Historicity of Jesus - 2

[Husky]

^ Me too. Waiting.





Anyway, the following is not limited to the topic of the "historicity of jeebus", but is about the "historicity" of all such fables. Or rather, it's about How the Origins of All the Worst of Human Stupidity lie in Self-Delusions that turned into Mass-Delusions. <- That's too long for a book title, else I'd have sold the rights by now. But the short, snazzy title should be "Mindvirus".





Historical fact: Monogawdism = (repeatedly) the product of delirious and even diseased minds.



Back in September, New Scientist's (print) cover contained among its headings "The epileptic origins of monotheism". Fortunately, scanning wasn't needed as there's an online version.

(* Really, that was the print heading for the article as heralded on the cover of the issue, even though the online text has a different title.)



1. www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528812.400-tutankhamuns-death-and-the-birth-of-monotheism.html

Tutankhamun's death and the birth of monotheism

05 September 2012 by Jessica Hamzelou



TUTANKHAMUN'S mysterious death as a teenager may finally have been explained. And the condition that cut short his life may also have triggered the earliest monotheistic religion, suggests a new review of his family history.



Since his lavishly furnished, nearly intact tomb was discovered in 1922, the cause of Tutankhamun's death has been at the centre of intense debate. There have been theories of murder, leprosy, tuberculosis, malaria, sickle-cell anaemia, a snake bite - even the suggestion that the young king died after a fall from his chariot.



But all of these theories have missed one vital point, says Hutan Ashrafian, a surgeon with an interest in medical history at Imperial College London. Tutankhamun died young with a feminised physique, and so did his immediate predecessors.



Paintings and sculptures show that Smenkhkare, an enigmatic pharaoh who may have been Tutankhamun's uncle or older brother, and Akhenaten, thought to have been the boy king's father, both had feminised figures, with unusually large breasts and wide hips. Two pharaohs that came before Akhenaten - Amenhotep III and Tuthmosis IV - seem to have had similar physiques. All of these kings died young and mysteriously, says Ashrafian. "There are so many theories, but they've focused on each pharaoh individually."



Ashrafian found that each pharaoh died at a slightly younger age than his predecessor, which suggests an inherited disorder, he says. Historical accounts associated with the individuals hint at what that disorder may have been.





"It's significant that two [of the five related pharaohs] had stories of religious visions associated with them," says Ashrafian. People with a form of epilepsy in which seizures begin in the brain's temporal lobe are known to experience hallucinations and religious visions, particularly after exposure to sunlight. It's likely that the family of pharaohs had a heritable form of temporal lobe epilepsy, he says.



This diagnosis would also account for the feminine features. The temporal lobe is connected to parts of the brain involved in the release of hormones, and epileptic seizures are known to alter the levels of hormones involved in sexual development. This might explain the development of the pharaohs' large breasts. A seizure might also be to blame for Tutankhamun's fractured leg, says Ashrafian (Epilepsy & Behavior, doi.org/h8s).



Tuthmosis IV had a religious experience in the middle of a sunny day, recorded in the Dream Stele - an inscription near the Great Sphinx in Giza. But his visions were nothing compared with those experienced by Akhenaten. They encouraged Akhenaten to raise the status of a minor deity called the "sun-disk", or Aten, into a supreme god - abandoning the ancient Egyptian polytheistic traditions to start what is thought to be the earliest recorded monotheistic religion. If Ashrafian's theory is correct, Akhenaten's religious experiment and Tutankhamun's premature death may both have been a consequence of a medical condition.



"People with temporal lobe epilepsy who are exposed to sunlight get the same sort of stimulation to the mind and religious zeal," says Ashrafian.



"It's a fascinating and plausible explanation," says Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. However, the theory is almost impossible to prove, he adds, given that there is no definitive genetic test for epilepsy.



Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist at the New York University Langone Medical Center, thinks the theory must remain speculative.



"The exact timing of Akhenaten's religious conviction is not so clearly documented, and most cases of sudden religious conversion are not due to epilepsy," he says. "Monotheism could be related to epilepsy, or bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, or drug intoxication from a fungus - but this paper does not sway me to any of these options."



Markel agrees: "Do we know that a seizure led to monotheism? It's a nice idea, but we don't know," he says. "It's a very interesting hypothesis, but it's just that - there's no definite proof."

As regards the dubitability exhibited in the final statements above: it turns out that back in 2001, a neuroscientist made a similar diagnosis but with even greater self-certainty - but about a purported biblical scribe of the OT instead:





2. www.newscientist.com/article/dn1565-old-testament-prophet-showed-epileptic-symptoms.html

Old Testament prophet showed epileptic symptoms

19:00 17 November 2001 by Alison Motluk



The Bible may contain the oldest recorded case of temporal lobe epilepsy. Ezekiel, the prophet whose visions are recorded in a book of the Old Testament, apparently had all the classic signs of the condition.



