Second, that you find mystical experiences by other people inherently hard to believe but you believe your own because you are a normal sane person (1,2,5).

Unless I know them already. Once I already know people for honest, normal, sane people ("normal" isn't actually required and I object to the typicalist language), their miracle stories have the same weight as my own. Also, miracles of more empirically-verifiable sorts are believable when vetted by snopes.com.

If we're going to go gender-neutral, I recommend "eir", just because I think it's the most common gender neutral pronoun on this site and there are advantages to standardizing this sort of thing.

Xe is poetic and awesome. I'm hoping it'll become standard English. To that end, I use it often.

(including changing as a person)

I read your first link and I'm very surprised because I didn't expect something like that. It would be interesting to talk to that person about this.

So either only a tiny fraction of a percent of people are open to the knowledge - so tiny that you could not reasonably expect yourself to be among them -

Is that surprising? First of all, I know that I already converted to Christianity, rather than just having assumed it always, so I'm already more likely to be open to new facts. And second, I thought it was common knowledge around these parts that most people are really, really bad at finding the truth. How many people know Bayes? How many know what confirmation bias is? Anchoring? The Litany of Tarski? Don't people on this site rail against how low the sanity waterline is? I mean, you don't disagree that I'm more rational than most Christians and Muslims, right?

Different studies show somewhere from a third to half of Americans having mystical experiences, including about a third of non-religious people who have less incentive to lie. Five percent of people experience them "regularly".

Do they do this by using tricks like Multiheaded described? Or by using mystical plants or meditation? (I know there are Christians who think repeating a certain prayer as a mantra and meditating on it for a long time is supposed to work... and isn't there, or wasn't there, some Islamic sect where people try to find God by spinning around?) If so, that really doesn't count. Is there another study where that question was asked? Because if you're asserting that mystical experiences can be artificially induced by such means in most if not all people, then we're in agreement.

Well, okay, but this seems to be an argument from force, sort of "Jehovah is a god and Astarte a demon because if I say anything else, Jehovah will torture me". It seems to have the same form as "Stalin is not a tyrant, because if I call Stalin a tyrant, he will kill me, and I don't want that!"

I was thinking more along the lines of "going to hell is a natural consequence of worshiping Astarte", analogous to "if I listen to my peers and smoke pot, I won't be able to sing, whereas if I listen to my mother and drink lots of water, I will; therefore, my mother is right and listening to my peers is bad". I hadn't even considered it from that point of view before.