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Originally Posted by basilisk888  well (sry going back to hitler >.<) look at someone like Hitler he could mostly hide it from the people who he was "ruleing" so do you say that no other people in the world can do that. And if you see "god" your a saint... well what if you see a "person" and ask another person (olden times) who is that person. If they say they do not see anyone well what would you think if you never knew anything about mental illness or Schizophrenia... What would you do and say?  hahahahahahahaha |
I would say you missed the point entirely. You are making the same assumption that people who think no one knew about dinosaurs before the 1800's make, that just because the word didn't exist means that the knowledge of their existence didn't either. You said it yourself, there is writings about schizophrenia going back 2000 years BC. They didn't name it schizophrenia, they didn't give it it's own label, they just lumped it with a slew of other "isms" we have now days and considered them "madness". They had a lot of names for mental illnesses back then. Some of the ones that have lasted are lunacy, fury, frenzy, delirium, crazy.... the legal term now is insane.
As for Adolf Hitler he was not schizophrenic, at most he was
manic depressive. There are a lot of arguments about what he did and didn't have but none of the options include side effects of hallucinations etc. It is agreed he had delusions of grandeur but considering that he nearly succeeded maybe he wasn't so deluded.
In all it comes back to you have no proof and neither does anyone else. As a result to insist that schizophrenia must be the cause of religious writings/foundings is insulting.
You have brought out one point however and that is that there are a few religions who consider mental illness a sign of divinity and from what I have read they almost universally also use drugs in their religious ceremonies. Religions like animism, many of the polytheistic religions, and believe it or not most "new age" ones. That is probably one of the reasons I have difficulty taking them seriously. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity however I take very seriously. I don't believe in them all as true but I do take them seriously.
@Corvus The division between religion and science did not occur because of the church but on the part of anti-religious scientists who saw Darwinism as an opportunity to erode the power of the Catholic and Anglican church. We lost a lot of knowledge because of them because they threw out all of history and were egotistical of their insistence that they themselves were the peak of human knowledge and all that went before was either meaningless or not worth their time. It is only in the last 20 years that we have been finding out just how wrong they were but it is their legacy on which modern science is founded.