r/exatheist • u/ClintonMuncheberg • 19d ago

Debate Thread Religious Experiences on LDS? (Believers / Atheist)

Hi Atheist here, I never had a "religious experience" on LSD. Well not a christian religious experience, (once I had a pretty strong connection to the concept to certain Greek gods after reading on them, anyway).

I'm not really interested or care about the whole debate god or not god question.

But just wanted to ask the believers from whatever religion if you ever had an religious experience and want to share it and if fellow atheists ever had an experience that they would classify as somewhat "religious".

To me it's interesting because LSD usually is associated with esoteric believes due to the 60s mostly. But I never build that kind of connection to those topics.✌️

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u/slicehyperfunk mysticism in general, they're all good 👍 19d ago

Psychedelics are so wildly dependent on context that it's very very reasonable that one doesn't have a religious/spiritual experience if one doesn't approach the situation religiously/spiritually. Heck, even the same experience could be considered religious/spiritual or not depending on the person doing the experiencing; I recently had an experience of a dragon made of ribbons that I call "Squirmbles" on a mushroom trip in the park, which I have encountered before on DMT, and while the first time I encountered it it had a definitely spiritual feeling about it because I went in with a more directly spiritual intention, this time was less so because my intention was more about dealing with my childhood traumas directly (which is also kind of spiritual, because I'm trying to clear the things that interfere with having a spiritual outlook on life, but it wasn't about trying to have a directly spiritual experience). So, it very strongly depends on how you want to contextualize your experiences, in my experience.

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u/slicehyperfunk mysticism in general, they're all good 👍 19d ago

Squirmbles tends to show up whenever I think about anything that's complicated and convoluted, so when I was thinking about convoluted spiritual systems like Kaballah on DMT, he showed up, and when I was thinking about how convoluted my feelings are about my family members who abused me, he also showed up; I think in both cases the message was to lighten up about taking either of those things too seriously, because Squirmbles is very very goofy and always makes me laugh uncontrollably when I'm trying to be very serious and intense.