For me it’s Richard Dawkins, as otherwise I’d still be an uncommitted agnostic. I always had problems respecting anyone who still believed in fairy tales as an adult but the New Atheists pointed out so very clearly just how dangerous religions are.
I get how Carl Sagan could be a prime reason for one to see the light, but I wonder how DMT fits in the picture any more than any other chemical compound that affects consciousness (like alcohol for instance).
Aratina, try some and find out. This made me lol, for real.
KGsays
dylanadkins,
DMT is used by a number of South American religious groups as part of their ritual (in the form of a drink, ayahuasca/yage/caapi, which also contains an MAO inhibitor, without which DMT is digested in the stomach), so atheism is clearly not an invariable consequence of taking it.
Maybe (only slightly) off-topic but, does anybody notice that National Prayer Breakfast Day and Groundhog Day are both today. Since they have so much in common couldn’t we merge these somehow and get a big blowout holiday, say like christmas or something and get off work and school?
Thanks for the lesson on ayahuasca, KB. I had no idea.
jeanmarcsays
You’ve got it all wrong!
According to the interview of a psychiatrist (and Opus Dei member) in the major Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger, we atheists are envious and jealous of the religious people. We apparently suffer of three narcissic injuries: 1. that god still isn’t dead 150 years after Nietzsche. 2. we lack the outside moral instance provided by religion. 3. like ambivalent adolescent we crave for the parental love that we reject. Indeed we envy the believers for the love and safety that they receive from religion, while we are totaly alone in a gray and cruel world.
Lack of religiosity is apparently a mental defect, comparable to a lack of empathy.
I would love to if it weren’t illegal for most of us here in the USA. Reading the Wikipedia article on DMT just goes to show that getting around baseless drug laws is about the only thing religion is good for anymore. (Too bad the kid with the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner didn’t think of making ceremonial marijuana usage part of his religion. If he had, he would have won his case, right justices?)
lordshipmayhemsays
By “DMT” I assume you mean dimethyltryptamine and not any of the other “DMT” references I found. (Dreamtime is tempting…) From Wikipedia’s disambiguation page:
DMT may refer to:
In chemical substances:
Dimethyltryptamine, a psychedelic tryptamine
Dimethyl terephthalate, a polyester precursor
Desoxymethyltestosterone, a designer anabolic steroid
DMT1 (Divalent Metal Transporter 1) a transporter involved in human iron metabolism.
In other uses:
Digital Monetary Trust, an anonymous internet banking system using electronic money
Discrete multi-tone modulation, a form of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)
Dʿmt, a historical kingdom in what is now Eritrea and northern Ethiopia
Diver Medic Technician, a certification offered by the National Board of Diving and Hyperbaric Medical Technology
Dreamtime, a creation belief from the Australian Aborigines
John Phillips, FCDsays
KG, but there again you are talking about using the drug with all their cultural baggage attached to taking it. It’s a bit like how believers, as compared with non-believers, describe their experience with the god helmet. The religious couch it in religious terms while the non-religious just describe it as an amazing if baffling experience some with some sense of overlaying unity. In both cases it is just the result of varying powerul magnetic fields on the brain. In other words, ignoring those like RD for whom it had no effect, those who do experience something describe it, where they can, in terms that fit their existing cultural milieu.
Having used drugs like DMT in the past, as well as having had very similar experiences through sleep deprivation and even fever, I could easily see how easy it would be to mischaracterise simple brain chemistry screwups as more than they are. Especially if you have the cultural baggage to see such experiences in a certain way. Aren’t both Paul and Mo suspected of having had epilepsy or similar.
Note, I am not disagreeing with your point, simply attempting to put it in some context.
unclefrogysays
All experiences are open to many interpretations, I will go so far to say that we do not “see” the world with our senses but we see it with our minds. I have known people who took that class of drugs DMT being one who saw “GOD” and interpreted that god as jesus. People have “experiences of the Divine” many ways commonly with meditation as well as other activities including dance, chanting, sex and drugs of various types. Below is a link to a TED talk which I think illustrates what physically is occurring in all of these types of experiences the rational mind is being overwhelmed without loosing consciousness. Then the mind which does the thinking decides that the experience means what it thinks it means.
for some it means god for others it means no god it is still the mind that is doing the interpretation of events to find meaning. It is partly for this reason that science was devised as a way to get out of the errors in interpretation that so easily can occur.
