being inversely correlated with religiosity.

Although all the titles I have seen basically read as "Thinking people tend to be less religious", there is another way to interpret it. Intuitiveness is positively correlated with religiousness.

Perhaps allowing oneself to experience something is what makes the difference.

(with the author) that religious experiences are entirely human inventions, and not the result of any "god" that exists independently of the minds of his/her/its believers.

Psychologist and Philosopher William James described four characteristics of religious / mystical experience in The Varieties of Religious Experience. According to James, such an experience is:

Transient -- the experience is temporary; the individual soon returns to a "normal" frame of mind. It is outside our normal perception of space and time.

Ineffable -- the experience cannot be adequately put into words.

Noetic -- the individual feels that he or she has learned something valuable from the experience. Gives us knowledge that is normally hidden from human understanding.

Passive -- the experience happens to the individual, largely without conscious control. Although there are activities, such as meditation (see below), that can make religious experience more likely, it is not something that can be turned on and off at will.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_experience#William_James.27_definition

Here's the complete text:

http://selfdefinition.org/christian/William%20James%20-%20Varieties%20of%20Religious%20Experience.pdf

refer to.

Words ARE useful, but they are not identical with that to which they only refer - AND - we SHOULD, nay, we NEEEEEEED to value that difference.

Trying to make a God out of words is a huge fucking mistake.

like we do with most of the stuff you post.

It describes those moments which are mostly used by the religious but which most likely both the religious and the non experience. These can indeed be the best experiences of ones life. It neither exalts it nor diminishes it by recognizing that this is just part of being human.

Certainly the big name atheists are because non-believers have those type of experiences as well as the religious.

Maybe it will not catch on. But I like it because it allows non-believers to talk about their numinous experiences without using spiritual or religious. Of course, not wanting a rhetorical argument there may be other words that would suffice.

Always like reading your posts.

Even though it's been used since antiquity to describe a sense of the divine, it fits as well with a sense of connection to something much larger than an individual.

We are all star stuff.

... when we humans have an emotional experience to jump on the supernatural band wagon.


Just because unfathomably ignorant people in the past made up supernatural explanations for intense (and not so intense) emotional states doesn't mean that IS the explanation. Why it is considered "open minded" to simply jump to some conclusions someone made up in the Stone Age, or even before, is beyond me.

The supernatural is superfluous.

You're in prime position to get a response about the ever-shrinking deity.