I don't know why there has been so much talk on this board about religion and spirituality, whatever that is...but these individual journey stories seem a Thing to Do. So at the risk of attracting another Lord of the Rings-style fracas, I have a story to tell about spirituality and personal experience, from a non-believer's point of view.
This tale has a common enough beginning. Born and raised in a catholic family - end up a catholic. Not very exciting, but it bears mentioning. So many people are indoctrinated into a religion before they have any idea what's going on. Before any child has the moxie to question authority or the skill to try, we're battered into belief, forced to follow tradition and don't even understand why.
Not that church was any terrible, punishing ordeal for me. I can't tell any stories of being abused by church-folk. I survived a catholic upbringing unmolested -- even after being an altar boy for awhile. I just went looking for religious experience and couldn't find it, when I had questions people couldn't answer. God would clear this up, right? Let's go to the source. Well, no. That didn't work out.
I may write more about my crisis of losing faith some other time. But this is where I am now. I settled into firm skepticism and lack of god-belief, but with serious and poor opinions of the god-concept that I had been raised to worship. The xian idea of god is the one I've studied. You could call me a 'weak' atheist in general, lacking belief in gods, or an 'agnostic' atheist in that I find knowledge of god-concepts lacking, but a 'strong' atheist towards xianity, in that I think that god does not exist. That kind of strong atheism seems to demand a good reason, and I have some.
Key to my point of view is building a life based on few big assumptions. You can go all the way back to question reality itself -- are we brains in jars, are we programs running in someone's computer in the real universe. Perhaps. It seems necessary, in order to get out of bed, to treat the world as real and go live. That's one. We all share it.
You can question whether the data taken in by our senses is accurate. Again, to function it seems necessary to treat it as accurate. For the most part, with some exceptions, like hallucinations. We build a lifetime of experience that informs us on what data to accept, and what to question. That's another we share.
Explaining the universe, though. Do I need an answer or an assumption here to get out of bed, to function in society? No. I can get by, not knowing. So that's one we do not share. It does not seem justified to make up an answer -- especially not when there are so many different answers, often contradictory answers, often in the form of 'mine is best, and all others are wrong on pain of death/hell'.
Getting back to that sensory data, though...a person can think this through, can understand the need to generally rely on the senses, and the need to question unusual data. This is why the argument from personal experience is so dubious. How can I trust the believer's experience of god, which is contradicted by my experience of no god? I know why I am dismissive; I have good reasons. Why is the believer so quick to accept their experience, and so quick to dismiss mine?
For me, it took having an experience to really get it.
Some years back, I caught some bad flu type stuff in the late fall. The kind that lingers for weeks, that seems to get worse rather than go away. It was enough to get me to go get looked at, finally. I ended up in the emergency room, not because of any particular emergency, but out of their convenience in testing and monitoring me, I suppose. There was no sense of urgency about it. Just an overnight stay for observation. I went to uncomfortable sleep in the hospital thinking that.
I can distinctly recall waking, about a month later, as I was to learn. But it's difficult to call the time 'lost,' really. I woke up with memories. What I had experienced was as real as the place where I woke up. And there was no obvious clue that I had woken up to reality from something else. They just blended, seamlessly, and went on like that for awhile. I had been three different people. I could remember two of me/them dying. What did that mean? Have I been more than one person? Or was that some part of me? ...was it something important?
It's here, I think, that the argument from personal experience is most pernicious. From a safe distance, anyone might look at this and respond, of course it's just a hallucination. The drugs they used did this to you. It wasn't real. But in the midst of it, mixing one reality with another as the drugs wore off, measuring my progress in tubes coming out of me...not so easy. And oh, the believers. Believers are well equipped to accept personal experience. Many are taught to look for it, draw meaning from it, occasionally start a religion from it. And the believers around me were eager to help me assign some special meaning to my experiences, to change my life.
After being a content, seemingly well reasoned skeptic for over a decade, it took me a year to process those experiences. I was confronted with reality when I found my brother, who I had thought was badly injured, wasn't. It couldn't be real, but perhaps something else. Even he was ready to impute some other meaning to it. My sweetie, bless her (ha!) was the one to suggest my mind had brought outside stimuli into my dreams. The silent observer, she called it. I researched it and couldn't find it. Was she fooling me, indulging my skepticism? Was this something doctors didn't want to admit?
A chance encounter with the noise of a ventilator on a radio broadcast clued me in with a shock. To me, it was a noise out of nightmare. More pieces of the puzzle came together after that. It was the sticking point, the idea that being in a coma meant not being aware of the world around me. That was the impression I was stuck with. They put you unconscious, or you're in a coma, you are out. Dead to the world, sleeping beauty. To think otherwise is, well, disturbing...enough so that I'll leave it at that.
I came away, though, with some understanding about personal experience. It's hard, really hard, to have something like this happen and not change. To have some fantastic, awful vision and set it aside, not take it too seriously. To consider my senses and know they're not always that reliable, not just as an abstraction, but to know it.
For a couple of years after, I wondered if I left some part of myself back there, if something died and not all of me returned. I would ask my sweetie now and again about it. If she thinks I've changed, become something less. She tells me I'm calmer, not...detached, exactly, but not as fretful, bothered about things, little things. It granted me some small measure of perspective when I remember it.
Awesome life lesson eh? Don't sweat the small stuff. woo hoo. Such is the life and wisdom of the skeptic. It's pretty mundane. I entertain my doubts; otherwise I could not in good conscience call myself a skeptic. I have a lot more questions than I have answers, but I'll be damned if I am going to make stuff up just to satisfy my questioning mind. As per xianity, that damnation may well be literal. But I'm skeptical. I don't doubt that people have personal experiences. But I doubt the articles of faith that some draw from them. I question the source.