There comes a time for many people who have led highly spiritual lives for years, if not decades, when they realize that all their spirituality can be easily explained by standard human emotions. At that juncture, most walk away from Christianity for good. If they don’t walk about under their own volition, those in the church will force them out for nonconformity.

Spirituality

The assumption of spirituality is that there is a fourth dimension of reality, an unseen realm of supernatural power, either a direct link to God or of demonic powers. It is a central tenet of Christianity (they imagine they see it in the Bible) and of many other religions: you must plug into this spiritual realm to be an authentic Christian or to have the proper experience.

Many Christians, including myself at one point, have built their entire Christian experience and the basis of their belief in God upon a spiritual and thus supernatural experience. But if you have studied the behavioral sciences, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, or simply have thought honestly about this, you are confronted with the knowledge that our emotions are powerful and delusional at times, and even the Bible testifies that it is the most deceitful thing in the cosmos. Therefore, there is no objective evidence that this is supernatural, above what the brain can manufacture.

The fact that I am writing this and saying it out loud makes me a lightning rod, unfortunately. But I write this for those who recognize this fact but whose ideals are not permitted within Christianity. They pity us, devalue our relationship with God, or, as happened to me many times, declare us to be un-Christian. But we have reached our conclusion not because we are bad people, not because we are “God haters” as my previous best friend at my church has now called me, but because we champion honesty and truth. If there is a God, that God must dwell within honest and factual truth, or they cannot be God.

Thirty years ago, watching my whole evangelical persona and world collapse, recognizing how we were so dishonest with each other and ourselves, so pretentious and “godly,” I prayed to God that I was going to seek honest truth at all costs, even in the end, I discovered there was no God. The hardest thing in seeking factual truth is giving up our confirmation bias. It is profoundly scary.

Human Emotions

It is tough for someone who is part of a religious tradition to recognize the reality that we re-label our emotions as spiritual. I first encountered this while I was a psychology major. I saw study after study showing how unreliable our feelings are when it comes to drawing conclusions about reality. I witness our psych wards full of delusional patients. I’ve seen delusional behavior in myself and others. I’ve watched “godly” people claim they represent this spiritual world and use that as a tool for abusing people without mercy. But for decades, I suppressed this observation because I didn’t want to believe it, believing instead that I was a spiritual, supernatural person and the voices I thought I heard were truly God’s.

Let me speak for many like me. After thirty years of a superduper spirituality, believing I was living in this spiritual dimension, constantly hearing the voice of God, having mystical experiences, etc., my relationship with God is now based on objectivity, recognizing my emotions for what they are, and my relationship is profoundly better. There is no comparison. It is like being married to someone, where the relationship is built entirely on pretense, and then one day there is a breakthrough, and you get to know each other honestly for the first time.

No, I am not sharing the above to indicate that our relationship with God is better than the rest for whom mysticism and spirituality are paramount. I am only defending my tribe of people because we are constantly told that we are inferior.

Why Spirituality is Valued Higher than Emotions

Here is the real issue. The reason that Christianity has so embraced spirituality instead of our human emotions is that the church has wrongly designated emotions as something inferior at best, evil or “of the flesh” at worst.

A central teaching in Christianity is that we are all part of The Fall and therefore imperfect. Unfortunately, the line of demarcation between what is good in us and what is bad has been drawn vertically, along the lines of the early Gnostics. The Gnostics introduced into early Christianity the notion that everything material, the Earth, our bodies, our minds, was evil, created by a different, stupid, or evil god. Demiurge. So this is where the modern Christians get their idea that reason, thinking, and our emotions are all inferior or “of the flesh.” It is also where we get our ideas that other bodily functions, pooping, peeing, and having sex, are all dirty and the opposite of the “spiritual.”

But this is not true, and if this article were not already getting too long, I would show you how much God values our reason, wisdom, and knowledge throughout the Old and New Testaments.

But by downgrading our brains in this manner, we also downgrade our emotions. But our emotions were designed by, and created by God, yeah, the good God, and are excellent, not inferior to our concept of the spiritual. But if you went to some kind of event that was overwhelming, music, speakers, or whatever floats your boat, as a Christian, you feel compelled to call it a spiritual experience, not the truth; it was an emotional experience.

In the past six or seven years, since I’ve been battling cancer, I have some of the most incredible experiences with God. Many, maybe hundreds of nights, I’ve been awake for the entire night (from suffering), weeping and talking to God. It is mind-blowing. I spent over two years as a hermit, not allowed to leave the house due to my medical vulnerability and COVID. It was an incredible experience to be totally alone for fifteen hours a day. Intimacy with God that I never knew was possible. That’s why, for me, it is soooooo painful when people tell me that I’m not a real Christian, or a bad one, and that happens when people read this blog, or I attempt to be part of a small group or teach Sunday school. We are marginalized by both the conservative and progressive churches. Some days, I get so tired of this, and I think I would have been far better off if I had left the organized church completely thirty years ago. But what keeps me coming back are the majority of people I find there, who are gracious. People whom I adore.

True Supernatural

Albert Einstein is one of my favorite people. He was likely an agnostic, though some called him an atheist. Yet he wrote once that people must live their lives as if nothing were a miracle or everything were a miracle. What he meant was, if there is a God and God created the entire cosmos, then nothing is “natural.” Everything is supernatural because it is “above nature,” using the term nature to mean that which exists outside of God.

So, given this, it makes no sense to take our human reason or our emotions and call them inferior to any other supernatural experience. When I was an evangelical, we used a term, “it was a God thing,” to mean that as we walk around in this natural-godless world, now and then something would happen in the spiritual world that would transcend the ugly natural world and be from God.

But this doesn’t make sense if God indeed created the cosmos. Human emotions are as supernatural as some mystical, out-of-body experience, and I think we are healthier, mentally, when we recognize our feelings for what they are, the wonderful, God-given spice of life, deeply embedded within the material architecture of our brains, which God designed and built, thus like everything, supernatural.

Respectfully,

Mike