Everyone has been sending me this story about how a researcher has deduced from the crazy talk in the bible that Moses was high on drugs. I don’t believe it. Sure, it’s possible, but the information is insufficient, and the hypothesis is unnecessary.
Look at Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Robert Tilton, Billy Graham, Kathryn Kuhlman, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Fae Bakker, Ted Haggard, Kent Hovind, Oral Roberts, Aimee Semple McPherson, Peter Popoff, Benny Hinn, Fulton Sheen, Charles Coughlin, and every single little podunk charismatic and fundamentalist preacher you can find in any town in the country. They all report visions and conversations with a god, and get ’em going and they’ll start babbling apocalyptic nonsense ala Revelation … and they aren’t all high on psychedelic drugs. Human beings have a phenomenal capacity for self-delusion and fantasy; we don’t need to postulate strange drugs in the absence of evidence to explain lunatic religious behavior, and it’s actually a bit of a cop-out.
The simplest explanation is that the whole story is merely a legend.
I thought anyone who believed that Moses actually existed was high on drugs.
Maybe he went too high up the mountain and was oxygen deprived? He was high!
Similarly, I really don’t understand the obsession with finding rational explanations for biblical miracles. I’ve seen them for the red sea, the star of bethlehem, etc. Aren’t they supposed to be miracles? Where is people’s faith ;-)
I’d go along with you PZ on the drugs thing. People are more than capable of spewing crazy all on their own without the need of chemical assistance, as any sane reader of the Left Behind series can attest!
I thought that was taken as read amoung the sane?
Just from reading the bible I can conclude that every guy that wrote in this thing were REALLY REALLY REALLY high.
Neil Levi’s book Why are we moral? gives an evolutionary account of how we hold beliefs, based on no evidence, to be something real and concrete. Human beings evolved a great self-deception mechanism so as to believe what needed to be done. If you just hold that it’s nice to do A, you’ll give in, but if you believe that it’s true and you must do A, then now we have action. This is the same for these guys. Even though, they’re Hucksters, their self-deception mechanism allows them to be charlatans, and not bat an eye-lid. After all. The best liar is one who believes he’s not lying….
# 2 You got it in before me: exactly! Religion may not be
a drug in the physical and legal sense,but it has the same effect on unsound and “potentially sound” minds, and it
doesn’t cost anything except insanity and perpetual and
lasting delusion. Yet we do not regulate religion as a
danger to society and tax the crap out of it to make a
few bucks. True, religion makes a lot of money, but it is
sucked out from the retarded sheep tax free.
I agree with all here: the simplest explanation is that it is all just a myth in the first place. I can see where people might actively look for evidence of the things like catastrophic floods, fiery destruction of cities or regions, etc., but the idea of looking for a retroactive cause for an individual’s actions is just ridiculous. In the case of these myths, it is also unnecessary.
What all drugs might have been available to someone living in the time of Moses anyway?
@DaveX: Possibly opium, and lots of plants. You may not have all the chemical stuff we have today, but it doesn’t mean that the ancients had no idea what to use to get high.
After all, there were a lot of religions that used plants to get high for ceremonies
Your treatment of Ted Haggard is unfair.
He rightfully deserves to be placed among those who are high on drugs, and it was plain to see even before his legal troubles broke.
“After all, there were a lot of religions that used plants to get high for ceremonies”
Hmm. I suppose that can explain part of their success.
There is absolutely no, none, nada evidence that this character Moses from the Wholly Babble existed. He wasn’t high on drugs, his inventors were.
@11 Michelle,
Right, the Egyptian priests and priestesses used beer in their religious ceremonies. Non-alcoholic beer was available to the rest of the lay-people.
I conclude that if Moses wanted out of Egypt so badly and they used beer in their religious ceremonies, he was stark-raving mad. Therefore, he had no need of drugs to have bat-shit crazy halucinations. This, of course, assumes that Moses actually existed, which I doubt.
Some religious conversion experiences sound more like epilepsy than drugs. I’ve done a variety of drugs under close controls and none of them make you stupid enough to become religious. Except maybe tequila.
