Back
when I converted to Christian fundamentalism when I was in high school, I was
told in no uncertain terms that the Holy Spirit was absent from me before I was
baptized, and that it would enter into me at the moment of baptism. The details
were unclear; would the Holy Spirit merge with my own spirit, or would they
remain separate like two battling Zoroastrian entities? (Modern Zoroastrians
seem to be the only cultural group that every major religion wants to
slaughter.) It was also unclear whether the Holy Spirit would ever leave. But
at least if I should stop adhering to fundamentalist beliefs, the Holy Spirit
would become inactive.
Therefore
my conversion experience, and my subsequent rejection of organized religion,
followed the classic ABA experimental design. Situation A, my previous
unconverted self; B, my converted self; then back to A, my post-fundamentalist
self. My spiritual experiences during B should be significantly different from
those during A.
It
is true that, during B, I had deeply and soaringly religious experiences. My
feeling of inspiration was sometimes so strong that I could hardly breathe. The
whole world radiated colorful beauty. The problem is that I also had these
experiences before, during the first A. Somewhere around age nine I started
feeling unspeakable inspiration when I was surrounded by beautiful natural
scenes. Once at a Presbyterian church camp (which clearly did not meet
fundamentalist standards) up in the Sierra Nevada we wrote little skits. I was
Paul Bunyan going to heaven, and I said that if heaven didn’t have trees I
didn’t want to go. The feeling was so strong that I experienced it even when
riding my bicycle through endless acres of pesticide-drenched monocultures of
orange or olive trees. I can still remember the scent of Malathion. I
identified this feeling with God. And I believed the basic Christian doctrines.
But I had not yet been baptized.
Many
years later, when I left theology behind, I continued to have these
experiences. Just this past summer I felt inspiration over and over as I beheld
the wonders of nature (see my evolution blog). I am not an atheist like Sir
Richard Dawkins, but even he likes to quote someone who described him as “a
deeply religious nonbeliever.” If I am indeed still experiencing the Holy
Spirit, which really does make me love everybody and the Earth, then why is it
still a palpable presence in my post-doctrinal life? Why did I have these
feelings before and after my time as a fundamentalist? A statistician would say
that my experiences (the dependent variable) during A vs. B (the independent
variable) were not significantly different.
I
experience the mental state that many (most?) other people experience, and I
experience it more often than nearly everyone I know: I feel breathlessly
inspired by nature, and I love altruism. (I also hate those times when people
defy altruism. Those are the only times I get really, really angry.) But those
experiences are not associated with the presence or absence of belief in
fundamentalist doctrines.
We’ve
been sold a big lie. Fundamentalists insist that everyone who has not joined
their ranks is an abject sinner who lives only for pleasure and is constrained
from harming other people only by the fear of Hell, and that when you join them
you become a new person who is filled with the spirit of love. Both of these
assertions are wrong, and are lies. There are perhaps billions of
non-fundamentalists who behave in the way the Bible says we can recognize as
Christian, except for the doctrines and rituals; and there are at least
thousands of Christians in America who are constrained from acting aggressively
toward you only because they fear the secular law of the land.
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