God can never know more than the host

[ignoramus]

Kudos to the other posters for giving me this idea. I feel it deserves exploring further.

We know God is Omni everything.
We also know that God talks to theists. (We've been told by many -they can't all be wrong, can they?)

My question is: Why cannot God ever tell one of his believers something they don't already know?

The sceptics answer obviously is because God is a product of their imagination and therefore this "character" can never be
more knowledgeable than the mind it inhabits.

Theists? Does he talk in hunches? gut instinct? feelings? from the heart?
Got bad news there too... Those are human traits. We all have them. That's just your brain number-crunching to make sense of a particular situation.

It's pretty obvious really.

Let the apologetics begin:

[MTL]

[brewer]

I predict we will hear something about predictions.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Why is this thread in Life Sciences? Am I missing something?

I cannot speak for other believers. I had two profoundly religious experiences that would Maslow would have called “peak experiences”. Other than that I have had many, many times when both minor and major life events unfolded in truly uncanny ways. Generally, I have not been overly impressed with prayer requests. The “soft, still voice” tends to sound like my own. That said, I do have an on-going relationship with Being-as-Such (an intentionally neutral term I only use on AF) that pretty much colors every quiet moment.

[vorlon13]

In Mormonism, their 'God' demonstrably knows LESS than Joe Smith since Joe (and his successors in the LDS hierarchy) have, until recently, had to correct, change, revise, alter, update and reinterpret every revelation 'God' has seen fit to give them.

One might conclude 'God' was showing favoritism and gave all the good stuff to L. Ron Hubbard . . .

[Whateverist]

But several things occurred to me, immediately:

1.  I didn't have a religious experience.
What I had was a lucid dream in which my own subconscious was telling me
that I had outgrown the need for this gobbledegook.

2.  I DID have an authentic experience of Jesus...but that's NOT to say it was also of GOD.
As I have previously hypothesized,
Jesus is no more the "son of god" than any of us are;
and indeed, may be nothing more than a demon or lower-echelon spirit,
(of which there may be many, the fallen old Greek and Roman and Egyptian gods also among them, for all we know)
trying to trick humanity, with a mix of truth and lies,
into paying attention to him and believing that he is something he isn't,
which gives him, as a demon, strength.

3.  Jesus IS the Son of God, God DID turn His back on me,
and I am either beyond redemption, or simply not worth redeeming.
(Which means God can't be as merciful and loving as the Bible says He is).

4.  I didn't have a religious experience.
What I had was a lucid dream in which my own subconscious was telling me
that I had outgrown the need for this gobbledegook.


So my question to the Christians is this:

Why would a truly loving, forgiving God shut His ears to such an earnest plea?
Does the Bible lie when it says Ask, Seek, Knock?

If it was the Devil deceiving me,
why oh why would God allow Satan to deceive me
at the point where I had made a leap of faith?

If God does, in fact, exist,
but this was merely the work of my own skeptical subconscious,
why again would God not overrule my subconscious and silence it,
and accept my previous night's confession of a lack of faith,
and plea for forgiveness, mercy, and for subsequent illumination?

[My bold of your fourth point. Oops, should have bolded your number one I see now.]

Just to say if you didn't have "a religious experience", then no one ever has a religious experience. I have no doubt something like this underlies everything that goes by that description. You had a significant dream to you personally and seem to have internalized its import. The key with all unconscious phenomenon is to hold it in an "as if" manner. Its meaning is always poetic, never prosaic. It meant exactly what you thought/felt it meant and perhaps it helped you over the cognitive dissonance to some degree?

---

Why is this thread in Life Sciences? Am I missing something?

I cannot speak for other believers. I had two profoundly religious experiences that would Maslow would have called “peak experiences”. Other than that I have had many, many times when both minor and major life events unfolded in truly uncanny ways. Generally, I have not been overly impressed with prayer requests. The “soft, still voice” tends to sound like my own. That said, I do have an on-going relationship with Being-as-Such (an intentionally neutral term I only use on AF) that pretty much colors every quiet moment.

The thread was started by an ignoramus?

[ignoramus]

I would have thought "psychology" was a more accurate field to discuss these mental phenomena?

[brewer]

If god can't know more than the host and there are not any non human vectors (i.e. only humans know god), does this make god a parasite?

[ignoramus]

Very good analogy Mark!

I think we can think of the God phenomenon as a parasite of the mind...
Without a host, God cannot exist.
He injects himself to the young host via the parents! He is an aurally transmitted virus.
Once embedded he then feeds of the host's emotions.

So who is the "real" God?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Talk about insufficient evidence! There really is no reason to suppose that 'memes' are a real phenomena.