Answers from your deity

[Redflagsabounded]

When you pray ( or your version thereof),, and you believe they have answered you, how do you experience that? A voice, a feeling, something else? How do you know if it's real or your imagination?

To be transparent, I'm an atheist so think it's your imagination, but I'm interested not in being convinced, but in understanding another's point of view.

Only slightly influenced by a very religious ex who had an affair with an equally religious woman, and told me they'd prayed about the situation. Presumably it suited them for god to reply yeah, go for it. I would imagine it included the ass and ox yoke teaching. So to my mind, wishful thinking, but to theirs, there was an actual response.

How can you know the difference?

On occasions He has spoken to me, often not in answer to a prayer, but as an ‘out of the blue’ direction or command, or a personal encouragement or a factual piece of information which was helpful to a third party. How do I know it’s Him? I recognise His voice.

On other occasions impossible things happened in direct answer to very specific requests.

I teach in a church. One of the questions I tackle with prayer is how do we know if it's really God answering, or our imagination or something else. Right at the top of the answer is that God cannot contradict himself (a classic principle of Christian theology) so an answer to prayer will never be something that is clearly condemned in Scripture (or, in our case, the magesterium of the Church); if you think that God is encouraging you to cheat on your spouse, you're plain wrong.

I agree. He will not tell you to do something He condemns in scripture. Everything He does is right.

“He is the Rock, His work is perfect; For all His ways are justice, A God of truth and without injustice; Righteous and upright is He.”
Deuteronomy 32:4