Dan Foster’s Lame Test for the Divinity of Inner Voices
And how theists mythologize the self’s internal divisions
Dan Foster, the liberal Christian and editor of Backyard Church, suspects that some Christians are fooling themselves into thinking they’re dealing with God whereas they’re interacting only with a mental projection of themselves.
He asks, “How do you know you’ve found God,” and he challenges Christians to test their so-called personal relationship with the deity. “If you always agree with it, it ain’t God,” he says. Moreover, “If you fully understand it, it ain’t God.” And he goes on to say that God should ask something of you, change you, and free you so that you feel as comfortable in life as a happy child.
In short, Foster says, “There is one place that I know you won’t find God: In the mirror. If your God thinks like you, acts like you, speaks like [you], says the kind of things that only you would say, and asks nothing of you save for that which you would normally ask of yourself, then I think there is a very good chance that the God you follow is one that you have constructed for yourself!”
That seems right as far as it goes. Mind you, we could go further and say that this trope of speaking directly to and hearing from God is just a ruse, a way to impress others or to scare…
