Timmy Talk

[ILG]

New life? New behavior? New attitude? Consider (historically) how that many people (especially the young) can and have overturned their whole lives and behavior upon buying into world views associated with:
Nazi Party. Amway Sales Culture. Eastern Woowoo Religion. A Frat House. A Street Gang. A Rock Group. A Jihad Community. And so on. Such groups provide new meaning to people's lives, so they either conform (sometimes spiritually) to the system, or else leave--or any variation in between total conforming and wanting to leave. Anyhow, all those so-called families are at first just an external influence, but once purchased for oneself, things can quickly toggle over to being and feeling internally wonderful, something beyond ourselves and therefore pretty persuasive of its underlying credibility, just like religious faith.

I can see how this can be true for many. However, for me, my conversion experience was very internal, the external church just being something that happened and took root afterwards. What you describe can explain joining a group and receiving external validation but it does not explain the miraculous change that took place INSIDE me, apart from the group. My experience and the church are two separate things. Therefore, I have a very hard time looking at it from anything but a faith point of view. I am changed from that conversion to this day. It did not leave me when I left the church.

So, provide any new Acts 2:38 convert a church full of people who have experienced the same thing, who are well trained to provide cues, to answer questions, to offer comfort, encouragement, love. The conversion feels like the miraculous--yet all still psychological. The overall result is deep internalization. What was once someone else's concept becomes our own deeply held concept of god--complete conversion, but nothing unique to the Acts 2:38 experience, nor to any other faith or world view.

This also happened to me slowly over time, but initially, it was not so. My conversion and this process are not one in the same. It's just that the church was able to explain what already happened to me when no one else could. And so, I assumed they were right about the rest of things too.

The bigger miracle to me is rather how the human brain can, in the middle of seemingly intractable faith, simply think itself out of relatively deep self-delusion. The less interesting miracle (to me) is how people get hooked by a faith that has evolved intentionally "that you may believe." (John 20:31)

This type of "faith" you explain is more like a brainwashing. I believe this happens to some who are simply trying to fit into the church.

I do also understand why someone (probably accompanied with deep sense of gratitude, debt, or even a lingering fear of punishment) does not want to relabel or reinterpret their own conversion as "just human psychology."

This comment may not be directed at me, but I have (and never really have had) much of any feeling of gratitude, debt or fear of punishment (I had this fear of punishment while in the church though) towards or from the church. My gratitude and debt has been toward God alone. What He did for me at my conversion experience is WHY I did all the things I did for the church, feeling I was doing those things for God. The things I did were never to gain approval from the church, they were what I did based on my understanding of what God wanted from me based upon my understanding of what was taught. When I realized what they were teaching me was in error, I changed what I was doing and still live my life according to what I feel God wants from me. However, not having it spoon-fed to me makes it very hard to decipher what exactly He does want. And I miss the fellowship of church. However, I felt like God wanted me to quit going (which some people can't wrap their heads around, I know.) I don
t know if that is fo forever or for just now.

A few people--having untethered themselves from the traditional authority of scripture--may even toy with imagining a kind of God that does make better sense--someone they can live with, instead of the literalist-derived Bible God.

This may describe me. I am not sure. I do not believe in the authority of scripture as was taught to me in the UPC. However, I don't know exactly what I do believe. I could easily throw it all away if it were not for my conversion experience, which keeps me pondering the whole thing.

we then can have potentially 7.1 billion versions of a personal god where no one can point to any particularly authoritative source of information about that god, except to say, "He's just within you, and faith is the key."

That is sort of what I believe. We are all on a faith journey (or should be.....some people just push it aside and away). I think that our faith journey is very personal and we have to answer for it. The only authority that I need is the authority of my satisfaction with my journey and the satisfaction of those I hold dear. I believe we need other people as a gauge of sorts, because we are not made to be an island. On the flip-side, we alone are responsible for our relationship with God to know whether it is what it needs to be or not.

If however, there is a different, Real God out there who's simply not saying much so far, that kind of God will probably have no punishment for the likes of me blowing the whistle on the foolishness of the other morally backwards gods, such as Yahweh & Company.

I think we are all responsible to share what we know and believe (to some extent). In that case, if your life and your experiences lead you to believe what you believe about a morally backwards god (not the real God but the one that is taught), I think he would hold you responsible to blow the whistle on that false god. I don't know what I believe about eternal punishment but I am much less likely to believe in one now. If you did not say and fight for what you believe in, there may not be a punishment but a disappointment from a God who feels that the world can only be what it fully should be when we all live the life we were truly meant to live. For you, that means blowing the whistle. I would hate for you to disappoint God.