Psychology of Prophets: Who's craziest?

[SpuriusMaximus]

Crazy cult leaders tend to do that sort of thing, yes..

Heh. Do you figure that's where Catholics got that tradition?

 

[RebeccaBradley]

I was talking with some friends about what would happen if the commonly known prophets from antiquity were diagnosed by modern psychologists. Nowadays, if someone reports hearing God's voice or meeting his angels, they're not taken to a church, they're taken to a hospital...

Nowadays, people who claim to hear God's voice or meet angels go on talk shows, create websites, start cults, write bestselling books, and/or become angel therapists. Of course, they have a much wider menu than just God and the angels: aliens, ancestors, ascended masters, Atlantean warriors, etc etc.

I tend to go with Loss Leader on narcissistic / psychopathic disorders: abnormal, but not insane, characterized by charisma, lack of empathy, and utter egoism. Prophets and messiahs showing the same dynamic with their followers are actually pretty common in history and the present, following not just religious but often secular, political or military agendas. Look at the personality cults of Mao, Lenin, Turkmenbashi, for example.

And I think the psychology of the followers is at least as interesting as the psychology of the leaders; the followers aren't crazy, either, but historically they've been led to believe some very weird ****, and do some crazy, repugnant or self-destructive things.

Comments on a few of the prophets mentioned above:

Manson had a perfectly standard messianic agenda, claiming a revelation from the Beatles. The White Album, IIRC. He also had some input from Scientology in prison, though he couldn't really be called a Scientologist; it just provided some of the strands out of which he formed his own apocalyptic scenario.

Joseph Smith did claim to have talked with angels, but his main revelation came from translating the golden plates which the angel Moroni led him to find, and then conveniently took away again. Smith translated them by literally talking through his hat. Sounds like a scam to me.

Jim Jones, before setting up the People's Temple, studied the methods of Father Divine - even, in fact, tried to set himself up as Father Divine's successor, which didn't go down too well with Mother Divine. At any rate, he was a scammer from the beginning. It seems possible, however, that he was crazy by the end, which could probably be said for a lot of messianic figures.

Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Hubbard, David Koresh, the Mahdi, Ayn Rand, Madame Blavatsky, Napoleon, Hitler, Gandhi, Mary Baker Eddy, etc etc - however different these may look in their specific revelations and outcomes, it could be reasonably argued that they're all variants of the same old baneful cult structure. My view is that all religions are, in the final analysis, no more than routinized cults.

Edited by jhunter1163: 

Edited for Rule 10.

 

[epix]

My vote for craziest prophet goes to Moses. Already a murderer before even leaving Egypt, he suffered from severe hallucinations. During one particularly bad episode, he held an entire conversation with a shrubbery that had caught fire. He got lost (and stayed lost) in a desert for decades and he ordered men to kill babies and rape virgins... all of which he claimed was God's path.

Oh boy, we have a severe problem to navigate through the dictionary, don't we?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Just to add one thing I keep repeating in several threads, but it doesn't seem to stick in people's minds: don't forget ergot. Really, it's got effects exactly like LSD plus a nasty vasoconstriction effect. And by "exactly like", I mean LSD actually has the exact same atom configuration that causes that effect, it just lacks the part that causes vasoconstriction.

And we have plenty of record of even whole towns at a time going dancing in the street and confabulating some mystical revelation. Eating the contaminated bread and not even knowing that it had been contaminated, or really that there is any mundane and normal reason why 500 people are having a vision out of nowhere, was actually incredibly common.

Mind you, a temporal lobe epilepsy can also produce hallucinations, so for single persons we can't really know which is which. But still, basically there is a third explanation besides epilepsy and schizophrenia. Someone can be neither epileptic nor crazy for the rest of their life, and be perfectly able to care for themselves and function in society the rest of the time, and then out of nowhere have a surrealistic acid trip like John of Revelations fame.

But when we have group incidents like Paul describing the sequence of Jesus appearing to increasingly large numbers of people, either epilepsy or schizophrenia are actually very unlikely to act synchronized like that. On the other hand, you can pretty much track the spread of an ergot poisoning at mealtime there.

 

[TimCallahan]

Just to add one thing I keep repeating in several threads, but it doesn't seem to stick in people's minds: don't forget ergot. Really, it's got effects exactly like LSD plus a nasty vasoconstriction effect. And by "exactly like", I mean LSD actually has the exact same atom configuration that causes that effect, it just lacks the part that causes vasoconstriction.

And we have plenty of record of even whole towns at a time going dancing in the street and confabulating some mystical revelation. Eating the contaminated bread and not even knowing that it had been contaminated, or really that there is any mundane and normal reason why 500 people are having a vision out of nowhere, was actually incredibly common.

