Empiricism and Religious Experience

One challenge to James' Empiricist study of 'religious experience' has already been discussed--its incapacity to distinguish religious phenomena from a religious interpretation of phenomena.  Now, the notion of 'experience' itself presents his methodology with a similar, perhaps, deeper, problem.  For, what constitutes 'experience' is systematically related to a concept of a subject of experience, and a concept of a subject of experience is systematically related to a more general ontology, which includes an object of religion, an entity which may be  presupposed by the existence of the subject of experience, as, e. g., the human soul is a creature of God, according to many theories.  Hence, James cannot distinguish experience qua given, from experience qua religious interpretation of some given.  Accordingly, while he innovatively classifies a wide variety of experiences as 'religious', he still interprets them all in terms of the traditional deficiency-deliverance pattern.