People who believe God talks to them--What's going on?

This all seems quite rational when he recounts it in person.

xpost

People who believe God talks to them are obviously completely fucking insane (no offence to yr dad, Adam), why are we even bothering discussing this rationally? It's like people who believe the trees or Jimminy Cricket or Shaq or Bilbo Baggins talks to them; just cos one person's completely batshit aural delusion is grander than another person's doesn't mean they're any less fucking crazy in the head.

And maybe, just maybe, they are lying in the service of justifying their own faith? A kind of competition with other Christians?

Just because he admits his own condescension doesn't make it any less condescending.

one interesting spin on it might be: why do some people claiming to act on god's behalf (and perhaps on His specific instructions), gain credibility... and why do so many not gain any credibility at all?

just how should i feel about this sort of thing if i am a non-believer?

lots of x-posts

NB. I am being comically wankerish on this thread on purpose.

seriously, why did numerous people believe john smith (of the mormons)but so many other people who claim god speaks to them, are decried as schizoids and freaks? the vicissitudes of religious belief are pretty fascinating, seeing as they are often largely determined (so i think) by pretty worldly factors.

Yeah, but the 'God-spot' is king of distracting. If I found a point on your brain I could prod and make you see a chair, it doesn't mean there are no chairs, or that if I sat you in front of a chair and prodded this part of your brain (Ok, I'd be something of a dick, but assume I have your consent), it wouldn't stand to reason to claim there wasn't a chair in front of you. It's kind of a question about whether this part of the brain causes thoughts about God, or is stimulated by thoughts about God, or, indeed, God Himself.

x-post to Martin: Yeah, I got asked all thise questions when I got locked up too. I do believe in God, and that he 'guides' my actions in some way, but I just kept my crazy mouth shut about that.

PS. God just told me to go and get ice cream but when I got to the freezer in the garage it was all frozen and frosty and horrid and inedible = I have said bad things here this evening.

xpost

see, nick, part of me agrees with you, but also i wonder where this kind of talk gets us. i find it more interesting to think about how and why certain claims are believed by some people (and, often, why those same people stop believing after a certain point).

i think in the end it comes down to questions of community, god as social bond, and hearing a voice in a certain kind of evangelical community must be a sort of validation, like faith healing.

if there was a religious community that, as you point out about pre-reformation, was prone to think badly of this sort of thing i think it would cease to be expressed, at least publicly.

i find joan of arc to be one of the most fascinating stories ever... i am not sure whether
i believe that god really was speaking to her, but i am certain she wasn't just trying to
impress anyone.

the kind of person you're referring to would be an empty, searching person willing to
do anything to get attention... they exist, sure, but you can't lump them in with other
people experiencing other sorts of phenomena (whether that be true divine revelation,
mental illness, or some other inexplicable event).

that said, i certainly hope that at least some of the people who claim to be spoken to by
god are actually being spoken to by god... i would find this to be a much more interesting
world.

why did so many choose to believe joan at the time? why was her peculiar conviction so inspiring for some and dangerous for others?

anyway i think we've had a joan of arc thread right?

there's a lot of really weird middle ground between telling the truth and telling a lie

This is still pretty much the case in Catholicism. I grew up in a strongly Catholic environment (rural Southern Ireland), and I never heard anybody claiming God spoke to them, and if they had, the first people to laugh at them would be other believing Catholics. Instruction comes from the priest, not directly from God.

i onced ask my sister about the people in her church who seemed suspiciously moved to a great extent by the word of god and she rolled her eyes. i dont know, however, whether most christians look down upon such ostentatious displays of faith as she does.

that was a response to kevin

No - but I know the thrust of it. It is indeed relevant here.

maybe it's crazy in the sense of a difference of opinion, as in "supply side economics is crazy".

if you believe in an omnipotent god you have basically thrown human reason out the window. not that it is crazy to believe in god, but that a kind of religious nihilism is a direct consequence of taking the idea of an omnipotent god seriously. you cannot understand or predict (read: limit) the actions of an omnipotent being.

claiming direct personal revelation is, i guess, not crazy from this point of view.

I think believing in god and believing it has spoken to you are two very disintincly different claims. you can believe in god (and a lot of other things) without having witnessed any evidence to do so, whereas believing it has spoken to you is the equivelent of saying "oh yes I saw the flying saucer land in my back yard and I climbed aboard", which is obviously a lie or insanity as both flying saucers and god don't exist (imo).

