the origin of religion

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At the origin of every religion lies a psychopath. Agree or disagree?

Disagree.

It's a possibility, especially with modern era religions. But I think the older religions were an attempt to find an explanation of this world.

It's possible that not all races took to religion, let alone religious dominion. Some of the earliest known races set ethics outside the realm of their gods. And some of the gods were ethically worse than humans. I guess even back then, people were drawn to soap operas.

Disagree.

Religion is born out of lack of knowledge, and control of the environment and nature.

Psychopathy is a specific thing, even tribalism alone isn't Psychopathy, tribe can exist with or without them.

Think of Hitler, he didn't create religion. The mysticism in the Third Reich was Himler's obsession not Hitler's. Hitler was a skillful manipulator, and used this to his advantage.

I would go so far to say that Psychopaths are more likely to build on existing structure, and culture, then create new one. It is a bit of both.

Magical thinking is also a personality trait that doesn't need much prompting in many people. It in fact a neurotype called schizotypal spectrum.

Perhaps Mohammed was a psychopath? Perhaps Jesus was bipolar? Perhaps I should broaden this to mentally ill in one way or another.

I'm just thinking this is EXACTLY what a true psychopath would do. They would make up some crazy stories and myths and portray themselves as God, knowing full well that they aren't. Maybe the originators of religion didn't actually believe the s**t they were spewing. That is the question I am asking. Is this a possibility?

Sometimes I think certain people just had inexplicable subjective experience, experiences which translated outward enough for people to really believe them, the problem was what they saw couldn't but to words and by the time they did for a bunch of bronze-aged people they largely ended up - unwittingly in most cases - founding some very regressive societal patterns by how people handled that information.

It is possibility, but in term of modus, they tend to work more efficiently than that. Why do all the work, when most of the work is done for them?

Like I said people make up their own belief systems all the time, without realizing, people have all sort of superstitions. A psychopath could tap into that or any number of things.

There is no definitive contemporary evidence that either actually existed.

You can't view Christianity in isolation, there were similar movement around the same time, including ones with resurrection stories. "Messiah" is actually a fairly obvious political angle, where few opportunities for political change existed, what with Roman rule an local rulers.

Maybe.

I believe that religion was invented when the first scoundrel met the first fool.

I'm not sure what level of debate you're looking for here considering the way you phrase your OP. 'Psychopath' for example, is basically a media-generated term and is not generally used in serious discussion of mental health issues. 'Sociopath' or 'anti-social personality disorder, is more accurate.

Muhammad often seems to crop up in this sort of discussion as well but much to the disappointment of Islamaphobes the truth is that at its outset Islam was a highly progressive force in contemporary Arabian society and brought about great reforms in terms of social equality, including rights for women (and girls, as it happens). Islam was also directly responsible for the greatest flowering of human civilisation up to that point in terms of science, philosophy, engineering, astronomy, music, poetry, art and so on much of which underpinned the so-called 'Renaissance' in western civilisation which in turn underpins pretty much our whole western culture these days. This was all started by a 'psychopath' 'spewing s**t'?

As to other religious innovators, there is a commonly observed link between what is generally called mental illness and
certain artistic/creative/visionary/spiritual states of mind. Shamanism and schizophrenia have often been closely connected. Religious leaders, shamans, tzaddiks, yogis, all these have often been outsiders in some way, people who don't fit in with the conventions of their societies for one reason or another. I'm sure the autistic spectrum figures in this also and we can all speculate at our leisure. The Buddha for example was a drop-out who couldn't hack it as a family man.

Thanks, that IS a breath of FRESH air here.

Robert Sapolsky claims that schizotypals created religions. You might find some of his talks on youtube interesting.

Interesting I think this too, but have never heard of this guy.

I would say schizotypal spectrum more accurately. There is nothing "wrong" with them, in fact they are just a different nuerotype.

The function that is active schizotypal people, actually most of us have but usually less prominent, and it has a biological purpose.

Very analytical people like myself, still need to be able to break out of that to form conclusions, etc whilst analytical deduction could go on endlessly. This is a subjective/creative aspect of thinking and is associated with "leap of faith" and even in extrema magical thinking.

Very rarely, often due to brain injury, people cannot make decisions, becuase they are lacking this quality.

These things do not rule out each other. You could have a movement started by a lunatic where the premise is flawed, but is still has positive effects for society.
In the case of Jesus and Mohammed: they were either wrong, or they were right. If they were wrong than they are loonies: one claimed to be God and one claimed to be the final messenger of God. If these claims are false, then the whole premise goes out the window.

Religion is not the same as a belief system. You can have a belief system without a religion.

Religion originates when one person realizes he can get stuff, power and money from others merely by claiming to be holy (in some way or another) and gets a bunch of (usually poor, ignorant and desperate) people to believe anything he says. Yes, this means religions originate as cults then when widespread they become religions.

True they don't rule each other out but the question was phrased in terms of psychopathy and not just delusion. Retrospective diagnosis is a matter of speculation at best. You would have to look at what their behaviour showed about anti-social tendencies to decide what brand of 'lunatic' they were. Yes you could have a very effective sociopath at work but it's very unlikely that he could contain his destructive urges over a lifetime. There's also the matter of context: back in the day it wasn't particularly outlandish to claim that God had spoken to you or some such, there were loads of people doing it. Nowadays it's a different matter but then there were prophets and cults all over the place, it's just that some of them broke out and reached a wider crowd and others didn't. Jesus wasn't a 'Christian', he was a Jew and never claimed to be starting a new religion, Christianity came afterwards. Consciousness and society have moved on, just because someone sounds like what we would today call delusional doesn't mean that they were necessarily psychotic back then. If someone is genuinely psychotic it is almost always extremely debilitating in terms of their overall life and impacts severely on things such as communication and organisational abilities. Psychotics are generally very chaotic and would find it very difficult to lead people for long.

There's also the whole thing of bicameralism. This is the theory that the two halves of the brain at one time would talk to each other, quite literally, or to be more accurate, the right-brain would talk to the left-brain and that this was perfectly normal. Modern-day voice-hearers still experience the remnants of this faculty that we all used to have so none of this is as simple as deciding who was a 'lunatic' and who wasn't. This is one explanation for the whole concept of God and for example why the ancient Greeks thought their Gods were pretty much like people similar to themselves - they could hear the Gods talking to them every day.