> From the ever excellent World Wide Words[url]http://www.worldwidewords.org[/url]:

"Neurotheology
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This new and emotionally charged scientific field is trying to find out
what effect the workings of the brain have on religious belief.

One of the stimuli for such investigations is that some people who
suffer from temporal-lobe epilepsy experience religious revelations or
hallucinations during seizures, even if they are atheists. Work in the
field roughly divides into two types: either stimulating spiritual
experience with drugs, or studying brain activity during such
experiences using imaging techniques to see which regions of the brain
change. Such events seem to exist outside time and space and the
evidence suggests they are caused by the brain losing its perception of
a boundary between the physical body and the outside world. It may be
that what causes these spiritual experiences also leads to other kinds
of intangible events, such as reports of alien visitations, near-death
episodes, and out-of-body experiences. The oldest example of the term I
can trace is the title of a book by Laurence O McKinney published in
1994.

The neurotheologians have done a useful service in showing how these
deep and life-changing experiences operate in the brain. In doing so,
they have not explained them away; but they do help to explain the
persistence and even the validity of religion in a secular society.
    [The Dominion (Wellington, New Zealand), 2 Jun. 2001]

To adherents of a controversial, fledgling science called neurotheology,
these moments of serenity are little more than common blips in brain
chemistry.
                                [UFO Magazine, Jan. 2002]"

---
To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>