How do they do it? Maybe they just lie.

What I am talking about here is influence.  I'll give an example of what I heard today.  I have heard this story before, but I didn't mention it before.  There's somebody "in the hood" here who mentioned to me his "out of body" experience.  He said he was in an accident, and he looked down at himself below, on the ground.  What he said was that he felt like he "was in heaven".  But when he came back down to his body he was "in hell".

Because of that experience, and maybe a couple others like it, because it may have happened more than once, he doesn't believe in God...

He also added that he knows some religious folk who warned him about this, that he would go to hell, but he said he has already been there, done that...

I haven't had an out of body experience, so how do I know how I would react?  Would it make you believe, not believe?  For him, it was the latter, not the former.  As for myself, I can only speculate.  If I were in such massive pain that I was on the way out, and that happened to me, I would think an out of body experience would make me feel more religious, not less.

The point?  Everybody sees things in their own way.  The closest I came to dying may have been in an auto accident in the early nineties.  But that wasn't all that close, in terms of injuries.  In terms of possibilities of it being much worse than it was, though, it was too close for comfort.  As for remembering anything, I don't remember a thing.  I don't even remember how it happened.

This business with the cancer may have been close, too.  But it wasn't an out of body experience.  All I remember is some very long nights when I couldn't sleep, and the pain was definitely bad.

But it was not an out of body thing.

Somebody would have to have a similar experience before you would be treated seriously.  That is, if you wanted to influence him towards belief.  How would you do this, then?  Lie about it?  I mean, if you had the same experience, would you try to influence somebody with a lie?  Or would you tell the truth exactly?

I would like to think that I would tell the truth, but my experience in other areas just does not convince me that this works.

The good book says you may have to be predisposed to receive the truth.  But then again, almost nobody seems to be that way.  Indeed, I have yet to meet anybody who seems to be predisposed to be influenced by truthful speech.  It seems to be the other way around.

But I won't be going there.  Is that me just virtue signaling?  Maybe.  Let's just put it this way, I would prefer to believe that I believe that I would always be truthful, even if I am unsuccessful.

Besides, it is a good way to rationalize my own failure at persuasion.