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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My understanding and I am not religious, is he did actually exist.  [b]Now, the bigger question for me is did he really have these visions or did he have a mental illness?[/b][/quote]

I was raised religious, but am not today. It's interesting to think about. If people like the major historical religious (deities & prophets) figures did (or claimed to do), or said the same stuff today, they would be classified as bipoar, bpd, narcissistic, schizophrenic, completely making shit up, etc. The psychological standards have totally changed.

But because it was in the past... somehow we believe it. [/quote]

There was an interesting, if quite speculative, book written about this some decades ago called "The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Brain," by Julian Jaynes.  The theory, as I understand it is that the two hemispheres of the brain were not quite as in communication thousands of years ago as they are today and that hearing voices was the norm, not the exception.

Today it is much more the exception, and we tend to label people who hear voices as schizophrenics.  Yet there are still many people today who hear voices but otherwise show none of the signs of schizophrenia or bipolar, another mental illness in which people may hear voices.  They even have an association called Intervoice.

There are a number of saints who had auditory or visual hallucinations, for lack of a better word that is not quite so negative in connotation, like Joan of Arc and Teresa of Avila.  Paul would also be among these for his Damascene conversion.  Dostoefsky was an epileptic who experienced ecstatic religious visions during his seizures, and these were influential in his writings.  There has been speculation that Muhammed was also an epileptic who received the Quran during seizure episodes.

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