It confounds me how there is a debate. It is obvious to me and probably most on this board that religious states are psychedelic. According to nearly every sacred writing throughout human history, some sort of sacrament was part of the beginning of a given religion. The first time i took mushrooms, i looked at a bush and marveled at how it appeared to be burning without flame, "consumed but yet not consumed" as in the OT, and came to the conclusion (in my admittedly scripturally ignorant mind) that Moses was indeed tripping. No, the booming voice of God didn't issue forth, only the one in my mind (hmmm...!).
I don't doubt the designers Of these structures are trying to replicate the interior vistas we see in states of altered consciousness. I don't know, of course, for any kind of fact but the reality is that Syrian Rue is native to the middle east and Acacia is repeatedly mentioned in the Torah, being specified as the wood used to build the ark of the covenant, for one instance. While TMK there isn't a sacrament mentioned in the OT, perhaps the use of this desert-huasca instigated many of the visions of the prophets. From my limited reading, i understood psilocybin mushrooms as being absent in the desertified middle east.
I know, yes, that the structures are Islamic in origin, but let me digress. One of the Hebrew ( how's this for a clash of cultures in this thread! )names of God is Eloa V'Daat, and one of the interpretations of that name is 'God made manifest in the mind'. Godtakes place in the mind, and personally i believe that modern religion fears this knowledge. Catholics kept the Bible out of 'vulgar', or common speech for centuries, preferring to say mass in a language no one understood-Latin. (The biblical translation into common speech is called the Vulgate for this reason.) Religion somewhere became 'religion', a strict collection of precepts designed to keep class structures in place-rich priesthoods in close contact with ruling classes- and to enforce morality in the common people as well as keep them horizontally mobile.
So what would happen if one night suddenly someone realized that god is not some fairy king on a cloud but rather grows within the vast confines of each one of own minds,singularly as well as collectively across humanity? Hmm, i wonder...
Shoot, sorry for the, err off topic.
I found this pic quite humorous, esp since the card was handed to me by a street evangelist long after a friend and i discussed the whole 'fairy king' thing.
Without further ado or delay, here in all 'his'simultaneously earthbound and cosmic glory, I present F.K.!
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