Are religious experiences (or prophesy, or words of knowledge, or hearing God) just deja vu? What are theey?
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CF has always been a site that welcomes people from different backgrounds and beliefs to participate in discussion and even debate. That is the nature of its ministry. In view of recent events emotions are running very high. We need to remind people of some basic principles in debating on this site. We need to be civil when we express differences in opinion. No personal attacks. Avoid you, your statements. Don't characterize an entire political party with comparisons to Fascism or Communism or other extreme movements that committed atrocities. CF is not the place for broad brush or blanket statements about groups and political parties. Put the broad brushes and blankets away when you come to CF, better yet, put them in the incinerator. Debate had no place for them. We need to remember that people that commit acts of violence represent themselves or a small extreme faction.
deja vu
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juvenissun
... and God saw that it was good.
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Mr Strawberry
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This touches on something that isn't to do with the OP, but I think is fairly central to all discussions on this forum.
Your ability to rationally explain it depends upon whether you have a framework of ideas to explain the emotion you are feeling. I think the framework can be called a paradigm. Religion provides a paradigm to assign all sorts of emotions, feelings and even events that perplex you, but it isn't very helpful with explaining them. If one doesn't have an alternative paradigm then one goes through life happily assigning all these things to the religious paradigm, which is full of mystery and wonder and the inexplicable and has the added bonus of making you feel good, and this becomes part of one's own history or autobiography. The longer this goes on the harder it is to rewrite that history with another paradigm. No longer are we just taking an individual experience or emotion and saying that there is a different, perfectly rational explanation for it, but we are taking a religious person's whole life and saying to them: what you think you have experienced in life is wrongly attributed. Your whole autobiography is basically incorrect. Not surprisingly they will think you are stark staring mad. How can you possibly know what I've experienced? I experienced it, I should know! And that is why it will be almost impossible to convince you or any other religious person that you haven't felt the holy spirit. If we try and probe that experience we will understandably be met with heels firmly dug in and a whole raft of different objections to every rational alternative. You will not be thinking about one experience or feeling, but a whole lifetime of experiences and feelings. It's an interesting aspect of human nature. It's also why it is important to present the religious paradigm early, so that the seed can take root, so to speak, otherwise, without the religious framework to slot these feelings and experiences into, alternative explanations will be found and the religious paradigm will never have a chance to develop.
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juvenissun
... and God saw that it was good.
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The Bible collects the words of God. If you accept that, then you will hear the "sound".
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DogmaHunter
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No. Here we go again...
The truth does not depend on what anybody believes. Not yesterday, not now, not tomorrow, not ever.
What anyone believes is irrelevant to what is true
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PsychoSarah
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I am an auditory learner, I hear "narrator like" "voices" every time I read something. Btw, what characters say "sounds like them" rather than the author when the text is written at an above 3rd grade level (for how good it is).
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juvenissun
... and God saw that it was good.
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That may be true(?). But, what anyone believes, true or not, is relevant to everything about the person.
You do not believe the existence of God. Your belief is irrelevant to what is true. But your belief is relevant to everything you do.
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DogmaHunter
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My disbelief is not.
Your disbelief in the undetectable 7-headed dragon doesn't affect you any more then my disbelief in your deity of choice affects me.
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If you don't belief in what is true, it effects your life. A lot.
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You might want to reconsider.
What people believe can shape reality.
Does 9/11 come to mind? Thalidomide? L'Aquila?
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Such a great question! I don't know that I do know what God "sounds like." I've never heard him in the literal form of using my ears. I know that sounds silly, but I'm serious. What I do know is that I've had many moments in my life where I've made time to be still and seek him...his presence...his will.
I have felt his presence. I'll be honest in that it hasn't happened a ton, but when it does it's memorable. I'm sure I sound crazy to some (or explained away by my own psyche). Feeling his presence hasn't led me to some grandiose conclusion in life, rather it has solidified my faith in knowing that God is near and listening.
I hope I'm making sense. I just wanted to point out that I've never heard a voice. I have felt a presence.
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Standing_Ultraviolet
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I think that's correct for modern literature. The earliest parts of the Bible, though, were probably taken from a variety of older oral traditions and put together by editors who might not have cared that much for characterization. At least for books like Genesis, Exodus, etc., the characters are going to have different content for their speech, but interesting dialogue was probably waaaaaay toward the bottom of the editors' lists of things that they cared about. If you were to read the lines of Abraham, Lot, and others in Genesis, they would probably use the same lexicon and general tones of voice, even when they said things in opposition to one another. None of them are likely to have the sorts of "mannerisms" and "quirks" that you get with modern literature, because their dialogue the purpose solely of moving the story along. It was unlikely that its phrasing would be important, or that readers really expected it to be an exact reconstruction of anyone's real language (you get that with more inerrantist readers today, but the original readers almost certainly didn't even believe the text to be divinely inspired).
Epic poems were different, and where older songs and hymns were included in the constructed text, they would have been, too. There, the dialogue is more important, even if readers wouldn't have taken it literally as the words of the historical figures they believed the characters to represent.
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