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To be honest I am pretty sure 95% of them are lying or being euphemistic. It's just the way you communicate in their club. That last 5% or whatever covers a gammot from people that train themselves in prayer (similar to meditation) to people that have recognized mental conditions.
Like when someone says they felt like someone was telling them not to get on that plane. They get travel anxiety once and now it's gotta them getting a personal message from the being that created the universe.
There's a hypothesis called Bicameral Mentality which is the most serious exploration of this phenomenon as a mode of human thought, and although it's pretty controversial and essentially non-provable, IMO it's a worthwhile and thought provoking way to explore the concept of thought itself changing as social conditions change. The idea here would be that such people are tapping into a mode of consciousness which is less individualized and more metaphorical, ie instead of "talking to myself" my thoughts are "God talking to me".
If I were to take people completely at their word when they say they hear God talking to them, I would suppose that they are tapping into this mode of thought and that they are interpreting the outside voice according to their social conditioning (ie a Christian hears God, but an ancient Greek would have heard a muse) - although I'm a bit cynical so like Chana I tend to think that there are more people doing it performatively than not.
That said, I do fundamentally believe that our internal self perception is in part socially constructed and can be altered significantly on both long and short time scales - like people who "speak in tongues" or experience other forms of religious euphoria are likely experiencing a change in mental state brought on by their circumstances in that moment - so I find the idea that people are genuinely experiencing these things totally plausible.
Intrestingly in some other cultures schizophrenia often to presents as hearing religious figures speak to them and it being nice. So there is within the rage of reported possibility
I read this paper about the topic a few months back which talks about how differently people from different cultures experience hearing voices: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tops.12158
The most interesting part to me was the quotes from the people they interviewed:
USA (San Mateo)
We find that while there is much that is similar, there are notable differences in the kinds of voices that people seem to experience. In a California sample, people were more likely to describe their voices as intrusive unreal thoughts; in the South Indian sample, they were more likely to describe them as providing useful guidance; and in our West African sample, they were more likely to describe them as morally good and causally powerful. ... In general, Americans used diagnostic labels and were often familiar with the diagnostic criteria: all but three spontaneously described themselves as diagnosed with “schizophrenia” or “schizoaffective disorder.” In contrast, only four Chennai subjects spontaneously produced the word “schizophrenia” and said that they were suffering from it; only two in Accra used the word “schizophrenia” and, of them, one had been diagnosed in the United Kingdom. The Americans said things like:
“I fit the textbook on schizophrenia.”
“I have schizophrenia from my grandfather. It's a hereditary illness of the brain.”
“They know I'm a schizophrenic.”
“We schizophrenias.”
Americans described hearing voices as a sign of being crazy:
“I didn't tell them I'm hearing voices. I was afraid I might be called crazy.”
“You tell people out there that you have voices, they treat you differently.”
[asked about voices] “I don't tell people about my personal life, because they might think I'm crazy or something. They judge me.”
It was very clear in the American sample that people did not like their voices. Not one person told us that their predominant experience was positive. They were also very clear that their voices are often violent, and they talked about the violence in detail.
While some subjects in Accra and Chennai experienced violent voices, they gave that violence less prominence in their descriptions and fewer of them reported it.
Finally, the Americans talked about their voice as unreal thoughts in which there is a disrupted relationship between their thoughts and their mind. They were comfortable saying that they experienced the voices as real, but knew that they were unreal. They said things like this:
“I don't think there's anything there or anything. I think it's just the way my mind works.”
“I can distinguish myself from the voices, like from my own thoughts and my own thinking.”
One man hated the fact that the voice controls his mind and thoughts: “It's like my mind is trapped.”
“It's like I'm losing my mind … I know really deep down in my mind, when this is all going on, it's not real, and I keep trying to tell myself that all the time. But you know, I always have a feeling that this is reality.”
“Those are not my thoughts.”
These subjects spoke as if their minds were private places over which they had ownership. What made the voices so upsetting was the sense of violation of their personal control.
Accra (Ghana)
Subjects in the Accra sample spoke about their voices quite differently. They emphasized the moral action of their voices, and they treated the voices as causally powerful. Many identified the voices as spirits and described themselves as suffering from “spiritual attack” by malevolent voices who spoke audibly. “Voices is spirits” one man said. One woman experienced her psychosis as an unpleasant spirit marriage. It was a sexually active relationship, and if the spirit was displeased it beat her physically, a comment made by two others in the Accra sample.
