I started as a Christian, raised as a Christian, was baptized, blah blah.
As I got educated about biology and evolution, I started to wonder, "Why is it incompatible with creationism?" Yes, I am very aware of many Christians saying they have no problem accepting evolution but at that time, I did have a problem with it because I was a Christian fundamentalist that believed in creation. As I became aware of my sexuality, I wondered why it's a sin because it just felt normal and natural to me. As I wanted to become hearing, I wondered why God hasn't healed my deafness.
We all pondered, "Why do we exist?" and "Why do we die?" and so forth. Being a bookworm, I read everything on religions, New Age, and skepticism. I mocked at athiests and agnostics thinking that they're lost souls doomed to go to hell.
Anyway, as years went by and I became more educated, I thought Christianity was NOT for me and decided to abandon the Chrisitan lifestyle. Evolution made a lot more sense to me, intellectually. The Bible started to sound silly.
Being fascinated with the brain chemistry and how drugs can alter your thinking, I decided to experiment with mind-altering drugs (LSD, mushrooms, pot, etc). After few trips to the unknown, they literally made me realize that there is no "truth" whatsoever. It's all about perception. It got me very depressed. The trips were definitely psychotic... way psychotic! I finally understood why some religious people experience "oneness" and some other metaphysical expereinces.
However, a personal metaphysical experience does NOT make it true. For example, you may hear about people experiencing NDE. Those people are SO certain they spoke to God or saw Jesus or whatever. And what's so fascinating about NDEs you hear is that they are so alike, that you'd say, "no one can hallucinate about the same thing therefore it must be true." Now, that's a myth. Hallucinations can be the same across the populations. For example, LSD has consistently produced the same hallucinations that aren't found in other drugs. For example, PCP produces "warping" effects while LSD produces "melting" effects. LSD users often see inaminate objects come alive while PCP users don't see that. When your brain is starved of oxygen, it will cause hallucinations that are pretty the same among all populations. Lack of oxygen agitates the brain molecules enough that it can induce hallucinations.
When scientists inserted electrodes into brains of depressed patients, they get happy. Naturally, ethics prevent us from trying on different brain parts that affect our memory, our emotions, our "filter" etc but we know from research that damage to those areas change the personalities of victims dramatically.
Scientists also discovered that religious people had different brain activities than non-religious people. They scanned them with MRI to measure the activities and noticed some differences. Even prayer or meditation will induce physical changes. Guess what? It doesn't matter which religion a person belongs to, the effect is the same!
It's common for agnostics or nonbeleivers to become religious through traumatic periods. They want to believe their life is worth a lot more than just a pure existence.
If a person tells you, "I won craps and made $2000" and tells you that his system works, would you believe it? More than likely, yes unless you have a strong grasp of statistics and mathematical odds to know better. Yet, psychotic people have used them to prove something that's pure baloney. For example, The Bible Code is an example of how a psychotic author used math to "prove" even though it was already disproven and virtually useless. Scientists used the same algorithm to try the Constitution and the Constitution "predicted" Bill Clinton and 9-11 so it must be prophetic!
Selective memory is another factor that make us supersitutious or religious. For example, if a person prays that God heal his cancer and his cancer went away, he'll say, "GOD HEALED ME!!!" and many people, ignorant of statistics and science behind medicine, would quickly attribute to the healing power of God. But you know what? Most people did not know that cancers do spontatously go away and their religious beliefs make no difference at all. Muslims have praised Allah, Christians have praised Jesus, Jews have praised God for the healing powers. Atheists exclaim, "I'm so lucky!"
But if one gets cancer and dies, people are quick to forget the prayers asking for cancer to go away and move on. If you have a fever and you ask God to heal you, your fever goes away and you say, "God healed me!" but you're gonna be healed without praying as well. No athiest would proclaim, "God healed me!" and that lack of proclaimation is so easy to forget while a person SCREAMING God's praise is more memorable!
Psychosis is everywehere, we all expereince it.