No One Converts, Part III
The world feels holy.
That's stupid, and yet there are times when simply walking alone in the woods or strolling along a dirt road with friends, or almost any other ordinary thing can bring us a feeling of, more or less, 'this place is sacred.' It can happen suddenly. My friend Michael's comments made it impossible not to remember some of those moments in my life.
Despite our rational approach, despite how my talks with Michael about the reasons behind belief in God (and non-belief) were supposed to be about what's provable, we were left with a difference in our underlying experiences. It wasn't even a big difference in outlook. We both felt holiness around us. We only interpreted it differently.
Michael had been raised in a private, Jesuit boarding school. Perhaps it's not much of a surprise that the Jesuits converted him. The conversion from Judaism to Catholicism came to him as a revelation, apparently, as a series of visions of God. He got dream visitations from an actual, white-haired, bearded holy man. He loved the Jesuit priests' rational approach to it all. That's why Michael thought he could prove God must exist. For sure, he told me at length how believing in the Catholic trinity made the most sense.
For my part, I came from a tradition that included some family Catholic church membership, some Methodist, some Baptist, but mostly a bunch of Quaker church ceremonies as part of my schooling. And the biggest spiritual influence of all was reading about Buddhism and about pre-Socratic philosophies (which I often compared to Buddhism, especially the Epicurean school).
The rational approach, at least for the two of us, seemed to come from a need to explain our sense of holiness. If someone notices a heaviness or lightness in the air, they might search the trees or the skies or look to a nearby river to try to find the cause. We were doing something similar on a spiritual, emotional level. We sensed something. Where was a source?
That's why it was such a disappointment to Michael to finally admit, "I guess there's no rational reason to believe in God."
I remember feeling a slight sense of shock. I hadn't expected to convert him. A conversion had happened before but with a girlfriend. That's suspicious because of all the love and affection and trying to please each other. With a religiously-oriented friend, even a good friend, I had no reason to expect it. And I had no reason to be suspicious of it.
The next day, when I saw Michael, he seemed depressed. But non-belief can affect people like that. It had done it to me, at first. We discussed the lack of God for a little while that day but I didn't see any reason to try to talk him out of his mood. He had to come to terms with non-belief in his own way.
When we ate dinner together, Michael remained quiet. He didn't want to debate. Then, almost abruptly, I didn't see him for two days. Then, at another dinner with friends in the cafeteria, he said he wanted to talk. Almost immediately, before we even walked out of the dorms on our hike across campus, he revealed that he believed in God again.
"Eric, he came to me," Michael said. "He was a sturdy older man, sort of, with a flowing white beard and a voice. And the voice talked to me. I could feel Him. I felt His presence."
"Okay," I conceded. Rationality was not going to win over a personal, powerful experience. "So really, you still believe."
"Sorry, I thought it was rational. But it's more than that. I can feel God."
We walked in silence for a while.
"Fair enough," I said. And we started talking about black and white photography and whether it was really art. It was still easy to talk with him.
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Conclusion
Michael converted back to his beliefs after a few days. Other friends lasted longer, some more than twenty years. But I think everyone I knew who converted from a form of Christianity to atheism has since converted back to the sort of Christianity they'd grown up with.
Because I was young and fervent, maybe, I could seemingly help people convert themselves. But I think, in almost everyone, the conversions are unlikely to last. There's no good way to measure it historically, but I suspect that thousands of years ago, maybe two to five percent of people were non-believers in their local religion. It's a rational thing to do. But more being rational, it's an underlying judgement of people, a basic sense of experience. You have to determine whether or not other people might be fooling themselves. No one wants to die. Therefore, people might fool ourselves about it. And it's the same two to five percent making that judgement nowadays, too.
I'm sure the self-reporting has changed. In the middle ages, you might not want to come out and say everyone else is wrong. In the early days of Rome, you might not want to risk your life by saying Zeus is a figment of everyone's imagination. You might keep your opinion to yourself. But I suspect that, throughout the ages and throughout the religions, the proportions of doubters is roughly the same.
