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Just catching up on this one. Good stuff, a bit obscure maybe, but it’s about that fine line I often point to, the one mentioned in the OP of not knowing if experiences cause the brain changes or the brains are different, resulting in a different experience. I always allow people to report their own experience as true, because it is true to them, but then draw the line when they say it proves something that I should accept and act upon.

In The Righteous Mind, Haidt compares the Dawkins model of religion to Scott Atran’s. This is something you don’t see much in the atheist community, we can be just as guilty as paying attention to the louder voices as any community. The two agree on the theories of hyper-agency detection, and how that leads to believing spirits are behind the rustling of leaves.

But once that forms into religious activity, Dawkins sees it as a viral meme, an error that needs correction, and something that can be corrected by correcting the meme. This assumes our brains have stayed pretty much the same for 50,000 years and that successful religious memes haven’t changed much either. Atran sees religions as adaptive behaviors that encouraged cooperation and cohesiveness. That influenced group selection, so individuals didn’t survive just for being better hunters but for being better cooperators and for encouraging the group to stick together. As Haidt puts it, we are now struggling to deal with our tribal past, but if we didn’t have those tendency then, we wouldn’t be here to argue about it now.