What evangelicals hear when they talk w/ God

[Seven Severn]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... gle+Reader

 

An anthropologist researching evangelicals writes about how evangelicals communicate with God.

[wtylcf]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/17/we-talk-with-god-what-evangelical-christians-hear.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

An anthropologist researching evangelicals writes about how evangelicals communicate with God.

This was a totally fascinating article. I expected it to be much more negative than it was. When I was an evangelical Christian, I was encouraged during a youth church conference to keep a diary of God "speaking" to me. I re-read this diary years later, and saw that what I imagined God "saying" was nothing more than my own voice telling myself about the role I was expected to play, and it echoed the sentiments of everyone around me in church leadership. It wasn't "God" but my delusion of God.

What the author seems to be describing is much more phenomenological - attuning oneself to the pre-reflective elements of the mental landscape, the parts that aren't purely rational, and somehow pulling out sentiments that emerge out of an inherent empathy for others, the kind of "knowing" that has to do with our embodied state in the world, ironically enough, not our rational minds.

It's interesting that Christianity encourages this kind of "inspired" thought and that the author sees a way that it can possibly be useful even in a secular sense. I feel like if I went back to encouraging that kind of thought, it would turn out to be a bunch of made-up crap like before, instead of anything deeply meaningful or insightful. I can't conceive of myself having an "inspired" thought I'd tell someone. I'd be too worried about how it would come across.