 Indeed, in so far as spiritual sensations are prized for these reasons — because of their phenomenological feel or as a way of underwriting a person’s sense of their own importance — then they will be religiously defective (given the religious importance of the virtue of humility for example); and they are also likely to be epistemically defective, because of the suspicion that the believer, whether consciously or not, is engineering the production of such experiences for the advantages that they confer in these respects. It is in part for these reasons that there exists a very broadly based tradition of testing religious experiences by their fruits in practice. An experience that fails to issue in a livelier regard for the interests of one’s neighbour, for example, is to that extent disconfirmed on religious grounds (Alston 1991, pp. 250–254).