The thing that is interesting is that we humans seek out this experience across many cultures and in many ways. What is it doing for us?
I get how Carl Sagan could be a prime reason for one to see the light, but I wonder how DMT fits in the picture any more than any other chemical compound that affects consciousness (like alcohol for instance).
I can only guess at what Alex means when he credits DMT, in addition to Sagan, as a reason for his atheism, but unlike alcohol, which is a bludgeoning, dulling sort of euphoriant, indeed a depressant, DMT is – as you probably know from reading the Wiki article – super-strong, if short-acting, psychedelic/hallucinogen. Many people have reported gaining insight due to psychedelics because they actually change the way your mind perceives, interprets the world, and interprets ones own thoughts. They are literally mind expanding (something that can’t be said of most drugs). The most well known psychedelic, LSD, has been used successfully in conjunction with psychotherapy because of its ability to enable the user to view things in a manner that’s not usually possible without the drug(s). It allows one to be more open to assimilating ideas that do against the grain of cultural programming, especially the sort that emphasizes concrete, absolutist thinking. And if Alex was using DMT around the same time he was reading Carl Sagan I can easily imagine those two things working together to change ones mind in a very literal sense. (BTW, I’ve never had the pleasure of using DMT, but I have experience with a few other psychedelics).
An alternative explanation could be something similar to my experience, which was that drugs, particularly psychedelics, opened my eyes to the ways our brains can manufacture unreality, given the right input. I understood how people could think they saw or heard ghosts and how they could misperceive all manner of things. I realized that our brain accounts for any and all sort of mystical experiences. This has been reinforced by reading about how our brains function and reading books like Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things and Sagan’s Demon Haunted World.
Of course, Alex may mean something completely differnt.
gillycsays
Uncle Frogy @ 15 – what is it doing for us? It makes us feel special. (Speaking as one who has been there and done that, and has since been able to get some perspective on it.)
DMT is – as you probably know from reading the Wiki article – super-strong, if short-acting, psychedelic/hallucinogen. Many people have reported gaining insight due to psychedelics because they actually change the way your mind perceives, interprets the world, and interprets ones own thoughts.
unlike alcohol, which is a bludgeoning, dulling sort of euphoriant, indeed a depressant,
But I would say that alcohol also changes how one’s mind percieves, how one interprets the world, and how one interprets one’s own thoughts. Far from being bludgeoning or dulling, dance floors and social spaces are abuzz with inebriated people, and great writers–great thinkers and artists for that matter–have also been great drunkards. And while psychedelics might allow one to think against the grain of culture, alcohol does that and it disinhibits people enough to allow them to act against the grain of culture (including in some unfortunate cases, morals and laws).
I don’t know about how it was for other people, but alcohol certainly “opened my eyes to the ways our brains can manufacture unreality”, or, that is, to how fickle our minds are (or how pickled they are as it were). You have to take more than a drop or two of alcohol, but the results definitely can take you places you might never have gone.
The ability of DMT to affect one’s consciousness doesn’t seem like it would necessarily be any more insightful than alcohol to a person, which is why I’d be interested in finding out what it was about DMT that sparked Alex’s atheism (or perhaps extinguished Alex’s theism).
jaycubedsays
While I was already an out atheist when I tripped for the first time (1970 – 3/4 of an Orange Wedge, about 4-8 doses of LSD & STP), I met both God and the chemist who made that product 15 years later in the psychiatric hospital I worked at. (I didn’t see God while tripping, but I did watch a pair of sandstone cliffs come to life & battle each other!)
Ubiquitous Perpetuity God, a favorite of Herb Caen, had his name changed by the Court to “God”. The judge demanded a first & middle name: most people who couldn’t avoid him generally called him U.P. or Eubie to his chagrin. As I regularly answer to “god”, he didn’t care much for me. By the way, Neitzsche was correct, God is dead.
The chemist, who had been the third major S.F. psychedelics maker, was a sad story. He truly did burn out his brain with the effects of massive dosages of various hallucinogens/precursors.
