Friday, July 4, 2008

Referent for stimulated God response.

God Helmets OBEs Illusions and a Cosmic Presence. - Beliefnet Forums: "The brain does not exist in a vacuum. The brain operates by electromagnetic and chemical stimulation, normally naturally occurring. A muscle twitches, the nerve impulse is transmitted to the brain, is sorted out and directed to the appropriate areas of the brain to generate a useful response.

A natural response can be generated artificially by chemical or electromagnetic stimulation of the appropriate areas of the brain. This is routing neuroscience. Stimulate the pleasure centers and you get a reflection of previous pleasure responses. But the previous pleasure responses are critical. I don't think anyone argues that the stimulated pleasure response is imaginary in the sense that it arises without a previous history of similar natural responses.

So my question for you is what is the source of the previous history of religious experiences that is stimulated by the electromagnetic signals or naturally overstimulated by Temporal Lobe Epilepsy? A related question is what is source of the electromagnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes in the few hundred million ordinary believers without TLE who have experienced the presence of God? As far as I know EM stimulation was extremely uncommon prior to the 20th century and a lot of people claimed to know God back then."

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