When my mother speaks to me, she uses her mouth to produce sounds that resemble a language that I hear using my ears. This is the context most of the world uses when they say that someone is speaking to them. If what you experience is a warm and comforting feeling when something nice happens that you attribute to a god of some sort, then for the purposes of communication it would be nice if you would say so. It doesn’t take a “lifetime of shared experience” for one person to talk to another-it takes one person to talk(with mouth) and another to listen(with ears).
If someone “talks” to you, say so. If you have feelings that you attribute to some sort of supernatural being, say so.
They are not the same.
I hear the voice of my God in my heart, the same way that I hear my mother’s. I don’t expect you to understand, but I do expect you to please — please — stop your… come to think of it, where’s Jab?
Trying to make words mean what they mean, instead of redefining them to mean what we want to?
Using the English language, would you mind telling me what “I hear the voice of God in my heart…” means? Can it possibly mean that sometimes, when something happens or when you have certain thoughts or emotions, a feeling comes over you that you attribute to your diety instead of yourself?
If you hear “the voice of God” in your heart the same way you hear your mother’s, unless your mother has supernatural powers that means that she is personally using this means to contact you, it indicates that this is merely a feeling of remembrance, not communication, on both her part and you gods’s.
Trying to make words mean what they mean, instead of redefining them to mean what we want to?
Using the English language, would you mind telling me what “I hear the voice of God in my heart…” means? Can it possibly mean that sometimes, when something happens or when you have certain thoughts or emotions, a feeling comes over you that you attribute to your diety instead of yourself?
If you hear “the voice of God” in your heart the same way you hear your mother’s, unless your mother has supernatural powers does that mean that she is personally using this means to contact you, or does it indicate that this is merely a feeling of remembrance, not communication, on both her part and your gods’s?
Exactly. Which is why I could have a perfectly satisfactory conversation with Czarmom, understanding everything she had to say to me and being confident that she understood what I had to say. And at the end of that conversation, we’d both be a very small step closer to understanding each other on a personal level.
Just because I can hear and parse the language used in a message doesn’t mean I have the slightest understanding of the messenger. That sort of understanding requires a deeper level of communication and -sorry, but I insist- shared experience, with which it’s possible to apprehend any available subtext in the message.
(Just a note to Lib: IANATheist. My understanding of this particular messenger comes from exposure to those who do claim a personal relationship with him, and who try and be Christ-like in their approach to life. From that exposure, I can appreciate to a degree the subtext they see in the -IMO somewhat garbled- message recorded in the New Testament. And while I really dig that subtext, it’s not something I feel as a direct message from Christ.) (But certainly as a direct message from some of his more self actualized delegates, I suppose.)
Okay Czar: Just admit you believe in OG
Okay, I do see what Czarcasm is asking. Let’s break this down:
[list][li]Many believers (in the faith of their choice, not limited to Christianity) – and I would say most – do not have any perception that is directly attributable to the intervention of god, or at most a “warm fuzzy” sensation of a world in which god is present, a sense of the divine presence as an overlying, influencing force with no specifics.[/li][li]Some believers “hear God’s voice inside their head” in the sense of a communication from another person perceived as a received message without the sense of auditory reception.[/li][li]For me, and I believe a few others, there is a clear sense of guidance present and having-been-received from another – but not a sense of its reception. Just as, in speaking of one’s memory of learning something, the direct connection to the actual event of communication causing one to learn it may not be present but the overall concept that it was at some point in the past learned is, so “God’s message” is a present fact in me though I cannot specify the precise nature of how it was received. As though, to use a metaphor, it was transplanted into me while I was unconscious.[/li]
The parallel I find useful is a character in a Larry Niven story encountering the grogs, sessile forceful telepaths capable of implanting a thought, etc., into a non-telepathic person. The character speaks of the event in terms similar to these: “There was no sense of hearing him. But there was present in me knowledge with a crystal clarity that I know had not been there before.”
Does that help in discerning what we’re trying to say through the only useful metaphors at hand, Czar?
If you really are interested in how someone “hears” without their ears, I can add an anecdote. This is not evidence, but is meant to offer insight.
I had questions about reality, the facts of being, the fundamental difference between living, and not living. I doubted the significance of my own life. I received a revelation from God. I didn’t get answers. But I no longer had those questions. I was freed from the spiraling compulsion to judge myself, and everyone else. It was a message from God, and it would not fit into words. It was not a message for me to give to others, so I would not need words.
