sandlewood

For you atheists who were once theists, how do you view and explain communication with God? I presume you once believed you were communicating with him at one time? If I were actually communicating with God, that would be fairly good evidence to me and I might remain a theist and never switch to the atheist position. (Theists, please keep in mind that atheism is not the rejection of God.) I know that that theists will claim that you were never a "true Christian" and that you were never really in communication with God. But I wonder how they know that current Christians are "true Christians" and that they will someday not become atheists.

I'm asking this in kind of an intentionally naïve way. Yes, I know that no one claims to hear Gods voice as if they are taking to him on the telephone. From what people claim, it is more like thoughts appearing in your head. But I'm utterly amazed that theists will take this to be communication from God. I'm at a loss to understand how they can tell the difference between their own thoughts and thoughts that are induced by God. I don't understand how they are not suspicious that those thoughts are not simply their own conscience at work.

Not long ago I read a thread on a Christian board where theists claimed that God talks to different people in different ways. One woman even said that for her God was that "voice" in her head that tells her to return the shopping cart when she was done with it. Now it seems to me that God talking to different people in different ways is an excuse for inconsistent observations. It's a case of "anything that happens is proof of God". But why are Christians so ready to believe that their fellow Christians are actually speaking with god when it works differently for everyone and there is apparently no objective "test" to know if someone is really speaking to God or merely hearing his own thoughts?

I've never been anything but an atheist. When I was very young, I grew up in something of a religious environment—not so much in my immediate family, though those relatives on my father's side were fairly devout Catholics. But even as a child, the main thing that kept me from believing that a god existed was that I didn't hear anything. Others would talk of praying and of talking with god. Of course being a child I didn't take this to be anything more than a literal conversation, so naturally I didn't understand what anyone was hearing. I felt silly talking to thin air. So I simply went to church and kept my mouth shut.

ImGod

My old church talked about the many ways god communicates. That way they covered a larger basis. If they said that god had to speak to you directly, most people would give up prayer after repeatedly being unanswered.

An example of the extended communication method was the newspaper. The local paper ran a series of articles on stay at home moms the month my wife was struggling with whether to go part time. A coincidence, but rather compelling if you were praying and looking for a “sign”. You can extend this to the trivial; where are my key prayers, etc. You keep looking until you find what you had to find and give god the credit (like you would give up looking for your keys since you can’t go anywhere without them).

This was an excellent technique my church used to make you feel like you had a personal connection with god without having to actually "hear" him. I realized as I got a little older that the harder I worked on the major issues in my life (career, family, etc.) the less I needed to pray to god for guidance. So I stopped and trusted myself for the answers. It now feels really odd when I hear others pray for guidance and assistance on matters that they can directly affect without the intervention a “higher power”. The answer to your "prayers" is usually inside you and the voice you hear when you stop to pray/think is your own just telling you what you already know.

[ December 31, 2001: Message edited by: ImGod ]</p>

Makai

Well, I used to be a theist a year or two back, and I never 'heard the voice of God'. While I did 'talk to God', I never heard or felt anything that was a response. The only difference back then is that I felt that while I did not get a response, I thought there was a possibility I was being heard. I can't say, even when I really believed, that I ever felt *any* sort of response to my communications. While I had my 'blinders' on, this didn't bother me, but after I started question my beliefs, this lack of response became something which stuck out in my mind. I think that most people when 'communicating' are simply expressing their hopes and desires to themselves...people who say that they are actually having a two-way conversation, I'd have to think they're either making it up, or are so bent on a response that they delude themselves. Just my two cents.

-Makai

DarkDruid

Personally, I can't conceive how anyone can possibly hope to have a two-way conversation with a non-temporal being.

Although I've pretty much been an Atheist my entire life, I had a brief stint in Theism during the end of my gradeschool years. It was more of a way for me to appear non-threatening (I was a nice guy, but nobody would believe it if I didn't believe in god) than a real belief system. However, being somewhat of a rationalist, I tried all sorts of crazy ways to get god to talk to me. I tried doing something wrong, and all I heard was my conscience. I tried thinking of a dilema I was having, and then choosing a random page in the Bible to see if it matched up. And of course I tried "mentally speaking" to god. Of course nothing happened, but it gave me a large hint as to the nature of the universe.

Of course, that was around the same time I was reading up on psychic powers and whatnot. I stumbled accross a book that supposedly told you how to levitate objects. It described how levitating objects with your mind was like raising your arm. You can't just think about raising your arm, you have to acctually raise your arm. From what I've observed, most churches and religious people function in this manner. Pray and pray and pray, and if you don't hear anything, you must not be listening. Eventually, you'll want to hear something so badly, you'll just make something up... just the same way I was convinced I could move a pencil just a fraction of a millimeter with my mind.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Sandlewood et al,
Of course, you guys are all correct. There's no way to tell the difference between our own thoughts and "communication" from God.

Point is God has already communicated to us through the Church's oral and written tradition. God is finished with His public revelation. Private revelation, tho possible, is not the norm, nor is it necessary as most Christian denominations would have you think.

But just cuz God doesn't talk back to us doesn't mean we shouldn’t talk back to Him. Even if you can’t believe in one word of His 4,000 year long soliloquy with us called the Bible, you still ought to have plenty to say to Him... complaints, hopes, questions. Even if you don’t believe He exists, I highly recommend communicating to Him in this way as a means of making yourself more explicit to at least yourself, and if He exists, to Him as well.

I've noticed an irony in my own prayer life. Often times after praying for someone who needed help, circumstances would conspire to put that person into my life, forcing me to take a more active role with them. In other words, God answered my prayer by having me do what I was asking God to do. Shows His sense of humor.

