Governor Rick Perry, Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, and Entrepreneur Herman Cain all said that God had told them to run for President. Recently, Pat Robertson announced that God had told him who the next president will be and also gave him a message to give to the world. Let me also add that Deanna Laney killed her children because she believed God ordered her to and suicide bombers believe that God wants them to fulfill their mission as well. Do you see what they all have in common? God said it so that should settle it for everyone else.
While spending most of my life in church, one of the most popular statements I’ve heard was “God said” or “God told me to tell you”. I always respected the experience they had, trusted that they heard the voice of God, and then awaited for the awesomeness that they would articulate. At times the words would not be as powerful as I would assume a powerful God would say. At other times, it was as if they knew my mind or what I was going through.
What I learned to do was to distinguish the authenticity of the message with the relevancy and purity of the message. If what they said held true for my reality, was helpful, and overwhelmed me with a since of power, I perceived that God really did say it. But if the message seemed unethical, irrelevant, inconsistent, or something I had easily heard before, I dismissed it as just words from one who wish they heard the voice of God.
The “God said” or “God told me to tell you” phrases fall within the category of religious experiences. Religious experiences can be found within most of all the world’s religions including Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Voodoo. Paul had a religious experience on the road to Damascus, the Buddha had one under a tree, and even Muhammad had one in a cave for 22 years. Religious Experiences are said to be phenomena that allow for humans to commune with the divine (no evidence if animals have them as of yet, although they seem to be used at times in human ones), move pass the physical realm into spiritual realities, and allow humans to experience bliss and peace.
But how do we know they are really taking place? Gary Gutting develops criteria for religious experiences. He suggest that they must be repeatable, experienced by many in many diverse cultures, and must issue forth in morally better lives. To him such exist and therefore religious experience and God exists.
But philosophers of religion, like Louis Pojman, suggest that there can be problems with religious experiences. For Pojman there are several issues:
1) It’s hard to confirm religious experiences the same way we can confirm perceptual experience. I can confirm if it’s hot outside with a thermometer. But I cannot confirm with other tools that God really did tell Pat Robertson who the next president would be.
2) How do we distinguish which experience is valid or invalid? Pojman notes that although the person experiencing it believes its valid, why should the non-experient accept their reports? If Rick Perry and his wife believes God told her husband to run for president, what is it that would convince me that that is true other than faith or the fact that Rick Perry is already an authority figure?
3) Religious experiences are typically private. God seems to tell Pat Roberson about the decline of the country, but doesn’t tell it to the rest of the world. So how can we verify it, given its exclusiveness?
Pojman believes that if God has something to say, why isn’t he telling everyone? Why is God hiding or telling secrets? Why is God choosing to only tell special, peculiar people?
While I think that people may have good intentions with giving God credit, others may use “God told me” to add authority to their statement. For if they can convince people that God told them perhaps people will believe their statement more or respect them greatly.
While I agree with Pojman, my critical suggestions (unlike my uncritical ones as a child) are a matter of language and certainty. I think we should be careful with language and with assuring ourselves that God directly came to us. Because of the implications, to say such a thing should not be based on faith but on certainty.
Therefore, I think that we should quote our words, messages, texts as our words, even words we believe are inspired. But we should be careful not to quote them as God’s direct words.
To go a little bit more radical, I think we should change how we quote religious texts as well. Instead of saying, “God said in his word”, we should understand that the bible is a product of religious experience. People were inspired and believed that this is what God had told them. Bud did they know for sure? Do we know for sure?
Quoting every word of the Bible as God’s directly can be dangerous. Suggesting that God said everything in the Bible could be replacing the culture, context, and ideas of a group of people with God. As a result, we could probably conclude that if the Bible is God’s words, what God said then there are several “words of God” that would lead us to conclude that God is not that smart, ethical, just, or loving.
For example, In 1 Samuel 15:1 God tells Saul to kill women and children. Were those really God’s words? Today many scholars will refute that and some theologians will suggest that it contradicts the nature of God. I think that we should quote the bible as inspired words or people beliefs about God but not as God’s words.
We should then distinguish between our ideas and our feelings from actual direct words we believe God is saying. When someone receives a brilliant idea, they can quickly assume that God gave it to them. The logic can be that if God is the giver of good things, and if the idea is good, then God clearly spoke the idea to the innovator. But how are we so sure? Sometimes ideas are good, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are God’s. Slavery at one time had to have been perceived as a good idea as well as crashing into the twin towers and even the Holocaust. But good ideas do not necessarily mean they are God’s.
Happy feelings can sometimes be interpreted as “God told me” motivations. I can feel happy today and that feeling can cause me to give all my money away. Because of my overwhelming emotion, I could interpret it as God told me to do that action and be dead wrong about it. Emotions can cause people to act, but such emotions should not be indicators of direct orders from God.
Would we ever know if God is speaking directly to us with certainty? Well we may not be too sure. And if we are not certain, what’s so wrong with watching our language and being careful about giving God credit for stuff God may not have said? We could be wrong. It’s better to be safe than sorry. But unfortunately, most people may be more concerned more with their image than God’s.