Vampire Temple of Atazoth

 

 

The God Notion a Brain Matter Only

 

by Philippe L. De Coster

 

In the opinions of most people these days god is almost certainly an invention of the human mind rather then a true being in any traditional sense. Over the course of human history there have been thousands of different religions and different figures worshiped as gods. Since then a lot of these have fallen into abandonment in terms of being worshiped and people considering them to be the truth. With the world now consisting of only a few of the many religions that there once was it seems likely that this pattern will eventually come around again and that all religions will eventually falter and fade away.

 

Belief in God has long been held to be a superstition by the scientific community as the existence of such a higher power cannot be demonstrated through objective observation. While science is unable to prove whether or not God is real, the field of neurotheology has instead posed a new question that we can find answers to: is there activity in the brain specific to religious experience? Can science in fact shed light on Thoreau's question?

 

Rather, religion makes use of existing brain structures and their functions, and it appears that religious beliefs match up exceedingly well with those functions.

 

However, it is difficult to determine which of the functions related to religion ultimately provided the adaptive advantage that led religion to thrive throughout human history. Simply finding a relationship does not necessarily imply causality, and whether these findings ultimately imply that religion is nothing more than a brain-based phenomenon is another matter. The findings we are discussing link religion and the brain, but the brain may be receptive to religious experiences rather than creating them. Whether the brain generates religious belief or serves as a conduit for it remains a complicated question.

 

Ideas of spirituality were generated prior to neurobiology and gained immediate legitimacy as there was no knowledge of brains or the necessity of a brain to generate purposeful behavior. The current debate suffers from defining religion in terms of what western culture sees as a religious experience, or religious belief. The anthropology of religion needs to be recognized in order to separate magic, speculative explanations, and social meaning before deciding what neurological basis is active. At a time when religious beliefs stimulate some to blow themselves up, it is difficult to accept that religious beliefs are by nature adaptive.

 

It is also reasonable to speculate that, in an evolutionary time scale, gradual evolution of a range of brain functions enabled the emergence and adoption of myriad religious beliefs. Even modern biblical scholars and many religious practitioners would admit that there is little objective evidence that God has completely scripted the requirements of religious belief. The hypothesis to challenge here should be that religious belief emerged out of the cognitive and social capabilities of humans and that those abilities depended upon the structure and function of the human brain.

 

Counterfeit States of "Religious Consciousness"

 

There have always been persons who pretended to be participants in the mystic tradition who were decidedly not. The same is true in regard to Higher States of consciousness: there are people who experience counterfeit states and try to fool themselves and others that these are genuine.

 

Occurring within all religions, the phenomenon called "conversion" is actually nothing more than mind-control, programming, or brainwashing-- frightening a repentant, submissive person or group into a state of terror and subsequent release. Counterfeit "conversion" experiences were, for example, widely experienced in nineteenth century America, especially in what were called "revivals." Even today, "revivals" of one form or another are used by all so-called Christian faiths in manipulating obedient followers.

 

"Conversion" is an artificial, deleterious state induced in a submissive person by a self-serving religious leader. As the basis of his 1914 book entitled The Psychology of Religion, Dr. Edwin D. Starbuck examined a significant number of persons who had undergone the "conversion" experience.

 

He found that  "conversion does not occur with the same frequency at all periods in life. It belongs almost exclusively to the years between 10 and 25. The number of instances outside that range appear few and scattered. That is, conversion is a distinctively adolescent phenomenon."

 

Starbuck also discovered that imagination and social pressure were the two dominant factors in "conversion," and he was able to determine what "a small part rational considerations play in conversion as compared with instinctive." Surrender to the religious authority figure (minister or priest) is necessary for "conversion" to occur and results in the subject's ego being "lifted up into new significance."

 

The essence of "conversion" is the induction of a state of mere feeling which, when it has passed, leaves no spiritual improvement and often results in the subject feeling like a victim. Frequently the experience is so humiliating after the fact that the subject rejects not only the "conversion," but anything having to do with religion.

 

 

Starbuck discovered that the forces working in revivals are identical to suggestion and hypnosis--what we today would call brainwashing. The negative aspects of "conversion" are primarily caused by the self-serving religious leaders.

 

"An unwise and unfortunate use of revivals is that they take certain social standards and attempt to force them indiscriminately on all persons alike. The notion is formed, and, doubtless, rightly, that the only means of escape for one whose evil habits are deeply ingrained is through repentance, a definite regeneration and conversion. There seems to be practical ignorance of the other type of conversion, i.e., sudden awakening following the sense of imperfection, and still greater disregard of the fact that it is not natural for certain temperaments to develop spasmodically, or even to exhibit marked stadia in their growth. Consequently, the normal means of regeneration for the wayward and for hardened sinners becomes a dogma, and is held up as the only means of escape for children, for natures spiritually immature, for the virtuous, and for those temperamentally unfit. A certain competition for supremacy among churches, and for success among individual workers, exaggerates the evil. Each new convert is sometimes vulgarly called by revivalists another star in the crowns which they will wear in the future life. If there were only power of discrimination, they would see that their success in dragging many so-called converts into the whirl of excitement, hypnotising them, and leaving them empty afterward, is more fitly likened to the triumph of a man of prowess who wears scalps of victims as trophies."

 

The psychological manipulation of Christian believers has a long history. Leaving aside the peculiar mind manipulation practiced by Roman Catholicism, we can see that the basic tenets of Protestantism, from the time of Luther, were particularly well-suited to inducing terror in a submissive penitent.

