Easy to be Entreated

I have been working on the following post for a while. I was going to wait until I finished reviewing each of the distinct classes of spiritual experiences, but I want to go ahead and post what I have so far. When I was a true believer, I experienced many wonderful sensations that I was taught to attribute to God. When I came to no longer believe in God, I still had the desire to have those wonderful experiences because I enjoyed them so much and they enriched my life. Due to the particular path that led me to no longer believe in God, I had become fairly sure that those phenomena were produced and experienced solely by my physiology despite the strong impression that they were caused by some external source. The key to illiciting those internal experiences was to find what the necessary conditions were that led the body to produce those mental states. Or, to be more specific, how do we activate the neurons responsible for producing the phenomena? As far as we can tell, all ment...

Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot"

Perhaps it might be helpful to review a few terms. The following comes from the wikipedia entry on theism . It is possible to categorize views about deities in a variety of ways. One common procedure is to classify views about the existence of deities. This classification system categorizes view about deities as: theism — roughly, the belief that gods or deities exist atheism — roughly, an absence of belief in any gods or deities, or a belief that gods or deities do not exist at all. deism — the belief that a god or gods exists, but does not interact with events at the scale of human beings agnosticism — roughly, the belief that it is not possible to know whether gods or deities exist, or the belief that one does not know. Some classifications group atheism and agnosticism together under the classification of nontheism — absence of clearly identified belief in any deity. The main subcategories of theism are: polytheism — roughly, the belief that multiple gods or deities exist ...