[qroolen]

are you really sure you understand what religion is about by taking LSD-25? seriously, religion is so broad that claiming that you understand it and resume it on a simple feeling because you took a psychedelic, makes my stomach whirl... even after a sense deprived room psychodelic experience as well many other introspective trips in easier environments, as an atheist since children days

[sammalloy]

Not sure if it’s just me, but I can’t reply to your comment because it doesn’t seem to make any sense in English. Please revise or rewrite it if you want a reply. Apologies if English is your second language.

Edit: I would encourage you to read up on religious archetypes. They are not as broad as you seem to suggest, and are quite limited in scope and shared by most religions. Interestingly, these archetypes are all found in the psychedelic experience, indicating to some researchers that ancient religious practices in the past may have once had a psychoactive ritual sacrament. Over time, these rituals were either lost or abandoned, and replaced with symbolic sacraments. There’s an enormous amount of literature on this, so it would be difficult to briefly summarize it here, but suffice it to say, the leading religious archetypes are all found in the LSD experience. In a nutshell, the entheogenic theory suggests that modern religious beliefs and practices come from and originate from these experiences. This doesn’t mean these ideas are real or that god is real or that the Buddha was right, or that Christ was literally resurrected—it means that religion arises out of some kind of strange interaction with psychoactive substances and human brains. Obviously, this is highly controversial and disputed, but it does have some evidence in history, in practices such as the soma in the Vedic religions of India and the use of the kykeon during the Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece, as only two notable examples. In more recent years, researchers have tried to link these substances to religions like Judaism, finding solid, demonstrable evidence of cannabis use (as a psychoactive incense, high doses of cannabis are classified on a spectrum in the psychedelic category) in ancient Israeli shrines, and in Christianity, noting the strange, out of place imagery of fungi in the 12th-century Plaincourault Chapel, as just one example, besides the claims of John M. Allegro, who has been widely dismissed for brazenly claiming, from his scholarly interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that Jesus was a metaphor for the mushroom itself, and was never intended to be taken literally as a real person. I can imagine how disturbing these ideas might be to sincere religious believers who are heavily emotionally invested in their archetypes as real, literal, living and breathing ideas, but the psychedelic experience shows us otherwise—it’s all in our mind.

[qroolen]

yeah sure english is not my primary language, but what i found when asking people what religion means to them, i always find deep interpretation holes, even if they motif is something broadly common... like Christian interpretations etc.

but yeah, psychodelics always invoke a sense of unity in higher doses, and maybe that is a spectrum of feeling a 'holy' experience in a religious context. but what i perceive is; every person has an unique idea of it! even if they all say the same thing, my inner interpretation always perceive as a new thing or at least an addition to what i define as a religious interpretation of what life is or why we are here etc.

[sammalloy]

I understand what you are saying in this comment. I agree with you, unity and interconnectedness is the sine qua non of the psychedelic experience, along with a description of what is called nonduality. I’ve also found that when you talk with religious people, they describe this very thing, but know it using other words and concepts, like for example, god. The only person I’ve ever heard that addresses this shared experience within the gulf between atheists and believers is the author Brian Muraresku, but I’m not all that certain of his credibility or expertise. All I can say is that he at least got this right. In other words, when you give LSD to an atheist and a believer, it isn’t that they both come away believing in the idea or concept of god, it’s that they both experience a unitary experience of nonduality but interpret it differently. The atheist might say that they now understand the cosmic perspective that Carl Sagan always talks about. The believer might say that they have experienced what it is like to understand the mind of god. The atheist and the believer are talking about the same thing but are using different concepts and ideas to describe it, much like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. It should also be said that in the eastern tradition, atheism is historically more accepted as a legitimate path to wisdom than it is in the west, for example in the Rig Veda. I think it would be great for Christianity and Islam to moderate and liberalize enough to accept that atheism is a legitimate POV within their own traditions, but that might be asking and hoping for too much, too soon.

[qroolen]

i do not think an atheist perception of unity is about the same theme of a religious person. as far my empirical experience goes, atheists vary a lot how they felt it. (mine for example was in a dark room with P. cubensis that i could only hear my heartbeat, then i accessed, in my perception, unity; which was a white slightly blue orb of energy [something that all organic life can access or have in it perception]) religious people most of the time believe in the same thing. and considering the hypothetical (and not theoretical) state of explaining how life appeared or was formed, is at least curious that a vast majority of people interpret these questions the same way.

but as an atheist myself, you probably know my repulse towards a belief in a god, specially if it mimics or mirror itself in humans...

off topic: i am reading a book about elements on periodic table and the author mentions at some point about people observing that a mass extinction happens after 20 million years or so... and if we can prove it, it makes the existence of life way more interesting. as nowadays, i think the more we get closer to god, or a divine, unity thing, more i believe we should trust the scientific method, and go look for a sustainable way to get out of this solar system, secure, and maybe find some relatable life that maybe believe in something closer of what we have today: a god or entity that made this all possible

edit: i am drunk and it is new year eve... take it with a dose of compassion :P

[sammalloy]

That’s a fair assessment. To paraphrase Haldane, the universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine. Religion and religious people have a tendency to narrow this perception of majestic strangeness because they tend to be wary of uncertainty. Atheists on the other hand tend towards embracing uncertainty and like to revel in the strangeness. In my opinion, of course.

Happy new year!

[detourdog]

Some religions try not to use the term g-d simply because it is to literal.