In Reply to: Re: Research provides physical explanation for out of body experience posted by Thinker on August 26, 2007 at 16:19:19:
Arguing from personal experience, as you are doing, is most convincing to those who claim to have had one. But that argument is the least convincing to anyone else, and to anyone knowledgeable about psychology.
By claiming a miracle I assume that you are claiming you have experienced God directly. Well, some people experience a pink elephant, but that probably doesn't impress you. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't reveal to him there were no weapons of mass destruction). Individuals in asylums think they are Napoleon or Charlie Chaplin, or that the whole world is conspiring against them, or that they can broadcast their thoughts into other people's heads. We humor them but we don't take their internally revealed beliefs seriously, mostly because not many people share them. Religious experiences are different only in that the people who claim them are numerous.
Sam Harris wrote in The End of Faith the following:
"We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them 'religious'; otherwise they are likely to be called 'mad', 'psychotic', or 'delusional'.... Clearly there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are."
As for your claim of experiencing a miracle, David Hume gave one of the best tests for determining if one happened:
"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish."