mana from heaven = magic mushroom

to think that it wasn't blessings from god, but hallucinations that saved jews from death...

The Naked Truth was a fascinating watch, although I am worried if I show it to any of the churchgoing community that I am affiliated with, may revolt or something...

"Magic mushrooms can induce mystical effects, study finds"

No freaking DUH.

Granted I have experimented with hallucinogens (one was because of a side effect from a medicine prescribed to me for sleep, one legal one called salvia divinorum and then mushrooms) but it easy to see how a person can count them as religous expierences. They do not even need to have some chemical to do such. They can just deprive themselves of sleep or food or water.

A friend of mine eat a bunch of mushrooms (I believe he took a quater, when half an eighth to an eighth is usually what a first time user would use) on his first go. I warned him not to as he would have a intense expierence.

Well, he decided to anyways, and when we where not looking, he wondered outside.

"Hey ... where did go?"

shrugs all around

"Oh, well."

Not a good idea to be by yourself. You want to have a person near you that you trust to help incase of a bad trip or if you decide to do something incredibly stupid.

Ok, maybe we should of payed attention to him a little bit more ...

He ended up thinking he was dieing so he called 911. When the ambulance came, he started to run away from it as he thought it was some aliens. After finally realizing it was an ambulance, he lets them take him.

Ah, good times ...

I agree Israel should negotiate. But with who exactly?

The majority of my mushroom trips have been me alone, in the dark. My first trip I did an 8th of some rather powerful ones at my parents house while they were asleep. That was very naive of me, but everything went ok and I kept absolutely quiet even though I was literally out of my mind floating through the cosmos. It was the first religious experience of my life. Complete ego death.

Other successful trips followed the same recipe of me laying in the dark for hours, one with "God", one with everything. Time means nothing and you have no idea what your name is or what you're doing. You just have to go with the flow. Amazing.

Buuut, its not all fun and games. Once a friend and I decided to do 4.5g, more than I've ever done. He ended up puking up his shrooms', I kept them down. I ended up have a rather psychotic episode, complete with me being completely delusional and stripping naked at my friends house in front of everyone. I thought it was a dream; I thought I would be tripping forever. I felt like an idiot after that one. The shrooms tricked me, and I believed it completely. I was a lunatic.

These days I'm rather skeptical of mushrooms. Personally I value my working brain and despite the fact that I believe they're perfectly safe, I've had my fun. I think people who like mushrooms are really, really weird. Thats why I'm staying away from them. Mushrooms are so bizarre and ineffable and crazy. They have also provided me with altered states I never imagined were possible. They provided me with the only religious experiences of my life, even though I'm an avid atheist. To that I thank them....but my brain has had enough psilocybin for awhile....

Magic mushrooms can induce mystical effects, study finds. How dare you do that without God

Who said God wasn't involved? See, this is why I can't take hard core atheism seriously. If it was just skepticism, that might be one thing, but all too often it seems like it's essentially a reaction to the metaphysical and spiritual concepts put forward by literalist xtians, jews, and muslims. There are other ways of thinking of God beyond "an old bipolar man with a long white beard."

kura, I wouldn't take a single claim made by The Naked Truth at face value. Not a single one. The reasoning in that video is beyond sloppy, it's laughable. I've elaborated on why here.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that there aren't some interesting ideas in there, and some of them may be right, but I would not trust their arguments as they've presented them.

hrm...temporary error in typekey?

anyway, thank you, nationElectric,

but to ask for concrete evidence for the "cruel" truth of the religion that almost grabbed the world by its throat for many centuries will be neigh impossible.

maybe when the dead sea scroll is revealed(which intrigued me the most), it'll all be clear, but to just plainly ask everyone to dismiss the whole show is kind of slack.

another interesting part was, as I said, mana from heaven, because you've heard about 78 virgins right?

turns out it was a translation error and the reality was 78 raisins, which was quite rare in those deserts.

I will not stop to think of religions as a tool of the knowledgeble's to control the blind masses unless god actually appears, and even if one does appear, I will question its morality...

kura, I'm not saying dismiss the whole show. I'm saying don't trust it. There may be facts in there, but there is almost certainly a lot of crap, too. The reasoning is unsound. The evidence is sloppy. What I said is that I would not trust one single thing these guys say without investigating it thoroughly.

