Religious experience

Question 1

Define mystical experience

Answer 1

experiences of God or of the supernatural which go beyond everyday sense experience

Question 2

Define conversion experince

Answer 2

an experience which produces a drastic change in someone’s belief system

Question 3

Define Numinous experience

Answer 3

an indescribable experience which invokes feelings of awe, worship and fascination

Question 4

What is Swinburnes Principle of credulity

Answer 4

Swinburne’s principle that we should usually believe what our senses tell us we are perceiving

Question 5

What is swinburnes Principle of testimony

Answer 5

Swinburne’s principle that we should usually trust that other people are telling us the truth

Question 6

Define Naturalistic explanation

Answer 6

an explanation referring to natural rather than supernatural causes

Question 7

Define Neurophysiology

Answer 7

an area of science which studies the brain and the nervous system

Question 8

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)
What was schleiermachers argument on religious experience

Answer 8

essence of religion was based in personal experience.

not enough simply to agree to a set of religious doctrines, or commit oneself to a set of ethical principles.

Religious experience should be at the heart of faith

Question 9

Schleiermacher argued that religious experience is at the core of all religion and is ‘self-authenticating’ which makes it valid

Answer 9

Schleiermacher believed that every person has a consciousness of the divine, but that in many people this is obscured by other concerns. Religious people are those who are aware of, and try to develop, this sense of the divine.

Question 10

What did William James say makes a religious experience valid

Answer 10

William James argued that religious experience could be tested for validity: a valid religious experience brings about a lasting positive effect in the individual

Question 11

James identified four main qualities of a religious experience
What are they

Answer 11

1. Ineffability: the experience is impossible to express in normal language.

**2. Noetic quality: **the experience gives the person an understanding of important truths, which could not have been reached through the use of reason alone, having had the truth revealed to them.

3. Transience:the experience is over quite soon, lasting no more than a few hours, even though the effect of the experience could last a lifetime.

**4. Passivity: **the person having the experience feels as if the experience is being controlled from outside themselves - they are the recipients of the experience, rather than the instigators of it.

Question 12

name the four factors of a conversion experience

Answer 12

1 dissatisfied
2 searches intellectually and emotionally
3 point of crisis
4 sense of peace
5. long term change

Question 13

william james believed a conversion experience could be tested by what

Answer 13

its results, if the person is happier, kinder more loving then that’s enough to verify its validity

Question 14

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72)
Gave a naturalistic explanation of religious beliefs and feelings what does this mean

Answer 14

religious behef and religious experiences have origins within the human mind rather than coming from God.

when people think they are worshipping God they are in fact worshipping their own human nature

People created God in their own inuge, in order to meet their needs tomfeel cared for

Question 15

Sigmund Freud(1856-1939)
was strongly influenced by the thinking of Feuerbach
Freud gave an explanation of religion and religious experience which was similarly naturalistic

Answer 15

that people who feel themselves to be in the presence of God are deluding themselves

Question 16

What layers did fraud argue made up the psych

Answer 16

**The ego **- this is the layer of the mind which is obvious to us as the conscious self, where we are aware of our opinions and decisions,

**The id **- this is the unconscious self containing memories and repressed emotions and desires that we might not want to admit to ourselves.

The super-ego-, an inner “moral voice’ which tells us that some things are right and otheps are wrong.

Question 17

Freud argued that religious experience was a symptom of an
‘infantile neurosis

Answer 17

people are unable to cope with the idea of adult life, and so they invent an imaginary parent-figure who will look after them. They mistake the moral commands of their own super-egos as being the voice of God.

Question 18

Donald Winnicotf (1896-1971) was a paediatrician and psychoanalyst who extended these ideas of Freud’s

Answer 18

• Winnicott argues that **people cannot do without this illusion in their lives, even when they are adults. **Those who cannot make the distinction , between their illusions and reality are considered to have what he cally the ‘hallmarks of madness’ .
• illusion in his view, is an important and natural part of people’s mental lives, most often exhibited through creativity such as art and also through religion.

We need illusion and imagination in order to make sense of ourselves and our place in the world and to give it significance; this is why we enjoy fiction, films and theatre.

Question 19

What context did winscott agregue religious experience becomes madness

Answer 19

when the person tries to impose his or her illusions on others and expects them to give it credibility as ‘real’

Question 20

Neurophysiology
What was Michael persingers idea of religious experience

Answer 20

1980s, led by Michael Persinger. Volunteers wore a helmet-shaped device which transmitted weak magnetic signals through the brain, and a significant proportion of them reported feelings which had striking similarities to those reported by people who claim to have had religious experiences.

This study has been criticised for its methodology - for example, some have argued that the participants knew in advance what the investigators were hoping to find, and others who have tried to repeat the experiment have not produced such convincing data -
however, it has raised the possibility that religious experiences could be explained by natural, rather than supernatural, causes. It could be that people who are unknowingly» in the presence of some kind of magnetic field might think they had encountered God, when in fact it was just the effects of the magnetism.

Question 21

Edwin Starbuck’s (1866-1947)
What did edwin say about conversion experience

Answer 21

“Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon,”