Those examples don’t count, since they are drawn from the Old Testament, which everybody knows is mostly allegorical (especially the parts that disagree with what we feel comfortable with).
The New Testament, on the other hand, is the literal word of God (except for the parts we disagree with, but that can be ascribed to transcription errors and the like).
Barry
You can’t know.
If you claim to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you have heard God, as opposed to hearing what you want to hear or having an hallucination or experiencing some static in your neurons or hearing the voice of Cthulhu instead or whatever, you are in error if not necessarily insane. (You are in error insofar as you claim to know for sure).
As long as you acknowledge and accept that, you are behaving sanely and anyone who reacts to you as if (on the basis of your claims) you are insane is someone who is themselves not behaving rationally.
Amen
I know from my psych nursing days that all the psychotics I met who had direct contact with God received the messages via something - TV, radio, hallucinated figures.
The worst TV interview I ever saw was with a woman who had survived 30 odd days adrift at sea. I think the interviewer asked her had she ever given up hope. She replied that she had almost given up hope but then… “God spoke to me and I knew I would be alright”. She said this in the most matter of fact manner. The interviewer just read the next question on his list instead of asking her what God had said. In the whole interview the woman made no other reference of a religious nature and I wished the interviewer had just listened to her.
Kierkegaard had an interest in this particular subject. He referred to it as the “Teleological Suspensin of the Ethical.” There are several links and this is one:
http://allfreeessays.com/student/free/Teleological_Suspension_of_the_Ethical.shtml
My mother claims to have heard the voice of God once, folllowied by a miraculous event. I was born. 
Maybe it was the meds.
Who knows if meds can free up part of the brain that is receptive to the voice of God, huh?
I used to teach next door to a woman who said that God spoke to her while she was hanging clothes on the line and told her to go and buy a dog. I never knew if she was clinically ill or just a victim of some teachings. She was later relieved of duty. I saw her about ten years later and she swore she had never known me and seemed paranoid when I told her some things about her.
Also, a man who lived in my apartment complex many years ago murdered his wife “because she was a demon.” That’s what happens when you start becoming too judgmental…
I have experienced two distinct episodes where I seemed to hear something that I personally attribute to God - I say ‘seemed’ because I’m aware that the whole thing is entirely subjective and because it wasn’t exactly like hearing a human voice in the form of sound waves, but it wasn’t just a vague fuzzy feeling (I’ve had that a lot of other times).
On both occasions there was a specific instruction to help someone in need and on both occasions it resulted not only in success, but amazement on the part of the recipient. The strange thing is that the first time it was a life-and-death situation, but the second, it was seemingly almost embarrassingly trivial.
As AHunter3 says though, I can’t know it wasn’t all just hallucination coupled with coincidence, or my spider-sense, but then we could possibly argue that about a lot of mundane private experiences.
I’d say there are different levels of insanity.
If you believe God might be speaking to you, but you remain acutely aware that you might be fooling yourself, that’s pretty innocuous.
If you believe God is speaking to you and stop questioning the voice altogether, that’s getting dangerous.
If you believe God personally told you to dance naked through the city streets smeared in lime jello and singing “Louie, Louie” at the top of your lungs, that’s insanity.
People too often use god an an excuse when it comes to making decisions like if they fail at something “Oh, well that just isn’t the path god wanted me to take.” or “God told me that he wants me to do this with my life” It is a bunch of bullshit, they cannot function without believing someone else has control of the show or that there is some kind of divine hand behind everything, yeah I sort of got off topic.
A key point here is how ongoing revelation is handled the person’s individual religion.
I once worked with a devout Lutheran, who was of a very conservative cultural/political bent as well. He believed that there was a time when God spoke to people, but that time was past. (I have no idea if this is official church policy). And by extension, that a contemporary person who heard God’s voice was delusional. That sounded like rationalization to me, but I’m an agnostic/atheist, so I’m a pretty hard sell.
