Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled.
Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades.
“Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,” said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. “I can’t buy into that,” he said.
Ok so, here’s the funny thing, there might actually be a neural disorder to blame for the original polytheistic religions that morphed into modern religions.
There is the phenomenon that some people have an internal narration while others don’t, but there’s a hypothetical phenomenon within that phenomenon where someone has the internal narration, but doesn’t recognize the narrator as their own voice, but rather as an outside presence instructing them on what to do next.
First time I heard of this my mind immediately went to the evangelicals who swear up and down that they have a personal communicative relationship with God.
Ok, but followers of Judaism and Islam do not believe in a “personal relationship” with God. In those religions only the prophets got instructions directly from God, everyone else has to read their respective holy books.
I had the narrator when I was a kid and even asked other people if they could hear the person talking, which creeped out my siblings occasionally. Fortunately grew out of that by presumably realizing that was myself talking to me.
IIRC this is the idea behind avatar therapy for folks with vivid hallucinations
“Growing out of it” by slowly taking more and more control over how the hallucinations behave until they’re basically just a sensory extension of the internal monologue