Here we make a list of crazy muthafucka’s who claimed that god spoke to them.
1. Harriet Beecher Stowe
She is famous for being the author of the novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is the second best-selling book of the 19th century, after Bible. Harriet would say that she did not write the book but just took dictation from god.
2. Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith founded the religion of Mormonism in 1820 when he was 14. Mormon Church revealed itself to him while he was praying to God, asking which church to join and both God and Jesus appeared to him and told him there is no correct religion, so he should start another one. He allegedly had another visitation in which angel Moroni told him of a sacred history written by ancient Hebrews in America, which was engraved in an Egyptian dialect on tablets of gold and buried in a nearby hill.
According to him, he obtained the engraved gold plates and translated it to English with divine assistance. This translated book is called ‘The Book of Mormon’ was first published in March 1830 by Joseph Smith, to which the followers still adhere to. The book is one of the best selling of all time. Non believers say that the gold plates tale is a hoax.
3. Chico Xavier
He was a Brazilian medium who was voted ‘The Greatest Brazilian of all time’ in 2012. Chico was a practitioner of psychography or automatic writing, and claimed to write with our consciously writing with the aid of his psychic ability. His biographers claim that his psychic ability first appeared when he was four. Over a period of 60 years he wrote 496 books using this method, which has sold an estimated 50 million copies. His critics claim that he was a fraud.
4. Hong Xiuquan
He was a Chinese religious leader who was a self-proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ who claimed to have been directed by Jesus to rid the world of demon worship. To achieve this, Hong sought the conversion of the Han people to his own version of Christianity which he began propagating in southern China, an area which he named Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
This resulted in a civil war between the Qing dynasty and Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The civil war resulted in one of the bloodiest religious conflicts of all time and resulted in the death of twenty million people. The Qing dynasty won the conflict decisively.
5. William Blake
He was a English poet from the the Romantic era during the end of 18th century. Blake claimed that he experienced visions in the Westminster Abbey where he served as an apprentice to a engraver, for seven years from when he was 15 to 22. He claims that he saw Christ with his Apostles and a great procession of monks and priests, and heard their chant. These experiences became the basis of his artistic style and ideas.
6. Francois Ravaillac
He was a French Catholic fanatic who assassinated King Henry IV of France. Francois claimed that he experienced a vision which instructed him to convince Henry to convert the Huguenots, who were a religious group of French Protestants, to Catholicism. He tried to meet the King three times to share his vision, but was unable to meet him.
When Henry decide to invade Spanish Netherlands, Francois interpreted it as king’s decision to start a war against pope. So he decided to kill the king to stop the invasion. Francois stabbed the king with a dagger in his carriage, when it was stopped while it was travelling in Paris because of a blockage in the street. He was executed with his arms and legs pulled apart by four carriages, a punishment reserved for someone who killed the king.
7. David Icke
He is a English conspiracy theory nut who claimed in 1991 that he was the channel for the spirit of Christ, hence he should be addressed as “Son of the Godhead”. David announced that he recieved a message from the spirit world which predicated that world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes.
David repeated this message on the BBC show Wogan, for which he had to face severe public ridicule. After his appearance on the BBC show was aired, a crowd of young people gathered outside his house chanting, “We want the Messiah” and “Give us a sign, David”.
8. Jim Jones
Jim Jones was the founder of People’s Temple, a American new religious movement which combined elements of Christianity and Marxist ideology. He relocated his temple to a commune in Jonestown, Guyana, where a paranoid Jones ordered his group to commit mass suicide as a revolutionary act in 1978. More than 900 people died in this mass suicide.
Previously in 1961 in one of his paranoid episodes, he had warned his congregation that he recieved visions of nuclear attack that would devastate Indianapolis, where he then resided. They should have learnt from that episode itself.
9. Idi Amin
He was the dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979 who was responsible for the deaths of 100,000 to 500,000 people under his regime. He expelled 80,00 Indian-Ugandans in 1972, which he said was message from God who visited in his dream to issue this divine instruction.
10. Charles Guiteau
Charles Guiteau was the man who assassinated the 20th president of United States, James A. Garfield, because according to him, god told him to do so. He was charged with murder which he pled not guilty on claims of temporary insanity. The court rejected his claims and he was hanged to death in 1882, two days before the first anniversary of him shooting the president.
11. Sun Myung Moon
He was a Korean religious leader who claimed he was god. Moon founded the Unification Church in 1954. He claimed that he experienced a religious vision of Jesus which laid the foundation of his life’s mission to spread the message of a “new Israel” throughout the world. His claims of being God has been rejected by Jewish and Christian scholars.
12. Jimmy Swaggart
He is a televangelist who was part of one of the greatest moments in pop culture, when he gave a tearful apology on TV after he was exposed of having trysts with prostitutes. Jimmy regularly claims in his sermon that god spoke to him who tells him that he was put in this planet to spread the word of God to the entire world.
