This thread, and especially this post, and even more specifically, this statement:
makes me wonder how a Christian KNOWS that God is interacting with them, and that they’re not just willing themselves to believe that, or just automatically branding whatever they’re thinking/feeling/doing as a Gift of the Holy Spirit, for lack of an alternate explanation.
Can a Christian mistakenly believe they are interacting with God?
If yes, then:
How many Christians, out of all the Christians that are, mistakenly believe they are interacting with God, and how do we tell the difference (in cases where their beliefs/actions may affect us)?
Furthermore:
How can a Christian definitively tell the difference between warm’n’fuzzy and the real Gifts of the Holy Spirit?
This causes me a considerable amount of concern, given that God doesn’t concretely show his love in a This Is God’s Love™ See It Tonight at 11 kind of way, but yet people claim to be influenced in real concrete ways that can affect (and have affected) others.
Sure. Assuming I was some evil demonic entity, the very first thing I’d do when communicating with mortals who would respond positively to me if they thought I was some benevolent creature, would be to disguise myself as something good. If we’re assuming supernatural creatures exist, then why can’t they disguise their presence? Any demon of sufficient power should, IMO at least, be able to make someone think that they’re talking to God, or any of a number of gods.
And that’s assuming that there’s some sort of supernatural deception involved. What if, for example, there was a whole cosmos full of gods and goddesses? How would you know if the one you were in communication with and who was filling you with feelings of love and life and all that, was the one you wanted to be talking with?
As for a guess as to how many Christians were fooled in such a manner, assuming that various ghosts, demons, spirits, gods, goddesses, God and perhaps Goddess existed… I have no idea.
I have to admit my reason for asking this particular question is that I’m sure the answer is “probably quite a few” and I guess that kind of concerns me, because if we can’t prove a Gift of The Spirit, then how can we trust that people whose decisions are based on being “moved in such a way” are truly being moved that way and not in some kind of mistaken way? Christians’ beliefs affect people all the time. I guess that’s what I’m getting at.
None of them KNOW they are interacting with God, gods or anything else. And as said, any powerful, and many not-so-powerful supernatural beings could convince a believer that they were interacting with God, assuming they existed.
Simple. Any Christian who says he’s interacting with God is wrong, since there isn’t any such critter.
There are no such gifts, and no Holy Spirit, so again, it’s easy.
We can’t. Even assuming such beings as gods and spirits existed, we have no way to tell one from the other, so it would make far more sense to either ignore them, or judge their statements on their own merits. I mean, if a voice claiming to be God tells you to kill your children to prove your faith, isn’t it a good idea to ignore that voice, whether it’s God, Asmodeus, a hallucination or an invisible alien ?
I think Jim Jones would be a good example of this. I doubt that people needed to wait all the way until he busted out the koolaid to figure out he really wasn’t a man of God, do you?
From what I have have read of him his evil was very evident long before that but people are easily led a stray by following those who seek to serve other masters and themselves. By having a personal realtionship with God it is easier to see what is right and wrong and when in doubt to ask for guidance when one is not sure. Only a fool, or someone intent on evil, uses God as his justification for commiting evil. Wrong is wrong. You don’t have to be at all religious to know the difference. But as someone who used to be almost a sociopath, my relationship with God has helped me to put others before myself, which is something I feel I must do gladly to have peace not only with God but myself. I’ll let you know how it works out. (with myself)
IIRC, correctly, we had a poster not too long ago who really had thought he had been spoken too directly to god. The episodes he described sounded like hallucinations from schizophrenia or something of that nature.
No, see, the “how come only you can be right?” argument is perhaps the best challenge to a Christian’s claim to have a hotline to heaven. Christianity is among the ‘exclusive’ religions; it claims to have the only god in town, and so if it’s correct, then believers in other distinctly different gods (such as Thor) must have been wrong in their belief that they were interacting with their god. Once a rational believer accepts that a people can believe they are interacting with a god and yet be mistaken about it, it opens up the possibility that they themselves are mistaken in their belief.
Or it would if they don’t egomaniacally believe that everyone else can be wrong but they themselves are infallible. Every thiest I’ve mentioned this argument to in real life has taken the egomaniacal approach.
I guess you’d have to make a call based on what you already think you know about the nature of God. If you’re being moved in a way that Christ wouldn’t approve of, then you’re likely to be off track-- which I suppose is the point of those “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets. It’s not an ideal solution, and I’ve heard people say that it’s better to trust Jesus to guide you than to trust your own fallible judgement. But either way, you’re still making a decision to trust your own judgement, because you can’t know for sure if you’re being decieved. So maybe the best course is to make decisions with that uncertainty in mind-- so that even if Jesus wasn’t actually guiding you, it’d still be a decision he’d be okay with. If you rely on Jesus to guide you in everything, that’s effectively abandoning free will, and inviting deception.
But maybe that’s what is meant by a personal relationship with Jesus; you get to know him gradually, like falling in love, until you know him so well that you can’t be decieved anymore. When you finally know him well enough that you can trust completely in his guidance, then he doesn’t actually need to guide you at all.
I should probably mention that I’m an atheist, so I’m just blue-skying here. But I still think Jesus speaks pretty clearly through the Gospels in most regards. However, if I were you, I’d trust a message from Jesus before trusting a message from me. I have no idea what’s going on.
Well, they are egomaniacs, or a good imitation. Since they aren’t really getting messages from God, all they are really doing is listening to their own desires and labelling them God. That’s pretty egomaniacal.
I’m a Christian. The typical answer you would get from us is that a Christian would not be mistaken because demonic forces avoid us, and would not dare try to deceive us because we are covered (by the blood of Christ).
My answer to whether or not a Christian can mistakenly believe they are interacting with God is “more often than not.” You can usually tell which ones are wrong. They generally have some kind of self-centered message from God, or something that reinforces something misguided that they have already committed to believe. This often ends with someone testifying that God told them to commit a crime.
I am of the opinion that God’s communication is through abilities. If you have a natural ability and desire to paint, for example, and can use that talent to spruce up the church lobby and raise funds for the homeless shelter. Maybe that’s just people falling into place where they are needed, maybe not. But the voice-from-the-sky thing…I’m not really believing it.
I’ve always wondered if, with all the advances in technology, couldn’t a person become convinced that they’re interacting with God, while, unbeknownst to that person, they are really being hoaxed by some fantastic special effects from an all-too-human source?
