I often awaken in the middle of the night with words bouncing around inside my head. Part of those thoughts includes guilt about my previous post being too negative. My main point with yesterday’s posting is that the first problem with the American church’s emphasis on subjective experience is that it forces us, who relate to God objectively, out. For now, I am keeping some involvement with my local church because I do admire the people there. They have the best pastor I have ever had, and the first woman. The church does take the simple commandment to love the least of these seriously, and it is that part of the church I want to be more involved with.

The second problem with this overemphasis on subjectivity is in the area of epistemology, or how we find truth. I am confident that God has given us only one way to find truth: by looking at the evidence and drawing rational conclusions. Christians claim that most truth comes via the subjective, the Holy Spirit speaking directly to their spirit. But here is the rub. If you fully understand human emotions, both from the fields of psychological research and the Bible’s own claim that our emotions are profoundly deceitful, then if God does directly speak to us, it would be almost impossible for a mere human to distinguish God’s voice from the emotional noise that is always inside our heads. Yet, every Christian will claim that they have the ability to make this distinction. This is where Christians get into a lot of trouble, and I will spend the rest of this post illustrating this point.

But I will add that the fundamental philosophical problem, which I will address when I talk about the history of the church, is thinking in dualistic terms. In this type of dualism, reality is sharply divided between the material (Earth, nature, our bodies, science, our brains, reason, our daily lives) and the spiritual (God, angels, our spiritual/emotional lives). In this model, Christians put the “spiritual” at the top and the material at the bottom as inferior or just plain dirty.

Plato was famous for creating a dualistic model similar to this; however, he put human reason at the pinnacle, while Christians put it in the dirty basement, to be avoided. Reason for them is anti-God. The consequences of this irrational epistemology are tragic. I could write several volumes on these examples, but I will quickly give just a few that come to mind.

1. Speaking to an evangelical pastor friend who had been with me in the discipleship group I was in, he said, “Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are running a child sexual abuse operation right out of the White House.”
   I ask, “That’s remarkable. Where is the evidence of this?”
   He says, “Everyone knows this; you just have your head in the sand.”
2. When I was very sick with Myeloma, an evangelical friend called me and told me that during a CT of her back, they found a small tumor in her pancreas. The doctor said that pancreatic cancer is usually terminal, but in her case, catching it so early, by dissecting the tumor and doing eight weeks of chemo, he is certain he can cure it. She had the surgery and then one dose of chemo, but it made her feel sick to her stomach. She says that her husband and the Holy Spirit have told her that if chemo makes her sick, it is poison, and she should stop it. Depend on God, and he will heal her. I begged her to look at the evidence, at what the doctor says, and not to listen to her gut (figuratively and literally). That nausea is just a side effect of chemo, but it will cure her cancer. I told her that I would give anything to be in her shoes, to suffer through just eight weeks of chemo and be cured, whereas I must be on chemo for the rest of my life. She quit the chemo and, over the subsequent six months, died a horrible death of suffering.

3. I ran into someone I knew from my discipleship group. After hours of talking, he confided in me that he was alienated from his daughter (in college now) because he had sexually abused her as a child. Yet, God had spoken to him, telling him that He understood his sexuality and that he had done nothing wrong.
4. I was in a church once where the pastor wanted to go mega and build a new five-thousand-seat church. God had spoken directly to him. Another group, who had built the previous church themselves and gone into a lot of debt, opposed him and claimed that God had told them not to build. The church ended up in a big fight and split.
5. I was an elder in a church, and in that church was a woman, a single mom with a six-year-old daughter. I had observed that the woman had a mental health problem, I think a factitious disorder. She had amazing story after amazing story, often with the Holy Spirit intervening as she was hanging in her car off a cliff, or having cancer that disappeared, or being chased by a Grizzly Bear, struck by lightning, and on and on. The wife, Claire, of a family in our church had shown some doubt about one of her amazing stories. Two weeks later, the woman appears before our board and says that Claire’s twelve-year-old son had sexually abused her six-year-old daughter. How did she know? The Holy Spirit had told her about it.

The board said that they could not doubt what the Holy Spirit has said, right? As part of my due diligence, I interviewed the twelve-year-old boy, who denied it. I interviewed the six-year-old girl with her mother present, and she denied ever speaking or meeting the boy. I became convinced that this was just part of the mother’s mental health problem. The board decided to excommunicate the boy’s family from our church and make a referral to the police. The head elder’s view of my psychological interpretation vs. the mother of the six-year-old’s Holy Spirit encounter showed that I was thinking in “Man’s way” and she in God’s. This is raw dualism. The police also found no evidence of sexual abuse. The boy’s family was devastated, so much so that they never returned to any church.

Again, these few stories are not what have convinced me that the “voice of God” is ambiguous and distorted as a means of finding truth. I could tell hundreds of such stories that have convinced me, including some of the major decisions in my life that I was 100% convinced God had directed me to, but that turned out to be huge mistakes.

We follow God’s principles. That is what the Bible says the Holy Spirit does: reminds us of the rational words spoken by Jesus, such as seeking factual truth and loving others as ourselves. But relying on secret messages directly from God, I think, is delusional and dangerous. This is how all cults start: the mantra of all Christian abuse.
Respectfully, Mike