As an atheist nothing fascinates me more than the people of faith and I try to watch them as much as possible. Thankfully, Prof. T. M. Luhrmann at Stanford did exactly that for her book “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God,” and I have been reading her columns in The Times. These lines caught my attention:
"We often imagine prayer as a practice that affects the content of what we think about — our moral aspirations, or our contrition. It’s probably more accurate to understand prayer as a skill that changes how we use our minds........ The prayer warriors said that as they became immersed in prayer, their senses became more acute. Smells seemed richer, colors more vibrant. Their inner sensory worlds grew more vivid and more detailed, and their thoughts and images sometimes seemed as if they were external to the mind. Later, I was able to demonstrate experimentally that prayer practice did lead to more vivid inner images and more hallucination-like events."
Professor Luhrmann has essentially been trying to study how the believers can imagine, to the point of experiencing them as real, having conversations with "god" or being in the company of angels. It seems to me that highly religious people just have incredibly powerful imagination and can see things that are nothing more than creative images in their brain. Good for them!
"We often imagine prayer as a practice that affects the content of what we think about — our moral aspirations, or our contrition. It’s probably more accurate to understand prayer as a skill that changes how we use our minds........ The prayer warriors said that as they became immersed in prayer, their senses became more acute. Smells seemed richer, colors more vibrant. Their inner sensory worlds grew more vivid and more detailed, and their thoughts and images sometimes seemed as if they were external to the mind. Later, I was able to demonstrate experimentally that prayer practice did lead to more vivid inner images and more hallucination-like events."
Professor Luhrmann has essentially been trying to study how the believers can imagine, to the point of experiencing them as real, having conversations with "god" or being in the company of angels. It seems to me that highly religious people just have incredibly powerful imagination and can see things that are nothing more than creative images in their brain. Good for them!