Surely you just made that up.

it's human to jerk other parts as well. and at least when you're a nonbeliever you don't have to be made to feel guilty about it!

Whoever said God had to be sane?

so there's some variance as to how many icelanders do believe in elves... but most info
seems to indicate it IS a majority.
there were a lot of other articles about this too.

So, yes.

It's not that I think God has to be sane. It's just that it's hard enough for me to remain so without listening to all His blather.

The idea of competition mentioned upthread seems much more interesting to me. I've been to a few of the religious services where people flail about and cry and shout out "thus sayeth the lord" and it did seem to me that religious experience was taken as proof of piety.

Um...

Are you serious? How does that make me feel superior? if someone came up to me and claimed to have spoken with god I would most certainly not believe them and therefore be suspect to their state of mind or that they were just blatantly lieing for some other gain, and fwiw this has happended to me in my lifetime and it's more or less what sealed the lid on my non-believing.

It's my opinion, did you realise everybody is entitled to one?

If I went about with banners and loud hailers shouting about how crazy these people were, THEN you might have an argument.

(xpost Yes, that's EXACTLY what I've admitted. Remeber all of those times when I told people off for twisting your words? Pretend that never happened. Dipshit.)

"Grand Illusions: The Spectral Reality Underlying Sexual UFO Abductions, Crashed Saucers, Afterlife Experiences, Sacred Ancient Sites, and Other Enigmas" by Gregory Little.

It's quite surprising what all these things have in common. Anyone who understands consciousness understands that it is not understood. Life only comes from life and just where exactly does a thought come from?

Anyway, there are lots of reasons people might think God is speaking to them, from the Divine to the mundane, but without access to their consciousness we are not really in a position to say. And it shouldn't really bother us, unless they are dangerous.

On another angle though, there's a famous but controversial book by Julian Jaynes, 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' on this subject, which argues that until quite recently in human evolution, the right brain communicated to the left brain in visions and commands, which the body then acted on. It takes a crisis of civilisation which the gods cannot solve before this process is superceded by one in which the left brain is no longer commanded in such a way, but begins to question or query such internal visions or voices, according to Jaynes.

And again, I have a vast multitude of options for ways I could feel superior to you. I don't have to get into religious debates over the internet to do so.

No the only person who is offensive here is the one who calls someone a prejudiced asshole for expressing opinion that 90% of people on ILX hold. (yeah i pulled that number out my ass. what?)

This is really fucking dumb. If 90% of ILX holds the same opinion that you have expressed on this thread (which they don't), they are also prejudiced assholes. Numbers have nothing to do with it.

Are there any other religions outside the judeo christian/islam trinity in which a deity is likely to actually speak to you? Especially an omnipotent singular deity? What other religions actually rely on the existence of a single deity as a predicate of the whole system of belief? Cos taosim, buddhism and confucianism are more like philosophies, right? And hinduism has like a thousand gods that are totally not omnipotent and totally don't do talking to crackerjack mad heads, right? What about sikhism?

The Hindu gods talked to people all the time.
The Greek gods talked to people all the time.
The Roman gods talked to people all the time.
etc., etc.

Riddle me this, Batman: How is the fundamentalist dogma of atheism any less insane than the fundamentalist dogma of any religion?

'Cause it's not a 'revealed' religion that requires us to follow a book or books.

The fact that you have other ways to feel superior doesn't negate that you could be doing it here.

How do you mean "revealed"? And how is that better?

Short answer: they're insane.

Because if I say "I don't know," you'll jump all over me for giving a nonanswer.

Leaving work now. No more answers from me today.

It's been pointed out to me that if the voices and visions deconstruct the image of God, you're on your way to becoming a mystical atheist - an intuitionist of sorts. Don't forget, the jews were commanded not to make an image of God. This would tend to deconstruct the idea of visions and voices emanating from a supernal motive force or being.

I'd never tell someone to stop believing or try and convince them to not be an athiest; but that's not what this thread is about. This thread is about people who say God talks to them. I don't believe in god so I reason that anyone saying Giod talks to them is either attention seeking for whatever reason or else completely mad.