Mind you, a temporal lobe epilepsy can also produce hallucinations, so for single persons we can't really know which is which. But still, basically there is a third explanation besides epilepsy and schizophrenia. Someone can be neither epileptic nor crazy for the rest of their life, and be perfectly able to care for themselves and function in society the rest of the time, and then out of nowhere have a surrealistic acid trip like John of Revelations fame.

But when we have group incidents like Paul describing the sequence of Jesus appearing to increasingly large numbers of people, either epilepsy or schizophrenia are actually very unlikely to act synchronized like that. On the other hand, you can pretty much track the spread of an ergot poisoning at mealtime there.

that section of 1 Corinthians might well have been subject to later editing and interpolation, particularly with respect to the more than 500 brethren seeing Jesus at one time.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well, yes, it could be just BS too, as a fourth possibility. I just wasn't trying to start that particular talk again in another thread

Especially, since, as I'm understanding the OP, we're arguing as if that stuff was real, anyway

 

[MikeSun5]

Just to add one thing I keep repeating in several threads, but it doesn't seem to stick in people's minds: don't forget ergot....And we have plenty of record of even whole towns at a time going dancing in the street...

A quick read about ergotism said that painful convulsions would occur prior to any hallucinations. Doesn't really sound like one would be dancing like Bowie and Jagger after having a really bad seizure.

Very interesting theory, though...

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Nevertheless, such mass dancing and hallucinating episodes are actually attested at least between the 7'th and 17'th centuries all over Europe. See, dancing mania. It's not clear if it's ergotism or what the hell (all theories have strikes against them too), but it happened and for some incidents there's ample documentation. Different alkaloid, perhaps?

And nevertheless, whether the dancing mania were ergotism or not, ergotism itself without dancing is also well attested to have happened lots. Sometimes even in severe mass poisonings described as a "plague", e.g., in the 9'th century. In fact, it happened often enough to have an order of monks dealing with amputating gangrened limbs and whatnot after the incidents. Told you it has a nasty vasoconstriction effect, and, yeah, that nasty if enough toxing was ingested. This one actually happened regularly all the way into the 19'th century.

It also doesn't help that the first report of the connection between the ergot fungus and "Saint Anthony's Fire" (ergot poisoning) happens in the 17'th century, and it reports it as basically a find. The poor barstards that would be hit by that in earlier times wouldn't even know what hit them, nor to check the grain before milling it and making it into bread.

(Not that anyone would, though. There are also documented incidents where the meat of cattle dead of anthrax was sold to towns who didn't know that detail. Because, you know, when you're already at bare subsistence levels, for some people the choice between "I starve" and "other people die" isn't that hard to take.)

But, anyway, some poor bugger who falls to the ground in painful convulsions and starts hallucinating mystical stuff, would think it's the real deal. They couldn't even there can be any natural cause for it, before the 17'th century.

 

[TimCallahan]

Nevertheless, such mass dancing and hallucinating episodes are actually attested at least between the 7'th and 17'th centuries all over Europe. . . .

Hans, wasn't there a village in France that suffered accidental ergot poisoning in the 1950s or 1960s?

 

[hgc]

This guy:

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Hans, wasn't there a village in France that suffered accidental ergot poisoning in the 1950s or 1960s?

I seem to remember something like that.

Well, I didn't say it stopped happening completely. IIRC the most recent poisoning of a city with Ergot happened in 2001, so, yeah.

What I was saying is that:

- in the 17'th century the dancing mania suddenly stops. Whatever peculiar alcaloid or variant or pathogen or whatever was causing that, that's one source of mass hallucinations and mystical feelings that's gone.

- in the 19'th century, ergot poisonings tapper off, mostly because people by now know not eat the contaminated grain. Of course, isolated incidents still keep happening, but it at least stops being a regular thing.

 

[RebeccaBradley]

Skeptical Inquirer published an article by Robert Bartholomew on tarantism and dancing mania in 2000:
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/rethinking_the_dancing_mania

To summarize, contemporary descriptions of the dancing mania show it to have been structured rather spontaneous, not at all like the wild spontaneous convulsive dancing you'd expect with ergot poisoning. A quote from Bartholomew's conclusions:

"So what is the most likely explanation for dance manias? Based on an examination of a representative sample of medieval chronicles, it is evident that these episodes are best explained as deviant religious sects who gained adherents as they made pilgrimages through Europe during years of turmoil in order to receive divine favor. Their symptoms (visions, fainting, tremor) are predictable for any large population engaging in prolonged dancing, emotional worship, and fasting. Their actions have been “mistranslated” by contemporary scholars evaluating the participants’ behaviors per se, removed from their regional context and meaning. Tarantism was a regional variant of dancing mania that developed into a local tradition, primarily in southern Italy."

