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I don’t know much about Buddhism, but I know an awful lot about Christianity, having been a fervent evangelical for well over 10 years. Maybe they realized, like me and many others, the Bible contains much wisdom, along with a whole bunch of nonsense, superstition, and fairy tales. I turned to Deism; they turned to Buddhism, but the critical factor in both cases was coming to the realization that the Bible, with its three headed god who came to earth and yet didn’t, and is dying to save everybody but can’t, and who is so holy that he has no choice but to send billions of unclean sinners to a lake of fire for eternity but has no problem inviting Satan into his presence to make wagers about tempting Job, that says when man moved from running around naked devoid of moral understanding to wearing clothes and knowing the difference between right and wrong this was some sort of “Fall”…isn’t “the word of God.”

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I wonder if Buddhists walk past churches and think, “Why would they prefer this anthropomorphised, personalised reality over an impersonal one?”

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Other than waving your Bible at them and insisting that Buddhism isn’t Biblical (to which they would say, ‘duh’), what argument do any of you have against that?

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The advice I was given by an older Christian when I was struggling with this a number of years ago, is to test anything that I thought was God speaking to me by these two criteria:

1. Is it in line with Scriptural teaching?

2. Will doing this lead to an increase in love, joy, peace, etc. (the fruit of the Spirit in Gal. 5:22-23)?

If it meets those two criteria, she said I could feel confident that it was God’s voice. Whether it is God’s voice speaking directly to me at the time when I’m praying, or through my own understanding of His purposes, developed over years of hearing Him speak through Scripture and through people teaching and preaching from Scripture, is not really important to determine.

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There are a lot of people who want some kind of spirituality because they sense that life is more than the physical dimension that we can test and measure in the lab. But they have been turned off Christianity for various reasons, whether over the problem of why a personal loving God would allow evil, the idea of people of other religions going to hell, or behavior by professed Christians that seems very un-Christian.

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For someone who truly hears God’s voice in a inner and subjective level, how do they know it is God’s voice and not there own and how does it differ from what the Buddists are doing?

I don’t know that there is a definitive answer to this other than that the Bible says, “Call to Me and I will answer you” (Jeremiah 33:3) and (speaking of the Good Shepherd) “his sheep follow him because they know his voice” (John 10:4). The bottom line, to me, is that I must trust God to answer me (and to steer me away from falsehood) when I am truly seeking Him. He doesn’t give me anything more than faith to work with, because my relationship with Him must be based on faith. I can’t insist that God make Himself clear; all I can do is call on and humbly open myself up to Jesus Christ, trusting Him to live up to His promise to guide and protect me.

The difference between this and what the Buddhists are doing may not be evident from our perspective, but I think from God’s perspective (which is the only true one) it’s similar to the difference between calling your father and dialing a random phone number. In the latter case you may or may not get a connection, but whatever voice you hear certainly will not be that of someone who knows and loves you.

Doreen in #15 says “thoughts I thought were God’s to me, turned out very wrong and therefore were not His after all. So although I spend hours daily in meditation on His word and speaking to Him, I am wary of what I think I’m hearing back. Especially if it’s something I really want to “hear.””

It’s true that we can easily deceive ourselves into thinking God is saying something to us that He’s not. But I’ve found that each time this happens to me, I can look back and see how I allowed myself to be deceived, often even ignoring a little “stop” in my heart. It’s good to be wary and conscious of my capacity for self-deception, but it’s not good to refuse to listen. The key, for me, is that I must surrender my will as fully as I am able, and ask the Lord to purify my heart so I am truly seeking Him and not just seeking to be affirmed in what I want. Seeking to hear from God is essential to relationship with Him, but it is a process that ultimately kills our flesh.

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John Quincy Adams vacillated between orthodox Calvinism and Unitarianism his entire life. When Adams writes the letter to junior, you can see from the context that his son seems to be in a Calvinist “phase.”

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