Did God Ever Speak To You?

[amateur]

When you were still actively xian, did you ever hear god's voice?  Did you ever get divine inspiration after praying for it?  Was it good advice?

 

I'd always hear in church, "Pray about it for an answer," and "Listen for God's voice."  People would say, "I prayed about it and God lead me to this decision."  Or simply, "God told me to do this."

 

I never heard god.  I never really understood what they meant when they said those things, but they were said with such *certainty* I didn't ask what they meant for fear they would look at me with pity.  I was always well aware that when I had a big (or small) decision in life, that it was up to me to weigh the pros and cons and come up with what I believed to be the best decision with what I had.

 

It never bothered me that I didn't hear "god's voice," but I used to kind of feel like those that did thought they were in some alternate "club" who were blessed to hear the ACTUAL GOD speak to them about whether to buy a new car or not.  Or whatever.

 

But did anyone here actually hear god talk to them?  Do you still believe she/he/it talked to you?  I think it'd be pretty cool, especially for some of those preachers that are "always" hearing from god.  

 

And if god never spoke to you, how did you feel about it?  Did you think it was because of a failing on your part?  

 

[Voice]

I heard my inner voice and like yourself, "voices" of the congregation and their expectations of me, and I made them all sound like God.  I can't say with much confidence that I heard God's voice.  I sure thought I did.  It was all I wanted.  I have delusions of grandeur.  It's a symptom of the bipolar condition.  I was always called to have some grand purpose, a prophet at one point.

[par4dcourse]

I did once. He said "what a load of crap." I listened.

[Denyoz]

When you were still actively xian, did you ever hear god's voice?

 

According to popular Christianity, all of God's words are written in the Bible.  So his voice can't say anything other than what's already written in the Bible.  Otherwise it wouldn't come from God, right?

 

So in that sense, yes.  I could "hear" Bible verses in my head, in response to questions I would ask.  But most of the time, there was just no answer because no verse in the Bible exists that could answer my specific questions.  I could not ask God anything that he had not already addressed in the Bible, including what kind of car to buy.

 

At one point, I got fed-up with the Bible and decided to listen to any answer that would come to mind, thinking the Holy Spirit could enlighten me directly.   That's when I started getting interesting and helpful answers.  I then soon realized that I was hearing my own "higher" voice, my own spiritual wisdom sort of.  I remember thinking: "How weird, the voice of my holy spirit is actually telling me that the god of the bible is an imposter and that Christianity is a lie!"  This helped me a lot in my deconversion. 

[Realist]

Nah ... I never heard his voice ... although I spoke to him countless times ... but then again I was probably never a (true) christian! 

 

I also remember believing in santa claus once too .... I also spoke to him on many occasions! He too never spoke back! Maybe I was never a (true) santa believer? 

[amateur]

Denyoz:  "According to popular Christianity, all of God's words are written in the Bible.  So his voice can't say anything other than what's already written in the Bible.  Otherwise it wouldn't come from God, right?"  Whoa  -- that's a very cool observation!

 

I get very confused when people say they "take everything to god," as in EVERYTHING, and then they act on the answer they get.  I can't imagine how those people get out of bed in the morning while waiting for a response.

 

I wonder what they hear?  A male voice?  Female voice?  Is it from a direction (like, "I hear it coming from behind my left shoulder.")?  

 

I read a very interesting book by Julian Jaynes, "The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind."  To try to quickly summarize this very long book and theory (which was NOT trying to refute, disprove, or indeed prove religion of any type, by the way): Jaynes was a psychologist and Yale professor who in the 70's had a theory that people's brains had evolved and changed over the millenia.  You know how our brains are made of two halves, and the right hemisphere controls our left side, and vice versa, and the right hemisphere is supposed to be more creative and the left side more logical (if I have this wrong, and I know it's super-simplified, I'm sorry, but you know the idea)?  Well, Jaynes had a theory that many hundreds, thousands of years ago the two hemispheres were NOT connected, and any "voices" heard from one side, which we now hear as certain thoughts or as some type of memory (for instance, for a couple years after my mother died, I could occasionally "hear" her calling my name IN HER VOICE from somewhere behind me, which at first was startling, then as I got used to it it lessened, then it faded away), they thought were from either a god or a tribal leader.  He backed this up with lots of study of ancient writing, including biblical writing.  To really super-simplify this, he had a lot of examples from the books of Amos (written during the bicameral era) and Ecclesiastes (written post bicameral), where he gave examples of lack of self-awareness vs. the self-awareness and "poetry" of Ecclesiastes, and how Ecclesiastes could not have been physically written in Amos' time because people could not think that way back then.  Anyway, what I got from reading the book was if that theory was true, then it made absolutely perfect sense that people in the OT were always hearing "the voice of god," and by the NT it wasn't happening any more.  He said we still have vestiges of it left, mainly in mental illnesses, but also in those "voice memories" like when I heard my mom after her death.  Are people that "hear god all the time" simply mentally ill?  I don't want to assume anything or sound disrespectful, and if someone here did used to hear god all the time (or even once in a while) it would be interesting to know.  