Gives a nice new meaning to the old “opium for the masses” phrases.
Or not that new, actually. Inducing “spiritual” experiences with psychedelic drugs is nothing new.
Well, John, who wrote Revelations, was certainly stoned.
Given that hasish grows wild in the Middle East, I always thought that the author of the Book of Revelations was high and hallucinating.
But doesn’t all this just go to show that Marx was right? Relgion really IS the opium of the people.
Let me see if I can follow the researcher’s thinking here.
Moses saw some weird shit
I’ve seen some weird shit
I was tripping balls when I saw weird shit
Conclusion. Moses was tripping balls when he saw weird shit
Looks solid to me. But then again, I’m pretty high right now.
I think that it is fair to assume that the whole Moses story from the Bible – all of it, from being found as an infant, floating in the river Nile to the Exodus and on through the years wandering the desert – is a myth, an assemblage of tales from many sources, and a good example of a people’s foundation myth. There is practically no archaeological evidence that the Hebrews ever lived in Egypt, let alone were held there in captivity as slaves.
Many modern people assume that the named people in the Bible were real and that the events described in scripture are historical and actually took place, exactly as they are described. Of course, anyone who takes 2 seconds to think about it knows that this is absurd. For how long did these stories exist as solely oral traditions before anyone bothered to write them down?
The Bible is a collection of books, and it is LITERATURE and not a historical document (at least in the modern sense of historical scholarship.) The whole Exodus from Egypt tale is a good story and makes for an interesting read, but I fail to see how anyone can take it seriously and believe that the events described were real.
Now, having said that, if there indeed were an individual named Moses who was a leader of a tribe of people and who brought them laws that supposedly came from a deity, then I would have little problem believing that drugs were involved. As the author of the linked article says, there are many religious traditions all over the world where mind-altering drugs are used in sacred ceremonies. Why not the Hebrews?
Isn’t there a biblical passage about someone being stoned off his ass?
Anyway I would say that there’s no concrete proof Moses was on drugs, but it would explain a whole lot. On the other hand, I can’t imagine chiseling anything coherent in that state. Unless it was all a bad acid trip (or whatever they had back then). That’s a lot more believable than a god personally telling him the 10 suggestions.
There’s as much proof as Moses existing as there is he was on drugs.
If we accept, for the sake of argument, that Moses actually existed, and that he had the experiences described, I suspect that mental illness is a more viable explanation.
In the days before anyone realised that there was such a thing as mental illness, anybody raving about phenomena that weren’t accessible to everybody else was generally regarded as divinely inspired (OK, I’m prepared to accept that a lot of them were just ignored, too.) In Phaedrus, Plato is quite explicit that madness is a gift from the Gods:
Personally, I’m of the opinion that there really were men regarded as “prophets”, and they really did have some remarkable visions and experiences. I just don’t think those experiences were in any way a source of information about the real world. (I am also of the opinion that myths tend to accrete around real people and events, so there probably was a person or persons who provided the original template for the stories we now associate with “Moses”. Just because the stories most people know about William Wallace are almost completely fictional, that doesn’t mean he never actually lived.)
You might be right about Moses, or you might be wrong about all these other fundiethumpers. How do you know that they’re not all on drugs? At least one of them is known to have been, and at least one other one is likely to have been. I suggest that the hypothesis be tested; drug screen the Fundies!
I thought it was clear that most of the writers of the bible where high. Hell by the time of Ramesies opium dens where a freeking pass time. I don’t think it is a streach at all to say that Moses really did see a burning bush (right after all of that burning grass)
There is of course no evidence that Moses was a historical person, that the Israelites ever made an exodus from Egypt or wandered in the dessert, or that they conquered the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan. (The current consensus is that the Israelites WERE the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan, just a subset who lived in the highlands and assigned pretty much the same stories and wife to a deity named YHWH instead of to alternative deities named Ba’al, El, Dagan, and the like). The slimmest evidence for anything remotely resembling stories in the Pentateuch is that (1) Egyptians had lots of slaves from all around, and (2) for about a century in the third millennium BC Egypt was ruled by a foreign dynasty with names from a west Semitic language, which by a massive stretch could be a kernel for stories about Joseph (except that he was supposed to be serving under a native Egyptian pharaoh so even that doesn’t really fit). Indeed, there is essentially no Egyptian or Mesopotamian textual evidence for the “glorious kingdoms” of David and Solomon, strange given the large amount of material available from that period.
