Just a further thought on the 'religious experience under the influence of fever / Lsd etc."

It may be that many people need these extreme conditions in order to open their minds and be receptive to the supernatural (remember the old saying about "there are no atheists in a crisis?"). It may be that during our normal workaday routine we get so bogged down with our own patterns and preconceptions like hamsters on the wheel (I go to work, I come home, I eat, I sleep, I go to work, I come home...at weekends I have a few beers...I get up, I go to work (hungover), I come home...) that we are not open to the supernatural and even try and shut it out if it intrudes on our lives where we have left little space for anything else except the drudge of our familiar and comfortable routine.

Taking Bee's comments on kids, I see an analogy here: kids are like a blank canvas, their minds are open to all possibilities. And as Bee says, they lose this openess as a result of growing up, often of being told 'green trees are green, red roses are red, and there's no need to see them any other way that the way they always have been seen'. You could take this axiom as being an analogy of empiricism. It's no surprise that kids have 'imaginary friends' that they lose as they get older and are told such things are 'impossible'. But how do we know they are, since as adults most of us have lost the faculty of being open to such things due to our own hard-wired preconceptions about the world?