Consciencebound

This is a story from back in 2004 which I did not see at the time. Someone just forwarded an article to me about it the other day. It is a story about a disgruntled Colorado man who seemed to experience some pretty unfair treatment in his small Colorado town of Granby. His frustration culminated in building a steel and concrete reinforced bull dozer and destroying 15 buildings and many cars and finally by taking his own life. A video montage of this even is below or you can read a story about it which includes a lot more details here and a discovery channel story on it here. What I would like to comment on is this man’s feeling that he was guided by God or some higher power.
I am not trying to single this man and his crazy actions out as a representative example of believers in any way. Although I can sympathize with his frustrations, his actions are hardly condoned especially because his clear intention was to also take a number of people’s lives. I also know that many believers will think that this man is crazy and that God was most certainly not guiding him to do this. What I do think that it illustrates however is the way that humans can be clearly deceived by their own circumstances and by their own beliefs to think that God is on their side and leading or speaking to them and feel that they have clear evidence for this. The man who did this, Marvin Heemeyer, made audio tapes of his plans and his thinking before the event so we have some insight into what he was thinking.

Some of the things that he said about God’s direction are:

- “God has asked me to do this. It’s a cross that I am going to carry and I’m carrying it in God’s name.”

- “I think God will bless me, to get the machine done and to do what I have to do”

- “I’m trying to be prepared as I can be to do what I believe needs to be done. What God has inspired me to do”

- “It definitely is in God’s hands. it is not in my hands. With out a doubt. I’m building it, but there is a reason why I am successful at continuing this project.”

- “That’s another thing that is so uncanny. Why didn’t I get caught… How come they didn’t catch me? It was right there under their nose. Well, I wasn’t supposed to get caught.”

- He said that God “clouded their vision” so that they couldn’t really see what he was doing and what he was planning.

Heemeyer saw clues to God’s guidance in his feelings of rage and revenge, the injustice of his circumstances, his inspiration for his plans to execute the revenge and the coincidences which enabled him to continue his project. Strangely, these are all things that any person who sees evidence for some supernatural involvement in their lives looks at. And this is why it is so vitally important to learn to be able to distinguish between evidence for God which is reliable and that which is not.

Many different people experience many different things. Sometimes people experience strange things which would seem to suggest that something spiritual is happening or that God is doing something or talking to the person. Anyone who is interested in the truth should at least be interested in honestly looking into such experiences and claims to see if they have validity. We have to look at the experiences and claims with an open yet critical mind because we know how easy it is to be deceived and we know how many different conflicting stories that there are like this out there.

Here are some questions that this man could have asked which might have helped get at the truth of the situation:

- How do I know that it is God who is telling me these things?
We know that people can hear voices (or what they think are voices) in their head and that those voices are completely generated by their own mind and usually a chemical imbalance in the brain. This should always be taken into account no matter how lucid or “normal” a person is since there are many (millions) of examples of this happening to otherwise normal people. It does not mean a person is crazy, just that there is something going wrong in their brain which can usually be treated.

- Can other people confirm that “God” is telling me these things? Is there an audible voice that is heard by other people as well? Is it an internal impression that I have?

- Can my impression that God is speaking to me be understood in any natural way? We should always seek to find a natural explanation for what we experience. The more that we understand about psychology and the human brain/mind, the more things that we have been able to explain by appealing to natural explanations. This is not to rule out the possibility of God, but it has been a very reliable way of understanding the world that has worked pretty well. There used to be many more things attributed to God’s direct working which we now clearly understand by natural explanations like weather, droughts, earthquakes, floods, voices, demon possession etc.

Again, these critical questions are not to rule out the possibility that God is talking, they are only to help a person to make sure that it is really God talking and not something else. These are the same critical thinking questions that we should ask of any out of the ordinary claims.

Similar Posts:

• The Balony Detection Kit
• Studying Islam has made me an atheist
• A Skeptical Discussion of Miracles
• Faith… What’s the Point?
• Is God Necessary for Morality?
• Truth Seeking
• Questioning God’s Moral Character