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Includes an interesting account of Robert Jesse's (former Oracle VP, software engineer) efforts to resurrect this research:

When the history of second-wave psychedelic research is written, Bob Jesse will be remembered as one of two scientific outsiders who worked for years, mostly behind the scenes, to get it off the ground.



For those who haven't seen them, his talks are highly worth watching and will completely change your ideas about religion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM-yinhpOgQ

http://vimeo.com/10968562


Your comment reminds me of Timothy Leary and the Harvard experiments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Psilocybin_Project


In the same vein (and including at least one essay by him):

http://csp.org/practices/entheogens/EFR.html


> will completely change your ideas about religion

Sort of presumptive.


Keep in mind that I can see how many views those videos have. I can also see what the best selling books on religion are on Amazon, how many copies of the books he references are sold each week, how many views the most popular YouTube videos on religion have, etc. So it's not difficult to say that even if he is drawing from the most famous works in the academic study of religion, which he is, most people here probably haven't been exposed to those ideas.

And as for why most people here would be convinced, he has an engineering and science background, and his talks are largely aimed at engineers and scientists.

FWIW he's not trying to get you to 'believe' in religion, whatever that means. Rather, his points are more along the lines of that scientists should learn more about the academic study of religion and the commonalities between religion and science, rather than allowing the discourse on religion to be set by extremists.




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