According to all medical encyclopaedias and psychiatric reference books, schizophrenia is any of a group of psychotic disorders usually characterized by withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations, being accompanied in varying degrees by other emotional, behavioral, or intellectual disturbances. Schizophrenia is associated with dopamine imbalances in the brain and defects of the frontal lobe and is caused by genetic, other biological, and psychosocial factors.

Just about everything of what is said in the Bible and the Koran about the founders of those two creeds, points in the direction of a biochemical imbalance in their brain. These men showed systemic signs of delusion in their behavior.

They claimed to have heard heavenly voices, which is a typical symptom of this disease. People with schizophrenia tend to hear, see, feel or smell things that are not there. Just as in a dream, where fantastic events can not be distinguished from real ones. Thus, the hallucination of a voice is perceived in the brain just like a real person talking.

In present times psychiatrists and psychologists have reported millions of cases of people who claim identical things, consisting of two or more voices conversing with each other. However, nobody else has ever been able to hear the voices. Not the doctors, not the nurses, and not even the family members of the patient. That was exactly the situation for Jesus and Mohammed. Only they heard the voices and it was not because they were the chosen ones. It was simply because the others did not suffer from that neurological disequilibrium.

Since in modern times religion does not play a powerful role in the lives of people, many of the persons assuring to have heard voices did not claim it came from God. In ancient times when the belief in the divine was omnipresent, everybody assured it came from above.

Whether in the past or in present times, in all cases the person always clings to these beliefs even after the beliefs are shown to be false. That is a typical symptom and that is what Jesus and Mohammed did. In their times many contested their claims with strong rational arguments but both clung on to their unsubstantiated ideas.

It is human nature to explain things simplistically and religions excel in simplifying things when trying to explicate any phenomenon. Due to the total absence of scientific information in the ancient times in which those two characters lived, it was inevitable that they and their contemporaries would interpret that situation as a divine calling.

Illogical patterns of thinking, is another common expression of this mental illness and both men experienced it. The structure of their thoughts was completely detached from reality and there was never an effort to search for correlations or establish causality linkages. These men never substantiated their arguments with statistical evidence or with historical facts, basing everything on anecdotes and so called commands from God.

Withdrawal from reality and the experiencing of hallucinations are also typical symptoms, and both men were completely delusional. They thought they could walk over water, move mountains, feed the masses, and cure diseases. The truth of the matter is that the historians of the time did not report any of these events. Given the large scale following that these men had in Palestine and in the Arabian Peninsula respectively, it was inevitable that something as huge as the supply of food and medicine to a hungry and ill population would have been recorded in some way. However, nothing was reported.

What was reported was the violent way in which Mohammed instituted his belief in the peninsula, for he waged war to impose his will.

What was also reported was the continued misery and sickness of the population of both lands. There were no such miracles as the transformation of uneatable goods into food and wine. Life expectancy was of just eighteen years of age in Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula before the coming of Jesus and Mohammed, and during the time they realized their miracles, people continued to die by the droves at the same early age. Nothing improved while they spread their gospel. Not the food supply of the country, not the level of health, not the quality or the quantity of housing, and not even the level of crime or household violence.

Once they died and rose to Heaven, where they supposedly took better care of their people for they could lobby more directly God, the miserable living conditions of those two territories remained as bad as before. Hundreds of years went by and the people of the region prayed uninterruptedly to the God that Jesus and Mohammed had peddled, but there was still no improvement.

When life finally started to improve, in the nineteenth and twentieth century, it was not because their prayers were finally answered but because there was an inordinate amount of scientific and technological discoveries.

The religions that Jesus and Mohammed founded have never delivered concrete benefits to the Middle East or to any other region of the world. There have been numerous unsubstantiated claims, but non that could be quantified in a serious way or that could be classified as progress.

They on the contrary mislead the world in the wrong direction and in doing that, hindered progress. Over the past two thousand years, the religions they created have systemically restrained the advance of science, which is the only thing that brings wealth to humanity.

Despite the harm that they have caused, they cannot be blamed for misleading humanity. The reason they cannot be blamed is because they were sick. They were mentally ill and cerebral illnesses are beyond the control of the person that suffers from them. Schizophrenia is due to genetic, biological or adverse psychosocial factors.

It is not clear whether the cause driving Jesus and Mohammed to behave like they did was genetic, biological, psychosocial, or if it was a mixture of two or more of those factors. Whatever the cause, the fact is that they were both victims of circumstance.

However, it is almost a certainty that the third factor played an important role. The extreme violence of their times and the deplorable misery of the epoch played a major part, for such atrocious conditions tend to push people into efforts of mental escapism. Just as a child who is regularly beaten and sexually abused tends to seek refuge in a fantastic world of myths and legends, so do adults who are confronted with terrible conditions that seem insurmountable take refuge in a world of fancies.

The poverty and the violence of the times were indeed insurmountable and it was only until the nineteenth and twentieth century that the Middle East and the rest of the world started to experience some significant improvement in living conditions. In that two-hundred year period, life expectancy in the Middle East went from twenty in 1800 to sixty eight in the year 2000.

To understand the dangers that schizophrenia can cause when people who suffer from it attain positions of influence in a nation or in the world, it is worth pointing at what the latest research has revealed about the worst war of all times.

The Second World War was the sole responsibility of Adolph Hitler and new studies show that the Austrian suffered from schizophrenia. In Hitler’s family there was a long history of this disease and in his case the main variable causing it was clearly genetic. However, the psychosocial factors seem to have also played a part for he was brutally beaten by his father, he became orphaned at an early age, lived in dire poverty once his parents died, and experienced the horrid savagery of trench war during the First World War.

The biochemical imbalance in the brain of Hitler caused the death of fifty million people and left traumatized several generations of Europeans, Jews and others who suffered. History teaches that humanity must not deposit its faith in people with unstable brains, and Jesus and Mohammed were that kind of people.