Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.

[Jehanne]

Last item, first.  I sometimes cry, when I am sad, and sometimes the suffering in our World is too much to bear, and I succumb to my emotions and sob.  I do feel pity on children who die before their time, because, I know to a scientific certainty that they are gone, forever, and that absolutely nothing remains of their conscious experience, that which made them adorable little children.  I blame religion, more often than not, for its belief in a God and an afterlife, that posits the false notion that aspects of a human being's identity survives the death of that individual's brain.  If people understood, as do I, that the physical death of an individual (especially, a child) means that individual's annihilation, never to return, I believe that the war in Ukraine would not be occurring right now, and, overall, that there would be much less violence in the World today.  (Just my two cents.)  I weep, albeit distantly, with the parents who have lost their child, and have empathy for their need to believe that their little one has gone to Heaven, and that they will be reunited with their dead child someday, and I am not about to tell them otherwise, unless, of course, they come here of their own free will, in which case, we owe them the truth.

Oh ok, I get what you mean now. Thanks for clarifying. So you meant to say that you weep for people, not for beliefs.

As for the first item, I am not a psychologist, anthropologist, archeologist, neurologist or sociologist, but, the evolution and psychology of religious belief has been well studied.  From our distant H. Sapiens ancestors some 75,000 years ago who worshiped the carved figure of a giant snake right up to the present, religious faith and belief serve individual, societal and political purposes.  We all can and should empathize with that; but, at the same time, religious faith and belief can be destructive, too destructive, in my opinion.  As such, belief in God needs to go, in my opinion, not only for the individual, but, especially, for the survival of our species.

Ok, but the evolution and psychology of religious belief being well studied does not lend support to what you argued in the OP specifically.

Even the study in the OP doesn't say what you said at the top of your OP.

Referring to this specifically:

For the varieties of religious experience, we need look no farther than the following:

That is false. We do need to look farther than just a subset of cases in which religious experiences are linked to TLE. That study doesn't account for all religious experiences in general; it's saying that there is a significant correlation between having TLE and having religious experiences.

Let me put it this way: If a person were to claim they felt God's presence while praying in a church, do you consider that to be a religious experience? And if so, is it due to TLE? What does Ockham reveal to you in this case?

As an atheist, my greatest, fondest hope is to live forever in eternal, endless bliss, in the arms of an eternal loving God, along with all those whom I loved and knew, pets, too. Such is not in the cards, though, and I do lament my own annihilation someday, and those whom I love, and, yes, such does, on occasion, bring tears to my eyes. In this respect, I do weep for beliefs, as well as for those who hold them; atheism, at times, can be downright depressing.

At the same time I so very firmly believe that atheism offers Humanity true hope, especially, to survive. Atheism is, I believe, intellectual thought of the highest grade devoid of any baggage or contradictions that, in my opinion, plague the writings of intellectual theists; one can see on their faces and hear in their voices the cognitive dissonance as they try over and over to bend and shove their square peg into a round hole. As such, it feels good at times to be living in the real World, a breath of fresh air on a spring day. Atheism, while depressing for me, can be liberating.

Someone feeling the presence of God is purely psychological and physiological; as a believing teenager, I remember those experiences well. For some, the presence of God is downright psychotic and dangerous. For nearly everyone else, it's just a benign, comforting physiological experience; some good public health at no cost.

As for my OP from six months ago, I linked to an article in Wikipedia, and yes, as some two-thirds of schizophrenics in our Day are never diagnosed (they have what psychologists term "functional schizophrenia"), all religious experiences, including the founders of all World religions, could be viewed as being functional schizophrenics, with or without temporal lobe epilepsy. By the way, someone could have a seizure, "see God", without any overt physiological manifestations.