Was Muhammad Schizophrenic?

[firedragon]

You said there's no Qur'anic canon, so this means there must be some differences between manuscripts.

Canon, is a biblical concept. Its not relevant to the Quran.

 

[Rival]

Canon, is a biblical concept. Its not relevant to the Quran.

So if you find two Quranic manuscripts and they do not agree, then you go to make a translation/interpretation of the Qur'an into another language, which manuscript would you use? And why would Uthman have had those others burned, if that hadith is right?

 

[firedragon]

You said there's no Qur'anic canon, so this means there must be some differences between manuscripts.

By the way, even in Biblical studies, differences between manuscripts "has nothing to do with canon". For example, a textual variant between codex B and Vaticanus does not mean they are two canons. This is the wrong notion. Unless you are taking two different versions and are comparing one canon with another. Lets say like the Marcion canon vs the Athanasian canon. That is not manuscript differences, its two canons.

 

[firedragon]

So if you find two Quranic manuscripts and they do not agree, then you go to make a translation/interpretation of the Qur'an into another language, which manuscript would you use? And why would Uthman have had those others burned, if that hadith is right?

Well. Why would Uthman burn the other Qurans other than Hafzas? All you know is that he wrote it in the Qureishi dialect. I know that Muslims give a lot of speculative answers based on this Hadith, but just read this Hadith and that's what you understand.

There is nothing about "differences" and how these differences can affect a "Shariah". These are all nonsensical, superficial statements we hear day in day out spoken by unscholarly, evangelical sources. Most of them are just making things up on the fly.

You asked me which manuscript I would use. Can you give me my choices? Maybe after you give that, I maybe able to answer that better. Just giving superficial answers with no analysis is not my approach and is worthless.

 

[Rival]

You asked me which manuscript I would use. Can you give me my choices?

Given that you told me there's no canon I assumed you already know them. But if there are lots of manuscripts and they all agree with one another, I would call that a canon. As this is not my field, and I'm just reading what you are writing to me, I'm taking what you say and trying to work with it. Either there are manuscript variants or there aren't, yes?

 

[firedragon]

So if you find two Quranic manuscripts and they do not agree, then you go to make a translation/interpretation of the Qur'an into another language, which manuscript would you use? And why would Uthman have had those others burned, if that hadith is right?

Also, just to make it clear to you. Burning old Qurans instead of just burying it or throwing it is everyday practice of Muslims. We don't throw away older Qurans for whatever reason. I had a Quran which was pretty old and the print was blurry. We burnt it rather than throwing it away when I was getting rid of some old books. Rest of course I gave away.

 

[Rival]

Also, just to make it clear to you. Burning old Qurans instead of just burying it or throwing it is everyday practice of Muslims. We don't throw away older Qurans for whatever reason. I had a Quran which was pretty old and the print was blurry. We burnt it rather than throwing it away when I was getting rid of some old books. Rest of course I gave away.

Yeah I'm aware of this. An Indonesian also told me

 

[firedragon]

Given that you told me there's no canon I assumed you already know them. But if there are lots of manuscripts and they all agree with one another, I would call that a canon. As this is not my field, and I'm just reading what you are writing to me, I'm taking what you say and trying to work with it. Either there are manuscript variants or there aren't, yes?

Pls stop using the word canon. Better.

Anyway, if your question is "are there manuscript variants" I would say of course yes.

But 99% of these variants you see on YouTube are bogus scholarship of evangelists who don't understand the subject from Adam. There are textual variants and rendition variants.

 

[Nakosis]

I hope you will not get this disease, do you think a schizophrenic is able to lead 2 persons let a lone full nations?

Do you believe everyone who hears the voice of God is actually speaking with God?

I suspect milder form of schizophrenia are not debilitating. They are not necessarily dangerous and like most can lead normal lives. Some just happen to have conversations with God.

 

[Nakosis]

An interesting question, because a diagnosis of schizophrenia actually doesn't mean we know the cause of it. That's why thinking people have to stop and think about this question: the causes of schizophrenia are not known; they are not fully understood.
And while meds treat a symptom, their use also doesn't indicate the understanding of a cause.

