What About Personal Visits With Mary and Jesus

I've been reading How God Becomes Real by Tanya Marie Luhrmann (2020). She is an anthropology and psychology professor at Stanford. She uses these disciplines along with sociology to probe what goes on in people's minds. She studies religion. There have been many other scholars studying this phenomena for decades and there is a deep library of publications. 

The obvious skepticism about anyone claiming to know what goes on in one person's mind or in minds collectively is, "How do you know?"    

Psychiatrists try to determine what is in people minds by asking them to describe their thoughts. By comparing the descriptions of thousands all over the world for a hundred plus years there are some agreement/conclusions about what is going on in human minds. Even though there remain unresolved questions and problems, progress has been made.   

Professor Luhrmann approached studying the minds of religious people, and the non religious, in a similar manner. Over many years she has conducted interviews with people asking them to describe what was in their minds. She has asked people of the same religious group in different parts of the U.S. and on different continents to describe their minds on certain topics within religion. She also asked people to review the history of their thinking.

After spending some weeks attending churches of a Pentecostal denomination, she interviewed 20 people each in the U.S., Asia and Africa. Each person had heard the voice of God or Jesus and each felt he/she had been in the presence of one or the other. She asked if the voice/god was in front of them, behind them to the left or right, etc. Believers in the U.S. were absolutely certain of the voice and presence but felt the deity had entered their minds and was not elsewhere in the room. In Africa the deity was in front of respondents. In Asia the deity was seen/herd during encounters with friends.

Universally, people who see/hear distinctly the deities have received training in how to experience this. Those who have experienced it have often experienced it previously, the techniques practiced. The church repeats often how to have this experience.  

The author is careful not to say people "believe" they had these experiences. She treats the presence of deities in the same way believers do, they were actually there. 

People in other branches of the faith, for example, high church, may feel the presence of their god at communion or in prayer. Every year many Catholics report they visited with Mary. The source of the presence during prayers or Mary visits seems always to be the same, training the mind. 

Those of us who are skeptics also are trained. Children are now trained in critical thinking. All of us are trained to be skeptical by the constant barrage of advertising. 

What we need to remember is that training can persuade us we should follow other lemmings off the cliff. There is a long list of mass suicides caused by minds trained to think this is what people were supposed to do. Heaven's Gate and Jonestown are just a couple of them.