for a reason that we don’t understand). It’s also pretty difficult to write off spiritual experiences in other religions as all being false.
I could think of a Batman analogy. Batman is real, but nobody is totally positive who is behind the mask. Many people argue that Jesus is behind the mask but others disagree. Regardless, Batman has been rescuing a lot of people lately from muggers in dark alleys. If a person has one of these “Batman experiences” they can very easily insist that Chuck Norris is under the mask not Jesus lol. The experience was real, but their exact interpretation is mistaken (for argument’s sake we’re assuming it’s unquestionably Jesus under the mask).
However, if a person tells me they had a spiritual experience that revealed to them that Christianity was false in the sense of it being an evil experience, one that flat out goes against a positive experience that is reported by people with God experiences, maybe influencing the person to hurt people or something , I would reject it wholesale as not being a God experience. I would say it’s something different. Not so much because I’m just picking & choosing what I like but because I have developed an entire belief system in my life that God is like something, and what God is like won’t result in some evil/fearful/stressful/etc experience if you feel His presence. To put this scenario into the Batman analogy, someone claims that they were minding their own business walking down the alley and Batman just started beating them senseless, then he stole their wallet. I would have to object that it had to be an impostor dressed up like Batman.
It would be further complicated IMO though because a genuine experience could be mistaken for an overactive imagination, or heightened emotions. And that doesn’t even imply that the person is foolish or gullible. Most people have heard of “This thing called spiritual experiences” their whole lives, so it’s not too hard to accidentally attribute something in your life to it, but to be mistaken. And I definitely would think that an outside observer would be even less capable of telling the difference, to the point of being pretty powerless to tell the difference.
Think about a person who has been pampered their entire life, they have never seen true stress a day in their life. They have heard about this thing called heartache many times before, they are even friends with someone whose spouse ripped their heart out by cheating on them. One day this person who lives in this low stress bubble of reality is about to eat dessert and they are super excited because it is the most delicious looking piece of cheesecake that they have ever seen before! However they need to make a quick trip to the bathroom first. Upon returning to the dinner table their jaw drops as they see that someone else ate the cheesecake. They are now convinced that they know what a heartache experience is!! Um, sorry but not quite! However it’s understandable that given the history of their life the person might conclude that that MUST be what people have been talking about when they speak of a heartache experience. The disappointment for the cheesecake loosely matches up with how people seem to talk about heartache (to someone living in a low stress bubble).
Making it even more complicated would be a person who DID have a legitimate spiritual experience, but for whatever the reason, wherever life has taken them, they second guess that it was real, they start to rationalize.
So I most definitely do not think someone else’s internal experience could be verified by myself, and at best I would be a little more impressed with the story of a spiritual experience coming from certain people over others.
