Mind on the brain

"Religious experience is said to be associated with activity in a particular part of the brain.  For some reason this is supposed to imply that it is delusional.  But all thought and experience can be located in some part of the brain, that brain more replete than the starry heaven God showed to Abraham, and we are not in the habit of assuming that it is all delusional on these grounds.  Nothing could justify this reasoning, which many religious people take as seriously as any atheist could do, except the idea that the physical and the spiritual cannot abide together, that they cannot be one dispensation."

     Marilynne Robinson, "Freedom of thought," in When I was a child I read books (New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 10.