[QUOTE=CJJ*]
Should a distinction be made here between people who repeatedly claim to speak directly with God or other supernatural beings, or those who are profoundly moved by an experience even they claim was a singular, one-time event?
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I’d say the people who have only one profoundly moving experience are what we’d call “normal”. People react in all sorts of ways to things all the time; some people can have profound experiences just by looking at nature. People can have dreams that impact them profoundly. People can get in near-fatal accidents that rock their world. I gather that a lot of atheists have such experiences too. The difference is that they don’t decide that their personal internal experience supplants objective reality.
In my observation, a person can train themselves to have religious experiences regularly; on demand, even. A religious experience for most people is little more than basking in a particularly moving feeling, after all. The problem isn’t that the people are manipulating their own feelings and causing themselves to daydream chats with their diety; it that (again) they decide that these internal experiences override what they know or can learn from objective reality.
[QUOTE=CJJ*]
I’ll admit I’m a little depressed about the direction of this thread. Not only has it taken the relatively interesting question raised in the OP and reduced it to the usual shouting match over the existence of God, but it now has some folks advocating what I have to assume is the forcible injestion of drugs to cure those we see as deviant. A strange argument coming from those who think religion is “an avalanche of hate and madness” whose effect on the conversion of believers is to “tyrannize, assault and kill them.”
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I think that the drug thing was presented as a possible test for whether religious experiences were real. It wasn’t until kanicbird referred to it as ‘brainwashing’ that the possiblity of the use of drugs as a cure came up. From there, of course, it snowballed.
The real weak point in the drug argument (as a testing method, not a “cure”) is that Der Trihs referred to the drugs as ‘anti-hallucination’ drugs with the implicit assumption that they worked specifically and only on hallucinations. And, sure, if we knew that that’s all they effected, they’d be a good test. The problem is it’s sort of hard to know what effects a drug actually has; maybe it also by the sheerest coincidence dulls the ‘spiritual vibe’ center of the brain…not that any REAL God would be balked by a mere drug, but there’s still enough actual uncertainty in determining the effects of actual drugs to make this a somewhat valid counterargument. (And one that kanicbird essentially made, not that that was acknowledged.)
The best test I can think of for whether religious experiences are hallucinations is whether all persons who have religious experiences report having observed the same things, which one would expect if they were actually observing something with objective existence. (That is, were religious experiences actually windows onto another objective reality, there would essentially be one religion in the world, with splinters and subdivisions over minor points of confusion, but in general agreeing about the whole. This isn’t the case, of course.)
People who see hallucinations honestly think they’re seeing what they’re seeing. This does not mean they they actually are seeing talking frogs (or talking burning bushes). So, honesty really has little to do with it - a liar is probably leading you wrong, but a person can be honestly wrong too.