I've had first-hand experiences of God. I don't think first-hand information (of any kind, mind you) can be verified. Our only tests are against similar experiences - as you say, "we can derive the same thing ourselves." It's common among believers to have shared similar and even identical experiences, so for us that's proof our experience is real.

That wasn't my experience.

And I have had first hand experience of the stars falling out of the sky.  Mind you, I had been using LSD that night.  Even so, it happened just as surely as your experience of god. 

I'd love to hear which of the old gods you experienced. And you had no one telling you how to experience the gods?

Ok.

I still wonder how much of the "experincing God "is due to conditioning (raised in a Christian family, sitting under sermons for years) or the tendency for humans to want to conform to a group they like.

Maybe you should do a study.

btw, my family wasn't really christian. I was the only one to go to church(sometimes I made my mom come with me). Sometimes I made my own sermons. Also since paganism is so varied, it's pretty hard to conform to them.

I'm not right wing enough to get bankrolled for that

They didn't give me shit.

oh... so you DID get screwed.... ahaha >.<

You don't have to be told expressly what god is like to have a completely generic religious experience. People who claim to be abducted by aliens usually tell similar stories. It's not because there are alien abductions, it's because abduction lore is so prevalent in society that anyone would concoct a similar story.

Nobody went to every person on the planet and explained to them in explicit detail what a dragon looks like, but if you ask nearly anyone in the world what a dragon looks like they'll say something similar. And people don't even worship dragons and aliens.

It's such BS to say that no one told you what god was like yet you experienced god in a way that's in accord with other people's notions about it. Have you read books? Have you watched films or television? Have you listened to music? I assume that you talk to other people. It's not like you were living alone on an island or in a cave.

Oh, I wasn't talking about what you said. I was talking about JeremyHenson. He said:

While I'm not going to claim Wikipedia is the most trustworthy source, I found these two bits:

Charismatics in the USA

Charismatic Christianity has grown in the last decade. As of 2008, according to Barna surveys, one out of every four Protestant churches in the United States (23%) is a charismatic congregation. A slight majority of all "born-again" Christians (51%) are charismatic. Nearly half of all adults who attend a Protestant church (46%) are charismatic.^[3]

Numbers

In 2000 the Charismatic Movement numbered 176 million, neocharismatics 295 million and Pentecostals 66 million^{[citation needed]}

This means that charismatics are the second largest branch of Christianity after the Roman Catholic Church (although charismatic Catholics do not see themselves as part of a separate non-Catholic ecclesial entity). They are 27 percent of all Christians. Charismatics are growing at the rate of 9 million per year making the total adherents around 618 million by 2009.^[4]

That sounds reasonably "mainline" to me.

How do you have non-institutionalized Christianity, exactly?

Wow, didn't realize they were "number 2" after Catholics. I meant "mainline" to refer to non-evangelical Protestant groups like Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, etc. But yeah, in terms of the main stream, looks like charismatics are it among Protestants.

That will likely take a lot of explaining. I'll try a short answer, and if needs be it can branch off to its own thread.

Non-institutionalized Christianity has no human authority structure or hierarchy. So there's no modern pastor in an individual church, no denomination, nothing like that. There's rarely a building.

Instead, a group of Christians meet (usually in a house) and share Christ collectively with each other. A meeting is ideally led by Christ directly, supernaturally if you will through the Holy Spirit. People will spontaneously, by guidance from the Spirit, share a song, a prayer, a story, a prophecy, a teaching from scripture, or whatever else they're led to do. It doesn't always work out smoothly - people aren't perfect - but it's a powerful experience when it happens.

There are workers, people who carry on the tradition of the apostles. They help establish churches, help people come together and learn to follow the Spirit. They're often available to answer questions or give advice to resolve conflicts, but as a rule workers are hands-off so Christians can grow to maturity by resolving their own differences and not relying on human leaders. Workers don't have authority over churches; they're respected for their experience and call from God.

Churches should judge a worker by their character and teaching instead of blithely following, because there are false ones, and even legitimately called ones aren't perfect.