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

There are opinions for and against any explanation. Some seemed to be organized and predictable at very specific dates, and generally more of a festival than anything else, but in other cases even local writers don't seem to have the foggiest what's with those people.

ETA: still, it's probably unfortunate that I brought those up into the mix, because more classic, mass ergot poisonings are still well documented even if you exclude the dancing mania. My point was merely that such one-off hallucinations brought by some poisoning or illness are a third explanation, besides epilepsy and insanity. Someone can be perfectly sane the rest of the time, and then have a one-off vision on the road to Damascus anyway.

 

[I Ratant]

I was talking with some friends about what would happen if the commonly known prophets from antiquity were diagnosed by modern psychologists. Nowadays, if someone reports hearing God's voice or meeting his angels, they're not taken to a church, they're taken to a hospital. So this got us thinking about which prophet was the craziest in terms of mental illness (of course this assumes that all the stories in the religious texts are true).

My vote for craziest prophet goes to Moses. Already a murderer before even leaving Egypt, he suffered from severe hallucinations. During one particularly bad episode, he held an entire conversation with a shrubbery that had caught fire. He got lost (and stayed lost) in a desert for decades and he ordered men to kill babies and rape virgins... all of which he claimed was God's path.

Which Prophet of God/Allah/Yahweh/Jehovah do you think would get locked up the quickest if they peddled their same wares in today's society?

.
Moses is a fictional character.
The real nut-case would be Abraham.
And Mohammed.
And Joseph Smith.
And Jim Jones.
And Marshall Hepplewhite.
And Jim Bakker.
And Jerry Falwell.
And Oral Roberts...
Pick a religion, it's got its nutcases.

 

[I Ratant]

Actually Smith did do time in New England for fraud. If at first you don't exceed, lie, lie again.

.
A winnah!

 

[Simon39759]

Well, if you are going to assume the various prophets are indeed non-fictional (unlikely for Moses, possible for Jesus, very likely for Muhammad) and did actually say and do the things attributed to them...

I'd say the only sane prophet was Siddhārtha Gautama.

 

[RebeccaBradley]

... My point was merely that such one-off hallucinations brought by some poisoning or illness are a third explanation, besides epilepsy and insanity. Someone can be perfectly sane the rest of the time, and then have a one-off vision on the road to Damascus anyway.

Agreed. Researching prophets and messiahs, it's striking how many of them show no tendency towards prophecy, and none of the necessary charisma, until after they are struck with a fever or a stroke or some such event that could damage or alter the brain in certain ways, specifically in the frontal lobes. Paul on the Damascus Road is a great example, also Wovoka of the Ghost Dance, Adolf Hitler after the "Pasewalk incident", and many others.

A fun example is the infamous Emperor Gaius Caligula, who started his reign as a GOOD guy, raising popular hopes that he’d be a wise and just emperor. Then he nearly died of a brain fever, and when he recovered, he was a depraved, capricious, hyperactive monster with delusions of being a god, and a messiah.

Not crazy - psychopathic, with the charisma and megalomania that often seems to be part of psychopathy. But as I said above, the psychology of the followers is at least as interesting - they're not crazy, either, and generally not stupid, and yet they can be led to do stupid, crazy things.

 

[I Ratant]

Well, if you are going to assume the various prophets are indeed non-fictional (unlikely for Moses, possible for Jesus, very likely for Muhammad) and did actually say and do the things attributed to them...

I'd say the only sane prophet was Siddhārtha Gautama.

.
Confucious seems sane.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well, true, but I'm not sure he even belongs here. I mean, in all fairness, Confucianism isn't much of a religion, and Confucius isn't a prophet of anything. It's a lot easier to get the job without hallucinating, when said job doesn't involve receiving messages from otherworldly entities or taking regular trips to higher planes of existence.

I mean, seriously, that's the impression I get after reading the Analects. The only places where he even touches a religious topic at all, is stuff like some noble taking a pilgrimage to some shrine reserved for the Emperor. Which isn't knowing his place, dammit. But otherwise "the great master" isn't even saying what would that shrine or deity or belief involve.

Confucianism has been called a religion by some of us westerners, but really it's just a philosophy. Not only he doesn't really qualify as a prophet any more than Aristotle does (and in fact probably a lot less less), but obviously one doesn't need to be crazy to do that job.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

You know, after debating Paul of Tarsus in another thread and reading his epistles some more, I'm starting to wonder if he wasn't actually crazy. I mean, sure, the original vision could have been epilepsy or ergot or whatever, but his subsequent behaviour and writing style are less easily explained by that.

