Tag: God

Are you Dead Yet? 

Rilaly1 Comment

“Are you dead yet?” 

“No.” 

“Isn’t this great?” 

“No.” 

How many of us know a “No” character? How many of us know someone who scrunches up a face and says, “You like life? What the heck is wrong with you?”  

No one says that, of course, but they’re dark. They’re so dark, it’s almost as if they’re obsessed with death, and I’m not just talking about goth customers of Fantas Magoria either. I’m talking about relatively normal people living normal lives who focus so much on what they consider the big circumstantial matter that they fail to put enough focus on the little, tiny stuff that could make their little lives more circumstantial.

Those of us who enjoy life, often find ourselves at odds with “No” types.

“I want a happy death.” I would advise you to make the most out of life you can before you die. That might lead to a happier death. “I just put a bundle down on a sound-proof, fully insulated casket on a plot that is as far removed from traffic as I could find. I had to put up with the sounds of traffic in life. I don’t want that in death.” They talk about death as if it’s sleep, as if the sounds of traffic might prove so annoying that it will intermittently wake them from a peaceful death. Nobody knows anything about death, except that it is a final punctuation mark. Once you’re gone, you’re gone.  

We shouldn’t care how this “No” character chose to live his life. Even though we needed him, we shouldn’t care that he wanted it over. He didn’t care that we needed him so much, and he didn’t really want to be remembered. He just wanted it over, for about thirty years he wanted his life over. He chose to live those thirty years in a manner that he thought should be rewarded, but he didn’t really pursue the idea that he should make the most of the gift of life. He just didn’t think that way, but he was a good man. Should we really care how or why he became a good man?  

What if this man wanted to hurry up and get his life over with, so he could join his beloved wife on the other side of pearly gates? What if he never found his life particularly rewarding, and he wanted hurry up and get his reward for living a good and virtuous life? What if there is no afterlife? What if his whole reason for living the life he lived turned out to be untrue? Is it untrue? We don’t know, but it seems like such a waste of life.

They told us there was an afterlife, but who were they? They were writers inspired by God. What does that mean? All writers are inspired by another author, especially at the beginning of their career, but how much does an author inspire what another writer writes? At what point does the writer take over and leave their inspirations behind? The only facts we know with 100% certitude, at this point in history, is that life exists on Earth, and it will end at some point. This might prove disappointing to many, but this could be it for us. 

We’re not supposed to question Them. Why? Why were we created with such intellect if we weren’t supposed to question them, Him, or the teachings inspired by Him? If our creator was so narcissistic that He didn’t want us questioning him, why didn’t he give us the intellect of the chimpanzee? Did He make it a sin to question Him, or did His inspired writers write that questioning them was a sin?   

“I’m not taking any chances. I’m living my life right, just in case.” Again, nothing wrong with that, but even if your quality of life was diminished by her death, you still have something she doesn’t, life. You are here now, and we need you. Why not live the life you have left here on Earth and let matters take care of themselves? Death will come soon enough, and once it does, whatever happens, you’ll likely be banished from Earth.    

If there is an afterlife, will we look down, up, around, or back on our life on Earth with regret? Will we wish we would’ve lived better or different? Even if Heaven, Summerland, Nirvana Celtic Otherworld, or Valhalla are the paradise we’ve been promised, will we be as happy as we’ve ever been, or will they provide us a moment to look back on our life on Earth? If they do, will we finally see how substantial and special life was?  

Life is not a minor inconvenience on the path to something greater, as far as we know. Or, if it is, we should not focus on that idea so much that it begins to impede on our life on Earth. What if the guardians at the gate inform us that life was the reward or gift? 

If we don’t enjoy life for what it is, because of the poor choices we’ve made, we should consider changing it. Some might require a complete overhaul, but most only need a few subtle tweaks. If we’re so unhappy in life that we begin looking forward to death it might be time for a change, before it’s too late, because once you’re gone, you’re gone.  

The fundamental, overriding philosophy of his life was that life is but a comma. I couldn’t articulate a proper response to this at the time, but if were granted enough time to ask him another soul-searching question, I would’ve loved to ask him, “If we’re looking for punctuation marks to define the life we lived, wouldn’t we love it if our loved ones applied an exclamation point at the end of our sentence? You suggest that you don’t want to take any chances that there isn’t an afterlife, and I appreciate that, but what if you applied the same rationale to the beforedeath? My guess is, if there is an afterlife, you’re going to find that the only punctuation marks are question marks, and the final answer to those questions will be that you focused too much of your life on death.”  