I personally found DMT to be extremely unpleasant, but having taken a fair amount of other hallucinogens in my past (in rock & roll, drug testing was multiple choice, not pass/fail) I do believe that they set me up to question a lot of things others took for granted.
a miasma of incandescent plasmasays
DMT, makes me hear Tool’s Merkaba in my head just thinking about it. I got this post right away. Very nice. Try DMT once, and then go read Revelations after you come down, tell me that one experience was the result of a real spiritual vision and the other simply a change in your brain chemistry.
Hahaha… I’m glad at least a couple people nodded knowingly. Cheers, @Plasma Miasma, spiral out and keep going, my friend.
Ok, the tl;dr version: I grew up in a catholic Caribbean island. At 7 the notion of “God and the Devil” seemed a little fishy to me, so I did a nice scientific test, and went out in the back yard and summoned Satan. He failed to show, corroborating my hypothesis nicely. By 13 I was going around calling myself an atheist.
Then in my early 20s I moved to Northern California, joined the nascent Rave culture, and was exposed to a lot of slippery spirituality – slippery in the sense that it was defined vaguely enough that it was hard to argue away – and I became doubtful. I could easily imagine uberintelligences, hypedimensional ‘alien’ DNA manipulations, all sorts of things SO sophisticated that we have not even begun to reach the technology able to detect them, you can only “experience” them. I became an agnostic. This then led me to the conclusion that if there WAS another dimension to reality other than our meat brains, with perhaps some everlasting life payoff if you “figure out the rules”, then what could possibly be more important than figuring out those rules? So I dove into it – chasing down every lead, every religion, every pathway to spiritual enlightenment.
And after a while, it all boiled down to empiricism. Yes, one can experience the divine via meditation or entheogenics or hearing a really sweet gospel choir – but did anyone else experience the same thing you did? Was it in your head, or outside? If all the human minds in the world ceased to exist simultaneously, would the experience still be there?
Reading Carl Sagan’s “Demon Haunted World” led me to ask the right questions, and DMT proved to myself beyond a shadow of a doubt that the experiences are internal. What you experience in that state feels so real, so tangible, it’s overwhelming. To have someone else do it right next to you at the same time, and describe something completely and utterly different.. welp.
There were many other things, of course – I feel I should mention Gerald Edelman; the man is on the forefront of how neuronal firings can create mind… but definitely Sagan and DMT were the final kicks I needed to “see the light”.
Note: I ain’t condoning or endorsing DMT, that stuff is bruuutal. But I had a mothership to board :)
I tried DMT once. Interesting.
For me it’s Richard Dawkins, as otherwise I’d still be an uncommitted agnostic. I always had problems respecting anyone who still believed in fairy tales as an adult but the New Atheists pointed out so very clearly just how dangerous religions are.
A good post albeit rather verbose.
I get how Carl Sagan could be a prime reason for one to see the light, but I wonder how DMT fits in the picture any more than any other chemical compound that affects consciousness (like alcohol for instance).
is there a TL;DR version of this?
Aratina, try some and find out. This made me lol, for real.
dylanadkins,
DMT is used by a number of South American religious groups as part of their ritual (in the form of a drink, ayahuasca/yage/caapi, which also contains an MAO inhibitor, without which DMT is digested in the stomach), so atheism is clearly not an invariable consequence of taking it.
Maybe (only slightly) off-topic but, does anybody notice that National Prayer Breakfast Day and Groundhog Day are both today. Since they have so much in common couldn’t we merge these somehow and get a big blowout holiday, say like christmas or something and get off work and school?
Thanks for the lesson on ayahuasca, KB. I had no idea.
You’ve got it all wrong!
According to the interview of a psychiatrist (and Opus Dei member) in the major Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger, we atheists are envious and jealous of the religious people. We apparently suffer of three narcissic injuries: 1. that god still isn’t dead 150 years after Nietzsche. 2. we lack the outside moral instance provided by religion. 3. like ambivalent adolescent we crave for the parental love that we reject. Indeed we envy the believers for the love and safety that they receive from religion, while we are totaly alone in a gray and cruel world.
