Been listening to a lecture on tape about Early Christianity by Luke Timothy Johnson and he has an interesting definition for a religious experience (i.e. in contrasting it with a aesthetic experience). If one goes to church and hears a magnificent sermon on the Good Samaritan and afterwards you tell the priest how much you liked the sermon but then your life doesn't change, then you had an aesthetic experience. If you go to the symphony and hear Mozart and then go home and buy a violin and begin study, you had a religious experience. Then funny thing is, he said, that you can never tell whether you are having a religious experience at the time you are experiencing it...
From the Gratuitous Nonsense Dep't
I worked briefly for the Mexican government in the Mexican Immigration Service (MIS) in ’89. I was hired to stop the flow of illegal Americans crossing into Matadoros, Mexico. I was given a badge and a gun and told to shoot anyone with blonde hair and blue eyes. Brown-haired Americans should be interviewed to determine if they are Mexicans before being jailed.
My first day on the job was unsettling. I saw what looked to be an obviously American family in a late-model van crossing the border. I stopped them.
“What business do you have in Mexico?” I asked.
“We are here on vacation,” the driver said.
“How do I know you’re not here to steal Mexicano jobs?"
“What Mexican jobs?”
I stammered, “I ask the questions."
Damned if this North American family didn’t proceed to run the barricade. They had entered Mexico illegally! My first customers. The dust rose up like a fog and they were gone.
I called it into my supervisor.
“No, no no! No one from Ohio comes to Mexico for a job…they come to escape non-stop rain!”
From then on I was ready. A family with Indiana plates drove up.
“State your business,” I said.
“We are here on vacation.”
"Aren't you really here to escape the constant clouds of the Midwest?”
"Well, to be honest, yes."
“And you expect me to believe you will leave sunny Mexico and return to 300 days of cloudy weather in Fort Wayne?”
They made a run for it too. Had my gun ready, but I didn’t shoot. I figured they were right. I’m now working at a specialty supermarket for gringos in central Mexico.
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