 

 "God," says Luther "is the God of the humble, the miserable, the oppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even to nothing; and his nature is to give sight to the blind, to comfort the broken-hearted, to justify sinners, to save the very desperate and damned. Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion of man's own righteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean, miserable, and damnable, but righteous and holy, suffereth not God to come to his own natural and proper work. Therefore God must take this maul to hand (the law, I mean) to beat in pieces and bring to nothing this beast with her vain confidence, that she may so learn at length by her own misery that she is utterly forlorn and damned. But here lieth the difficulty, that when a man is terrified and cast down, he is so little able to raise himself up again and say, 'Now I am bruised and afflicted enough; now is the time of grace; now is the time to hear Christ.' The foolishness of man's heart is so great that then he rather seeketh to himself more laws to justify his conscience. 'If I live,' saith he, 'I will amend my life: I will do this, I will do that.' But here, except thou do the quite contrary, except thou send Moses away with his law, and in these terrors and this anguish lay hold upon Christ who died for thy sins, look for no salvation. Thy cowl, thy shaven crown, thy chastity, thy obedience, thy poverty, thy works, thy merits? what shall all these do? what shall the law of Moses avail? If I, wretched and damnable sinner, through works of merits could have loved the Son of God, and so come to him, what needed he to deliver himself for me? If I, being a wretch and damned sinner, could be redeemed by any other price, what needed the Son of God to be given? But because there was no other price, therefore he delivered neither sheep, ox, gold, nor silver, but even God himself, entirely and wholly 'for me,' even 'for me,' I say a miserable, wretched sinner. Now therefore, I take comfort and apply this to myself. And this manner of applying is the very true force and power of faith. For he died not to justify the righteous, but the un-righteous, and to make them the children of God.'"

 

Commentary on Galatians

 

In the nineteenth century this Protestant dogma so suitable to psychological manipulation was refashioned by revivalists such as Jonathan Edwards. His tormented parishioners left their nail marks as they gripped the church pews in paroxysms of terror while listing to Edwards rail about "Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God."

 

In the genuine mystical tradition, regeneration is the genuine state of higher consciousness achieved by the sincere seeker, of which "conversion" is the counterfeit.

 

 

"Hermetism. . . was in its primary intention and office the philosophic and exact science of the regeneration of the human soul from its present sense-immersed state into the perfection and nobility of that divine condition in which it was originally created."

 

 

M. A. Atwood, Hermetic Philosophy and Alchemy, 1850
Starbuck, Coe, and other researchers into the phenomenon of "conversion" discovered that it was essentially an experience of compliant adolescents, men and women who had not yet developed the ability to think and act for themselves. In the mystical tradition, candidates for "regeneration" must be mature philosophers--lovers of wisdom--in the sense that Pythagoras and Plato would have understood the term.

 

"Candidates for the regenerate life, moreover, were such as were prepared, as how few of to-day are?, to renounce and transvalue all the world's values, to step entirely out of the world-stream by the current of which the majority are content to be borne along, to negate the affirmations of the senses and natural reason which for the multitude provide the criterion of the desirable and the true, and generally to adopt towards phenomenal existence an attitude incomprehensible to the average man to whom that existence is of paramount moment. They were animated by no motives of merely personal salvation or of spiritual superiority over their fellows; on the contrary they will be found to have been the humblest, as they were the wisest, of men. They had advanced far beyond that complacent stage where religion consists in fidelity to certain credal propositions and in 'being good' or as good as one can, and where sufficiency and robustness of faith are represented by the facile optimism of 'God's in His heaven; all's right with the world.' Their philosophic basis was rather that 'the world is out of joint' and all men with it, and in a condition sorely needing saviours and co-operators with God to reduce and adjust the dislocation."

 

M. A. Atwood, Hermetic Philosophy and Alchemy, 1850

 

We must understand that "regeneration" is an actual fact within the mystical tradition, no mere allegory or metaphor. As we have been "generated" in the physical world, so we can--through the proper preparation and knowledge--experience "regeneration" into a Higher Consciousness.

 

 

Even though we have become entranced by the physical world, there still abides in us, though in a state of atrophy, a residual germ of the divine principle which can be stimulated into activity to raise the personal consciousness to the point of unity and identity with the Universal Mind.

 

Michael Persinger  thus argues that religious experience and belief in God are merely the results of electrical anomalies in the human brain.

 

Michael A. Persinger (born June 26, 1945) is a cognitive neuroscience researcher and university professor with over 200 peer-reviewed publications. He has worked at Laurentian University, located in Sudbury, Ontario, since 1971. In detail, Michael A. Persinger was born in Jacksonville, Florida and grew up primarily in Virginia, Maryland and Wisconsin. He attended Carroll College from 1963 to 1964, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1967. He then obtained an M.A. in physiological psychology from the University of Tennessee and a Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba in 1971.

 

Persinger  opines that the religious bents of even the most exalted figures—for instance, Saint Paul, Moses, Muhammad and Buddha—stem from such neural quirks. The popular notion that such experiences are good, argues Persinger in his book Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs (Praeger Publishers, 1987), is an outgrowth of psychological conditioning in which religious rituals are paired with enjoyable experiences. Praying before a meal, for example, links prayer with the pleasures of eating. God, he claims, is nothing more mystical than that.

(Extract of my new book on preparation to be published shortly)

 

© February 2012 - Hagur

 Read also previous page in Dutch, as part of brain activity and consciousness:

http://static.skynetblogs.be/media/163941/3460198106.12.pdf