Hi cvelee, welcome to the forum!
First of all let me say your piece was quite readable and understandable. However to me personally, you seem to discount anything that you did not experience yourself or that was not proved by science. What does that say? Nothing at all. It only tells me that your point of view is limited (no pun intended) yet understandable. Look at your experience in shared SP (almost a SD?). If you would have never experienced this, would you believe it to be possible?
However I agree that much of spirituality these days is crap. People believe too easy and spirituality became a fast food consumption product. Everyone seems to think he or she can OBE at will and have SD’s easily, etc. I agree most of this is based on wishful thinking. However not all people are like that. Believe it or not, there are those of us who have come to experience that there’s more to life that science can tell us, and we aren’t part of the wishfull thinkers, nor lunatics, in my opinion. “Spiritual” ideas can also be based on a combination of personal experiences, scientific scrutiny and logical thinking.
If you are interested, I wrote an article on this subject, I posted it a while back in this thread.
Ps: what do you say to experiences of people having NDE’s on no brain activity (no cortex activity, so how do they “see”?).