Category Archives: Christian proselytising

Return To Sedra

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Here they are, the new Wunderkinds of the Christian circuit: Martin and Millicent Sedra (and a while lot of other Sedras too though I don’t know where they fit in the Great Scheme of Things. The Sedras are the new Wizards of Aus, running a megachurch in Sydney. According to their own press they’re having an impact for Christ around the globe (a pub down the East end.)

34 year old Pastor Martin is from Egypt where he was persecuted for his Christian faith and was forced into growing a beard and wearing expensive designer shades to conceal his identity. Millicent, his wife of almost 8 years, is much younger as you can see in the links but her age is kept secret to avoid any scandal criticism of her being too young to know what she is talking about. Or something. Her videos reveal her to be a young woman who has succeeded in exalting herself to a position of authority and influence while lacking any real experience of life and, indeed, wisdom.

Naturally both Millicent and her husband spout the usual stuff and nonsense about Jesus but also feel qualified to speak about the issues of the day: mental health (demonic); homosexuality (sin); pronouns (‘hell’s language’); women in power (‘Jezebel Spirit’); sex (for hetero-marriage only); Islam (fake. They’re really big on Islam.) Naturally and contrarily given their stance on women in power, Marty and Millie dispute the Bible’s position that a woman should neither hold authority over a man nor preach. After all, taking 1 Timothy 2:12 literally (as they claim they do the rest of the Bible) would prevent Millicent from doing her thing for the Lord and would surely cut off a lucrative revenue stream. The couple announced recently that Millie is pregnant with the couple’s first child. The news was greeted by some acolytes as a tumultuous and spiritually significant event.

The Sedras speak to millions, in stadia and across the Internet and have a massive influence over gullible people’s lives and beliefs. Yet what they are offering is dangerous clap-trap. Their followers worship them as great prophets and God’s agents in what are surely the end times. Jesus is returning soon! Hallelujah!

What is more likely to manifest soon is some controversy or other that even now is lying in wait. How many of the Sedras’ worshippers will then say they knew they were deceivers all along?

Jesus, Jesus and more Jesus

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You find me in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Not, fortunately, in the water but on the world’s only ocean liner, the Queen Mary 2. Dennis and I have been in U.S., both in New York and Washington DC, on a diplomatic mission to the White House. Well, a tourist visit anyway. As I dislike flying (a slight understatement) we are sailing home on the ship. It is a much more dignified and pleasurable way to travel.

Our visit left me wondering how you guys over the pond that I currently find myself on, cope. Not with your president (though heaven knows that too) but with the proliferation of evangelical Christians.

While visiting the Washington Monument in DC we had a small book pressed on us by a young boy whose father(?) stood a little way off. The cover suggested it was about America’s 250th. Inside it was the fourth gospel and the letter to the Romans. It ended up in the trash alongside dozens of others.

On the Metro we were treated to songs about Jesus by a small group of musicians who knew a captive audience when they saw one.

Outside the Capitol we were accosted by a young man on an electric scooter who asked as he glided by, ‘Hey guys, do you know God loves you?’ (He didn’t hear our reply. Perhaps just as well.)

I mean, how do you put up with this?

Worse though was my Facebook feed. I know I’ve grumbled about this before, back home in England, when every other post is about Jesus. But in the U.S. it was worse. I would say 9 of every 10 items items were about him. (Fortunately there are fewer now that we’ve put a few nautical miles between us and the Land of the Free.) You can see a small sample of the hundreds of inanities I received up top.

I did venture to put comments on some of them (Dennis says I was just winding up the witless. Someone’s got to). Responses varied, telling me that,

as I didn’t know Jesus I had no right to comment;

I would one day soon be on my knees at His feet (I did tell them this was more than unlikely given the state of my knees);

the Bible doesn’t suggest women shouldn’t be preachers and Jesus doesn’t say Christians shouldn’t pray ostentatiously in public (both, of course, are the case);

homosexuality is a grievous sin (I assured them it was a lot of fun too). Christians shouldn’t attend same-sex weddings (this one was particularly sad as one Christian couple who commented said they wouldn’t be attending their daughter’s wedding to another woman. As result their daughter now wouldn’t take their calls. I advised them to go ahead and attend and that it’d be okay. Loving Christians™ then swarmed in and told me how evil I was for encouraging the couple to endorse sin.) 

