Clearly, there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.
(Sam Harris, The End of Faith, p. 72)
Reminds me of the Frank Schaeffer line from “Crazy for God,” “Pat Robertson…would have had a hard time finding work in any job where hearing voices is not a requirement.”
Sadly, it also reminds me of a tragic post on Primordial Blog.
http://primordial-blog.blogspot.com/search/label/Blair%20Donnelley
The author, Brian Larnder, talks about a Pentecostal acquaintance of his that ended up murdering his own daughter. He believed that God had ordered him to kill his wife and daughter. He had been hearing voices for some time before that, but in the Pentecostal Church that meant that you were more holy, more spiritual than the others. The social insanity of the church covered up his personal insanity.
There are so many great quotes in the book! This one makes me want to read it again.
As Bill Maher says, and I paraphrase, “when one person hears voices, it’s called schizophrenia. When millions hear it, it’s called religion”. And this has been used to justify many terrible things. Most serial killers, for example, come from religious homes – mostly evangelical, I believe, but some catholic. And many of them claimed to hear god’s voice telling them to kill. This is the natural fallout of an irrational belief in a god who talks to people.