Atheists: have you ever had a religious experience and what did you make of it?

[bennyboy]

Apologies to the drug users out there but;
I believe that my conscious mind is the product of uncounted generations of natural selection. It has sculpted my anatomy and physiology to provide me with an unbelievably complex series of chemical reactions self assembled in to neural networks whose end product is my unclouded mind. Whacking that system with an external chemical clearly powerful enough to seriously alter its operation and believing that it improves the system is akin to believing that hitting a Rolex with a pick-hammer will help it tell time.
Subjectively, you may believe you are doing better work, psychedelics are famous for this. But only in a few instances (ritalin studying or epo/blood doping for racers or androgens for adding muscle) are the results actually improved performance in some limited way. And those interventions pretty universally come with deleterious side effects.

Ummm. . . I'm gonna go out on a limb and say much, if not most, of the best art (including music) that has ever been created has been done so either under the influence, or at least by someone who is often under the influence.