@Tes yeux noirs,
Yes, that sort of thing is all too common. The member Manden (who has revealed that his name is Manfred Dangler) has spammed the site with numerous threads, in mnay of which he tells us that the "true god" speaks to him. PC here claims that he and others--he is insistent about the plurality--receive messages from a male spirit in a female body, which spirit is actually Jesus (although he sometimes describes the spirit as the "holy spirit"). The thought processes of such individuals is completely alien to me. Julian Jaynes in
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind argues that humans were not conscious throughout most of history in the sense that we are. In particular, he claims that they were governed in their activities by auditory hallucinations arising in one hemisphere of the brain, and "heard in the other hemisphere as an external voice. This is from the Wikipedia article on Jaynes:
Quote:Jaynes wrote that ancient humans before roughly 1000BC were not reflectively meta-conscious and operated by means of automatic, nonconscious habit-schemas. Instead of having meta-consciousness, these humans were constituted by what Jaynes calls the "bicameral mind". For bicameral humans, when habit did not suffice to handle novel stimuli and stress rose at the moment of decision, neural activity in the "dominant" (left) hemisphere was modulated by auditory verbal hallucinations originating in the so-called "silent" (right) hemisphere (particularly the right temporal cortex), which were heard as the voice of a chieftain or god and immediately obeyed.
When i read Jaynes' book, i was not convinced, and, as is so often the case, his reference to history and ancient literature were dodgy. However, the experience of people like Manden and PC here certainly do make one wonder.
