I like the Julian Jaynes theory--totally unprovable but still brilliant-- that humans' brain structure, which allows for hearing voices, used to be the norm, based on ancient literature references over three thousand years ago, and that initially everyone thought of God as their personal God, and that was simply the hallucinated voice. For example in the Illiad, humans were portrayed as mere puppets that had to obey their gods. The theory is that the further development of a unified consciousness in humans led to a sharp decline in the experience of hearing voices. For whatever reason, it's unclear, but humans became generally better developed at the ability to subsume those voices into a single consciousness. The Bible, as well as numerous other ancient texts, refers to people pining in anguish over the loss of that personal "god" voice in their head. Feeling forsaken by God. At the same time, leaders--chieftans, kings, etc. Started insisting that their personal God would now be the God of all their subjects, leading to the rise of a priest class to tell people what God expected of them. It is estimated that nowadays roughly 10% of people hear voices at some point or other, whether mentally ill, under unusual stress, grieving a death of a loved one, or even just sleep deprived. The bicameral mind theory is fascinating.

Yes! If you remember the name of that podcast, or whose it was, let us know, please.

@MikeInBatonRouge I believe it was episode #344 of Dogma Debate, titled Christian Listener vs. David Smalley. Pretty long episode but really good.

@MikeInBatonRouge Now I'm second guessing myself. It could also be episode #347 of Dogma Debate, titled Doubting Christian vs. David Smalley. It's long as well but equally as good as the other episode. It's in either of those episodes.

I think you were just talking about the Borg, actually. "Resistance is futile!"

Come on now! God has a great mustache, but clearly no beard. So stop making up stuff!