So speculating on whether Moses was high is a bit like trying to explain whether King Arthur needed to take steroids or HGH to pull the sword out of the stone.
Personally, I think it’s akin to making a scientific explanation about out why Gandolf changed color after he fell into the pit.
It spoils the good stories.
Because, as far as I am aware, there is absolutely no evidence that they did. And it’s not like Hebraic religious practice is completely lost in the mists of time… We have extensive, detailed evidence for the rituals associated with (for example) ritual cleanliness and the preparation of parchment, so why would any rituals involving drugs have been completely lost? Especially considering that we do actually have a veritable treasure-trove of ancient documentation for this particular religion?
It’s not like Druidism, where you can just make stuff up because we’ve got no evidence. There’s plenty of evidence, and (as far as I am aware) none of it even hints at the use of drugs in ritual. If anyone does know of any such evidence, I’d love to hear about it.
#16 – Well, I personally know a person who was smoking pot when the Mormon missionaries came knocking, and they succeeded in converting him. I don’t know for sure that the pot had anything to do with it, but I bet it didn’t hurt.
#14 BINGO; I thought it was clear that most of the writers of the bible where high. Hell by the time of Ramesies opium dens where a freeking pass time.
Moses: a self-help guru high on authoritarianism.
Especially considering that we do actually have a veritable treasure-trove of ancient documentation for this particular religion?
As well as massive amounts of archaeological evidence. Along the lines Dunc’s comment, they got high from sacrificing things on stone alters on the tops of hills, preferably next to trees — not from eating shrooms or smoking shit, I’m sorry to say.
Tceisele: Magic underwear and ancient Jewish submariners? I think you’d have to be either really young or really stoned when you first heard that stuff for there to be any chance you’d buy it.
I think Moses got stoned when he took those two tablets.
When I first read the headline:
“Moses was stoned when he set Ten Commandments, researcher claims”
I thought it had to do with rock throwing. My respect for the Israelites jumped a whole lot.
Oh, well.
…exactly, especially PZ and #2 and #21: our opinions do not depend on the (unlikely) historicity of a Moses figure, and we don’t need such speculations. Absolute objectivity is always the best policy.
Peter
What a stretch. Someone please apply Occam’s razor to this fool’s throat. When apologists cannot succeed, their brethren will resort to all types of rationalization of tradition. Intellectually dishonest and sad.
This theory also makes one giant assumption: That Moses was a real person to begin with. There’s zero historical evidence for most of the Exodus story. There may, possibly have been a historical analog or two but Moses is most likely an amalgamation of different historical situations all stirred together and baked into a fable.
Next we’ll here about how Captain Ahab was bipolar.
There’s always Julian Jaynes’ explanation of pre-1000 BC civilisations based on widespread schizophrenia and an “hallucinated reality”. If I remember correctly he had quite a lot to say about the ancient Hebrews.
I don’t know about Moses, but I’d lean toward the myth argument.
However, someone wrote the Book of Revelations, and from my very-experienced past encounters with various psychotropic substances, Revelations reads very close, in my opinion, to how someone might describe and interpret their drug-induced visions.
Of course, Revelations can also easily enough be ascribed to pure, stark-raving bat-wing lunacy.
It reminds me of a theory that the Renaissance artist Hieronymous Bosch came up with all those crazy images of the afterlife due to an outbreak of ergot of rye, causing l.s.d.-like symptoms.
A lot of people believe it. I tend to think he just had an excellent imagination for combining two or more objects together to make a startling image.
obviously, that researcher has never tripped before, for the simple reason that the 10 commandments are sort of, forgive me–rational.
