I think that delusions naturally reach for mysterious forces to explain occurrences. As time goes on our delusions become more and more detached from reality and only mysterious forces can explain all occurrences. So people need a powerful blanket theory to make sense of all of their detached from reality causes and effects. So god might be the mysterious force or the government. Both work in a coercive manner behind curtains. Also, People from older times really did believe in witches, spirits, and gods. So their minds were more readily to use those heuristics to explain their delusional blanket theory.
As time has progressed with science we have rationalized, using empiricism, to the point where God is such a small part of our lives. We even question whether we are conscious at all, if we can feel pain, or love because we can't objective see it with the microscope. I think science is limited here because science can only see objective, external reality where if we use the introspective method we can't help but live in subjectivity and experience intrinsic properties such as our own consciousness.
When the author talks about how the Western world has closed itself off from collective living and god I think it's because of the industrial revolution, the age of reason, and science. When Nietzsche wrote "God is dead." in... I think it was the Gay Science, he meant that we had killed him, we let him die because of the power of our reason. He saw that as sad because from now on we have nowhere to aim our lives now, and that's where he sets out and tries to create a new meaning of life, one that is aesthetic.
Times back then were probably more stressful and complex so more people might have had psychosis from the complexity of survival then.
My father's delusion slowly shifted to have religious elements in them. He believes he is one of the angels that guard this realm from evil forces. He believes he has a divine gift to foresee bad events before they happen.
Also, the Greek God Dionysus, the god of wine and religious ecstasy is interesting here. There are two Greek words that are telling. Ecstasis is when one exits there body, and enthusiasmos is when they then let the god enter within. This was mostly a woman's religious cult for some reason. The men of the time were more inclined to olympianism which is a patriarchal religion of zeus as ruler. It was cool and calculated, while Dionysian was full of passion. Today there are still churches that practice ecstasis and enthusiasmos when you go to a church and they are speaking in tongues and flailing their arms and passing out as the priests touches them.
The article says:
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We tend to think that there is some central part of our brains that acts as a clearinghouse, processing all the outside sensory data that come into our heads via our eyes and ears and so forth and then deciding what to think and how to respond. The problem with this picture is that scientists cannot find anything physical in the brain that seems to act as the clearinghouse. In physiological terms, there is no “I myself”; such an entity seems to be a mental construct, something human beings evolved over millions of years but which has no independent, physical reality.
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He's taking a dualistic approach where mind and body are two separate entities. I myself believe it's one substance with two aspects, namely, physical and mental, and then allows for the interaction of the one aspect to move the other aspect. So in this theory maybe everything has a fundamental consciousness, whatever that may be. I'm inclined to believe in this but I'm not really sure.