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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (83067)	9/9/2008 1:23:29 PM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541602

Yes, many people of faith are first introduced to their religion in their home as children. We call it 'living on borrowed testimony'. At some point, though, the individual needs to aquire his or her own testimony of the reality of God and the record of his will contained in scriptures. Call it a personal conversion. Otherwise, they have a weak foundation to slog through life with, i.e. the house built on sand idea. The emotional experience you speak of is simply (I think) the firing of the God spot within our brains- you can get it to fire in the laboratory. Religious people ponder the possibility of this being the case, too, although I've never heard it referred to as the 'God spot'. I like it...it's succinct and better than self-deluded. At any rate, it's not at all unusual for this to arise in conversation among people of faith, especially since a state of what might be called 'religious ecstasy' is somewhat similar to a 'drug induced ecstasy'. But even though there might be some physical similarities in the brain's response to the stimulus...God vs. a drug or a lab experiment...you can't logically conclude from that that God wasn't the stimulus. I think one must then look at what flows from the experience. To be simplistic, I've heard of people jumping off rooftops when a drug fired up their brain but I've never heard of such a person turning away from their wealth and committing their life to charitable works. People who have their God spot stimulated in a lab experiment probably just go home and say 'cool'. The Bible speaks of "false prophets" and tells us that "by their fruits" we will know which are false prophets and which are inspired by God. I think this applies to the God spot being triggered notion and what follows next.