Three of the seven following sites are parodies, while the others are serious attempts at religious expression. Good luck choosing which are which!

Landover Baptist Church
4 Step Proof for God of the Bible
OBJECTIVE: Ministries
Rapture Ready
Time Cube
Chick Tract – The Last Generation
True Christian Church of Christ

“… I prayed harder and just then I felt like everything I was saying was being sucked into a vacuum.  When I stood up, I felt like thin air; I had to brace myself. I felt this energy, it was a kind of an ecstasy.” — Cathy

“Something began to flow in me — a kind of energy… Then came the strange sensation that water was not only running down my cheeks, but surging through my body as well, cleansing and cooling as it went.” — Colson

“It was a beautiful feeling of well-being, warmth and loving… I went home and all night long these warm feelings kept coming up in my body.” — Jean

“I felt something real warm overwhelming me. It was in just a moment, yet it was like an eternity… a joy, such a joy hit me with such a tremendous force that I jumped… and ran.” — Helen

(from Conway & Siegelman, Snapping, pp. 24, 32, 12, 31)

For many Christians, being born again is unlike anything they have ever known. A sense of personal conviction, yielding or release followed by indescribable peace and joy — this is the stuff of spiritual transformation. Once experienced, it is unforgettable. Many people can recall small details years later.  In the aftermath of such a moment, an alcoholic may stop drinking or a criminal fugitive may hand himself in to the authorities. A housewife may sail through her tasks for weeks, flooded by a sense of God’s love flowing through her to her children. A normally introverted programmer may begin inviting his co-workers to church.

This experience, more than any other, creates a sense of certainty about Christian belief and so makes belief impervious to rational argumentation. A believer knows what he or she has experienced and seen. Even converts who don’t feel radically transformed after praying “the sinner’s prayer” may feel overwhelmed by God’s presence during subsequent prayer or worship. Evangelical and Pentecostal forms of Christianity that are gaining ground around the world particularly emphasize emotional peaks such as faith healing or speaking in tongues. Worshipers may get caught up in exuberant singing, shouting, dancing and tears of joy.

What most Christians don’t know is that these experiences are not unique to Christianity.  In fact, the quotations that you just read come from two born again Christians, a Moonie, and an encounter group participant. Their words are similar, because the born again experience doesn’t require a specific set of beliefs. It requires a specific social or emotional process, and the dogmas or explanations are secondary.

Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman have written an excellent overview of what they call sudden personality change, or “snapping.” The first edition of their book, Snapping focused on small counter-cultural cults and self-help groups that sprang up in the 1960’s and 1970’s such as Hare Krishna, Transcendental Meditation, EST, Mind Dynamics, Unification Church, Scientology, and others. When asked about whether Evangelical Christianity might fit the pattern, Conway and Siegelman were reluctant to say yes.

Today they admit, “In America today, increasingly, that line [between a cult and a legitimate religion] cannot be categorically drawn… Our research raised serious questions concerning the techniques used to bring about conversion in many evangelical groups.”

Conversion is a process that begins with social influence. As sociologists like to say, our sense of reality is socially constructed. We will come back to this later. Suffice for now to say that missionary work typically begins with simple offers of friendship or conversations about shared interests. As a prospective converts are drawn in, a group may envelope them in warmth, good will, thoughtful conversations and playful activities, always with gentle pressure toward the group reality.

In revival meetings or retreats, semi-hypnotic processes draw a potential convert closer to the toggle point. These include including repetition of words, repetition of rhythms, evocative music, and Barnum statements (messages that seem personal but apply to almost everyone — like horoscopes). Because of the positive energy created by the group, potential converts become unwitting participants in the influence process, actively seeking to make the group’s ideas fit with their own life history and knowledge. Factors that can strengthen the effect include sleep deprivation or isolation from a person’s normal social environment. An example would be a late night campfire gathering with an inspirational storyteller and altar call at Child Evangelism’s “Camp Good News.”

These powerful social experiences culminate in conversion, a peak experience in which the new converts experience a flood of relief. Until that moment they have been consciously or unconsciously at odds with the group center of gravity. Now, they may feel that their darkest secrets are known and forgiven.   They may experience the kind of joy or transcendence normally reserved for mystics. And they are likely to be bathed in love and approval from the surrounding group, which mirrors their experience of God.

The otherworldly mental state that I refer to as the domain of mystics is known in clinical situations as a “transcendence hallucination,” but this term fails to reflect how normal and profound the experience can be as a part of human spirituality. The transcendence hallucination is an acute sense of connection with a reality that lies beyond and behind this natural plane. It typically lasts for just a few seconds or minutes but may leave profound impression that lasts a lifetime. For Christians it may be interpreted as an encounter with a supernatural person — Jesus, or an angel. (A seeker of the paranormal might be convinced of an encounter with aliens or spirits.) More often, a person gets a disembodied sense of connection accompanied by intense feelings of joy, wonder, peacefulness or alternately terror, depending on the context.