Yet half the subjects reported good voices as their primary or only voice-hearing phenomenon. People emphasized their good voices and de-emphasized their bad voices. It seemed to be important to indicate that one was not responding to the bad voices: People often spontaneously insisted that they did not respond to them. Many told a story of the voices having gotten better, or the good voice telling them not to respond to the bad voice or even driving out the bad. They made comments like:
“Mostly the voices are good.”
“They just tell me to do the right thing. If I hadn't had these voices, I would have been dead long ago.”
“That's what has kept me alive until now, the voices, the voice of God I hear.”
“They want me to do good things.”
“They don't talk madness, but they speak good.”
It's like you've been controlled by God to do everything. [Do you feel controlled by God?] I feel controlled by God to do everything positive. [Do you feel that God ever takes thoughts out of your mind or puts thoughts into your mind?] … No. It feels like thoughts are being rearranged. It's being rearranged. If you are supposed to do something on your own, no, God will just change it and tell you, “No, don't do it this way anymore. I've put this other thought in you.”
She admitted that she heard demonic whispering, but said that God told her not to pay attention. No one in the Accra sample clearly distinguished inner unreal experience from outer, real, experience, the way Americans did. When they talked about the mind, they talked about its moral valence. As one woman put it: “The mind should be positive.”
Chennai (India)
The striking thing about the Chennai sample is that more than half the sample (11) heard voices of kin (e.g., parents; mother-in-law; mother; sister-in-law; father; sisters; etc.). Another two experienced a voice as husband or wife, and yet another reported that the voice said to listen to his father. Often, these voices from kin are both good and bad. One man, for example, heard his sisters berating him, but he also experienced an ancestral group of father, grandfather, mother's father, mother's sister, who seemed to support him and be companions to him. “I like them,” he said. He has a back-and-forth conversational relationship with them in which they gave him good advice. They tell him to take his bath, brush his teeth, drink his coffee. ‘Yeah, it's quite useful.” He talked about them “smiling” at him in his mind. A woman explained that her voice “talks like all the familiar persons in my house” … I don't know if the voices are giving me companionship because I am lonely. I thought it was for good, but I lose my sleep over this … majority [of voices] is good … I feel shameless, but these voices help me to maintain my dignity … Now these voices all console me and make me go forward.” And yet she also reported that she was afraid of them, and they beat her. She felt this physically in her body.
At least eight people reported a significant positive experience of their voices; for five, this experience was predominantly positive.
“I like my mother's voice.”
“Voices, yes, I like it. It will keep talking which is enjoyable.”
“I have derived happiness by thinking about him.”
“I like it … their talking is a time pass and it is interesting.”
“I have a companion to talk (laughs). I need not go out and speak. I can talk within myself.”
The dominant theme in the voice-hearing experience of the Chennai subjects is that voices offer guidance. “They talk as if elder people advising younger people.” The woman who heard Hanuman also heard the voices of the clinical staff—particularly her doctor. She liked that; her doctor took care of her. Her (invisible) doctor said: “And you are doing the right thing only and I am not angry about it.” Regardless of whether the voices are liked or not, they tend to give good commands. Kin scold, and they command the patient to do domestic tasks: cook, clean, eat, bath—“go to the kitchen, prepare food.” They also insist on good behavior; they tell people not to smoke and drink. Another man said that his voices were never helpful, but he described hearing his father give him a weapon to fight a ghost, and telling him to eat a lot but not to eat too much because he would get digestive trouble.
The authors conclude one of the key difference between the American, Ghanan and Indian people is the sense of individualism and private ownership over the mind:
We suggest that these differences arise, in part, from different cultural expectations about the mind, or about the way people expect thoughts and feelings to be private or accessible to spirits or persons. Americans imagine the mind as a separate, private place (D'Andrade, 1987). God may know what one thinks (Barrett, 2004), but even Americans taught by their church to experience God as talking to them in their minds find it difficult to accept, at first, that thought-like experiences might be God's words (Luhrmann, 2012). To use Charles Taylor's (2007) formulation, the American (and Western) mind is “bounded.” It is consistent with this that our American subjects so uniformly hated their voices, interpreted them as symptoms of madness, and experienced them as violent and as violations of the mind. These comparative differences can be attributed neither to the lesser religiosity of the Americans—they are nearly all religious—nor to the lesser violence (compared to a South Bay suburb) in the sprawling, impoverished, and chaotic cities of Accra and Chennai. The Americans seem to feel assaulted by voices. The very experience of hearing a voice is an assault, and their only explanation for it is that there is something wrong with their mind.