It's more likely that God communicates via the way I just described than via words. Dreams, predilections, coincidence, things you happen to notice, these are His providential domains. If atheists paid more attention to these things and less attention to fools like me they'd have more chance of becoming theists. Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

CodeMason

I have tried communicating with God. I found it an utterly pointless excercise. You're more likely to get a response from talking to a rock.

Vibr8gKiwi

How was this decided? Did god come down to the last prophet and say "hey, this is the end of my public revelation, I won't be talking to anyone directly anymore." Or did a bunch of early Catholics get together and take a vote where they all just noted god wasn't talking to any of them so the heavens must now be closed? I know most of the Christians sects (though not all) believe god is silent now, but I don't see any reason for that conclusion.

(please don't stretch the warnings in Revelation to try to deal with this. Revelation refers only to itself ("this book of prophecy") and was written before the scriptures were canonized together as a book and so couldn't be referring to anything but itself).

sandlewood

Thanks for all the responses. So it seems that people do not think of communication with god as a two-way communication in which they somehow hear him. Or at least, that's true of the people here. Though I'm not so sure about theists who restrict themselves to Christian boards. I'm not sure what you mean by "tradition" here. I assume you are not referring to the Bible. Do you mean the Christian religion? Are you saying that God has created the religion itself? That he has directed events so that the Christian religion was cultivated. Has God said that he is finished? That's not to be sarcastic, I really don't know if there is such a statement in the Bible or not. I don't think that "speaking"—that is, thinking—to a non-existent deity will help me to be more explicit. Why should it be any particular non-existent deity, anyway? Why not Allah? But I do think there is something to what you are saying. I think writing your thoughts helps to clarify them. As my Introduction to Philosophy teacher said, "if you're not writing, you're not reading." Anyway, that's all beside the point. So God communicates through events and happenings in the natural world. I would assume that these things are not proof of God to you, but that having already accepted that God exists, you also accept that God directs events. Do you believe that every event that occurs is caused by God? Or only some of them? If only some, then what methods do you use to distinguish the messages from the other events? I'd think that some events are not directed by God but are caused by humans, since we are supposed to have free will. So you need a way to distinguish these. And perhaps there are further events that are caused by neither God nor humans but are simply random. Deciding which events are actual messages would seem to be open to interpretation and very error-prone. I'd hate to have to go through life thinking that every event—every story in a newspaper, every coincidence, every meeting with a new person—was some message from God that I'm supposed to unravel. I'd go nuts.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Vibr8,
You ask:


The Christian sects believe many things by osmosis from the Catholic Church, starting with the Bible. How do they know these writings and not those writings are the inspired word of God? Because the Catholic Church decided this matter in the 4th century. How do they know God is silent now? Because the Catholic Church said so. But it's hard to find a Christian honest enough or informed enough to admit that.

How do Christian sects square believing these foundational Church teachings while disbelieving Church teachings on just about everything else? They can't. But it doesn't bother them because they make no pretense of having an intellectual tradition. From the get-go Protestants gave up on having an internally consistent modus operandi. Ergo, much of what little they believe that isn't ad hoc, they believe via osmosis from the Catholic Church.

To answer your question, the Incarnation (the Word became flesh), is the reason behind public revelation ending with the ministry of Jesus Christ. The rational for this can be expressed syllogistically as follows:

1) God, by definition, is perfect.
2) Ergo, what God does, God does perfectly.
3) Ergo, what Jesus did, Jesus did perfectly.
4) Ergo, Jesus perfectly communicated publicly the mind of God to man.
5) Ergo, God cannot make additional public communications to man without it indicting Jesus' public ministry.
6) God cannot indict God.

Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

bgponder

Hey Y'all, Happy New Year,

This topic runs deep with me, so here you get to surmise that the cornbread guy is either a closet Neo-Catholic/self-styled mystic/pantheist who lost too many brain cells in the youthful discretions of the 70's, or is merely foolish.

I struggle with a mental symphysis for Catholic conceptions of God/existence, and whether the universe and existence itself is indeed conscious, for there can be no doubt that the universe contains the capacity for all consciousness. The current evidence we have of the structures necessary to facilitate consciousness indicate it as exclusively biological; yet biological life is derived from non-biological structures. We have our consciousness; "lesser" things of the animal kingdom have theirs; it seems that consciousness can be held in degrees according to the complexity of structure, with the strange side effect as we move toward the hive and the colony of the mass acting as one.

I am by no means suggesting that rocks, minerals, the elements of abiogenesis, the chemical elements or quarks necessarily entail the eventual rise of self awareness, but in our universe, in fact, it did, as far as we know.

Now indulge me a bit further before I am cut to pieces by Occam's razor, and my friend Brother Albert Cipriani, and allow that with an amorphous, only slight perceptual trick, that of defining "communication" as interaction, we do indeed communicate with existence each and every moment, to our singular and collective good or ill, (for in this scenario indifference does not and never has existed--everything matters) whether asleep or awake, extending ourselves to others or introspecting, biologically alive, or dead, and further, through the happenstance of the evolution of our species, biology itself, our planet, our sun, our galaxy, from the beginning of time through now and beyond, we have communicated and shall continue through our children, and all the changes to existence wrought by all the doing and non-doing--for existence itself, even though it could have been different without us and our communication, is in fact what it is, with us and our communication.

Now if God is Existence, then God speaks with us and we speak with God, singularly, selectively, and collectively, as we will, and as God wills.

**Sigh**

<img src="graemlins/boohoo.gif" border="0" alt="[Boo Hoo]" /> If only I could get past all those codified, contradictory, anthropomorphic, anachronistic things that make accepting my own intuitions so damned hard.

Anyway, that's my two cents, sorry if I bored anybody.

Peace Cornbread Happy New Year!! Barry

[ January 01, 2002: Message edited by: bgponder ]

[ January 01, 2002: Message edited by: bgponder ]</p>