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Gleb_Tsipursky comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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The two cases are non-analogous. Grooves in a phonograph record are not designed to be read by a human. Perhaps a better analogy would be reading sheet music, but most people are not trained to do that either. The reason people show such a strong preference in the latter case is that most people will get nothing at all from the record (or sheet music, for that matter).
This is a truism. Moreover, it is often argued that colors, flavors, &c. are of the map, not of the territory. If this is the case, colors may not be "real", even if the experience of colors is.
The attempt to losslessly transmit a complete subjective experience would be futile, although I've read some poets who took a good stab at it. Experience is one of the media that make up the map. Two people, given exactly the same stimulus, would have two different subjective experiences. It would certainly be easier to compare similar experiences with a similar reference frame but it is far from impossible to transmit one, even if some of the nuance is necessarily lost.
Finally, religiosity and spirituality are neither identical concepts nor even close synonyms, though they are treated as synonymous in the post. If you could define the two as you intend for us to read them it might be less confusing.
Yes, that is the whole point. The experience of God may be real even if God isn't.
Also, the reason I didn't choose sheet music as my analogy is that the information content of sheet music is different from the actual music. To get from sheet music to music you have to add information (in the information-theoretical sense) like the waveforms of the individual instruments. That is not the case with the grooves on a record. They contain all of the same information as the audio waveform, but simply rendered in space rather than in time.
I think the crux here is to avoid arguing against people's experiences when trying to raise the sanity waterline. If one argues against their deep experiences, there's a big danger of the backfire effect. If one acknowledges the experience of God as something real, but delineates that from proof of an actual God existing, this may go further with religious people.