The Touch Of God
Offline Hello Everyone, it's been quite some time since I logged on this site but here I am once again. 
I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with a friend of mine that I hadn't seen in years. She began going to church not so long ago and she tells me that at her church the presence of God is so overwhelming that every time the priest gives "the touch of God" you faint. I asked her to explain to me how exactly this comes to be.She told me that the priest barely puts his hand on the person's forehead and suddenly this person feels a force that pushes them back and makes them faint. She also says that the priest doesn't even have to touch you for this "force" to reach you out in the crowd. The funny thing is that my Mother says it happened to her at one of her Church meetings. Now I know my Mother can be too naive when it comes to religious matters and such but I do not want to tell her that I think she is a lying bullshitter. My friend told me that she was sure that if I was to attend to her church this Sunday and receive "the touch of God" I would faint, I told her when pigs fly.So we ended up making a bet, it's easy money on my part so why not eh?
Now the question is whether these people really believe in God so badly that they work themselves up to the point of fainting or if they fake it, either way it's quite painful if no one is there to catch these people when they fall.
All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.
Isaiah Berlin
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Offline I agree, I think the chi, life energy all that is supernatural nonsense. Like faith, and in faith it can make things seem real to people.
Yea, but the thing is the crowd has to be a willing participant. If a rock start hit some groupie with his coat and hopes he would fall down, nothing would happen. The preacher knocks people down because they expect to be knocked down...if the rock star screams, "Go nuts and hit everyone" a mosh pit forms and 500 people are in the hospital, but if the preacher did that people would stop and stare at him.
Well, certainly I am not throwing in with you 100%. Not even 80%. Even so, one simply does not have to look too hard to find examples of this stuff going on. If you have ever been to a major sporting event or a huge rock concert, you should know that there is something oddly powerful about being part of a group of many tens of thousands of people who are all having a blast. Only in those two cases, the energy is not being directed towards religious nutty crap. Yet the power is still clearly evident.
Some day when I will be more mature, rich, having authority, and good contacts on influential people, I'd like to go into that research. I just had poked a little into that through a help of very reliable friend, and it's way beyond what I expected. I'm still flabbergasted, in terms of physics. Hopefully I'll have opportunity to reveal a something of what I found out.
Well, what you call it is what you call it. Of course Asians may call it chi, Native Americans have a word for it (which I would not know) and the same holds true for any group of people who try to work this. I can tell you something you might be interested in. Between being a Christian and an Atheist, I spent several years of my life in researching the occult. Within that world, one term is not enough as they have finely divided this into numerous categories depending on specifically what you are doing. Today, of course, I reject all of that as being a form of belief in stuff that probably holds no more water than more conventional religions. Even so, that is part of my history and that part of stuff that can as easily be called meditation or whatever is something that I learned quite well. The fundie idiots are playing with stuff that really is best left alone.
I disagree. This must be researched, it's a science of new millenium. The world of subtle energies is very dangerous, because human beings are so sensitive towards them. Only few have some resistance, it's mostly about reserved emotions. But these energies, if they are studied in laboratory and through machines, will have no such danger. Here, scientific approach gives us advantage, because the danger lies mainly in those that get exposed directly to these energies and lack critical mind. The scientific promises are powerful, this research will reveal the relationship between human mind, energy, and string dimensions.
I see, you weren't much succesful occultist. I don't know what you did, but this area is pretty much about experience. I have no belief left, it's impossible with what I have seen and done.
Yes and no. And yes. When I say energy or power, I am certainly not referring to potential or kinetic energy that can be measured with lab grade instrumentation. What I mean is pretty much along the lines of what you are calling a dangerous power. At the best of times, remember that one of the more basic objections to Pascal's wager is that you could easily end up wasting most of your life and a good part of your cash. On the other end, there are groups like Heaven's Gate where everyone ended up castrating themselves and drinking the cyanide koolaid so that they could take a ride on a UFO.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
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Your last paragraph is just perfect....yes they do believe in a god SO BADLY that they do psyc themselves into fainting spells. Also they behave in this group-think-phenomana as a way to prove to other attendees that they are as godly as all the other fainters. They may not even consider it fakery but they do want to fit in so without a true need to faint they up and faint anyway.