While people may not believe this man was anything special, his question remains something for people to think about as they try to understand the causes of schizophrenia.

You raise another question of how to convince patients that their psychotic symptoms are not supernatural intimations...
But I'm not so sure it is worth the effort to convince them that these are not supernatural intimations. It suffices to note that they believe such a thing. After all, they aren't special in this regard. Plenty of other people believe they get supernatural intimations and don't have their lives adversely affected. So the problem is really that the patient's life or the lives of those around the patient have been adversely affected by these psychotic symptoms or "supernatural intimations"... and therefore, it doesn't matter. I think it would be more important to help the patient to understand the adverse effects of his condition... which should include a prognosis of the potential effects if left untreated. After all, this is the point of taking meds, isn't it? I mean, you wouldn't be trying to get a patient to take his meds if his condition wasn't causing a problem (or potential problem) either for himself or others, would you?

So let you in on a secret, I have had conversations with God. I felt they were real. Was that schizophrenia.
I just kept it to myself. I suspect if I went about talking of my conversations I'd have been diagnosed.

I can understand how someone could believe they were talking with God and otherwise function normally.

 

[Aupmanyav]

Do you believe everyone who hears the voice of God is actually speaking with God.

Also remember that there are thousands of fakes. Read in Wikipedia, Iran had 1200 people in jail who claimed to be Mahdis. A fake will be a very cunning person, not at all a schizophrenic, who would easily claim that what he was saying is from God (as if a God or Allah exists). What you need is foolish people who will believe in what that person says. There is no dearth of such people in the world. And there could be hundreds of reasons for believing. It could be money, it could be sex, it could be the importance that posing to believe gives the person importance in his group.

 

[Ponder This]

So let you in on a secret, I have had conversations with God. I felt they were real. Was that schizophrenia.
I just kept it to myself. I suspect if I went about talking of my conversations I'd have been diagnosed.

I can understand how someone could believe they were talking with God and otherwise function normally.

Possibly it was schizophrenia

 

[Nakosis]

Possibly it was schizophrenia

Sure, didn't cause me any problems. If fact, God offered some pretty good advice.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Along with other religious leaders, Moses, Jesus, Joseph Smith?
Isn't this a more likely explanation than divine intervention?

Yes. Except Moses as that dude is almost certainly a fictional character.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

One might be inclined to think that it would be a more accurate explanation rather than divine intervention but it would just be speculation at this point regarding people like Jesus and Mohammed. Also, I can't say with certainty when God created all things, so there's that. Well I guess doctors explain it very carefully to their patients and also one can't say that patients wouldn't believe these things if there wasn't religious texts with people who have claimed that they were God or a messiah etc.

All these "prophets" make claims of "divine encounters", which comes down to seeing impossible things "appear", "hearing voices" etc.

The account of Mohammed in his cave, reads like full blown hallucination.

But more importantly, they can't ALL be right. At best, only one (or very few) are correct as they all make mutually exclusive claims. The rest is either extremely gullible, or suffering from mental disorder.

But seeing as how they all make similar claims of such "encounters" based on the same kind of "evidence", it is far more likely that all are wrong.

I wouldn't say that they all suffered from psychiatric conditions though.
Some were probably just high after eating the wrong mushrooms.
Some others might have been hallucinating from heavy fever.
Some others were just superstitious with a vivid imagination.

Any of these is more likely then them actually having magical encounters.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

If the Qur'an were written by Muhammad, I would say it shows way too much consistency to come from a psychotic mind. Those with schizophrenia rarely talk so coherently.

Well schizophrenia is not the only psychiatric condition that comes with hallucinations and stuff...

Nevertheless, it is not necessarily the case that they can't be consistent in their ..well... whatever it is they do.

Have you ever heared of Terry A. Davis?
This is a guy, a programmer, who suffered from severe psychiatric illness.

