I was out for a walk yesterday evening along a nearby canal. A breeze came along and blew a few leaves in my path. I stopped in my tracks and watched them settle on the ground; transfixed. I was about to continue when another breeze started up. But this time, along with the breeze I heard a voice whisper "I created you..." That’s how it started. Now it’s more common place. God speaks to me fairly often. He directs me in my life, and offers comfort when I’m low. Moments ago, he told me nobody would believe me. He says you’ll think I’m lying or I need help. If that is what you’re thinking, doesn’t that show I’m communicating with a being that has the power to read minds? No human can read minds, and I’ve never met you, so how could I know what you’re thinking? And it’s not just me. Deanna Laney heard God too, and she was ordered to kill her sons. Like Abraham she obeyed, by crushing their heads with rocks. But what did the news reports say about this act of obedience to God? ‘Delusional’. ‘Insane’. Was Abraham insane too then for almost burning his son to prove his faith in God? In a Texas court, people making the case against Deanna gave their expert opinions on the negative mental state of a person who hears the voice of God… after swearing on a book written by authors who heard the voice of God. (Pause for affect!) Why is it that practically everyone, religious people included, knows straight away that anyone who claims to hear a divine creator is wrong? Do they have proof it’s not real? Do they think God couldn’t communicate to a few people now and then in this fashion? No. So, why? Common sense, lack of evidence, brain power (and not much is required to know people who make this claim are lying or delusional). Did I lie about God talking to me? Yes, of course I did. You’re not stupid. You saw right through it. So why in the world do we see all this respect and admiration for people in history who said the exact same thing? Why do so many people base their lives on words from the type of people they would avoid today? Is it the ‘dust affect’? The dustier the book, the more reliable it is? Find them in a pot in a cave, and these ‘words from God’ are automatically true? Would my lies (or delusions) become true if I hid them in a pot too? I’m struggling to understand why common sense disappears when religious people make unwarranted exceptions about certain ‘words from God’. Take any ‘prophet’ from the past and consider how well they’d be treated in this day and age. “What’s that? You saw a burning bush? Well, yes, you are in a boiling hot desert. These things happen. A voice too? I think the sun got to you!” “What’s that? You want to marry a six year old girl, and have sex with her when she’s nine?! No, sorry, you’ll have to be kept away from children and – sorry? Oh, you heard God tell you it was okay! Oh, well in that case, we’ll have to do a psychological evaluation too. Maybe put you on some medication.” “What’s that? You flew to heaven on a winged horse?” “What’s that? You were walking along the road and saw a bright light which can only have been from God?” “God wrote some rules on a piece of rock for you when you were up the mountain?” “God just told you he made everything in seven days?” “God told you stars will fall to the Earth any day now?” “You saw a talking snake?” Most of these people would be ignored or helped to overcome their delusions nowadays. Were there no delusional or lying people back in the days when the popular religious texts were written? Of course there were. It’s not a new 20th or 21st century phenomenon, is it? So keep in mind, almost everyone who claims to believe the people who said they heard the voice of a god, those who follow books full of that kind of thing, are throwing aside their common sense, which should be applied just as much to claims of old as any new claims they come across.