The goal is to let Christ be manifest among the church. The church is called the "Body of Christ" for a reason. From my experience, most institutional forms are really about keeping people safe from Christ, letting them stay immature because becoming mature is a painful process. So few believers function, instead sitting passively, and only a small fraction "do ministry."

I still consider institutional Christians my spiritual brothers and sisters, despite my disagreement with their practices. I hope that answers the question, but if it raises a lot more questions I'll start a new thread.

"Anecdote" implies telling someone something, which is second- or third-hand information. It's not an anecdote when it's first-hand. That means it's evidence for me, but not evidence for anyone who hasn't shared the experience.

We can often reproduce experiences others have had, which is a kind of test, but we can't really know what someone else experiences. For instance, I might say "I see a red car." If you look and see a red car, you'll probably accept that my claim is true.

So if I say "I heard God speak to me," and you'd never heard God yourself or accepted anyone else's claim of hearing God, you probably wouldn't believe me. If you'd heard God, too, we'd probably describe our experiences to each other as a means of testing them. If I say God sounded like a whistling wind and you say he sounded like an avalanche, we might still not believe each other.

Even if our experiences match, one of us could still be lying or delusional. We judge, we assess, based on whatever we've found to be reliable.

yep, zymotic is right, jeremyhenson.

I don't see why it makes a difference where the knowledge came from.  Even if my knowledge of the Grand Canyon originated from my geography class, I do not see how it would be sufficient justification for my claim that the Grand Canyon is real. 

To answer the question; logic, revelation of scripture, the experiences of people, history, etc.

Maybe "revealed" is a fuzzy term, but we have the biblical records, which themselves are meant to be taken as historical documents.  Why are you trying to apply the scientific method to history?  We could not scientifically test the existence of Jesus because we have no DNA or fossils (since he was resurrected, we could not).

God, by his very nature, would not comport with the scientific method.  So why would you apply that to Him?  If I am making the claim that there exists a being who, as the creator of the universe, cannot be subject to its laws, then you need to find a different criteria by which you can judge the validity of my claim.  If you assume the validity of materialistic naturalism, then you need offer some justification.

Because I sought Him and I found Him. 

That leaves you without a religion.

But tell me, how did you test the experience? We know how to induce and enhance feelings of god experiences. In and of itself the experience has no meaning.

Care to describe this experience?

The only tests I had for myself - which aren't scientific - were that the content didn't resemble things I already knew or believed, and that I couldn't find anything inherently wrong - amoral, insane, incongruous with my understandings of the world - with them.

I've heard of the research on inducing "god experiences;" it's interesting stuff.

My initial experience of God was when I was an agnostic 13-year-old. For background, I had attended a Presbyterian (PCUSA) church from early childhood 'til I was 12 or 13, when I'd long since disregarded the whole thing as a bunch of well-meaning delusional old folks. I retained a belief in spiritual things in general, but made no claims on understanding any of it and wouldn't have been surprised if materialism was the only truth.

My first experience of God was during a bike ride to a friend's house. It was lightly raining and I don't recall thinking about anything beyond getting where I was going safely. I felt a sudden rush of insight, so unnerving I had to stop to prevent falling over. The "message" was what I called the meaning of life. Life was to be lived to please God and for the sake of other people, and these things were really the same. I recognize it now as the "golden rule" or "great commandment," but couldn't have told you a thing about either at the time.

I did not know it was the Abrahamic God at the time, but I knew it was a singular and omnipotent God. I can't offer any proof or test to that knowledge, beyond saying there are some things that can't be mistaken. I was effectively a deist until 2006 (when I was 24), and still didn't bother with anything religious.

At 24 I met the woman I later married, who was a Christian and pursuaded me to read the gospel of Mark. I recognized the God I'd heard in the bible, and came to believe in Jesus Christ. My theology and beliefs have been developing since, because I'm initially skeptical of most teachings and do my best to study things for myself.

That was my first experience of several, and the pattern is fairly consistent. God reveals something which may or may not have familiar components but always shows me something I'd never considered or heard of before. Sometimes they're impressions of God speaking (like my first experience), sometimes they're visions, once it was a dream. Only two experiences - both visions - contained traditional biblical imagery, and neither matched my preconcieved ideas of the subject matter.