To me being religious is following some ceremonies, rules and orders in some hope that it pleases God, being delusional, in the context of the OP - being called delusional by others, is knowing God. It is the relationship with God that others don’t see that cause them to categorize it as delusions.
How do you know you’re not just delusional?
I don’t know. They may be from suggestion only. I can’t tell and have never studied them. But nevertheless they happen, and the Baggins ones don’t. My point of view is to acknowledge them - as a purely 100% psychological phenomenon - as the one and only possibly-legitimate possibly-not-false “God experience”. And to expressly reject - from the religious point of view - all other God-claims.
In other words, from an American-style point of view, I mean to limit freedom of religion to that which can reasonably be scientifically considered not disproved. That people not be legally permitted to claim protection for an alleged belief in the unbelievable. That this is basically all that religion has left to offer.
Well, at least you’re not trying to say that people imagine God and not Frodo because only one of them is real. However I maintain my belief that any careful examination of the reasons why people think they are hearing God would fail to justify calling those reasons “God” - and I can prove it! People in different places and cultures have all kinds of crazy experiences which have nothing to do with the entity known as “God”, and those experiences strongly tend to be culture-specific.
Which means that the reason nobody has Frodo-experiences is because nobody expects to, basically - and when they do have some kind of anomolous undefined experience, they don’t leap to blaming/crediting Frodo for it.
Regarding limits to freedom of religion, I believe that all people should have legal protection to believe what they wish, but absolutely no religious activities or actions should be protected or given special exceptions (like tax exemptions). You can believe what you want, but as you obey your crazy religious orders, obey the law. In other words, no laws shall be made respecting an establishment of religion, with “respecting” having its “regarding” definition. And as a result no laws shall be made prohibiting the free exercise of any religion because no laws will mention any religion - though no exceptions to the law will be made to accommodate religion either.
(I realize that this technically opens up the opportunity for backhanded abuse - no bread products or wine can be consumed in any public building on sundays by any group! But as long as socially liberal people are in charge I don’t imagine this will be a big issue.)
FWIW, where I worked with the Mental Health Review Board, it was accepted that there was no absolute dividing line between “delusional” and anything else. Not between “delusional” and “Good Husband”, or “delusional” and “Scientist”, or “delusional” and “Republican” or “delusional” and devoutly religious.
There is no set of “delusional” views that is not held by some subset of ordinary common sane people. You can’t define delusional by that method.
(Because it wasn’t our legislated responsibilities, we didn’t try to determine if someone was delusional or not. We only had to determine if they were a danger to themselves or other people, or required compulsion for some other reason. So we only had to notice the difficulty of defining delusions.)
My childhood BFF’s mother was an odd duck. I grew up in the most conservative of conservative Utah Mormon communities and “Helen” was considered to be the Queen of Devoutness.
After birthing 11 kids (my friend was the youngest kid, Helen was probably early 50s when she was born), she took over one room in their small house for herself and would lock herself in there for hours, doing her “devotionals” (praying and reading scripture?)
Helen was one of the most humorless, outwardly unhappy people I’ve ever known. She spoke up in church meetings often and at length, wrote deeply weird letters to the local paper decrying perceived instances of community moral decay (usually sexual in nature), and was rather feared in the community – you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Helen, it was like slapping Jesus.
She was also a devout vegetarian, verging on '70s style veganism, and had a lot of eating restrictions. She ruled the kids with a humorless, iron fist and they were terrified of her. (On the other hand, her husband was an elementary school principal and a jolly, loving guy everyone adored – the kids were lucky to have him).
As an adult I’ve thought about her often. She was my friend’s scary, holy mother when I was a kid, but now I think about her as a possibly deeply depressed and even mentally ill woman. I now hope that she was just escaping from her life and screwing around in her personal Holy Devotional Room; it also strikes me that in a different place and era she would have been a fantastic and possibly sainted Catholic nun/martyr type – the visionary who starves herself to death in her convent cell.
But taken at (modern) face value, Helen strikes me as a religious delusional: at times she claimed to see God/hear holy beings, she seemed to despise her children and certainly terrified them, and she was just so . . . absent in any parts of life that didn’t relate to God and church.
But: despite a deeply religious upbringing I’ve never believed in God stuff, so I have no understanding of what religious ecstasy feels like.
BTW people do seem to have space alien visions, which correlate to what aliens look like in the latest hit movie or TV show. That might be better correlated to God visions than Frodo.
I bet people do have Frodo visions but realize they are not real, unlike the equally unreal God and alien cases.
People who have God and alien delusions do realize they aren’t real. and then they don’t.
One of the common symptoms of schizophrenia is auditory hallucination, “hearing voices”. People who hear voices try to classify them: that voice came from the TV. That voice cam from Fred standing next to me. That voice came from… my head? eventually the system of classification breaks down, because the input is so scrambled, and people try other categories:
That voice came from God. That voice came from Aliens. That voice came from the government. That voice came from Sauron… I must be a hobbit.
This is normally (not always) quite distressing. I’m the son of God? I don’t think I’m the son of God. That’s crazy. Am I crazy? But God (or Sauron, or the Aliens) is talking to me. What do my friends think? If I get rid of this ring will something even worse happen? Should I take it to Hawaii?
As I mentioned above, there is no black line between crazy beliefs and sane beliefs. Some people are quite sane and believe we are engaged in an epic struggle between good and evil: some people are crazy and have the same belief.
For the record I don’t believe you have to actually be schizophrenic or otherwise mentally ill to have religious experiences up to and including hearing voices and having visions. Normal human experiences like feeling connected while meditating/praying, feeling elated while in a crowd of like minded people, and dreaming/daydreaming are, in my opinion, experiences that can very easily be experienced by a totally sane person and also very easily mistaken for the effect of divine intervention.
I’m not aware of people hearing space aliens in their head, though no doubt this happens. I was thinking of night terrors of the sort that inspired the alien abduction stories. This is a real syndrome, that inspired succubi and incubi legends in the old days. Today we don’t believe in demons but do believe in aliens.
People going through this seem to think it is real at the moment. If you are seeing something that looks real, thinking it is aliens who can do seemingly impossible things might seem more plausible than the correct explanation that it is all in your head.
These are delusions, but certainly not symptoms of insanity.