Let's start with issues of consent, re: the gods asking to help.
If an unconscious person washes up in your ER, you help them.
If, however, someone has a "Do Not Resuscitate" tag, health care providers do not have the right to revive them, and if they do, they can be held liable and sued. And a doctor may want to scream, "PLEASE LET ME HELP." But that doesn't change what the patient's rights are.
I think the nature of equality and freedom are often grievously misunderstood. I can be smarter than someone, stronger than someone, healthier than someone, better educated than someone, and that cannot and does not make me their superior, or they my inferior. It must be assumed, for me and any other fully conscious individual, that we know what we want for ourselves, and in this capacity, we are equal. To suggest that access to better information and greater wisdom gives a being the right to non-consensually intervene is a slippery slope.
No one ever has full information about anything, ever. "Relatively informed" or "adequately informed" is a given. That's why BDSM invented safewords. That's why consent needs to always be fully revokeable. Because even discussing a scene six ways from Sunday, you can't always know how things will feel in the moment.
Let's talk about immediate threat of physical harm. I wouldn't just pull either of my children away from oncoming traffic. I'd push or pull anyone in immediate danger of being hit by a car if they appeared unaware of the threat. That's possible imminent death that they did not plan for that particular Thursday.
The VAST majority of all other cases we could think up involve "spiritual well being."
If you are working on becoming a person who does less harm to your neighbors, and you are nice to your friends and family, if you are, through some arrangement, adequately housed, fed, watered, cleaned, and up to date on your medical needs, you are doing GREAT. There is no equivalent of on-coming traffic.
Might you die soon, through disease or accident? Sure, but that's everyone. Kids get cancer. Babies die. People have strokes. It's tragic, it doesn't make sense, and we should not TRY to make it make sense, because most of those avenues are just ways to reduce the empathy we feel for those who suffer, and a lot of them lead to the New-Age to Alt-Right pipeline. We can't let natural deaths, even senseless ones, become opportunities for supremacy culture to get its foot in the door. In this country in particular, we need to be vigilant against it.
RE: how to structure a religion so that it doesn't all boil down to who can accurately hear the gods? I have only half an answer, because we're all standing waist deep in authoritarian sewage, reasoning through the haze of our collective trauma.
But imagine a world where it never occurred to you that anyone should ever have control or power over anyone else. Imagine you were never introduced to that idea. You gathered with people because you like people, and it's cool when you have people to share resources with. You like sharing. It's fun to give people cookies you made, or sing a song for them. Some people are good at certain things, and others excel elsewhere, and that's GREAT because it diversifies your resources. There are non-physical people, too. They have powers you don't. But also, you have powers they don't. Imagine that, in the same way that you don't see the awesome, super-diligent cleaner who can't read anymore after a head-injury last season "inferior," or feel any need to measure him against yourself, it doesn't occur to you to measure yourself against these non-physical community members, either. You just know that, like Bina is great at writing poetry, these people can do the occasional miracle, and those who commune with them get better at stuff, or get great advice.
Different people relate to them in different ways. Stonn here has bones he rolls, Xor uses a pendulum, Tina uses automatic writing, John relies exclusively on omens, but everyone recognizes that certain feeling of suddenly being ON, being inspired, being suddenly blessed with an insight. So when you pray to a god, you all sit in a circle, and when you feel called to, you share an idea you have. And people discuss the merit of the idea, not the merit of the person who had it.
That's how Quakers do it.
As a training tool, you might need to initially give people participation tokens to spend, as people are learning to share the air.
I think a paradigm of, "what does our community need, and how can we think and work together to meet those needs" is healthier than one where we occupy ourselves with questions of who is worthy of wearing the big hat. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter where an idea comes from, as long as everyone agrees that it solves the problem in question.
Moreover, and only slightly relatedly, even if you have leaders, psychic mediumship is the worst possible criteria for leadership. It would be like if we chose our leaders based on visual or auditory acuity. To add to that, I am not certain I've met anyone who is fully satisfied with the mediumship of other people. You can say it's jealousy, or whatever, but I prefer to think that a person's inner light is trying to speak, and we too often encourage them to listen externally. In that we know what we want for ourselves, all fully conscious beings are equal.
I think we need to ask the question, "what role do we want the gods serve in a our community, and how much of that actually has to do with establishing systems of controlling other people?"
And think really carefully about the answers you hear from within or without. And maybe slowly walk away from anyone going on about the gods solving disputes over differences of belief and/or practice. Because they're trying to use the gods as a tool to prove themselves right and that's sketch as hell.