If they were instead inspired by Moses tripping on shrooms, you’d expect them to read very, very differently.
Minimally, I’d expect a least one commandment to have some prohibition against conversing with reincarnated raccoons.
The obvious one would be hemp, marijuana, hashish, cannabis.
Wine.
Opium for sure.
A lot of species of Solanacea have alkaloids. Bella Donna, various others.
Maybe Kat, coffee, tea stimulants.
The two most available would be alcohol and pot. You can do a lot with just those 2. I’m amazed the fundies aren’t going bughouse crazy about some guy who claims Moses was a drunken pothead.
PZ,
Are you familiar with any studies on the psychological basis for conversion experiences?
Christian descriptions of ‘coming to Christ’ are almost identical to Muslim descriptions of ‘surrendering to the will of Allah’, and have a lot in common with certain phases of shamanic vision quests (although the latter lack the fascist component), as well as with epileptic auras. These are all real phenomenon, even if their cultural interpretations are, um, arbitrarily motivated.
I’ve done all of those drugs raven, except the alkaloids. Lot’s of pot, hash and even smoked opium once.
I’ve had pot and hash that would flat out lay me down, but the only ones on which I ever really truly tripped and experienced an alternative reality were LSD and possibly mushrooms. The mushroom effects were sort of a weird, LSD-lite experience.
Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, Neurotheology and Paranormal Experience
You really should at least put a strike mark through Ted Haggard, given the methamphetamine and all.
me,
salvia divinorum has some very profound hallucinogenic effects. Any Moses couldn’t get it, since it’s a new world herb.
And if we insist that babble writers were hallucinating, I think culprit #1 is their own defective brain. Second would be disease.
“How do you know that they’re not all on drugs?”
I think the more parsimonious explanation is that they’re all lying.
I thought anyone who believed that Moses actually existed was high on drugs.
Ding! Ding!
#16 – Well, I personally know a person who was smoking pot when the Mormon missionaries came knocking, and they succeeded in converting him. I don’t know for sure that the pot had anything to do with it, but I bet it didn’t hurt.
If those boys showed up while I was smoking, there might be a conversion, but it would be them attending a different church.
I’ve read a couple books by John Schumaker, a psychologist who posits that religion, hypnosis, and psychopathology are all intertwined as similar phenomena, and involve the brain’s ability to process information among multiple pathways. In the right conditions, this leads to highly-valued ‘dissosociative states’ — a sort of pleasurable trance which religions are designed to invoke.
Although he’s an atheist, he seems to think this is a good, healthy thing. Those religions which have gone all humanistic and rational have gotten away from “real,” mature religion, which should include drums and rhythm and spells and mystical experiences and stuff like talking in tongues.
Schumacher laments that he ‘lost’ his Catholic faith when they changed the mass from Latin to English, and he actually started listening to what they were saying. Horrible thing, there — he would have been able to remain happy and deluded if only they had retained the irrational elements that help send us into life-satisfying dissociation. Religions need to realize that.
Weird kind of theory and interpretation, but interesting.
plus this is based off the assumption that moses existed, which is another matter entirely.
I guess the human mind was designed to function best while in a trance state.
So can we just have raves and jam-band concerts instead of all the mystical “kill the heathens” stuff?
Thanks, #45. A rich place to start.
#51, I asked about associations with epilepsy because, as someone diagnosed with it, I’ve had the aura experiences in times of stress, and mine were, well, pleasant doesn’t really begin to describe it: I had the feeling that I was being offered a choice, and that only if I willed it I could join . . . something else, something bigger, I don’t know. I always declined, but always with a little bit of regret.
Diet and stress management made the partial seizures go away, and I’ve always wondered if there couldn’t be a cure for religiosity, too, but really, all we need to get away from is the social superstructure built on the ecstatic experiences.
So can we just have raves and jam-band concerts instead of all the mystical “kill the heathens” stuff?
I thought that was San Francisco in the 1960s, but I was born in Iowa in ’68, so all I know are legends.
