You receive a revelation from God; what do you do? It seems to me that you first have to decide if the revelation is genuine:
The revelation is indeed from God
The revelation is from the Devil, intended to trap you, and induce you to commit sin
The revelation is a delusion, a product of your own subconscious
As a believer, you accept the tenets of Christianity (God is all knowing, all good, and all powerful); therefore, if (1) is correct, you should act on the revelation, and do as God has asked. However, you suspect that “Old Scratch” may be behind this revelation, because God has not appeared to you (in any recognizable, tangible form). You suspect the Devil, so you should reject the revelation as false?
If you conclude as (3) (the revelation is a delusion), then you are safe-you can reject it, confident in God’s beneficence and omnipotence.
Granted divine revelations are rare-very few people get them (probably only a handful since the last of the Apostles died off). Surely, God realizes the dilemma. The question is: How would a supreme being send revelations in such a way, that the faithful would not experience the confusion listed?
Personally, I have trouble with (2): my understanding is that ever since that night (when the Devil attempted to tempt Jesus (“all these things I will give you, if you fall down and worship me”-Jesus replies “get the behind me, Satan!”). I take this to mean that God (from that point) removed all the powers of Satan to tempt mankind. In any case, this concept of Satan having power over God is blasphemous. So, what would you do?
I assume that if God exists as he is commonly described, then with his omnipotence and omniscience he can irrefutably prove to me that he is actually God and not a delusion or impersonator. I can’t imagine what proof would be undeniable, but then I’m not omniscient.
I’d probably assume I was insane, since the god and devil think are so utterly preposterous. I mean, I’ve met crazy people, I know they exist. Why should I suppose the voice in my head is an invisible spirit that created the universe?
Get myself admitted to a psych ward because I am hallucinating.
Although I remember years ago seeing the worst TV interview of all time. A woman who had survived (IIRC) 17 days adrift in the ocean said she was about to give up and die and then “God spoke to her.” I waited for the interviewer to ask what God had said but he just fobbed it off and asked the next question on his clipboard.
The woman said nothing else that indicated any religious affiliation.
I don’t demand an Omnimax god. If Dr. Manhattan showed up and convinced me he was real by teleporting me to mars or something, I’d accept him as god. If he said “Every thursday wear a blue hat, recite this poem I wrote, and then spend half an hour saying how great I am in your own words. Also refrain from Chocolate and try to be a decent person. In return I’ll smite your enemies and make you incredibly wealthy,” I’d take the bargain.
This happened in the Bible more than once, and there were a few cases where the people put God to the test to see if it was really him. Some Muslim traditions also say that Muhammed suffered this same dilemma when he was given the divine revelation.
OK, that’s a good starting place. Is the revelation consistent with what you know of Jesus in the Bible? Does it make sense that that person would be asking you to do whatever it is?
This is a matter of some disagreement. Most born-again Christians would probably regard their personal experience of God as a revelation, and many of them would surely add that they believe that at one time or another, God has asked them to do something fairly specific.
Compare against the Bible, as I said above. Compare against what I believe to be my own experience with God. And (assuming the call isn’t to drop everything and do something right now) I’d give it a couple of days, to see if this revelation seems to be reasonably robust, or whether it fades “like ice in a drink, invisible ink, or dreams in the cold light of day,” to quote the Rutles. If God wants me to do something, He can tattoo that message to my heart and soul, and it’ll still be an inexorable part of me as long as I can still fulfill that calling.
Assuming I bought the whole God & Satan and so on system, as postulated in the OP, I’d do/believe what I was told if it seemed a good idea. Some of my reasons :
If it’s good advice, it’s good regardless of where it comes from. Yes, even from Satan; it would be an appropriately devilish thing for the Devil to do to give someone good advice knowing that the person so advised will do anything but he’s told because the adviser’s the Devil.
If you honestly try to do the right thing, using your own judgement, but are fooled by the Devil, any God or other third party will cut you some slack for being fooled by a superior being, assuming it wasn’t obvious what was happening. And if God doesn’t, he’s not good anyway.
There’s simply no way for you, as a human, to tell the difference between God, the Devil - or a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, for that matter. Anything above a certain level of capability is going to be able to provide you with “evidence” of anything it pleases.
Do so in such a way that it can’t be mistaken for delusion ( accompanied by miracles, or containing information the revelationee couldn’t possibly get without nonhuman help ); and provide the reasons why it’s a good idea. We can’t tell the difference between God, the devil or some other superior being; but we can judge the results of our actions. And if we go around following good advice, it doesn’t much matter what it’s from; even if the Devil is good and God evil, we’d be following the Devil while thinking we we doing God’s work, and we’d be on the right side.
That’s why you need to use your own judgement. If “God” tells you to do something bad, either it’s not God, or you are wrong about God being good. And you can’t tell if it’s God or not.
Actually, the Bible strongly suggests that one can and should be able to tell the difference between good and evil spirits. So if, for sake of argument, you buy into “the whole God & Satan and so on system,” this part has to come out.
