illicit drugs that alter brain chemistry. Why should we think anything different (anything other than altered brain chemistry) is going on when a religious person says they experience Christ, or Allah?
I think this is a terrible comparison.
Illicit drugs alter brain chemistry by a artificial chemical means - forcing the release of Dopamine and/or Serotonin. A religious experience, is not caused by an external chemical forcing the brain to release those neurotransmitters.
It may lead to an altered state of brain chemistry, but the question is WHY. We know why illicit drugs do what they do, but we have no idea why praying, or having a religious experience, can lead to a release of these neurotransmitters. We know why excersize releases them.
What is triggered in our brains, when people have a religious experience, that causes this to happen?
My friend, the point I am trying to get across is that a religious experience
is altered brain chemistry -- not that it
causes altered brain chemistry. Of course there is a difference between what causes the chemistry in either case, but that is not the relevant part of my analogy anyway.
I don't think my comments have anything at all to do with causation, really. What they have to do with is what the religious experience is; I'm saying here that when a religious person says "I'm experiencing X," where X is some appropriate religious experience such as, say, coming into contact with Christ, X really refers to the specific fashion their brain is functioning in at that time, and nothing else (especially not any external, magical entities from other dimensions!). This isn't incredibly unreasonable, given that when a person says "I'm experiencing depression," they are similarly referring to the specific fashion their brain is functioning in at that time (when they are actually clinically depressed, anyway).
The reason illicit drug users enter the picture is that -- with the appropriate circumstances and appropriate drugs -- they report having an experience that seems the same as the religious one. It is of course difficult to assess whether the experience of one person "is the same" (or feels the same) as another, but it's at least possible: we can pretty well tell what a person feels when they stub their tow because we've had the same feeling. And what these guys and gals are reporting sounds
extremely similar to the religious experiences people describe.
If the drug users are eliciting the same experience as religious people sometimes feel, then we know that the religious experience is just altered brain chemistry, because that's all the drug user's experience is.
That is the point I am making.