Atheist Analogies #3: Religious Experience

Due to an influx of SPAM on the original post, I had to duplicate it in hopes of clearing up my email.

This atheist analogy is about religious experience. Religious experience can take many forms for different people. For some it's just a euphoria that fills them when they are listening to their pastor or praying, for others it involves speaking in tongues, and for others it involves the use of hallucinogens.

Growing up in a rural town in the Appalachian Mountains I got to witness quite a few examples of the first two. However, the only common local drug was cannabis, and that was used for recreational purposes. Keep in mind that where I grew up the Pentecostal and Baptist religions were virtually the only regional religions for many years. In such a culturally isolated location it wasn't very difficult for the fundamentalist and evangelical churches to thrive.

There wasn't a time that I didn't go to church and see someone nearby standing, holding their hands up, and saying "Thank you, Jesus" or some other platitude. Usually this involved a slight swaying to their stance, reminiscent of seeing someone inebriated.

Speaking in tongues was also fairly normal. There were few churches in my localized area that didn't have occurences, and most had them with each service. For a few, the platitudes that I spoke of above would be replaced with an inarticulate babbling, and quite often with trembling. Others would run around among the pews and people, holding their hands up and loudly making noises similar to the babbling of the more sedate group but higher in volume.

Since I grew up with these sorts of occurences, I found them normal when attending a service. It wasn't until I in my teens, and attended a few churches further removed from my locale that I noticed that not everyone did it. Later examinations of the occurences in the churches I regularly attended seemed to show some correlation between the self-viewed "piety" of the person and the severity of their experience.

Like many others I found myself wondering why I didn't share the same experience as the others. I prayed and "listened" for any sort of response, but I never felt the euphoria that the others seemed to experience. However, I did find that other things could give me a similar experience.

Some of you may have listened to music that elicited an emotional response. It was music that caused, and causes, a catharsis for me. A song with just the right combination of tone, rhythm, and "message" can bring on that euphoric religious experience that I witnessed so often growing up. I've even found that simply standing in an isolated location with a wonderful view, which there is no shortage of where I grew up, can cause me to feel calmer and more at ease and peaceful.

In the ~20 years since my discovery I've had several "religious experiences", but none of them have occured inside of a church or during prayer. Anything that can cause a strong emotion causes the same reaction from me (minus the running around and babbling) that I witnessed in those who I attended church services with. However, I don't find it necessary to call upon the supernatural to have a religious experience. I just allow myself to experience the beauty of the world around me.