I didn’t comment on the numerous posts I was unfortunate enough to receive about Creation, which happened exactly as recorded in Genesis; Noah building his ark and collecting animals to survive a worldwide flood and ‘Evilution’ being Satanic. I was informed too that the resurrection, the Bible as the infallible Word of God and Jesus coming back soon are not ‘up for debate’. I mean what would be the point? Sometimes though the level of ignorance was so staggering and I took it upon myself to mention it maybe once or twice. Can I get an Amen, brothers and sisters?

Amidst all this, I encountered a couple of new stars in the Christian fundament: Martin and Millicent Sedra, and I’ll share my thoughts on this pair next time.

Showing Off

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We interrupt this blogcast to bring you breaking news of shenanigans in the wonderful, wacky world of religion.

There’s been a kerfuffle here these last few days after Muslims gathered in Trafalgar Square to engage in mass prayers (that’s mass as in ‘3,000 men‘, not Mass as in the cannibalistic ritual beloved of Catholics.) This was not well received by many in the capital with a number of politicians on the right questioning whether it was really the Good Thing the Muslim mayor of London (and number one Donald Trump fan), Sadiq Khan, thought it was. Sadiq is himself is a Muslim and was present at the pray-in, taking selfies with his admirer. One politician who thought this wasn’t kosher (am I confusing things here?) was Nigel Farage – Donald’s real number one fan – who suggested that if he were ever to become Prime Minister (there’s a chance), he would ban ‘performative public prayer’ of the sort witnessed in Trafalgar Square.

This seems to me not an unreasonable proposition given the Quran (Surah Ma’oon, 107:4-7) regards ostentatious public prayer gatherings as not quite the done thing:

So woe to those who pray yet are unmindful of their prayers; those who show off…

Naturally, Christians have waded into the controversy, wailing that should Muslims be stopped from enjoying prayer spectaculars, they too might be prevented from doing the same thing. Some fear carol singing and pushing their faith on others who have no interest whatever in hearing it might similarly be prohibited. Of course, banning public prayer would not, unfortunately, include carol singing or proselytising on account of the fact that neither of these two activities are prayer bonanzas in and of themselves.

The authors of the Bible also seemed to think that ‘performative prayer’ is a no-no. As Jesus’ script writers have him say in Matthew 6:5-6:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Let’s not forget that as well as being God incarnate for brainwashed Christians, JC is a prophet in Islam. Both Christians and Muslims are prepared, naturally, to ignore their holy books, their prophets even, when they take to the streets and squares of modern cities ‘to be seen by others’ as they debase themselves in front of imaginary gods. It’s not Nigel Farage who wants to forbid ostentatious public displays of piety. Jesus and Mohammed got there first.

As a post script, can I mention that as an atheist, I find these prayer pantomimes, by whichever brand of the deluded, to be both unnecessary and offensive?

No, I thought not.

How some see others as brainwashed while they themselves are not

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You may have been informed yesterday that a new post was available. For some reason, WordPress may have briefly put next week’s post online while I was working on it. If so, please ignore it as it really needs to be read after this week’s post. As we’ve recently been reminded, context is all! Here’s the correct post for today:

Apparently, I’m anti-intellectual and a fascist. This was revealed to me when I became involved in a discussion on Facebook about a highly suspect report claiming less well educated people were more likely to vote for right-wing parties. This, the Facebook ‘experts’ scoffed, was because less well educated people were brainwashed and indoctrinated. My mistake was in suggesting that better educated people were just as likely to be indoctrinated as their less well educated counterparts. Perhaps higher education institutions, inclined to the left, might influence the views those attending them to the extent that they too are conditioned. Hence, the accusation I’m anti-intellectual and a fascist*.

