Religious experience.

Question 1

What are the key concepts of religious experience?

Answer 1

• Religious experience is an encounter with the divine.
• Usually individual and subjective.
• Religious experiences can be corporate.
• Ineffable.

Question 2

What did Paul Tillich say about Religious experience?

Answer 2

Tillich described two stages in a religious experience:

• An event or encounter followed by a special understanding of that event which reveals its religious significance.
• He said that a religious experience produces a feeling of ultimate concerm - a feeling that demands a decisive decision from the person recieving it.

Question 3

What did Rudolf Otto say about RE?

Answer 3

• Coined the word numinous.

- Often a person would see a vision and then experience a feeling of the power and majesty of God.

Question 4

What did William James say about RE?

Answer 4

James observed that religious experiences are emotional reactions directed at God. The emotions are usually:
- Reverence, a joyful desire to belong to God.

James concluded that there were four common factors of religious experience:

• Ineffability.
• Noetic quality.
• Transciency.
• Passivity.

James also states that religious experiences are deeply personal.

Question 5

What did Richard Swinburne say about RE?

Answer 5

Swinburne supports religious experience.

• Principle of credulity: unless we have overwhelming evidence to the contrary, then we should believe that things are as they seem to be.
• Principle of testimony: we cannot constantly doubt people’s account of religious experience.
• Thousands of people have religious experiences of what seems to be God to them that we should believe them, the sheer weight of the testimony is sufficient proof.
• Religious experiences have a deep effect on the life of those who experience them.

Question 6

What did Richard Dawkins say about religious experience?

Answer 6

• In the God Delusion, Dawkinds claims that religious experiences are just an expression of people’s needs.
• He claims that testimonies of mystics are an illusion created by the mind to enable people to cope with their fear of the unknown.

Question 7

What did Michael Persinger say about RE?

Answer 7

• Came up with the God helmet theory.
• Persinger constructed an electronic helmet that induced religious experiences by putting small electric signals and magnetic vibrations into the temporal lobes and front of the brain in the wearer. By suppressing this part of the brain, the sense of individuality is temporarily lost making the person feel that there is something else.