Misconceptions of Christian theology

[jstrodel]

I do not know how I could live without this intense, specific and necessary comfort that I receive from the tangible presence of God.

Here we have a person who, by their own admission was a drug addict who used and abused hard drugs to the point that it was extremely dysfunctional and required treatment.

This suggests several things to me. First, this person's brain is likely no longer operating according to factory specifications.
Second, the person may be unusually vulnerable to addictions and addictive behaviors.
And also, that this person has a prior demonstrated obsession with unusual experiences.

And here we have this person, testifying to having experiences which are not shared by the bulk of his peers (even among Christians, much of his experience is outside the norm).
Moreover, he claims that if he were deprived of the continuing presence of certain of these experiences, he doesn't know "how he could live."

No offense, js, but I'm not sure I need a transcendent creator to explain the facts of your experience.

This looks like a winner to me, advocate that drugs are ok for people to use, no problem, they can be tolerated and drug users can be accepted. Because as soon as you do this, you tolerate drug use, then you can invalidate all religious experience based on your previous toleration of drug use (which, as a matter of fact, the dangers of drug use are greatly exaggerated by government propaganda). I speak to the atheist movement as a whole, which typically tolerates drug use, as opposed to you individually.

You should try and see if you can get all atheists to follow your approach. Maybe through this approach you can win the culture war.