One day, he had a "revelation" from God who demanded him to build him a Temple in the form of an operating system. So he did exactly that... He created a complete operating system from scratch and called it TempleOS. He also created his own version of the C programming language which he called "Holy C" and which, in all honesty, had a few extremely brilliant features.

The OS worked. Do you have any idea how much work goes into creating an OS from scratch. The vast majority of developers out there wouldn't even know where to begin. The dude literally programmed loads of it in assembler code. If you don't know what that is, that's about the lowest level of code you can use. One step further is inputting 1s and 0s manually.

It's completely insane what he accomplished. You can look him up on youtube as he posted a lot of video's where he gives demo's of his OS and ..eum..goes on quite insane rants from time to time, lol. Warning: LOTS of foul language...

He died a couple years ago, run over by a train. Not clear if it was suicide.


Anyhow, I think his TempleOS is clear evidence that even the worst cases of psychiatric patients are capable of consistent brilliance and epic works.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Also, it's very possible for someone with no mental illness to believe they are Messiah like etc. I'm not sure if that could be classified as a mental illness in and of itself according to psychiatry.

it's called the messiah complex

 

[Jimmy]

it's called the messiah complex

I'm not sure how sick that makes the individual if they just believe that one thing and then move on with their life and have no physical or mental symptoms. They probably wouldn't tell anybody because they would realize that people would look at them like they were ill. They probably look at the fact like it's no big deal to be the Messiah so therefore it doesn't make them sick. I don't know if this scenario exists but I'm Trying to come up with something that would be hard to classify as an illness. But having said all that I guess it would be a little far-fetched and it probably is an illness if they think that, even if they don't exhibit any symptoms and if it truly doesn't seem to bother them

 

[Rival]

Well schizophrenia is not the only psychiatric condition that comes with hallucinations and stuff...

Nevertheless, it is not necessarily the case that they can't be consistent in their ..well... whatever it is they do.

Have you ever heared of Terry A. Davis?
This is a guy, a programmer, who suffered from severe psychiatric illness.

One day, he had a "revelation" from God who demanded him to build him a Temple in the form of an operating system. So he did exactly that... He created a complete operating system from scratch and called it TempleOS. He also created his own version of the C programming language which he called "Holy C" and which, in all honesty, had a few extremely brilliant features.

The OS worked. Do you have any idea how much work goes into creating an OS from scratch. The vast majority of developers out there wouldn't even know where to begin. The dude literally programmed loads of it in assembler code. If you don't know what that is, that's about the lowest level of code you can use. One step further is inputting 1s and 0s manually.

It's completely insane what he accomplished. You can look him up on youtube as he posted a lot of video's where he gives demo's of his OS and ..eum..goes on quite insane rants from time to time, lol. Warning: LOTS of foul language...

He died a couple years ago, run over by a train. Not clear if it was suicide.


Anyhow, I think his TempleOS is clear evidence that even the worst cases of psychiatric patients are capable of consistent brilliance and epic works.

I have heard of him and yes, I'm aware that schizophrenia isn't the only condition that comes with psychosis but I was responding to the title/thread. I can see your point, but if - just let's say- we take the tradition for what it says, the Qur'an took 23 years to complete. I'm not sure that a person with such mental illness would even survive 23 adult years in a desert culture with no medication at all. I could be wrong but it seems far fetched.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

I'm not sure how sick that makes the individual if they just believe that one thing and then move on with their life and have no physical or mental symptoms. They probably wouldn't tell anybody because they would realize that people would look at them like they were ill. They probably look at the fact like it's no big deal to be the Messiah so therefore it doesn't make them sick. I don't know if this scenario exists but I'm Trying to come up with something that would be hard to classify as an illness. But having said all that I guess it would be a little far-fetched and it probably is an illness if they think that, even if they don't exhibit any symptoms and if it truly doesn't seem to bother them

I wasn't making any claims about how "sick" or how "problematic" the condition is.
Just informing you that it is a diagnosable condition known as the messiah complex.

As most such conditions, I'ld expect there to be gradations ranging from the trivial to the extremely disruptive to the point of not being able to live a normal life.