Lack of religiosity is apparently a mental defect, comparable to a lack of empathy.
If you understand german, have fun reading this interview: http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/kultur/diverses/Antireligioese-sind-neidisch/story/25551290
Taken together or separately?
I would love to if it weren’t illegal for most of us here in the USA. Reading the Wikipedia article on DMT just goes to show that getting around baseless drug laws is about the only thing religion is good for anymore. (Too bad the kid with the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner didn’t think of making ceremonial marijuana usage part of his religion. If he had, he would have won his case, right justices?)
By “DMT” I assume you mean dimethyltryptamine and not any of the other “DMT” references I found. (Dreamtime is tempting…) From Wikipedia’s disambiguation page:
KG, but there again you are talking about using the drug with all their cultural baggage attached to taking it. It’s a bit like how believers, as compared with non-believers, describe their experience with the god helmet. The religious couch it in religious terms while the non-religious just describe it as an amazing if baffling experience some with some sense of overlaying unity. In both cases it is just the result of varying powerul magnetic fields on the brain. In other words, ignoring those like RD for whom it had no effect, those who do experience something describe it, where they can, in terms that fit their existing cultural milieu.
Having used drugs like DMT in the past, as well as having had very similar experiences through sleep deprivation and even fever, I could easily see how easy it would be to mischaracterise simple brain chemistry screwups as more than they are. Especially if you have the cultural baggage to see such experiences in a certain way. Aren’t both Paul and Mo suspected of having had epilepsy or similar.
Note, I am not disagreeing with your point, simply attempting to put it in some context.
All experiences are open to many interpretations, I will go so far to say that we do not “see” the world with our senses but we see it with our minds. I have known people who took that class of drugs DMT being one who saw “GOD” and interpreted that god as jesus. People have “experiences of the Divine” many ways commonly with meditation as well as other activities including dance, chanting, sex and drugs of various types. Below is a link to a TED talk which I think illustrates what physically is occurring in all of these types of experiences the rational mind is being overwhelmed without loosing consciousness. Then the mind which does the thinking decides that the experience means what it thinks it means.
for some it means god for others it means no god it is still the mind that is doing the interpretation of events to find meaning. It is partly for this reason that science was devised as a way to get out of the errors in interpretation that so easily can occur.
The thing that is interesting is that we humans seek out this experience across many cultures and in many ways. What is it doing for us?
uncle frogy
I for got the link
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
uncle frogy
Aratina
I can only guess at what Alex means when he credits DMT, in addition to Sagan, as a reason for his atheism, but unlike alcohol, which is a bludgeoning, dulling sort of euphoriant, indeed a depressant, DMT is – as you probably know from reading the Wiki article – super-strong, if short-acting, psychedelic/hallucinogen. Many people have reported gaining insight due to psychedelics because they actually change the way your mind perceives, interprets the world, and interprets ones own thoughts. They are literally mind expanding (something that can’t be said of most drugs). The most well known psychedelic, LSD, has been used successfully in conjunction with psychotherapy because of its ability to enable the user to view things in a manner that’s not usually possible without the drug(s). It allows one to be more open to assimilating ideas that do against the grain of cultural programming, especially the sort that emphasizes concrete, absolutist thinking. And if Alex was using DMT around the same time he was reading Carl Sagan I can easily imagine those two things working together to change ones mind in a very literal sense. (BTW, I’ve never had the pleasure of using DMT, but I have experience with a few other psychedelics).
An alternative explanation could be something similar to my experience, which was that drugs, particularly psychedelics, opened my eyes to the ways our brains can manufacture unreality, given the right input. I understood how people could think they saw or heard ghosts and how they could misperceive all manner of things. I realized that our brain accounts for any and all sort of mystical experiences. This has been reinforced by reading about how our brains function and reading books like Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things and Sagan’s Demon Haunted World.
Of course, Alex may mean something completely differnt.
Uncle Frogy @ 15 – what is it doing for us? It makes us feel special. (Speaking as one who has been there and done that, and has since been able to get some perspective on it.)
