How do you convince religious people that the voices in their heads are NOT the voice of God, Jesus, Angels, etc.?

I feel like capitalizing my sentences today.

This essay is pretty rambling and disorganized. I haven't settled it yet.

I imagine a community. It's a subject I'll be writing about in more blogs, because the community has many aspects, and right now I have only about two hours to write.

But one question I've asked about this community is: How do we handle religion?

I'm an atheist myself. I'd like to have a small community where we shared the same religious beliefs and practices. This is important to me now that I've learned about electronic mind control. Religion used to be a more neutral issue for me personally. I could have had a community where people prayed however they wanted. But now, I know that people can 'listen to the voice of God' in their heads, and they can be misled and deceived by human beings playing the role of God. So it's no longer a neutral issue.

It's true, sometimes you can get information or suggestions that are helpful, from those voices. But I truly believe THEY SHOULD NOT BE THERE. Helpful or not, they don't belong in my head. If I had a CHOICE about it, it might be different. If I could choose to block them out whenever I wanted to be alone, and if I could choose what information I wanted to obtain, and if I could choose whom to associate with and whom to avoid, it might be different. But I can't choose those things. Not until I have technical knowledge and physical shielding.

When I picture people I'd invite into the community, I wonder just how to interact with their religious beliefs. I already know people from over the years, people who might be lonely enough, dissatisfied enough, people who don't fit in very well, people who aren't wealthy and happy in the normal world. You won't yank people out of a great government job with a lifetime pension. You won't yank people out of their mansions. But you might get people who just don't like the difficulties of the world we have now. If you find those people, you must incorporate their religions into your community.

Personality theories like the Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram teach us that different types of people contribute valuable, important things. And community members won't always be logical-minded, but we still really need them. So you just WON'T be able to make every single member stop believing in God altogether and become an official atheist.

But this community has important attributes. I can't just ignore them or skip them. I can't just leave out particular requirements. And it's VERY IMPORTANT that the new communities explicitly and openly talk about electronic mind control, explicitly talk about voices we hear in our heads, and other mental and physical phenomena that are currently taboo. We can't ignore those things anymore. In order to protect people in this new millennium, we MUST address mind control.

And this will cause a major conflict with sincerely religious people who really want to pray to the voices in their minds and sincerely feel comforted by the presence of a strong, reassuring, all-powerful deity character watching over them. A long time ago, there was nothing wrong with that. Perhaps praying felt different, centuries ago. Perhaps when they prayed, the voice of God never said anything back to them. Perhaps they heard only silence. That is what I imagine it was like, in the old world.

But nowadays, when you pray, God answers. He'll talk to you in words and sentences, and he'll tell you to do specific things. When you pray to God to make you rich, increase your sales, get an attractive person's attention, and buy you a new car, God OUGHT to ignore you! I've said it before: it seems blasphemous that people would pray for specific, worldly things, AND GET THEM. But if you read religious websites, you see this is happening to religious people every day. It's meant to be helpful, but when I see it, I feel that something is very, very wrong about it. Even if it's helpful, it bothers me to see this. Here's a typical example: 'My sister was dying of cancer, and I prayed to God to save her, and the next day, a total stranger walked up to me and told me about a book he read that contained all the information I needed to cure my sister's cancer! Now my sister is alive and well, thanks to God's helpful intervention.' When this kind of thing happens, I want to know: Who is spying on us, categorizing all that we do, labeling who we are, performing computer searches on us, and then puppeteering the 'right person' to go speak to another person at just the right moment? I can't stand the idea of it. And it's deceptive to make people think that 'God' is the one doing this. It's done by people - human beings who want to pat themselves on the back and say, 'I did a good deed!' Then they go home and tell themselves that God loves them and that they're going to heaven because they used a psychotronic system to force people to do things they wouldn't otherwise have done. And it's true, the lady's cancer got cured. But on the other hand, it's also true that I've spent years lying in bed unable to think a single thought without somebody zapping me and preventing me from thinking what I want, the way that I want, by using that exact same system.

I can't just filter out everybody but atheists. I agree with Julian Simon: the more the merrier. A larger number of people is better for a community: people divide and specialize their labor. Each unique person contributes some skill and plays some role. I can't just accept only the 'logical' people who might already agree about atheism. There are many people whose skills, abilities, and personalities are very, very valuable, but they're religious, and nothing will convince them to be otherwise. There are many people who are still badly needed even if they aren't 'geniuses.' Ordinary people are valuable. I hate to say words like 'ordinary people', because it always sounds insulting. But if I look for ONLY logical-minded geniuses that already agree with atheism and already know about electronic mind control, I might get a community with, like, fewer than ten people in it.

Not only that, but new children are born, and they differ from their parents. Very soon, the community will change from within. How do we cope with people who spontaneously start acting religious on their own? They will need some kind of structure to move into. The same goes for newborn people who spontaneously start initiating force against others and attempting to govern others through theft, lies, and force. They also need some social structure to move into. It won't be just one generation of people. So children's inevitable differences must be accounted for.

Here's one good thing about small, local communities: They don't have to be all-encompassing or perfect. When small communities are allowed to differ from each other, people can form 'sects' when they disagree. They can leave one community and move into another. This is how Amish communities work. Local Amish groups wear slightly different styles of clothing and disagree about which types of technology they allow or forbid.

My interpretation of 'what is anarchism?' is that it emphasizes smaller communities of people, instead of one huge government / money system controlling the whole planet or whole continent. The bigger, the worse. Small and medium-sized communities give people a chance to customize their lifestyles, to disagree, and yet to continue trading with one another, enjoying the benefits of a large marketplace, sharing the knowledge and skills of six billion people (or is it 6.5 billion now?), while still LIVING in a small, supportive group of people. Again, this fits with what Amish communities do. They DON'T block out the outside world. They buy and sell things from and to outsiders. They just filter some things out. And their communities are still small and supportive.

