Dear PinkFreud,

There appear to be 3 main ways people become "true believers":

1.  Faith
2.  Reason (apologetics)
3.  Revelation (mystical or semi-mystical experience)

This particular question does not involve #1.  The religious
literature for #1 is voluminous.

But #2 and #3 are more interesting.  Please point me in the
direction people who have fundamentally altered their lives based upon
reason or revelation, and *not* faith alone.

A great answer would point me to 2-3 web links with individual case
studies or even aggregated data.  Of course, I would also enjoy
hearing your personal experience if you do not mind sharing.

Thanks !

Ron


P.S.   All comments appreciated, whether you think this is hokum or
critical to human beings.  Thx!

---

Request for Question Clarification by pinkfreud-ga on 11 Nov 2002 20:58 PST

Thank you very much for requesting me by name. I am honored.

I would like to hold off on my answer, if that is acceptable, so that
I may do the question justice by praying about it tonight, and
approaching the question with an eager spirit and a rested mind
tomorrow.

Given the nature of this question, I am sure you will understand.

Best wishes,
pinkfreud

---

Clarification of Question by nronronronro-ga on 12 Nov 2002 06:48 PST

Thanks, PinkFreud.  
Take all the time you need.  I appreciate your thoughtful approach.  

Ron

Thank you for requesting me by name. I'll give some details about one
conversion which sprang from mystical visions, and one whose roots
were in reason and logic, with links to further information. My own
transforming experience had some characteristics in common with each
of these. Like the mystic, I was blessed with a miraculous healing
accompanied by stunning visions; like the intellectual, I sought (and
finally found) my truth in Reason.

------------------------------------
------------------------------------

As an example of one whose conversion grew from mystical revelations,
consider the extraordinary Dame Julian of Norwich, said to have been
the first woman to write a book in English:

In the year of our Lord 1373, the Third Sunday after Easter fell on
the eighth day of May. In the early morning hours of that day, a
thirty-year-old woman lay on her death bed somewhere in Norwich,
England... We do not know the baptismal name of that woman as she lay
on her death bed. We do not know the name of her family or the name of
her priest. What we do know is that she did not die! Instead, during
the next eleven hours, she was granted a series of fifteen visions
which opened to her mystical depths of understanding about God, the
Holy Trinity, the Crucified Lord, and the life of Christians. Her full
recovery was almost immediate, and the following evening, she was
granted one final vision. She soon wrote down an account of these
visions (or "showings", as she called them), and before long she had
made the decision to give her whole life to meditation, prayer, and
service.

Saint Mary's University of Minnesota 
http://140.190.128.190/merton/julianbio.html

------------------------------------

She describes seeing God holding a tiny thing in his hand, like a
small brown nut, which seemed so fragile and insignificant that she
wondered why it did not crumble before her eyes. She understood that
the thing was the entire created universe, which is as nothing
compared to its Creator, and she was told, "God made it, God loves it,
God keeps it."

She was concerned that sometimes when we are faced wiith a difficult
moral decision, it seems that no matter which way we decide, we will
have acted from motives that are less then completely pure, so that
neither decision is defensible. She finally wrote: "It is enough to be
sure of the deed. Our courteous Lord will deign to redeem the motive."

A matter that greatly troubled her was the fate of those who through
no fault of their own had never heard the Gospel. She never received a
direct answer to her questions about them, except to be told that
whatever God does is done in Love, and therefore "that all shall be
well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

James Kiefer's Christian Biographies
http://elvis.rowan.edu/~kilroy/JEK/05/08.html

------------------------------------

True contemplatives do not seek unusual experiences, much less 
personal power. Their consuming goal is intimacy with God. Apparently,
the singular incident of the 16 showings provided the insight which
influenced Julian's entire spirituality. It is telling that her "long
text", which amplified the awareness she had received from these
revelations, was composed 20 years later (when she'd reached what was,
for the era, the "advanced" age of 50)... Christian mysticism is based
on grace: the indwelling of the Trinity in the souls of mankind, and a
divine call to holiness. Julian emphasises this, and various other
points of doctrine, with an exquisite joy, focussing on bliss and
glory rather than the idea of earth's being a battleground for good
and evil.