Re: satanaugustine
But I would say that alcohol also changes how one’s mind percieves, how one interprets the world, and how one interprets one’s own thoughts. Far from being bludgeoning or dulling, dance floors and social spaces are abuzz with inebriated people, and great writers–great thinkers and artists for that matter–have also been great drunkards. And while psychedelics might allow one to think against the grain of culture, alcohol does that and it disinhibits people enough to allow them to act against the grain of culture (including in some unfortunate cases, morals and laws).
I don’t know about how it was for other people, but alcohol certainly “opened my eyes to the ways our brains can manufacture unreality”, or, that is, to how fickle our minds are (or how pickled they are as it were). You have to take more than a drop or two of alcohol, but the results definitely can take you places you might never have gone.
The ability of DMT to affect one’s consciousness doesn’t seem like it would necessarily be any more insightful than alcohol to a person, which is why I’d be interested in finding out what it was about DMT that sparked Alex’s atheism (or perhaps extinguished Alex’s theism).
While I was already an out atheist when I tripped for the first time (1970 – 3/4 of an Orange Wedge, about 4-8 doses of LSD & STP), I met both God and the chemist who made that product 15 years later in the psychiatric hospital I worked at. (I didn’t see God while tripping, but I did watch a pair of sandstone cliffs come to life & battle each other!)
Ubiquitous Perpetuity God, a favorite of Herb Caen, had his name changed by the Court to “God”. The judge demanded a first & middle name: most people who couldn’t avoid him generally called him U.P. or Eubie to his chagrin. As I regularly answer to “god”, he didn’t care much for me. By the way, Neitzsche was correct, God is dead.
The chemist, who had been the third major S.F. psychedelics maker, was a sad story. He truly did burn out his brain with the effects of massive dosages of various hallucinogens/precursors.
I personally found DMT to be extremely unpleasant, but having taken a fair amount of other hallucinogens in my past (in rock & roll, drug testing was multiple choice, not pass/fail) I do believe that they set me up to question a lot of things others took for granted.
DMT, makes me hear Tool’s Merkaba in my head just thinking about it. I got this post right away. Very nice. Try DMT once, and then go read Revelations after you come down, tell me that one experience was the result of a real spiritual vision and the other simply a change in your brain chemistry.
Hahaha… I’m glad at least a couple people nodded knowingly. Cheers, @Plasma Miasma, spiral out and keep going, my friend.
Ok, the tl;dr version: I grew up in a catholic Caribbean island. At 7 the notion of “God and the Devil” seemed a little fishy to me, so I did a nice scientific test, and went out in the back yard and summoned Satan. He failed to show, corroborating my hypothesis nicely. By 13 I was going around calling myself an atheist.
Then in my early 20s I moved to Northern California, joined the nascent Rave culture, and was exposed to a lot of slippery spirituality – slippery in the sense that it was defined vaguely enough that it was hard to argue away – and I became doubtful. I could easily imagine uberintelligences, hypedimensional ‘alien’ DNA manipulations, all sorts of things SO sophisticated that we have not even begun to reach the technology able to detect them, you can only “experience” them. I became an agnostic. This then led me to the conclusion that if there WAS another dimension to reality other than our meat brains, with perhaps some everlasting life payoff if you “figure out the rules”, then what could possibly be more important than figuring out those rules? So I dove into it – chasing down every lead, every religion, every pathway to spiritual enlightenment.
And after a while, it all boiled down to empiricism. Yes, one can experience the divine via meditation or entheogenics or hearing a really sweet gospel choir – but did anyone else experience the same thing you did? Was it in your head, or outside? If all the human minds in the world ceased to exist simultaneously, would the experience still be there?
Reading Carl Sagan’s “Demon Haunted World” led me to ask the right questions, and DMT proved to myself beyond a shadow of a doubt that the experiences are internal. What you experience in that state feels so real, so tangible, it’s overwhelming. To have someone else do it right next to you at the same time, and describe something completely and utterly different.. welp.
There were many other things, of course – I feel I should mention Gerald Edelman; the man is on the forefront of how neuronal firings can create mind… but definitely Sagan and DMT were the final kicks I needed to “see the light”.
Note: I ain’t condoning or endorsing DMT, that stuff is bruuutal. But I had a mothership to board :)