religious experience

Question 1

Direct Religious Experience.

Answer 1

When someone encounters God directly.

Question 2

Indirect Religious Experience.

Answer 2

Experienced encouraged by everyday general experiences.

Question 3

Corporate Religious Experience.

Answer 3

An experience shared by a group of people.

Question 4

Corporate Religious Experience Example.

Answer 4

Toronto Vineyard Airport Church, where people have broken into laughter, tears or animalistic sounds because of the Holy Spirit.

Question 5

Personal Religious Experiences.

Answer 5

Experiences of the individuals, visions, vocal, mystical or prayer.

Question 6

Rudolf Otto’s concept in ‘The Idea of the Holy’

Answer 6

Uses the ‘numinous’ as description of the ‘wholly other’ and the phrase ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’ in reference to religious experiences being mysterious and seductive, drawing someone in due to their intense love to what they are experiencing and believes there is no adequate human language for the experience.

Question 7

Numinous.

Answer 7

An experience of God, which transcends the everyday.

Question 8

Wholly other.

Answer 8

Signifies God as being in an order outside that of ordinary order.

Question 9

Example of intellectual vision experience.

Answer 9

Teresa of Avila, ‘seeing’ Jesus’ presence as an emotional experience.

Question 10

Example of a coropreal visiom experience.

Answer 10

St. Bernadette of Lourdes saw the Virgin Mary telling her to dig at her feet and later found a spring of healing water.

Question 11

Example of an imaginative vision experience.

Answer 11

Joseph in the Bible dreamt Angel Gabriel telling him Mary was birthing the son of God.

Question 12

Example of a vocal experience,

Answer 12

St Augustine heard a child say ‘pick up and read’ when he was in a moment of melancholy and took it as a direction from the above to return to his theological studies.

Question 13

Example of a conversion experience.

Answer 13

St Paul was kicked from his horse on the road to Damascus and heard Jesus say “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”, then fell blind to later be healed by a Christian and converting to Christian belief.

Question 14

How can religious experience be understood?

Answer 14

• Union with great power.
• Psychological effect.
• Physiological effect.

Question 15

Where William James discussed religious experience.

Answer 15

Gifford Lectures published in ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’.

Question 16

William Jame’s four common threads between religious experiences.

Answer 16

• Ineffability: experience is beyond human language.
• Noetic quality: provides unique knowledge.
• Transience: short experience with a long effect.
• Passivity: experiencer is under influence of a superior being.

Question 17

William Jame’s view on religious experience.

Answer 17

• Are not proof of divinity, ought to be tested, but are still genuine claims to what the experiencer was actually experiencing.
• Commonly inline with that persons context or culture, as we interpret experiences based off concepts have come to understand.

Question 18

Principle of Credulity

Answer 18

Principle we should believe someone until we have reason not to.

Question 19

Principle of Testimony.

Answer 19

Principle people are generally honest and we need reason to believe otherwise.

Question 20

Caroline Frank Davis’s description-related challenge to Richard Swinburne.

Answer 20

‘If there is a reason to suspect the subject’s description, then we can not even begin to evaluate the evidential force of the experience.’

Question 21

Caroline Frank Davis’s subject-related challenge to Richard Swinburne.

Answer 21

The issues possibly arising based off the experiencer.

Question 22

Caroline Frank Davis’s object-related challenge to Richard Swinburne.

Answer 22

Debate around God’s nature, being, immanence and the difficulty in using human language to explain transcendence.

Question 23

Freud’s objection

Answer 23

Religious experiences are symptoms of neuroses, which religion develops from problems in the infanthood and so a mind projection or illusion of that which we are missing.

Question 24

Marx’s objection.

Answer 24

Claimed religious experiences were psychological projections of human’s personal ultimate perfections and needs.

Question 25

Rudolf Otto’s objection.

Answer 25

Argued the miracles and religious experiences in the Bible were meant to be read as myth rather than accurate historical accounts.

Question 26

Hume’s objections.

Answer 26

Humans are attracted to the bizarre and mysterious, often adding exaggerations or inaccurate details during storytelling.

Question 27

John Cottingham’s objection.

Answer 27

“The dimension of the ‘sacred’ as it has often been called in religious parlance, does not in fact require religious belief at all, but simply arises from a certain kind of special sensitivity to the purely natural world we live in.”

Question 28

Four key challenges to credulity.

Answer 28

• The circumstances of the experience generally produce unreliable results or the experiencer is unreliable.
• The experiencer is unable to interpret an experience generally.
• Its possible to prove the experiencer was not present.
• Its possible to prove the experiencer was not involved for the experience.