What happens at the moment of death? Some say it’s the unceremonious end of a life. There’s nothing more. There’s no soul and no afterlife, and if there’s anything to the idea of rebirth, it can only be found in the manner weeds and worms use our carcass for nourishment. We will die one day, as the ground squirrel, the clover, and the elephant will? Life doesn’t last forever, and it’s our job to do the best we can with the 73.77 years we’ve been granted. 

Some believe our state of being doesn’t end, it changes. Some believe that the afterlife involves a literal transformation into something else. They call it reincarnation. They also believe that their souls have been reincarnated hundreds of times already, and they always trace the path of their soul through someone noteworthy and glorious. Most people were Julius Caesar during the height of his rule in a previous life. No one looks back to see themselves as a vulgar peasant who was forced to commit atrocities to survive. What if, as a result of the life we lived as a human, we come back as a grub, or a dung beetle? Will we have any consciousness of the life we lived before? Will we know that this is our reward/punishment for the life we lived, or will our consciousness of life be as minimal as the dung beetle’s?    

Various religions believe life on earth is but as stage, as opposed to the stage. These religions teach us that this is not all there is, and some of us take great comfort in knowing this. That comfort bothers others, because some are always bothered by comfortable people. They suggest that most religious doctrine almost seems centered around a marketing strategy to attract the angry, sad, and uncomfortable people who need hope.   

We all know the Christian version of Heaven and Hell, but the various Pagan religions have Summerland, the Celtic Otherworld, or Valhalla. They also have their own versions of the Christian purgatory, in that the unsettled soul moves from being to being until it learns what it needs to know to enter the promised land. Most religions share the view that this life on Earth can’t be it. 73.77 years on earth, and we’re done? It can’t be. We’re human beings. We’re the top of the food chain. We have emotions and intellect that should be utilized by a greater force. If the controlling force(s) allow us to dissolve to dust, it just seems like such a waste of life.  

Some other philosophers suggest that it’s possible that through our psychic energy that we’ve created a promised land, through the rational if God doesn’t exist, there might be a need to create Him. We created the internet through our collective intellect, and the metaverse, and the omniverse, who’s to say we couldn’t create our own afterverse composed of dead souls congregating for the rest of eternity? We created this reward for ourselves, because we’re too important to the universe. There’s got to be more than this. What if there isn’t? What if this is it?  

My aunt passed away, or she thought she did. She looked up and saw a bright light. It moved her to tears, until her daughter informed her that it was the examination room light. The sweet smile on her face diminished, and she felt dumb when we giggled. The doctor arrived in the room minutes later, diagnosed her, and they treated her for the next week. She was released from the hospital, and she lived the rest of her remaining years disappointed. One might think that such a near-death experience might wake a person up and lead them to live a better life than the one they lived before the experience. She didn’t. She experienced what she thought was glory, and she lived a life of disappointment and routine in the aftermath.  

What if we had such a spiritually moving experience? Researchers suggest we continue to live 2-20 seconds after death. They say that we experience a surge of electricity in our brain in this brief time span. Other research suggests that dreams can last 50 seconds, but that the average dream only lasts about 15. With both of those theories in mind, we can guess that this surge of electricity in our brains can make an after-death dream feel like one of the most powerfully surreal dreams we’ve ever had. We might feel more alive than we ever have after our death. We might even call it an afterlife experience.    

We should hold no grudges or superiority over intellects who focus on the afterlife. Better minds than ours believe in the phenomenon, and dumber ones believe that we become nothing more than worm food … if we don’t purchase the proper casket with the best insulation technology has to offer. Some label the former superstitious, others mystical, but whatever we call it, it’s not an indicator of intellect. 

I don’t know if there is evidence that could end this debate, but what if we received concrete, irrefutable evidence that the afterlife did or did not exist? Would this lead us to live better lives, or would a sense of hopelessness increase? Would we enjoy our lives more in the aftermath? If there is no afterlife, we’ll never regret how we lived. If there is an afterlife, we might regret how we lived. What difference does that make to you now though, I ask these “No” characters.  

