[extropy-chat] Re: John Wright Finds God

[john-c-wright at sff.net]

Mr. Adrian Tynes writes, in answer to my question:

>Keep an open mind about the possible causes, and
>integrate that one experience with all the rest of
>the evidence one has perceived.  Perhaps science
>can't explain everything (yet).  But just because we
>don't know why X happened, doesn't automatically mean
>that God or aliens caused X.  True, it *may be
>possible*, but there are other possible explanations,
>some of them more wondrous than simply blaming it on
>mystical beings that happen not to show up whenever
>we specifically look for them.

Bravo. This is a perfectly rational answer, and shows a healthy measure of
common sense. And yet...

And yet, I am in the same position as Mr. A Square of Flatland might be in
trying to describe a sphere to his fellow two-dimensional beings. "It was like a
circle, and yet it was not a circle, for it extended into directions for which
we have no name and cannot picture." Mr. A Square has no word for "volume" and
he cannot express the overwhelming solidity of his three-dimensional visitor. 

A religious experience is not like observing an interesting object. It is not as
if a mermaid swam into my room, and I decided to explain the sight by assuming,
against all evidence, that there was a God who sent her. 

A religious experience, or, to be precise, a visitation by the Paraclete is a
literal inspiration, the entering of one spirit into another. The Holy Ghost
enters the mind and soul and works a transformation. The only analogies I can
think of are one both shopworn and mildly insulting to my brother atheists: like
explaining sight to a man born blind, like explaining romance to a boy below the
age when girls have cooties. 

No, wait. I am (or pretend to be) a writer after all, so I should be able to
come up with a new metaphor, one that deprecates me and not my audience. Hmm .... 

Trying to explain a religious experience is like a Yahoo trying to explain his
love of the shiny but useless metal called gold to the dignified and
perfectly-rational Houyhnhnms. No matter what he says, the Houyhnhnms cannot see
the value or the beauty of the substance they cannot eat. 

My experience was one that attacked and changed the axioms, the very foundations
of my thought. My conception of what constituted myself, the universe, and my
relation to it, were changed. So radical a change cannot be integrated with
prior experience because the root of all experience is overturned. 

Imagine discovering where your thoughts come from before you think them, and
tracing those thoughts back to a mind infinitely greater than your own, timeless
and unutterably benevolent. It would be like one of the characters in my books
suddenly growing aware of me, his author, and realizing that the thoughts and
words I ascribe to him are mine, not his. How would you even begin to describe
such an event? One is not aware of one’s own thoughts through the eye or ear by
means of touch or taste. There would be nothing to hold up to another man’s
eyes. And yet, neither could the experience be dismissed. 

I can also testify (and this will sound like a paradox, but make of it what you
will) that the change was a growth, not merely an alteration. By that, I mean
that all the things I used to see, I still see, but now my understanding has a
weight and solidity, which heretofore it lacked. My new beliefs are larger than
and encompass my older. A man who changes his coat merely makes a change, and he
must put off the one to put on the other: a man who grows into an adult, while
losing nothing of his personality when he was a child, builds a new level onto
old foundations.