*day-liah*,

I don't think that your message is 'thread drift' at all. It addresses the very hub of the issue.

I am of the view that, in order for something to be 'true' it does need to be physically demonstrable and REPLICABLE.

I'm quite sure that individuals have had astonishing, even unbelievable experiences. However, when it's only the word of one individual, then it's completely useless, as we have no way of deciding if they 'made it up' were mislead or whatever.

Science differs from religion in one profound way. Science wants to be proved wrong. It is always a 'best guess' and is happy to admit error when some further experiment shows something that doesn't fit with the current theory.

Religion (or any belief system) is fundamentally different, in that the basic world view is fixed, and any new discovery is moulded into the belief system as it alrealy stands.