You can be sure that most folk to whom God speaks are not surprised at all. Surely you understand that God only speaks to very worthwhile people.
Worthless folk like me are way way down the list.
And surely, if God did speak to you you would instantly recognize the Authority, and not question Him, right? I'm pretty damn sure that the day God speaks to me I'll know it.
Now that I think about it, in fact, I remember a strange event from long ago where I sang a song to a flowing echo and all the words to it appeared as I sung put there the moment I needed them to come out. Looking back on it I see it's very strange, but at the time I know for sure it wasn't me that was singing.
I recall now also, a TV show I saw, where some 40 year old man, who had experienced many a blow to the head, got hit again and suddenly could play the most amazingly beautiful piano instantly without having taken a single lesson, and who is now a professional song writer and musician. He sees the notes fly by, left to right, in space before his eyes, and the notes tell his fingers what to do.
In order to understand this stuff, in my opinion at least, we are going to have to do a lot more than look under a petri dish.
"You can be sure that most folk to whom God speaks are not surprised at all".
Thus the psychosis. I should actually use the word delusion (though modern psychiatry gives a pass on religion as a delusional disorder simply because it more or less had to be grandfathered in. New religions though depending on how zany they are can be considered folie a deux aka mass delusional disorder). If someone said to you "you know the bacteria are talking to me with words on the petri dish and I am not surprised at all", what would you say?
"And surely, if God did speak to you you would instantly recognize the Authority, and not question Him, right? I'm pretty damn sure that the day God speaks to me I'll know it."
History is littered with episodes where europeans were greeted as gods by cultures they visited. This is like an aztec who has never seen a european saying "if I heard a european speak, I'd recognize it as a european". Or consider if the bacteria on the petri dish were claiming to be the creator of the universe? Surely you'd raise an eyebrow or two? Even more convincing, is we have proven diagnoseable medical conditions where people claim God is directly speaking to them. The only way we prove it is because he's telling them to do things society considers unconventional and telling the individuals they have powers that society considers impossible (like flying). Look up paranoid schizophrenia and tell me again if you're sure you can truly recognize the voice of God if it speaks to you.
"I recall now also, a TV show I saw, where some 40 year old man, who had experienced many a blow to the head, got hit again and suddenly could play the most amazingly beautiful piano instantly without having taken a single lesson, and who is now a professional song writer and musician. He sees the notes fly by, left to right, in space before his eyes, and the notes tell his fingers what to do."
So what? People have had head trauma and become homosexual afterwards, before being completely heterosexual. People have had head trauma and acquired new languages, had extreme personality changes, and etc. And so on. People also wake up and forget who their wives, kids, and themselves are. Strange unexplained occurrences doesn't necessitate the existence of other sentience. They simply explain our lack of understanding of certain subjects. People used to think disease was caused by evil spirits and that not bathing would keep those spirits away by bad smell. Now we know what causes most disease. The diseases we don't know what causes them, we don't assume its the devil or evil spirits. We simply concede that we don't understand the process.
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