Athiest dogma isn't dogma because it's based on reason and thought and debate (in my case Mackie's The Miracle of Theism and a year of religious philosophy at univerisyt). Obviously you get some athiest assholes who foist themselves on otehr people and couldn't give two figs for teleological, cosmologuical or ontological arguments (or any opthers) for and against god and just assume anyone who believes is a total idiot, but most athiests i know are pretty pragmatic, and it's simpkly a case of the pragmatic solution to the problem of religion everytime is to not believe because it seems irrational to believe.

Many, many x-posts here.

Fuck it, I should have stopped when I said I would.
-- n/a

Hahaha I know that feeling.

Yes, kevin, some of my language is deliberately conforntational (i've had a coupel of beers), but isn't suffering from delusions a symptom of mental illness?

It's an unfortunate side effect of occam's razor - it's more rational to assume a minority are wrong than a majority. Nonsense, of course, but I have lots of problems with occam's razor.

http://www.phildennison.net/elvisfans.jpg

I have come to differ on that one. Many would still agree with you. The psychobiological evidence here is that when a person is dreaming, imagining, or envisioning, or seeing, the visual cortex is always active. When a person is talking, thinking or hearing voices, the language areas of the brain are always active. It makes a certain conclusion hard to avoid.

I suppose it's quite an interesting point that many people wish to draw a distinction between dreaming and having hallucinations. Why? The average dream conforms to most definitions of hallucination. The fact that one is lying in a certain position and has one's eyes shut seem incidental. Freud observed that we all go psychotic every night, and are perfectly normal in the morning; he felt this was good news for psychiatry, as it demonstrated that recovery from full blown psychosis was possible.

Excuse me but why bring in periodicals irrelevant to this discussion?

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/takethelead/images/2003/ym.jpg

you see, this is a cruel, unfair stereotype. nowadays santa buys the large majority of his toys wholesale or directly from the toy companies (you think kids these days want handmade wooden dolls? no!). since this only requires a minimum amount of elves, the rest are left unemployed.
the past few decades have seen a lot of elves left aimless and disenfranchised, looking around the world for better jobs. also, as a result of this there has been a tremendous upswing in elf substance abuse and elf-related crime.

Are the brainwaves while one is hallucinating the same as when one is in REM? I'm not sure, but I don't think they are. Sleep is a different state of consciousness from being awake. Hallucinating is different, too, but both of them differing from a wake state doesn't make them the same.
Also, dreamers are able to realize they're dreaming and that none of the dream was real. Hallucinations are distinguished by the hallucinator never knowing if they are real or not.

You're right about being able to know you're hallucinating. Some hallucinators don't know that they are, but some do.

I, in turn, think that the fact that you dream during the sleep cycle and just don't snap into them from a fully alert state, is relavent.

You know how peeples walk around all intoximicated and say, "Dude! I just saw a pixie!"? I wonder if elves get fucked up and say to their friends, "Whoa lil bro, I could swear I just saw one of those humans, man."

TED:     thats cool... want to talk about what happened
ED:    i dont know how to explain it to you
ED:    but anyway ...
TED:     just try
ED:    well
ED:    i had a bad night
TED:    yah
ED:    and i was crying
ED:    and I was online right now when an IM popped up
ED:    in the name was the picture of a cross
ED:    and I tried to reply and said that "cross" couldnt be responded to
FRED: holy shit who is this guy
ED:    i dont know how to put a picture of a cross in the name part of an IM, do you?
TED:     i think u have to change your icon
ED:    no it wasnt an Icon, it was in the name on the very tip of the IM
ED:    it said "IM from" and then the symbol of a cross
ED:    it was a sign
FRED: hahaha wacko
FRED: ask him if he took his lithium
ED:    it was a sign
TED:     what do u think it meant
ED:    that I am doing everything I am supposed to be, that I am on the right path, that its ok to feel lost once in a while
ED:    that i am being watched
FRED: That I am a manic depressive
FRED: that I need meds
FRED: seriously when i was manic i thought i was talking to god on the computer and shit
FRED: thats obvoiusly his problem
TED: lol on the computer?
FRED: well shit like that yeah
FRED: its totally bipolar illness
FRED: totally typical
ED:    that i am being watched
TED:     cool
TED:     are u a very religious person
ED:    yes and no
ED:    I am very spiritual
ED:    and i pray
ED:    and i believe in God and Jesus, and love them
ED:    but i dont go to church
ED:    maybe I will start again
ED:    now after this
FRED: hahahahahaha
FRED: dude needs some Zyprexa
FRED: or some Depakote
FRED: or seraquel
FRED: or you name it
FRED: he needs to take em all in one gulp
TED: sent u a pic of ED
FRED: k
ED:  TED, thank you for listening
ED:    i appreciate it
TED:    no problem
ED:    im gonna finish my poem now
ED:    buddy list me
TED: argh more like block list me
FRED: tell him to take his lithium
FRED: this guy totally looks bipolar
TED: hehe
FRED: LITHIUM
FRED: I'm so happy
FRED: cuz today
FRED: i shaved my head
TED: i found my friends
FRED: and i found god
FRED: on AIM

