Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.

[The Grand Nudger]

I have a question...were any of the people who supposedly experienced some religious thing during an epileptic event non-believers beforehand?  Are there people out there who suddenly "saw the light" upon experiencing such an event?

I may have missed the answer to this as I wasn't really processing some of the things I read on this thread so pardon me if I am asking something that's already been addressed.

I think I've heard of some professed unbelievers experiencing god during NDE's, but they had been exposed to the concept of god, which is all that it would take.

Where do you find someone that has not been exposed? The dark heart of the amazon? Even they have gods.

Well..there was this guy named Paul™.....

In seriousness, the researchers are talking about dissociative episodes (among other things).  Experiencing an OBE or NDE is, all by itself, the thing in question.  I went through a few de's after I got my head bounced around, never believing in gods before or after. No need to trudge through the amazon to find people who have these experiences and attribute them to gods, or to find people who have them..and don't. You could easily find christians who aren't so bankrupt as to insist or imagine that god is talking to people when they have a seizure or suffer from trauma or a neurological disorder. That much is easily worked out even amongst the set who says as much in pious prattle when you ask them whether a god is sending some other cultist or a test subject their visions.

Inauthenticity and all that.....

"Feeling god", in this sense, is alot like feeling hot or cold. We don't actually have a thermometer in there, nor do we have a godometer. Feeling something, and that something may correlate to an external whatsit, but it would be foolish to believe that a human being knew what was making it feel a certain way - we don't have that kind of data on how we work - it's not available to us. So we got alot of shit dead wrong over the years. We say, for example, that janes mean comment makes us "feel sad" - but..ofc, jane's commenting isn't actually how our feelings are produced.

Statements such as "I felt the spirit of god come all over me" are analogs to comments about jane as the cause of sad feelings - and the kinds of experiences these researchers can induce are either analogs to or the same thing as those experiences which feature so prominently in so many religious narratives.