Article note: It's such a good (fictional) example.
It's also such a classic "almost no one checked the references, and the person who propagated it misunderstood what they read." scenario.
Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It’s a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything and the whole world was sinking deeper and deeper into filth and disease and poverty and ignorance. It is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved.