Does religion produce unique sensations?

[robvalue]

I've never been religious so it's a bit hard for me to answer this.

I'm going to say no, although I admit this isn't based on anything but my logical thought.

Considering there is nothing "real" about religion, all that is actually going on is self/group delusion and social interaction. The sensations are just going to be chemicals of some sort being released in the body, or certain brain configurations. Since there is nothing magical about any of that, I see no reason why you couldn't get the same effect some other way. I'm not saying I can simply list other ways that it can be done. I'm saying that it is reasonable to expect there is more than one way to achieve this result, since it is artificial in relation to the supposed truth of the subject matter.

Now, there is a slight problem with the question. If I came up with a non-religious way of getting the same effect, it is fairly likely to share a lot of the traits with the "experience" of religion (particularly the social dynamic). So someone holding the sensations to be unique could just say, "Well that's just like religion then". A bit of a no true Scotsman fallacy. Since no one can actually label what is going on "religious" except by the testimony of its adherents, what does such a classification really mean?

I think I would be tempted to rephrase the question: does group/self delusion produce sensations that cannot be achieved otherwise? In other words, you have to really believe things that are not true. (I'm talking in realistic terms here, let's not get all agnostic and shit ) That is the part that's not so easy to reproduce. But delusion is not limited to religion either; so again, strictly speaking, it's not just religion.

Tl;dr: As religion is not "real" I can't hold it accountable for anything unique. I'd instead focus on the self/group delusion aspect.