"Very funny Scotty; now beam down our clothes."
VEGETARIAN: Ancient Hindu word for "lousy hunter"
If man was formed from dirt, why is there still dirt?
Both. Some get so riled up they might actually pass out, those that are part of the church social group might fake it out of peer pressure.
Sort of like hypnosis, it doesn't really work unless you are a willing participant.
Have you ever watched videos of people speaking in tongues and having those faith seizures? Some of them are so obviously faking.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
People are very impressionable to begin with. Add to that a severe lack of critical thinking, they want it it to be true, and in church like that they are in a room virtually filled with group pressure to feel "the touch of God". I would be surprised if there were many fakers. I bet almost everyone there, preacher included, really believes "the touch of God" actually is taking place.
Can you get a mate in the crowd to film it? Be keen to hear how this turns out. Theists underestimate the power of the group over the individual. Everything I ever felt in church was a people feeling.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
And if you go, and do not faint, they will just say you don't have enough "faith".
Those are all over youtube. One of my favorites had Benny Hinn dubbed with some sweet Drowning Pool. Notice how he can knock over whole lines of grown men with, of all things, his jacket.
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I once tried something like that on myself, you know, I can't believe gossips, everything must be tried. So I went to an actual american-type Evangelic group in near town. The priest says he gets all worked up with "fire of Holy Spirit" and then zaps people with that. I know my nerve system is a bit sensitive, but still, thee priest's touch burned like hell. He only lightly touched my top of head, forehead and chest, and it really wasn't pleasant. I think I writhed and backed off a little. I will not try that again, these Christians clearly don't know what they're doing. If that "fire of holy spirit" is some bioenergy and they really can zap people with that, then no, thanks, I'll pass. Getting knocked out by God makes us somehow better people, riiight... I wonder what are stroke and heart attack possibilities.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Amazing what people can talk themselves into...
ZJ,
You might check out the film Marjoe. It's about Marjoe Gortner, who was raised from a child to be a preacher. He eventually left the church, but not before participating in this documentary about his life. He explains how it's easy to get a crowd worked up, and how easy it is to do exactly what you describe.
It's a great documentary, even if Marjoe participated in a cynical attempt to launch an acting career.
"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers
Yeah! Then Benny Hinn one is hilarious! Mass hysteria and peer pressure. Imagine how you would feel if it didn't happen to you! So you go along with it! "Yes I felt it too but i fell further than you and bounced around a little!"
"Oh, I'll remember to bounce next time!"
You only have to think about any mass belief in anything, be it a tree, a bleeding statue or whatever, if the people believe enough, the will produce similar results from whatever power they imagine.
I went to Christmas Masse in 2006. (I rarely-if-ever go to any sort of place of worship, and If I do, it's usually at the behest/coercion of family)
The Catholic pastor had such a persecution complex that it did NOT take me long to figure out he was addressing non-Catholics visiting his 'place of worship'. Pro-life views galore, "we all have our own faults"- or words to that effect, "I could tear hell wide open with my sin", "well we could always make room for one more (hypocrite)" -his generalized response to Catholic Church critics (like Dawkins)....
The simplest way to respond to such discomforting BS is to just walk away, quietly shrug... and think "Wow! This Xtianity BS... it's like a never-ending backflip of Trick Psychology!" (and it's quite a well-designed organization of Trick Psychology, but never the less...)
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)
OK, everyone mark your calendars. I am actually going to agree with Luminon on this one.
Obviously, the nutty preacher types have no idea what they are doing. Obviously they are messing with something fairly powerful. Heck but that clip where Benny Hinn is knocking a couple of hundred people down with nothing more than a gesture shows that quite well.
Now the thing here is that what is going on probably has many names. You may call it by whatever name works for you, the martial arts community may call it chi. The batshit loons in the New Age cults may call it life force or whatever. Personally, I just say that the human mind is capable of all manner of strange and sometimes awesome things.
Really, what is happening here is that people get themselves worked up and then weird crap happens.
We have all seen the guys who break boards barehanded. It looks like a big deal but only until you have done it. I have and I can tell you that it is really about learning to get your head into the right place so that it does not seem irrational to put your hand through a board. Then your hand will just go through it like it was tissue paper.
