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The God Helmet

Leumas

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For all mystics and theists who have interacted with "god"....have a look at this video and PONDER that you might be just having a DELUSION.

It is not a coincidence that to "see gods" one has to do something that is mind altering in one way or another. Either not eating, or ingesting too much of something or too little of something or maybe being at a stage in life that results in chemical imbalances due to too much love or too little love or illness or shock or accident or loss or or or.....in summary BRAIN DAMAGE to be blunt about it or if I want to be nicer about it BRAIN ALTERATION.

Listen well to the words in this video .... LISTEN if you can and your brains are not too "altered" to understand.




ETA: Another way to induce a delusion "see gods" without having a brain damage is to "meditate" or to induce a trance or move in rhythmic fashion or to bore oneself out of one's mind. Again in summary…mind alteration in some manner or another…. That is to not be of a normal mental state.
 
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I fear that believers will simply apply the "true Scotsman" logic..."Just because you can produce spiritual effects in the lab doesn't mean mine wasn't real."
 
I was listening to a Richard Wiseman interview where he was talking about the "god helmet" effects occurring even when it wasn't switched on. Does anyone have any info about this?
 
I fear that believers will simply apply the "true Scotsman" logic..."Just because you can produce spiritual effects in the lab doesn't mean mine wasn't real."
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Sorry but that does not apply in this case.

There are a lot of psychedelic effects you can produce with drugs and a lot of things you might see. Let's say someone says they can see atoms while high, which obviously they cannot... does that mean atoms can't exist?

In truth, the article does shed light on an interesting phenomena. However, it informs little about deities or any such thing.

To be honest, I don't really see the point. I tend to treat religion as a historical and social phenomena. Anything else is speculative in the extreme... on either side of the question.
 
Lamuella said:
I was listening to a Richard Wiseman interview where he was talking about the "god helmet" effects occurring even when it wasn't switched on. Does anyone have any info about this?
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It's referred to in Paranormality. *checks Kindle* The experiments were repeated by Pehr Granqvist, et al. in 2005, the paper was called Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields, in Neuroscience Letters, 379, pps 1-6.

ETA: Available here, for a price ($31.50).

Abstract

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with weak (micro Tesla) complex waveform fields have been claimed to evoke the sensed presence of a sentient being in up to 80% in the general population. These findings have had a questionable neurophysiological foundation as the fields are approximately six orders of magnitude weaker than ordinary TMS fields. Also, no independent replication has been reported. To replicate and extend previous findings, we performed a double-blind experiment (N = 89), with a sham-field control group. Personality characteristics indicating suggestibility (absorption, signs of abnormal temporal lobe activity, and a “new age”-life-style orientation) were used as predictors. Sensed presence, mystical, and other somatosensory experiences previously reported from the magnetic field stimulation were outcome measures. We found no evidence for any effects of the magnetic fields, neither in the entire group, nor in individuals high in suggestibility. Because the personality characteristics significantly predicted outcomes, suggestibility may account for previously reported effects. Our results strongly question the earlier claims of experiential effects of weak magnetic fields.
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Bikewer said:
I fear that believers will simply apply the "true Scotsman" logic..."Just because you can produce spiritual effects in the lab doesn't mean mine wasn't real."
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True Scotsmen can produce spirituous effects even outside the lab.
 
RobDegraves said:
There are a lot of psychedelic effects you can produce with drugs and a lot of things you might see. Let's say someone says they can see atoms while high, which obviously they cannot... does that mean atoms can't exist?
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We know atoms exist.

Let's say someone says they can see atoms purple and pink polka-dotted unicorns with red teeth while high, which obviously they cannot... does that mean atoms purple and pink polka-dotted unicorns with red teeth can't exist?

See the difference?
 
zooterkin said:
It's referred to in Paranormality. *checks Kindle* The experiments were repeated by Pehr Granqvist, et al. in 2005, the paper was called Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields, in Neuroscience Letters, 379, pps 1-6.

ETA: Available here, for a price ($31.50).
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Many thanks.

It's actually also online for free (thanks, google scholar)

http://www2.psychology.su.se/staff/pgran/Granqvistetal2006.pdf

EDIT: oh, and for completeness, I just found Persinger's response to this:

http://www.telefonica.net/web2/lupelandia/piramidescerebro/PersingerResponse.pdf
 
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Let's say someone says they can see atoms purple and pink polka-dotted unicorns with red teeth while high, which obviously they cannot... does that mean atoms purple and pink polka-dotted unicorns with red teeth can't exist?
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Sigh...

My point is that what people see while high or other type of influence has no bearing whatsoever on the existence or non existence of deities. It has historical, sociological and biological bearing but says nothing about whether or not visions have any bearing on reality.
 
RobDegraves said:
Sigh...

My point is that what people see while high or other type of influence has no bearing whatsoever on the existence or non existence of deities. It has historical, sociological and biological bearing but says nothing about whether or not visions have any bearing on reality.
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Oh yest it does....it explains where the idea came from in the first place.

The GENESIS of the GODS is the hallucinating mind of high-on-drugs shamans and primitive benighted hunter-gatherer societies.

