Are all forms of religious faith indicative of insanity? (My counter example.)

[Whateverist]

A sensible medium is certainly best.  Like you I find no role for gods.  But I do allow for a layer of mystery which underlies consciousness.  Or maybe the 'mystery' is only extreme complexity resulting from the same processes which produce 'me' also producing 'the world'.  Contamination may be inevitable when the part of the world we try to understand is the part known as 'me'.  In that task especially, observer expectancy may inevitably produce a hall of mirrors.  Perhaps god is simply the shadow of subjectivity clinging to the 'world' which consciousness presents us with.  At its best, religious experience may be the acceptance of 'god' as the projection of the mystery which underlies our selves for the sake of understanding ourselves and the world better.  Of course I'd respect a theist more who could articulate this strategy rather than going literal.

Be aware that there are suspected neurological underpinnings for religious experiences, too.  That's not to say that the ineffable doesn't exist -- there are certainly depths of emotion and experience in us that do not submit to rational linguistic analysis. But if there is an intracranial explanation for things like feelings of oneness, or feeling the presence of a deity, then it seems to me possible that mystery is where consciousness loses track of a portion of the brain for a time. This view appears to comport, in a way, with what you've written in the quote above.

I'm not sure I quite follow. Can you say more about what you mean in the part I bolded? "Losing track of one's self" is often a very desirable experience when you are in the grip of a good book or caught up in a play or movie. Likewise when you are engaged in a creative or challenging physical endeavor. The study of neurology through studying the effects of brain trauma has revealed that there is a layering of experience. That our experience can go on even if we lose the capacity to self-censor, or identify faces, make appropriate associations, or recall words, or .. so many other things we take for granted otherwise. So one can imagine that various conditions other than brain trauma can impact which layers are able to be present, as in the interval between sleep and wakening or as a result of certain drugs. Perhaps drugs represent a kind of transient brain trauma? But I definitely believe all religious experience is intracranial, and I don't mean that to be dismissive. I assume all experience is intracranial. Leastwise that certainly seems to be the organ that filters sensation and add cognition.

I completely agree with what you wrote in your first post in this thread about thought and rationality being appropriate to answer certain questions and feeling/emotion being more central to answering others. As information processing bags of chemicals with selective self-awaredness, we are quite the puzzle.