The word “modern,” which I do indeed use a lot, is infelicitous because it’s ambiguous. It can mean just “better, relative to the past,” so all societies can think of themselves as modern, including ancient ones. That sense of the word isn’t so helpful, and it’s not the one I assume.

I’m thinking of modernity, rather, as being indexed to a specific revolutionary period in history, as I outline in several articles. I’m talking about the modern age that came after the medieval and ancient ones in Europe. So the transition to modernity consists of the rise of Protestant individualism, the Italian Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism and democracy, and so on.

So we can ask whether out of body experiences are modern in that second sense, and the answer is no they’re not. Such experiences aren’t characteristic of modernity since they were more plentiful before those historical transitions. People used to think that such experiences were as common as dreams and mental illness. They used to be a dime a dozen. So no, they’re premodern.

I also see no reason to identify atheism with materialism, but that semantic question is beside the point.

Your main point seems to be that some kind of spirituality is consistent with “atheism” or with materialism (with modern science and philosophy). I’d agree, but so far that’s a trivial concession. Spirituality can be so vague and unfalsifiable that it’s only vacuously consistent with naturalism. Also, the question is whether traditional forms of spirituality have become stale, so that we could use a new one that’s more suitable to the late-modern zeitgeist.

This is the substance of my point about the burden of proof. There’s a new cultural context in town. It’s called “modernity,” as defined by the above historical transitions. Those transitions weren’t absolute since much of the old world persists, as do many of our self-deceptions and illusions. Most people are hypocritical because the truth often hurts. Instead of coming to terms with harsh facts, we ignore them or pretend they’re otherwise. We tell ourselves stories to make us feel better.

So one harsh fact is that modernity happened. This led to what John Vervaeke calls the crisis of the loss of life’s meaning. Of course, lots of modern writers recognized the same downside, from Dostoevsky and Nietzsche to Kafka and Freud. The old gods are culturally dead, and new idols have risen to take their place. But the new gods aren’t so captivating or inspiring, partly because modern progress has turned most of us into decadent consumers.

I think the question that faces us here is whether late-modern spirituality that’s sustained by the God-of-the-gaps style of arguments about the Big Bang, consciousness, quantum mechanics, and various paranormal phenomena is liable to be compelling and to unite us in a worthy mission. In my view, a new religion should be grounded in an unshakable revelation, not in fragile appeals to lacunae in the scientist’s ever-widening naturalism.

But you’re right that naturalism isn’t what it used to be. Science has re-enchanted with one hand what it disenchanted with the other. Nature is a strange place, which is why I think pantheism should inform the new religious mindset, to challenge dehumanizing materialistic consumerism. The difference between our approaches seems to me that you find solace in what I see as sketchy appeals to the paranormal, whereas I’m content with standard scientific theories. But we both take that data in a spiritual/existential direction.

You’re free to interpret the universe as deriving from “God,” if you keep the deity vague enough for your theism to be untestable and trivially consistent with the outputs of scientific cosmology. But that strikes me as a hollow basis for a fresh and viable religious mindset. Note that the Eastern and esoteric Western religious traditions are consistent with naturalism precisely to the extent that they’re implicitly atheistic, in that they eschew anthropocentric personifications of ultimate reality.