David, I'm sorry, but I must be missing something, because I can't see any relevance to the subject in most of your last comment.

In fact, your response seems to be solely aimed at trying to prevent a proper discussion being held.

All sorts of great ideas are misused. That doesn't invalidate the ideas, it means that we need to learn how to minimise the chance that they might be.

On the subject of Bougainville, I was living in PNG at the time and I can well remember that one of the major agitators was a fellow called John Momis, who was a Catholic priest and is now a politician. The thing that he and the rest of the separatists accomplished was to shut down the only source of wealth the island had, in a bid to try to take that source over for themselves. The mine remains closed to this day and Bougainville remains a poverty-stricken mess. I've been to the mine and there is no doubt it was poorly run, but the resource was valuable and it could have been made a good operation to fund development. Instead, Bougainville is a constant begger at the PNG Parliament and Momis benefits from that through being the man who gets to hand out the largesse to his wantoks.

Momis wasn't even a Bougainvillean, he was a Morobe man, from Salamaua. He managed to become the voice of the rebellion because he was educated and had a somewhat protected status as a priest. His skill at inflaming resentment to political ends was pretty useful too.

The thing is, David, that we could have a really interesting discussion about whether religious experience and psychosis are related, we could have a good discussion about all sorts of things around the topic, but you simply want to try to prove to yourself that your cognitive biases are justified.

It's a shame, but don't try to tell me I haven't tried or that I'm insulting you and run away in dudgeon. You've squibbed it.

Dear Craig,

Let’s back up a bit.

You wrote: “Spirituality is a quintessential part of the human experience, even if some never experience it or don't recognise it when they do. The fact that it can be misused by the unscrupulous does not taint the beautiful ideas it can generate.”

I looked up the definitions of spirituality in my Unabridged Dictionary and found none that seemed to match the concept you have mentioned above. All but one referred to ecclesiastical materials and the one that didn’t defined spiritual as opposed to material.

I don’t recognise that I have experienced spirituality. Have you? If so can you tell me about it? If you haven’t experienced it can you give an example of someone else who has experienced it and has told about it?

Will you tell about some of the ideas it has generated?

I am willing to listen.

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Dear Craig,

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John Nash is an interesting example. There are many others : Joan of Arc who had her first “vision” at the age of 13, Bernadette Soubirous (the 14-year old peasant girl from Lourdes), St Teresa of Avila, etc …

I noted the following about Nash in Wikipedia :

« Nash … spent several years at psychiatric hospitals being treated for paranoid schizophrenia.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, a person suffering from the disorder is typically dominated by relatively stable, often paranoid, fixed beliefs that are either false, over-imaginative or unrealistic, and usually accompanied by experiences of seemingly real perception of something not actually present. Further signs are marked particularly by auditory and perceptional disturbances, … Nash dated the start of what he termed "mental disturbances" … when his wife was pregnant. He described a process of change "from scientific rationality of thinking into the delusional thinking characteristic of persons who are psychiatrically diagnosed as 'schizophrenic' or 'paranoid schizophrenic'". For Nash, this included seeing himself as a messenger or having a special function of some kind, … and searching for signs representing divine revelation.

Nash suggested his delusional thinking was related to his unhappiness, his desire to feel important and be recognized, and his characteristic way of thinking, saying, "I wouldn't have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally." He did not draw a categorical distinction between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. »

Mental disorders are not the only source of hallucinations and delusions. They can also be provoked by alcohol and drugs. Many so-called “creative” people in professions such as publicity and show-biz often have recourse to these expeditious methods in order to surpass their limits and break into new grounds.

Unfortunately, the mentally deranged are unable to differentiate between delusion and reality.

Believing you can fly when you are “high” can prove fatal … and definitive!

The narrative of the life of Jesus reminds me of the Greek tragedy of Icarus.

He strove to fulfil his mother’s ambitions for him and died in the process.

