Word: lsd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This leads back to the question, "why do people smoke marijuana in the first place?" Dr. Preston Munster, Assistant Director of the University Health Services, declared that "anybody who uses drugs, be they marijuana, LSD, mescaline or heroin, has some deep and recognizable psychological problem." This would be difficult to prove or disprove and, even if it were true, it would not answer any questions about conscious motivation...
...religious; but there are less convincing cases in which drug takers appear to have read religion into their visions or rigged the setting to induce a spiritual experience. One professor at a Protestant divinity school recalls that he was handed a rose to contemplate after taking his dose of LSD. "As I looked at the rose it began to glow," he said, "and suddenly I felt that I understood the rose. A few days later when I reread the Biblical account of Moses and the burning bush it suddenly made sense...
...experience with drugs was a special service in the basement chapel beneath Boston University's nondenominational Marsh Chapel on Good Friday last year. Organ music was piped into the dimly lit chapel for a group of 20 subjects, most of them divinity students, half of whom were given LSD while the rest took placebos. A minister gave a brief sermon, and the students were left alone to meditate. During the next three hours, all except one of the LSD takers (but only one of those who took placebos) reported "a genuine religious experience...
...Around Christ. Most churchmen are duly skeptical about equating an afternoon on LSD with the intuitions of a St. John of the Cross or a Martin Luther. R. C. Zaehner of Oxford, a Roman Catholic and an expert on Eastern religions, holds that the drug-induced visions are simply one of many kinds of preternatural experience, and are qualitatively different from the ecstasies granted mystics. Presbyterian Theodore Gill, president of San Francisco Theological Seminary, wonders whether the drug experience might be a rival rather than a supplement to what conventional religion offers. Says he: "The drugs make...
Others feel that the church should not quickly dismiss anything that has the power to deepen faith. Dr. W. T. Stace, of Princeton, one of the nation's foremost students of mysticism, believes that LSD can change lives for the better. "The fact that the experience was induced by drugs has no bearing on its validity," he says. In an article on the drugs written with Leary for the journal Religious Education, Dr. Walter Houston Clark of Andover Newton Theological School argued that the structure of the drugs is similar to that of a family of chemicals...