Well, what sort of good advice are we talking about?
We don’t need a revelation from God to know we’re supposed to love our neighbor, for instance. (At least in theory. Some of us - myself quite definitely included - could do with a dramatic reminder at regular intervals. :)) So presumably what one would get in a revelation from God would be direction of a sort intended specifically for the individual receiving the revelation.
For instance, one might feel as if God is calling one to a particular professional path. That’s not general good advice - not everyone should be heading down that particular road. It’s only good advice for me if it’s somehow right for me. If I got a revelation telling me to be an undertaker, I’d say that if it was God telling me that, then he’d lost his freakin’ marbles. For someone else, though, it really might be what they’re called to do in life.
Why would God need to tell them that? Maybe they weren’t sure - maybe they didn’t see the things inside their own selves that made it the right thing for them to be doing. Or maybe it was just in their blind spot - they simply hadn’t considered that option at all, even though, once they saw it, it was one of those ‘of course!’ :smack: moments.
But if some noncorporeal prankster spirit tried to tell me that I was called to be an undertaker, I doubt I’d have one of those moments. Though maybe such a spirit would come up with something more personally plausible - maybe it would tell me I should be an actuary. But if that spirit wasn’t God, I probably still wouldn’t have one of those moments, but it wouldn’t be the quality of the advice, in some general sense, that would have me questioning the advice: I’ve received that advice from other people of good judgment along the way. I would have to rely on the ability the Bible says I as a Christian should have to distinguish between spirits.
Not really; that just means that whoever wrote that part lacked imagination and/or was ignorant. To be fair, we can’t really expect some bronze age guy to consider the possibility of aliens grabbing him and wiring his brain into a virtual reality simulation, after all. Or of someone using drugs or brain stimulation to force you to believe that it’s God you are talking to.
How about, “Look at position thus-and-so in the skies to avert doom !”, and we look and find an asteroid that’ll impact Earth in 80 years; plenty of time to do something about it since we’ve been warned, but we’d never see it in time without warning. Or on a less dramatic level, “Trust not your new friend, for he will bring you misfortune !”; and you check his background and discover he has a long trail of associates whom he’s exploited or who have suffered convenient deaths or something similar. Or “Expose yourselves to cowpox, for it will protect you from smallpox”; something that would’ve been rather useful to know pre-vaccine ( in fact IIRC that’s where the word “vaccine” comes from, cowpox in latin ).
Actually, we do ( although I’d call “loving” your neighbor going too far ). Judging from history, the idea that it’s a better idea to cooperate than conquer, tyrannize and slaughter had to be learned; it’s not innate. Nor, apparently, is it obvious to someone who hasn’t seen just how beneficial large scale cooperation is. In fact, if the advice that people claimed to be getting from God was consistently good advice ( instead of a mishmash of everything from good advice to self interest to bigotry to outright lunacy ), that would be pretty good evidence that there was something real behind religious revelations.
If I had sufficient uncertainty in the source of the message to even frame the question, then I’m far too uncertain to accept the message as coming from God - especially if it’s telling me to do something I wasn’t going to do anyway. At best (presuming I’m pious for the sake of argument), I would pray for confirmation, so if he really cared to have my obedience he could come back and expunge my capability to doubt properly this time.
Um; isn’t that the same as saying that you’d believe that the message was from God and do what it said if God reached inside your head and mind-controlled you into doing so ? While that’s true, it would also be true if Satan or the Illuminati did so.
No, for two reasons, the lesser one being that one presumes that God can be thoroughly convincing if he wants to be, even without removing my decision-making ability.
The real reason is that I’m in the role of a theist who believes in an interactive god here, and thus I think that I’m talking about a specific entity whom I very likely think I know at a personal level. I talk to my dad, and when he says something, I have no doubt whatsoever that it’s him I’m talking to - if I had any uncertainty whatsoever about his identity, it would be indicitave that there was something ‘wrong’ with the communication, and that I shouldn’t trust it. Presumably, the same could go for God. Now, it might theoretically require him to appear in corporeal form in front of me and hang out for a few months or years while I got to know him…though many theists I know seem to think they already have that familiarity. Ergo, they should be able to tell when it’s “really him”, intuitively, based essentially on subconscious analysis of the details of the interaction.
Does this mean we can’t be fooled, and that we can’t be completely convinced by a fraud in disguise? Of course not. However, if I come out of the interaction asking whether it was real, then it’s definitely time to seek confirmation.
(My bad for saying “expunge my capability for doubt”, which muddied my point quite badly.)
The thing is, so can any number of other hypothetical creatures that aren’t God. It’s not really a matter of what God can or can’t do; it’s a matter of humans being so much more limited that any number of non-gods could fool us easily.
Thing is, if you are dealing with beings of godlike power, and you even suspect that one or more of them are evil or otherwise dishonest - and the Devil exists in this scenario - then rationally, you have to doubt your own senses and judgement in dealing with any of them. If you meet God and come away without doubting it was him, that’s less an example of how convincing he is than it is of you being incautious.
