I am not religious and people who have conversations with a god are, in my view, a tad delusional. Private faiths I can handle, whatever gets you through your day, but when you’re a public figure and you starting tell me that god said this and that to you, I am going to think that you are, well, crazy. Hearing voices is not a sign of sanity (even in the wizarding world according to Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter series).
My favourite God said this to me story is from 1898 and the pious William McKinley. At the end of the Spanish-American War, McKinley had a problem, what to do with all the Spanish territory the US Navy had now occupied most especially the Philippines. And so he prayed all night we are told. And in the morning God said this to the fair but historically misguided William McKinley:
Keep the Philippines. Make Christians out of those heathens.
That’s a funny thing for a Christian God to say because the Spanish had been in the Philippines since 1565 and over the next 332 years made the Philippines the only Christian nation in Asia. McKinkley followed God’s less than sage advice and annexed the Philippines, Palau, Guam and the Marianas. They are still Catholic and unless God doesn’t think Catholics are Christians, this story shows that people who talk to God and where God talks back are, well, a tad delusional.
From the New York Times:
Asked about her rosary, she called it, in humor, “an error.” She said she remembered her father saying the rosary, but could not remember exactly how it worked, how many times she was supposed to pray to the Virgin Mary. “So I thought, in case it’s not 10, maybe 15,” she said, fingering the rosary’s 15 buttons, taken from a jacket the guerrillas had provided her.
God is personal to her, she said. “I know that I talk to him, and that he responds.” People dismiss the miraculous, she said, and “prefer talking about coincidences,” but “what I think about miracles is that it happens all the time to everybody.”
It’s five sets of ten Ave Marias with a Padre Nuestro in between each one. There’s an Acto de Fe at the beginning and the start. There are also Gloria a Ti Señor after the first three Ave Marias of the first set and after the last Ave Maria of the other sets before the Padre Nuestros. I still keep my grandmother’s rosary with me on my nightstand along with my my 1931 edition of the Origin of Species. The latter is my bible, the former is my memory of my grandmother whom I adore to no end. She taught me how to say the rosary, how to tied my shoes, to swim, to walk, and so much else. And never did she ever tell me that God had spoken to her and said this or that. It was really more about leading a righteous moral life.
Faith is a private matter, believe what you want but please don’t come preaching to me about miracles as some act of God or some perverse notion that it was God’s will for McKinley to annex the Philippines or have you suffer in the jungles of the Guaviare for over six years.