Clivedurdle

My niece did a similar version of this a few years ago - not on her website though

http://www.jo-davies.com/

gurugeorge

I think that while I have no objection in principle to some religious visions having been drug-induced, such a specific and tricky-to-establish hypothesis doesn't seem to me to be necessary, since the brain has its own innate ways of producing visionary experiences anyway, and they're not all that hard to get or induce.

Think dreaming while awake (or the other way round, being awake while dreaming, i.e. lucid dreaming). A bit of sleep deprivation, some breathing exercises or repetitive prayers, and Bob's your Uncle, you can talk to "gods" and "spirits" (who seem quite real and will talk back to you in riddle-like phrases) to your heart's content. People in the West have just gotten out of practice over the centuries - hence we don't believe in "magic" any more, because we have no "magic"-like experiences in our lives (i.e. we don't talk to "gods" or "spirits" like the ancients did, it isn't a sanctioned part of our culture any more to do so). It's not necessarily even pathological, but just a slightly unusual development of a natural function (kind of a dislocated proprioceptive function mixed with whatever the mechanisms are behind hallucination and dream imagery).

I posted this a while ago on the General Religion forum, but here's the link again to a great article on the Straight Dope, from a rationalist who has played about with this. It's an area that's being explored now by cognitive science (e.g. Susan Blackmore, Thomas Metzinger).