Ah! But!:D If I tried to say that I have an invisible/intangible friend thats a 6ft pink rabbit you would (quite reasonably) assume me to be mistaken (or indeed certifiable), and say that I am wrong, even though you cannot disprove me.
I will let you fill in the rest of my argument:D

whats a Faraday cage? I've got a feeling I should have learned this in physics and I was too busy messing about...

But we would (should) agree on your right to believe in said rabbit should you decide to do so.

The difference for people such as Towny and myself is that we have experienced things which to us is 'evidence', even though we don't require it.

A big (or small) metal cage around something that supplies that something, or whats outside the cage, with insulation from an electrical charge or electromagnetic interference....I think

I think i'll get me one of them

getoutta town.....what you would/should agree is that I am a loony tune for believing such a thing....and need locking up.

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The difference for people such as Towny and myself is that we have experienced things which to us is 'evidence', even though we don't require it.

The brain is capable of making you feel such things....and of making you think that they are real.
An example: When someone has an angiogram (dye is pumped into the coronary arteries and then observed on x-ray) they can feel that they are in the presence of an invisible being/angel/devil, they might feel an incredible feeling of peace come over them. Or they might simply feel heat or that they have wet themselves. All of which is simply an effect of the dye entering the coronary arteries.
There are other explanations for religious experiences....

i think some studios use it broadcasting studios that is :D

EDIT ramrod your right about the dye thing i have heard that is true

No, I might think it would be an odd concept but that's up to you.


Ahh that old chestnut. Well it looks like you've got thousands of years of religious belief all wrapped up there.....

Actually no. I have felt personal experiences which can only have come from my God. They are too personal for me to go in to here but your theory does not allow for the times when I've been faced with extreme danger only to be given a 'get out of jail' card which got me out of the situation. This has happened many times.

My own father felt that there was a peaceful friendly invisible presence in the room when he had his angiogram.

Is the dye just acting as a weak drug? I suppose anything could have some kind of effect when lots of it is in your bloodstream. But what do I know eh??

but you would know that I had a screw loose

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Ahh that old chestnut. Well it looks like you've got thousands of years of religious belief all wrapped up there..... Actually no. I have felt personal experiences which can only have come from my God. They are too personal for me to go in to here

Of course they were personal, they were (probably) created by your brain for you.

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but your theory does not allow for the times when I've been faced with extreme danger only to be given a 'get out of jail' card.

I have had occurrences, close shaves, near misses that, if I was religious I would have attributed to a higher power. Before you say....how do you know that they weren't down to divine intervention?.......of course I don't but I think that on balance, they probably weren't.
We could go round and round for days......years even:D

lol, good one

eh, I do a lot of reading on .co.uk and .com, and very little posting, but i couldn't resist this one as much as i tried.

I don't mean this in a nasty way or anything, but is it possible that some people just need something to believe in because they aren't or can't be happy otherwise?

No, it's when the dye enters the coronary arteries, but even if it is a drug effect then it doesn't disprove my argument.

What, like 'hydrogen atoms, if left long enough, turn into people' ?

That's the biggest pile of nonsense in the universe, and very far indeed from proven, observable fact.


EDIT - You mean all these years, all I had to do to stop seeing the big man with the beard was to stop sniffing dye? I knew Epson printers were bad news. Well I'm kicking that habit right now then. ;)

Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili of the Nuclear Medicine Division at the University of Pennsylvania have been conducting brain-imaging experiments on highly proficient mediators in order to identify those other brain areas where activity is linked to religious experience. One of their most interesting findings was decreased activity in the posterior superior parietal lobule. Our sense of distinction between self and world may well lie in this brain area.

It is certainly described in the mystical literature of all the world's great religions as a state of ultimate unity. And when a person is in this state he or she loses all sense of discrete being, and even the difference between self and others is obliterated.

Such experiences are often described as a perfect union with God, and would appear to be mediated by the posterior superior temporal lobule, which is what helps us diffentiate between self and non-self. So altered activity in this area might be linked with a sense of unity with the world.

A decreased sense of awareness of the boundaries between the self and the external world could lead to a sense of oneness with others, thereby generating a sense of community and cohesiveness. This could explain why religious sentiment could be of positive benefit for the survival of tribes. This could also explain why natural selection favoured the evolution of a religious centre in the brain.

But Newberg and D'Aquili have an even more parsimonious neurological explanation for God. They point out that one natural function of our brains is constantly to infer the causes of events we witness. But what happens when no cause is discernible?

Newberg and D'Aquili postulate that the brain invokes gods, powers, spirits or some similar causal agent. When we find no discernible rules we can use to our advantage, we construct myths to help orientate ourselves within that disquieting universe.

But even if the final location of God is in the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain, this might not be a final victory for atheists. Finding the existence of a neural structure which sustains religious experience could simply be evidence that a higher power so contructed humans as to possess the capacity to experience the divine.