Earlier in 2001, Eric Altschuler, a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Diego, claimed that the Biblical strongman Samson may have been the earliest known sufferer of antisocial personality disorder. Now he says that records in the Bible reveal that Ezekiel, who lived about 2600 years ago, showed extreme classic symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy.



People with the disease experience partial seizures, often accompanied by a dreamy feeling that things are not quite as they should be. Patients are often misdiagnosed with psychiatric problems. Neurologically, Ezekiel displayed some obvious signs of epilepsy, such as frequent fainting spells and episodes of not being able to speak.



The Biblical figure, who chronicled the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC, exhibited other peculiarities associated with the disease. For instance, he wrote compulsively, a trait known as hypergraphia. Altschuler points out that the Book of Ezekiel is the fourth longest in the Bible - only slightly shorter than Genesis. "It's impenetrable," he says. "He goes on and on."



Aggressively religious

Ezekiel was also extremely religious, another characteristic associated with this form of epilepsy. While many Biblical figures are pious, none was as aggressively religious as Ezekiel, says Altschuler. Other signs of epilepsy can include aggression, delusions and pedantic speech - and the man had them all, Altschuler told a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego.



Understanding that Ezekiel may have suffered from epilepsy helps put his writings into perspective, says Altschuler. "Once you appreciate that, you can see where he's coming from."

[color="#800080"](Yes, *everyone* can see where he was coming from....)[/color]



It also serves as further evidence that this disease is genetic in origin. "If there were no old cases," he says, "we'd have to ask if there was something wrong in our environment."

Those aren't the only famous monogawd fictions fitting the profile:





3. Since the 7th century itself, people have argued that islam's Mohammed was - at best - a schizophrene. Over the ages, it's only been amended to 'a textbook schizophrene'.*

And was it Elst who had some writings on how Mohammed was no less delusional than the above cases, and that (from memory) Mohammed also suffered from epilepsy, with all his delirious "visions" brought on by his fits.



(* Apparently, people all over continue to point out the matter in everyday conversations:

e.g. www.asiafinest.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=179149

"Jesus And Mohammed Were Schizophrenics, by: Charles Sabillon"

I've not read beyond the title (I don't need convincing), but it is itself a step in the right direction:

The title appears to show it has no time for Clive Staples Lewis'(?) famously woefully illogical ultimatum concerning jeebus - i.e. that of "liar, madman OR gawd". Note how Lewis conveniently forgot to list "non-existent", thus not allowing that - solely correct - option.

Indeed, there's no reason for anyone - including the just-posted link - to continue to pretend that jeebus has any historicity, since from the early centuries of the 1st millennium CE learned people have been pointing out that Jeebus Never Existed. His character may be schizophrenic as described, but it is nevertheless a fictional character.)





4. Remember how in the middle ages the christian church still continued to insist that people with epilepsy "were possessed by the devil". Or else, that the fits such people underwent were "in communion with satan".

Sadly, on account of this rigid belief of the church, people who had the disease were frequently rounded up, tortured, burned or otherwise killed.

For "possession".



Ironically, the examples given above (of [[color="#0000FF"]EDIT copy and paste error: didn't mean Tutankhamun but[/color]] Akhenaten, Ezekiel, Mohammed, etc) are indeed cases of people who were "possessed" - but by their own delirium. I.e. they were very much self-deluded. They *invented* evil monogawd religions - by *inventing* fictional monogawd entities (of evil character, but the two go together) - and then peddled these onto the masses (i.e. conversion), if not on pain of death, then by force and deception, thereby extinguishing existing authentic ancestral religion. And it's being triumphantly declared that their brute-force butchery (replacement scheme) was the victory of "the truth" of their invented "gawd" entity/entities. <- Human penchant for self-deception grows.





Anyway, I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but people can try to link the dots and discern the pattern for themselves:

Looney delusions and zealous (intolerant) monogawd fictions.

[Solution: => Deranged minds it IS.]



You'd think the self-evident moral behind all this would be that people should never mistake human invention for reality.

And yet, to think that billions of people over the centuries have been following the fictions that emanated from obviously deranged minds. True, that they were largely coerced. However, their descendants are plain-delusionally adhering to the frauds perpetrated on the human psyche, and are zealously entrapping further others still.



Now, if individuals *insist* on following inventions, each may as well follow something their own mind invented, rather than the fiction of someone else - let alone one made up by some person suffering from obvious mental disorders whereby the dangerous fiction is particularly a consequence of their disorder. Inventing your own fictions still won't make the invention *true* of course, but - all else being equal - it's the more sensible option.

(Of course, in contrast to both cases, heathens throughout the ages and throughout the world have preferred their own real Gods to any and all human invention.)





[Disclaimer: all the above is directed exclusively at incriminating the famous mindviruses and those who invented/propagated it.

Clearly not directed at anyone who coincidentally shares a similar illness, yet has nothing to do with inventing spooks let alone perpetrating such things on others.]