The Christmas wager

77. Afterward, he reported a neardeath encounter that included repeated attempts to cross a river and “a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful … responsible for the government of the universe”.

Ayer retained his atheism, but declared that the experience had “slightly weakened” his conviction that death “will be the end of me”.

As a young man in the 1960s, the filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, of RoboCop a fame, wandered into a church and felt “the Holy Ghost descending as if a laser beam was cutting through my head and my heart was on fire.” He was dealing with his then-girlfriend’s pregnancy. After they procured an abortion, he had a terrifying, avenging-angel vision at a screening of King Kong.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the essayist and atheist, had shocking experiences of spiritual rapture as a teenager, which she wrote about in 2014’s memoir, Living With a Wild God. The “wild” part is key: She rejects the God of monotheism because the Being she encountered seemed stranger, less benign and more amoral than the God she thinks that most religions worship.

William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist, had never seen an exorcism when he made his film. A professed agnostic, he decided recently to “complete the circle” and spent time shadowing the Vatican exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, just before Amorth’s death at 91. He recounted his experience in Vanity Fair this fall; it did not make him a Catholic believer, but it did