(Heb 11:1) Faith makes us sure of what we hope for and gives us proof of what we cannot see.
Ah! wishfull thinking, in other words.
I can only hope they are genuine experiences orchestrated by God himself. But the greatest cogent evidence for me for spirituality is that it continues to work for me and billions of other people worldwide, it gives life a purpose and a meaning, it causes me to want to wake up early in the morn every morning and do something stirring and exciting because I know that I have a purpose a transcendent purpose that nobody determined for me.
If you can only hope, how can you claim to know?
It's nice that your experiences give pleasant results. How is this evidence that the experiences are real? One can easily imagine falsehoods that would have all sorts of beneficial effects.
The burden of proof is on the guy who wishes to dismiss these experiences as mere by-products of physical events.
I gather that religious experiences can be evoked by stimulating the brain electrically, so proof looks like it may be on the way.
Anyway, why is the burden of proof not on the one making the claim that religious experience is supernatural? That looks to me to be the more outlandish claim.
Let me tell you something on the side, on both sides of the argument people claim to have the backing of the evidence, but you know what, evidence is silent for the most part it is us who determine what the evidence is saying. Atheists claim that the evidence speaks against God, theists disagree, where does this leave us, it leaves us in the realm of faith, that is, whose report shall we put our faith in, the atheists report or the theist report?
Something puzzles me about people of faith. They seem to acknowledge only two options; one believes, or disbelieves. The option of reserving judgement in the absence of solid evidence is rarely mentioned. The idea of a continuum of confidence is also often absent, although I do detect some such notion in your own post. I would appreciate your views on these other positions.
I suppose that all this may be off-topic, except that, unless god(s) can be firmly established as real, the idea of sin is null, as others have pointed out before.
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