Ok, I’m not up on my biblical history, but I did happen upon a tv show on ventriloquism the other day that told me that Moses (or whomever he was based on) was involved in some sort of schooling (I forget if he was a priest of some sort or it was something else). But that everyone who went through that sort of training had to learn ventriloquism. (I’m sure it would help in decieving…I mean, converting… the masses.)
Assuming the show got it’s history right, I think the narrator was right in saying it “sheds a whole new light on the burning bush story, doesn’t it?”
You and me both, but c’mon now, Mister Sociologist! The Summer of Love was just one manifestation! Rave and jam-band cultures, though perhaps in a waning phase, live on here in the 2k-naughts. You yourself have spoken of the communal ecstacy of the dance floor. That’s what I’m talkin about! :-)
You yourself have spoken of the communal ecstacy of the dance floor. That’s what I’m talkin about! :-)
Just don’t give Extasy to people on SSRIs. No workie. They’ll need other happy-touchie-feelie pills.
Oh, sure, I’m with you there. Psychpharm issues aside, though, I’m neutral on the mind-altering drug issue (personal choice and all that) but personally I go for the trance state induced by sound, vision, and movement, rather than by ingestion of exotic chemicals. It may not be as exciting as LSD, nor is it likely to qualify as temporary psychosis, but it’s still fun. ;-)
definitely fun…even moreso when watching yourself dance from the other side of the room :)
Did anyone give actual evidence that there ever was a Moses?
Oh, and has anyone in here heard of the idea that Akhenaton was actually the basis of the Moses figure? The idea is that the characters of Akhenaton and Sargon the Great were mixed together to make a messiah moral play and, as with most legends, was taught as fact sorta like King Author was taught as fact or William Tell was.
What I mean to say is that people love their heroes, even if they have to make them up as they go along…
I wrote this at Richard Dawkins’ forum a couple days ago, regarding these claims:
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
The chance that Moses actually existed, and happened to be the leader of a small band of Jews is near improbable. It’s all a moot point, only helping to reinforce this bullshit mythological story. Moses was probably an Egyptian figure, perhaps obscure, perhaps better known in his time, but some cult developed around him and took off, then others embraced those aspects and incorporated it into their indoctrinated bullshit beliefs, and here we have the old testament, and all the glorious bullshit it repeats. These are all mythical stories folks, and take them with a grain of salt. Just because they are related to us through jews, then christianity, makes no difference, because before judaism there was zoroastrianism, and other beliefs from far flung regions like sumeria, nubia, anatolia, all condensed into a storybook with powerful self-perpetuating memes. Long story short, stupid poisonous memes that do few people any good.
While I do not believe in my own personal Jesus(Shit, I do not even believe in Depeche Mode.), I do believe in personal hells. In mine, I am stuck in a jam band concert.
I do not even believe in Depeche Mode.
I believe in Dave Gahan!
Exposure to the right sort of chemicals, whether deliberate or accidental, schizophrenia and temporal lobe epilepsy are all viable explanations. Whether or not there was ever a historical Moses, we’ve had no shortage of people who had visions and voices from what they took to be God.
I once knew a schizophrenic guy who had made a hobby, since childhood, of sleight-of-hand conjuring tricks, at which he was very, very adept. I never thought of it before, but back in the Bronze Age, sans meds, Ed coulda been the founder of a major world religion.
They may not all be high on drugs, but Ted Haggard certainly was.
(Hey, that rhymed!)
” I do believe in personal hells. In mine, I am stuck in a jam band concert.”
Mine would probably be a jam rave. With eternally flowing rivers of cough-syrup-flavored energy drinks.
Maybe they aren’t ALL high, but Haggard at least is certainly no stranger to mind alteration.
I’ve often wondered whether Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder played a role in ancient (and recent) religions. The obsession over avoiding certain animals as food, the need to perform various bloodletting rituals for “cleansing”, etc. all point, in my estimation, to OCD. I’m curious as to whether anyone else has thought about it in these terms.
