And when people do that, you say "they're having an argument," right?
Nope! around here it's called "flaming".
But that's what I've learned been part of sci for 4 years. I've had a few myself.
It only seems less likely because that is usually the basis for people's belief in the soul. There are many who believe in the soul because they believe in ghosts, reincarnation, stories of psychics, things like that. None of those things would require the existence of God.
But all those things fall under the same premise, mysticism. As identified by Ayn Rand, this is what it reads: What is mysticism? Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one's senses and one's reason. Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as 'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing.'"
"To the [mystic], as to an animal, the irreducible primary is the automatic phenomena of his own consciousness. An animal has no critical faculty; he has no control over the function of his brain and no power to question its content. To an animal, whatever strikes his awareness is an absolute that corresponds to reality - or rather, it is a distinction he is incapable of making: reality, to him, is whatever he senses or feels. And this is the [mystic's] epistemological ideal, the mode of consciousness he strives to induce in himself. To the [mystic], emotions are tools of cognition, and wishes take precedence over facts. He seeks to escape the risks of a quest for knowledge by obliterating the distinction between consciousness and reality, between the perceiver and the perceived, hoping that an automatic certainty and an infallible knowledge of the universe will be granted to him by the blind, unfocused stare of his eyes turned inward, contemplating the sensations, the feelings, the urgings, the muggy associational twistings projected by the rudderless mechanism of his undirected consciousness. Whatever his mechanism produces is an absolute not to be questioned; and whenever it clashes with reality, it is reality that he ignores."
"Since the clash is constant, the [mystic's] solution is to believe that what he perceives is another, 'higher' reality - where his wishes are omnipotent, where contradictions are possible and A is non-A, where his assertions, which are false on earth, become true and acquire the status of a 'superior' truth which he perceives by means of a special faculty denied to other, 'inferior,' beings. The only validation of his consciousness he can obtain on earth is the belief and the obedience of others, when they accept his 'truth' as superior to their own perception of reality."
-From For the New Intellectual
"A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between 'I know' and 'They say,' he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him."
"From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness - and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror."
"When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient superspirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness on others. 'They' are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. 'They' are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind." Ayn Rand.
http://hem.passagen.se/nicb/mystic.htm
Mysticism is a desease that deterioriates the mind, and it has been doing so for milleniums ever since the development of consciousness by man. Have you ever heard of Julian Jaynes theory?. here's an example of his theory:
Jaynes's central idea is that our modern type of consciousness is a recent development; indeed, that it began no more than 3,000 years ago. In earlier times human mentality was characterized by auditory and sometimes visual hallucinations, in which people heard the voices of the gods speaking to them and telling them what to do. Only when this process became internalized and recognized as coming from within the percipients' own minds did truly modern consciousness begin. The minds of 'preconscious' humans were split in two (the 'bicameral mind'), probably as a result of a dissociation between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Jaynes finds evidence of this in Homer's Iliad, in which the characters continually receive orders and advice from various deities.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/anthony.campbell1/essays/skeptic/jaynes.html
Thus and conclusion when man, retreats his mind to hear the voices again to feel the power of his imagination and call it god's wisdom and begins to hear voices or speak in tongues, what he is going through is a mild case or in some cases, a full blown mind desease schizophrenia.
chizophrenic Process, the Emergence of Consciousness in Recent History and Phenomenological Causality: The Significance for Psychotherapy of Julian Jaynes
Wilkinson, Heward
International Journal of Psychotherapy, 1999, March, Vol. 4(1): 49–66
This paper on Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (J. Jaynes, 1990) illustrates the concept of "phenomenological causality," whose affinity to the Buddhist concept of "co-dependendent origination" is also touched on. Jaynes's work is explored through its relevance to schizophrenic experience. He holds that hallucination was a normal aspect of human decision-making in stress situations until around 1200 BC — the bicameral mind. This does not imply a simple equation of schizophrenic experience and hallucination; for originally there was consensual authorization, now lost, of hallucinatory experience of gods and ancestors. Jaynes has 4 main hypotheses: bicamerality (the two modes of mentality); the constitution of consciousness; the dating; and brain localization of the different modes of experience. Consciousness replaces bicameral resort to hallucination in situations of stress; it is constituted through metaphor. Schizophrenic experience transforms bicamerality through the shift in consensuality: as alienation, deconstruction of thinking and language, loss of the 'analog' constitution of normal consciousness and self, a fusion of consciousness, and bicameral modes.
Religion: Is It All In Your Head? Talan, Jamie
Psychology Today, 1998, April, Vol. 31 (2): 9
Vilayanur Ramachandran, M.D., a neurologist, believes that somewhere in the brain's temporal lobes there may be neural circuitry for religious experience; he points to the fact that about 25 percent of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy are obsessed with religion. He thinks that these patients' seizures caused damage to the pathway that connects two areas of the brain: the one that recognizes sensory information and the one that gives such information emotional context.
Well that should suffice for now, if it was a bit too much just let me know, I get going and it's just hard to stop!.
Godless.