What God Actually Said (Or Didn't) To My Readers
As I wrote the other day:
What I want to know, from my ex-religious readers, is about your relationsip with God. Not what was happening in reality, but what was happening in your head, in your own created reality? How did you feel that God actually interacted with you? What sort of things did God say, and how? When did you communicate? And how, given your present non-belief, do you explain all of that now?
On the other hand, you could have ditched belief precisely because you never did actually feel like God was really there and there was all too often a massive silence.
I thought it would be nice to compile the responses in the comments section here.
I truely believed that god was talking to me through thoughts and impressions. I wouldn't act on it all the time. I guess when you think that the holy spirit is guiding you and your who life is immersed in the christian culture then you naturally gravitate to thoughts ans ideas of doing what you think god god is telling you to do. After watching Derrin Brown (or any decent mentalist) I'm convinced that the mind is a vastly powerful underestimated instrument that can easily be manipulated to do insane things.
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“What sort of things did God say, and how? When did you communicate?”
I was a nominal, lukewarm, church-going believer up until age 13. After attending a church camp that year, I became very rabidly committed to Christianity, church, and intense prayer. Hours-long prayers after school, alone in my room, were commonplace. Most of those sessions did not involve hearing anything, but typically included very subversive (to me now, at least) cycles of binging on self-loathing and inadequacy before a perfect god, and then purging on relief from that strong guilt once sensations of forgiveness washed over me: typical fundamentalist Protestant stuff.
After one particular prayer marathon, unable to reconcile the very straightforward command of Jesus for all Christians to “Be perfect, as you Heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:48) with my rather catastrophic inability to follow this command, and after hours of begging God to help me, I very clearly heard a voice say, “Just be perfect.” It was a voice that I knew I did not hear with my ears, but one I could not recognize as belonging to my own “inner voice”. It was the first and last time I would have such an experience.
“And how, given your present non-belief, do you explain all of that now?”
A few features of my story may be very familiar to some former believers. One is my age at the time of my experience. Evangelicals know that adolescence is a very emotionally turbulent and vulnerable time for children. They explicitly prey on children at this age to win new converts, so they will offer things like church camps that separate children from their familiar surroundings and social safety networks, and drill them with indoctrination techniques that any self-respecting cult knows work. It also should be no surprise that things like intense isolation, prayer, meditation, group chanting, fasting, etc. are all tried and true techniques to induce unusual perceptions.
In my case, I now believe that what I experienced was a form of autonetic agnosia deficit, an inability to recognize or identify one’s thoughts as belonging to oneself. Some schizophrenics suffer from this type of source-monitoring error which impairs the ability to identify self-generated mental events.
We know that the right posterior parietal cortex is a critical link within the simulation network for self-recognition & sense of agency. Activation of the right inferior parietal lobe/temporoparietal junction correlates with the subjective sense of ownership in action execution. Accumulating evidence from fMRI, as well as lesion studies in neurological patients indicates that the right inferior parietal cortex, at the junction with the posterior temporal cortex (temporoparietal junction), plays a critical role in the distinction between self-produced actions & actions perceived in others. Lesions of this region can produce a variety of disorders associated with body knowledge & self-awareness, such as anosognosia. It is interesting that Michael Persinger’s famous ‘god helmet’ magnetically stimulates the right temporal lobe & evokes the perception of other minds.
My best guess is that my self-induced prayer trance elicited a temporary downregulation of activity in the temporoparietal junction, and a very typical, very context-appropriate thought became something that felt very foreign and “other”.
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You used the word “rabidly” toward the beginning of your post. I like that word. It kind of describes much of my demeanor for some years.
After I rededicated my life to Christ in my mid-20s, I was rabid about sin. Specifically, sexual sin. Because I felt God telling me to be so.
If I was watching TV and someone was committing infidelity against a spouse, I would get rabidly upset. Because I felt God was rabidly upset and therefore he was telling me to respond in the same way. After all, this TV adulterer was setting up some sort of terrible example that would inspire other audience viewers to sin against their spouses. When I went to the movie theater and I saw a film where a teenager chose to lose his / her virginity at a party, I was rabidly angry, again because it seemed God was telling me to be angry. Hearing discussions about sexual activity on Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey? Look out! God and I were the rabid tag team of anger.
It’s funny, I never got rabidly upset about other biblical sins, such as lying, killing, stealing, worshipping via a different religion, etc.
I can now trace my ‘rabidness’ back to my stereotypical Victorian grandmother, who I did love in my childhood. She lived to be 90+. And she was rabidly angry about sex. She read her bible daily and went to church faithfully. I’m sure she was the way she was because she felt God telling her to be this way, when in fact, it was probably my great-grandmother who trained up her daughter to be this way.
My grandmother passed on her sexual values to my mother, who was the person I cherished the most in this world until the day my mother died. My mother was my best friend. Her head wasn’t quite so screwy when it came to, um, screwing. She wasn’t quite as disapproving of sex as my grandmother. But, she was still somewhat Victorian, once removed. So my mother undoubtedly knew God disapproved of so many things sexual and that he told her feel the same way.
I should, at this point, be crystal clear that I don't harbor any anger toward either of these two women who were central forces in my formative years. They were simply who they were. They showed more love, rather than the opposite. Like all of us, they were a product of their times.
When I rededicated my life to Christ in my mid-20s, I dove head-first into being more like my grandmother because God told me my grandmother was the one who was most accurate in her thinking. I felt God telling me that my grandmother had more wisdom when it came to God’s will.
