I understand not wanting to get bogged down in semantics, though I beleive that 'epiphanies' and 'revelations' would be better words than 'religious' experience. The word 'religion' implies things that I don't associate with a rush of knowledge or realization.

Sam Harris has offered the terms "spiritual" and "transformative" for such experiences. These seem pretty good.

Really, how someone signifies their experience is of little issue to me. I do care, however, with how they believe their particular signification entitles them to act.

Skepticism makes clear that we can't nail down exactly what is going on in the universe. The best we can do is get what it's like a lot of the time, but even so, this is not how it is essentially. So when some analytic zealot starts jawing off about "truth" and how they have some monopoly on this because they've managed to abstract something into a truth functional representation I end up wanting my soul saved from its misery.

The problem is that "epiphany" and "revelation" are not only religious terms, but each refers to a specific concept within Christianity.

So? The particular words that a religion chooses to co-opt are irrelevant.

I liked his epiphany under the stars but his views on religion and history are kind of uninformed and cliche. I really don't understand why the dominant form of atheism is aggressively spiteful of religion. I am an atheist that feels no need to criticize why people choose to join religions, as I know there are so many reasons that I am a hypocrite for saying, "Don't you get it, there are galaxies!" As long as they are not religious of the conservative, cena- mark-America-destroying variety, as in hapless proselytizers, than what's the problem?

Lots of religious people are scientists, physicists, and so on. Who is he talking to exactly, and would they be receptive to this self-inflated "You can't see things the way I can with my limited sensory abilities so fuck you" approach?

Goddammit, way to suck ALL the beauty out of this video to make it a soapbox, once again, for siding with tyrants and oppressors.

This video stopped being about the beauty of nature once his rant against the shivers that religion sends through his body began.