That's fascinating. I haven't seen it covered that thoroughly
Believers talking about God speaking to them is not dissimilar from how acid heads throw around the term ego death. Some genuinely experienced it but for most it's just a meme
Nutjobs, she only talks to me
Not sure if it was God speaking to me, but there have been a few moments in my life where I had a strong thought that didn't seem to be coming from my conscious mind and I couldn't just ignore or distract myself from. Like I couldn't explain why I felt it so freaking strongly. Could have been unconscious signs resulting in a massively strong gut feeling, but some of these were too "direct" for me to just write off as only that.
A big one I wish I had listened to is that I got the distinct strong feeling that there was something wrong about my relationship with my then long distance girlfriend. That one I did manage to shove to the back of my mind after a few days, and I wish I hadn't because it all went to hell after I wasted a few more years.
Another one was the night after I first met my now wife. I knew I liked her, and I knew I wanted to ask her out. But stronger than that I had the distinct thought "If you don't ask her out you will regret it for the rest of your life". Like wow, that's extreme, I just met this woman.
many protestant (especially evangelical) traditions have a theology that heavily emphasizes a direct, individual relationship with God, individual Bible reading and interpretation, priesthood of all believers, etc, which encourages personal religious experience and verbal reports. this is unlike most other Christian sects, like say Rman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, which prioritise a more communal, sacramental, and liturgical approach to faith, supported by extensive institutional and clerical authority that guides, channels, disciplines, or interprets personal claims of direct revelation
In some cases I think it's genuinely people being worked into something like delusion by decades of enculturation by their religious community, and in other cases an odd neurological event that they immediately assign religious significance to rather than considering any other interpretation.
Also people who seem to just think getting a strong moral feeling is God talking to them and also also just liars.
Surely a message from GOD would be unmistakable and impossible to confuse for one's own thoughts and feelings.
If such a thing exists, that doesn't change people having, for example, a psychotic break from reality also believing that it was unmistakably the voice of God, they just are wrong in thinking they know while the first group would be right in thinking they know. To other people, there's not really an observable difference
In some charismatic circles a part of it is that you literally need to in order to fit in. Like if you're not "baptized in the spirit" you're not a full Christian per se, so there's a lot of external pressure to validate the practice and have an experience.
Given that you're also not usually doing in depth text study of the Bible or church tradition it also helps express and regulate the doctrines of the group, with the added benefit that the truths you articulate are almost always going to be contextual and personal. That way you can reaffirm that you're in a "relationship", not a "religion"
Where was a thing on the internet a few years back. It was the tulpa craze. People reported that if you worked hard enough on it you could intentially create an imaginary friend. People who are more isolated or more loosely integrated with reality seemed to have better luck at it. So the process faling implies to me that there is there is a biological component. This seems to be like that. Where some categories of delusion are delusions that you have a delusion. So I am sure for some people they are able to intentionally learn to interpret a subset of inner monolog as external. That seems to be exactly the process of some kinds of skitsotypal hallucination. Which still a better use if their time than AI. Lots of authors claims they experience similar effects
A few years ago wgen i was much more disregulated, emotional, isolated and in general poor health i believed i could hear various historical figures talking to me in my dreams and while i was awake (and conversely me monologuing to them, always one way either them at me or me at them), this has always been a low level thing for me but as a child it was just other schoolkids and teachers and stuff. Anyway it went on to increase in how much it happened and how frequently it appeared outside of just dreams and went from historic figures to religious figures, (interestingly over time it became less and less literary until just strong emotions and concepts would flash into my brain as i looked at them in my minds eye) at a point i converted back to Christianity like i was as a child — gradually the frequency of it happening decreased until one day i realised i hadn't had it in like a year, and i only have it happen with irl people once every half a year or so now and it doesn't feel really like a separate person speaking to ne anymore, idk why really.
In the end i kind of just put it down to mental illness and a weakening ability to delineate whats yourself and whats not but i stayed christian out of inertia, idk i suppose there's a fair few people like me with like a latent tendency towards thinking like that getting triggered by high stress situations or poor conditions into 'hearing' constant religious revelations