Ok, I think I see where you're coming from. I think we're operating with a somewhat different idea of what the spiritual or numinous necessarily is or has to be. For me, mysticism was never all that appealing, regardless of what tradition it came from. I guess the mystic whose thought I'm most familiar with is Terence Mckenna, but I always ingested his thought with a sort of mysticism filter applied. I thought he had a lot of deep insights into some of the deeper paradoxes of our cultural fabric, and how they're illuminated by entheogenic drugs, but then he always had to go to some kind of crazy shamanistic new age crackpot place with it.

To me, the spiritual is more about integrating the internal world with the external, the present with our evolutionary past, the individual with the collective, the irrational and primal with the rational and civilised.

In my younger years, I was very judgemental of religion; I just didn't see any value, and saw it merely as obsolete intellectual baggage. I felt a distinct superiority from being free of this epistemic crutch. This actually changed over night when I took psychedelics for the first time(AMT, if anyone's curious). I had a powerful religious experience, felt a presence, "the love of god shining down on me", whatever the cliches are people use to describe experiences like this. This didn't affect my atheism, strengthened it if anything, but it did show me some of the value the religious find in their beliefs, and I gained a lot of respect for them. It also exposed one of the fundamental human paradoxes I mentioned above, namely the relationship between the internal world and the external world. And I've found drugs helpful in exploring that tension, as well as other tensions like some of the cultural delusions we all inevitably believe in one form or another.

Sex(the wilder the better) is similar in the sense that it makes nakedly(ha) obvious the fundamental paradox between being an animal and living in a civilisation. After all, how can you understand the human experience without first understanding the animal experience upon which it is built?

I could go on about this, but it's getting long winded, so I hope that sheds some light on why I think drugs and sex are valid "spiritual tools". There are many others too for sure. Like art, for instance. And not every tool is for everyone, of course.

I do agree that overt focus on one tool or perspective(I.e only living like an animal) can often lead one astray, and I've certainly gone astray myself. But I don't think it's inevitable. I think they more easily lead people astray when they end up in bubbles, like you hinted at. There's a process that's sort of analogous to how groups in social media end up being echo chambers with extreme views. I think this is a direct consequence of taboos built into Western society causing various groups too strongly self-isolate.

I think that would probably be impossible to quantify. Would you consider amount of sexual abuse per religion, per believer, per cleric, or what? And, of course, reliable historical data on sexual abuse is unavailable.

I think your impression is likely a result of “deviance amplification”—-i.e, hearing about all the bad shit that goes on in more obscure religions, and taking that as indicative of prevalence.