Im not sure what this sensation is other than real hunger for like a peace of bread or something when I read specifically the Christian bible kjv. It is something I’ve heard people in my old church discuss and most people who are Christian usually explain it as a hunger for the word of god but it has to be a psychological effect right? Maybe something that effects the part of the brain that makes you hungry. It’s really od and I’m curious if other fellow atheists experience this and if theres any studies done on it? If there is a psychological effect taking place I could use it in my mentalism show to showcase the placebo of god.
Never heard of it and never experienced it when I was a god-botherer. That’s not to say it isn’t real for some people. The simplest explanation would be that the Bible is boring as hell to read and so you are undistracted from things you would normally ignore, and/or, you naturally want to do something more, er, gratifying. Or, it could be some people’s psyche’s way of telling them that reading the Bible is particularly pointless and snore-inducing. YMMV.
It is at this moment a bare claim.
I can only concur, people get hungry, sometimes while reading, this doesn’t seem that mysterious to me.
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Were you reading about loaves and fishes?
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Most people get hungry reading about or discussing food topics. It’s like thinking about yawning.
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There’s a verse in the Beatitudes that says, “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’ sake” and predictably some literalists who don’t understand metaphor and simile think they should be physically hungry and salivating from any stimulus that involves “the things of God” or it’s not genuine. Then one claims to feel this hunger when reading the Bible and others pile on to say, why yes, I [guess I] feel it too.
I saw this phenomenon over and over – a sort of one-upsmanship where Fred gives personal testimony of something god allegedly did or some feeling he had from god and then the next person feels they have to at least match, if not top it, and pretty soon you have all these strained dutiful testimonies of god’s personal intervention in everyone’s lives. It’s the whole point of “testimony time” in the churches I went to – you are made to publicly testify of god’s activity in your life and it better be good. And they know that the herd effect will whip everyone up to at least participate in the active manufacturing of all that confirmation bias.
Hilariously, you could almost sense everyone’s inward groan / eye roll when testimony time rolled around because most people are not so much an attention whore that they actually enjoy it. It’s just part of the dutiful oblations you must engage in.
No but thats a great question! The reason I’ve brought this up was to see if other atheists may have experienced this as it occurs as a form of hunger that is very intense. Even if I had eaten prior to doing any studies. If you’re familiar with any of Darren browns work such as his netflix special “miracle” he has studied and explained in detail the psychological effects that “faith healers” use along with the placebo of god. I’m curious if this was an effect that was intended to push belief and faith as other people all over discuss this same occurrence. Is it that the people of old who wrote these texts knew that to some degree they could utilize the people who take things to a literal extreme to there advantage and say this is a form of evidence that god was “working through them”? The reason i bring this up is due to how common it actually is in churches to discuss this specific topic as if it’s gods divine presence. Kind of reminds me of the age old lie about males having a rib missing
It is far from universal. I spent from age 5 to about my mid 30s in a particular fundamentalist sect including a year of formal study in a Bible Institute and had some adjacent exposures (including soft-core charismatic) in similar churches and never heard of this hunger thing – then, or since. Nor do I in retrospect recall experiencing anything remotely like it despite being one of those who studied my Bible systematically and daily.
That’s not to say I couldn’t have missed a real phenomenon, including even just reading about it before you mentioned it. But maybe it’s better to address your derived thesis – that this is a real physiological response of some kind that they latch onto as “proof” of … something.
It certainly would be. I mean, in the world of charismatic Christians, there are very real emotional / ecstatic experiences that are regularly ginned up and pointed to as evidence of god’s spirit doing stuff. There’s a spot in the brain informally referred to as the “god spot” that, if stimulated with an electrode, produces euphoric feelings of transcendance and non-duality and a sense of a benign Presence, etc. And it can doubtless be released by various forms of drugs or meditation as well. So those things get leveraged as evidence. In fact if you point out that these feelings are a psychological / physiological / emotional response that can be reproduced at will without summoning the gods or going through religious rituals, theists will shrug and point out that this is how god made us and that god uses that spot in the brain to make himself real to us. Or some such hogwash.
So such a mechanism isn’t novel or unheard of.
It was completely sarcastic.
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And so was my response geez 
just wanted to respond with a thesis thats all.
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This seems very convenient for the theist in an argument. What “spot” is this exactly? I’m aware of theories of the experience of god being a placebo but I had no idea that there was a spot in the brain that is directly responsible for such experiences. I actually assumed it was taking place with multiple separate parts of the nervous system reacting together. Thats really fascinating I wonder if this “spot” is in other creatures brains and how they would react to that stimulus?
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I read about this some years back, where someone was being treated for some issue – ISTR epilepsy – and it was discovered they could induce religious experiences and feelings with these electrodes they were mucking about in there with. To me, this was just more evidence that religious “peak experiences” have a biological explanation; to theists presented with this info, it was evidence that the brain is purpose-built to commune with god. So it goes.
From what I can find today, however, the situation is rather more murky than that and probably more as you assumed, or as the below link puts it, “functional not anatomical” – although the article also says religious experiences and increased religiosity seem to be associated with primal structures in the brain stem, which would fit with the universality of religious tendencies – per studies of people with brain lesions.