So, are the founders of religions/religious movements - such as Joseph Smith (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), Buddha (ostensibly Buddhism), Jesus of Nazareth (ostensibly Christianity or Nazarene Judaism), Chaitanya (Gaudiya Vaishnavism), Mother Ann Lee (Shakers), Ellen G. White (Seventh-day Adventists), Charles Taze Russell (Jehovah’s Witnesses), Muhammad ibn Abdullah (Islam), Ali ibn Abi Talib (ostensibly Shi’ism), Abu Bakr (ostensibly Sunnism), Ja’far as-Sadiq (Shi’ism, opposed to Sunnism), Muhammad ibn Ismail ibn Ja’far as-Sadiq (Ismaili Shi’ism), Musa Kazim ibn Ja’far as-Sadiq (Twelver or Ithna Ashari Shi’ism), Hassan-i-Sabbah (Fidayin Ismailism, precursor to Nizari Ismailism), Paul (Roman Catholic Church), Osho, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson z"l (Chabad Lubavitch Judaism), etc. - trying to deceive their followers, were themselves deluded by some psychosis, or inspired by God? In other words, are religions founded out of genuine reasons or as frauds from the start?
There’s absolutely no reason to expect that the answer will be the same for all the example you give (and the countless others you don’t give), is there?
Whether you’re a theist or an atheist, unless you’re completely blinded by ideology and have no idea how the real world works, you’d expect a variety of factors to explaing the foundation or establishment of any social institution, whether religious or not. And you’d expect some of those factors to be more or less “good” or “bad” according to whatever ethical criteria you yourself employ to determine goodness or badness. And, in relation to each religion, you’d expect a somewhat different mixture of causes and factors, and of “goodness” and “badness”.
If you’re an atheist you’ll leave divine causation or divine inspiration out of the list of possible factors, whereas a theist will likely include it. But both of you will still have a long list of causes and factors which you both agree could have contributed in any particular instance.
My personal suspicions is that relatively few religions which survive more than a short time were started as outright conscious frauds. But I don’t actually know that. And I don’t beleive anyone else does either.
I don’t think a more useful answer than this is possible.
I vote genuine reasons, primarily. But it’s also far more complicated than that.
I do think, for instance, that the speculation that the sorts of behaviors common to either schizotypal personality disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder bear striking resemblances to many religious practices and visionary understandings has some merit, certainly in the historical development of various religions.
Consider Hinduism and the obsession with washing. Not just washing, but washing an exact number of times with each hand while arcane rules at what not to stare at. In thinking about where these ideas came from, it’s just too tempting to see a visionary suffer of OCD trying to deal with disease by imbuing it with deep meaning and spreading the idea that it had powerful significance not only for curing their own anxiety, but for all peoples.
Given that people who were slightly “odd” (but not TOO odd: not full-blown schizophrenics) were often placed in shaman-type roles in early societies, it’s not a stretch to see what we know today as very common pathologies of the more minor forms of psychological disorders in many of the particularities of religious practice and free-association.
So two, perhaps is the whole project of deistic religion itself: the absolute certainty that first individual natural things, then more abstract natural forces, and finally the universe and existence itself should have a human-like personality.
Of course, the problem is that we would use these “diagnoses” to write-off the founders of these practices, when in fact they just deepen the picture. Undeniably, most of the major religious founders had in themselves a deep conviction of their own revelations or insights. Scientology is the only religion I can think of that I would seriously ascribe to outright deception and trickery.
Is this not a bit of a circular question. If you believe in their message, you believe them to be divinely inspired. More often them not, their specific religious books [for the starters of religions] proclaim the writers to be divinely inspired, or indicate that the prophetic figure was divinely inspired.
If you do not believe in the message, you have to explain away their delusional ravings of God, angels and devils as some sort of pathology or scam. No other rational explanation can be given. Normal people do not set out to invent complicated things such as serious religion, especially as more often then not they are trying to alter the status quo, a situation likely to get you blacklisted in most socieities of old. Normal people have too many everyday things to achieve. Normal people are too scared to take the risk.
Something powerful had to be motivating these people, whether that was God or schizophrenia [sp?] depends entirely on your own personal bias.
I disagree with this. Normal people do their best to understand the world around them, and sometimes normal people come up with entirely novel explanations. A normal person may come up with a novel explanation that’s entirely incorrect without being either a crackpot or a scam artist.
The idea that Jesus was a scam artist is pretty funny to me. You can make the case that he was a crackpot, but if he was a scam artist, he had to be about the least competent scam artist in all history, judging by how much personal comfort his scams obtained for him.
I’d like to point out that Buddha never demanded faith; he never demanded belief of any kind in any dogma. He offered a viewpoint and a possible technique for release from suffering. That’s all. He never mentioned a deity and he never spoke of an afterlife, much less punishment and reward.
But there are definately ‘religious’ leaders who fall into the scam artist category. The Bhagwan Shri Rajneeshi and The Reverend Moon come to my mind as good examples of this.
I think its very unlikely for normal people to make such a leap, because to do so would incur upon them a terrible social cost. To create a new relgion would be to challenge the relgious orthodoxy and its entertwined political orthodoxy at the same time. If you had such a new viewpoint on the world in the intolerant days of yore, you were probably much more inclined to keep it to yourself, or dismiss it as a flight of fancy then to go out and take the risk of preaching your message in the open. Something exceptional in your psychology must have driven you to be out there on the road preaching your message. Whether that was divine will, greed or some sort of mental pathology depends on who you ask. But there had to be some exceptional component to you that would make you feel compelled to do it.
Absolutely agree–I was just disagreeing with a blanket statement that all religious leaders must (assuming their religion is incorrect) be scam artists or crackpots. There are definitely scammers out there; there are definitely crackpots out there.
Hell, I still plan to start my “50 Names of Marduk” cult up someday. And that’s gonna be totally a scam.
Again, I agree that there needs to be something exceptional in someone’s psychology to go out and found a religion; I disagree with pathologizing this aspect of a person’s personality.
Was Galileo insane, when he risked everything to promote a radical theory of the cosmos? Would he have been insane if he’d been mistaken?
YOu can, of course, redefine mental illness to include such behavior; I disagree that this redefinition is reasonable.
I can’t speak to the other examples you gave, but this one is not a good one. The reasons:
(a) Rabbi Schneerson didn’t start Judaism
(b) Chabad isn’t a separate religion; it’s a subset of Chassidus, which is a subset of Orthodox Judaism
(c) Rabbi Schneerson didn’t even start Chabad Lubavitch. He was the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe.
I think it is fair to say that some religious leaders are out-and-out frauds. Some noncontroversial names have been mentioned here.
Also, some religious leaders are insane. A good example is the younger brother of Jesus Christ, Hong Xiuquan.
However, I think that many religious leaders do not plan to start a religion. I think Christ and Martin Luthor are both in this category–they wanted to purify an existing religion. Many of the leaders in the OP did not found a new religion, they were merely prominent members of one–like Rabbi Schneerson and Paul. All of these people presumably believed in the religion to which they considered themselves to belong.
I suspect that in addition to frauds, crackpots, and reformers of existing religions, another category would be charismatic philosophers who had no particular religious message but were nevertheless venerated/deified by their followers. (With or without the permission of the venerated/deified.)
Simple answer: both. Obviously some people have started religions as a sham just for their personal benefit. And I’d define a “genuine reason” as someone who sincerely believe in what they teach. I have little doubt some people started faiths who were sincere. Note the word “fraud” implies that there is no genuine belief.
What UDS said for the general question in its broadness. An individual’s answer will depend on whether or not he/she is a deist/theist/atheist/naturalist.
For me, this question is actually one of the most compelling reasons for believing in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If Jesus did not really rise, it is difficult to describe him as the founder of Christianity. That would be the 11 Apostles. Yet, all of them believed that Christ was risen and were willing to die to proclaim it.
The resurrection is (was) a falsifiable event. It is not similar to an experience of enlightenment. If I come to you and say “I had a revelation of Truth from God,” your only options are to believe or disbelieve me; there’s no way you can verify or falsify whether or not it really happened to me.
The Apostles were in a position to know if Jesus really did rise or not. If he did not, it is difficult to understand why they would perpetuate such a fraud. “No, no, no, Mr. Roman soldier, you can put away that sword/cross/lion/fire. I was just kidding, see?” People will die for something that they earnestly believe is true even if it isn’t. They won’t for something that they positively know is false.
[BTW: Hallucinations? All of them? Swoon theory? I don’t think so.]
Of course, if he really did rise from the dead… well, we know what happened after that.
