So any response to my argument? Or do you agree with me that your position is based on a priori assumptions, whereas mine is not?
No, you just dont have a position on this subject. You just admitted you think you cant know anything about it.
You do write a lot for someone who doesnt have a clear position on the topic. 
If you had a position on the subject, you would have a priori assumptions (as any claims on any subject has).
I don’t agree with that. They don’t have to change their minds about those things before being able to change their minds on the nature of religious experiences. It seems to me that people often employ appeals to religious experiences as arguments that are supposed to persuade people out of their “materialism”.
I don’t think having to a priori abandon materialism is necessary to accomplish that. For example it could be that a good argument based on specific evidence from religious experiences could amount to strong evidence against materialism. We could speculate on what such evidence could be, but I don’t see why such evidence and arguments could not be made in principle.
The discussion on religious experiences happens with each party standing on a foundation of priors which are intrinsic to their approach/argumentation.
Yes, I certainly agree with that. We have our background knowledge through which we evaluate new data and claims. That background knowledge can increase the evidential burden that new claims being made will have to overcome to be accepted by the person with the background knowledge. If I have an enormous amount of scientific evidence of the success of materialist explanations, it is going to require extremely strong or very large amounts of contradictory evidence to overcome this. I think this is how it has to be, we can’t just ignore what we already know.
Hence the way i see it, there will be some amount of question begging in any argument for or against religious experiences…
I don’t agree with this. I don’t see why there has to be question-begging. Question begging is fallacy in deductive logic. Having background knowledge that needs to be outweighed by better evidence is not a question begging fallacy, that’s just how evidence-based reasoning works.
Have you heard about the red vs blue marble in a jar-analogy? The question is whether a jar before us, which we can’t see into, has more blue or red marbles. You put your hand into it and you can feel there are possibly several thousand marbles in it. You take out one marble, it’s blue. Now you know there is at least one blue marble in it, there are still thousands more. You take one more out, it’s blue again. You keep going for a while and maybe you have picked 8 more blue marbles out of it.
Someone comes along and says: There are more red marbles than there are blue marbles in the jar. Strictly speaking that is possible, you know there are still thousands in there. You pick out 10 more, all of them blue. It’s still possible that there are more red than blue marbles in there, as there are still thousands to go. But every time you pull out a blue marble but don’t pull out a red one, the burden increases. All the evidence you have collected says otherwise. For every blue marble you take out, it will require a larger and larger amount of red marbles to overcome that evidence and indicate the opposite trend. If you’ve pulled out 50 blue marbles, it will require at least 51 marbles to change the evidence around.
When you had only picked 1 blue marble, then 2 red ones would have been enough to have evidence that most of them are red. But when you’ve picked out 50 blue ones and not a single red, the evidential burden for the claim that there are mostly red ones has increased a lot.
Take the example of categorizing religious experiences as “emotions”. If a person believes that emotions are a product of physiological processes and cannot be caused by Spirits (God is a Spirit); then emotions cannot have spiritual causes by definition. I doubt you will be amenable to attributing emotions to the work of spirits.
Sure, if some hypothetical person is convinced that emotions cannot possibly be caused by spirits, then such a person is unlikely to change their minds on that. It’s just that I don’t think there are many such people, certainly no one around here thinks like that.
Now, it happens to be the case that many religious experiences ARE emotional experiences, and me stating as much is not me making a metaphysical claim about the cause or origin of those experiences. If I feel love, awe, wonder, true happines, humbled, a sense of deep connection with my surroundings, those are all emotions. Love is an emotion. Awe is an emotion. Wonder is an emotion. Feeling humbled is an emotion. And so on. They’re emotions. And I would be fine with calling that a religious experience. And you should be fine with it too, because in describing the contents of that experience I have not made ANY claims about what is causing it.
And yet you DO seem to have a problem with it, and I suspect it is because you WANT to assign it a metaphysical or “spiritual” importance, and you see the absence of such an interpretation to be an attack on your belief that it has one. I think you should just let it go and accept that it is possible to describe the set of emotions we call a “religious experience” as emotions, as that is what they are, without it automatically constituting an attack on your belief when what you believe is not explicitly stated to be the cause of religious experiences.
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Kindly refrain from misrepresenting my position. If you do not understand it, than simply ask questions, as I have regarding your position.