Ok ok . . . I apologize. You're right.

I have a slight problem with this idea. We humans are equipped with sensory apparatuses that perceive the world. They are made to perceive the real world and not a fantasy one because if they did, they wouldn't be useful. As far as we know, is if a train is heading straight towards you at speed and you for some reason see it as a harmless cloud of gas, the train will still hit you if you don't move out of the way. Your hallucination has little bearing on that fact.

Healthy people perceive something that closely represents part of reality, like electromagnetic radiation at certain wavelengths. As social animals, humans also synchronize their perception of reality which is part why isolation is often an important step in psychosis. If you have a psychotic version of reality in your head, meeting others may mean meeting more real versions of the world which contradict your own. Most healthy people will challenge their perception of reality if it frequently contradicted.

Perception is flavoured by feelings, but generally speaking, God is felt rather than perceived. Fully conscious, healthy people generally don't see God manifested (not really). Believing in God doesn't mean your prayers will be answered, even if you believe they will. The point is, believing in something doesn't necessarily make it real. You'd have to believe so strongly that you are completely trapped in your own version of reality and even then, the train would still hit you.

I believe the most useful perception of the universe is the one which most closely resembles reality because, put short, it's just more predictable and practical.

Psychology Theorist Carl Jung developed the theory that we contain within our psyche, genetically, the great archetypes from the past. For instance, the earliest archetypal imagery Man possesses is the night & day. When the sun went down for prehistoric man, very bad things happened. Sun came up, things got better. The Sun & the Moon after many generations become a symbolic image inside our psyche that we start to attach significant other things to, for instance the Abrahamic god, it is symbolically attached to the rising/resurrecting Sun. Man then recreates story after story of symbolic themes to highlight and understand this Daytime & Nightime experience. It has evolved to where we are this day.

all well & true, but how does these two tie in with the neuroscientific explanations about perception of God?

i still anchor it with the chemical leu-enkephalin

Leu-enkephalin . . . isn't this a morphine-like neurotransmitter?

yes

i can't cut and paste bits from this article, but please read paragraphs 1.2 and 1.3:-

http://philipclayton.net/files/paper...rsonAndGod.pdf

I'm no expert on the brain chemistry of religion I'm afraid, but I have read that epileptic seizures can give intense religious experiences with the power to religiously convert the epileptic.

A quick search on google scholar got me this scientific article f.ex :

source >> The []God Module[] and the Complexifying Brain - Rausch Albright - 2003 - Zygon® - Wiley Online Library

yes i'm aware

i'm here just testing a hypothesis that this God feeling has its roots in the neuro-transmitter leu-enkephalin (basically an opiate) that is shared through people following a certain branch of religion through the neuroscience of empathy, merely by interaction, speech and emotiveness

the article i posted has an in-depth analysis of cognitive apparatus and sensory perception of God as well

I remember reading a short paper my psychology professor wrote called "Is God in the Amygdala?", but I no longer posses the paper. However, a google search of the same title turns up this (obviously based) article, which is kind of similar.

Are humans 'hard-wired' to believe in God?

^^well, that sort of confirms my hypothesis

though I wouldn't place it in the Amygdala, but the entire brain

lemme break down my hypothesis some more:-

Individualistic experiences

Autosuggestion - speaking in tongues, a still small voice that is God
entering into trance-like state triggering release of opiates and "reality" perception chemicals like serotonin

Group Experiences

Prayed over, singing praise - empathetical on a neuro-scientific basis for release of leu-enkephalin

Edit

i also see the need for most believers in some sort of "pattern recognition" - even if things happen in your favour just coincidentally, it is because God is watching over them

i put this down to our evolution since the days of being hunter-gatherers, our neural pathways are wired in such as way for us in order to strategise and see "patterns" in order to maximise survival