A wet ground is a sign of rain.

A wet ground is a symptom of rain, but it does not mean that it has rained. Similarly, fruits of the spirit are symptoms of the influence of God, but it does not mean that if someone feels good or peaceful that they have experienced the influence of God. In reality, a person can feel "good" because they are smoking marijuana or because they won a fight. These feelings are "good", but lack an indescribable element. A commonly used word that is cross-cultural that I think fits well is the term: "enlightenment". Spiritual experiences often have the symptoms of joy, peace, love, kindness, patience, humility, tolerance-- AND enlightenment. Enlightenment is accompanied with a sure knowledge of certain things. That assurance is so powerful that it is stronger than seeing it with your eyes. The assurance is of the existence and character of God, and of other things too which are hard to put to words.People who have not experienced enlightenment from the influence of God are incapable of understanding it because the experience cannot be explained properly. It is like having someone try to describe a color that is like no other, or a flavor that is unlike anything you have every tasted. The experience is the prerequisite to its comprehension.Those who mock such experiences and the conclusions drawn from them, have either never had them (which I think is usually the case) or else they have had only a very small/weak experience, or they have not had such an experience in such a long time that they cannot recall what it was that they experienced properly. Or lastly-- and incomprehensible to me-- are those who perhaps may have such experiences recently and strongly and yet somehow deny them. I say this is incomprehensible to me because I cannot imagine being capable of denying such an experience. It would be easier to deny every thing I had ever seen, heard, and felt because these experiences of spiritual enlightenment are more impactful and more powerful and more life-changing than anything that ever passed through my optic nerve, hit my tympanic membrane or traveled thru my sensory receptors to my brain.I am so thankful for religion. Without it I cannot imagine having had such experiences. The framework of my religion gave me the teaching, opportunity, support, structure and guidance to have those experiences-- not just once, but repeatedly throughout my life. Religion is much like the scientific study of medicine, in that it is not perfect and still has a lot of progress to make (and has some very blatant problems), but it is impossible to fathom what my life would be like if I had not had the support of those in religion. I wouldn't know what I had missed; I would incapable of comprehending what I had missed-- because of that I would probably assume that people who described spiritual enlightenment were crazy/delusional or I might have thought that I had already had these same emotions because I could still relate to the symptoms (like peace and love) and therefore wrongly assumed that I had experienced the same thing that they had experienced and they were just being weird about it because they somehow connected these emotions to some imaginary being... but its not the same thing, its not just the emotions-- that's just the wet ground, it is not the storm. Its not even close to the same thing.That being said, religion does not guarantee these experiences of spiritual enlightenment, anymore than owning a map and sitting in a car guarantees your arrival to a desired destination.