(April 11, 2013 at 4:29 am)FallentoReason Wrote: My objection up to this point would be that the line is now being blurred between experiencing God and "experiencing" God. Literally experiencing him (as I talked about in the OP) could arguably be said to have little room for ambiguity in the believer's mind i.e. they're pretty much convinced that what their senses picked up was in fact God.I would not discount the fact that religion is a least partly experiencial. I practice a number of meditative disciplines: compassion, non-duality, mindfulness, contemplative, and the path of negation. Each of these cultivates within the practitioner a receptive metal state that improves with practice, allowing a better understanding of their own inner life. It isn't all that much different from the study in any other discipline in art or science. A deeper and more fuller understanding of your own consciousness brings you closer to the origin of that consciousness.
Or at least so it seems. Could it be a delusion? Possibly. That position requires a radical skepticism that denies the evidence of the senses, the brain being, in its own way, the most important sense organ.