Nicely put. There are lucid dreams, and there are hallucinations in awareness that one is hallucinating. Hallucinating without such awareness is delusional.

Freud took cocaine, and Kepler was an astrologer, and Newton had some funny ideas about alchemy, and Betrand Russel was a philanderer with halitosis, but let's not hold that against him as these facts bear no relation to the formal question of whether their statements are true or false.

What interests me is this: if you hear a voice telling you something, in virtue of what is that a command? And what obligation is there to obey it? People say all kinds of things to us every day, and even if they're intended as commands, we don't always follow them. So why view inner speech utterances as commands at all?

Jung posits however that in the modern world we have seriously lost touch with the links and communication channels between concious and unconcious thought, between the left and right brain, between the spiritual and the practical. "Man and his Symbols" goes over all this in a very readable manner and it has me looking at the concepts of "sanity" and spirituality rather more openmindedly than I used to.

Once upon a time, people werent crazy. They were sages, seers, shamen. They used drugs to attain such states, or could attain them with meditation or by just being like that anyway. Now, we just label that crazy.

Besides all this, no on on this thread has clearly definied either "crazy" or what they mean exactly by god "talking" to them. Are they actually HEARING a voice in their concious mind, and cannot distinguish it from a real one? Or are they just meditating upon an idea/inspiration and feeling led by it?

For me personally, that goes back to what I tend to believe, which is that we ourselves are "god" and a part of the greater flow of the universe in a way. They say, you know, that memory can be inherited, sort of like instincts are in animals.

OK now I probably sound kooky.

"Man & His Symbols" = great book which everyone should read. I was going to bring up Jung, but I figured "who the hell wants to open that can of worms and will it amount to a hill of beans?"

In terms of religious voices, however, it's more interesting. I guess the most famous example is Abraham and Isaac. I have to say, even though I believe in God, I wouldn't kill my child if he told me too. (for various reasons - I don't think it's the sort of act God would command, so if a voice told me to do that it would be a good sign that it was in fact not Him. Also, I think morality is absolute, so even were God to command it I could not do it.)

I guess if you accept that mystical experience as it has traditionally been described includes a sort of meta-justification, which makes the truth of the experience unquestionable and super-real, then experienceing such a vision of God, associated with a command, it's easier to see why someone might follow it. Why we should obey God is a more difficult (in some ways) question. I think the solution to that has been traditionally to hold that as God is perfectly good he onyl commands the perfectly good. Which might involve jettisoning the Abraham and Isaac story - but if we are going to censor the Bible for God acting in ways which seem immoral Christians would have to abandon the old testament, and Judaism wouldn't be left with a lot. (obviously a more mature understanding of scripture could avoid that problem, as it has done.)

It was inevitable that Jung would come into this. After all, looking at one's dreams and visions as a form of creative perception is a whole other angle to modern psychiatry (or at least the drug-em-and-get-em-back-to-work arm of modern psychiatry). Also, seeing gods and demons as archetypes, or socially shared anthropomorphisms of basic principles of life and reality, seems to me to be a much more sophisticated way of looking at things than just saying, 'follow your visions' or 'ignore your visions'. It allows a dialogue, an exchange, with unconscious material. It brings things into line with the observations of many scientists and artists that some of their most important work came to them as a vision, or in a dream.

Maybe I didn't put that clearly enough. Many=not all.
May not be clinically insane, but they've got one foot in the pool.

Well said Colin, this is a very important point.

Do we label artists and writers mad if an inspiration fell onto their head in a sudden rush?

Yes, I know some artists are actually "insane", but one shouldnt have to follow the other.

