Thought Without Limit

[Angrboda]

What is surprising to me is that the religious experience is built out of the brick and mortar of everyday experience. We don't see another person's mind, yet we assume it is there. Is it so strange then that we leap to postulating other unseen minds in places that they aren't? Raising your arms to the sky, singing, dancing, touching each other — these are perfectly ordinary experiences, yet they cause major changes to our state of mind through the influx of hormones into the blood, physiological changes, and activation of mood states in the brain. Out of these ordinary bricks, a powerful religious experience can be built. I would say the failure of your imagination here is in not realizing how well-grounded the bricks which make up the religious experience are, how firmly rooted in real, everyday experience they are. Yes, there are fantastic elements in religion, but if it weren't for these other elements, religion wouldn't have the power over us that it does. Without the mundane mental and physiological effects of ritual and belief, religion would be a pale ghost that appeals to no one. It would be "too disconnected," and "too imaginary."