Just finished reading
"Under the Banner of Heaven" it is an amazing book, about fundamentalist faiths in general and the Mormon faith in particular. It is a fascinating exploration of the mindset of religiously inclined people and what drives them, I loved this passage in particular.
In the view of psychiatrists and psycholinguistics, any individual who proclaims to be a prophet, or a guru- who claims to communicate with God- is, almost by default, mentally or emotionally unbalanced to some degree*
*of course, many have argued that psychiatry is itself is simply a variety of secular faith - religion for the nonreligious.