Suppose that I had shields that actually worked. They might not work perfectly - there's no such thing as a perfect shield. But what if you put a religious person inside the effective shield, and asked them to pray to God? The experience would be traumatic. God would no longer be there. God would disappear. God would be silent and inaccessible.

But if God is all-powerful, defying the laws of physics, then no shield can block him. You'd think that would prove it to a believer. You could say 'See? Those voices you usually hear aren't God. We blocked them out. If it were God, he could go through the shield.'

But it doesn't work that way. You don't merely convince someone to never believe in God again. Whenever they talk to you, they 'push a button' that says, 'Believe everything I say to you.' When they push the button of unconditional belief, the 'faith sensation,' you can't help yourself from believing they're God. When they lie to you, you believe - and it's not your fault. (I finally watched Good Will Hunting, a movie I've heard about and wondered about for a while now. It has a scene where Robin Williams says 'It's not your fault.' I really identify with that scene. It reminds me of the time when I decided, 'I'm not crazy.' People can't help getting screwed up when horrible things are done to them. It's something you have no control over.)

So the community must accommodate this somehow. People will always go back out into the world, and they'll hear God's voice talking to them again, and they'll believe what they're forced to believe.

Since I'm an atheist, I'm going to make a few assumptions. If I still hear voices inside the shield, I'm going to assume there's a 'leak,' or there's information I don't know about, something I've failed to consider, a problem I haven't solved yet. I will always assume this. I will always assume that nobody, nothing, anywhere, can violate the laws of physics. This is a permanent and unbreakable rule. If I hear voices inside the shield, I'm not going to give up and say, 'Oh well, that MUST be God, because he broke through my impenetrable shield.'

What do you do after demonstrating that your shield blocks out the voice of God?

In the community, we must have some kind of practices or teachings that fill in the structures of religion. People will always have religious habits and tendencies. You have to fill in that 'slot' in people's minds, fill it with something rather than just ignoring the problem. This is why I might call myself an 'anarchist' but still want something more specific - what are we anarchists to DO with ourselves while we sit around waiting for anarchy to happen? Agorism is one of the more specific 'routes' of anarchism. So it must be with religion. As it is with taking away government, you don't just take away religion and then fill in the blank with nothing. You substitute it with something that achieves goals that you think are better for your community. If you leave a void sitting there, then people will inevitably fill in the space with something even worse. A strong structure must be built that tells us what to do when people inevitably become religious or initiate force.

I might begin by requiring that people spend a little bit of time meditating inside the shield, but they're still permitted to pray in their normal way outside the shield. The shields are very small at first, because they're too expensive. People still live in an exposed, outdoor environment most of the time. Shielding is something you do as a short-term retreat, to recover from your daily bombardments of unavoidable outside attacks, interactions, random noise, and ambient electromagnetic fields.

I might have talks with people about what exactly the voices say to them, if they're able to remember.

It isn't always a voice. They also attack you with feelings, urges, sensory experiences, dreams, perceptions, hallucinations, and just about anything that the mind is capable of doing. It is very, very hard to distinguish what's real, what originates within YOU.

In Scientology, they have various levels of achievement. You learn new secrets when you reach higher levels. In my community I don't want things to revolve around 'secrets.' But there might still be various levels of meditative achievement or something. Levels of achievement occur in the mystical, meditative religions.

We might think of it as levels of RESPONSIBILITY, also, not just achievement. Levels of achievement and levels of responsibility. To what degree are you responsible for your own actions? To what degree are you held accountable? This is very, very hard to determine in a world of mind control. Who is accountable for what, when EVERY exposed human being is a puppet?

In one of his books, Edward de Bono said something about this issue. I forget which book it was. He said people argue about what to do when someone is accused of a crime, and they use some kind of insanity defense, or some other way of saying 'it wasn't my fault.' He said, sometimes it really wasn't your fault, but you have to go to jail anyway. I find this idea very unpleasant, and yet I see some truth in it: someone might have a range of skills and knowledge that make them an extremely dangerous 'puppet,' someone who's being manipulated to do terrible things, and even though it's not their fault, you have to lock them in a room to stop them from shooting at you - at least temporarily. This kind of thing happens all the time. It's especially bad because we have no technical understanding and no defenses against psychotronic manipulation.

Well, I'm running out of time here. There's no specific conclusion - it's just a bunch of musing.

Basically, I'm asking questions like 'What is a community?' 'What purposes does a community serve?' 'Why are communities breaking down, or nonexistent, in today's society?' 'What kinds of communities do exist and how do they function?'

I ask these things because right now, my community says there's no such thing as electronic mind control - and nobody's directing their capital into research and development aimed towards protecting us against it. The only people who DO spend money and capital on electronic mind control are the government and the military, who are only too happy to use it to spy on, attack, and control us, not to protect us. (I always say that random people and mafia also do these things... But I am reminded 'government itself is always your number one enemy.')

And nobody in my community gives social support, comfort, guidance, or protection of any kind to people afflicted with this kind of suffering. I reluctantly acknowledge, I've heard several times about the 'hearing voices network.' I haven't talked to them and I don't know if they're any good. From what little I read, I think they advocate that we try to make friends with, or integrate, the voices as though they are parts of our own personality. But I feel distrusting if anybody says that we should listen to good voices and not listen to bad voices... I'm not comfortable with hearing ANY voices telling me what to do. I just want to know what life is like without it!

Not only that, I don't just want to 'talk about it' to someone. I want to block it out - NOW. I want seclusion. I want to know who I am when I'm alone. I want to know what I want, what I care about, what I'm capable of. I want to know how it feels to be human.