During the last few decades of the twentieth century scientific ability to explore the brain directly increased dramatically, so neuroscientific discoveries during the period resulted in a broadening of perspectives from which psychological explanations of religion may be given. First, the ideological impasse on method between behavioristic and psychoanalytic or introspective approaches in psychology yielded to more pragmatic heterophenomenological (Dennett 2003) or neurophenomenological (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991) methods for investigating mental states. Second, Platonic and Cartesian views of emotion as inherently irrational and subversive of productive cognitive functioning were contested by studies that showed that absence of emotion produced a cognitively dysfunctional Phineas Gage, not a pure-minded Philosopher King (Damasio 1994). Third, the Enlightenment notion of a person as an isolated, autonomous rational optimizer, a "ghost" in a bodily machine, began to yield to a notion of a person as an embodied...