While I tend to agree human stupidity is enough to explain the major religions, especially if a lot of prophets likely suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy…
There’s at least one major hallucinogen not listed above that is known to have been used in religions around the world and was likely present in the middle east at the right time. Psilocybin.
In fact I’ve seen a very good argument that compares the actual life cycle and physical properties of the Psilocybin mushroom to descriptions of mana from heaven in the old testament. Both appear seemingly out of nowhere with the dawn, both are round with blue flesh that rots if not picked and preserved by noon, both can be eaten, or preserved by being turned into something like bread. The active ingredients in Psilocybin can be absorbed through the skin if in the right carrier, like say anointing oil. While we don’t have specific evidence of its use in the abrahamic religions, we know other cultures definitely used it for ritual, the Aztecs for example preserved it honey.
But as I said I figure humans being humans explain religion at least as well. Ignorance, stupidity, the greed and manipulations of the priests, mental disorder and insanity on the parts of the prophets, malice, hardly seems necessary to include drug use. But if a priest knew that pouring oil over people’s heads would give them a religious experience that set them on the path for life, I’ve no doubt what so ever he wouldn’t use it. It might not explain the origins of religion, but it’d be a hell of a tool for expanding one.
I agree with the above commenters that speculating on the causes for the behavior of a figure whose actual existence is not well established is not a very fruitful line of inquiry.
Also, I think I read somewhere (perhaps in Asimov’s Guide to the Bible) that there’s at least one fairly straightforward explanation behind the whole Moses/Exodus myth. Given the evidence that the Jews were actually natives of Canaan but, for whatever reasons, were a minority (possibly an opressed one or one that at least felt oppressed), a national myth sprang up that said, “Hey, we aren’t just oppressed Canaanites! We’re actually some whole other people! Yeah! We like, you know, escaped from slavery in Egypt ’cause, um, God told us to come here and promised this land to us! We have a right to this land, and, uh, we should like, take it!” The Exodus myth, after all, with stuff like Moses being protected from a culling of first-borns being put in a river and rescued by a Queen and raised in the royal house, was a very common myth all over the Middle East. Everyone had it. The likelihood that the myth was true for the Jews but everyone else just made it or stole it from the Jews is pretty low.
“In mine, I am stuck in a jam band concert.”
There are worse things – one of the bands that appeared at the coffee house I hung out at (along with thirty or so space-occupying 16-year olds) sounded like birdongs and jet engines played at high volume. After a few hours of that, a lobotomy is a rational option. (Of course, their groupies didn’t spend any money, making the free concert worth less than that to the coffee shop owner, and the shop closed not long after.) Alternatively, a job at any of the local Arby’s during night shift requires one to listen to a host named Delilah, crappy soft rock, and bad testimonials to love out of poorly written romance novels. Considering how much Arby’s employees are paid, I think that the psychotropic drugs required to withstand her show would rapidly consume any pay the employees receive.
I think that’s easily explained without resorting to diagnosing entire cultures and ethnicities with OCD. (That came later – LOL.) Diseases like trichinosis (from eating undercooked pork) and the incidence of deadly allergies to things like shellfish likely played a significant role in the codification of those aversions.
I’m confused as to how a fictional character gets high…
I have mentioned it before, but it seems that there are many who aren’t aware of the book “THE BIBLE UNEARTHED” by Silberman and Finkelstein. It deals rather completely with the Exodus myth and others. There is also a video docu based on the book which you can find on youtube or googlevideo.
Apparently the old testament was started to be written around 600 BCE and that “history” before that is unsubstantiated.
How does a fictional character get high?
Easy!
“Judy hesitated, then took the ‘joint’ from Buzz. I guess a little puff won’t hurt, she thought to herself. Six weeks later, pregnant and insane, her reputation ruined, her life a shambles, she walked out to Crawford’s point at midnight and jumped from the cliffs to her death in the rocky surf below.”
P.S.: Judy was also gay.
Apparently the old testament was started to be written around 600 BCE and that “history” before that is unsubstantiated.
A second for the book The Bible Unearthed.
