Mrrzzy: "demonstrable. Note that this includes the word Demon... yikes!"

Don't worry Mrrzzy, there's no worry there! 'demonstrate' has nothing to do with dark forces, just comes from the old Italian via Latin stem of 'mostrare' the verb meaning 'to show'.
Like 'manager' has nothing to do with men, just comes from 'mano' meaning 'hand' as in, "to have a hand over something".

Bee -

the one problem with attributing religious experience to physical dysfunction as you described above, is that such a cause-and-effect realtionship cannot be be proved with 100% certainty as being simply the result of psychosomatic disturbance. If anyone tries to claim otherwise, they also cross the threshold into belief. Even with drugs like LSD, we know they cause hallucinations, we expect people to have hallucinations and delsuions when they take it. Some of these delusions can be easily demonstrated (remember, the criterion of empiricism?) for example the delusion one can fly, but beyond such examples we are getting into a more grey area. If someone says they have had what they call a religious experience on LSD, how can we know that such is not the case and ascribe it solely to the drug? If we are to keep our minds open to all possibilities, it is possible that such a thing did indeed occur; and especially if the divine doesn't manifest itself in some physical, empirically meaureable way, there is no way of coming to a firm conclusion about the experience. All we can say is that it was real enough for the person who experienced it, though we may never have experienced such a thing as such ourselves.

(BTW I haven't had any experinces I would consider 'divine' on LSD myself, just in case you were wondering)