He believed in a deity. He believed in the Christian God. “Why do you think he placed you here, on Earth? What’s your purpose? I doubt He put you here, or any of us here, to live for the promised land.” A literal interpretation is that the promised land is a promise He made to those who make the most of life on earth. Obsessing over that promise almost seems to me a violation of the contract. My guess is God loses patience with those who obsess over death and an afterlife. My guess, if God chose to bring this debate to a close, is that he’d say, “Do everything you can with the greatest gift I ever gave you, life. Death comes soon enough for everyone and everything, and when it does, you’ll know what happens.”   

The Biological Control of Flatulence

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Farts are funny. It’s immature to laugh at them, but we can’t help it. We’ve all dealt it, and we’ve all smelt it. Its universal appeal stretches across demographic lines, income brackets, and various levels of sophistication and intelligence. We might laugh out loud, behind a hand, or wait until the alleged perpetrator has left the room, but sooner or later, most of us will be laughing. Depending on how bad it smells, flatulence might be the one bodily function that offends everyone and no one at the same time. It embarrassed us (most of us) when we do it, but most of us don’t mind laughing at ourselves most of the time. The jokes we tell about them play as well in the seediest bars as they do in the most refined churches. They’re funny, and we laugh, but are we laughing so hard that we forget to ask why we have at least some ability to control this biological quirk?

Those of us who have a layman’s interest in evolution find it fascinating to read scientific theories regarding the most basic bodily functions we all take for granted. The theories are based, in part, on evolution and natural selection, but they are just theories. Most of these discussions involve relatively trivial, yet fascinating theories regarding why we have the ability to blink, fingernails, earlobes, and goosebumps. We don’t analyze these actions, because what’s there to analyze? Have you ever met a person who couldn’t blink. A friend of mine had this problem, due to necessary surgeries, and she had to regularly drop saline into her eyeballs. I didn’t value my ability to blink before I met her, and I never appreciated the greater mechanization of the human body before I met those who have a deficit in the basic functionalities we all take for granted. 

Most of our functions were born of need. If animals didn’t have levels of functionality necessary for survival, they either developed them or went extinct. When the species found a way to survive, a level of natural selection occurred, in which the animals passed those adaptations along. How has the otherwise indefensible ball of mush, we call the octopus, managed to survive hundreds of millions of years? They adopted and adapted various intricate survival techniques that are almost inexplicable to science.

At one point in human history, early humans realized they were near the bottom of the food chain, and they tried to find ways to neutralize the other animals’ dominance. In the course of developing weapons and other techniques necessary for survival, they developed the most complex organ in the animal kingdom, the human brain. Fossil records indicate that the human brain grew in size, relative to the body from early primates to the current Homo sapiens. The need to survive, in other words, dictated our brain’s current size and complex level of functionality. The owl needs acute vision to see small prey from their perch high up in trees, and they need to be able to fly down to catch them. Due to the complexities of the human brain, we didn’t need either of these abilities to survive, so we never developed them.

We don’t need goosebumps, but according to some theories, humans may have needed them at one time to ward off prey. When man was more hairy, the goosebumps made the air stand up and appear more abundant, so they would appear larger to the prey. The other, more widely accepted theory is that our hairier ancestors strengthened their hair fibers to stay warm, and the scientists suggest that raised hairs trap air to create insulation in a manner we still use. Thus, when we’re creeped out or cold, our brain still sends a message to the body to raise the hair fibers or strengthen them to make what we have more abundant, or appear more abundant. The point is that there’s nothing really interesting about basic, common bodily functions, until we delve into the idea theories regarding why we have them. 

If we have scientific explanations for why we might have needed something as trivial as goosebumps, why no explanation for the control we have of gaseous releases? Ashley Cowie wrote an interesting, historical guide to famous flatulence in history that includes stories of fart gods and various other spiritual connections to the breath between the legs, and the idea that if a person pushed hard enough they could “fart out their soul”. Other articles list some scientific theories we have to explain the biological need to release gas from the system. There are scientific explanations to explain why some flatulence smells and others don’t. There are even scientific explanations to explain why some farts are louder than others are, but there are no scientific theories I can find to explain why we can control (for the most part) the force and volume.

All animals have this ability of course, but humans are the only ones who voluntarily deploy it on a regular basis for entertainment purposes. Watch a young wild animal let one go, and the force and volume is apt to startle them. Older animals, like older humans, are unmoved by them. Some humans say they do it to gain relief, others suggest they require it for medicinal purposes, but most of us just do it for fun. Was there ever a reason for this ability, a source for it that would define its need in such a way that we enhanced it?

