Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – hearing voices

Occasionally, I come upon a post by a theist and then comment on it.  A couple of exchanges in, suddenly there are “rules” that are enforced when the Christian can’t find an answer or finds the line of debate less than flattering to his points.  Oh well, that doesn’t stop reality from existing.

The post I found was on hearing the Christian god.  This claim of directly interacting with the deity is pretty common in Christianity, where each Christian is sure that they were told directly what this god “really” means when it comes to the bible, etc.   Our author states “Without God personally speaking to us, we are not able to follow Him. And without following Him, we are left following a Book and the dictates of the religious community in which we live. The problem is: The Book points to Him, and in Him alone do we find eternal life.”

That does present a problem since Christians don’t agree on what this god is saying.

The claim that god speaks to someone is fraught with peril.  In addition to the wildly differing claims by Christians about what this god says to them, we also have that Christians claim that their god tells them to kill their children, or do other heinous acts, and they follow through.  There is no way to tell who is telling the truth, if any at all.

The author states that “If someone thinks they are hearing from God, there is no telling what they might do to act upon what they are hearing.”  This is true, we have no idea and this god does nothing to show any differences between hearing this god and hearing voices if you are schizophrenic.   He also states “The other difficulty we have (and this applies to believers) is knowing the difference between what God is saying and what we are saying.”  That is indeed the case: how can one tell since each Christian comes up with a different message from this god?

In that we have these problems, there is no reason to think that anyone is hearing from this god.

Our author also tries to claim that we simply must be hearing from this god because the mind isn’t the chemical lump in our skull, it has to be something else.  What this something else is seems to be a little beyond our author since he never explains it or explains how it is interacting with the brain and acting just like the brain is its source.  We also get the usual willful ignorance from a theist that the entire universe is supposed random, when that’s not what the evidence indicates.

It’s easy to simply say “no” when you want to claim that the brain isn’t the source of the mind, but a lot harder to defend that position in reality.  That’s why our author ends up making very silly claims that if we don’t believe in his magic, then we simply must believe that our minds are “illusions” and life is meaningless.  All he has are baseless claims intended to gin up fear.

And as one final attempt to gin up fear, we have the common Christian claim that atheism somehow is responsible for atrocities, when that is not the case.  But it sure does make a theist happy to spread such fear and try to convince people that only they are the salvation, they and the “word” of their god.  How dare we know that we don’t need them and their god to be humane humans.  Humans are good without their god or any other.

Father along down the comments we have other comments by our author and the site owner like “”One things I found when I became a Christian is how much Christian denominations actually agree, doctrinally. The examples you cite are not, to my knowledge, differences held among Christians. They seem to be opinions held by those that are not.”

This was in response to a post I made that our Christians edited to not show that Christian have doctrinal difference.  What are those differences you might ask?

what morals does this god want?

what is heaven/hell?

is there free will or predestination?

what is the purpose of prayer?

What/who really was Jesus Christ?

how is one baptized and what is the significance?

do saints exist/intercede?

what will get one saved?

what parts of the bible are to be taken literally, metaphorically or ignored? 

This isn’t even remotely the end to those points. Rather inconvenient when an atheists shows that a Christian is either ignorant or is making false claims intentionally, isn’t it?

I was told that Christian are to look to the life and behavior of Jesus as captured in the Gospels and not religious doctrines.  However, again, we have problems with what JC does in the gospels and in Revelation, something that many Christians don’t like to admit to at all.

Those posts showing where JC calls people a dog, says that people should hate and abandon families and kills a lot of people in revelations are also being held in moderation.

“what would Jesus do” ends up being quite a lot of different things and that is evidently embarrassing.