As far as LDS, my understanding is that the official stance of the Mormon Church is that ongoing revelations heard by lay people are not valid unless they pertain to personal, day-to-day things, like where to buy a house, what college to send the kids to, etc. The world-changing revelations were reserved for the Prophet (or other high-ranking Church officials). Perhaps an LDS member here can confirm or correct this?
I personally accept the aforementioned partial copout that whether the person is sane depends on the actions that God is telling you to take.
Yes, that is correct. It still doesn’t solve the problem, though, since somebody can claim that God told them to paint all their children red and call them tomatoes. You don’t have to receive a “world-changing” revelation in order for it to be a sign of insanity…
[Oh, and in case anybody is wondering at my presumption, last I checked I was still officially listed on the rolls of the LDS church…]
Barry
That’s true. However, Lafferty believed that the mainstream Mormon Church was evil and that he was appointed by God to be the new prophet.
I think I saw the woman who was rescued from sea. As memory serves, what God told her was “Eat the other people on the raft and then steer towards land”.
That ain’t insanity where I come from, mac. That’s a well spent evening.
Oh, did I leave out the self-immolation part?
Auditory halucinations are definite evidence that the brain 'aint working properly. But we only count this as insane if the voice tells you to do something illegal or destructive and you go and do it. (Or if you hear voices so often that they distract you from knowing what is going on around you).
OK, I finally whipped out the DSM
(from diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia)
criterion A (two or more of the following)
so to be insane, the person needs to be hearing god plus one other of those two things and:
Criterion B Social/occupational dysfunction
basically, there has to be a marked drop from how the person was doing beforehand.
and:
Criterion C Duration
at least 6 months involving signs of the disturbance with 1 month of god talking to him and the other criterion A symptom.
and D: it’s not some other disorder like depression or bipolar or some other psychotic disorder.
There are plenty of other disorders it COULD be, but most often god talks to people who have schizophrenia when he talks to people who have a mental illness.
I only saw the episode once (about a hundred years ago) but Johnny Fever struggled with this issue on WKRP in Cincinnati once. Johnny had some kind of dream or vision or something in which he truly belived that God spoke to him. The voice said something like “I want you to be a golf pro”.
Johnny spoke with his boss about it, because he wasn’t sure if he was going nuts or not. His boss said that he didn’t know if it really was the voice of God, but he hoped it was, that there was a God who would talk to us.
[Upon reading this during preview, I realize that reminiscing about an old TV show contributes nothing to the resolution of a Great Debate, but I’ll hit Submit anyway.]
What if you are deaf & you hear him speak to you? Is that automatic looney bin?
Interesting aside, Joan of Arc heard auditory voices. No one in power at that time questioned that she was hearing voices, just if the voices were from Satan or the Archangel Michael. Following what the voices told her to do, she raised an army - which was not something that an ordinary peasant girl could do. Following the voices also got her burned at the stake by the English. Was she hearing from God, Satan or was she insane?
Well, take from what else was known about her, there’s more to diagnosis of a mental illness than one symptom. Ok, granted, pursuit of her version of self actualization got her killed, but she was fulfilling her divine mission.
And-
Mental illness often is a function of a system outside of a discrete individual, and the individual is merely the “identified patient” in the system. For example -anorexia. this is an illness constructed of personal anxiety, (often) trauma, and societal forces. So to call Joan insane without consideration for her historical/societal context may not be fair.
If I had to guess at a diagnosis for her, I’d say she maybe was bipolar with psychotic features (or some version of it, these things tend to change as society changes). People who are manic tend to have quite a bit of charisma.
Joan of Arc did not “raise an army.” She convinced the king of France to grant her command of his army. The king, desperate for a spark, let her do it and the French army was inspired and revitalized enough to win some battles against the Bristish. It’s still an extraordinary story but not all that mystical in the long run.
BTW, Joan swore until the day she was burned alive that the voices kept telling her that angels would fly down and rescue her her from the flames. Obviously the angels never showed up so was Joan crazy or was God lying to her?