From my point of view, both arguments seem false. The first one, about the sacred mushrooms, seems to be based upon the assumption that Christ was an ordinary man, just like you and me, who (in true 1960s fashion) achieved some enlightenment by way of hallucinogens. While I am not a Christian, I also believe Christ was what we call a "Manifestation of God". These are people sent by God to teach mankind more about what it needs to know to become... whatever God seems to want us to become. Considering many major religions have laws against mind altering substances I would consider a MOG (I am just going to shorten it so I don't have to type it all lol.) would not succumb to vices of that sort.
There are several peoples who have developed some dependance on natural hallucinogens, one example that pops to mind are the Huichol people of Mexico, but these customs seem to be customs that have grown to be religious beliefs rather than a purported teaching from God.
This is not to say that the Crusaders didn't get hold of magic mushrooms and use them during the crusades. This I could easily believe, but Christ doing drugs and saying "Oh wow, man." I just don't see it.
I think there is a real drive, or a blindspot, in the human psyche that gives man a serious need to believe he is the center of the universe and acknowledge no higher power. Even among ourselves we try to place one over the other on a superficial basis based upon color or skill or intellectual taste or even what colors we favor. Whatever puts us at the top of the heap. The idea of a MOG flies in the face of that somewhat. So does the idea of a power higher than us with plans all It's own.
The other book, the breakdown of the Bicameral mind seems to me to be an atheist's attempt to answer the question "If there is no such thing as God, then how come people in history thought he spoke to them"? Taking an assumption then trying to make an argument that supports it. In no culture I ever heard of, or even in the bible, (referred to here as probably the oldest written history in existence), was it ever purported that everyone could hear the word of God. If a bicameral mind was a part of evolution, and it happened that way, then this would have been the effect at some point. There were people who were not right in the head or even senile who were considered to be closer to God or the ancestors or holy, but it could be more believably argued that people whose mind was not quite right were more open to what Acedius referred to as the Collective Unconscious. This gave them random access to ideas which might have been, by coincidence, or divine design, relevant to items at hand. True prophecy has always been rare and (imho) not something that anyone sane would seek out. I have never heard of one who got that kind of divine attention that I would envy.
Here is another idea which has been something I have been thinking about recently, after watching the movie "What the bleep do we know".
We know from science that what we actually see and how we perceive things is somewhat false. We see a table as a static item that we put things on etc. In reality this table is a huge collection of atoms which are constantly interacting with anything close to it. By extension we become a part of any environment we spend any time at all in yet we look no different even though we leave parts of ourselves anywhere we go.
Same thing with time. We are beings that live in a linear time structure and we perceive the world from that point of view yet we also suspect time is not linear.
So how do we manage to exist and perceive things the way we do?
I have been thinking lately along the lines that there is something like filters in our psyches or even in our physical bodies, perhaps both, that orders our perceptions and parses things into an order we are capable of understanding and relating to.
Maybe those filters are out of whack somehow within the "minds" of some people and they hear and see things we do not and can sometimes, as a means of coping, process that information in useful ways.
Ok, that was off the subject sort of but I see a Bicameral mind as less of an evolutionary model than an aberration and one of the possible ways those filters could be messed up. I do not believe, however, that everyone was at one point that way.
Ok, that was long. If you got this far thanks for reading. Most people's eyes begin to glaze before this point. Hopefully I haven't entirely alienated the group lol.
I will be interested in seeing what the response is.
Lylah
posted 2 years ago. ( reply )