My mother can tell me things, with silence, by the way. She does it all the time.
Tris
You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever known.
So what does most of the world mean when they say, “That movie/poem/book/painting really spoke to me?” Do they mean that the poem used its mouth to produce sounds that resemble a language that they hear using their ears?
My mother rarely if ever says, “I love you,” but I know she does, because of the ways that she says the things she does say. I hear her words in my ears and my brain, but I hear her love elsewhere.
It really takes deliberate obstinance to not understand what people are talking about when they talk about hearing a god.
Not when, in a discussion about communication, you are trying to pin down the difference between communication between two physical beings, and an emotional feeling you get that you attribute to a supernatural being without any physical independent evidence that either the “communication” is going on or that the supernatural being even exists. If you want be to accept at face value that a god talks to you, there must be some way to show me that such a being exists. If all you wish to say is that you talk to(not with) your god, more power to you.
The example about your mother is not pertinent. At least she physically says and does things, that can be observed by others, that you can interpret as love. The example of the movie/poem/book/painting doesn’t apply because there is a movie/poem/book/painting that actually exists that others can see and interpret themselves.
Even if we expand the notion of communication to include interpretation of physical action or material objects, there still has to be a physical action or material object to interpret.
congrats on the 4,000th post, Czar!
Ditto what Vanilla said.
Since I’m trying to achieve what you asked for, Czarcasm, I’d appreciate your addressing my last post and whether it answers the objection you raised. Thanks.
I can accept as fact that you sincerely believe that some of the thoughts and/or feelings and/or emotions you have come from an outside source that you think of as “God”. Personally, I think that you are good enough to come up with these thoughts on your own but, as you cannot prove to me that God inspires you, likewise I cannot prove to you that he doesn’t. I’ll just give credit for your intelligent observations to you personally-who or what you pass the credit onto is your business.
[hijack]
{{{{{PHIL!!!}}}}}
[…dancing a happy jig…]
Welcome back, my brother! You were sorely missed. I’ve been defending Paul McCartney for you while you were gone! It’s so good to see your name on the boards again.
[/hijack]
Czar, there are billions of “others” who observe God. If a man is blind, does your mother not exist because he cannot see her?
Thanks for the warm welcome, Lib! I recently spent a month in Frankfurt, Germany, sans my wife, and reading the SD helped with the loneliness, so I tossed in a few posts. Not to say that my self-imposed exile is completely over–I am, as it happens, nuttier than a fruitcake, and sometimes the SD feeds the worst aspects of myself.
Czar, I actually find myself mostly in agreement with your last post, and I’m sure we’d both agree that we reserve the right to change our minds concerning the existence of gods should the evidence change. The point that billions of people the world over and throughout history have heard (or, if you prefer, “heard”) something is incontrovertible. What it is that they have heard remains the issue, at least for us heathens.
PLD,
Good to see you.
Don’t worry, we love you heathens. In fact, without a healthy population of free range heathens, there wouldn’t be much reason for evangelists, now would there. 
Tris
Are we assuming that they “heard” the same message, and from the same god? think that the only thing that can be proven, and not assumed for convenience’s sake, is that perhaps billions of people have been taught by their religious leaders that certain thoughts and emotions come from an outside source and not from themselves. In times past, such messages were “heard” from Zeus, Odin, Thor, Inanna(sp?), and Shiva. Today, such messages are attributed to beings that range from the Christian god, the Jewish god, and any number of other dieties.
Libertarian, let’s not get into yet another definition quandary with the word “observe”, o.k.? If a man were blind, deaf and mute my mother could still physically touch him, which is still material evidence of her existence. At best the billions of others observe phenomena that they then attribute to your god-they do NOT observe your god. When you observe something, you should be able to describe the physical attributes of said something afterwards.
Yeah, but some people are just in a coma altogether.
Regarding whatever messages people might hear, I think this thread is about the ones they hear from Jesus.
No, Lib.
This thread is about what people get out of Jesus’ message as it is described in the Bible, not about what they “hear” from him. People might get a message from the words attributed to him and not believe in either him or his message, incredible as that may sound.
The comment about people in a coma was nonsense, unless you were trying to infer that if people don’t “hear” the same messages from your god that you do, they are somehow deficient.