I rather enjoyed and I am intrigued by these portion of your nutty comments— You wrote: “Oh yes, my bitter little God-hater, He does. But you’ll never forgive Him for talking to others and not you, will you? ....It is quite possible to distinguish between hallucination and a genuine personal revelation. .... People very definitely do get clear and unambiguous messages from God. That is one key factor in evaluating their validity.”
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My response:
So tell us, will you please, are you one of those special people God talks to? When you get these “clear and unambiguous messages from God, what does he (she?) sound like? Is the voice sort of like George Burns, or Chuck Heston, or Roseanne Barr? When you hear this voice, are you alone, or are others present, and do they hear the voice too? How frequently does God speak to you? Can you make the voice go away? Do you sleep well, or does God sometimes wake you, whispering in your ear, “dsc, tomorrow you will kill the paper boy.” Finally, how do you know these voices are not, in fact, hallucinations? You said you can tell the difference. I understand, but how do you know this voice is really God’s and not Satan’s or your cat’s? Please don’t hurt me, I’m just curious.
“My response:”
...Is puerile in the extreme. Nonetheless, I will employ your attempted mockery as an opportunity to contradict some of your more eggregious errors.
“So tell us, will you please, are you one of those special people God talks to?”
If I am special in any way, it is in the same way that the Special Olympics are special.
“When you get these “clear and unambiguous messages from God, what does he (she?) sound like?”
Wouldn’t it occur to you, just as a matter of logic, that an omnipoent God would have more convincing and less ambiguous ways of communicating than just a disembodied voice droning in a person’s ear?
“When you hear this voice, are you alone, or are others present, and do they hear the voice too?”
Setting aside your dismal miscronstrual of communications as a matter of “voice,” in history the number of people with whom God has communicated at one time has ranged from one to over 70,000.
“Do you sleep well, or does God sometimes wake you, whispering in your ear, “dsc, tomorrow you will kill the paper boy.”
Wouldn’t it occur to you, just as a matter of logic, that a voice urging you to commit an act that God forbids couldn’t be from God? Your hatred of God has rendered you totally irrational on the subject.
“Finally, how do you know these voices are not, in fact, hallucinations?”
Setting aside the matter of “voices” again, wouldn’t it occur to you, just as a matter of logic, that an omnipotent God would have ways of demonstrating that a communication could not have originated from within the person concerned?
“I understand, but how do you know this voice is really God’s and not Satan’s or your cat’s?”
People are, in fact, deceived by Satan or schizophrenic hallucinations. That is why such revelations need to be subjected to intense reality checking by third-parties. Where an experience doesn’t appear to be a Satanic deception or evidence of mental illness, the Church usually just says, “Could be, but nobody is required to believe in it.”
Another indicator is that genuine revelations are congruent with prior revelations, and do not purport to change or add to them. Anything that contradicted the Bible or appeared to be license to violate one of the Ten Commandments would, therefore, be right out.
I’m taking my 7-year-old steelhead fishing right now, so that’s all I’m going to write. You can find oceans of information on the subject if you care to look.
“Please don’t hurt me, I’m just curious.”
Any Christian will tell you, if one prays, “Lord, should I hurt this person?” The answer always comes back, “No.” If it comes back “Yes,” you got a wrong number.