Can You See God and Still Be an Atheist?

People who have had spiritual or religious experiences can still become atheists, because those experiences can be interpreted naturalistically. Stop making assumptions about atheists. Listen instead.

[gao]

As a zen buddhist, every spiritual experience I have is atheist

[diemdia]

I have a (now mild but previously fairly intense) psychotic disorder. I used to have these really horrifying episodes where I would hear “demons” screaming and clawing at my bedroom window. I’d be completely comatose out of fear and praying for God’s protection. I was heavily religious at the time and interpreted these experiences as God’s punishment, and leaving Christianity was really integral to realizing that I was having mental health issues and that not everything a person is capable of experiencing exists outside of themselves

[wj]

When I was 13 or 14, I was attending my grandfather's funeral, also the first funeral I had experienced. My grandmother started singing a catholic song that she said was my grandfather's favorite song. She was the only one singing in a crowd of 50+ people. It wasnt a popular song so nobody else knew it by heart.

In that moment, while everyone was staring at our family, I heard what I could only describe as a single note chorus. Like the typical "ahhhh" singing that you hear in a movie when the clouds part and a beam of god-ly sunlight shines through.

At the time, I told my parents I heard angels singing. But after examining the experience through a skeptical lense, it doesnt seem unlikley to me that a young child, who has terrible social anxiety, would have a surreal audio experience while experiencing death for the first time, and being stared at by a bunch of strangers.

In fact, I have had many auditory experiences since then. I have been around other people and have heard full instrumental songs that I have never heard before playing out loud, even though nobody around me could hear it. Does that mean a supernatural band was trying to communicate with me?

In short, yeah you can have spiritual experiences and still be an athiest. Does that mean that nothing could make me a theist? NO! The point is that personal experience is not a reliable method for finding truth!

[jameskpolk]

I’m sitting in my library at college and the guy across from me is wearing a shirt that says “anti-atheist: the belief that atheist do not exist.” Should I shatter his worldview?

[Wolf]

When you understand how fragile the human mind is, you understand how easy it is to fool. Even the mildest hallucination can easily be misinterpreted as a "spiritual"experience.

[ArcadeJackson-usmq]

I’m an atheist but some gospel music is so beautiful it can bring me to tears.

[TheContrarian]

I did a six round treatment of ketamine. Each treatment increased by 10MG. I experienced so many different mind blowing things, it’s just a crazy ride. I could easily see how someone can mistake an experience of this sort as mystical or even in religious ways. I did think I had tapped into alternate dimensions but never believed that I was visited by a deity.

On the other hand, I did dance with those elephants found in Hinduism lol

[RaleighRonsClassics]

I was a charismatic Pentecostal and the Churches I went to loved spiritual or supernatural experiences. I was Baptized in the Holy Ghost, drunk in the spirit and spoke in tongues. At the time I thought it was all Jesus. It's easy to assign anything out of the norm to God. However, since those days I have seen similar activity in other non-Christian religions too. Those sort of emotions, feelings or activity can really boost faith in God. However, there may be other explainations I never considered back when I was involved in Christianity. It's easy to claim anything we can't explain to the Supernatural but I have since left that mindset because once we entertain it we constantly need more and more. It's like an addiction.

[junoeclipse]

It is very easy to believe that there are aspects of the universe and our ability to interact with it that our understanding of science has not yet caught up with, but to use that as proof that any specific religion is correct would be quite the leap in logic.

[daedalusdreamjournal]

the issue I see with these questions is that a spiritual experience will have a different meaning and most of all definition.

This makes it difficult for theist and non theist to discuss the subject.

[Scudboy]

Basically don't make assumptions about other people's experiences. Talk to someone, not at them. Listen to what someone is actually saying, not what you assume they are saying or why.

[SuperPank]

I have had a spiritual experience that made me think RSSB was right, when i was 14. I had to work a lot to deconstruct from that, for more than a decade.

[pauligrossinoz]

This doesn't work with presuppositionalists, or with anyone at all who can't even consider the _possibility_ that they're wrong.

People like William Lane Craig.

People who have already decided that they're right, and who are never going to change their mind, have already decided that _your_ own experiences are invalid if they ever contradict theirs.

These people just will tell you that you are wrong until the end of the Earth, and they should be immediately dismissed solely on the basis that you will not waste your time on somebody who can't ever admit they might be wrong.

[mathewseiller]

Listen?!? Respect?!? Good sir! What are these things in today’s discourse?
(Takes off old man guise)
Seriously… thank you for this!

[FlowerGirlVJV]

2020 I was getting bullied by my closest love ones was about to HARM others and myself but I ENCOUNTERED the highest power in my bathroom floor I DIDNT need church or religion! But I met Jesus I encourage you to meet the highest power! ❤

[DaveCM]

I was absolutely positive for years that I had a religious experience. Looking back now, I'm sure there was a plausible explanation. While I was a Christian, I doubt anyone could have changed my mind.

[timothybodey]

I am and was an atheist when I had two specific spiritual experiences with "God" and "the Devil". I intentionally made myself have those experiences because I believe (and generally have some evidence) that these experiences are purely psychological/neurological. I had these experiences after getting a Bachelors in Psychology specifically looking at the bio-psycho mechanisms of belief and religious experiences. Even if they aren't "real", they still feel real and hold very significant meaning. I'm a very different person from before to after those experiences. If I decided to believe these experiences to be objectively real, I would be one of those atheists who had a radical conversation.

I could push myself to have those experiences again, but I think I've gotten what I need out of them. Maybe one day I'll do it again, intentionally or not.

[FrozEnbyWolf]

Yes. I saw God in a dream back when I was still Christian. However, this was no anthropomorphic being, but an abstract incomprehensible feeling. There was a cityscape washed out to grayscale, above which was a rift in the sky, like a tear in the fabric of reality. Through the rift was a dark shape that was both everywhere and nowhere at once, and I heard a screaming chorus like rushing wind in my mind. This is how I conceptualized God at the time, which might be why I gradually lapsed out of Christianity. My ideas were just too different from mainstream religion for me to call myself one of them anymore.

I feel that today, as an atheist, I'm more free to come up with and discover my own ideas about God and spirituality than when I was confined to Christianity.

[JeGaysus]

Also! Atheists are varied. Some believe in an Afterlife and Ghosts, others believe in Aliens. Some believe in none of it. Atheism does not mean there are. I supernatural beliefs, it’s just a lack of knowing there’s a God. Outside of that? Experiences and opinions are varied.

[highground]

I am a Catholic and I have also had some spiritual experience and it is true that there are simpler naturalistic explanations for it, it can be “both/and” rather than either or but i want to say to the charismatic christian who says 100% it was spiritual and a naturalist who says theres a simpler explanation for it, i wanna say they’re both wrong, there simply isn’t a way of knowing!