 

Jaynes' theory would make sense whether the bible was real or not.  If the bible was "real," it would make sense in that the people who wrote the OT truly were "hearing" those voices.  If it was compiled from myths (which I believe) those myths would have been from an older, bicameral time, so of course talking snakes and talking burning bushes made perfect sense at that time.  

 

There is still a "Julian Jaynes Society" on the internet.  It's very interesting, really not religious at all, tho sometimes religious questions are raised.  It's an all-together interesting theory.

 

 

And I'm sure most all of us here WERE "true" xians, and very serious about our faith.  If we never heard anything, especially after lots of asking for answers, then it's one of the things that's proven to us that xianity is just not real.  I remember once I attended a service with lots of "speaking in tongues" with a couple friends, which really freaked me out (I was a teenager and came from a very polite church where if someone would have yelled out "Praise Jesus!" LET ALONE started speaking in tongues during the service, all eyes would have been politely averted and everybody would have felt embarrassed for that person; it was simply "not done."), and I asked my one friend, who was a big born-again person, later about that speaking in tongues thing.  He just kind of laughed and said, "Yeah, I've spoken in tongues there.  It's not real.  You just start saying words and repeating gibberish, but you do it when you get into the service."  That always made me wonder if ANYBODY spoke in tongues for real or were they all faking to go along with whoever had originally started it? Same with "hearing god" -- do people just SAY they hear god?  

[florduh]

I thought I heard God once, but it turned out to be Morgan Freeman saying "titty sprinkles."

 

There are people who hear voices. They claim the voices to be from God, Satan, demons or aliens. All of those people have a mental illness. Most Christians seem to say that if God speaks to them it's through Scripture or coincidence.

[Voice]

[snip]

[mymistake]

Never out loud.  Sometimes I thought my own sub-vocalization voice was God - you know the voice everybody has when they are thinking what they want to say or making a list.

[amateur]

Voice, I don't want to be disrespectful of people who have any type of mental illness.  My sister works with adolescents in a mental hospital with severe mental illness, and schizophrenics truly "hear" voices, and sometimes those children say that those voices are demons that are telling them to do horrible things and who get very angry if the child does not obey them.  That is very real to them, very real to their families, and very tragic. I'm not talking about people who hear those types of voices.  These are people who need to be in a hospital setting to protect them and their families, getting good medication and good care, and some of them can never be "recovered."  I would never make fun of any type of mental illness.

 

I'm more interested in the people from church who used to say they regularly heard god's voice, or when a preacher repeatedly says s/he follows what god tells them.  I thought Julian Jaynes' theory of the bicameral mind, and how some people might have vestiges left, such as when I heard my mom's voice from behind me, and how some people would interpret that voice in their head as god.

[GoddessOfWisdom]

Odd that I'd forgotten this...

 

I used to hear my name called, usually in the middle of the night, but a few times during the day. It made me literally get up of bed (yes, fully awake) to see who was calling my damned name all the time. After many occasions of this happening, Mom explained that I was being called by god, and that our entire family was prophetic in some way. (Mom has been known in our family as a prophetess; she would often call things way before they happened in a way that makes it hard for me to discount as a fluke. I haven't tried very hard, though.)

 

Well, yeah. I could tell you what you want to know about that (and tongues/visions, too) if you give me a few more specific question so that I know how to answer.

 

Can't give a scientifically accurate interpretation, though...haven't researched/thought about it long enough, tbh. 

[amateur]

Goddess:

 

Well, in the bible, when Samuel was living with Eli, Samuel heard his voice being called at night and thought it was Eli.  When he asked, Eli said no, that's god, ask god what he wants.  So that's what Samuel did and god answered.

 

If you heard your name being called, were you ever told to ask what the voice wanted?  Did it go further than hearing your name?  Was there any other message?  Was it always the same voice?  Male, female?  Could you recognize it if you heard it again?