The science behind it suggests that the volume of flatulence depends on how much gas we have bottled up and/or how tight the sphincter is. The digestive system needs to remove/release gas, and if it served that biological need alone, the rectum would be similar to a building’s exhaust flapper. Instead, we have muscles that we can voluntarily (for the most part) expand and contract to release anything we want, at any volume, to disrupt or enhance, social gatherings, and no one has come up with a sufficient explanation why.

Some have theorized that louder flatulence might be equivalent to some sort of biological alarm to warn us when there is too much CO2 in our system. The louder the flatulence, the more CO2 buildup we have, and the greater need for one to switch to a healthier diet. If true, that might explain why some flatulence is louder, but it doesn’t explain how we arrived at this ability and if natural selection played any role in it. We don’t need the control now, but we don’t need goosebumps either, so why do we have these abilities? Is it possible that at one time, a time when modes of communication weren’t what they are now, prehistoric man manipulated their flatulence to communicate coded levels of alarm to their fellow man? If a wolf was near, they let loose some silent killers to inform those in their clan, by scent, that a wolf was near, stay still, or prepare the weaponry for the hunt. If a sabretooth tiger was near, they let her rip. Is it possible they communicated with flatulence in a manner similar, but different from the Native Americans’ smoke signals, and that which the military would later use with the Morse Code in WWII, and the predators couldn’t figure out our secret signals to one another in time.

Seeking answers for why we have this ability might also help explain our individual view of God. Most Christians believe God created everything from life to the universe and everything in between to support the harmonious relationship between the heavenly bodies. If God created everything from the Sun to Jupiter to the flagellum and the atom to serve a purpose, what was the purpose behind giving us the ability to control the force of our flatulence? Both literal and contextual readers also agree that God gave us autonomy, but they disagree on how much. Literal and contextual readers of The Bible both agree that God is of unlimited omniscience, so the only conclusion we can arrive at is that He knew how we would use this ability. Some might consider it heretical to suggest this, but did God design the intricate anatomy down to the smallest, most insignificant elements of the anatomy, or did He allow for some autonomy on the part of the being in the same manner he provided autonomy of belief? Was the control of the force and volume of our flatulence a gift that He gave us, knowing how we’d use it, and an indicator that He has such a wonderful sense of humor? Did He decide to give us some wholesome fun with our body or, was the ability to control our flatulence a biological quirk we discovered on our own in the process of forcing waste out?  

Atheists, who also happen to be scientists, suggest that too often religious people explain any gaps in modern scientific understanding with the idea that there had to be a miracle involved, and that miracle had to arrive at the hands of a creator. Religious people suggest that scientists do the same and that if God inspired the writers of The Bible to explain everything from creation to goosebumps to this control of our flatulence we might not be having these debates. We probably shouldn’t question the content, or the purpose, of the best-selling book of all time, and it might have damaged The Bible’s legacy as a serious philosophical document to waste time on such trivial matters, but it would’ve also provided us some much-needed information and some levity if God inspired The Bible’s authors to include some incidents, and discussions about, flatulence in the various stories and parables of the book. Whatever the case is, some of us prefer to think that God gave us The Bible as a philosophical road map to figure out the larger things and a progressive intellect to figure out the rest.

Oh! Our Electromagnetic Minds

Rilaly3 Comments

“God isn’t dead,” says a neuroscientist from Canada’s Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, named Michael Persinger. “He’s an energy field, and your brain is an electromagnetic map to your soul.”

To further define this provocative statement, Persinger conducted a series of experiments that caused “cerebral fritzing” in the hemispheres of the brain to generate images. Persinger found that when the right hemisphere of the brain was stimulated in the cerebral region, an area of the brain presumed to control notions of self, a sense of a presence occurred. The frizting then called upon the left hemisphere, the seat of language, to make sense of the presence. What was that presence that the right hemisphere generated?  Was it God?  In some instances, the left side of the brain told the subject that it was. In other instances, the subject believed they were seeing aliens, some claimed to have seen deceased loved ones, and others stated that they saw a presence, but they couldn’t tell what it was. It all depended upon the person.

The BrainIn a separate story, of the same theme, a young female believed she was being visited by the lord of darkness: Satan. Every night, at about the same time, this young girl would wake with recurring night terrors, and when her parents came running into the room, she claimed to have seen Satan at the foot of her bed. Her family was worried that their daughter may have been possessed. They called in exorcists and various spiritualists, to rid their frantic young daughter of her horror. After these attempts proved unsuccessful, the family called in doctors to see if these images were occurring as a result of her diet, some psychological malady, or some sort of sleep deprivation. Others believed the visions may have been a natural byproduct of narcolepsy, sleep paralysis, migraines, anxiety disorders, or some form of obstructive sleep apnea. In other words, they thought that her young, active mind was always playing tricks on her, even though they all believed that these visions were very real to her. When no medications, or psychological assistance, proved successful, the family decided to permit an experimental, investigatory group to walk through and see if their very specific ideas about the girl’s problem could help her. The investigatory group walked around the room with an electromagnetic sensor that pinged on an alarm clock that was resting by the head of her bed. They found that her alarm clock’s cord had become frayed, and it was emitting Electromagnetic rays near the girl’s head. The group replaced the clock, and the young girl no longer had the visions.

Want to build the scariest haunted house ever made?  Cocoon it inside electrical wires, throbbing with pulses of electromagnetic fields. This will stimulate the cerebral regions of your horrified guests to a point where they may cause them to believe they are sensing a presence. You won’t need to hire sixteen-year-olds to don Frankenstein’s monster masks, and you won’t need to spend hundreds on setting. You can just wire up a rusty, old tool shed and spend a few bucks to insulate the wiring, to prevent injury, and voila!  You will have the scariest haunted house man has ever created.

Want to open up a fortune telling booth, or bolster your claim that you are some form of spiritualist that can conjure up the dead for your customers. A little wiring, a conductive floor plan, a little setting here, and some costume designing there to provide aura, and you should be able to convince anyone and everyone that you have a gift.

The thrust of Persinger’s thesis is that it is your brain that creates these images. Images that can titillate, fascinate, and horrify any audience, and when these portions of your brain are stimulated with electromagnetic field-emitting solenoids, in a designated manner, they can be induced to create images that seem surreal to the human mind.

To create this atmosphere in a lab, Persinger used what he calls the “God Helmet”. It has also been called the “Koren Helmet” named after its creator Stanley Koren. Persinger places his subjects in a sensory deprivation tank that has white lab coat technicians on the opposite side of a 500lb. steel wall with a number of dials and switches to provide subtle stimulation through the solenoids inside this helmet.

The God helmet was not designed for the sole purpose of providing a subject with a feeling of God’s presence, but various tests ended up yielding such results.

“Those with a predisposition for God, often believed that they saw God after donning the helmet,” says Persinger. The tests that yielded these results were the ones that generated the controversy and the headlines for Persinger and crew.

In other, related speeches, Michael Persinger spoke about the effects various controlled substances (marijuana, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and LSD) can have on the various receptors in the brain, and he suggested that these drugs would not have any effect on you if you didn’t already have the proper receptors in your brain for these drugs to stimulate. In the proper setting, electrical stimulation can achieve the same results, he stated.

“So, I can get stoned using electromagnetic stimulation?” Persinger says he is often asked when he speaks to college students. “You can,” Persinger responds. “Electrical stimulation can trigger specific parts of the brain in the exact same manner a chemical can trigger specific parts of the brain. But,” he warns, “Excessive electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain can provide some of the same deleterious effects that chemical triggering can, or any excessive, exterior triggering for that matter.”

Speaking of drugs, Persinger believes that electromagnetic testing could do away with the need for pharmaceuticals over time. What are most drugs and pharmaceuticals but chemical triggers that let the brain know that it needs to assist the body’s healing process more. To help mask the pain of a sore wrist, until the body can find a way to heal it, the brain sends out prostaglandins. When the brain doesn’t provide enough prostaglandins, or it doesn’t provide them soon enough to our satisfaction, we take Aspirin. Michael Persinger thinks this same procedure can be accomplished in an electromagnetic manner, so that we don’t have to take aspirin, chemotherapy for cancer, or antibiotics in general. “We could make EM wavelength patterns work the way drugs do. Just as you take an antibiotic and it has a predictable result, you might be exposed to precise EM patterns that would signal the brain to carry out comparable effects.” As with controlled substances, if our brain did not have the proper receptors for these pharmaceuticals to trigger, their effect on our body would be negligible.

“Whether through Electromagnetic or chemical enhancement, we’re all looking for ways to assist what the brain does to help heal the body,” Persinger explains. “Among more sensitive individuals, tests show that their skin will turn red if they are led to believe that a piping hot nickel has been placed on their hand. That’s a powerful psychosomatic effect of the brain on the body. Suppose we could make it more precise?”