Gloriana's Court
http://www.gloriana.nu/julian.html

I know of no testament of ecstatic spiritul insight that can surpass
"Revelations of Divine Love," by Julian of Norwich:

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0140446737

------------------------------------
------------------------------------

Poet and scholar T.S. Eliot approached belief through a very different
doorway, that of rationality and the disciplined choices of the mind:

"Most people suppose that some people, because they enjoy the luxury
of Christian sentiments and the excitement of Christian ritual,
swallow or pretend to swallow incredible dogma. For some the process
is exactly opposite. Rational assent may arrive late, intellectual
conviction may come slowly, but they come inevitably without violence
to honesty and nature. To put the sentiments in order is a later, and
immensely difficult task:  intellectual freedom is earlier and easier
than complete spiritual freedom." -- Thomas Stearns Eliot, "Selected
Essays"

Eliot reached this connection between religion and culture because he
lived in a time in which he saw people, including himself, wandering
aimlessly in search of meaning, and because he was finally able to
find meaning through Anglicanism. There is much evidence, however,
that his conversion was not a conversion of passionate belief, but a
conversion of will. Eliot had reached the end of his philosophical
rope and so turned reluctantly but determinedly to the last available
source of authority and meaning.

Loyola University Student Historical Journal
http://www.loyno.edu/history/journal/1992-3/weidner.htm

------------------------------------

In a lot of his work he explored how society encouraged or prohibited
religion and literature. He was also preoccupied with the ways in
which writers before him had approached questions of faith, such as
Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare and Baudelaire.

Eliot also believed that a lot of the most remarkable achievements of
culture had arisen out of discord and disunity. He thought that
society in his own age had broken down to a large extent, as expressed
in his great modernist poem The Waste Land. Writing after the Great
War, he felt that modern life was rife with futility and anarchy. It
was his interest in the institutions of society that led him to see
the importance of communal worship, and the significance of religious
practice for entire nations, as well as for individual souls.

Christis
http://www.christis.org.uk/archive/issue67/ts_eliot.shtml

------------------------------------

The Waste Land has been called an epic in miniature because in its
440-something lines it captures the empty spirit and meaninglessness
of existence... Then comes Eliot's conversion and "Ash Wednesday."
Eliot does not need to subtract much from his themes... he was raised
and educated a Unitarian, and while that may have felt next to
agnosticism, especially when arriving at Anglicanism, it was not a
tradition hostile to Christian faith... I'll end with mention of the
magi, whose journey, albeit through a Biblical setting, is also
clearly through a wasteland, but it is a waste land whose savior has
arrived.

Mason West's Web Pages
http://mason-west.com/Eliot/gotgod.shtml

------------------------------------

After reading agnostic Bertrand Russell's essay "A Free Man's
Worship," Eliot decided its reasoning was shallow. In 1927 Eliot was
confirmed in the Church of England. Though criticized sharply by the
literati for his turn to Christianity, he expressed his faith in his
poetry.

Eliot believed his finest achievement was writing the broadly
religious poem Four Quartets (1943). Its themes of incarnation, time
and eternity, spiritual insight and revelation, culminate in an
allusion to Pentecost:

The dove descending breaks the air/With flame of incandescent
terror/Of which the tongues declare/The one discharge from sin and
error./The only hope, or else despair/Lies in the choice of pyre or
pyre/To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Christianity Today
http://www.christianitytoday.com/cr/2000/004/11.13.html

------------------------------------
------------------------------------

I cannot resist the inclusion of this glorious exemplar of the
complementary nature of the mystical and the intellectual. The austere
academic T.S. Eliot, in his great poem series "Four Quartets," quotes
none other than Julian of Norwich...

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time...

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

from "Four Quartets: Little Gidding," by T.S. Eliot

Homepage of Tristan Fecit  
http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/gidding.html

------------------------------------
------------------------------------

My Google search strategy:

"religious conversion" 
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22religious+conversion

"conversion experiences"
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22conversion+experiences

"julian of norwich"
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22julian+of+norwich

"t s eliot" 
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22t+s+eliot

Here are some excellent books touching on the subjects of religious
awareness, awakening and conversion. Note that this is a list of my
own personal favorites. It is weighted toward conversions to
Christianity, but does not exclude remarkable books dealing with other
beliefs.

