Ascribing remarkable experiences to God (spoiler: I think it's unwarranted)

[GrandizerII]

I notice, in many (if not most) cases, theists end up believing in God because of some remarkable experience they may have had that (for whatever reason) they link to the God of the religion/faith they're more at home with. And of course the difficulty, from the skeptic point of view, is that we don't ever have sufficient access to the experiences other people have, as experiences are very personal and subjective, and we aren't always there to witness the same things they do.

The way I personally look at this is when someone says they had a really remarkable experience that they just can't explain naturalistically, I tend to believe that they did experience something remarkable, and I do believe that sometimes remarkable things do happen that baffle the mind. But to ascribe it to the God of one's choice is really making a leap of faith, unless you have actually sensed the divine being in a manner that makes you confident that it was such (and even then, you need to account for possible hallucinations and all that).

When I've experienced a remarkable event, I sit down and think about it a lot. And no matter how I try to make it unremarkable, it just doesn't work. But I accept that bizarre coincidences can happen, and always happen, anyway. I accept that the mind does play a lot of tricks on you. That, and given so many other explanations for these weird events (such as multiple worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, simulation "theory", extra-terrestrial aliens, etc.), it would be unwise to ascribe the experience so confidently to a supreme deity. Especially when there is no clear message being sent from that deity, and/or if the experience isn't exactly something that a God would very likely trigger.

That's just my take on it.

[The Grand Nudger]

That, or people tell self aggrandizing religious fibs about the day god came down and took notice of them, personally. 

[Fake Messiah]