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Maku said:
How come in the bible God talks to all the prophets and people, but now you never here god talking to any modern day prophets?
Some athiest said it on his site and of course I love god, but what he said makes sense.. How come you never hear God tearing up places for sinners such as amsterdam, it's the new sodom and gomora...
Hello, Maku -
There is a theory about this, first brought out in the 1970s*. The idea is that people were not
conscious until very recently in human evolution. "Conscious", as the theory uses the word, does not mean
awake,
alert or
aware, but it has a more specialized meaning. According to the theory, people up until the time of the earliest civilizations did not experience themselves as agents with volition who could make decisions. They could think, speak, calculate, and perform many ordinary cognitive functions, but they had no center from which to make their own choices. Instead, voices in their heads told them what to do.
You have probably heard that we each have
two brains (we usually think of them as being two halves, or hemispheres, of one brain). Several thousand years ago (says the theory) these two separate sections operated much more independently of each other, and communication between the two sides was not as easy as it is for us today. Ancient man had a very "bicameral" mind - two distinct units in his head.
The way in which the brain-half responsible for making decisions communicated with the half responsible for action was by means of a audible voice. The ancients heard voices in their heads, which was really the two hemispheres communicating with each other, telling the person what to do. That is why, in literature and stories dating back to about the time of Homer's
Odyssey, the gods are very active - always meddling in human affairs and telling them how to behave.
Later, these two parts of the brain established better connections and began to function more as a single unit than as two distinct brains. Today (says this theory) when one half of the brain tells the other half what to do, you experience it as you yourself making a decision, not as a divine voice giving orders. The old
bicameral mind has broken down, and we moderns do not hear voices in our heads so much as our ancestors.
There is a lot of historical and neurological evidence that makes this a fascinating theory. If you are interested, see below for a very readable book about it.
I would not discuss it with weak or immature Christians, lest it cause them to stumble. It calls into question the doctrine of scriptural innerency, and it causes one to entertain a natural explanation of some of the more "ungodly" utterances of old Yahweh.
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* Jaynes, Julian.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.
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