Two recent surveys of people who took psychedelic drugs and reported “God experience encounters”, along with successful clinical trials using psychedelic therapy for depression, have given rise to public misconceptions about psychedelics and atheism. Specifically, three inferences have been drawn: (1) that the psychedelic experience tends to dissolve atheist convictions; (2) that atheist...
This final chapter compares the Catholic sacrament of extreme unction with modern experiments in psychedelic therapy for the dying. Extreme unction has an unusual history within Christianity: Catholics embrace it as a last, crucial fortification of the soul that prepares someone for heaven, but Protestants, going back to Calvin, view it as a fraudulent mystification. Secular scientists have...