What a fascinating thing to say! Seems kind of like a stock fixture of the Left "progressive" imagination to suggest that some people are so deluded or dumb that they can't even tell whether they've really had an "experience."
Seems to me that an "experience" is quite a factual thing because it is a lived thing, not something that just happens in one's (self-deluded) imagination, something impotent to actualize in "reality"....
If you feel it -- if your total body and your emotions are resonating to something such that physical changes are taking place -- then that something is likely to be "real" enough....
For this dude, there is no genuine religious experience here -- for the simple reason that there is no such thing as a "genuine religious experience" in principle: Such are only in the deluded imaginations of backward, unprogressive, superstitious Christians....
But of course, an experience of this sort is unimaginable to this guy; ergo, such cannot possibly happen in the "real world." (I.e., he makes himself the measure of what is possible.)
What is wrong with people like this? Folks like this so often appear truly demented to me, not to mention relentlessly uncharitable (and baselessly judgmental) towards their fellow human beings. They do not seem to live in the same world as the rest of us...or want to.
Maybe they are just firmly planted in a relentless denial of Reality.
Which would call for our pity, compassion. Still, I do get a little sick of the manifest arrogance of this attitude so common in the ranks of our self-appointed cultural elites.
Thanks for the post, presidio9.
C.S. Lewis on reality (paraphrased): "Everything is real. The question is, are they real snakes or real delerium tremons?"
Or as they say down home, "The silly boy picked up a snake to kill a stick."
Schrader is just like most of the rest of us - he sees what he is, but in his case reality is illusion and illusion is reality.