Well, LittleToe, if you think carefully about your experience with God, I think you can see why many people must have as much skepticism about its being real as they do with the claim of various JW "anointed ones" to having similar experiences. Why are you special? If God is who his followers claim, then he should be able to see that at least hundreds of millions of humans are at least as special as you, and give them similar experiences. As the American comedian Don Rickles used to say, "What am I? Chopped liver?"
I think it's telling that only Christians have this sort of experience. Their religion demands that they have something like that, and so they do. We see this all the time with the crazy American Fundamentalist faith-healing and tongue-speaking sects. People who, for emotional reasons, want to join up with them, very quickly get these experiences. Why is that? I'm sure you don't actually believe that these people -- often extremely sincere -- really do get healed or speak in real foreign languages. Or that God is somehow involved with protecting those whacked out Bible Belt snake handlers from harm. How is your experience different?
When my dad had his hallucinations, if he didn't have some measure of skepticism left he might have tried to convince others that his hallucinatory conversations with the people who appeared in his room were real. He might have succeeded. After all, no one else was there to disconfirm it, and it was his experience.
So, in the same way that I must relegate the claim of the "anointed" JW I described to your option 2, so must I relegate yours. Why? Because I agree with what Carl Sagan wrote in his article "The Burden of Skepticism" in Skeptical Inquirer (vol. 12, Fall 1987):
If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.
On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.
Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science.
I've been skeptical of extraordinary claims all my life. I have to think it must be part of my personality because it certainly wasn't taught to me by my JW parents or other JWs. I've never had anything even bordering on the sort of extraordinary experience described by many people. Does that make me wierd? Or does it make me not gullible?
Beardo wonders if Satan or God seemed to appear to me personally, would I be skeptical? Damn right I would! I'd wonder if, for once, I was having a hallucination. But I'd also keep an open mind and demand proof from these smart guys that I wasn't hallucinating. If that weren't good enough for them, they could just zap me and I'd never know the difference. But if they took the trouble to appear to me, then I'd have to conclude that they wanted to convince me of something -- that they didn't think I was chopped liver.
AlanF