If God didn't exist, would we have invented Him/Her?
Distinguishing between what is real and what is not is always a challenging exercise. Most of us can remember sights, sounds and feelings that we have had in the past (nostalgia can be a beautiful feeling!), and almost all of us have had dreams. Yet how can we tell the difference between the memory or the dream and the real world around us?
What if you were to dream, and in that dream you were to pick a flower, and when you awoke that flower lay across your chest?
Modern science is getting better at modelling our profound experiences. If you stimulate our serotonin system (our neurotransmitter usually associated with feeling 'good') in a particular way, you can induce a deeply powerful mystical experience in some people, to such an extent that two months later most of them still regard it as one of the most spiritually significant experiences in their lives.
Is that God working through the magic mushrooms?
Does God work through hypnosis, mass hysteria and disindividuation?
Or is that humanity playing God?
posted by Daniel @ 11:15 am
2 Comments:
I believe God is that which describes all of the beauty and that which lays beyond our own understanding and intelligence. If God didn't exist then why for so many thousands of years were churches built, religions practised and God worshipped? I do believe in God as the power of prayer has enabled events to take place. I am currently undertaking the Alpha Course which allows for an awareness and understanding of God and heard the well known UK Preacher, Andy Gumble speak. In an experience he was in London and desperately needed a lift to London and prayed to God for a lift to happen. He then heard a knock on his door and a man asked him if he needed a lift to London and perhaps you may wonder if this is devine intervention or not. Also at a recent Church Service the whole congregation got on their knees to pray to God for rain and to open the heavens. Today it is now raining so is it just chance or devine intervention? What you say about stimulation is an interesting concept but what creates the stimulation and what is the mystery behind it? Who or what was responsible for the universe around us and allowed for life to exist and our world and environment to be put together? If there is not a God then a very deep routed explanation and Scientific Evidence needs to look into the difficult concepts for which it at present is unable to answer.
If you believe that God lays beyond your understanding and intelligence, you will never find sufficient evidence or an adequate explanation. But if you could suspend that belief for a moment and actually consider the issue before you, perhaps you might note the evidence:
- 'God-like' experiences can be simulated and elicited from people through drugs, hypnosis and other experiences.
- Coincidences happen... just because a group prays for rain for a thousand days in a row, and 'suddenly' it rains doesn't mean that they 'caused' it to rain.
People who live 'guided' or 'spiritual' lives have very different experiences of reality from those who do not. To me, if we can get 'it' by hypnosis or mushrooms or whatever, we're not really talking about the kind of God that I would want to believe in... would you?
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