Thanks for your frankness.
Within my viewpoint it is easily answered: These experiences are not attributable to any god, likely because no gods exist, and they can instead be accounted for by explanations of the sort @John_Harshman suggests.
Does that help explain why I remain an unbeliever?
Can you be a bit more specific re: the nature of this “investigation”?
My friend, I need no evidence to convince me that it’s ok for you to remain an unbeliever. 
I only need your word on the matter.
I would consider investigation to be reading it while also getting help from scholars so that you discern the cover-to-cover story intended by the authors. It’s easy for Christians to cherry pick highlights and easy for sceptics to cherry pick things that make them cringe. It takes more time and patience to gain an understanding of the story and evaluate from there.
edit: regading getting help from scholars, bibleproject.com is currently one of the most accessible and well done resources for help with understanding the big story and themes of the Bible and it’s grounded in good quality scholarship.
That would only help me better understand the beliefs and intentions of the people who wrote those stories. It would not much help me determine whether their beliefs were true.
I think you would need to know the story and the claims that it is making in order to evaluate it. That seems like the starting point if you actually want to evaluate it. I don’t know how you’d evaluate it without investigating it, which I would think starts with reading it.
If evaluating the Hebrew Bible and the NT as a whole is not desirable, then you can start with Jesus. But then, I’d suggest reading the gospels, and accessing scholarship.
And yet, what you describe simply doesn’t even vaguely relate to what one would do if he had a hypothesis that a god existed, and he wanted to evaluate that hypothesis. Likewise, Mark’s descriptions of his thinking process earlier in this thread. It resembles the sandwich-making Dada epistemology more than it does any sincere inquiry.
It’s up to anyone, of course, to decide what classes of experience satisfy him as to the truth or falsity of some proposition. But while the rule, in the realm of personal experience, is de gustibus non est disputandum, I think that most of us recognize that these personal poetic ways of relating to the world are not useful for discerning the answers to straightforward questions of fact, e.g., “is there actually a god?” They’re very good for discerning the answers to questions like “how do I feel about stories of the gods,” and that sort of thing, but as epistemology, they are worse than useless. And their results, bearing as they do only upon one’s own subjective experience, are likewise worse than useless, if the project is to explain anything about the underlying question to someone else. If the project is purely to be the subject of some sort of study in cultural anthropology, well, sure, expressing these things has some value to the researcher into that sort of thing.
What would one do?
Is Jesus quoted in the Bible as teaching that?
Empirically, one might approach from any number of angles. My inclination would be to start by looking for evidence that there actually is any such thing as a disembodied spirit at all. The most straightforward place to start would be to look for any evidence that there are such things as the endo-geist which some religious traditions call the “soul.”
I have read it, and am also familiar with some of the scholarship surrounding it. But I don’t really see how delving more deeply into that will result in me changing my mind on whether it is true. Could you give maybe one or two examples from Bible scholarship that you found convincing yourself? I also wonder what percentage of people who do believe the Bible have engaged in this level of investigation.
I’d like to take a shot at offering up some things about the Bible that I find compelling. I’m up against the need to get some work done, so I’m going to have to come back to this later.
Thanks for the kind conversation, Faizal
Not that I am aware. I do not actually believe that Christianity is much rooted in the teachings of Jesus. It entails many precepts and beliefs that have arisen as it continued to develop as a religious movement after Jesus’s death. Not for nothing is it called Christianity, rather than Jesusism.
My pleasure.
You may already know this, but Chrisitanity comes from “christ”, which comes from the greek word for messiah. A better english translation would be Jesus the Messiah." But then, christians, or “little christs” developed because of the prominence of Greek spoken in early churches.
Here’s my last post for a while. I might agree with you somewhat on this, depending on what you think about the gospels in the NT. Much of Christianity is what it is because of traditions that have developed. But I think the teachings of Jesus in the gospels are the teachings of Jesus. So any group of Jesus followers, ideally, should be able to reorient to Jesus’ teachings as they notice they’ve drifted from them. Some actually do this.
Yes, that was my point. The religion is based on the idea of Jesus as “Messiah”. Not on Jesus as “Nice Guy Who Said We All Be Nice To Each Other Now, 'Kay?”
Please be specific.
And do you have a basis for that belief?
I would agree, but suggest that denominations vary dramatically in their extent of such rooting, with some all but ignoring them.
I would further suggest that such rooting is inversely proportional to their rooting in tribalism.
AFAIK, all major factions of Christianity hold the belief in the triune nature of God as a core tenet, and that is not something that is any more than vaguely alluded to by Jesus in the NT. Correct me if I am wrong.
It has long seemed to me that the more emphasis a church places upon the divinity, in the full-on paranormal sense, of Jesus, the less emphasis there is upon his teachings. That has always struck me as a bit sad, as the divinity would merely be an interesting and puzzling fact about the man, but teachings are potentially useful. And while I’m not on board with everything the gospels attribute to him, some of it is pure wisdom.
Precisely.
And one would think that the more one believed in the divinity of Jesus, the more important the teachings of Jesus should be, but the converse is the norm, at least in the US.