No reason justifies disbelief.

[bennyboy]

Starting with raw experience is an affirmation of empiricism.  A person who has a "religious experience" - that says god spoke to them or revealed something to them, or transported them to some place where they saw some thing..is explicitly invoking an empirical basis for their claim.

You are conflating subjective experience with empiricism.  That's a pretty poor affirmation of science as an exclusive methodology for seeking truth.

"I think therefore I am."
You: You are observing your subjective experiences as objects, so that's an empirical realization.  Congratulations, you're doing science!

That's fine, if you are willing to accept Buddhist meditation systems and philosophical insight as science.  Sam Harris, I think, might actually agree.

But it's not what we normally mean when we use the word "science," and I don't think that it's what LadyForCamus and others in this thread mean when they used the word in opposition to the idea that insight might be a valid (or valuable) tool for seeking truth.

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Please demonstrate this through empirical means.

Oh please...

We have billions of people, all with different, mutually exclusive, beliefs, many of them claim to have revelations of their various gods.

Of course, they can't all be right. But they sure as hell could all be wrong.

If revelation can lead Muslims to their beliefs, Christians to theirs, Hindus to theirs, Zoroastrians to theirs, etc, etc, how can it possibly be reliable?

Consider the possibility that there are categories of "religious" experience  (quotes because I want to distinguish between the experiences themselves and any source attributions people might make about them) which are difficult to verbalize, and which are rarely achieved.  I think that's a fair enough supposition.

It may be that various myths, parables, and so on were attempts by people with Eureka! moments to explain the knowledge gained by insight, and to lay out some path for followers to arrive at that state of mind.

Buddhism does this very explicitly, but there are schools of meditation and insight in all of the religious traditions.  They are represented by an EXTREMELY small portion of the population which claim a religion as their own, but I'd say there is enough commonality there that you could say they transcend the boundaries of their individual mythological traditions.

Fasting, long periods of prayer, self-abasement (i.e. the suspension of ego), altruism, and so on-- these aren't just moral virtues or commandments.  They are psychological techniques, and f practiced constantly, they are likely to bring a person to philosophical realizations that you couldn't arrive at though science.

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How do you tell the difference between an illusion that seems like a revelation and a revelation?
That's right. There isn't one.
So by their nature they are unreliable.

How do you tell the difference between "empirical observations" made in a material monist Universe, or in the Matrix, or in a God-monitored idealistic reality, or even just in your own dream?

We've learned enough about science not to reaffirm that our general sense of exist is accurate, but to demonstrate that it is not.  When you or I look at a table, we don't see a gazillion virtual wave functions vibrating in space, some of them in a state of paradoxical superposition.  Instead, we see the idea of a table-- its flatness, its parallelism to the floor,  and so on.

Whatever is really "out there," we aren't seeing it, and can't.  This is a scientific truth at this point.