Evidence for Believing

[mordant]

@Lek

Some people do not like to say it, some people do not like to hear it, but fuck them all.

The truth of the matter is that when individuals personally witness that which has no support to prove to others of its existence except to be taken upon by fallible religious faith, then that thing exists purely as a concept in the mind of the individual experiencing it. Yes, I am referring to a form of delusion. Religious people no more hear god than schizophrenics hear whatever they hear or people prone to hallucinations see what they see.

But they're not hearing anything. That's the point. So it's not even hallucinations.

Delusions, yes. They feel things and think that must be God.

ETA: By "they", I am referring to the typical theist who does not have schizophrenia or anything of that sort, and who is sure God exists and "speaks" to them in some way.

In the long-ago when I was an evangelical Christian I used the same vocabulary. It's correct that I was not hallucinating or hearing things. I had simply been taught to reassign mundane things like intuition or internal rumination or imagination to be manifestations of god's influence on my thinking.

I have no doubt that a minority of people DO hallucinate, due to mental illness or to some propensity to certain unusual mental connections like synesthesia. But it is rare. Time and again I would be having a conversation with Christian friends and they would be thinking about some decision they had to make and rather than just say what they think or feel or intuit they would just say that god had "impressed upon them" that some course or other was the best way forward.

As a child I was taught the story of Samuel, a young boy who was in the care of an elderly priest at the temple. He kept getting awakened by a "still, small voice" calling his name. He thought it was the old dude who had called him, and the third time he awakened the priest asking him what he wanted, the old man said, look, if this happens again, you are to say, "here i am".

So in other words from the cradle we were immersed in the notion that god speaks to us in these subtle ways that are easily mistaken for something mundane, so we were being taught to see the divine in ... well, basically in whatever we wanted to see it in.