"chimp3: How does your claim that religious experiences being chemically induced render atheism dead?"

The way Christianity is practiced today has completely squeezed out the possibility for mystical experience. In the Perennialist position, Jesus was simply another individual who had a mystical experience, perhaps several. However, today he has been pedestalized by Christians and revered as the "one and only divine appointed son of God." That safely seals the possibility of mystical experience "upstairs" as Alan Watts once put it. Christians obviously have lost touch with the very thing that prompted the religion in the first place, and now attend church to relish in high abstraction. So, then each Christian develops their own unique interpretation of religious texts through various forms of eisegesis.

If you go back to 100 A.D., you'll find Christian mystics practicing quietism. This is a technique quite akin to Zen in Buddhism. It is a form of meditation that involves the cessation of volition. Dr. Rick Strassman has speculated in this book that these techniques are perhaps methods to induce endogenous N,N-DMT or a natural mystical experience. In fact, studies have been done on Tibetan monks that entered into this altered state through meditation exhibited similar brain states to the psilocybin-induced state via fMRI. The Christian mystics who practiced quietism that induced this "mystical experience" even referred to it as "Christ consciousness." They recognized that this potential or this experience that Christ had is a potential in us all, and I believe that is what science is just beginning to explore through the scientific investigations of the mystical experience.

You mentioned schizophrenia. Well, there’s different things to be said about this. I mean, first of all, how many psychiatric residents who are the people who come most in contact with schizophrenics (whatever that means) — how many psychiatric residents have ever seen an “unstoned schizophrenic”? Very, very few, because the very first thing that happens is for the convenience of physicians and the nursing staff is some outlandish drug is brought into the picture which then deflects this “healing process” from ever reaching any kind of natural conclusion. In fact, some professionals in the field such as Dr. Seth Farber believe that schizophrenia is simply a catch-all umbrella term for forms of mental behavior that we don’t understand. In the 19th century, there was a term “melancholia,” which we would now call bi-polar depression, so forth and so on, but all forms of sadness, unhappiness, maladaptation, so forth and so on, were poured into this label meloncholia. Now, schizophrenia is a similar thing. I have been studying these various topics such as mystical experience, schizophrenia, STPD, etc. for just a little over a decade and a half now, and I remember being in the Tolman library reading about some drug, and I stumbled across this book on a shelf and I just pulled it off, it was a book about schizophrenia, and it said if I may paraphrase, “The typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining, marginal to his society, incapable of holding a regular job, these people live on the fringes content to drift in their own self-created value system.” I said, “That’s it! That’s it! Now I understand!”

You see, we have no tradition of shamanism, we have no tradition of journeying into these mental worlds; we are terrified of madness. We fear it because the western mind is a house of cards, and the people who built that house of cards know that, and they are terrified of madness. Tim Leary once said, albeit he supposedly has denied being the author of the quote, but whoever said it, it was a brilliant statement that can be interpreted as a very enlightening pun. Someone once said, “LSD is a psychedelic substance which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it.” Right? And I would bet you that more people have exhibited psychotic behavior from not taking LSD, but just thinking about it than ever exhibited from taking it. Certainly in my family, I watched my parents both go psychotic from the mere fact that LSD existed. They would never have taken it. There is a great phobia about the mind. The western mind is very queasy when first principles are questioned. Rarer than corpses in our society are the untreated mad, because we can’t come to terms with that.

A shaman, on the other hand, is someone who swims in the same ocean as the schizophrenic, but the shaman has thousands upon thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon. In a shamanistic society, if you exhibit “schizophrenic tendencies,” then you are immediately drawn out of the pact, and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans. You are told, “You are special, your abilities are very central to the health of our society, you will cure, you will prophecize, you will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions.” Now, contrast with a person exhibiting schizophrenic activities in our society is told, “You don’t fit in. You are becoming a problem. You don’t pull your own weight. You are not of equal worth to the rest of us. You are sick. You have to go to the hospital. You have to be locked up. You are on a par with prisoners and lost dogs in our society.”

So, that treatment of schizophrenia makes it incurable. Imagine if you were slightly odd, and the solution was to lock you into a place where everyone was seriously mad? That would drive anyone mad. If you ever been in a mad house you know that it’s an environment calculated to make you crazy, and to keep you crazy. You see, the point is that this would never happen in an aboriginal or traditional/shamanistic society.

I really apologize for this long-winded response, but I feel passionately about these topics, and terms like schizophrenia and STPD are bandied around in this forum as they they hold some kind of concrete definition in neuroscience. They don’t. Truth be told, the very diagnosis of schizophrenia and its subsets are based upon its relative definition to the DSM-5 (Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) which is an out-dated book by three years. So, because they’re merely categorized based on a broad spectrum of behavioral patterns characterized by “social and interpersonal deficits marked by acute discomfort with, and reduced capacity for, close relationships as well as by cognitive or perceptual distortions and eccentricities of behavior, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts.” (That’s straight out of the DSM-5) many people today in fact attempt feign schizophrenia in hopes to be diagnosed with it in order to benefit from the pharamceuticals handed out by health insurance companies, and paid for by governmental stipends. My point is that once someone has a mystical experience, there is a sort of metanoia that occurs.

You see, Perennial philosophy isn't a theist, atheist, or even agnostic point-of-view. Atheism is concerned with rejecting theistic claims which today have been completely contorted to the point where the atheist is basically rejecting the notion of a Santa Claus-like entity. The atheist interprets a religion, and develops their own abstract notion of the divine, and proceeds to reject the very notion they conjured and proudly announces him/herself atheist. Perennial philosophy, on the other hand, is saying at the core of all the major religions you'll find individuals undergoing a very specific type of altered state which contemporary neuroscientists, psychologists, psychopharmacologists, etc. are referring to as a "mystical experience." So, then God isn't abstract notion of a the "sky daddy" that George Carlin was famous for making fun of, but rather that these words have always been metaphors to describe the inner experiential aspects of this experience. So, atheism is then dead in the form that you're no longer rejecting silly abstract claims made by clueless theists, but now are addressing something concrete in existence, and so you can do away with a position that's generated simply by rejecting religion at the surface. Recall in the title I also mentioned that theism is dead for the same reason, because we now know what prompted these religions, it isn't as mysterious as Christians believe. You see, if you were to mention mystical experiences in a Christian church, it would probably be regarded as blasphemous, because that's how out-of-touch they are with what is supposed to be a pristine, natural state which is void of any conceptualization, volition, etc. and is available to each and everyone one of us.

One more thing I'd like to add, and I apologize for the lack of brevity... The term "mystical experience" evolved as a distinctive concept since the 19th century, laying sole emphasis on the experiential aspect, be it spontaneous or induced by human behavior. Richard M. Bucke also used the term "Cosmic consciousness" to label this phenomenon in cosnciousness, and there had been other terms used by psychologists such as "peak experience" and the "oceanic feeling," but William James popularized the term "mystical experience," and it took foothold. Alan Watts also spoke very eloquently on the topic of Perennial philosophy, and I want to link to a talk he gives on it below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2gYYeqomgE