damn i had a hugely profound and hard-hitting spiritual experience while preparing for my mission. i remember it till today and at the time i could only describe it as “extra-terrestrial”. i could easily have described it as intense euphoria, spiritual extacy, or god’s presense. it brought me to tears for the first time in 6 years and it the thick warm blanket stayed with me for a half hour until i got home. everyone saw what i had experienced, my red eyes and happy demeanor. everyone was shocked to see this in me. as was i, the skeptic in me at the time laughed out loud as the tears came for it was so awkward, so unexpected, so not-from-me.

“I don’t buy it, but we can all choose for ourselves how to interpret our experiences.”

family members say i have forgotten that feeling and “my testimony”, but i haven’t forgotten it at all. i think this should testify as to how convinced i am that the church is not true- even against such a strong spiritual experience as i’ve described above. the damning evidence overrides even this powerful experience i went through.

now the hard part is figuring out what that was that i went through that day, i am not wholly free of the cognitive dissonance from this nor do i think i will ever be as scientific explanations in neuroscience are new and feel somewhat lacking. maybe the church is true and god just wants logical and studious people out of it. there, that almost makes sense.

I understand if you don’t see yourself reflected in what I wrote. I’ll have to reread your post to see if I misunderstood. Perhaps I missed some new angle on the dark night of the soul. In any case, my post wasn’t a direct response to yours. I was responding to how the dark night of the soul has been used by the religious to justify their belief despite feeling no one on the other end of their prayers. Mother Theresa’s confessors are an example of this, so my post isn’t a strawman argument. People actually belief that.

For what it’s worth, I still feel the same feelings I once associated with the Holy Spirit even though I no longer believe in any typical conception of God including the Mormon one.

To be honest, I’ve never had an overwhelming spiritual experience so it is probably easier for me to dismiss them.

I think some people—like your some of your family it sounds like—never seem to understand that these experiences are always filtered through our personal interpretation. There isn’t one obviously right interpretation otherwise we would have only one religion.

I reread your post. I applaud your new openness to ambiguity and doubt. I wish more people would be less certain of their beliefs. A little humility is a good thing.

From your post:

So to anyone who feels he or she may be experiencing a Dark Night of the Soul, please consider that it’s not necessarily because you did anything wrong, although an honest self-evaluation never hurts. Nor does it necessarily mean that the Church isn’t true. Nor does it necessarily mean that God doesn’t really exist after all. Rather, you might be experiencing a Dark Night of the Soul simply because God wants to see who you truly are, or perhaps because He wants to help you see who you truly are.

Restating what I understand from this passage, you are saying that being unable to feel God’s presence may not mean that God doesn’t exist. You are saying that it may mean that God is testing you.

This is the same as the logic that I discussed in my post except that you don’t state these propositions as a certainty. That uncertainty is good and reasonable. I can’t say for certain that a dark night of the soul means that there’s no God. None of this negates what I said about accepting the concept of the dark night of the soul undermining the use of spiritual experiences as evidence of God.

If God wants me to believe, he knows where to find me.

I would offer another viewpoint on how we interpret these experiences. Always the sociologist (I can’t help it!), I think we should not underestimate social influences. By the way, I think everyone has “spiritual experiences.” Even total nonbelievers. As you know, I’m agnostic as to what their source is (I lean heavily toward the non-supernatural, though). But they are still real. I think they are real experiences that make us feel small, big, important, insignificant, inspired, or otherwise. They connect us to our surroundings and to other people. They connect us to the earth.

I’m not a praying person, but when I am in nature I feel prayerful. I say prayerful because I don’t have a better word for it.

Anyway, back to social influences. We understand and interpret our experiences using the tools we have. A kid growing up in a secular family has a neat experience at camp or during a family movie night or something and he just interprets it as a nice experience that confirms the beauty of the earth, or family, or whatever. A Mormon kid has the same experience and his linguistic and social tools lead him to interpret it as a message from Heavenly Father through the Holy Ghost. Also, there is social pressure for that Mormon kid to experience (and correctly interpret) such experiences. So I’m talking about cultural and linguistic tools, as well as social pressure to conform and have certain experiences.

I should know – those tools and that pressure kept me active in the church longer than I should have. But these experiences are real, and we should exercise caution and respect when we speak with others about their own.

Yes, I agree with your assessment of shoddy logic that points to God’s influence in his absence and his presence, in blessings and in the lack thereof.

What to do with these experiences now, and how to interpret them, is an issue that I certainly have to deal with. In my last comment I talked about the social context of our experiences, and I certainly think that explains a lot of my own experiences. But, I don’t feel like I can just explain it all away so easily.