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This article below seems to suggest that some people have visions and experience oneness with God due to the characteristics of the brains….article even speculates that Paul’s Road to Damascus experience may have been the result of a seizure… http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104291534 The scientific establishment as it stands would rather choke on its own vomit than admit anything spiritual. If you even endorsed such a thing in a scientific paper, your peer reviewers would have you out the door before you could say the word “heretic”. The starting premise is that something physical or physiological can never interact with something spiritual, because the existence of the spiritual is not to be admitted.
True science would be open to all things. But we do not have such an ideal, we have science which is reliant on funding and entrenched hierarchies. It is beholden to commercial interests and the arms industry.
I mention on another thread the prospect of machines which could read minds and even delete thoughts. Strange though it would seem such brain-scanning machines are developing slowly over my lifetime and are available in some major hospitals – they aren’t quite at that stage but getting there. They have benefits for finding brain damage, but a true mind reading machine is a gift to any intelligence agency, police force or dictatorship.
There are also elements in the world which see religion merely as a mental illness – the metadiscourse of that article. What really follows from such an idea logically, is that religious people are mentally ill and mentally ill people must be treated for the good of society. Since religious people still have some numbers they can’t all be herded into hospitals or forcibly medicated, but it has been attempted on occasion in China and the USSR which are/were officially state atheist.
Religious or not, the mind is extensively interconnected with the body. Being hungry, tired, or malnourished greately affects us in how we act and how we experience the world. There are also many examples of where spiritual experiences can be manufactured; Otherwise, Robert Tilton could’ve never become the multimillionaire tycoon he is, “Praise be”. Current research shows, there is a stronger genetic correlation for “religious aptitude” than for homosexuality. This makes perfect sense, even from a 100% TBM stance, as God even states that he bestows certain spiritual gifts to some, but not to others. Genetics is most likely one of the means God bestows certain gifts to certain children.
Is it likely that some of the religious experiences some people have experienced, are a result of seizers, schizophrenia, or other psychophysiological phemonina? Of course! Is this always the case? That’s a whole other ball game. My biggest concern, is being able to discern what spiritual experiences are from God, and what are not.
I remember watching a documentary on the mind and they showed a few cases of people getting bonked on the head and suddenly becoming super duper spiritual – you know – crying at each sunrise and sunset, deeply loving all animals – even every bug. One guy went from a successful businessman to someone that didn’t care enough to keep a job and one rather scruffy beach bum that became a spiritual leader. Leaves me scratching my head (and makes me wear my bicycle helmet when riding). Speaking of this, has anybody done a thread or a book report on The Varieties of Religious Experienceby William James? My son recommended it to me, and it is part of the reason I am here.
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