THE GOD EXPERIMENTS

I just read a fascinating article in Discover magazine, about scientists testing various theories as to the religious experience. Is it genetic, chemical, psychological? Many if not all of these fit into my own theory of the origin of religion which briefly goes something like this:

When we as a species became self-aware it was wonderful, we then became aware of our own death, this was terrifying. In order to cope we reassured ourselves and each other of an afterlife. We buried our loved ones. Then ritual burials followed. This required facilitators 'knowledgeable in such matters'. These people gained respect and power. Power corrupts. Mystics became leaders/kings/priests. As populations increased and tribes began warring, people needed a common bond to differentiate them from the others and to maintain populations. Playing on our natural ability to wonder in awe and be paralyzed by fear, they created elaborate lies & myths to maintain power and enrich themselves. They perpetuated theese myths from one generation to the next.

Think about it, you are whatever religion you are because (more likely than not) your parents raised you that way. You had no choice. You were not educated in several religions and then at an appropriate age given the choice of which you subscribe. You have been the victim of indoctrination and brain washing. The only way we can rid the world of the injustice, ignorance and hypocrisy that religion is, is when we have the courage to break the chain and not force religion on our children. Logic will not work as our pyche is very complex...

Below is a condensed overview of the article. Most tie into the awe & fear aspect that makes us human. If only we hadn't manipulated these sensations into tyrannical religions for power and wealth.

DISCOVER, December 2006 By John Horgan
Religion is arguably the most complex manifestation of the most complex phenomenon known to science, the human mind. Religion's dimensions range from the intensely personal to the cultural and political. Additionally, researchers come to study religious experiences with very different motives and assumptions. Some of them hope that their studies will inform and enrich faith. Others see religion as an embarrassing relic of our past, and they want to explain it away.

Many researchers view the brain as the key to understanding religion. Others focus on psychological, genetic, and biochemical origins. The science of religion has historical precedents, with Sigmund Freud and William James addressing the topic early in the last century. Now modern researchers are applying brain scans, genetic probes, and other potent instruments as they attempt to locate the physiological causes of religious experience, characterize its effects, perhaps replicate it, and perhaps even begin to explain its abiding influence.

The theories described below illustrate the diversity of scientific approaches to understanding religion. The field suffers from vague terminology, disagreement about what exactly "religion" is, and which of its aspects are most important.

INVENTING GOD
Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham University in New York. Noting the plethora of gods that populate the world's religions, argues that the belief in supernatural beings is a result of an illusion that arises from our tendency to project human qualities onto the world. Religion "may be best understood as systematic anthropomorphism," he writes in his book, Faces in the Clouds. Anthropomorphism is an adaptive trait that enhanced our ancestors' chances of survival. If a Neanderthal mistook a tree creaking outside his cave for a human assailant, he suffered no adverse consequences beyond a moment's panic. If the Neanderthal made the opposite error—mistaking an assailant for a tree—the consequences might have been dire. In other words, better safe than sorry. Over millennia, as natural selection bolstered our unconscious anthropomorphic tendencies, they reached beyond specific objects and events to encompass all of nature, until we persuaded ourselves that "the entire world of our experience is merely a show staged by some master dramatist."

ORGASMIC GOD
Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has focused on the tendency of people from different religious traditions to report similar mystical experiences, which typically involve sensations of self-transcendence and "oneness." These commonalities indicate that the visions stem from the same neural processes, Newberg hypothesizes. To test his theory, he scanned the brains of more than 20 adherents of spiritual practices using a variant of the PET scan. He found similarities between rapture and orgasm though it isn't total. The hypothalamus, which regulates both arousal and quiescence, seems to play a larger role in orgasms, while the brain's frontal lobes, the seat of higher cognitive functions, are apparently more active during spiritual practices. He concludes, an "evolutionary perspective suggests that the neurobiology of mystical experience arose, at least in part, from the mechanism of the sexual response."