But what I really took away from the book was not so much how “unsubstantiated” the myths in the pentateuch are, but how well-substantiated are the historical realities of the people who made these their foundational texts, and how enlightening it is to read them with an eye to the background beliefs and expectations of the intended audience.
Centuries of Christian apologetics have largely obscured this kind of analysis, but taking the Exodus as an example, there are all kinds of anachronistic details in the narrative that only make sense if you read it as a fictionalized account of the distant past written for specific religiopolitical reasons and intended for a specific audience. And there’s reason to believe that ancient people were okay with this, that the original audience understood the difference between myth and history –or, more accurately, placed little value on the concept of historical accuracy that is so important to us moderns. Which just makes literalism all the stupider.
To enlarge on Dunc’s point, I read an article in Discover magazine years ago that told about a Swedish (I think) researcher who looked at the relatives of schizophrenics. According to the article, they were more likely to be either interested in science fiction and fantasy, or religious fundamentalists.
So I wondered, what’s the link? Well, to enjoy SF, you have to be able to read something that is certainly not true, or even possible (faster than light travel, for instance) and suspend disbelief. To believe the religious mumbo jumbo, you have to do the same. IOW, you have to weaken the distinction between reality and fantasy.
What’s schizophrenia? Partly, it’s the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
So what does this have to do with Moses? Not much. But read the stories about Abraham, and think to yourself “Abraham was paranoid schizophrenic.” The whole insanity as holiness thing makes a lot of sense.
“The whole insanity as holiness thing makes a lot of sense.”
Yup. There’s a long tradition there, and it’s where the “tetched” thing comes from, eh? The mentally ill / mentally infirm were said to have been “Touched by God.”
Then there are the prophets, the apolocalypticos, the seers, etc… those who are apparently dissociated from reality must be in touch with something higher – eh?
Although Ted Haggard did do meth. So we can’t say he’s not influenced by drugs.
cubicle charlie #70 wrote:
That’s been brought up in several scholarly works on the psychological/neurological grounds for religious belief — particularly in the cases of some of those extremely odd medieval Christian “saints” who unceasingly rocked and spun and counted and prayed and amazed all with their holiness. Ritualized behavior is one of the hallmarks of both religion and OCD. I’m sure some of those righteous nuns who did rosary and stations of the cross 8 hours a day for 40 years straight were compulsives who found their niche.
The author I mentioned before — John Schumaker — wrote quite a bit about the OCD connection to religious experiences (in either Wings of Illusion or The Corruption of Reality or, probably, both.)
One of the things I particularly remember from his work is his comparison of religious belief to annorexia nervosa, which he had worked with quite a bit as a psychologist. His point was that human beings had a strong tendency to process their thoughts along different pathways in the brain and hold opposite beliefs at the same time. And in pathology that got too far out of whack. An anorexic knows that she is too thin: she understands that she does not look good: she realizes that she will die if she does not eat. AND, at the same time, she also knows that she is too fat. She has to lose weight. She knows this in a different way than she knows that she should not lose any more weight, but it’s just as strong. Or stronger.
Her mind has gotten into a habit of thinking and reconciling contradictions without feeling any pressing need to choose. It’s a neurological process, a trick similar to what happens in hypnosis — and, according to Schumaker, it’s commonly and normally manifested in ordinary people in the form of religious compartmentalization.
The scientist knows that miracles are absurd: the scientist knows that Jesus rose from the dead. One should not believe things are true just because you want them to be true: faith is humble. Religion is perfectly rational: religion is valued because it is irrational. The earth is billions of years old, but I also believe it to be 10,000 years old. Which? Both. At the same time. Why is there a problem? It feels just fine.
I thought it a very interesting comparison.
If he thinks Moses was high, wait until he gets to Ezekiel. That dude was baking dung cakes.
There’s a simpler explanation for biblical visions. When someone is starving they start to hallucinate. Also oxygen deprivation will do that too. Most of the prophets wandered the wilderness for 40 days to “purify” themselves so they would see god. And since purification also included not eating (or eating a few “funny” leaves), they would see what they were expecting. Other visions occurred while sleeping. Yep, that’s right, dreams!
