There's no denying that Ali Reza Panah's claimed conversion to Christianity would be an unpleasant fact of life for him if he were returned to Iran.

Apostasy is a capital offence in his home country, and Amnesty International considers the Islamic nation unsafe for proven Christian converts.

I doubt if it would be much fun for the dubious converts either, especially if they've made well-publicised declarations in other countries.

Is Panah's conversion real? The Refugee Status Appeals Authority didn't believe so, but the Anglican Church argues otherwise.

Archbishop David Moxon, convinced of Panah's sincerity, says the secular state is in no position to judge the genuineness of a person's conversion to Christianity. And he has a point. How could the authority members have been so sure? How many of them have any idea what a religious conversion looks like?

As it happens, religious conversions are something of a favourite topic with me at the moment, having myself recently become a member of that tribe I used to scorn: born-again Christians.

How could this have happened, inquirers ask, when they find I've suddenly, inexplicably, "gone religious"?

In the minds of many of those I know, it is a sure sign I'm suffering from some kind of intellectual and emotional deficiency. I might as well admit to going bonkers.

That old rocker Alice Cooper, whose conversion saved him from a suicidal lifestyle, was right when he said being a Christian these days is a "tough call", an act of "real rebellion". Of course, few conversions are as spectacular and world-changing as the apostle Paul's on the road to Damascus.

"About noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone around me. And I fell to the ground and heard a voice." It was Jesus, reproaching him for his persecution of Christians. Blinded by the light, Paul had to be led by the hand into Damascus, where a "devout man" waited to restore his sight and give him his divine orders.

Some neurologists suggest Paul was having a brain seizure, even though it left his intellectual powers unimpaired, as shown by the many letters he wrote while shackled to a Roman jailer.

Yet most conversions don't happen in a hallucinatory-like flash of blinding light. They're much more gradual affairs. For me, there was the overcoming of intellectual objections, which had once seemed insurmountable but make me laugh now. And even after I'd crossed that divide, and taken my leap of faith, there'd been an intensely spiritual experience that literally knocked me off my feet. It was indescribable.