"Late Have I Loved Thee: Stories of Religious Conversion and
Commitment in Later Life," by Richard M. Erikson

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0809135949

"The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography of Faith," by Thomas
Merton

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0156010860

"The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values
and Spiritual Growth," by M. Scott Peck

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0684847248

"The Trivialization of God: The Dangerous Illusion of a Manageable
Deity," by Donald W. McCullough

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0891099093

"The Mind of the Maker," by Dorothy L. Sayers  

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0060670770

"Your God Is Too Small," by J. B. Phillips

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0684846969

"Saint Augustine," by Garry Wills

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0670886106

"Mere Christianity," by C. S. Lewis

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0060652926

"Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion," by
Alan Wilson Watts

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0394717619

"The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener," by Martin Gardner

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0312206828

"Be Here Now," by Ram Dass

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0517543052

"The Autobiography of Malcolm X," by Malcolm X  as told to Alex Haley

Barnes & Noble
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PHJT37G0A&isbn=0345350685

I appreciate your having given me this "soapbox" upon which to make a
stand, and maybe blow a few bubbles. Regarding the grand hunt for the
meaning of life, the universe, and everything, one of the best pieces
of advice I can give is this standard Google Answers Researcher's
phrase:

Please request clarification if needed.

Sincerely,
pinkfreud

---

Clarification of Answer by pinkfreud-ga on 12 Nov 2002 21:45 PST

Ron,

Having lived a rather full life for more than half a century, I do not
stun and amaze easily. But I am truly stunned and amazed (and, of
course, delighted) at your generosity.

Thank you for the five stars in my crown. And thank you for the best
tip I am likely ever to earn until I wait tables for the Heavenly
Host. ;-)

~Pink

Hi PinkFreud!  Well, you never cease to amaze me.  The book list alone
will keep me busy for weeks.  Fantastic!  I have already read, "The
Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener," by Gardner.  That book is
terrific;  if the others on your list are as good, then this will be a
joyous exercise.

I especially appreciate that you combined the "mystic" with the
"rational."  So many religious books are slanted toward those who are
*already* converted.  Talk about preaching to the choir!  For us
non-believers-qua-searchers, this is totally frustrating.

I've added $100 to the question because you have helped me enormously.
 If you tithe the hundred bucks to a church somewhere, please tell God
I'm not lost---just on layaway.   :-)

Thanks again.  You have a kind heart.  Ron

A well-written example of #2 is C S Lewis'
"Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life" 
This is the C S Lewis of Narnia (lion Witch & Wardrobe-- he was famous
as a Christian apologist in the post WW II era. He includes a great
deal of reasoning, which I've not been convinced has been the real
reason he converted to a very traditional Christian belief.

Thanks, Larry.  I'll get "Surprised by Joy" right away.
Ron

I, too, would say that C.S. Lewis is possibly the most well known
person converted by "reason." Another is Lee Strobel; in particular, I
suggest his books "The Case For Christ" (
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0310209307/qid=1037069882/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_2/002-9226576-3688868?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
) and "The Case For Faith" (
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0310234697/ref=pd_bxgy_text_1/002-9226576-3688868?v=glance&s=books
). Also,in "Letters From A Sceptic," the author details how he helped
his father convert through "reason." (
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1564762440/qid=1037069780/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-9226576-3688868?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
)

If you would like a perspective from a non-Christian viewpoint, check
out:
"Ancient Wisdom, Modern World - Ethics for a New Millennium" - by His
Holiness the Dalai Lama

While he is not of my Buddhist denomination (Jodo Shinsu) his works
are read by most practicing Buddhists.

"His Holiness calls for a revolution - not a political, an economic, a
technical or even a religious revolution, but a spiritual revolution
to help us through the moral maze of modern life." - book review from
the Cleveland Buddhist Temple.

Thanks, kriswrite and digsalot!  Very helpful.  I am reading *The Case
for Faith* right now.  Just finished the chapter about natural
selection versus creationism.  Absolutely fascinating!

I'll get the book by the Dalai Lama right away.  Hello Dalai!

