Prove To Me, God Exists ( Archived) (367)

Yeh bring back the fear of hell, at least you knew where you stood.

Many say they "looked within" or sincerely pleaded with God or Jesus to accept them and whadda ya know, he spoke to them or gave them some kind of sign and they felt insanely happy. Thereafter they "KNEW" that God exists and that they have been saved, etc, etc.

My theory is that the human brain has become such a hugely complex "computer" that it has taken to inventing these religious experiences to help it cope with its own mortality.

As a Unitarian Universalist, but more importantly as a human, I search to understand my place in the universe. Sometimes this is through looking at the vastness of the night sky, but usually, or at least on those days that are cloudy, the search is through religion; namely, the entity of God. People from time immemorial have had some sort of religious practice, whether it was sacrificial or if they had multiple gods, there has always been a sense of something larger than ourselves. However, if our lives can be described in one sense as the summation of all our sensory inputs and thoughts through the brain, then does that make a religion just another output of our minds?

In more recent years, scientists have started to take on this question and study it through neurobiology and the brain structure. Doctors and scientists looked at people with epilepsy, specifically temporal lobe epilepsy, for they are known to have deep religious experiences during the seizures. Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran, who headed the experiments at the University of California at San Diego found that those with temporal lobe epilepsy, in comparison to normal patients, were more responsive to religious words and images (2). "Spiritual experiences are the inevitable outcome of brain wiring," said Newberg. "We believe that the human brain has been genetically wired to encourage religious beliefs" (3). Dr. Newberg and the late Dr. Eugene d'Aquili worked on tracing the parts of the brain dealing with religion through nuns and monks during prayer. They studied the gray matter of the brain by using a single positron emission computed tomography (SPECT), which allowed them to detect the areas of the brain that received more blood during the religious experience, where more blood usually equates more activity. Their results indicated that there was "increased activity in the frontal lobes, the attention area, and decreased activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe" (3). The frontal lobe activity should not surprise most people simply because it is the area that is commonly associated with the higher mental activities and specifically with humans.



From Google.

lulz