If one assumed that Sensation A was Bad and Sensation B was Good, then they were consistent with Christianity being true. Sometimes they didn’t surprise me. Sometimes they did—I could get the feeling that something was Bad even if I hadn’t thought so (had even been interested in doing it) and then later learn that Christian doctrine considered it Bad as well.
This would be considerably more convincing if Christianity were a unified movement.
Suppose there existed only three religions in the world, all of which had a unified dogma and only one interpretation of it. Each of them had a long list of pretty specific doctrinal points, like one religion considering Tarot cards bad and another thinking that they were fine. If your Good and Bad sensations happened to precisely correspond to the recommendations of one particular religion, even in the cases where you didn’t actually know what the recommendations were beforehand, then that would be some evidence for the religion being true.
However, in practice there are a lot of religions, and a lot of different Christian sects and interpretations. You’ve said that you’ve chosen certain interpretations instead of others because that’s the interpretation that your sensations favored. Consider now that even if your sensations were just a quirk of your brain and mostly random, there are just so many different Christian sects and varying interpretations that it would be hard not to find some sect or interpretation of Christian doctrine who happened to prescribe the same things as your sensations do.
Then you need to additionally take into account ordinary cognitive flaws like confirmation bias: once you begin to believe in the hypothesis that your sensations reflect Christianity’s teachings, you’re likely to take relatively neutral passages and read into them doctrinal support for your position, and ignore passages which say contrary things.
In fact, if I’ve read you correctly, you’ve explicitly said that you choose the correct interpretation of Biblical passages based on your sensations, and the Biblical passages which are correct are the ones that give you a Good feeling. But you can’t then say that Christianity is true because it’s the Christian bits that give you the good feeling—you’ve defined “Christian doctrine” as “the bits that give a good feeling”, so “the bits that give a good feeling” can’t not be “Christian doctrine”!
Furthermore, our subconscious models are often accurate but badly understood by our conscious minds. For many skills, we’re able to say what’s the right or wrong way of doing something, but be completely unable to verbalize the reason. Likewise, you probably have a better subconscious model of what would be “typical” Christian dogma than you are consciously aware of. It is not implausible that you’d have a subconscious process making guesses on what would be a typical Christian response to something, giving you good or bad sensation based on that, and often guessing right (especially since, as noted before, there’s quite a lot of leeway in how a “Christian response” is defined).
For instance, you say that you hadn’t thought of Tarot cards being Bad before. But the traditional image of Christianity is that of being strongly opposed to witchcraft, and Tarot cards are used for divination, which is strongly related to witchcraft. Even if you hadn’t consciously made that connection, it’s obvious enough that your subconscious very well could have.
This would be considerably more convincing if Christianity were a unified movement.
Suppose there existed only three religions in the world, all of which had a unified dogma and only one interpretation of it. Each of them had a long list of pretty specific doctrinal points, like one religion considering Tarot cards bad and another thinking that they were fine. If your Good and Bad sensations happened to precisely correspond to the recommendations of one particular religion, even in the cases where you didn’t actually know what the recommendations were beforehand, then that would be some evidence for the religion being true.
However, in practice there are a lot of religions, and a lot of different Christian sects and interpretations. You’ve said that you’ve chosen certain interpretations instead of others because that’s the interpretation that your sensations favored. Consider now that even if your sensations were just a quirk of your brain and mostly random, there are just so many different Christian sects and varying interpretations that it would be hard not to find some sect or interpretation of Christian doctrine who happened to prescribe the same things as your sensations do.
Then you need to additionally take into account ordinary cognitive flaws like confirmation bias: once you begin to believe in the hypothesis that your sensations reflect Christianity’s teachings, you’re likely to take relatively neutral passages and read into them doctrinal support for your position, and ignore passages which say contrary things.
In fact, if I’ve read you correctly, you’ve explicitly said that you choose the correct interpretation of Biblical passages based on your sensations, and the Biblical passages which are correct are the ones that give you a Good feeling. But you can’t then say that Christianity is true because it’s the Christian bits that give you the good feeling—you’ve defined “Christian doctrine” as “the bits that give a good feeling”, so “the bits that give a good feeling” can’t not be “Christian doctrine”!
Furthermore, our subconscious models are often accurate but badly understood by our conscious minds. For many skills, we’re able to say what’s the right or wrong way of doing something, but be completely unable to verbalize the reason. Likewise, you probably have a better subconscious model of what would be “typical” Christian dogma than you are consciously aware of. It is not implausible that you’d have a subconscious process making guesses on what would be a typical Christian response to something, giving you good or bad sensation based on that, and often guessing right (especially since, as noted before, there’s quite a lot of leeway in how a “Christian response” is defined).
For instance, you say that you hadn’t thought of Tarot cards being Bad before. But the traditional image of Christianity is that of being strongly opposed to witchcraft, and Tarot cards are used for divination, which is strongly related to witchcraft. Even if you hadn’t consciously made that connection, it’s obvious enough that your subconscious very well could have.