As for Moses (an Egyptian name BTW), working on the admittedly false assumption that he even existed, the description of Mount Sinai sounds more like a volcano: People dropping dead walking on holy ground = poisonous gasses leaking from the ground; Moses’ hair turning white = one of those gases was chlorine; burning bush = small lava plume; etc. And remember when Moses went up to receive the law he was gone so long the people figured he was dead = food AND oxygen starvation.
So many religions have used various methods to create hallucinations that i don’t really have any objection to the hypothesis.
While i agree that there probably was no Moses I think (possibly mistakenly) that the story of the Exodus was,in part, based on the Hyksos expulsion.
Ahkenaton was the innovator of monotheism and his writing can be seen in the Bible as on of the Psalms 104. He pissed off the priestly class of all the other gods because he left them unfunded and focused only on Aten. There was a change of Pharaohs and Tutankhamen made nice with the previously neglected priests (note his name reflects his allegiance to the god Amen). There are hieroglyphs mentioning the years of neglect that the gods were subjected to.
The Aten priesthood and all those who followed them were banished to Canaan which was under Egyptian control at the time. It was a smart move which would get rid of those who had let the country erode and it would create a buffer against the northern invaders who would try to chip away at the empire. Some say Moses was the general who lead the exodus of this deposed group and that he later became Pharaoh himself.
Since all subjects of the Pharaoh were considered to be slaves (just as Jesus is Lord and Christians think of themselves as servants) this could be where the idea that they were slaves came from.
It’s likely that the whole thing is made up to be some great story that explains how a nation or people came to be but it may have an actual basis that has become obscured by myth. There is no possible way in hell that the Biblical myth is true. No people could be enslaved for 400 years yet maintain their own language and culture and religion. This is even conceded in the story because as soon as they leave Egypt they are whoring after Baal and making idols. This story was invented by elaborating bits of history and making up lots of crap some of which was stolen from other cultures (Moses and the bull rushes) and compiled as recently as 600 BC.
When I see announcments like this, I always get the suspicion that what the researcher is really after is something rather more warholian than the mere search for historical truth or probability.
ROTFL!
Well, there is this phenomenon of being found as a baby in the big river. Sargon said that about himself: born to royalty, he was put in a basket and thrown into the Euphrates, grew up as the son of a water carrier, and then became king… legitimate king, as his name literally means. The story of Moses, he of the Egyptian name, is so precisely opposite that some have wondered if he actually was an Egyptian prince and fled the counterreformation, taking monotheism with him. Of course this still doesn’t explain how that single god changed from a sun god into a rather Indo-European (Hittite…?) mountain-and-thunderstorm god, and most importantly still assumes any such person as Moses existed in the first place, which has yet to be demonstrated…
On another note, though: “King Author”? Switch off your spellchecker, and never switch it on again.
ROTFL!
Well, there is this phenomenon of being found as a baby in the big river. Sargon said that about himself: born to royalty, he was put in a basket and thrown into the Euphrates, grew up as the son of a water carrier, and then became king… legitimate king, as his name literally means. The story of Moses, he of the Egyptian name, is so precisely opposite that some have wondered if he actually was an Egyptian prince and fled the counterreformation, taking monotheism with him. Of course this still doesn’t explain how that single god changed from a sun god into a rather Indo-European (Hittite…?) mountain-and-thunderstorm god, and most importantly still assumes any such person as Moses existed in the first place, which has yet to be demonstrated…
On another note, though: “King Author”? Switch off your spellchecker, and never switch it on again.
On another note, though: “King Author”? Switch off your spellchecker, and never switch it on again.
Don’t remember where I heard it, but “spellcheck lets you know you’re spelling the wrong word right.”
At the recent Enlightenment 2 talks, David Brin made mention of being “high on Self Righteousness”.
Perhaps there is a connection to be made somewhere. Perhaps there are definitive, measurable hormonal productions during ‘proselytization’ that affect or produce notable emotional responses.