Religious experiences

All religious experiences are functions, incidents or products of the mind. There is ample evidence in psychiatric research that so-called “religious” experiences are in fact pathological mental states, akin to hypnositic trances or psychotic episodes. Given the power of hypnosis to achieve, for example, anaesthesia and other effects on the body, even the untrained intelligent person with sufficient empirical detachment and lack of bias, should be able to see how all experiences imagined by religious believers to be religious (or “divine”) are delusional.

This hypothesis I give a high rating (0.999); I am aware of no data with any credible claim to negate this, though many religious people imagine the opposite. This includes feelings of communication with a deity, a non-deity (such as a prophet or saint, or an ancestor) with which communication, or to which prayers, are customary or desired by followers of this or that religion. It also includes what are technically called ecstatic experiences, up to and including such extreme phenomena as stigmata. Mental states, some bordering on or well into the range of psychosis, in which the biometric phenomena match those for religious ecstasy, have been recorded historically. There is very good reason to take as the best fit to the evidence the hypothesis that there are no known religious experiences that are not fully explained by reference to mental states, hypnosis or auto-hypnosis, and other purely mundane (if admittedly not perfectly understood) phenomena.