guess we'll have to agree to disagree...
Not really. You continue to make fallacious assertions: you can agree to drop the issue, of course, but insofar as I support reason and logic, I must continue to hound your arguments. I do apologize that this must be: as I noted before, I am not claiming that your final conclusion (that religion is bunk) is wrong, merely that your arguments do not belong in the mouth of someone who claims to hold to reason and logic.
You are making the same logical fallacies as you started out making. If your argument is that disease caused delirium, then at least then you are stating a valid possibility. However, if that is your argument, then malnutrition and mortification are only relevant insofar as they lower the immune system and expose the body to infecting agents. Since one can (and usually does) become sick without these elements, they are extraneous. I still call them ad hominem attacks, but if you would wish, we can be kind and call them red herrings instead.
As for disease itself, as noted, science is quite aware that some sicknesses can cause delirium. But it is an “argument from probability” fallacy to then suppose that because a given religious figure COULD have had delirium resulting from illness, they actually had delirium resulting from illness. We can use many of the same questions I asked about psychedelic about diseases. Did delirium-causing diseases exist in Europe? Yes. Could holy individuals in Europe be infected by such diseases? Yes. The gap in the records is still quite problematic, however.
I don't doubt that you reject most medieval documents as reliable sources. However, by knowing the biases of the authors, we can still obtain pertinent information. Europeans in the middle ages had the perception of a holy illness. Saints were expected to become ill, or to have some malady, as a sign that they were particularly pious. There was a high level of motivation for religious figures to appear sick, and there was a high level of motivation for their vitae to contain this information. As such, we should expect an over-representation of sickness when compared to reality, rather than an under-representation. However, in studying vitae, one quickly realizes that few individuals were sick at the time of their first religious experiences. Some did indeed become sick later in life, but the types of sicknesses described are rarely in line with known diseases that cause delirium. Most appear, in all honesty, to be the result of hypochondriac. And, of course, only a portion of those who experienced delirium would have experienced it in such a way that would have been acceptable to society at large (more would-be saints were ostracized than accepted). Furthermore, as the Middle Ages progressed, the number of saints who experienced physical diseases decreased ("spiritual" manifestations became more popular: I am sure you can postulate why this might have been).
The result of what we know about medieval holy men and women is that only a portion were ever ill when they had a religious experience, and only a few of those who were ill sometime in their life were ill when they first had a religious experience. The logical conclusion from this is that your "slim chance" is actually the reverse. There is only a slim chance that any given religious figure was on drugs or in a sickness induced delirium when they had a religious experience. Your claim to the contrary has no basis in logic, reason, or the evidence.
Your new claim about dehydration likewise doesn't stand up to a basic scholarly inquiry. Yes, severe dehydration can cause delirium. Desert peoples survive, however, because they know how to stay hydrated. In order to dehydration to be a valid explanation, you would need to explain the extraordinary circumstances that led someone who normally could stay hydrated to become so dehydrated that they became delirious (and, in turn, explain how they stopped the delirium before they died of dehydration, so as to spread their message).
But again, even if all your claims were accurate, they are still meaningless. Let us discard those who were malnourished, those who were injured, those who were sick, and those who were dehydrated: there are still individuals who have had religious experiences. The twirling dervishes are a wonderful example. Since they don't suffer from any of your proposed causes of religious experiences, will you accept their messages as being really from god?
If I may be so bold as to assume your answer before you give it, I suspect it is "of course not." Again, this is why your arguments are so ineffectual: you are addressing the circumstances around religious experiences, when it is really religious experiences themselves that you reject. These experiences are actually fairly well studied (given their religious nature). Modern scientists know what behaviors can cause them, and they know what happens in the brain when these occur. Some scientists even propose that they can artificially induce them. Suffice it to say, religious experiences are real, at least in the sense that they can occur in healthy, sane individuals, even if not in the sense that a person is really connecting with god. You gain nothing by discarding the circumstances of just a few such experiences.
Perhaps you'd prefer to instead attack the experiences themselves? You are welcome to, but I warn you, you'll have no better luck there than you have with any of your other "arguments."
