the God part of the brain

[Disillusioned]

If you Google Michael Persinger and his "God helmet" and temporal lobe epilepsy, you'll find some research data and a lot of witty comments by smartass bloggers, but I think maybe these researchers are thinking in terms of B&W instead of shades of grey. I mean, it wasn't until recently that people who study autism realized that not everyone who has it is locked away in their own world. The same sliding-scale reasoning might apply to temporal lobe activity research.

 

I think that while Persinger might be having a lot of fun trying to induce divine experiences in people by getting them to try on his helmet, maybe he and other researchers ought to be concentrating on something in the brain which causes us to believe in magic on a scale from zero to whatever.

 

Close to the zero end of the scale is where I am: too much scientific thinking going on. While I don't deny the existence of God or of supernatural phenomena, I have a hard time believing they're real unless there's a nuts-and-bolts explanation, like there is with electricity. I find the idea that beings of spirit can break the laws of physics to be quite fascinating... enough to write stories about it. Ironically, I believe in ghosts, though I've never seen or heard one---even when I've been with someone else when they did. I think psychic abilities exist, but damned if I know how to make them work.

 

Moving up the scale, we have my buddy, who doesn't necessarily accept established ideas of God or of magic, but he's sure that beings of spirit exist and there are ways to make magic do actual work. This may explain why I studied witchcraft for 30 years and still don't totally believe in it, but my buddy took to it like a fish to water despite being much less well-versed in it than I. Even before converting to witchcraft, he gathered his own empirical evidence that voodoo dolls really work and are nothing to play around with.

 

Toward the higher end of the scale are my aunt and her mother, who are absolutely convinced there is a God, and are terrified of magic because they're pretty sure it works. My aunt is perplexed as to why I continue to write occult fiction while dodging divine punishment. Needless to say, she'd be paralyzed with fear by something like a voodoo doll. It's not all just about God and ghosts either... some of these people also believe certain chemical nostrums have miraculous healing powers (this is why they buy so many quack meds and keep quacks in business), yet as someone who studied chemistry since I was 12, I know there are very few chemists who are trying to synthesize the Philosopher's Stone.

 

At the extreme high end of the scale are Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Joan of Arc, and Muhammad, who were not only convinced God and beings of spirit exist, but that these beings also cross over into their conscious sensory perception. In fact, such people have no control over when these manifestations hijack their senses, and their temporal lobes may have petit mal or grand mal epileptic levels of activity. Dostoyevsky was the first to describe what his temporal lobe seizures were like... he characterized them as intensely spiritual experiences which non-epileptics can't understand. This is why temporal lobe epilepsy has been called "the Sacred Disease".

 

So there you have it. Not exactly laboratory research, but something definitely worth a scientist's time to check out.

[TaraMaiden]

Where on the scale does the

 

"Speculation is pointless, because believers can't prove it, and non-believers can't disprove it, so there's just no point getting your knickers in a twist over it, the whole point about heaven is not whether it exists or not, but to live life as IF it did"...

 

opinionist's PoV come?

[Disillusioned]

Where on the scale does the

 

"Speculation is pointless, because believers can't prove it, and non-believers can't disprove it, so there's just no point getting your knickers in a twist over it, the whole point about heaven is not whether it exists or not, but to live life as IF it did"...

 

opinionist's PoV come?

 

Experience and observation. Where else would it come from?

[TaraMaiden]

so it's a fifth criterion?

[Shakz]

Somewhere along the line, either in the process of tool making or the development of language, etc., humans evolved an imagination. "How" and what got superceded by "why," which is now our brain's default setting. When the answer isn't readily apparent we file the unexplained under "supernatural" until a reasonable explanation can be found. Some people are more knowlegeable or reasonable than others, hence the sliding scale in belief in the supernatural.

[Disillusioned]

Also, I wonder if it's possible for people in a given region to have a genetic predisposition for high temporal lobe activity, so they actually become the majority? I suspect this might have happened in the ancient Middle East, because prophets and visions were a dime a dozen back then, even moreso than they are in that part of the world today! And LSD wasn't invented until 1938, so that couldn't have been the culprit.

[edgeofdarkness]

there are as many today as back then but we dont take them as seriously becos we are better informed, we can verify things so much better, one if a church priest said something about the bible wed all go, it must b true becos he said so, he must be right, now people are a lot more sceptical and question everything, so the prophets dont get so much credibility, u seen any of the religious channels lately? loads of prophets on there problem is their ridiculous whereas once upon a time theyd b taken seriously.

[Shakz]

I think it needs to be said that no one has been able to duplicate Persinger's results so the link between temporal lobe epilepsy and spiritual experience is not definitive. People believe what they want to believe, for a variety of reasons, most of which are social.