Hi,
KingsXfan:
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I believe it has more to do with a religious experience than anything
else.
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I agree. The axiom is "people don't attend religious ceremonies becuase they believe in God, they believe in God because they attend religious ceremonies."
This experience is actually quite common -- and can easily be intrepreted in secular terms if one wants to. Carl Sagan (could we saint him, fellow Virians?) said "Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.", which I think perfectly sums up the "light bulb" experience.
For a while, I worked on a theory of this type of religious experience -- maintaining that it's essential nature was "parallel", i.e. functioning on many levels at the same time. It is grasping the "big picture". As Sodom said, often times the "flash" is replaced later with a more correct understanding, or even outright falsified. In cases such as this, the "faith" you speak of becomes a crime -- and the victim is yourself.
Sodom:
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As for those converting to Christianity - I dont know all of these
reasons, but in my experience it has always been fear of one thing or
another. Death, death of a relative, fear of the unhappiness, or
simply looking for someone else to carry the weight of life for them.
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I think many people convert to a religion in western society for the *social* benefits -- e.g. for friends or lovers. If I wasn't so rational and truth oriented, I could easily have done this myself.
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Oh sure, there are few historical relevencies that these books help
shed light on, but by an overwhelming majority - the stories cannot be
considered anything but metaphor.
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This is getting off topic, but a few night ago I saw a cool TV show on the old testimate. In it, a professor of religion mentioned that many of the stories of the OT, especially in Genesis 1 to 11, are *Jewish* adaptations of stories circulated before. This I knew. What had never occured to me before was what he said next: that in adapting these stories, the Jews put a charistically Jewish spin on those stories -- A *moral* spin. e.g. the flood story (which I think was orginally Summerian?) had no moral content in pagan traditions -- the world was simply flooded and a family escaped with the help of a deity -- but in the Jewish adaptation, the flood is *motivated* by God's desire to destroy the evil in the world, e.g. from a moral motivation. Similar adaptations occured to the garden story, to the Tower of Babel story, etc.
I suspect that such a modification enhanced the propagation abilities of said memes.
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"The truth shall set you free"
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I often wonder if this is even a true statement. Is not truth just as confining as non-truth, in terms to the structure of belief you maintain? Or is it that, even not knowing the truth, it STILL confines you, and so knowing it helps you to deal with the limitations it imposes? Do our lives contain any less coercion is we are aware that some things *cannot* be changed? (because they are the truth?)
ERiC
"... one has nothing to fear and everything to gain, from the honest pursuit of truth. The desire for knowledge, for facts unvarnished by emotional prejudices and so forth, will always function for a man's long-range benefit. It can never be against your interest to know what the truth is." -- George Smith: How to Defend Atheism (1976)