Personal relationships with deities

[robvalue]

This is a phrase I've heard thrown about so much that I thought it deserved its own topic. To me, this is a sensible, loose definition of a personal relationship:

An independent observer can verify that

1) Both parties in the relationship exist, and are easily distinguishable from being imaginary.
2) Both parties have an independent intelligence.
3) Both parties directly communicate with the other party in a meaningful, observable way.

In this way, I can have personal relationship with any human, any animal that has some way to at least acknowledge my interaction with it, and arguably with an artificial intelligence. It seems to me that if these 3 criteria are not met, it is not a meaningful personal relationship. The only exception I can think of is where one party becomes unable to communicate at some point, such as a friend going into a coma. You could maybe argue that you can continue to have a personal relationship with them, based on your history together, even though they can't directly answer back.

However, it seems to me that most people's personal relationship with God/Jesus/Allah etc. satisfies not even one of these criteria. In those cases, I would expect to witness them simply sitting in a room by themselves, either talking out loud to no one or just thinking things. How can I possibly accept this as a relationship? I've asked for indirect confirmation, such as the other party telling them something they couldn't already know, but I've never received this even using very simple criteria.

If there is anyone here who thinks their relationship with a deity actually does meet all these criteria, I'd be very interested to hear about it. Do you think you could convince an independent observer of those points? If someone wants to argue you can have a relationship while not meeting any of these criteria, then feel free. Then there is the problem of people all having a personal relationship with supposedly the same being (God/Jesus etc) but then coming back with contradictory messages. This means that one of these must be the case:

(1) Most of the people who think they are having this relationship actually aren't
(2) The relationship is such that the being cannot accurately express itself in a meaningful way
(3) The being is deliberately sending out conflicting messages
(4) There is no such being and people are imagining the responses

This last point is covered well in this humorous video by Nonstampcollector.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLBDFe3mDtk