Excerpt from The Language Imperative, by Suzette Haden Elgin (Perseus Books 2000), ISBN 0-7382-0254-1...

From pages 158-160:

"Religious language can be defined in many ways, from casual conversation ('I believe in God, I guess, but I don't believe in angels') to sacred text and purported revelations. The task of definition is made difficult by the fact that no method exists for determining whether a sequence of religious language is valid; that is, for distinguishing genuine religious language from phony religious language.When I gave lectures on this subject at the university, my students, whether they described themselves as religious or not, were startled to learn that this was so. They told me that they'd never thought about the matter before, but now that it had come up they felt that surely there must be some recognized standard against which alleged examples of religious language could be measured for validity, as well as some recognized international entity with the power to apply those standards and rule on such questions.
There are no such standards, and no International Board on the Validity of Religious Language exists. Let's suppose that I've walked into your livingroom and announced that I've just had a religious revelation, which I proceed to recite to you in the form of a creed or a psalm or a prophecy. You will probably think I'm out of my mind (which is something for which we do have recognized standards and judging entities). In the United States, unless you belong to one of the religious denominations whose rules about religious discourse differ from the mainstream, you'll find my behavior unseemly in the extreme, and personally embarrassing. But there is no way you can prove that my utterance either is or isn't as valid an example of religious language as, say, the Twenty-third Psalm.
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Attitudes and beliefs about religious language extend over an extraordinarily broad range. These attitudes and beliefs aren't just theoretical matters; they have significant real-world consequences. At one extreme is the belief that even the most seemingly trivial change in a sequence of religious language -- changing a single letter or sound or gesture, for example -- will ruin it. In some cases the claim is that change weakens the sequence, robbing it of some or all of its power; in others, that change would pervert the power of the sequence and make it powerful for evil rather than good, as with the practice known as the 'Black Mass.' At the other extreme is the conviction that religious language is just like any other kind of language, with no special strength or power."