The feeling of communion with your fellow human being, or standing in awe at beauty, love, the scale and complexity of the universe, or the very fact of existence is one set of very healthy experiences. Believing that anybody ever actually heard god “speak,” and devising identity, laws and cultural practices based on what you think he said is entirely another. Religion is the deliberate (or not) confusion of those entirely distinct experiences and it is becoming very dangerous. It is actually one of the key problems of our age and it seems to be becoming worse. If I were to draw an analogy to a person I would have to say it is like watching a person being ravaged by mental illness. You know it is crazy, you watch the decline, and it happens anyway. Religious “belief,” the notion that anybody EVER heard God speak, or that they had any access whatsoever to his thoughts as might be embodied in language is collective psychosis, literally.