This happy experience got me to thinking about the extent to which we’re all indoctrinated/ conditioned/brainwashed.

Like many of you reading this, I was brainwashed as a Christian. I swallowed whole the story I was told: that I was a sinner in need of salvation because my sin alienated me from God. Jesus had to give his life so that I might be reconciled to God. I had to accept Jesus into my life. I would then live forever, going to heaven after I died to be with God, Jesus and the angels. You know this story. And a story it is. As Yuval Noah Harari shows in his book Nexus we – all of us not just the less well educated – are more susceptible to investing in a story than in cold hard facts or evidence (not that there is any evidence for this Christian narrative, as with so many of the others we’re subject to.)

Then there were too all those optional additions to the Jesus story that weren’t optional at all: God would meet my needs if I prayed in earnest, read His Word (always with the capitals), met with fellow-believers and listened to the prompting of God’s Holy Spirit inside me. (Deep breath.) Also If I shared my faith with others (‘witnessed’), grew in my walk with him (a mixed metaphor, surely?) and regularly gave money to the work of the church, then I’d be a True Christian™. You and I could not be reasoned out of any of this, because we weren’t reasoned into it in the first place.

The indoctrination was reinforced on an ongoing basis, which is why we were constantly told that we must ‘fellowship’ with those who had been similarly brainwashed. We were told we must also reject and separate ourselves from the thinking and values of non-believers (‘the world’) because they might be a threat to what we were being taught, causing us to backslide and out of the Truth (a feature of every cult.)

There came a point for some of us, however, when a small chink appeared in our armour of God conditioning: an unanswered question about something we’d been told that seemed, well… a little off; an unconvincing attempt to reconcile faith with an aspect of science; the realisation in a crisis that God wasn’t there at all.

It was this latter for me, and as I’ve said before, I began to read books I hoped would throw some light on what I’d believed for so many years. Did these books condition me in ways contrary to those I had escaped from? Yes, probably. But I didn’t subscribe to their stories unquestioningly. I weighed arguments and evidence, taking some on board, putting some aside and creating a synthesis of views as diverse as Carrier’s (Jesus was probably mythical) and Ehrman’s (Jesus existed but was mythologised by early converts.)

I’m quite prepared to accept that this too was a form of conditioning, my selection and rejection of arguments and evidence being determined by my being predisposed to find some persuasive and others not. This predisposition was of course part of earlier conditioning to which I had already been subject, the result of my liberal education that taught me to be impressed by sound argument and evidence. We can’t invest in a position, idea or even propaganda without previous conditioning predisposing us to. Our politics, religious beliefs, rejection of religious beliefs, perspective on life and morality are not genetic. We do not arrive equipped with them, rather we learn them from our environment, our parents, our education, influential people in our early lives, the media, our reading, our culture, the zeitgeist, the groupthink we’re subjected to and the bubble in which we find ourselves. In short, the views we’re exposed to, which is why most of us in the West are not communist or Muslim. Even rebelling against familial or societal values is a form of conditioning, replacing the views and values of our parents or school with others from, for example, a subculture or political cause.

We are never in a position to exercise ‘free will’. We can only make decisions about that which confronts us in the present, with whatever we have internalised in the past. I don’t think there’s ever been a truly original thought in the history of humankind because each thought depends on that which has gone before, both in our own heads and in the heads of others. Your position on any issue, your opinions, views, religious/anti-religious beliefs politics are all the result of conditioning, as selective as that might have been as a result of your conditioned predispositions.

Where does that leave us? Not as ‘free thinkers’ (your free thinking will conform fairly closely with that of other ‘free thinkers’) nor as entirely open-minded (your previous conditioning and the predispositions it led to have taken care of that.) It will, in all likelihood leave you exposed – even though you may regard yourself to be immune – to whatever political and social propaganda is circulating in your particular culture. We’ll take a look at this next time – if you’re predisposed to.

