Memo to them: Your god detests your wealth and will brutally and eternally punish you for it. (Transfer the funds to my account, and you'll be saved!)  

At this point I'll resist the temptation to go off on some caustic rant like House probably would, though it's still fun to imagine what he'd say walking around that parking lot. He's good. He makes us atheists proud. He'd probably mention how confused and hypocritical religious people tend to be. How they frequently lack the slightest hint of intellectual integrity. And how they don't ultimately believe what they say they do or live according to either the letter or the spirit of their own holy book, nor even know what it contains. If they did, they'd probably be atheists, too (or at least a lot poorer). As House himself put it during a conversation with a nun in "Damned if You Do," "You can have all the faith you want in spirits and the afterlife, heaven and hell, but...when it comes time to cross the road I know you look both ways."

Is House antireligious? Goddamn right he is.

He's also an especially astute non-believer, a fact to which the following quotation testifies:

House: "I choose to believe that the white light people sometimes see, visions this patient saw, they're all just chemical reactions that take place when the brain shuts down."

(Three Stories)

And even this clearly calculated-to-offend insult possesses a certain measure of truth:

House: "If a person talks to God, he's religious. If God talks to him, he's psychotic."

(House vs. God)

There is compelling and provocative science on the subject of spiritual experience, research that should make everybody wonder about where religious conviction really comes from.

There is evidence, for example, that religious visions occur disproportionately to people with a condition called Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE), a finding that shines new light on the whole history of religion. Consider Ellen White, who began to have potent religious visions after suffering a brain injury that brought on epileptic symptoms...and then later went on to found the Seventh Day Adventist Movement.

These observations have been supported in the lab, such as one study where temporal lobe epileptics were more emotionally sensitive to religious words than ordinary people, with the medial temporal lobe serving as the main culprit in the heightened responding (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1998). That's pretty convincing evidence for a causal relationship between TLE and spiritual experience.   

And if naturally-occurring epileptic paroxysms can bring people closer to God, then so should artificially-occurring brain stimulation that similarly alters brain patterns, right? That's precisely what neuroscientist Michael Persinger wondered before repurposing a special helmet that had the capacity to stimulate people's parietal and temporal lobes by generating fluctuating magnetic fields, a device he dubbed the "God Helmet." The results of his studies are fascinating, and they grabbed a lot of media attention. When normal participants were hooked up to the God Helmet, around 80% experienced a "sensed presence," which ranged from something very subtle to full-blown visions of God (Persinger, 2002). Oh, is that where faith comes from?

Possibly, although the findings have been tricky to replicate independently, and at least one group of researchers (Granqvist et al., 2005) concluded that the differences may have been due not to the magnetic stimulation at all, but merely to the greater suggestibility of the religious subjects. Persinger has vigorously defended those initial studies but, as always, caution is in order. Nonetheless, his findings are exciting for religious skeptics, because they so directly impugn the authenticity of religious experiences.

OK, so where does that leave House and his position on religion? The right perspective on House's religious views follows naturally from the whole of the preceding analysis. He claims that religious people might be psychotic - and he might be right - but mostly what he believes is that religious experience is nothing more than a spurious byproduct of brain activity that under certain circumstances yields phony impressions of reality. That's something many nonbelievers have suspected for a long time. Now there is solid empirical evidence (from multiple sources) to support those skeptical intuitions. And there will no doubt be even more convincing evidence to come as science continues on its current superstition-bashing course.

All of which renders our scurrilously iconoclastic House an exceedingly worthy emissary of the scientific enterprise as well as a valuable resource in the war on religious stupidity.

Ted Cascio is co-editor of House & Psychology (John Wiley & Sons).

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