More seriously, thanks again for the leads.
I am on a quest of sorts, and this helps very much.

Epiphany is a powerful persuader.  One case you may enjoy perusing is
that of Betty J. Eadie, author of "Embraced By The Light."  Her
experience was one of revelation.

Embraced by the Light
http://www.wisdomstore.com/wisdomstore/productview.asp?product_sku=2294

Thanks, journalist!  I've seen "Embraced By the Light" in the
bookstore, but never bought.  I'll get it now.  Thank you!

If you are on a personal spiritual quest, I highly recommend "A Course
in Miracles."  It is a study in perception and will only serve to
enhance whatever spiritual path you choose.  The book normally sells
for $30 and there is a web site at http://www.acim.org/ where you may
learn more about it.

Thanks again, journalist!  I'll check it out right now.

Clarification:

Could you please define for me, the term "true believer".

Thank you.

Perhaps the leading modern Christian mystic is Thomas Merton.  His
"conversion" is portrayed in "The Seven Storey Mountain," but that is
not one of his best books (although the most popular).   Instead,
visit "Contemplation in a World of Action" and "New Seeds of
Contemplation" as an introduction to his more than 50 books.

Researcher7,

Thanks for your comment.  Unfortunately, I can't really define "true
believer" because I'm not one...yet.  This is as close as I can get: 
someone who believes there is a *divine* presence in the
world---distinct from the material world apparent to our senses---a
non-materialist---a believer in God.

Thanks again.  
Ron

Nellie---thanks for your help.  Will definitely get "Contemplation In
A World of Action."  Thanks again!

This is a paraphrasing of the story of mathmetician Pascal's
conversion which was purely mathmatical.
A tourist was visitng a monestary and asked a monk why he would devote
his entire life to his religion. What if he was wrong? The tourist
said he didn't believe there was a heaven. "Just supposing I'm right,
you would have wasted your entire life." The monk replied, "If I'm
wrong, I've wasted 50 years, if you're wrong, you've wasted eternity."
Apparently Pascal liked the odds on that one and proposed the famous
wager:
"If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having,
neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then
incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is ... you must wager.
It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let
us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us
estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose,
you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that he is."
Any biography of Pascal is sure to talk about his conversion to
Christianity and his reasons behind his faith.

Kilksf---much appreciated.  I've always heard the term "Pascal's
Wager," but never knew what it meant.  Thank you!   ron

Thank you, Ron, for the courage of your question, and of your quest.
Thank you, pinkfreud, for the power and wisdom of your response.  You
are both in my prayers.

Just a few quick comments:

- For me Christianity seems to fit the facts better than other
worldviews. Yet mysteries remain.  My beliefs grow from evidence
rather than from mathematical "proof."  Pure reason is useful, but it
leaves too much out.

- No philosophy or religion has all the answers--at least, not yet. 
To contend that materialism, atheism, or even agnosticism rely on
solid science while religion rests on shaky faith is difficult upon
examining the assumptions which underlie science and realizing that
they, too, are matters of faith.

- For 49 years, my life (what I recall), has gone better when I've
been seeking and surrendering to God than when I've been defying or
ignoring God.

- Somewhere on your amazing reading list, consider including some
Bible.  For the mystical, perhaps the Gospel of John.  For the
philosophical/poetic, the book of Job.  For the theological, Paul's
letter to the Romans.  The range of styles and subjects--and available
translations!--is vast and deep.

- I agree wholly with pinkfreud's advice to "request clarification." 
Related words have helped me since my teens.  The ancient Hebrew
prophet Jeremiah, speaking for God, wrote, "You will seek me and find
me, when you search for me with all your heart."

--Paul

A good site for apologetic literature. Quite cerebral, not
platitudinous, helps the non-believer understand the Christian point
of view.

http://www.northave.org/MGManual/intro/tablec1.htm

Thanks, zhiwenchong!  I appreciate it.  Am still reading "The Case for
Faith." That book alternates between great clarity...and swirling mud.

I'll check out your recommended site right away.  Thanks again!  ron

curious7---thank you for your wise thoughts.  These "rang true" for
me.  I appreciate your help.  ron