CEREBRAL GOD
A neuroscientist in Ontario, Persinger attempts to explain religious experiences with a pathological slant. Our sense of self, is ordinarily mediated by the brain's left temporal lobe. When the brain is mildly disrupted—by a head injury, psychological trauma, stroke, drugs, or epileptic seizure—our left-brain self may interpret activity within the right hemisphere as another self, or what he calls a "sensed presence." Depending on our circumstances and background, we may perceive a sensed presence as a ghost, angel, demon, extraterrestrial, or God. Religion (or at least the experience of God), might be a cerebral mistake. Some patients, when their temporal lobes were stimulated, reported hearing voices and seeing apparitions—not overtly religious experiences, certainly mysterious ones. Persinger has tested 600 subjects, and as many as 80 percent "sense a presence" while being stimulated, compared with 15 percent of a control group.

PSYCEHDELIC GOD
Dean Hamer, head of gene structure, National Cancer Institute, is endeavoring to link religion to a specific gene. In the 1980s, a study of 84 pairs of twins—53 identical and 31 fraternal—who had been raised separately. The study was the first to suggest a genetic component to what the researchers called "intrinsic religiousness," which includes the tendency to pray often and to feel the presence of God. Hamer sought to build on these findings by linking religiousness to a specific stretch of DNA. Hamer focused on genes called monoamines. The monoamines, which include serotonin and dopamine, help to regulate mood. psychiatric drugs, Prozac and Thorazine affect monoamines, as do psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline, which can produce mystical visions. Eventually Hamer found a gene called VMAT, that corresponded to higher scores for what he had defined as spirituality. The gene manufactures a protein that binds monoamines into packages, called vesicles, for transportation between neurons. Hamer calls the VMAT variant "the spiritual allele," or more dramatically, "the God gene" (also the title of his book).

CHEMICAL GOD
Rick Strassman traces spirituality to a single compound, dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. He proposes that DMT secreted by our own brains plays a profound role in human consciousness. Specifically, that endogenous DMT triggers mystical visions, psychotic hallucinations, alien-abduction experiences, near-death experiences, and other exotic cognitive phenomena.First synthesized in 1931, DMT is the primary active ingredient of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea ingested as a sacrament by Amazonian Indians. (Although DMT is a controlled substance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that members of a church in New Mexico can ingest ayahuasca for religious purposes.) Like LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin, DMT resembles serotonin. But what makes DMT unique among psychedelics is that trace amounts of it naturally occur in the human body. He speculates that endogenous DMT—perhaps produced in excess or improperly regulated by the body—contributes to schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. From 1990 to 1995, Strassman supervised more than 400 DMT sessions at the University of New Mexico. Many of his subjects reported quasi-religious sensations of bliss, ineffability, timelessness, and reconciliation of opposites; a certainty that consciousness continues after death of the body; and contact with "a supremely powerful, wise, and loving presence." Others underwent classic near-death experiences, feeling themselves leaving their bodies and moving through a tunnel toward a radiant light. Forty-seven percent encountered otherworldly beings, variously described as clowns, elves, robots, insects, E.T.-style humanoids, or "entities" that defied description. These bizarre beings were not always friendly. One of Strassman's subjects claimed to have been eaten alive by insectoid creatures.

WHY THE INTEREST
Science cannot tell us if God exists only in our imaginations or as an entity beyond our comprehension. So why do some scientists continue the search for the roots of religious experience? Because such studies offer the potential to alter our lives. These findings could lead to methods—call them "mystical technologies"—that reliably induce the state of spiritual insight that Christians call grace and Buddhists, enlightenment. Treatments for depression and other mental illnesses.

WHICH IS WORSE RELIGIOUS OR GOVERNMENT MIND-CONTROL?
Suppose scientists found a way to give us permanent, blissful, mystical self-transcendence. Would we want that power? Before Timothy Leary touted LSD as a route to profound psychological and spiritual insight, the CIA was studying its potential as a brainwashing agent. Persinger warns that in the wrong hands, a truly precise, powerful God machine, capable of implanting beliefs or signals that seem to come straight from the Almighty, could be the ultimate mind-control device. "Just think of the practical impact," he says. "People will die for this."