just following your example..

Religion offers most people a supportive community of like-minded followers and a set of ready made one size fits all rules by which to live your life productively and with meaning.
Only the rules are dated etc and they do not necessarily lead to bettering one's self because wisdom and self discipline must be earned and are not so easily obtained as by just reading one book.
My father was raised a strict catholic and chose to raise his kids as atheists. He now leans towards zen teachings.
I think Christianity has an important place in Western culture eg, literature that it has inspired, so I wouldn't worry about sending my kids to an Anglican school and I certainly would teach my children the most fundamental 'golden rule' (which is decidedly lacking in Muslim beliefs).
Besides all children know that scripture teachings are a load of crap. I remember how we made fun of it when we were kids, while the moral of the story was always pretty obvious to us - but somehow people come to believe that its all actually real - and that part I will never understand. Why bother complicating things with religion...?

works for me.

Fear of death compels people to look into religion. In order to remove the fear of death, I recommend ingesting psilocybin mushrooms. They are a remarkable tool in connecting your mind to your soul. :)

Cool, a self-described agnostic who appears to hold a positive belief in a soul. I like it.

Your nuttier than a squirrel turd.

He probably means soul as in what Loui(F! I can't spell for **** tonight) Armstrong had that made his trumpet sound so sweet.

In any case, doing 'shrooms is a really bad idea. Besides doing brain damage, the effects are anything but fun.
Save time, hit yourself in the head w/ a hammer. It'll be cheaper and you won't risk going to jail.

Sir, you are WRONG! I am sorry to be so blunt. If you do research into psilocybin, you will find that it is simply a DMT compound. It releases the same DMT substance that is released when you are in dreamy sleep. Trust me... 20,000+ hours of research. It simply allows you to dream while consciously awake connecting you to your spiritual side. Just because it is not socially accepted doesn't mean that it is wrong. Also, it has been known to help patients with brain cancer and cluster headaches. I recommend researching your information a little bit better before saying that something as natural as a mushroom could cause brain damage. Prove me wrong... Dare you to try.

Unfortunately, I agree with you regarding the jail part, yet who knows, that could change too one day...

The effects are fun if you are happy with your life! The effects are hard (also known as a bad trip) if you are a depressed individual and haven't found the creator yet. Shrooms make you feel the connectedness to your self aka your soul. If you led a bad life where you treated people poorly, then your soul will be slapping you in the face to wake you up. If you led a happy life of caring and helping people, then your soul will give you an amazing experience. The experience is different and unique to each user. I will tell you one thing that is for certain--shrooms encourage critical thinking and creativity to the highest degree imaginable. If you are an artist looking for ideas, shrooms are the way to go. For example, a musician could become a musical genius over-night so-to-speak. However, our Luciferian society does not promote creativity. If you don't believe me that our society is Luciferian, take a look at this video series, and it will surely wake you up to REALITY: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyqwrsuQoNk Watch if you dare! Beware... watching this will change your life forever, but not for the bad...

BTW, Atheists will have the hardest time with shrooms, for they will realize that the creator does exist, and they will most likely have a hard time coping with it. An atheist won't be an atheist after using shrooms... he will become an agnostic, for he will realize that there is a father creator, yet he will realize there is no way to prove it other than to offer people the same experience that he shared. Get my drift?

you really have no idea who I am, do you...

I could say the same thing about you, but since we are all one... you are me.

Um....if it allows us to dream while awake, then its connecting us to our sleepy side, not our spiritual side.

Not when you are seeing images in your head that you have never seen with your own two eyes. That should be proof enough when experienced. I personally saw many images with high-detail that I could draw as if I were there in the dimension that the mushrooms were showing me.

Like I said... images I have never even seen with my own two eyes. How would that be possible if the spiritual world did not exist?

Like hell I am.

Because you dink, it's a DREAM. Look it up. By forcing your brain to do things it's not supposed to do, dream while conscious, you are damaging yourself. It's like giving a computer conflicting commands. The computer crashes. While brains are resilient, they aren't industructable. With continual use, the damage is cumulative. One of the first things to go is logic and reason skills. Which is why people like you start thinking the hallucinations are real.

There's enough crazy and stupid in the world. Please stop trying to recruit others into your craziness and stupidity.

Humans have a capacity for creativity. Most of our scientists seem to believe we are unique in this, but I'm not convinced (lack of evidence isn't evidence of lack). We are truly awesome at it, though. I don't need to dream, nor take mushrooms to do it - I just closed my eyes and 'created' a series of things I've never seen before, including an underwater hotel, and alien that can live between planets and on planets; a dynamic, pulsing 3d artwork of colored energy, and a lightless parallel reality composed of feelings and sensations.

This is what humans do, and the capacity for it is built into the structure and chemistry of our brains. Most of us have a healthy division in the nature of our waking minds and our sleeping minds, so that we can properly perceive and respond to reality while we are awake.

To have our natural, inborn creative, imaginative capacity increased, and to have that division between waking-brain-activity and dreaming-brain-activity diminished naturally leads us to having bizarre experiences while on mushrooms, but it doesn't necessarily mean that our mushroom experiences are evidence of a 'spiritual world'.


To more directly answer your question: Its possible because we are wired for that potential. We can learn more about this by studying neurology. Our dreams and our ability for creative visualization are personally available evidence of this.

Arcamedes, are you for serious? Do you feel inclined to compensate for my laziness and spoon feed me links?

I knew that acid could cause permanent damage, I didn't know that mushrooms could. I've known many shroom heads who became wing-nuts, but I thought it was because of how they interpreted their experiences, not because of physical harm they suffered.

Some of the greatest leaders and musicians were "shroomers." We are meant to be creative people -- not people in a structured and controlled society. It is hard to be creative when everything you say and do is controlled by the government.