High Lord Tolkien wrote:
Well that makes me happy!
Whenever I'm in a crowd listening to a speech I often turn around and say that out loud. The day someone quotes me back with "Well, what so special about the cheese makers?" is the day my life is complete.
Maaaaan... I'm not gonna fantasize about trying to set things up to try to make that happen in my church, (which is simultaneously one of the unlikeliest places for it to happen, and also a place where it COULD actually happen) but..
...I want to take this opportunity to note that if you became a Christian THE SAME DAY as you had that happen to you in a church, then your life truly would be complete.
AND it would make it look like you just prophesied in the post you just wrote.
But...
"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.
They don't take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage.
The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience."
-Flannery O'Connor
"In spite of much that militates against quietness there are people who still read books. They are the people who keep me going."
-Elisabeth Elliot, Preface, "A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael"
Linna Heartlistener wrote:
...I want to take this opportunity to note that if you became a Christian THE SAME DAY as you had that happen to you in a church, then your life truly would be complete.
.
I used to be anti-Kant (because of Ayn Rand). Then I read what Kant actually wrote and instantly became a transcendental idealist. I used to think citing intuitions was stupid when it came to moral argument, and disliked the idea of reading John Rawls since he supposedly used intuitions to support his theory of justice. Then I read A Theory of Justice and became a Rawlsian about political morality--even to the point of accepting the use of intuitions to support arguments about morality, even in political theory. I used to be an atheist who thought Jesus was "just a man." Then I read Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo and ended up believing that Jesus was the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity.
The actual conversion to theism, or transtheism at least, or what-have-you, though, had not much to do with rational argument. I was going through a particular emotional ordeal and I thought I saw a Trinitarian pattern to what was happening. So despite my inability to make the image of the Trinity coherent, I thought, "Oh, the Trinity does exist and communicates to people in these various ways." But the thing that pattern applied to was not a question of evidence, but a set of three songs by my favorite band, with one song "sacrificing itself" for another song. Like, I originally thought something would happen when I was at a concert, during Song 1, but due to a trailer for a movie based on the band, I changed my mind and thought it would happen during Song 2. Since it didn't happen during Songs 1 or 2 (or any others for that matter), I felt terrible when listening to Song 2. I thought, "If I'd gone on believing it would happen during Song 1, Song 1 would be the one that was ruined, but it's my favorite song of all time so that would've been the worst thing ever for me, possibly."