Though this gets too close to the "madness and genius" concept and argh I'm not going there, not after the speech I did in my prof writing classes.

"God told me to minister to my community"

"Allah told me to shoot all the infidels!"

Which is sane, which is right? Either, neither? Both?

You do strike me as sane. I myself am extremely sane. Yet I have enough visions and voices to keep me entertained all day long with the TV off! I assure you it's possible.

Speaking of SPECTRUMS, I would like to point out that the book I previously suggested, "Grand Illusions: The Spectral Reality Underlying..." by Gregory Little picks up precisedly where Jung left off with his book about UFO phenomenon.

I have had poems come out of my head almost word-perfect in one draft, and had NO idea how I came up with them (rare, but it does happen). Where's that shit come from? It's always in there. The mind is a strange and powerful thing.

Surely this is a common way to feel? If not, you're all madder than I thought.

"we all go a little mad sometimes.."

Me too. You can have a very active inner world---crack jokes to yourself, make up songs, ponder anything and everything---yet still be pretty grounded in reality.

I missed this part! He takes mighty quick surveys.

you ever read Jaques Vallee?

i suggested something similar earlier upthread:

i think it's more or less the same as that subconcious 'inner voice' everyone has. it's just that religious people tend to interpret it as the voice of god and thus give it more importance.
-- latebloomer (posercore24...), September 16th, 2004.

What this leads to is the question of whether or not all people who believe in religious doctrine of whatever creed are irrational / delusional / insane or not, on an incredibly mild level (which may just be a level of acceptance of received wisdom as opposed to a level of actual engagement with rational argument, which obviously doens't make you insane necessarily, just not interested in / capable of the kind of rationality necessary to conclkude that God doesn't exist - otherwise my [vaguelly] Christian mother would be 'insane'; she doesn't believe in God because he speaks to her but because she thinks or feels or whatever that it's a nice thing to believe and she hasn't ever really engaged seriously with the arguments against), and whether the ones who hear voices are, in addition, schizophrenic or something similar.

Obviously there is SHITLOADS of WILD conjecture here, and I'm sure someone will take offense, but certainly none is meant. I mean I love my mother, obviously, I just think she's completely irrational about some things (like reading The Daily Express, but that's another matter).

I guess it depend on what degree they feel God is talking to them or making them do things. Otherwise non-mentally ill religious people might interpret their interior dialogue as God talking to them. I doubt that requires a truly fucked up or abnormal mechanism. Maybe the voice of 'God' is a part of their subconcious they don't normally access with everyday conciousness so that when they have these 'voices' or thoughts (maybe unleashed as the result of an emotional crisis or some other catalyst) it's interpreted as an "other".

But these people usually can control their own actions, even if 'God' is speaking to them, no? Schizophrenic differ in that they are literally at the mercy of the voices in their heads.

You have a point. Maybe the difference is that they FEEL like they can make the choice between obeying the voices in their head and not obeying (even though in all probability they will)?

Possibly another difference is that their 'voices' are perceived as a break form ordinary conciousness, experienced as an 'other'.

Schizophrenics are largely not able to differentiate between their voices and themselves (which is why they often have 'Jesus' complexes or messiaanic delusions).

Dude, aren't you the one who invoked 90% of ILX agreeing with you as a reason why you're right?

Ha! Can we go back to the basic premises of Christianity here?

Oh, Happy Rosh Hashanah.

You never told me if whether or not you believe these people are actually hearing GOd.

I'd also had a good few bongs but at this point felt totally alert. 'God' told me that the next time I took ecstasy I was going to die, he didn't tell me in which manner, whether it be completely drug induced or by falling under a bus, but this was just so real feeling that however implausible it seemed in the cold light of day I have never touched ecstasy again.

Can't be a bad thing, eh?

thanks,

amateur!!st

Heard of, but never read. I definitely will if you have a suggestion in particular. Thanks to overstock.com, I spend about $100/month on books.

Do you want to spend $200/month on a opera singer's career?

-- redfez (redfe...), September 17th, 2004.

get 'dimensions' or 'passport to magonia' first if you can.

also recommended: 'confrontations', 'forbidden science', 'challenge to science' and 'messengers of deception'.

also recommended in that vein (not by vallee though):

'the trickster and the paranormal' by george p. hansen and 'borderlands' by mike dash.