[ExI] Religions are not the ultimate cause of war

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 5:00 AM,  Charlie Stross
<charlie.stross at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2 Oct 2012, at 23:00, Tom Nowell <nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> And in response Anders speculated on how common this cognitive malfunction is. Well, it's time for confessions of a paid-up chucklehead here. As a genuine religious believer, I'm definitely experiencing something subjectively, whether it's the agency attributing parts of my brain misfiring or my consciousness responding to the Divine. Discussing spirituality with co-workers in the past, I've discovered a lot of people who are "not religious, but very spiritual" - while one British comedian liked to dismiss this as "this means I don't like going to church but I'm still scared of dieing", I prefer to think of this as "I'm getting similar experiences and emotions, I just can't a find a label to fit". I sometimes wonder how common experience or non-experience of (for lack of a better phrase) "spiritual feelings" are.
>
> Quite common, I think. I've had mystical experiences; I just don't attribute them to anything other than my own neurochemistry giving me an endogenous trip.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation of temporal lobe is supposed to do
that.  Temporal lobe epilepsy is known to have that effect.

What is more interesting is that a few current day religions seem to
have partly originated in people whose medical history makes it likely
they had temporal lobe epilepsy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_G._White#Head_injury

Keith