QUESTION: What differentiates a "religious" perceptual experience (e.g., hearing God speak, believing you've left your body, or considering yourself to have received divine instruction) from a more "pathological" delusion or hallucination?
In other words, why is it that some people who "hear the voice of God" are institutionalized/ medicated/ laughed at, while others go on to lead religious congregations/ write books/ etc.
How do we, as a culture, decide who is "speaking to God" and who is nuts?
How well their experience is aligned with existing norms? F
ReplyDeleteor example, people who claim to see the likeness of Jesus in nature are often given the benefit of the doubt, while those who see his likeness, in, say, a corn tortilla chip are usually written off as bat-shit crazy. A person who claims that God "spoke to" her/him is perhaps more believable when God told them to do something we would anticipate (like feed the hungry), and perhaps less believable when God told them to do something uncharacteristic (like stop believing in Hell).
A lot of Christendom disagrees with me on this one, but I'm very skeptical about people who claim to hear the voice of God, kinda for the reasons Gordon mentioned: It seems that when God "speaks" he almost inevitably tells the hearer to do something the hearer already wanted to do anyway. That's too cozy of a coincidence for me.
ReplyDeleteAnd so, to continue speaking from my inner cynic, I think the ones who sell books/lead movements/get TV shows/start cults/etc. are the ones who are the best salespeople of their message. The ones who don't do a good job of selling their message are written off at best and institutionalized at worse; generally, I think the ones who are medicated, etc., are the ones who present themselves as harmful.
Take or leave that as you wish.