I think there’s also an intuitive (naive-realist) view that anything that produces a sufficient level of warm fuzzies must be mysterious: if an experience is strange, powerful, and wonderful, then its cause must be strange, powerful, and wonderful as well. (Think of the amount of magical nonsense said about love, for instance.) It seems plausible that religion exists in the first place largely because of this line of reasoning applied to ‘mystical’ experience by people who had no way to know better.
I think there’s also an intuitive (naive-realist) view that anything that produces a sufficient level of warm fuzzies must be mysterious: if an experience is strange, powerful, and wonderful, then its cause must be strange, powerful, and wonderful as well. (Think of the amount of magical nonsense said about love, for instance.) It seems plausible that religion exists in the first place largely because of this line of reasoning applied to ‘mystical’ experience by people who had no way to know better.