Richard Carrier said:
The most fantastic experience I had was like that times ten. It happened at sea, well past midnight on the flight deck of a cutter, in international waters two hundred miles from the nearest land. I had not slept for over 36 hours, thanks to a common misfortune of overlapping duty schedules and emergency rescue operations. For hours we had been practicing helicopter landing and refuelling drills and at long last the chopper was away and everything was calm. The ship was rocking slowly in a gentle, dark sea, and I was alone beneath the starriest of skies that most people have never seen. I fell so deeply into the clear, total immersion in the real that I left my body and my soul expanded to the size of the universe, so that I could at one thought perceive, almost 'feel', everything that existed in perfect and total clarity. It was like undergoing a Vulcan Mind Meld with God. Naturally, words cannot do justice to something like this. It cannot really be described, only experienced, or hinted at. What did I see? A beautiful, vast, harmonious and wonderful universe all at peace with the Tao. There was plenty of life scattered like tiny seeds everywhere, but no supernatural beings, no gods or demons or souls floating about, no heaven or hell. Just a perfect, complete universe, with no need for anything more. The experience was absolutely real to me. There was nothing about it that would suggest it was a dream or a mere flight of imagination. And it was magnificent.
However, he continued reading and studying, and he decided that these experiences were all in his head, and he moved away from Taoism to a more typical metaphysical naturalism and secular humanism. This included reading the Bible again, and he found the Old Testament disgusting and the New Testament disappointing, and the whole Bible full of gross immorality. So that was out.
Some folk are so totally sold on abstract "isms" that they'll throw direct experience out the door in favor of ideological tenets. But there are few things more "all in my head" than whatever stupid "ism" that anybody comes to believe in.
He got past the analytic bit of the brain that wants its conceptual "pegs" to fit its conceptual "holes" and so was more nakedly open to experience.
Some of the description of his experience sounds religious, but is it really? "I left my body"... "my soul expanded" ... "It was like undergoing a Vulcan Mind Meld with God". But...
1) he immediately qualified such phrasing with "Naturally, words cannot do justice to something like this. It cannot really be described, only experienced, or hinted at."
2)
he has a christocentric way of describing his relation to Taoism too, which supports that his Christian background likely infects his description of a lot of things (I see it in secular humanists all the time). So his skewed choice of phrasing doesn't mean the experience itself was inherently religious.
I think secularist/scientistic ideologues imagine the alternative (to being stuck inside a highly reductive and cartesian viewpoint) is to get religious about things... to indulge in "woo". No, it doesn't go straight from the reductionism direct into religiosity.
Religion laid claim to these "oneness" experiences ages ago and slathered a lot of metaphysical, hyperbolic language all over them. But that's not a good reason to (anti-empirically) reject such experiences -- just because religious persons obscured them with the language of "woo".
IMV,
Carrier found the baby in religion's bathwater and, for ideology's sake, threw it out. What a tragic thing to squash wonder with dogma. I make a point of this because I think it's a huge mistake to concede valuable experiences that are ubiquitous to all humanity to religion simply because they're traditionally associated with religion and, so, tend to be described in the language of religion.