In his published paper “The Tectonic Strain Theory as an Explanation for UFO Phenomena,” Persinger maintains that around the time of an earthquake, changes in the EM field can spark mysterious lights in the sky. A labile observer, in Persinger’s view, could mistake such a luminous display for an alien visitation.

Persinger maintains that environmental disturbances –ranging from solar flares and meteor showers to oil drilling– can be documented to correlate with visionary claims, including mass religious conversions, ghost lights, and haunted houses. He says that if a region experiences enough mild earthquakes, or other causes of change in the electromagnetic fields, this may explain why one specific spot becomes known as sacred ground.

“One classic example was the apparition of Mary over the Coptic Church in Zeitoun, Egypt, in the 1960s,” he continues. “This phenomenon lasted off and on for several years. It was seen by thousands of people, and the appearance seemed to precede the disturbances that occurred during the building of the Aswan High Dam. I have multiple examples of reservoirs being built or lakes being filled, and reports of luminous displays and UFO flaps. But Zeitoun was impressive.”

“Might it surprise anyone to learn, in view of Persinger’s theories, that when Joseph Smith was visited by the angel Moroni before founding Mormonism, and when Charles Taze Russell started the Jehovah’s Witnesses, powerful Leonid meteor showers were occurring?”

“One might think Christians would be upset that this professor in Sudbury is trying to do with physics what Nietzsche did with metaphysics –kill off God. One might also think that devout ufologists would denounce him for putting neuroscience on the side of the skeptics.” {1} But Persinger claims that the purpose of his experiment is not to suggest that God doesn’t exist, or to disprove alien visitations. He claims that his argument concerns the notion that certain EM fields may be tinkering with our consciousness. He claims that most of those individuals that founded various religions may have experienced some sort of EM intrusion in their enlightening experiences. Other than the Smith and Taze Russell experiences mentioned above, there is the Saul of Damascus transformation that occurred following a bright flash of light. Persinger’s theory suggests that that experience may have occurred to Saul, later Paul, as a result of a minor seizure or a strike of lightning. Moses seeing the burning bush, may have been as a result of Moses being close enough to lightning striking that bush that receptors in his brain may have heard the voice of God coming from that bush. Persinger doesn’t appear to want to damage these stories in lieu of what these men went on to accomplish following the initial experiences, but he does believe that there was an electromagnetic element to these stories that has never been explored before. The element is what Persinger calls electromagnetic spirituality. These ideas, and others, have given rise to a field called Neurotheology. Though neurotheologists do not have specific concerns related to the validity of their subject’s belief, they do seek to determine what’s happening in the brain during a religious experience without apology.

Persinger claims he can create a religious experience for anyone by disrupting the brain with regular electric pulses. This will cause the left temporal lobe to explain the activity in the right side of the brain as a sensed presence. The sensed presence could be anything from God to demons, and when not told what the experiment involved, about 80 percent of God Helmet wearers reported sensing something nearby, a presence of some sort.

No matter how one reads the findings of Michael Persinger’s experiments –or the qualifiers he uses to settle the religious mind– the reader can’t help but feel they are conducted with the goal of undermining God, faith, and religion in general. Perhaps it’s our insecure inclinations regarding faith, or the fact that so much of science these days seems obsessed with diminishing God to a point that even the most devout begin to ask serious questions about their belief systems, but it cannot be denied that the role of God in our society is under attack, and the faithful cannot help but be defensive whenever a new scientist poses a new theory of this sort. To the latter, a word of caution may be necessary, for as science continues to progress, your outlier status, as one who refuses to meld the two, could increase.

As Norman Mailer once said: “If God didn’t want us to question His existence, why did He give us a progressive intellect?” Why didn’t He give us the less complex, and thus less curious, brain of the chimpanzee, and be done with it?  If God were insulted to the point of damning us in the afterlife every time we questioned Him, why did He give us a degree of brainpower that exists somewhere between His and the chimpanzee’s?  We could speculate, and debate, the reasons for this, and we would all end up in the same spot where we began. We could also spend all day speculating whether there is a grain of truth to Persinger’s theories on the electromagnetic capabilities of the brain, and the results of his experiments, but it’s hard to imagine that God would be insulted, or even aggrieved to the point of damning those involved in exploring the mind for answers, and thus using the gift of the mind He gave them, to its fullest extent.