Transcendence hallucination can be triggered by neurological events like a seizure, stroke, or migraine aura; or by a drug such as psilocybin, but it also can be triggered by over or under-stimulation of the brain. Some mystics from the past have described or even drawn these events with such impressive detail that a diagnostic hypothesis is possible. Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval mystic, wrote of the intense pain accompanying her visions and created scores of drawings that show the visual field distorted in keeping with a migraine aura.

In modern times, author Karen Armstrong describes the seizures that she first thought to be triggered spiritually. In discussing an altered state known as Kundalini awakening, one migraine sufferer commented,

“I usually don’t follow any of the mystic/esoteric stuff, but I must say it is kind of strange to see all my symptoms lined up like that outside of a western/medical context.”

Let me emphasize, though, that these altered states don’t depend on some kind of neurological damage or pathology. They can be unforgettable, peak experiences for normal people, long sought and hard won by those who care about the spiritual dimension of life. Sensory deprivation, fasting, meditation, rhythmic drumming, or crowd dynamics have all been used systematically to elicit altered states in normal people.

Since we humans are meaning-makers to the core, such a powerful experience demands an explanation. But for most of human history, naturalistic explanations simply were unavailable. “Lacking understanding and with no reliable method for investigating the phenomenon, people through the ages have grappled imaginatively with their experiences, looking to some higher order and ascribing these abrupt changes in awareness to a source outside the body. They have been explained as messages from beyond or gifts of revelation and enlightenment, personal communications that could only be delivered by a universal being of infinite dimensions, a cosmic force that comprehends all space, time and earthly matter.” Needless to say, some supernatural hypotheses are more compatible with what we know about ourselves and the world around us than others.

In an evangelical conversion context like a revival meeting or missionary work, religious interpretations of the snapping experience are provided both before and after it occurs. These explanations become the foundation stones on which whole castles of beliefs later will be constructed. The authorities who triggered the otherworldly experience are trusted implicitly, which gives them the power to now transform the convert’s world view in accordance with their own theology. Conversion activities can be harmful because all too often authorities use this power to promote a kind of tribalism that is built around exclusive truth claims and Iron Age moral priorities. The unforgettable born again experience gets used to justify beliefs that may be factually or morally bankrupt.

The conversion process as I have described it sounds sinister, as if manipulative groups and hypnotic leaders deliberately ply their trade to suck in the unsuspecting and take over their minds. I don’t believe this is usually the case.

Rather, natural selection is at play. Over millennia of human history, religious leaders have hit on social/emotional techniques that work to win converts, just as individual believers have hit on spiritual practices they find satisfying and belief systems that fit how we process information. Techniques that don’t trigger powerful spiritual experiences simply die out. Those that do get used, refined, and handed down.

With few exceptions the evangelists, from mega-church ministers to “friendship missionaries,” are unaware of the powerful psychological tools they wield. They are persuasive in part because they genuinely believe they are doing good. After all, they have their own born again experiences to convince them that they are promoting the Real Thing. Consider, for example, the Apostle Paul, whose Damascus Road event (possibly a temporal lobe seizure) transformed his moral priorities and sustained a lifetime of missionary devotion. What decent person wouldn’t want to share the secret to healing and happiness? The challenge is trying to figure out exactly what that secret is. As I say to my daughters, it is not enough to be well intentioned — even joyfully, generously so. We also have to be right.

Essentials: Flo Conway & Jim Siegelman, Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Personality Change

Iona Miller, “Fear and Loathing in the Temporal Lobes” http://neurotheology.50megs.com/whats_new_9.html (excellent bibliography).

Sharon Begley. “Your Brain on Religion” Newsweek May 7, 2001. http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/neuronewswk.htm

Guess who’s coming to visit us on Capitol Hill, folks? Mars Hill Church.

This week, Mars Hill’s Joel Fariss—a deacon at MH’s downtown church—wrote a blog post entitled “Mission in Capitol Hill.”

Capitol Hill is majestic in its standing among Seattle culture shapers, with its long Broadway avenue freckled with dirty Thai restaurants and hipster clothing stores, as well as a statuesque presence in the coffee world. Among these elite caverns of caffeine lies Bauhaus Coffee and Books. Bauhaus has long been a Capitol Hill landmark and is seen by locals as a comfortable place to hang out… literally. Just the other week I looked towards the door as I saw legs of black lace wrapped in a tight and short leather skirt which met the fur shawl that fell from the shoulders of a beautiful… man.

A MAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A guy I know has been creating some really cool relationships with some of the staff there over the last year. The fruit of his ministry is amazing considering the hostility that most hold towards Christianity on the hill. Farris goes on to quote a bunch of scripture relating to Mars Hill’s mission to spread the word of God, fix the sinners, etc.

Then, Fariss writes:

This is what Mars Hill is doing on Capitol Hill: Living life intentionally. We are loving our neighbors, eating with them, serving the city with them. We have a vision to serve and love Capitol Hill to see the hill transformed to love and serve Jesus.Are You In?

