First, on the question of religious experiences, yeah, recently I’ve had a real big one:
New Year’s Eve - fifth of Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum, empty in 45 minutes (all me) – and I’m alive today.
I now have the distinct impression that every time I drink, the next day I'm presented with someone in a more dire situation than mine asking me for help - a mom and daughter ran out of gas and i pushed thier car to a am/pm; another time an elderly lady asked for money for the bus, so I gave her $5. I personally feel that I got a semi-agreement with God that states:
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If I help others while I’m hungover (or in general)
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The worst things that can happen while I’m drinking,
won’t happen, just as long as I don’t push my luck.
As to whether or not you can consider something a ‘religious experience’ or pass it off as mere coincidence, here’s one explanation that makes sense to me (probably because I made it up ):
If you’ll allow me a few premisses:
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There is a God in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sense AND
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Said God is omniscient (knows everything, understands it all too) AND
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Said God is omnipotent (wants something done, then it’s getting DONE).
So here’s God, being that he/she is omnipotent, that means that she’s not being constrained by anything, she’s got the remote control. Control includes the concept of time (you, for example, can’t go back fifteen minutes ago and get something different for dinner, you’re stuck with what you ate). So as far as interacting with humans who are in this time paradigm, she can view our lives almost like a tapestry, seeing the past, present and future all at once, interacting with all of them (for the sake of ‘free choice’ the future is the unwoven part, that can be woven any which way, but she can see the infinite possibilites -omniscient, remember-)
So God’s checking out the human drama, seeing what’s going on, and she just so happens to notice that regardless of the different choices that the people can and will make, a certain building is going to errupt in flames in a week because of a multitude of variables, and that when this happens every situation that can happen has people in there and those people are going to die. God sort of planned on them staying alive a little while longer, hell maybe one of those people has the possibility in the future to cure some disease or make better tasting airline food. “Well, that’s no good” God says, so she reviews the history of the universe as it is, does a few computations, carries the nine, goes BACK to the beginnning of it all, delicatly grabs hold of a single thread, and YANK! pulls that sucker out of existance.
The effects of such an action could be catastrophic, causing the sky to be green, man to die out in the late BC’s, and panthers’ developing human-like speech, but actually not a whole lot happens because, let’s review- God is omniscient (know’s what’s going to happen when she does this) and omnipotent(makes sure her action only affects what she wants it to effect). So, what happens?
Turns out that pulling that thread only changed the weather pattern on Earth by very very small smidge and not much is noticable in the way of changes to human history, but now on that dreaded day of the building being burned, the town that it is in is experiencing percipitaion, and when that fateful day comes to pass, the rain keeps the fire under control until the local FD shows up, saves everyone, and hosts a big party where many a brew are drunk, and everyone is happy.
So now we look at what the people involved thought about what happened. Some considered it a true act of God, a miracle of the first order; others saw it as merely coincidence, anyone could have told you that it was going to rain that day, you could see it in the weather forecasts up to a week prior, it was “just coincidence and luck that the fire happened during the rainstorm.” Science explained it, so it’s not a miracle.
…Science explained it, so it’s not a miracle.
Wait. If God is all powerful, and all knowing, what exactly stops her from being able to not only perform a great miracle affecting the lives of humans, but also making it follow all of the laws of science and physics? If something did stop her, then she wouldn’t be all-powerful would she, and if she couldn’t think of a way to do it, she wouldn’t be all-knowing either…
But why would she do it that way? Might be because she wants to inspire faith- you know "believing something when you don't really have a reason to believe it." If God just showed up and had the angels fly everyone out of the burning building, then eveyrone would have proof that there is a God, and that she cares about what's happening to us on Earth, hereby sort of putting an end to this debate about the existance of God, which she may just find very entertaining, so she does it her way, letting people still have the choice of believing in God or not, because she never gets tired of that look atheists get on thier faces when St. Peter calls out "NEXT!"
However, this story is just a logical possibility, could happen, probably doesn’t and oh do you remember the premiss stuff?..
Now if you
A) Do not assume/presume that there is a God in the Judeo-Christian-Islamice sence AND/OR
B)Do not assume/presume that Said God is omniscient AND/OR
C)Do not assume/presume that Said God is omnipotent
THEN:
D)This dog don’t hunt.-
It was coincidence that the building burst aflame on the same day that the rain happened to come down, most likely it wasn't a 'religious experience' and as to whether a god exists, this has not much to do with that thought.
For me though, I believe pretty much in the basic premisses 1, 2, and 3, so I say, to myself mostly, that if it has a scientific explaination, then it was God interveneing, because she may have changed a few things to make things go the way they did and she also is the one who set down all those rules and laws and whatnot that allowed whatever happened to happen.
So, believe what you will and in the words of Oscar Wilde,
“Every man should believe in something, and I believe I’ll have another beer.”