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Articles

Hallucinatory Experience & Religion Formation

Shawn Harte considers how hallucination might be mistaken for the supernatural.

When with a skeptical eye we scrutinize the supernatural mythology of the world’s religions, it can be easy to understand why David Hume viewed these beliefs as the products of “sick men’s dreams.” But it is premature to dismiss religion-forming experiences in this way. We resort too readily to skepticism, in order to relieve ourselves of the responsibility to investigate those things we do not know how to understand. Religions derive not from the supernatural; but nor do they derive from liars or madmen. Rather, I will assert here that religions are the result of honest and sane but misguided individuals who experienced two extraordinary but very natural phenomena: sleep paralysis, and the out-of-body experience.

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