God: who are you; what are you?
(Coming in 6 parts)
Part 1
It has been a staple of my thoughts for some years now that the voice of God that I experience in my head is distinctly different from my own voice, and I know this to be true because I know what it is like to think things over with myself, but when God “talks” to me, it feels different. This voice has become extremely precious to me, and is, in practice, the foundation of my claim to believe in God because he is real. I do have my final, fall-back defence whereby I reinterpret God as a creation of the human mind, rather than an independently existing being. However, in everyday living it is my sense of being in a relationship with God, because we converse with each other, which is the heart of my faith.
However, I now want to consider if I am wrong, and the voice of God in my head is not so different from my own voice after all.
The most I’m willing to say is that – if the voice is mine – it’s a very remarkable voice, as though I had attained the wisdom, insight and compassionate justice of God himself. This is so intrinsically unlikely that it’s more plausible to suppose that it is the voice of God. However, if I try to bend over backwards to be kind to those of secular persuasion – and, of course, to give due reverence to the wonder of human nature at its best – then I wonder if it’s possible that this “God’s voice” is what we sound like when we are having moments of great insight. Of course, many people fool themselves into thinking that their own desires are the voice of God – sometimes in a good but inadequate way, but we also know that this can be in grossly immoral ways, such as, “God told me to slaughter those people”. However, God’s voice in my head is always kind and wise, to an extraordinary degree – and this is not true of me.
Spiritual Devotion 