The same thing applies to people walking on hot coals. If you don't know the physics of how it is done, it sounds pretty insane right? There are a bunch of people who do self help seminars where they spend a few hours getting you all worked up and then you just walk across them like nothing. Once you are sufficiently worked up, it no longer seems unreasonable to do that. The reality is that while the coals may be at a high temperature, temperature and heat are different things. Really, there is no huge trick to walking on hot coals because they are nowhere near as hot as they look.
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Well, now I'm really curious about possible reasons for the way people respond during events other than their faith and the social pressure, even though I'm pretty skeptical. As described in Eastern martial arts, if there is some way for people to channel their internal energy and turn that into significant force, it would be very valuable knowledge for many different fields in science. Or, on the other hand, with regard to the touching, I wonder if there is some way for people to put some sort of chemical on their hands that wouldn't affect them, but would quickly produce some sensation on everyone they touched.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
There is one great fundamental axiom of "chi" energies, which is that they follow mind, thought, attention, and so on. The mind itself is a form of energy. A plain sunlight is only a pleasant warmness. But if that sunlight is focused from 100 square centimeters into less than one centimeter, it can start fire.
So it is with mind. A typical mind today is distracted hundred times per day by commercials, cell phones, bodily needs, work and entertainment. Almost nobody in the West knows, what happens if their mind is focused, like a gas-jet welder or magnifying glass. People in our civilization don't have time for that, they use the power of mind in a different way. But this is the time when the energy of mind becomes powerful enough to be studied and observed in practice.
I can only recommend to skeptics to try things for themselves. You don't have to believe me, if you are brave enough to challenge Christians in person, then you should be brave enough to infiltrate their ranks incognito and try a dose of holy spirit's fire.
I'm more concerned about the fact, that average Christians are much into experimenting with these practices and they abuse it to make an impression on people. People love new cool stuff, if they are able to experience the unknown, they will trust it uncritically. For example, a lot of them believes a random voice in their heads that it's really Jesus or some other historical figure. Or that stream of energy pouring on them is really a fire of Holy Spirit, although there's no evidence for that. I would love to see all this as an object of scientific research, which would take the oligopoly away from Christians.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Yea, but the thing is the crowd has to be a willing participant. If a rock start hit some groupie with his coat and hopes he would fall down, nothing would happen. The preacher knocks people down because they expect to be knocked down...if the rock star screams, "Go nuts and hit everyone" a mosh pit forms and 500 people are in the hospital, but if the preacher did that people would stop and stare at him.
From my perspective there isn't any 'real' energy involved, but the person leading the group is able to put the crowds brains into a highly energetic and highly susceptible state. It isn't magic, it is just psychology.
But it is a dangerous form of power. I think where we part ways is that your definition of power is quite a bit more fluid than ours.
And martial arts stuff...well, it is like Answers says, if you know the physics you know it isn't actually superhuman, it is simply that you need to psych yourself up to really commit to an act that goes against your intuition.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
There is no such mysterious "force". No esoteric Sick Fuck Foo Master has so far been able to come anywhere near the combat achievements of even a mediocre fighter in the MMA league. It's all smoke and mirrors, the Wizard of Oz. And the name for that which is going on at the "charismatic" events is hysteria. It's well known woo woo in an Emperor's new clothes. But, of course, if you *want* to believe, you shall have your experience.
All hail the REAL master, Fedor Emelianenko:
"The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind." (Alphonse Donatien De Sade)
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I agree, I think the chi, life energy all that is supernatural nonsense. Like faith, and in faith it can make things seem real to people.
Faith is the word but next to that snugged up closely "lie's" the want.
"By simple common sense I don't believe in god, in none."-Charlie Chaplin
Well, certainly I am not throwing in with you 100%. Not even 80%. Even so, one simply does not have to look too hard to find examples of this stuff going on. If you have ever been to a major sporting event or a huge rock concert, you should know that there is something oddly powerful about being part of a group of many tens of thousands of people who are all having a blast. Only in those two cases, the energy is not being directed towards religious nutty crap. Yet the power is still clearly evident.
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