A fifth alternative: Lord, Liar, Lunatic, Legend, or Just Plain Wrong. It’s amazing that the simplest explanations—that someone might simply be mistaken, that they might have sanely and honestly misinterpreted the data—gets so completely ignored and erased.
Yeah, but ‘Just Plain Wrong’ is how I would describe thinking Hawaii is in the Caribbean; It’s not how I would describe having followers that think you are God in flesh.
The question is whether it’s possible to simply be mistaken about having divine powers, without having an underlying mental disorder. And clearly the answer is ‘yes;’ and clearly this possibility has a higher prior probability than ‘Jesus is Lord.’ So neglecting the option is unconscionable, and is where the trilemma gets nearly all of its plausibility as an argument for Christianity.
Suppose a few really unlikely events happened, and caused everyone around you to think you were the messiah and/or divine. Would it be inconceivable, barring true insanity or deliberate deception, to come to think oneself the messiah and/or divine? Do you think that every psychic, every cult leader, is either (independently) insane or deliberately lying? It just ain’t so; self-deception is stronger than that.
A fifth alternative: Lord, Liar, Lunatic, Legend, or Just Plain Wrong. It’s amazing that the simplest explanations—that someone might simply be mistaken, that they might have sanely and honestly misinterpreted the data—gets so completely ignored and erased.
Yeah, but ‘Just Plain Wrong’ is how I would describe thinking Hawaii is in the Caribbean; It’s not how I would describe having followers that think you are God in flesh.
The question is whether it’s possible to simply be mistaken about having divine powers, without having an underlying mental disorder. And clearly the answer is ‘yes;’ and clearly this possibility has a higher prior probability than ‘Jesus is Lord.’ So neglecting the option is unconscionable, and is where the trilemma gets nearly all of its plausibility as an argument for Christianity.
Suppose a few really unlikely events happened, and caused everyone around you to think you were the messiah and/or divine. Would it be inconceivable, barring true insanity or deliberate deception, to come to think oneself the messiah and/or divine? Do you think that every psychic, every cult leader, is either (independently) insane or deliberately lying? It just ain’t so; self-deception is stronger than that.
That reminds me of Yvain’s ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’