I felt like I was now a member of my own particular little trinity.
Why did I have to rededicate myself in my mid-20s? I did so after having left the church for about 8 years as a teenager / young adult. I rabidly left the church earlier because I found myself rabidly attracted to others of my own gender. I left the church because I felt that God was angry at me. And if my grandmother or mother ever found out about me being "a homosexual", they’d be angry at me because God told them to be angry at me. As well as the members of the only church I knew growing up. As well as all the other people in my conservative little town. Everyone would be rabidly angry with me for being gay because they knew God would be angry with me for being gay.
So, when I rededicated my life to Christ, I necessarily rededicated my life to rabid anger. Perhaps the more rabidly focused I demonstrated myself to be, the less temptation to my sexual attraction….
Fast forward to now (25+ years later), out of the closet and out of the church, and I have a sweet partner whose family never was religious, so he never had a personal grasp of church, Christ, God. Therefore, he has never felt God telling him to be angry about anything. Rabid nor otherwise. From the day he was born, by default, he was and is an atheist.
On the other hand, in today’s social / political culture, who are some of the most rabidly angry people in the country??? Those who sincerely say: “God told me….”
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I think in a sense for me it was more just about a feeling of having tried to do something about something that I couldn't actually do anything about by doing something that I could tell myself worked even though it would have been, andwas, trivial to see that it actually didn't. I knew it was a contradiction, but I tried not to think about it because thinking about it meant having to actually do something about that contradiction.
I've learned a great deal about the human mind since then - especially about the many cognitive biases I can now identify as having played a part of it; and the gradual path I took while trying to square beliefs I knew where in conflict with reality with said reality.
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Never heard a word, never saw a sign despite over 70 years of trying. Finally just said "eff it". Turned to those who can show me many more reasons to not believe.
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Never heard a word, I prayed, I fasted, I cried, I tried but nothing but a vast silence.
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I think my form of "communication" with God was largely one of desperation. I read all the Bible's promises for believers, and I heard stories from other people who claimed they'd seen angels or something of the sort, but I never personally experienced anything that could be considered supernatural: just a hodgepodge of coincidences that I attributed to the divine. I thought if I only believed harder and more completely I would experience something amazing.
When I was little I wholeheartedly, and naively, promised myself, and God I suppose, that I wouldn't become a statistic in college. I wouldn't be one of the many who "fell away". I wouldn't let the devil get me. And I didn't. I just realized that there was no devil by whom to be gotten.
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While I was still a believer, even when my faith was at its strongest, I don't recall any time when I felt like I could hear God speaking to me in a literal voice with words. I still would have said that God was communicating with me through the Holy Spirit, but it was always more through feelings and intuitions. If I came to a conclusion about something, even if in reality it was all of my own doing, I would attribute it to the Holy Spirit guiding me and speaking to me through my conscious. I can't say for sure, but I would say that this is how very many (maybe most) evangelicals "communicate" with God.
I recall a few instances where people would talk about how they could literally hear the voice of God at times, but I have to wonder how honest those people were, or if it's possible that they may have had some kind of genuine mental condition that cause them to hear voices they interpreted as "God." Or they were just so enamored with the idea of God speaking to them that they projected him onto the thoughts inside their own head, until they couldn't tell the two apart.
For me, it wasn't until I really started questioning my faith that I put God to the test. I don't even remember how many nights I would lay awake in bed, begging God in my head to just say one clear word to me that I knew wasn't coming from within my own thoughts. I did this for at least two years. Sometimes when I was by myself, I would actually scream out loud, often to the point of tears, begging him to say ANYTHING and prove to me that I was wrong about him. Needless to say, it never happened. I feel foolish now thinking back on those days, but at the same time, it's what I had to go through to purge myself of the idea of God being real.
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I was taught two things - God is all around, present in his world, and God communicates through the Bible. So those were the two places I felt him. That warm, happy feeling you get on a nice spring day, therefore, became "God's presence". It felt a lot like a hug, or hanging out with a good friend.
I also looked for meaning in the Bible, and anything that felt significant was attributed to God pointing it out to me.
Basically, both of them were attributing supernatural causes to my own thought processes. I still get the warm fuzzy feeling on a nice sunny day. I just now recognize it as my body liking being out in the sun and fresh air. Nothing supernatural about it.
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The church of Christ teaches its adherents that person to person verbal communication with God is over and unnecessary, because the bible is the inspired word of God pertaining to all of life. All extra biblical communication, including prophecies and speaking in tongues, ended with the death of the last apostle. Technically, the bible is it. However, individuals often feel that God communicates in more passive ways like answering prayers, granting wishes, and "opening doors." As long as it didn't contradict the bible and was beneficial, it was from God. The message would either be he loves me or he approves of my actions. Some people feel the love more than others. We didn't have much money but I would find great deals on things we needed, which became a sign that God was with me, disregarding the fact that I spent time and energy actively looking for ways to afford those things. Really, anything good and pleasant was confirmation of God in my life. When life isn't always pleasant, or bad things happened, the guilt for not being close enough to God crept in. Efforts at prayer ( one way communication) and bible reading for answers are increased. If life continues to be harsh, God was "refining us by fire and perfecting us through trials," because he loves us. I was a rabid bible reader, which led to my eventual realization that it wasn't actually the words of a God.
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Thanks to the readers here for providing some interesting accounts!
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