Remember your disillusionment upon learning that Scooby Snacks were in fact peyote buttons and that H. R. Pufnstuf was really all about, you know, puffin’ stuff? How your innocence and wonderment vanished in the twinkling of an eye? That’s exactly how long it will take for your faith to go up in smoke when you read this shock-horror revelation about high times on Mount Sinai:
“And all the people perceived the thunderings, and
the lightnings, and the voice of the horn, and the mountain smoking.â€
Thus the book of Exodus describes the impressive moment of the giving
of the Torah on Mount Sinai.The “perceiving of the voices†has been interpreted endlessly since
these words were first written. When Professor Benny Shanon, professor
of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reads
the verse, he recalls a powerful hallucinatory experience he had when
he visited the Amazon and drank a potion made from a plant called
ayahuasca.“One of the things that happens when you drink the potion is a visual experience created via sounds,” he says. Shanon
presents a provocative theory in an article published this week in the
philosophy journal Time and Mind. The religious ceremonies of the
Israelites included the use of psychotropic materials that can found in
the Negev and Sinai, he says.“I have no direct proof of this interpretation,” and such proof cannot be expected, he says.
Haaretz deserves kudos for its hilariously poker-faced use of “provocative” and “theory†to describe what is merely the latest example of a delightful parlor game: The attempt to explain—or explain away—religious belief in terms more credulous and literal-minded than the believers themselves could ever hope to manage. The History Channel specializes in this sort of thing (click here for a scientific explanation of the events of Exodus), which, incidentally, seems tailor-made for people who are very high very late at night. But at least the History Channel can say it’s only after ratings.
The odds of a debilitating, emetic hallucinogen writing the Ten Commandments are pretty slim, to judge by the works we can authenticate. But I think clever readers will agree that our aim need not be to refute or discredit a man who thought and then said this in earnest:
Shanon also sees signs of a hallucinogenic vision in
the story of the burning bush. “Moses ‘looked, and, behold, the bush
burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed,’†Shanon quotes from
Exodus 3:2. Time passes differently when under the influence of the
plant, he notes. “That’s why Moses thought the bush was not consumed.
It should have been burned in the time he thought had passed. And in
that time, he heard God speaking to him.â€
Well, at least he’s got a sense of humor about it: “[N]ot everyone who uses a plant like this brings the Torah. . . . For that, you have to be Moses.†So was it God talking through the plant? Or just the plant talking? It’s hard to say what, if anything, Prof. Shanon is thinking—perhaps he just wants to put his own “experimentation” in better company—but he makes for a good cautionary tale. At a time when many intelligent people are turning away from religion, and many not-so-intelligent ones turning to it with greater fervor, we tend to think only of how literalism makes religion dangerous. It can just as easily make religion dull. If one believes, like Christopher Hitchens and friends, that religion is man-made, one should at least regard it as art, and not as a tedious accounting of pharmacology, geology, meteorology, epidemiology, or even, God help us all, alien invasion.