*For the record, I have not so far voted for a right wing party in all of my 70 years. I get my news from a variety of outlets, some left wing, some right. I spent all of my working life in Education, the latter part as an academic; anti-intellectual I am not, though I have little time for those who flaunt their credentials and use them to cudgel others.

Falling By The Wayside

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Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity was short lived. Those who trumpeted his being ‘saved by the blood if the lamb’* in 1979 were strangely silent about his leaving the faith in 1982.

Didn’t Jesus say this sort of thing would happen? Sure he did. In Mark 4:1-20 he warns that not everyone who heard ‘the word’ about the coming of the Kingdom of God would take it to heart. He dressed it up as a story about a sower who scattered seed willy-nilly so that most of it was wasted. Some fell by the wayside, some in shallow soil, some the birds carried away. Only a fraction of the message took hold, and those who in whom it did endured.

It’s as if Jesus knew in advance that many of those who heard his message once he’d gone would lack the resolve to persist in ’the way’. Or did he? Isn’t it more likely that by the time Mark wrote his gospel, 40 years after the cult had got underway, there were may who’d given up on the idea that the Messiah was soon going to come through the clouds to inaugurate God’s Kingdom on Earth. They had abandoned such a ridiculous notion and had left the cult behind.

How then to explain such a destabilising and unexpected course of events? Wouldn’t the Saviour have known this would happen? Of course. And so the parable of the Sower was invented to ensure it looked that way.

The writers of the fourth gospel try a different tack by having Jesus pray for unity (John 17:20-23) which of course they wouldn’t have had to do if there wasn’t already disunity. We know there was division in the early church because Paul and the authors of Hebrews and 1 John (2:!9) write about it. Hence the sticking-plaster solutions to the problem in the gospels – the parable of the Sower and Jesus’ unity prayer. It surely couldn’t be ‘the word’ itself that was the problem. No, it had to be the shallowness and flightiness of those who heard it. Or maybe, as Paul suggests, it was simply that God hadn’t chosen them, back at the dawn of time, to be part of his glee club. They were deluded if they thought so. Nevertheless, they needed a means of letting God and Jesus off the hook.

Bob Dylan and those like him in the centuries that followed didn’t stand a chance with this kind of reverse-engineered thinking. 

*Dylan’s own words in his song ‘Saved’ (1980)

Conversion Porn

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You’ll recall, I’m sure, all those stories you were told at church, youth group or summer camp about people, almost always the worst of sinners, who had wonderful, supernatural conversions. They turned from debauched lifestyles to Jesus, who set them on the right path and turned their lives around. I’m sure there were people who experienced something like this, but any overpowering emotional experience can produce similar results. Remember those high-profile conversions though? When Jewish Bob Dylan gave his life to Jesus and made gospel albums. My, how we rejoiced! Nicky Cruz of Run Baby Run fame, saved by Jesus from a life of knife crime. Doreen Irvine, one time prostitute, stripper, heroin addict and witch who turned to Jesus to find redemption, not to mention a best-selling book, From Witchcraft to Christ. Joni Eareckson who broke her neck diving into shallow water and, paralysed, called upon the Lord to help and restore her.

Boy, did we love these stories back in the early 1970s. I can’t remember how many times the church youth group was shown The Cross and the Switchblade, with Eric Estrada as Nicky Cruz and Pat Boone as David Wilkerson, the pastor who converted him. I know a dog-eared copy of From Witchcraft to Christ was passed round too and that we took a bus trip to see Doreen Irvine speak somewhere. Likewise Joni Eareckson’s and her best-seller. (I still have some admiration for Joni, who seems the most genuine of them all, despite making a living from her life-changing accident and subsequent conversion.)

