jesus and schizophrenia

the new house I moved into suits me very well.  I love the location, the people here and the feeling that I can come home easily when I want to.  I live with an old (but lively) german/french woman named Erika Barry, who makes delicious food and always responds with "Ah! Jaaake...ça va?" on the telephone when I call.  She has three chickens who wander into the house from time to time to drink some of the cat's milk.  The cat's name is Tiger; he lives outside and sometimes I see him hunting things in the wood by the side of the house.  The backyard is enormous, with large old trees and places to sit and ponder life or read a book ( I haven't had time to do either yet.)  There are two Finnish girls who live in the room next to me, and another American from the California program with us.  It's really nice to have other people my age in the house; I'm looking forward to getting to know all of them.  The Finnish girls know who Teemu Selanne is, but they're not hockey fans.  Also, Suomi means Finland in Finnish; I felt like an idiot after asking why the Finnish national hockey team had Suomi on their logo.

Today in my neurological modeling class we talked about schizophrenia.  The professor talked about general info for awhile and then discussed treatments for the illness, and then began to comment on the fact that due to schizophrenia, a lot of people who consider themselves to be hearing God are now classified as schizophrenics.  He continued to discuss the fact that, if Buddha or Mohammed or Jesus were around today, they would have probably been diagnosed schizophrenics, delirious with the prophetic thoughts of God.  The manner with which he approached the topic was unlike anything I had heard at Berkeley, and naturally surprised me.  I've found that in Europe, if someone's not religious, their attitude towards religion is very negative and readily-expressed.  Even if Jesus and other religious figures were schizophrenics, which we'll never know, they had enough convincing material for us to continue talking about them today.  By convincing, I mean that their thoughts on society and ethics held enough substance for the ideas to be passed on to others.  It's getting old to read about the different church press releases on sexual abuse cases; it's a easy sale for the media right now.

The other thing about my classes is that, even though we are only 20 to a class, no one stops the lecture to ask questions about something.  I don't know if it's just not done, or if people don't care enough, but I feel discouraged from raising my hand by the lack of questions (and even more so because I don't want to sound like an idiot when I ask a question).  I was totally lost in my artificial intelligence course, but I didn't want to raise my hand because no one else was, yet I could tell that other people were lost.  I have to figure that one out.

I walked home from school today and found an "Albert Camus Preschool."  The thought of Ms. Kim's interpretation of Camus' dark existentialism plus little preschoolers made me laugh, and the fact that the French felt the need to dedicate a preschool to Camus seemed silly.