I mean, he somehow hallucinating about a new guy called Jesus ("God saves") the Annointed, and that guy taught something. You don't start a new religion if you don't have some kind of new message. And indeed he calls himself a "messenger" ("apostolos") of some "good news" ("evangelion"). Then according to himself there are other people who saw or knew Jesus, and they start some kind of religion. And especially if we assume that those people must have known Jesus before he was nailed, and, you know, actually had something to say about what he said or did, it ought to be somehow important.

Now Paul travels all over the place to tell people about Jesus, and writes a ton of letters about Jesus. We know there are more than the epistles we have, because the ones we have refer to some we don't. Long letters too. I mean, 16 page letters. He's obviously that excited about telling people about his new imaginary friend.

And yet he doesn't actually say almost anything about Jesus, other than that he died and rose in spirit and is now some kind of regent of God. But even there he doesn't go into any details.

For a start, it's strange for someone ranting 16 pages about their new idol that he doesn't give any time, place or physical characteristics of Jesus or deed at all. Ask any Metallica fanboy about his idols, and you'll hear a lot more details, because to them they're important.

And generally, one constant of human stories is that even fiction about some guy felt a need to give you a place or some description of the protagonist. Think, from "There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name [was] Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil" to limericks starting with stuff like, "There was a young person from Smyrna". It helps with suspension of disbelief.

But more importantly, he never says anything about, you know, what Jesus said.

And Paul gives a lot of rules in there. He tells his disciples even what women should wear, whether priests should marry, what Christian slaves of Christian masters should think about that situation, whether they should be circumcised, etc. It's not like there would have been a shortage of situation where maybe it's relevant to know what Jesus actually said about that kinda thing.

And that's kinda the odd thing. Paul could say, for example, "Jesus said not to allow a woman to teach", but actually he says "I do not allow a woman to teach." Even when he mentions Jesus at all in some argument, it's some personal consideration about being like Jesus who accepted even crucifixion, than some actual example of what Jesus said or did.

(And I mean, it doesn't even have to be real. Paul has the greatest name-drop opportunity there. He has a new god who you have to trust him about what that god wants. He could treat Jesus like a catholic priest treats a new choir boy, and just put his stuff in Jesus's mouth )

Now some would probably figure out, like I originally assumed, "well, he already told them about Jesus, probably gave them some scripture too, there's no point repeating that in the letters." But there actually is. Paul references his own BS from previous letters in a couple of places (which is how we know there were more), but never once did he pull some reference to something he said about Jesus. Or, you know, some kind of, "just look on page 3 of that scripture I gave you, that objection is already answered there." Even when he's explicitly arguing against some deviation or heresy or some people coming and giving his flock new religious ideas, he doesn't reference anything Jesus said or did, or anything Paul said before that Jesus said or did, and which would be a more conclusive refutation.

In fact, the only references that there even are any words of Jesus (but still not what they are) are in the pseudepigraphic forgeries, not in Paul's epistles.

Or, ok, he knows some guys who presumably knew Jesus better. You'd think it may be important to find out stuff about Jesus from them and/or share it with the rest of the world. I mean, remember, Jesus is important enough for Paul to write 16-page letters about him, and lots of them. But he's not important enough to know or share what the guys who knew him say about him?

Paul even mentions those having an opinion at all, in one incident where he actually feels qualified to tell Peter how to act to be saved. And even then, it's not as in something that can be traced to Jesus, but on a matter of opinion where apparently some agree with Paul, while Peter is built up as a hypocrite so that Paul can demolish his objection with a tu quoque instead of addressing it.

Now I'm not looking to reopen the discussion about whether Jesus was real or whether that group was real. As per the OP, I'm doing this exercise under the assumption that it all was like the book says.

But think about it. Paul manages to write probably tens of incredibly long letters, across 20 years or so, all about this new saviour that he obsesses about... yet end up saying nothing whatsoever about him in the process, nor even hinting at having said anything about him before. Doesn't that sound like the kind of failure mode you'd expect in schizophrenia?

Things get even funnier if you include Acts. (Remember, the thread is about what if the story about them was true, and that story does include Acts.) So apparently he's been some part of some great persecution of Christians, and whatnot, yet when he gives it up, it's suddenly over. Acts 9:31 actually says, "Then had the churches rest throughout all Judaea and Galilee and Samaria, and were edified; and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, were multiplied." That's it. Paul converts, persecution is over, everyone gets a break. It's a one-man persecution show. He doesn't even seem to be working for any authority who'd have ordered that persecution, because, you know,

A) then they'd just send the other cops and prosecutors after those guys, and

B) there was nobody who had religious authority over all 3 provinces. In fact, Samaria and Judaea were considering each other a major heresy and offense to God, and were at each other's throats over it.

Yet Paul claims no less than to have laid waste to the church. What the hell? In 3 provinces? Working alone and without any real authority? How does he do that? Exactly how delusional is this guy?