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

[JuliaL]

Sure, I had a confident experience of immanent transcendence.
It was drug induced and after I recovered, I concluded that the weirdness experienced came from a malfunctioning brain.

I also had a period after a serious intracranial bleed (secondary to a motorcycle crash) requiring craniotomy and decompression. Every day I had many exceptionally vivid sensations of deja vu. I HAD been there before. I was a veterinary student at the time and very personally interested in the phenomenon. Presuming some validity to the sensation I tried repeatedly to expand the events into not just sensation of having been there before. I tried to predict the short term future. If I 'knew' I'd already been in what was currently happening, couldn't I get a hint of what was to come? Specifically, knowing short term future events can be exceedingly profitable in playing the numbers, the lottery or options trading. It never worked, needless to say, and I concluded that my sensations came from inaccurately tweaking a brain circuit that under normal circumstances was excited by actually recognizing a situation that had been previously experienced.
I also had hallucinations of a lilac fog and a hum and some migraines, but these were really prosaic and boring.

[thesummerqueen]

How is a religious experience different from a spiritual experience?

[watchamadoodle]

I've had a variety of religious/paranormal experiences throughout my life - probably every 5 or 10 years from early childhood to now in my late 40s.

I had a nervous breakdown in 2009 after visiting a friend, and I had many experiences for about a year afterwards. When I opened-up about these things with a therapist, she told me about psychosis. It took me several years to accept that explanation, but I am 99% there.

Some people believe that psychosis happens when a person can't cope with spiritual experiences (the shaman swims and the psychotic drowns). Sometimes I wonder about that too.

[Minimalist]

How is a religious experience different from a spiritual experience?

Religious experiences cost money.

[helyott]

If an orgasmus is a religious experience, then i could answer = YES.
Guess what i did.

[Davka]

How is a religious experience different from a spiritual experience?

It includes hallucinations of deities, along with the hallucinations of having (spiritual) being which is somehow separate from your physical being.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Nope.

[KevinM1]

I've felt a mix of awe, joy, and incredible humility a few times looking up at the night sky with absolutely no light pollution in Yellowstone National Park. Being in a place so geologically and biologically active, as well as interesting historically speaking, while being able to see the face of the universe clearly is simply incredible. But those feelings aren't divine in nature. They come from me understanding how small and precious we are in this sea of stars.

Now, if only we could stop killing and abusing each other over myths and/or profit.....

[LastPoet]

I can't say that I did, all that I got was some hair on the back of my head raising on some heavy metal concerts and I was once god after an LSD tab.

It's an experience, but it will fry your brain if you do it too much.

[downbeatplumb]

My experience of religion is one of boredom, feeling out of place and uncomfortable.
Like a lion in a den of daniels.