The whole idea is the product of human imagination and has and never had any basis in reality....just like leprechauns or medusa. So the quest then is to try to find a scientific explanation for HOW and WHY would we have come up with the idea....what is its evolutionary advantage and cause if any. Just like we try to explain the evolution of human language.

Human language is an evolutionary by-product and so is religion and thus god.

If I showed you a hypothesis for how humans developed the idea for medusa…..does that then have no bearing on the actual existence of a medusa? Is it possible then to still believe in the existence of a medusa despite the fact that we now have all the explanation for why it was dreamed up in the first place let alone the fact that there is no evidence that it exists?


Have a look at this hypothesis of mine. Also I think you aught to read these books:
 
Oh yest it does....it explains where the idea came from in the first place.
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The GENESIS of the GODS is the hallucinating mind of high-on-drugs shamans and primitive benighted hunter-gatherer societies.
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Ok..first of all, large letters are not more convincing.

Secondly, it's a fine hypothesis but...

A. It's not new. Lots of historians, including myself, tend to look at religions as being a social constructs. There are a number of reasons why various societies developed religions and it was typically to fulfill some significant purpose. Just saying it's an hallucination is oversimplifying the subject hugely.


B. It still has no bearing as to whether or not a deity exists. Democritus made up the idea of atoms for philosophical reasons, yet they turned out to be true (well, the idea, not the details). Let's say I imagine beings made of sand. I just made them up. Does that mean that they cannot exist in any universe or any situation?

Once we know everything, then we can say for sure what possibilities are real and which are not. Until then, we simply cannot do so logically.

Like anything else that is purely speculative, I don't advocate taking time to research the reality of stuff that is just made up, just as I don't go actually looking for Zeus. However, a deity is such a vague and nebulous concept that I think saying that we made it up, whether true or not, hardly invalidates the idea.
 
Elypsis44 said:
We know atoms exist.

Let's say someone says they can see atoms purple and pink polka-dotted unicorns with red teeth while high, which obviously they cannot... does that mean atoms purple and pink polka-dotted unicorns with red teeth can't exist?

See the difference?
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From that, no, that does not mean said ridiculous unicorns can not exist.
It is no different from the atoms. Whether the subject of the statement is mythical, or actual, it doesn't provide any more or reality of the matter. Just because something mythical going in and mythical going out is still mythical, doesn't mean that something actual going in and actual coming out is any less actual or any more actual.

As far as this experiment goes, as interesting as it may be, it doesn't deductively rule out any such existence of a God just because some people have experiences of the presence of a God.

As well, the people whom claim such experiences are what we would call "Super religious." They are the ones, to whom, regular belief in their deity isn't enough, and they need that little extra proof for themselves, so that whenever they're questioned about their belief they can fall back behind their bulletproof wall of this such an experience.

So, even with this information given, they're the least likely of all religious people to ever concede that maybe there isn't such a God, even if this test could account for in and out of lab experiences of God somehow, the people this information would be targeted towards would be completely disinclined to accept it at any point, by the very nature of the people that are being targeted by it, they're the types that this wouldn't affect.
 
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Possible disruption of remote viewing by complex weak magnetic fields around the stimulus site and the possibility of accessing real phase space: a pilot study

Abstract

In 2002 Persinger, Roll, Tiller, Koren, and Cook considered whether there are physical processes by which recondite information exists within the space and time of objects or events. The stimuli that compose this information might be directly detected within the whole brain without being processed by the typical sensory modalities.

We tested the artist Ingo Swann who can reliably draw and describe randomly selected photographs sealed in envelopes in another room.* In the present experiment the photographs were immersed continuously in repeated presentations (5 times per sec.) of one of two types of computer-generated complex magnetic field patterns whose intensities were less than 20 nT over most of the area. WINDOWS-generated but not DOS-generated patterns were associated with a marked decrease in Mr. Swann's accuracy. Whereas the DOS software generated exactly the same pattern, WINDOWS software phase-modulated the actual wave form resulting in an infinite bandwidth and complexity. We suggest that information obtained by processes attributed to "paranormal" phenomena have physical correlates that can be masked by weak, infinitely variable magnetic fields.

*gasp :eek:

Someone get a debunker in there on the double!

And what the heck is 'real phase space'? Sounds kinda woo-ish... Maybe Persinger is a witch! :p
 
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hehe.. apparently a debunker has already been there.

An examination by Randi of the 65 statements made by Ingo Swann and Harold Sherman concluded that 37 percent of the statements were incorrect.[39] Of the statements, 7 were correct yet obvious, 11 were correct and available widely in reference books, 5 were probably true (scientific speculation), one was correct but not available from reference books, 9 were too vague to verify, 2 were probably incorrect and 30 were certainly incorrect.[39] Randi's evaluation of the 31 claims about Jupiter by Swann identified 6 as true, 1 as very likely, 3 as probable, 4 as obvious, 1 as "probably not," 11 as wrong, 1 as "not known," and 4 criticized for being vague or nonspecific in various ways, e.g., "it's liquid" and "surface gives high infrared count, and heat is held down."[40] Swann has stated he hates James Randi's guts.[41]
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Gosh... hated by Ingo Swann. I am jealous.
 
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