 

For me, I just heard my mom calling me in her voice, from behind me, always in the day at total random but always when I was alone.  It did make me jump the first few times.  I was very confident it was just some type of aural memory because I'd had 18 years of her calling my name.  

 

Have you spoken in tongues or have you been able to interpret someone else's speaking in tongues?  What was your mood when it happened, did it have a different feeling from regular speech?  Did your mom speak in tongues or interpret?

 

Same type of questions with visions -- have you had them?  What types of things did you see?  Were you aware it was a vision, and not something real in front of you?  Did you feel any different during it, or did it just happen?

 

Thanks for posting and for answering!

[kolaida]

Yes. There were several times where I believed God had "spoken" to me, but not verbally. I had been praying and praying and then was suddenly filled with a strong sense of peace and thought it was God reassuring me.  It felt like white light filling my body and mind and calming me down to the point I felt no anxiety. I instantly knew things would be okay.  

 

I am now realizing it was probably just the power of my belief that made me assume it was God, while it was probably my body responding to my mind trying to calm it down and get some rest. I just didn't stop and consider any alternate reasons at the time and made the assumption it had been God's presence calming me. Naive, I suppose, but that's how it was. 

 

I've also heard my name called several times at night and during the day, but this is actually a pretty common thing. Part of hypnagogic illusions, apparently illusions that lead to sleep. Also due to my OCD and generalized anxiety disorder and tendency to ruminate, that ups the odd of hearing things (auditory illusions).  I have also experienced a large decrease in these and they only seem to return if I'm under a ton of stress or having an OCD trigger.  

 

I never recognized the voice calling my name, it did usually sound female, though, and I figure it's because I'm female.  I would go up to my sisters, mom, and sometimes co-workers asking why they'd called and gotten a funny look. I guess I have gone up to my brother a few times as well. There'd been a few times in the middle night, I'd get up and check the room and then look to see if anyone else was awake. It used to really freak me out. 

 

But I am finding the mind to be a pretty amazingly powerful thing. 

[GoddessOfWisdom]

Goddess:

 

Well, in the bible, when Samuel was living with Eli, Samuel heard his voice being called at night and thought it was Eli.  When he asked, Eli said no, that's god, ask god what he wants.  So that's what Samuel did and god answered.

 

Yeah, that's the exact story my mother reminded my of when I told her about it.

 

If you heard your name being called, were you ever told to ask what the voice wanted?  Did it go further than hearing your name?  Was there any other message?  Was it always the same voice?  Male, female?  Could you recognize it if you heard it again?

 

Well, at first it sounded like my mother's voice, which is why I kept coming to her when I heard it. later, the voice changed into something very...androgynous. I couldn't identify the sex from the voice at all. It I heard it again, I'd probably recognize it; it was quite urgent at times. I must confess that I doubt it occurring again, though.

 

For me, I just heard my mom calling me in her voice, from behind me, always in the day at total random but always when I was alone.  It did make me jump the first few times.  I was very confident it was just some type of aural memory because I'd had 18 years of her calling my name.  

 

Similar, only my mother would just as often be in the house with me. Never from behind me, though...it sounded more like a literal voice in my skull, toward the back, as if it were hollow. I just assumed my hearing was funny and that the voice must have come from outside at first, cause the alternative would be crazy, ya know?  

 

Have you spoken in tongues or have you been able to interpret someone else's speaking in tongues?  What was your mood when it happened, did it have a different feeling from regular speech?  Did your mom speak in tongues or interpret?

 

Never interpreted in my life. M first time speaking in tongues was while my family and I were visiting this one church that I despised (luckily we didn't go more than 4 times, tops) and I had run into a girl friend of mine who I hadn't seen in a while. She discovered a hole in her pants during the music/worship part of the service and requested my help covering her so she could run to the back where the bathrooms were.

 

I gave her my sweater and stood outside the (single-stall) bathroom for moral support or whatever. While there I just decided to try doing it, since I'd seen it done before.

 

Well, the emotion that filled me was a buzz from having done a good deed. I mean, giving a girl my sweater isn't enough to merit a Nobel prize, but it wasn't just that, though...it's hard to articulate. I just felt an overwhelming love and concern for this girl well up in me. I knew quite a few negative things about her former and current living situations, and I just randomly began to care deeply about her, her family, her life. Just -- enormous well-wishing and benevolence, if I had to describe it.

 

Anyway, I was praying for her, standing there outside the bathroom, and I just felt my words start changing into incoherency. There was no way to describe the skyfull of good things I wanted for her, so my mouth just poured out syllables. There was a warmth in the area near my diaphragm, just under the ribcage, if that's important.

