May 06
Sam Harris Needs Research Volunteers
trackbackResearch Volunteers Needed!
We are preparing to run another fMRI study of belief and disbelief, and we need volunteers to help us refine our experimental stimuli. This promises to be the first study of religious faith at the level of the brain. By responding to the four surveys I have posted online, you can make an enormous contribution to this work.
Please answer as many of the surveys as you can. If you only have time to answer one, please choose at random (otherwise, we will have many more responses to the first than to the others).
Feel free to post this message to your blog or to forward the relevant links to your friends. We especially need Christians to respond, as one of the goals of these surveys is to design stimuli that a majority of Christians will find doctrinally sound.
http://www.samharris.org/
May 17th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
I’m a manic-depressive atheist and, while off meds, I’ve had extremely powerful manic episodes every three years (only mild depression at times between episodes.) They all resulted with a conclusion that the only rational explanation for my incredibly enjoyable and hyper-functional state…was that I was Jesus Christ. I’m now on meds, but I was able to function at a higher level during manic episodes until the very end…when my brain raced too fast and I realized that I had to commit myself to the local loony bin.
I even bought my current car while “psychotic Jesus,” with my dad unaware of my delusions. I picked an overpowered 240HP Honda Accord Coupe V6 6-speed…because I thought Jesus might have to get somewhere fast! I’m an expert on manic-depression, with a B.A. in Journalism, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Jesus, as presented in the historically highly questionable New Testament, was a manic-depressive.
I’ve written about this on the religion section of my mostly-satire website, http://www.thegayblackjew.com/ My views will surely be seen as biased, however, logic supports my argument. Manic-depressives have contributed at a hugely disproportional rate to literature, music, inventions…anything that requires thinking “outside the box.” Furthermore, of those who have had the delusion of thinking they were the son of god, only manic-depressives can be mentally capable of presenting themselves as sane despite their insanity. Schizophrenics cannot do this. Only temporal-lobe epilepsy, to my knowledge, is capable of producing a man or woman who is completely delusional yet able to appear sane to at least most people.
Historians view history with hero-worship goggles and ignorance about manic-depression. I’ve read a convincing book arguing that Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin were manic-depressive tyrants…and I believe Jesus was as well. In one essay on The Gay Black Jew, I call Jesus a psychotic manic-depressive bastard tyrant, and provide a serious defense of my views. But historians, for the most part, simply cannot even consider that such powerful people could be “mentally ill.” Oye vey, yo, manic-depression can explain so much of the world’s history…it drives me nuts! It takes one to know one…and I know many.