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Nash spent just a few months in hospital, Banjo, admitted by his wife. He was subjected to the awful experience of what was then regarded as state-of-the-art for schizophrenia, insulin-shock "therapy".

He was released because he learnt to suppress his reactions to his mental processes and tell his doctors what he figured they would need to hear. He then made his wife promise never to admit him again and fled the country. He finally returned after he "decided to stop paying attention" to the ideas he couldn't make sense of. However, it should be noted that even later in life, his mind never stopped working to make sense of the very counter-intuitive and his work on embedding discontinuous geometries in continuous matrices came when he was in his 60s!

Schizophrenia of the paranoid subtype is commonly associated with the sense of the sufferer that they have some special purpose often based on their interpretation of their observations of things in the world. Nash's comments about his mathematical background are particularly interesting and illuminating. The famous Indian mathematician Ramanujan reported his ideas as coming in dreams. Euler, Pascal as previously discussed, Einstein, Newton and many other greats in the field of mathematics all reported their mathematics as having come to them in various somewhat inexplicable ways.

Does it invalidate the ideas of a Ramanujan that he couldn't properly explain them in many cases? Similarly, if the ideas that underpin some of the great religions came to the prophets in a form that we would today call mentally disordered, do the ideas lose value?

David, this might help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirituality

Yes, I have had what I would call spiritual experiences. I think that you have too, but your distrust of being religious has lead you to reject them, or to categorise them as something else.

Csikszentmihalyi coined the term "flow". Look it up.

I saw a lovely quote this morning

All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable
which makes
you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see
something that isn't even visible.
N. McLean, *A River Runs Through it*

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Dear Craig,

.

You wrote:

« Nash spent just a few months in hospital, Banjo, admitted by his wife. »
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Many thanks for that, Craig. I imagine your source is more reliable than Wikipedia.
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You ask :

« Does it invalidate the ideas of a Ramanujan that he couldn't properly explain them in many cases? Similarly, if the ideas that underpin some of the great religions came to the prophets in a form that we would today call mentally disordered, do the ideas lose value? »
.

Of course not. For mathematic and scientific ideas to be valid (have value) they have to be falsifiable. It doesn’t matter what inspired them.

It’s not the person who is “valued”, it’s the ideas, irrespective of the person and his mental state at the time.

Archimedes is reputed to have been inspired by the displacement of the bathwater when he stepped into it. The fact that he happened to be just taking a bath did not invalidate the principle that bears his name. Nor did relaxing under an apple tree admiring the scenery invalidate Newton’s theory of gravity.

The ideas expressed by a prophet are quite different. A prophet is “an inspired teacher, revealer or interpreter of God’s will” (OED definition). It is not empirical evidence but religious faith that assigns value to the prophet’s ideas, whether he is mentally deranged or not.

It is not even the possible pertinence, accuracy or wisdom of the prophet’s ideas. It is the faith that his followers place in him as God’s minister and spokesman.

It’s not the ideas that are “valued”, it’s the infallibility of the prophet, irrespective of his mental state at the time.
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You also observe :

« Einstein, Newton and many other greats in the field of mathematics all reported their mathematics as having come to them in various somewhat inexplicable ways. »
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Intuition, a stroke of genius, lateral thinking, particular circumstances … ? Perhaps. In any event, not because they were suffering from some chronic mental disorder such as bipolarity or schizophrenia.

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Banjo, some of the greatest puzzles in mathematics involve trying to prove that a stroke of insight is correct. The Clay Foundation has a list of what were 7, now 6 and possibly 5 grand problems that have not been solved.

The reason that the most recent proof has not yet been ratified is that it is in itself so large and complex that it is presenting a massive challenge. And that's in response to a very simply formulated "conjecture".

Many of the great mathematicians and thinkers in other fields have been bipolar. Einstein almost certainly was.

If a proof of a relatively simply piece of mathematics can take centuries to be devised, and if mathematics (as Godel showed with his incompleteness theorem) cannot provide certainty, then don't you think it's asking an awful lot of religion to do so?