Ray Comfort & The Experience (Featuring Glenn Beck)

I recently listened to The No God Cast Podcast where they had on Ray Comfort.  At first I wasn't able to get through the podcast and had to turn it off.  The reason is that I have spent so much time working on recognizing fallacies and bad logic that I couldn't take listening to Ray's poor use of reasoning. I have already been through and dismissed anything he argues and just found it to be a waist of my time to listen to all of it again.  It wasn't until I was on a road trip where I had nothing to do that I decided to listen to the whole thing.

The part I found interesting was his conversion story. You can hear the specific podcast here. Basically he was 22 and had his own business, a great wife, and a kid.  He felt he had everything but started to fear death and looked into science and medicine and felt at a loss. This is when he found Jesus.  He was talking to someone about Jesus and had a powerful experience with the idea of Jesus taking on his sins. He repented that night and came to Jesus.  He said that the next morning the world looked different and he saw god in everything.  From then on he has found the bible to be the word of god and has many experiences with religion and Jesus that have lead him to where he is today.

I have no reason to doubt this experience. I don't doubt the power of it or the fact that his whole outlook on life changed after that day. I also don't doubt this conversion experience by Glenn Beck:

The interesting part starts around 2:30. Basically he was having a hard time with alcoholism, his career, his family, and life in general when he came to the Mormon church. He was looking for a religion and the Mormon one was the one he connected with.  His experience seems genuine to me and I have no reason to think he is acting. You can see it in his face and hear it in his voice, and I am moved by the emotion I see and hear. (It should be know that I hate Genn Beck. I hate what he promotes politically and the crazy he feeds into.) 

I see both of these experiences as genuine. It is the assumed outside source of god that I doubt. The pattern is simple: they are looking for something, find something that moves them, associate it to a religion or idea of god, and have a powerful connection afterward. Correct me if science says differently, but the power of the experience fuses the idea of the religion and Jesus (or Mohammed, Buddha,...) in association with the experience. So when you think of the religion or Jesus, you get the emotions of the experience, and when you have similar experiences, you think of Jesus or the religion. The brain primes ideas that are associated with other ideas and experiences. The more powerful the experience, the more powerful the association. 

The fact that they have had these moments does not excuse the pollution that they put into our society.  The nonsense they fight for, politically and socially, is awful. They get in the way of what is taught in schools, what science is accepted in society, the rights of women, and moving forward as a society. They both base all of these things on these experiences and further experiences they have had.  They ignore reality in order to fit the world into their little religious minds and then spread that poison with the assumption of their correctness and the thought that god has their back in endorses their ideas.  We atheists must continue to correct and argue with these ideas that are based on incorrect assumptions about real experiences. 

Their experiences are also contradictory. I wouldn't be surprised if Ray would consider the Mormon church to not even be Christian. Glenn would argue that Ray would have to accept the Mormon idea of god and be baptized and married in the Mormon temple in order to get the the highest level of the kingdom of heaven.  It would be a strange god to inspire them both to promote their faith in order to draw people from each other's faith to their own.  These experiences are not unique to these two and can be found in every religion and spiritual following. A few minutes looking for these experiences on the internet can show just how many there are.

The point is that we as humans are capable of experiences that are powerful. These experiences can even be had when discussing false ideas or nonsense. They are human experiences that are had while interacting with others or alone while thinking or in a meditative state.  They don't tell us about the outside world or anything supernatural, but they do tell us about our brains and what it is to be human.  Atheists are capable of having equally powerful experiences and often do.  I myself have had many of these experiences and many have been after becoming an atheist. During these experiences people can often be manipulated into believing in nonsense and we atheists have to keep our reasoning in check.  This can have a dampening effect on the experiences, but may be something we chose to do because we choose to be grounded in reality and refuse to be taken advantage of. My goal is to find powerful and "spiritual" experiences that keep me grounded in reality and add meaning to my existence.