Theologue, all that proves is that the Apostles were convinced that Jesus had risen. It doesn’t prove that he had.
People have accepted martyrdom from belief systems ranging from Communism to Anarchy. People have died for atheism and theism, for industrialism and agrarianism, for big-endianism and little-endianism. The martyrdom of the Apostles lends absolutely no weight to the factuality of the Resurrection. And the martyrdom of Christians who were only told that Jesus had risen (although there’s no reason to think that the Apostles hadn’t “only been told”) carries even less weight.
Is there a way to tell if a religion was invented or the result of genuine actions?
Example: people say that Joseph Smith, Jr., was a fraud; he invented the Book of Mormon, he established polygamy for his own perverted entertainment, he attracted followers and their emotions and wealth for his own enjoyment and benefit; in short, he was a trickster who fooled many people to join his invented religion. On the other hand, there are people who genuinely believed that Joseph Smith had an encounter and repeated communication with divinity, and that he genuinely felt that the religion he was establishing (along with the book which he believed was divinely revealed to him) was according to will of God.
Similar arguments on both sides are made about Muhammad, and I am sure about other religious leaders.
Then there are the obvious frauds: Scientology (which claims to be a religion but isn’t), cults like the People’s Temple (oh, such a cool name that was), Heaven’s Gate, etc.
But, to question further, were these frauds? Or were the leaders genuine in their efforts? Could it be possible that L. Ron Hubbard started Scientology/Dianetics as a joke but later come to believe it? Could Jim Jones have honestly seen himself as a religious leader leading his people? Could the people of Heaven’s Gate honestly have believed their beliefs which caused them to do what they did, without having some nefarious or evil-minded demagogue necessarily exploiting them? Sure, this all seems very incredible to us, but people are wont to believe strange things.
I actually saw that Heaven’s Gate guy in person, when he was in town, and the man was totally sincere, and way, way creepy! Bone-chilling creepy. Not evil, but deeply, and truly, fucked. But he had juice, charisma, whatever. I could see it as possible he could attract followers. Me, I just wanted to get as far away from him as possible, and I got really, really drunk. Didn’t think about him again for years until the story broke.
Did you hear the part about the telescope? Some of his victims pooled some money and bought a really expensive telescope, so they could see the saucer coming to get them. When they didn’t see it, they returned the telescope and demanded their money back because it was defective!
I figure like this: if you actually set out to start a religion, then you are almost certainly a fraud, whether you know it or not. What the Irish call chutzpah. But big-time.
First of all, let me mention that the absence up to this point of any mention of J. R. “Bob” Dobbs in this discussion is inexcusable
I like the coments to the effect that most founders of the major religions (or denominations) did not really set out to create a new one right off the bat themselves, but more often would have been looking to reform or reorganize or expand upon an existing one (even Muhammad claims Islam “brings back” the True Religion of Abraham/Moses/Jesus, that had become distorted by Jewish and Xtian followers); and that often it’s the disciples that actually build a new religion after-the-fact around the founding figure (Buddha, Jesus). In that sense, the succesful building of a new religion is the result of it supplying some sort of spiritual/social need that was not being satisfied by the existing structures. A supply/demand kind of situation. Interestingly, the need AND the satisfaction the new religion provides may well be legitimate even if the circumstances of the new religion’s origin are murky (as Christianity says, “by their fruits ye shall know them”).
WRS, the process with L.Ron seems to be that originally he thought he was developing a form of mental therapy as an antithesis to psychoanalysis (which he believed harmful); but eventually it “came to him” that he really was dealing with something more fundamental about the universe and human nature, i.e. a religion. That can be fully sincere or crackpotty or both. The third, a.k.a. “fraud” alternative would be that when he realized that dianetics as “therapy” would go nowhere and be denounced as quackery, he switched directions and called it a religion, thus insulating it from regulation.
This is pretty much my understanding of what happened–he found out how lucrative his theories were, but was getting in legal trouble. So, he started a religion and the bucks started really rolling in.
Also, anyone who has read any of the books/articles about the life of Joseph Smith should recognize that this guy basically started a religion as a way to get laid, and it apparently worked out famously in this regard. It’s interesting, though, where it has gone since then. From what I can tell, there are a great many Mormons who clearly are not low-lifes and who live their lives according to values that a great many Christians aspire to. It just amazes me that they haven’t realized that their religion is based on such obvious fraud–or that they don’t care if it was.
