What makes people irrational thinkers?

[Simon Moon]

I have told this story previously on this forum, but I will tell it again.

I have a good friend (we grew up surfing together) that in his early 20's got hooked on meth and alcohol.

Of course his life fell apart, he was living on the street, doing petty crimes for drug money, etc. Then one day, he wandered into a Hindu temple near downtown LA, and claims to have had a mystical experience with a Hindu god, and instantaneously quit drugs and alcohol. He hasn't had anything since that day almost a decade ago.

He got his life together, started his own successful tile contracting business, got married, and has a kid. To this day, he is a Hindu.

So, my question is; did he have an actual real numinous and mystical experience, with the Hindu gods? If you don't think he did, how do you tell the difference between his 'not real' mystical experience, and a 'real' one? How is he supposed to tell the difference?

We can have very meaningful experiences and attribute those experiences to anything we want, but that would be a lie. The truth is our brains create those experiences.

When we lie to ourselves and believe that lie to be the truth, then yes it's difficult to tell that truthful lie from the truth.

What we have to do is think critically about every experience that seems to hold a significant life changing moment.

Is it more reasonable to think an omnipotent being that cannot be detected, somehow cares about a human being in a universe of trillions of galaxies that IT caused this change or maybe the person's own brain believes a grand lie to make his life better ?

We lie to ourselves all the time.
Small things. I'm a good looking guy. I'm fun at parties. My farts don't stink. My clothes look good. I work hard all the time. I'm great at sex. All my thoughts are completely rational.

We don't have grand experiences all the time, but when we do we place that moment as THE truth of what we WANT it to be.

You can tell the difference between a real mystical experience and a fake one by realizing that they are all are fake. They all happen in our brains.

Of course what you say is true.

I am trying to ask Neo-Scholastic some Socratic questions in order to get him to question his own assumptions, presuppositions and whether the things he thinks are properly basic, really are.

While I will not make the claim, with absolute certainty, that there are no 'real mystical' experiences with a god, I see absolutely no method to differentiate a real one, with one that has been created by our own minds. And the only way around it for a believer, is a road paved with fallacy after fallacy.