Bob Dylan’s gospel albums? Not so much. Who wants to hear him torturing some less than sparkling songs about Jesus? Certainly not me, not now, not even then. Despite claiming he saw Jesus in a vision, Dylan’s love affair with JC was mercifully brief.

What I didn’t do at the time was ask questions of these stories, particularly whether they were really credible. It’s strange how all of their protagonists got best-sellers out of their miraculous conversions. How most hitched a ride on the Christian speaking circuit, not to mention the movies some of them had made of their stories. It seems a good living could be made from meeting Jesus. But credible? Not so much. Certainly Doreen Irvine’s story has been disputed and debunked. I should have asked too why Nicky Cruz and his gang were the only ones saved out of all of the knife gangs in New York in the 1960s. Was Jesus not interested in the others, nor their potential victims? What about their non-conversion stories? And Joni: why did she have to be paralysed for Jesus to get in touch? Was she really restored by him? Certainly not physically; she remains paraplegic to this day, still clinging to stories of how Jesus saved her. Does she not wonder why he didn’t act a few seconds earlier to prevent her terrible accident? (Apparently not: she ‘rationalises’ her accident as God discipline of her in order to bring her to himself. Nice God you got there, Joni).

I wish I had asked these questions back when I was a gullible teenager subject to the church’s propaganda, instead of lapping up the conversion porn they made sure came my way.

Pest Control

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I used to pride myself on how patient I could be. I’m finding recently however that I’m becoming far less so. Not with everyone, I hasten to add, but with religionists, Evangelical Christians in particular.

As I mentioned last time, they have infested my Facebook feed with their inane Jesus-Loves-You Amen BS and now I find they’ve practically taken over a science page I occasionally read called From Quarks and Quasars, a sometimes sensationalist site that collects together science posts from other legitimate sources. It recently published an item called ‘Earth Was Once Entirely A Water World, New Research Shows’, prompting 5.2k comments. Many of these were from cranks trying to show how the finding verifies the biblical flood story, despite the fact the article makes it clear it is talking about something that occurred 3-4 billion years ago. Certified genius Dennis Mears offers this comment (all grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors in the original):

Of coarse it was !! but we don’t need “ new research “ to know what every culture on earth has talked about in their history for thousands of years . We can simply read genesis and learn about it in detail

while Scotty Johnson wades in (pun intended) with:

It’s called the flood, it’s recorded in Genesis in the Bible, Noah and the Ark, kids have been learning about it in Sunday School for years. Scientists should study the Bible first, maybe they wouldn’t be surprised when they discover something.

It’s down to astute reader Gene Steiner, catching the original article’s reference to 3-4 billion years, to correct it:

(In) Genesis 7:24 the great flood covered the whole earth, even the highest mountains; and the waters remained on the earth for 150 days…. Not billions of years ago, but 4500 or so years ago during the NOAHIC GLOBAL FLOOD! We knew that all the time!

This is the line subsequent commenters take up until we get to Tobie Schalkwyk, who offers the insight that the water-covered Earth is the same as mentioned in Genesis 1:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And on it goes for thousands more comments. The photo at the top of this post was also shoved on somewhere along the line.

It is the purveyors of this sort of crap that I no longer have any patience for. I want to call them out for their tomfoolery. It’s the same with commenters (Arnold and Don on this blog, Marley1312/Aussiestockman on Gary’s, Revival Fires on Bruce’s) who think atheist sites exist only to provide a forum for their brainless theobabble and Bible-bashing. They can’t be argued with, such is the depth of their ignorance and need to inject Jesus into everything. They bring out the worst in me: snark, bad language and name calling (as you can tell from this very post). I don’t want to stoop to this level, nor is it good for my blood pressure, and so feel compelled to leave them to it. I avoid reading comments and sometimes actually abandon sites I like to read because of the infestations of religious gobbledegook.

I know it infuriates some of you too, but what to do? Let the epidemic spread or resist it? What do you advise?

