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The Self Fullfilling Prophesy

Jesus the Man, Jesus the Myth

How can you tell when a voice in your head comes from God and not from something else? People have been taught many things about voices in their heads. Some say demons talk to people, some say angels talk to people, some say the devil talks to people, some say the Holy Spirit talks to people. Other people say that when it comes to personalities and voices in the head then one is the optimum number.

Thousands of people every year seek medical help for the problems of voices in their heads sending them inappropriate and dangerous messages. It is hardly a novel idea that when a person claims to hear a voice in their head that they are sick, wrong and quite probably dangerous.

Men who claim God told them to kill their loved ones and act upon it are often declared insane and so get special treatment by the criminal justice system. But such attitudes are relatively new. A few thousand years ago back in the Middle East in the bronze age the One True God apparently often told men to kill their sons or put whole cities to the sword, normal behaviour apparently for the benevolent and in-errant God. The real point for you to think about is why people believed their stories.

As I see it everything comes down to AUTHORITY. Your delusions and hallucinations are wrong, because they say so. The delusions and hallucinations (have you read Revelation? What was that guy John on?) of the respected figures of Church history are given the rubber stamp of authority and so taking on board the hearsay account of subjective impressions of men long dead becomes somehow worthy and honourable. Almost all of the Bible is hearsay, uncorroborated and based on the idea that if Prophets of old said they heard the voice of God then they did hear it and to doubt it is to be a miserable sinner destined for Satan's toasting fork.

Why should anybody ever be believed when they say that they have heard the voice of God? What organ does our species possess that enables us to know the difference between a strong impression and a true impression? All the studies of psychology that I have seen make me profoundly sceptical of human subjective impressions. In the end all of religion is based on these impressions. “I can hear a voice and it feels important.” Madmen have voices in their heads that other people believe are just voices in their heads, prophets are madmen who convince other people that they have the voice of God in their head. It comes down to how convincing and charismatic the sufferer is and how gullible and prepared to believe are the people around them. Once the prophet is dead then whether or not the story is believed depends on the ability or authority of the storyteller.

Can you imagine a world in which there were no prophets and no religions? I suggest you do not have to stretch your brain too far to come up with a straight forward answer. God or no God there will be prophets and priests, and only the best stories of the most convincing deluded religious maniacs will be spread.

Many of the books of the Bible that concern prophesies and prophets were deliberate works of fiction with no relation to any real events or real people; Ruth, Job and Jonah are as real as Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Pimpernel. Moses is as real or mythic as King Arthur. Many others started as accounts of the lives of prophets but had extra material inserted into the story to strengthen the illusion of foretelling events accurately or to pass off second rate prophesies and interpretations as being the work of much older and better regarded prophets. Of course as soon as books of scripture began to be regarded as authoritative and holy then the temptation to fiddle with them to suit the causes of the day became ever stronger. The classic example of this is in the way that Isaiah has been bent to be seen as a foretelling of a Christian Messiah born of a virgin and the complete fabrication of the story of the Nativity to fit “the prophesies in the scripture”.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited