There is a not insignificant amount of evidence pointing to psychedelics as playing an outsized role in the formation of religions.

A shaman brewing a mystical drink that gives you visions of supernatural forces is pretty convincing evidence of a god(s) to your any 2000 B.C. person. How else could you explain such a trip while having no concept of chemicals much less neurochemistry.

It's pretty convincing evidence to a 2000 A.D. person too!

It's an interesting theory that I've heard before, and I think it did probably play a role at least some of the time, but I think we need to be cautious about attributing too much to it. I think people who have interest in drugs often may get excited about this idea and push it a little far.

My point is you don't necessarily need chemical inducement to start or sustain the idea. Centuries of religious people believed in transcendent consciousness at times in history where they demonstrably had no access to drugs. You don't need to partake to be moved by John Lennon's all you need is love either; a lot of the people listening did not. And part of our cultural norms have these ideas baked in, with or without drugs.

Alternatively you can also meditate/pray your way to similar states as the ones psychedelics induce. It takes a ton of practice, but I was able to generate very notable open-eyed hallucinations after just 2 years of low-intensity meditative practice (roughly equivalent to 120ug of LSD).

It is totally believable that a true religious zealot would be able to achieve much, much more with decades of practice.

Ram Dass told the story about how he visited the guru Neem Karoli Baba (AKA Maharaj-ji) and gave him a bunch of LSD, which supposedly had no effect on the guru because he was already having open-eye hallucinations from his meditation.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/baba-ram-da...

Probably BS, but matches with what you say.

Hehe maybe the guru had a severe psychosis and that’s why the lsd didn’t do anything.

In your experience, how common is this? I must know at least thirty people that have meditated for over 15 years, and none have mentioned open-eyed hallucinations.

I have also had this experience. Meditating for 12 minutes a day for a year or so.

Fever will also cause hallucinations.

And in the three main monotheist religions formation stories there is a good amount of time spent/lost in the desert.

Sam Harris recently interviewed historian Brian Muraresku about just this topic. Brian studies ancient mystery religions, in which a central part of the “faith” was often an experience that was likely induced by psychedelics. It’s frustrating how little first-hand literary evidence there is, but archaeologists have managed to find actual ancient wine jars laced with all sorts of interesting crap — wine back then wasn’t the pure stuff we have today.

Maybe because psychedelics wake up the part of the human psyche that understands religion

That doesn't seem right.

I think of the brain as a "rationalization machine". It observes environmental inputs, and reflexively seeks to ascribe a cause for those inputs. In so doing, a causal model of the world is constructed (whether accurate or not), allowing the agent to make intelligent decisions about what actions to take in order to produce desired outcomes.

What hallucinogenic drugs tend to do is overwhelm the brain with sensory inputs that are sui generis and cannot be folded neatly into a pre-existing causal model of reality, but that are so numerous that they cannot simply be ignored.

So the "protective mechanism" of the brain, rather than abandoning or risking damage to this highly valuable causal model of reality, is to shunt these experiences over into an "other" category of mystical and religious significance. The fact that these experiences are inexplicable, rather than being an indication of any "malfunction" in the brain which might prompt us to doubt our perception in general, is instead proof of their cause: the incomprehensible divine.

This isn't academic, just my 2c.

> highly valuable causal model of reality,

It's important to not become too confident in this either. Our perception of that is as you say useful but also subjective and flawed, and I think if you get down to pure materialism, it's harder to pin down than you may think.

Even something basic which seemingly we all agree on at a basic level and require to function, trying to answer questions like "what is time?", you quickly can end up with mind bendy examples from physics where the intuitive understanding falls apart.

At the end of the day, you can either see a beautiful thing and share it with a bunch of people. Or you can see an ugly mechanistic thing and think that you're smarter than the people seeing the beautiful thing

I don't think whichever one you see is a choice either, more like the yanny vs laurel thing

At one point I made the same argument you make. Now I don't see it that way. And I feel much better honestly

For what it's worth, I don't think it's ugly.

I think you're right that it's a personality thing, maybe connected to how strong the "rationalization drive" is? I don't know.

I guess I'd rather tickle the rationalizing side of my brain with a rationalizination of the tendency to stop rationalizing rather than just stop rationalizing :)

At least we know rationalization is not possible without free will!

That would require that religion exists outside of human experience, to be discovered and understood and awoken to - which is a nice story, but not strictly true.

There is no religion, outside of what we imagine. We made it up. It isn’t like the water cycle, it’s not something just waited to be discovered by humans who know how to look for it. Religion is fantasy.

> There is no religion, outside of what we imagine.

You're making a metaphysical claim here, good luck proving it

Someone mentions religion and you come along and decide to attack it with the same cliche. Why?

I'm not totally convinced objective reality exists either. This kind of existential question cannot really be answered. You presumably think, as I tend to also, that what we describe in our scientific understanding exists independently of us, and it is there to be discovered, understood, and awoken to. But we can't really know that we're not "imagining" in a similar way as your derisive description of religion. Further, if objective reality exists, it's very, very vast, and we are very small, our senses and cognition limited, and we are likely unable to comprehend it.

Really in all cases, religious and secular, we make the best guesses available to us. I think we need to be humble about all of this.

Peacefully loving all is just a natural state of relaxed mammal. It's an idea you might try to verbalize if you are cut off from disturbing sensations by a chemical or perhaps when your are comfy, warm and fed, without extending any effort because you have all your needs taken care of by disciples you sweettalked into doing it.

Hippies like many modern leftists are really puritans. They don’t know themselves as such, but this Puritanism you see in such “movements” is quintessentially American.