Marsh Chapel Experiment

[Entheogentleman]

Hello fellow Christians! And thank you for reading this post.

I stumbled upon this video and was wondering what other Christians felt about these topics.

If you haven't heard about it google The Marsh Chapel Experiment its like 3 min.
In short a study was conducted by Dr. Timothy Leary where 15 people were given psilocybe mushrooms in a religious setting to see if it would generate a mystic or spiritual experience similar to the ones the authors of our Bible had.

One man Randall Laako later became Rev. Randall Laako as a result of the powerful impact this study had on his life.

This raises alot of questions to me about my Christian faith, does any one have any thoughts about it??

 

[2ndRateMind]

Well, the thought that occurs to me is that just because religious experiences may have been provoked by hallucinogens, doesn't mean that they are invalid as religious experiences. There is a difference between explaining the spiritual, and explaining it away. In other words, it seems to me that a mystical experience may be both a hallucination and a profound contact with truth: it doesn't have to be either one or the other. They are not mutually exclusive.

Best wishes, 2ndRateMind.

 

[Tissue]

I haven't watched the video, so this post may not be properly oriented toward the matter, but I'll give it a whack.

If an individual hallucinates in a particular context, their hallucination will likely have some relation to that context and to their expectations in that context. If they consider their hallucination to be a genuine experience (that is, not generated by their own brain), then they will clearly act upon it accordingly.

This does not prove that all religious experience is a hallucination, nor does it even give that view a huge boost.

 

[dayhiker]

A little reading in religous material from different pagan groups will lead one to know that drugs have often been included in some religious groups experiences.
If the 70's it was understood that drugs was opening up some around us to be open to Christianity because of the experiences they had had on drugs.

Not all religious experiences are experiences with the one true God. Some are just emotional experiences induced by emotional preaching. This also has been known about in the church for centuries. But God uses all this to lead those who will lissent to the voice of God. After all, God isn't against us having experiences, He basically doesn't want us to put those experiences before Him.

dayhiker