*I* am a raving lunatic.
Most raving lunatics are not at all like sane people think we would be, even off our meds.
I haven't known many schizophrenics, but I've known a lot of other bipolars.
People who are crazy, even before meds, can and could go through long periods of stability just because the diseases wax and wane on their own.
And you can be in a period of relative stability and still believe God is talking to you. In fact, a lot of raving lunatics are hyper-religious because that's one of the areas of the brain frequently affected by what we've got.
I suspect that throughout human experience, raving lunatics have been labelled holy men or holy women and had their visions and teachings followed by others.
It certainly explains Mohammed better than anything else. Guy at 41 years of age, in a cave, decides an Angel is talking to him. Riiiiight. And half of what he was so arsed about at all his neighbors in Mecca, and why he had to run away to Medina in the middle of the night in the first place, was because his friends and neighbors who lived with him and should know thought the man was a dangerous raving lunatic.
One of the bigger differences between Mohammed and Jesus is that Mohammed happened more recently so perhaps we have more information or people were noticing different things, already, to write down.
And Jesus appears to have been a much nicer person.
But I have no problem at all with believing that Jesus was a very good person, and a very wise person, and also a raving lunatic. Because those three things are not as incompatible as people without a major mental illness, or without a close family member with major mental illness, think they are.
I think that either the information about Jesus has been reported and distorted very selectively *or* he was a raving lunatic, or a bit of both.
Having a cow at the banking people in a Temple, throwing over tables, grabbing a whip and running around after them beating on them----all that isn't exactly the *normal* way of dealing with a bad policy.
It was effective. It was probably even a good idea. But not exactly normal.
Crazy people have those kinds of violent rages. Frequently at things that would have hacked other people off, too. Other people would have just chosen to exercise more control than to start throwing tables, yelling out accusations, and beating the crap out of semi-random examples of the whole group of people making them mad. Normal people, even if they were as upset as Jesus appeared to be, would have handled that differently.
So yeah, I think he was a nice, wise, lunatic who nevertheless said a lot of important things.
Timoclea
