God as an Hallucinogenic Experience

Benny Shannon is a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Benny has traveled all over the world.

On one of his travels, in 1991, he ended up in the Brazilian Amazon forest. For some reason he ingested ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew made from plants that grow in the Amazonian forest.

It was a very powerful experience. He attained, he said, "visions that had spiritual-religious connotations." (Whatever that means.)

The good professor has published a study suggesting Moses "may have been stoned when he set the Ten Commandments in stone." Shannon says that "psychedelic drugs formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times."

[That would explain a lot -- like how at one moment God is loving and kind and the next moment is telling the Israelites to invade, plunder, rape and kill whole populations. Do psychedelic drugs make you schizoid?]

Anyway, Shannon goes on to say that "The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an altered state of awareness."

Shannon notes that "concoctions based on the bark of the acacia tree, frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, contain the same molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared."

So when you read about how biblical folks "see" sounds, you can understand that to be another "classic phenomenon" arising from the use of these types of drugs.

Shannon doesn't believe that the event on Mount Sinai was "a supernatural cosmic event," but he doesn't believe the story is a legend, either. It was "an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics."

It's all very interesting. While I don't think that the Moses of the bible was an actual historical person, the drug use of ancient peoples is quite well established and the Israelites were probably no different.

Or the other possibility is this: Maybe the scribes and priests who wrote these stories or cobbled them together from ancient sources, were stoned themselves.

If so, did the concept of god derive from a hallucinogenic experience?