Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.

[Angrboda]

I am curious to know how would you go about diagnosing military leaders and social reformers with schizophrenia, which is debilitating. I am going to focus on the Islamic prophet because I know more about his biography than that of other religious figures, 
For people who are interested, there is a peer reviewed article of a neurologist, Frank R. Freemon, [Chief Neurologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Nashville] entitled "A Differential Diagnosis of the Inspirational Spells of Muhammad the Prophet of Islam", here is what he has to say about schizophrenia : 

That's interesting stuff. And I appreciate your efforts to "rule out" schizophrenia by referring to scholarly material. I don't know if someone else presented a different challenge to you, but my point is that because physiological phenomena can "in principle" produce mystical states of consciousness, they are a contender for an explanation of these experiences.

I'm not saying Mohammed necessarily had schizophrenia. He might have wandered into a mushroom patch or ate some moldy rye. Perhaps he fasted for a very long period or engaged in extended periods of meditation. All of these things are physical activities that can result in mystical experiences.

My (not-so-ambitious) hypothesis is that it might have been a physiological cause. There is no saying one way or another whether God intervened. There are a plethora of ways such experiences could have been had without divine intervention. These things have been documented to happen in people with little or no interest in religion when such physiological prompts are induced in laboratory conditions.

This being the case, we needn't assume divine intervention as a prime hypothesis. It is one hypothesis among many, and a weak one at that.

My money is on syphilis.