I would love to talk with you more about the gospel of Jesus and the implications thereof, you can find me every Monday at Grey Gallery and Lounge on 11th between Pike and Pine on Capitol Hill: 5:30pm.

Yes, the same misogynistic, hipster church — which compared homosexuality to cancer — wants to come here and save you from yourself.

Grey’s management says they weren’t contacted Fariss or Mars Hill and aren’t sure what to expect, come Monday. “If it’s just [Fariss] and a couple people having a beer and talking about god, I don’t have a problem, but if it’s a mission thing then it’s not something we would tolerate,” says Grey Gallery and Lounge owner Erik Guttridge. “If it were to be a sort of mission at Grey, we’ve asked people to leave [for similar things] before.”

When contacted about his “mission” Fariss seemed a bit rattled. He danced around Mars Hill’s stance on homosexuality, saying that he disagreed with Pastor Mark Driscoll’s gay-cancer analogy, but still believes all you gays are sinners.

His best-but-totally-incomprehensible explanation:

“I believe that if there have been negative things said about homosexuality, where those statements are coming from, they are coming from the same place on a biblical or Christian perspective on abusive fathers or other injustice in the world. Maybe the same place we would say victims find themselves in. People are victimized in certain ways.”

The last anti-gay church that tried to get a foothold in Capitol Hill didn’t last long. This time, all the queers, punks, militant atheists and lovable godless weirdoes should head over to Grey next Monday, pack the place and make Mars Hill feel as welcome as possible.

A recent edition of the U.S. Army’s suicide prevention manual advises military chaplains to promote “religiosity,” specifically Christianity, as a way to deter distraught soldiers from committing suicide, which in recent months, according to one veterans advocacy group, has reached epidemic proportions.

The Army Suicide Prevention Manual says “Chaplains… need to openly advocate behavioral health as a resource” to treat suicidal soldiers and instructs behavioral health providers “to openly advocate spirituality and religiosity as resiliency factors.”

Here is the official Suicide Awareness for Soldiers 2008 (PPT) presentation at the U.S. Army center’s website.

The Army says:

Chaplain may want to state the following: Spiritual faith looks outside of oneself for meaning and provides resiliency for failures in life experiences. Religious belief adds the dimension of a supportive community to help one deal with crises. Both can be expressions of a relationship with God, or a higher power, that is everlasting. The bottom line is that Soldiers should not base their reason for living in the success of a relationship with another human being!

Soldiers need to take care of each other and rid any thoughts of survival of the fittest. Almost all religions adhere to some form of Christianity’s Golden Rule…

“Soldiers should not base their reason for living in the success of a relationship with another human being!”?

Soldiers don’t need God. In fact, they DO need to base their reason for living on a relationship with another human being. They need to appropriate mental health care. They need effective PTSD diagnosis. They need to not be stop-lossed… AGAIN.

What do our members of the Armed Forces in Tacoma Atheists say to this?

… Similarly, the threat of hell has no particular weight upon those who do not believe that it exists. Since it is supposedly designed specifically as punishment for the crime of not believing that it exists, we must admit we’re faced with a circular argument. The threat of hell is not sufficient evidence to persuade someone to believe in it if they don’t believe in it. The threat of hell only has relevance to those who believe that Jesus exists, but since they believe that Jesus exists, they are presumably in no danger of hell!  In effect, if hell exists, it is only a danger to those who do not find the threat of hell to be a deterrent to non-belief!

Let me make sure that this point is completely clear. The threat of hell only bears any weight for those who believe the threat to be credible. It is not designed to convert the unbelievers. After all, unbelievers don’t believe, so the threat is empty to them. It is designed to scare believers into obedience. If nothing else, we ought to be able to discard the notion of hell based only on this observation, but let’s not be hasty. Let’s examine the actual punishment, not just the threat of it.

When we scold a child for getting too close to a hot stove, we are attempting to protect him from being injured, and we are trying to give him the knowledge that stoves are dangerous. If a child has been scolded and returns to the stove, loving parents will often make him go to timeout, or perhaps forgo a trip to the toy store. The unpleasant consequences of his actions are designed to make him a better, safer person.

In short, the existence of hell logically dictates a God that does not conform to any possible definition of “good.” This in turn dictates that humans can literally have no confidence in any decision they make during this life. Either they will go to hell or they will go to heaven, and there is absolutely nothing they can do to alter this fact, nor is there any way they can hope to ensure themselves a spot in one or the other. In other words, if hell exists, then our knowledge of it is completely and utterly irrelevant to our lives. Even if we believe in hell, we can rest easy at night knowing that we are utterly helpless to determine our own fate. What will happen will happen, and there’s nothing we can do to change it.

In short, “meh.” You can worry if you want to worry about something designed my men to keep you afraid, or you can just get on with your life and tell Blaise Pascal to shove it. Keep reading.