 

Same type of questions with visions -- have you had them?  What types of things did you see?  Were you aware it was a vision, and not something real in front of you?  Did you feel any different during it, or did it just happen?

 

Yes, I have. One was lucid -- I was aware that it wasn't real. It happened when my family was all on their knees praying in the living room during one of the darkest phases of our lives. My dad was praying and told god that we weren't getting up from on our faces before him until he sent us a word, vision, tongues, something. I wasn't bothered by that, I wanted some encouragement as well. I had a vision of a vast reddish desert landscape obscured by a giant tornado. Upon closer inspection, the tornado had a being inside it, clearly evil, and it seemed at home in the chaos. My mother interpreted that as meaning demonic forces were causing confusion in our home.

 

The second was while I was asleep, though this was too vivid to call a dream. I was wandering through my childhood home, a place that is the apex of positive memory for me. The best time in my life. I was going into every room, touching my fingertips against the walls, looking out of every window. I ended up cleaning the windows, one by one, with some Windex and paper towel given by my mother who was also cleaning up. Eventually I got to this hallway where there is a row of two window, and the hall way ends with a third window perpendicular to the length of the hall.

 

I cleaned the first window, looking out into the side yard happily. Then I moved over to the second window. Finally, I turned to the window that faced the front yard. It was open. Just as I was about to pull down the glass, I got a spine-chilling scare. A man dressed similar to this woman, with dreads, was charging toward me. He was taller than a human, very angry, with eerily red (as in bloodshot) eyes. Those eyes had pure hate in them. He was coming toward the  

 

In the vision I screamed out for Jesus, slammed the window shut, and ran to my mother. This jarred me awake, and then I ran to my mother in real life. Haha. 

 

Thanks for posting and for answering!

 

No problem at all. 

[GoddessOfWisdom]

I forgot to link this woman.

[rach]

No I never heard the voice of god but I was involved (forcibly) in a community where people were always 'hearing from god.'  It did make me feel like I was not good enough and very frustrated and left out because I never heard anything.  I was always hearing adults say 'god led me to (this or that decision)' and I always wondered how they were so sure it was god's leading.  God had "led" someone to take an expensive missionary trip to a tropical resort, or led someone to buy an expensive home, or led someone to marry an abusive spouse, or led unfit parents to conceive or adopt a child. 

Since I've left my official religious days behind I have had what I feel to be insights, direction or inspiration from the great spirit creator.  These quiet sources of inspiration come from artistic sources like novels, dreams, dream visions, music/music videos, and poetry. 

[amateur]

Goddess, very interesting experiences!  Thanks for sharing!

 

Kolaida:  yes, I agree the mind is very powerful.

 

rach:  I think those people are the ones I really wonder about, the ones who are always "hearing from god," then doing things that of course they would have done anyway, like buying that nice house, or the nice missionary trip.  Funny no one from any church I went to ever heard god tell them to "go and sell everything you have and follow me."

[Voice]

Voice, I don't want to be disrespectful of people who have any type of mental illness.  My sister works with adolescents in a mental hospital with severe mental illness, and schizophrenics truly "hear" voices, and sometimes those children say that those voices are demons that are telling them to do horrible things and who get very angry if the child does not obey them.  That is very real to them, very real to their families, and very tragic. I'm not talking about people who hear those types of voices.  These are people who need to be in a hospital setting to protect them and their families, getting good medication and good care, and some of them can never be "recovered."  I would never make fun of any type of mental illness.

 

I'm more interested in the people from church who used to say they regularly heard god's voice, or when a preacher repeatedly says s/he follows what god tells them.  I thought Julian Jaynes' theory of the bicameral mind, and how some people might have vestiges left, such as when I heard my mom's voice from behind me, and how some people would interpret that voice in their head as god.

 

I understood that.  I don't hear those kinds.  I just wanted to point out that my mentally ill inner voice convinced me it was God and called me to do mentally ill things.  It seems funny now, but I can never go back to Madison, WI.

[Margee]

The loudest voice I heard from the 'spirit' was in the last 5 years and it screamed, ''Get out of Christianity!''  

 

Finally I heard a sensible voice!!

[♦ Fuego ♦]

Three times. The first time was when I was praying for an answer if I should marry a particular woman.

I asked and heard "No."

This was heard in the sense of someone being in the room with me and responding. I sat there stunned and said "Ok, please don't get angry but I need to double-check that I really heard that. Should I..." 

"NO!" This was as if someone in the room had actually yelled it.

I said, "Ok, nuff said, it's off."