This Must Be Heaven

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In the last week or so my Facebook feed has been bombarded with posts and memes of a religious nature. Every other one is of this sort. Most are Evangelical though some are evidently Roman Catholic, what with Jesus and his mom with their hearts pinned to their blouses. All of them inform me in the schmaltziest of terms how wonderful Jesus/God/Heaven is. Just about every one is followed by comments consisting single word: Amen! Some have a ‘Praise Jesus’ and occasionally there’s profound philosophical insight (kidding).

Last time my FB was invaded, about six months ago, I had to go into each post separately to blocked them. For a while FB complied. Now that my period of grace (pun intended) is over, they’re back with a righteous vengeance. Before I block them all over again, I’d like to share one with you. Its picture is at the top of this post. Some bright-spark has given it the title First Moments in Heaven, which is patently not what it’s called; not even the nuttiest fantasist would include gravestones in heaven. None of the undiscerning commenters seemed to have spotted their inclusion. Having had this pile of old cobblers dumped on my FB page, I felt obliged to point out the problem. As if a single drooling commenter cared. Here’s a sample of what they went on to say:

I despair that this saccharine banality is the best many Christians have to offer. It really can’t be argued with; people who enthuse over such slush are immune to reflection, reason and critical thinking. A staggering 13,000 of them reposted the damn thing.

The picture evidently depicts the general resurrection here on Earth and, as I thought when I first saw it, is a Jehovah’s Witness creation, originating in a Watchtower magazine. Not a single one of the thousands of born-again geniuses who orgasmed over the picture noticed it was the product of a sect they detest. Again, I felt compelled to alert them to the fact.

Now to block the lot of them. Amen! Praise Jesus!

 

It’s the End!

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AI shows how it’s done. Arrange your elements carefully, and – hey, presto! – Jesus appears!

I’ve reached the end! The end of Jonathan Cahn’s The Dragon Prophecy that is. He has me convinced: the end of the age and the world itself, is just around the corner. He looks around the world, particularly the Middle East, sees the state it’s in and dives into the scriptures to uncover the prophecies that presage present day events. He then reveals how, collectively, these scriptures accurately describe the state of the world today following Hamas’s invasion of Israel on 7th October 2023.

Had he collected these passages prior to 7th October, would they have accurately foretold the events of that day? They should’ve done if that’s what they are really about. So where was this expose before 7th October? Where were the books, by Cahn or anyone else, revealing how the Bible predicted in detail, events that still lay in the future? Predicatbly (pun intended), they don’t exist. Cahn’s The Serpent’s Prophecy could only be written with hindsight, after the events, 7th October 2023 in particular, that he’s decided fulfil biblical prophecy. The prescience of these ancient scriptures is only apparent, to Cahn if no-one else, in retrospect.

He gathers disparate verses together to demonstrate how they do indeed predict current events. He omits many that don’t, even though they too appear to prophesy the future. He does this because they don’t fit the picture he’s trying to create: his interpretation of events in Israel and the significance he wants ascribed to them.

Cahn disingenuously forces unrelated verses to work together, like pieces from different jigsaw puzzles, to create a picture that loosely and disjointedly conforms with and thereby confirms his own conclusions. 

The culmination of The Dragon’s Prophecy is that the time is right and the stage set for Christ’s ‘return’. Cahn advises his readers to surrender to him before he comes though the clouds to do unspeakable things to them. While none of the ‘prophecies’ he’s pressed into service have ever been fulfilled and are certainly not being now, this one must surely be the greatest of the Bible’s failed prophecies.

Does all of this sound familiar? It should. Starting with Paul and the gospel writers, numerous hacks have pulled together biblical prophecies to show how events of their times fulfil the conditions for Christ’s return.

