The Holy Godmachine of Neuropsychology

Slashdot presented me with a real treat tonight. Obviously, scientists are able to read MRI of religious people’s God proximity encounters, and then replicate them for a different person altogether.

“Scientific American is reporting on scientific work done to map the euphoric religious feelings within the brain. As a result, it’s now quite possible to experience ‘proximity to God’ via a special helmet: ‘In a series of studies conducted over the past several decades, Persinger and his team have trained their device on the temporal lobes of hundreds of people. In doing so, the researchers induced in most of them the experience of a sensed presence — a feeling that someone (or a spirit) is in the room when no one, in fact, is — or of a profound state of cosmic bliss that reveals a universal truth. During the three-minute bursts of stimulation, the affected subjects translated this perception of the divine into their own cultural and religious language — terming it God, Buddha, a benevolent presence or the wonder of the universe.”

Well, scientists are able to create a deep spiritual experience at a press of a button. I wonder how that makes God feel. Does the machine make him come close to the person personally, or just replicate the effect without involving any actual deities?

Now I definitely need to get one of these godhelmets of my own. If for no other reason, then to find out how spiritual junkies feel. Then I could finally have a god of my own, one who would actually come to me at times.

Or then again, maybe this, just as all other scientific endeavors to undermine the spiritual authority, is just a fake. How? The Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage, of course.

Mister Persinger doesn’t hold back, though, and keeps effing the ineffable. From the article:

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

LOL. Makes me think it would be cool to amplify effects of the godmachine, so that it has an area effect. Then, you could just proclaim yourself to be god, and all the poor confused people would believe you, because they would feel it. Awesome. My life finally has a meaning again! :-D