Opinions and conclusions about Religion and God.

This is a nice exercise.I grew up nominally CoE, because the local school my parents sent me to required it. My Mother was a Sunday school teacher, but I know she never took the teachings as Gospel. I attended church as was required until I was about seven, and don't recall thinking much more than that the stories were interesting, but just stories and fables. I was never confirmed, it seemed like a pretty staid club.I think organised religion is a con. Most formal religions seem to be based on the understandings of bronze age farmers who were just starting to have enough free-time to seriously wonder about Why. I think that previous to this most nomadic peoples had enough on their hands trying to survive, and every day was pretty much like the day before. It strikes me that early man would have had a lot of questions and no real way to answer them. Cooperation and common purpose would have been key for early tribes, and answers which seem valid would have carried a lot of weight for unifying purpose. I think as religions became more formalised the reasons where mostly power based, whether consciously or not. I do not doubt many genuine believers thought they were truly doing Gods will when acting horribly to their fellows, but those country and empire builders spurring them on were far more pragmatic about their goals. Modern organised religion is the opiate for the masses, and it is effective. I do not think most life-long followers of organised religion ever challenge their own beliefs. I have thought them to be not fully human; to paraphrase Einstein, just a spinal column would have been sufficient.People want to know why. As has been said many times, religion provides an answer. Given the ultimate impenetrability of the question, it is good enough for those who can't or aren't willing to accept that there simply might not be an answer.Personal spirituality is slightly different. For those who see the problem of determining which religion is correct, a comfortable ground is to make something up which is acceptable. If this helps people to live lives that they find fulfilling then it's not so bad. I'm not sure how most personal views differ from a belief in ghosts or water divining, but as a method to avoid existential angst it's healthier than many others.At the risk of being pariahed as a fruitcake I will say that psychedelics had a strong influence on my current views. While on holiday during a university(CompSci) break I had a full-on flashback; physical collapse, hr below 20, convulsions, cold damp feet (if that means anything to anyone here) - the works. I think this was essentially an NDE, and the experience was similar to what I have read about them. The actual flashback lasted only 10 minutes, but was without a doubt the strongest most surreal experience of my life. God spoke to me. Literally. There were angels (of the traditional Christian type), singing, and a direct message/commandment from God - it was "Stop". As well as these religious themes, I heard a permanent tone that decidedly out-of-context, and the delicious paranoia (in retrospect) of being a constructed device that my Father (who was understandably panicking) wanted to reset with a secret reset button. I did document the entire experience over the next couple of days, and while the details have faded, the depth of the experience has not. Now after I'd managed to assimilate this experience I was left with the knowledge that God had spoken to me.This was at the time that Drosnan was about to release the Bible Codes book, and the concept of a multidimensional manual was very appealing. I bought it (not the book, the idea). After a couple of zealous months (I downloaded Elijah Rips Torah examination program) I started to realise all was not as it appeared. I was still in the process of reading Leary and McKenna and talking to many people about my experience. When it became clear that bible codes are simply a statistical certainty in any wide enough text, together with further reading about psychedelia I understood that my experiences might be internally generated. One of the clinchers was that the human brain produces its own hallucinogens during traumatic experiences. I cannot recall my source for this, or if in fact the body produces tryptamines or another chemical. Maybe someone can help or refute this belief. What I experienced was internally generated.I was always very curious about life and always wanted to know Why. I feel a strong sense of existence and know very little if anything can be _known_ at all. The psychedelic experience was fascinating to me, my first trip is still a seminal moment in my life. The initial rebirth into a the universe that is the same yet different still makes me tingle. The fact that perception is altered so much by a chemical strikes me as a clue that perception itself is internal. What we experience is _only_ a representation of the objective. I don't subscribe to McKenna's 'mushroom as pan-dimensional sentience', but there is certainly a lot to be learnt by cracking open the doors to perception.I went through a phase of meditation and astral-projection, meditation remains useful, projection is of course internally generated. I read Castaneda without knowing it was mostly fraudulent, and bought much of it. By the time I left university I had a personal spirituality heavily influenced by Rudolf Steiner, tribal myth and gnostic ramblings.Over the next couple of years reading pop-sci I left my wishwash behind and accepted that the universe might simply have no purpose that we can fathom. My uni thesis was a model of natural selection and reading Dawkins was fascinating. Watching and reading work by sceptics like Randi and Derren Brown, together with heroes like Feynman and Sagan (Demon Haunted World!) and even paying attention to Orwell's meaning behind doublethink (language as a framework for ideas and concepts) led me to drop any self-comforting supernaturalism.Phenomena like synaesthesia, schizophrenia and body-dismorphia with counter-intuitive problems like Monty Hall convince me further that I would not necessarily trust my experience over science - in contradiction to JavaMan in his Problem with Science II thread.Currently I am struggling with free-will, or rather the lack of it.To summarise;
I believe I exist, and that there is an objective external reality. I do not currently have a belief in a supernatural creator or anything supernatural for that fact. While there may be a god or gods, they are not deserving of worship, and given that god is unobservable (other than by internal generation) and undetectable for all intents and purposes its existence is irrelevant (to paraphrase someone else on this forum).So, to label myself, today I'd choose weak nihilist atheist.
Of course I could simply be a credophile who accepts whatever the last thing I read was.
p.s. Don't do drugs
p.p.s. Sorry for the length, I hope someone finds it interesting.

You mean I paraphrased your brother?

Cool, I hoped that was what you meant Crash.