More than this, the gospels were created in exactly the same way that Cahn creates his end-of-the-world scenario. Mark, Matthew and Luke, ruthlessly plundered ancient Jewish scripture to show how their suffering Messiah (whether real or not) was predicted there. Significantly, no-one prior to the early days of the Christian cult believed that these particular scriptures foresaw a suffering Messiah who would die for the sins of his people before coming back to life. The scriptures could only be made to do so in retrospect. After some claimed to have seen the risen Jesus, early cultists began to scour the scriptures for passages – how many they had to ignore or misinterpret! – that could be made to create a loose, disjointed picture of their super-hero. It’s how Paul attempted to persuade others that Jesus was the Messiah (1 Corinthians 15:3,4 etc).

So Cahn is doing nothing new, finding a ready audience for his particular sleight of hand.

Experiencing Jesus

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Back in my students days, sometime in the Middle Ages, I was involved in the conversion of a couple of friends. I’d only just met them, after starting college a week or so earlier. I was training to be a teacher and the college thought it would be a good idea if their new recruits spent a couple of weeks travelling to a school miles away to observe how education was delivered there (pretty chaotically it turned out.)

Jan, Karen and I travelled to the school in Rob’s Triumph Herald car. Rob was a new friend too. He and I met the first day of college and hit it off straight away, both being evangelicals (his guitar was covered in Arthur Blessit ‘One Way’ stickers) and bonding over our mutual love of Larry Norman.

Rob had one such sticker on the dashboard of his car and one day, on our way back from the school, Jan and Karen asked about it and what it was like to be a Christian. We had somewhere taken an unintended detour and the journey back to the college was taking longer than usual so we had plenty of time to share our faith with them. It was a dream come true – what committed Christian didn’t look for opportunities to witness to non-believers, which we did with great enthusiasm.

Before going off to college I’d had a strange vision: a vivid scenario playing out in my head. In it, some people I hadn’t yet met came to my dorm room and asked me to lead them to Christ. While I hadn’t seen my room at this point it turned out to look exactly as I’d seen it in the vision. Lo and behold, after our chat in the car, Rob appeared at my door that evening and said Jan and Karen had arrived at his room saying they wanted to become Christians. We took them to the little prayer room in the back of the college chapel and there the Holy Spirit took over. We prayed with ‘the girls’ and introduced them to Jesus. The entire room was filled then with another powerful presence like a wind or tongues of fire as we sensed Jesus there with us.

It was a powerful experience and for the girls an overwhelming one. They left praising the Lord on an all-time spiritual high. Soon after, Jan had to go into hospital (I forget why) and used the time to read the Bible we gave her in its entirety. She was on fire for the Lord there in that hospital ward. Later she surrendered her yoga materials to us once we’d shown her how the practice was Satanic and, doing the Lord’s bidding, we destroyed it for her. Jan and Karen joined the Christian Union, coming to the twice weekly meetings and began to attend the local evangelical church every Sunday.

To this day, Jan remains a Christian. I haven’t seen her for many years but we share Christmas cards and very occasionally comment on Facebook posts. Karen abandoned her faith a few years after her conversion.

How to explain this amazing experience? Conditioning meets emotion. That it was life-changing for both Jan and Karen (for a while) and also for Rob and me, was the result of our own intense feelings. Neither Jesus nor his Spirit was present in that little prayer room. We thought he was and that was enough. We didn’t need to see him, it was enough to sense his powerful presence (in reality our own heightened emotions.)

Wasn’t this how it was for the earliest Christians? Those Paul told about Jesus never actually ‘saw’ him; they felt him among them. This is how the gospels say it works, not the sighting of a physical body but the sensing of a presence. Matthew makes his version of Jesus predict that this is exactly what will happen (in reality Matthew is reflecting what early cultists had been experiencing for decades when he came to write his gospel):

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them (Matt 18:20).

In other words, a small group intent in their worship would experience the presence of their heavenly saviour. They would manifest a sense of his being there through their collective emotions, just as Jan, Karen, Rob and I did in that prayer room. As did those, like Cephas, who experienced him way back at the start of the Jesus movement, and as Paul did in his imagined encounters with the risen Christ.

No reanimated corpse required.