Everything is permissable... but not everything is beneficial
I hardly think me speaking to you (or even making a decision) under the influence of any type of plant or chemical is beneficial
No... it is not just some feeling i get from reading a book that causes me to believe in God. It's not just wishful thinking that there must be something beyond this life that causes me to believe. What i "feel" has very little to do with it.
I believe that God has revealed himself very clearly through the person of Jesus Christ. I believe he is fully man and fully God. I believe that he died, but was raised from death three days after. Because this, he is no less capable of presenting himself as real to me as he did to the people 2000 years ago.
So yes, I have a personal relationship with the man, and inherently God, even if i don't get to see him. He is no less real to me than you, who i cant see, or my friends who I see every day. I guess the best way to explain that is that I am blind and I cant see my friend, but he speaks and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he does everything possible to let me know that he is still with me.
Have i been left all alone to believe in this person I cant see? After all how to I know that you are really who you claim to be? If you really wanted me to believe you, you would send someone who knows you intimately to assure me of who you are. And God has done EXACTLY the same thing for me.
In becoming a Christian I have recieved the Holy Spirit. This means that God is no longer an external person who can feel distant and far away! Instead, God himself has made his home in me! Every day I must die to myself so that the life of God may flow from me.
How do I know that God lives in me? Because his Spirit awakens mine to his presence. And I am so humbled by the fact that the perfect and living God has chosen to make my sinful human body his dwelling place.
My natural state is rebelling against God's will for my life and there is NO way i can change that myself. It is only possible for God to live in a perfect relationship with God. So through my life, I exhibit the life of Christ in this; I am now dead to my sin, my rebellion against God, and I am no longer it's slave.
Yes I still sin, but every day I do what it is impossible for me to humanly do. By the Spirit I put to death my sinful nature and am thus the perfect God sees me as perfect. It is not because I am better than anyone else that God chose to live in me... but because he did i now have a full and active relationship with him.
In short, through the Spirit God revealed to me that I am not good enough to save myself, but he is awesome enough to save me. He did this through the man Jesus Christ who is as real as you and my best friends, and that I now have a saving relationship with.