Former Christians

[McCulloch]

I guess i never paid any attention to where your ID says "former christian." As a former christian, what was the Holy Spirit to you?

I think that there are two questions here.
What was the Holy Spirit to you when you were considered to be a Christian?
What is the Holy Spirit to you now that you a no longer a Christian?

[MikeH]

Many Christians believe you aren't saved unless you are able to speak in tongues.

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr?
Am I allowed to say without repercussion that this is definitely misguided?

[msmcneal]

It's sort of a non-issue now, but since someone asked, I'll try to answer.

When I was a Christian, the Holy Spirit was, to me:

1. the 3rd person of the Trinity
2. the representative of God on earth
3. the one who empowered believers to live a godly life
4. the one who gave believers spiritual gifts
5. the one who unified us to God (i.e., the main goal of mystics)
6. the "seal" of our belonging to God

[TheOneAndOnly]

I guess i never paid any attention to where your ID says "former christian." As a former christian, what was the Holy Spirit to you?

I think that there are two questions here.
What was the Holy Spirit to you when you were considered to be a Christian?
What is the Holy Spirit to you now that you a no longer a Christian?

When I was a Christian, I considered the Holy Spirit as my source of inspiration, for lack of a better word. When I needed get up and go, or just felt lousy, I went to the Holy Spirit. It truly felt as if God was around me, with me, and within me.
I looked to the HS as my conscience. If I thought or did something wrong, the HS would "let me know" I was doing something right or wrong. I guess you can say that heard God speak to me in many ways. At the time, I felt comforted by it, and was not "weirded out" by it at all.
I looked to the HS as the method that God worked in me and through me.
I never spoke in tongues, although not for the lack of trying. Many in the church I attended (charismatic southern baptist offshoot) did, and often were "slain in the spirit". Personally, at the time, I thought it quite creepy and strange, but I reasoned that I just hadn't gotten to that point yet, etc.
I had believed then, as I do now, that those who spoke in tongues often were simply either faking it for bragging rights, or had truly convinced themselves that they could do it, real or imagined. But I tolerated it, and never thought much of it.

As an atheist, I now believe that the feelings that the "Holy Spirit" invoked in me were simply psychosomatic symptoms of my reliance of my fundamentalist beliefs.
I realized through self-introspection that the HS was, for all intents and purposes, a figment of my imagination in relation to my chosen beliefs and worldview at the time. I had essentially allowed myself to be brainwashed with those beliefs, without realizing (or even wanting to) whether they were real or not.
And thankfully, I do not hear voices in my head any longer, either :phew:

[elle]

I guess i never paid any attention to where your ID says "former christian." As a former christian, what was the Holy Spirit to you?

I think that there are two questions here.
What was the Holy Spirit to you when you were considered to be a Christian?

The Holy Spirit was the comforter, the great mystery revealed, "God in Christ in me" (whatever that means). In my understanding, it was a part of God's essence or Spirit that he gave to every Christian when they were born again (See Romans 10:9-10 about being "saved" - same thing) in order to enable us to do supernatural miracles. Namely, word of knowledge, word of wisdom, discerning of spirits, speaking in tongues, tongues with interpretation, prophecy (kind of like tongues with interpretation minus the tongues), faith, healing, and miracles. My group was very academically oriented so I've got syllabuses on how that all plays out but I won't retype it here for the sake of not derailing the thread with a bunch of theology that I no longer subscribe to. If someone is really interested in the specifics of what was taught at "The Way Ministry" and the Biblical basis for it, I'm sure I could dig the syllabuses out of a box in my storage room.

What is the Holy Spirit to you now that you a no longer a Christian?

A fiction just like the other supernatural elements of the Bible. My church was big on speaking in tongues but not in the shouting, falling out type stuff. I was actually made to do it by my father (whom I was afraid of at the time) and I can still do it, but it doesn't make me believe in the Holy Spirit. I'm pretty good with languages so it's not much of a stretch that I can make up some sounds that seem like words and phrases from a foreign language.

[BwhoUR]

Some denomination believe that you never lose the holy spirit, my denomination being one of them.

Chapter and verse please.

[spoirier]

When I was Christian I remained desperately deprived of the presence of Jesus or of the Holy Spirit despite my devout wish to receive it. So without experience I could not form any precise idea about it.

Now I think the phenomena that Christians consider miraculous or attribute to interventions of the Holy Spirit, can have a diversity of causes. Some are simply natural (coincidences, peer pressure, self-persuasion...), but some can be supernatural too.
The same for the phenomena that Christians attribute to demonic influences.

The point is that now, contrary to the Christian view, I don't see any more discontinuity between the supernatural causes in the "divine" and "demonic" cases; and I see them share a common feature: none of the disembodies spirits that may cause "miracles" or "inspiration", got any hint from an omniscient being. They are just roughly as short-sighted and ignorant of God's will, as average humans are. You know, Christians themselves so often display their own unability to tell the difference. Several times, as a Christian visiting many churches as I travelled (especially among neo-Protestant and Charismatic movements), I heard Christians denounce some other church's "Holy Spirit" to be fake and made up by demons; or to make warnings about the presence of such cases within their own ranks.
A similar situation can be found with Catholic mysticism, with the official Catholic ultimate criterion how to know whether a vision is from God or from demons: we know that a spirit is from God if its teaching agrees with the official doctrine of the Catholic Church; it is a demon otherwise. What a circular reasoning, and indirect acknowledgement of the purely arbitrary, conventional nature of this assumed difference.
The problem is that even this criterion is not always clear to proceed: some spiritual revelations seem very close to the catholic doctrine but are still considered unacceptable for a reason or another.

For example, as I recently started discussing with a Catholic, he pointed out Faustina's diary as an example of what his faith is based on. So I started reading this diary, and found it quite natural to interpret her experience of "talking with Jesus" to be (sorry for her) an experience of relationship with a demon (or perhaps several) that has great fun making fool of her.
But this demon is not almighty; his conspiration is not quite elaborate. Rather, I think Faustina is primarily victim of the conspiration of her own incredible gullibility, her own indirect devout desire of being fooled in such a way. She essentially prays the demons: "Please, please, I beg you with all my heart and all the blood of my life: appear to me as Jesus ! I'll be desperate if you don't ! If you do appear to me as Jesus and confirm the Catholic doctrine, I'll feel saved and give you my life ! But if you appear to me in any other way, or teach me anything else than the Catholic doctrine, I'll remain desperate and I'll reject you !"

How can a demon respond to that ? Invariably stick to some higher purpose to contradict the Catholic doctrine, may it be for good or bad intention, despite knowing that anyway this would fall short as she'll reject the connection in this case ? Or give her what she wants so as to let the mutually consensual sadomasochistic relationship take roots and develop in the long term ? Seriously ?:blink:
If there was any sign of something wonderful and possibly worthy of being called "divine" in the behavior of her "Jesus", I could have seriously considered the hypothesis that he really was the Son of God. But as far as I happened to read her testimony until now, this turned out not to be the case. (Note : contrary to Faustina's own assessment, I don't consider his one-day weather forecast, nor his pushing a child to suddenly go to confession, as any sufficiently wonderful action or sign of divinity. I need greater and wiser actions than this to be impressed.)