Under the Banner of Heaven

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.