Mentally unstable people! Schizophrenics to epileptics
Who are some famous religious people we could talk about?
Epileptics:
Joan of Arc. She heard voices and saw visions. She led the French through some tough times by convincing them that God had told her so. She was later dismissed as a heretic and put on trial by the Roman Catholic church. She was sent to prison, and again put on trial for wearing manly clothing. This time she was burned at the stake though, What a loving religion we had back then! Amusingly she was later found innocent, and cannonized.
Not a whole lot of people know that she also suffered from siezures, which probably indicated temporal lobe epilepsy. In today`s medical and psychiatric science, suffering from this usually is accompanied by hearing voices and hallucinating.
Would she have had visions of angels of God without prior knowledge of this religion? Not bloody likely! If she were a Hindu, living and growing up with Hinduism, would her hallucinations include Shiva? Hard to say, depends how religiously fixated she was doesn`t it?
It`s interesting to note that sufferers of siezures have claimed an ability to control the experience of their siezures, actually altering what they might hear and see as their brain squirms like a dead toad attached to electrodes. Is that strange or what?
Sadly, today, Joan of Arc would just be put on medication, possibly operated on, and everyone would know her disorder is what was causing her visual and auditory hallucinations.
But back then she worked up the French into winning battles, merely because they honestly believed her claims to be true.
It is safe to assume mentally unstable people have always existed, it`s what they said and how they acted that determined how people took them:
Matthew 4:23 And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.
24 And his fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils [NKJV: demons], and those which were lunatick [NKJV: epileptics], and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.
(Just like that though, Mathew tells us Jesus healed them and it is believed. Maybe he should have erased these maladies from the face of the earth if they bad enough to make him heal, but oh well, that`s another topic.)
-Epileptic fits or Grand Mal siezures can occur in very rational people, they would seem very normal until their brains start misfiring. Schizophrenia is a little different of course! They can be paranoid, create all kinds of scenarios in their heads, babble, etc.
Anyway, with just a little bit of research we can find alot about these things.
The Major thing we need to not overlook in regards to my essay here is the mind/body relationships that occur in an unbalanced brain. Any hallucinations always seem to come from one`s subconcious, involving something they have experienced or learned about, or imagined.
I could post up a whole bunch of other cases and medical observations I guess, but would rather keep it short.