Frankly, trusting this program is roughly on par with trusting the bible. There is undoubtedly some truth in the bible. If one is attempting to understand various events in history -- or even in the present -- it may make sense to use the bible as a reference. But everything in it -- every last thing -- ought to be and must be verified independently, because the work as a whole is so obviously distorted. So it is, too, with the ironically-titled "Naked Truth."

And you know, there are other options beyond "trust the bible" and "trust a handful of conspiracy theorists." There's a great deal of evidence and debate out there. There's a ton of it. There are plenty of skeptics out there who are working to dismantle the bible, and who are doing it with scholarship far higher than in TNT. It is also, honestly, worth reading some of the better christian apologetics, because they often have a more nuanced and rational interpretation of the bible, biblical events, and the history and culture of the relevant regions. There's just a bunch of stuff out on the internet about this. There is no shortage of books. You can even hunt down some professors at some colleges and linguists and whatnot and email them and ask them their opinions about the matter.

I mean, even a quick trip to wikipedia, iffy as it can sometimes be, is an invaluable starting point. From it, we learn that The last of the Dead Sea scrolls were published in 1995. Some suspect a Vatican cover-up, but the evidence no longer supports this theory. There are no hidden scrolls which perfectly outline some master plan to hoodwink the world just waiting to be released. There is a case to be made that manna is mushrooms, but there are other theories, as well. (Personally, I hesitate to accept the mushroom theory because the story strongly suggests that the Hebrews subsisted primarily off of manna for forty years in the desert. I cannot possibly imagine anyone subsisting primarily off of psilocybin mushrooms for four weeks, let alone forty years...) But do you you see what I'm talking about? One theory from the video isn't credible anymore. Another one is, at best, a matter of debate. You've got to research this stuff on your own.

And remember, the question isn't whether the bible is true and god is an old man with a beard who gets drunk sometimes and slaps the jews around or the whole thing is a completely shameless scam run by a handful of cackling evil rabbis to enslave the known world. The question is "what the hell was going on?" It's not a true/false, it's an essay question, and it's going to take a hell of a lot more than one paragraph (or two hours.) Religion is complex. Until a couple of hundred years ago, it was your principle way of relating to the world -- you just didn't have a choice. Everything -- art, culture, philosophy, politics, sex, family, medicine, food, weather, physics, math, war, history -- all of it got filtered through a religious lens. Anything and everything significant that happened in a society wound up get bound into religion in one way or another. You have to remember that when you try to unravel religion. It's not driven by one person or one group of persons with one simple agenda. Are there politics and shameless cynical exploitation intertwined with religion? Sure! It's trivially obvious. But that's not all there is. Any time someone offers to take, what, five thousand years of human history and boil it all down into, "Well, the bottom line is that this one group was doing this one thing to achieve this one goal"... run for the hills. The world is a lot more complex than that.

Another note regarding mushrooms... all of the Abrahamic religions (and many other world religions) have various, legitimate mystical traditions. The mystic seeks to commune with the divine or the universe or whatever you want to call it. The mystic does this by putting him or herself into an altered state of consciousness. There are many ways of doing this including meditation, dance, chanting, fasting, and, yes, in some cases psychedelics. Mushrooms are one of many ways in which one can attain these states, and it's really no secret that the Jews (and the Catholics, and the Protestants, and the Muslims, and the Native Americans, and the Buddhists, and Taoists, and...) have people who attain altered states of consciousness in an attempt to understand God. Whether or not this act is useful or legitimate is open to debate. I'm happy to share my views on the matter, but this comment is currently long enough as it is. I am happy to share them if you're curious. Anyway, the point is that, even if the Hebrews used mushrooms... so what? What does that demonstrate? They never say what it demonstrates in the video. And, again, it's not like it's some dark terrible secret that would undermine Judaism or whatever. Maybe it's not totally common knowledge, but it's far from hidden.

They should negotiate!? That's rich, hey I'm going to go kidnap your family, and then you can negotiate with me.