Many religious believers argue that their particular holy book was written, inspired, or dictated by a god. They assert this as if it were self-evidently true, and when you question them on it, they usually say that it contains wisdom and insight which is beyond what a mere human could have come up with. I'd like to hear from believers who make such claims how they know this. Seriously, I'm curious how you would recognize divinely inspired writings. I think it would be fair to say that people have varying degrees of talent when it comes to composing and writing things down. Not everyone is a Shakespeare or a George Orwell. We can recognize when other people are smarter or wider than we are, but when it comes to the belief that there is intelligence beyond human, we don't have anything which can be demonstrated not to have had a human origin. A chimpanzee can watch a human being writing something down, but he or she cannot read it, and almost certainly doesn't understand the concept of writing. We are the primates with the largest brains on this planet, and we don't see any other creatures or beings who can write their thoughts down. We are arguably the smartest species on earth, but whether we're the wisest, collectively, is an open question. So for every person who writes something down, or preaches a religious message claiming that it was inspired by an angel or a deity, how could we tell whether what they're saying is true, or whether they're plagiarizing what they heard from someone else, or whether they're hearing voices from their own subconscious mind, or even whether they're knowingly making shit up. The existence of gods, or anything supernatural, is always claimed or inferred, but never demonstrated. If we originated from a creative intelligence, as opposed to being the end result of billions of years of cumulative natural processes, then how come the alleged creator chose such vague methods of communication, like holy books, which are open to all manner of conflicting interpretations? We are told by the religious the tarot maker wants us to know him and to worship and obey him. I can't help noticing that the messages I receive come from other humans, and not directly from the alleged deity. I've been told, on many occasions, that I'm spiritually closed off, or something to that effect, that I'm incapable of receiving such direct communications, do you partly to my doubt and tendency to overanalyze things, or even to think too much? Maybe I'm missing something, and my tentative conclusion that there are no such things as gods, angels, demons, or anything supernatural, is wrong. If this is the case, then I'd like to know about it, but in order to convince me, it will be necessary to demonstrate, rather than simply claim, that I've got it so wrong. Please, my theist friends, show me how to recognize divine authorship, and how to tell whether something comes from a mind greater than a human one.