Can a sane person have an insane belief? Yes. We all do. But that does not give anybody permission to think they are a prophet of God or something. That is too much.
If a person reports apparitions, people and thrill-seekers run after them. They want to pray where the visions happened. They want the spots marked. They want accurate transcripts of the messages. They want to know what the vision looked like. You can imagine St Paul saying Jesus appeared to him in a doss house in Ephesus so where are the queues who appear to beg this vision for healing? There is none of that at all in St Paul’s case. It is odd that a man who concentrates more on the “risen” Jesus than the gospels leaves so many gaps. Apart from saying Jesus rose and communes with him there is nothing. No detail at all is given in his letters. None of this matches real life, how people respond to visionaries and apparitions. People are curious and he must have been asked a lot of questions. He must have brushed them off. The silence in his letters about his encounters with Jesus prove that. What was he hiding? Remember hallucinations or an active imagination that can produce “visions” are often protected by silence. If you don’t want them exposed as illusions you are best to tell nobody much about them. That is a kind of lie. A person who seems to be talking about hallucinations might just be imaginative and using methods to stop being tethered to reality. One trick is to avoid close friendships in case they tell you some home truths. It is easy to imagine visions when you avoid any checks. You soon stop realising it was only your own creation. Paul could have been lying outright. But his facade of being a visionary was only sustainable by lying and twisting.
It is obvious that Paul was protecting his own imagination.
He advocated prayer so its not completely surprising.
People who pray seek a two-way communing with God. It is telling that people do this to work up the feeling that they are not alone and have a friend. They are careful to limit what God says to safe things, things that are going to happen anyway. Nobody says, “I got the impression during prayer that you should not go for this cancer operation for you will die.” It is going to be something like the hypocritical, “I have prayed for you to God and he will be with you.” Faith? That is not faith.
People forget that prayer is in fact giving revelations to God. God telling you something you know is still a revelation so don’t let them fool you with, “But you cannot reveal to God. He knows all”. That is not the point. You are still informing him.
Christianity teaches that God prompts you to pray for things he has already planned to send anyway. The idea is that he wants you to receive these things but in the context of the relationship that mutual knowing that prayer involves.
This turns prayer into a potential fortune telling enterprise. The Barnum Effect will be implemented. The Barnum Effect is when you look at something that could apply to anything or anybody and think it is about you specifically. For example, “The fortune teller is amazing. She knew I get angry sometimes”. Another, “I got the bike after praying for it. The bike was meant for me.”
You pray for Helen to recover. She does. You will say you knew at some level when you prayed that she would. You will think the Holy Spirit send you that assurance. A faith that leads to such superstition has no business objecting to dangerous soothsayers and mediums and other charlatans. It leads to the enabling of grief vampires. Despite banning the occult, believers are remarkably disinterested in doing much about it. That is why.
Atheists and sceptics have told us that if somebody thinks God speaks to him through the hairdryer or the fridge, that person is insane. [Many prefer to judge the thought as insane without calling the person crazy.] And if they believed their prayers worked best when chanted into the hairdryer or fridge we would still think they are crazy. In fact the hairdryer and fridge being added into the claim, “God spoke to me and/or I spoke to him” does nothing at all to make the claim any more or less absurd. If God speaks then he can indeed speak through a hairdryer and fridge. Why not? A person getting messages from the hairdryer at least has some kind of check. There is no check at all if you think God is telepathic and revelation only happens between your ears. For example, at least they have to turn the hairdryer on. The latter is worse for there are no restrictions at all.
Jesus didn’t have hairdryers or the fridge. His God spoke from clouds!
Though a person can be sane and claim visions and revelations, going too far with it means it is time for that person to get professional help.