 

I wondered sometimes if maybe my dad had overheard me and somehow responded so it sounded like he was in the room, but I never found a way that he could have done it.

 

The 2nd was when I was interested in a young lady at church, only she was dating a guy that was acting oddly. He would avoid any groups, and liked to take her "camping" for weekends. This seemed most unseemly... I got the creeps the more I heard about him and began fasting and praying trying to get some kind of lead. I went to church one Sunday, and her parents told me (with smiles) that she and he had gone camping again. I couldn't believe how cavalier they were about her rather obvious sin. I went into the auditorium and as soon as I sat down I heard distinctly, "She's at his house right now in bed with him." Again, I was stunned, but drove to his house (it was early morning) and both cars were there. Since believers feel that they NEED to butt in to try and save someone from sin, I did. It was ugly. In retrospect, it was none of my damn business. But I thought I had heard directly from God and needed to do something about it. Oddly accurate for a voice that I still don't know the source of.

 

The 3rd time was just before a big meeting at a charismatic church where a missionary was going to speak. This lady was going down the line of people waiting to get in and doing peculiar things. She'd lightly bop them on the head with a plastic hammer and then hiccup like she was drunk. Or she'd get out a dry paint brush and dust people, and say "I'm brushing off the cares of the world." Turns out she is a semi-pro clown but wasn't dressed up today. Frankly, she was irritating the hell out of me and I was gearing up to blast her good when I heard a simple voice says "Don't be mean to her". I liken the effect to one of the old television sets where the picture would go from full screen to a dot and then zip away. That was what happened to my anger. She did her thing to me and explained that she was a clown, I smiled and nodded and she went on her way. Not sure why it was important enough for a voice to come to me, or who it was that spoke, but at the time I assumed it was God.

 

I don't think I've heard any voices since then. Seen a vision or two, once of Sekhmet as a spirit guide (very surprising since I've never previously felt drawn to Egyptian deities), once of sitting under a weeping willow on a warm summer morning with creek running nearby. This had meaning to the woman who was running the guided meditation.

[GoddessOfWisdom]

 

I don't think I've heard any voices since then. Seen a vision or two, once of Sekhmet as a spirit guide (very surprising since I've never previously felt drawn to Egyptian deities), once of sitting under a weeping willow on a warm summer morning with creek running nearby. This had meaning to the woman who was running the guided meditation.

 

Please elaborate?

[wanderinstar]

At least twice I believed I heard the audible voice of God; once my name, the other was, 'This is your husband' (whom I married and am now divorcing). Many, many times I heard the 'inner voice of god' and believed it every time, which led to a very chaotic life. I also had dreams and visions (eyes closed) fairly often. Then 'he' spoke through the music and scripture; so basically he spoke a lot. Then there were times he went silent, and I was depressed and drowning in tears, desperate to have his presence back, afraid I pushed him away.

 

I am a very spiritual person so even before I was christian I sensed things intuitively and listened to my own inner voice so I guess by personality it was easy for me to get sucked into the really crazy side of fundies beliefs on hearing from god. Now I have been diagnosed with bipolar my 'hallucinations and delusions' make sense, as does the movement from ecstatic highs to crushing lows and my complete obsession with religion. My therapist told me many people without mental illness have hallucinations, especially religious people,  so it does not mean many here would  have a mental illness just because they heard gods voice a few times. Interesting how our brains change reality to help us fit in with the culture around us. Religion is extremely damaging to your mental health. I am so glad we are out of that mass delusion.

[amateur]

Thanks, everyone, for answering.  I think that answers it for me.  I do think a number of people in churches who hear god speaking, etc, think they do (but it's really their own head in whatever way) but mainly enjoy being a "member of the club."

[Kurari]

Yes I did, and I still do to a different extent. 

But I know now that these are archetypal manifestations of my own mind. I don't see evidence of gods of any sort managing anything in life and prayer is useless beyond it being a communing with your own psyche. I still practice visualization, meditation, and interact with the archetypes of my mind when I need comfort, guidance, or help. It works really well as I have a very strong sense of intuition and I feel healthier mentally and physically after I engage in doing these practices. 

[hereticzero]

I often felt influenced by the bible, which I was taught was god speaking to me through his word. It held me in slavery for over 45 years. Then I read parts of the bible that seemed to say, 'dude, this shit's crazy.' After I took a critical look at myself, my life, and what I was doing to myself because of religion, it all just sort of fell apart and hasn't had the same meaning for me anymore. Only words I hear now are what the voices in my wife's head tell her to tell me to do.