Greg Crawford wrote:
...what I am suggesting is that other substances can produce euphoric states that some would interpret as a religious experience, but which are purely chemical. Not all those chemicals originate outside the body. The release of some into the brain can be induced by particular activities.
So the question I am raising is, “how do we distinguish such chemically-induced states from genuine experiences of divinity?”
And I'd like to turn it around and ask "how can we say that genuine experiences of divinity (even with content) aren't chemically induced anyway?" We can't. Paul's revelations could have been the result of hallucinogenic drugs, for all we know. And, according to what you said to Leo, content can be purely subjectively assessed ("If you
experience a “daily self-revelation”, surely that is content?")
In other words, my answer to your original question here: > If such psycho-biological experiences are in fact a masking themselves > as encounters with the divine, how could one identify them? Is the > absence of content a clear indicator, or might that just be a symptom > of a person’s inability to articulate what they have encountered?
...is that IMO judging a true religious experience from a biological euphoria is so fraught with the potential for MISjudgement that doing so poses too great a risk of denying people's valid experiences of god.
Clare *************************************************** Clare Pascoe Henderson http://www.clergyabuseaustralia.org Clergy Sexual Abuse in Australia Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***************************************************
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