Religious experience Flashcards
Religious experience - What is religious experience?
> Difficult to define and put into words
Some kind of encounter between people and the divine
Solitary but can be corporate
Religious experience - Mystical experience
> Experiences of God or of the supernatural which go beyond everyday sense experience
Mysticism is a sense of connection with God at a deep personal level
God is known through intuition and the rational mind
Often arise through prayer and contemplation
Can involve visions or voices
A sense of awe and wonder afterwards
Visions of Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi
Described in the Bible (vision of Isaiah in the temple), voices heard by the boy Samuel)
Religious experience - Conversion experience
> Produces a radical change in someone’s belief system
1. Dissatisfied with their current ‘system of ideas’
2. Person searches for answers
3. A point of crisis with a sense of the presence of God. Person might have a vision, hear a voice, or have a strong sense of forgiveness.
4. A following sense of peace and joy, and a keenness to tell others about the experience.
5. In the long-term, there is a change of direction for the person.
William James - something becomes the centre of consciousness and religious aims become a habitual focus of energy.
Conversion of St Paul
Religious experience - Corporate religious experience
> Several people have the same religious experience at the same time
More evidential force as there are more witnesses
Coule be carried along by others’ emotion - don’t have more evidential force
Story of Pentecost, Toronto blessing
Religious experience - Near-death experience
> Hearts have stopped beating or are comatose
Sense of being ‘out-of-body’, loving presence, sense of great peace, feeling like travelling through a tunnel or towards a bright light
Some see these as evidence of life after death, others are more sceptical believing they have a more scientific explanation
Religious experience - William James
> Wrote a book called The Varieties of Religious experience (1902)
Aimed to take an objective, scientific approach to religious experience, collecting peoples own accounts
Religious experience could be tested for validity by it’s long lasting effects (just like a medicine)
Pragmatist approach - the truth of something could be established by practical results
Religious experience doesn’t prove anything but should be taken seriously
Religious experience - William James’ main qualities of religious experience
- Ineffability - difficult to express in normal everyday words
- Noetic quality- recipients feel they have learned something they didn’t know before
- Transience - the experiences do not last long although the effects may last a lifetime
- Passivity - the person feels the experience is happening to them rather than that they are doing it
Religious experience - Rudolf Otto
> Wrote a book called The Idea of the Holy (1917)
Aimed to explore the nature of the divine as encountered through religious experience
Thought it was central to religion that people should experience the divine
Divine could be described as ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’ - awe-inspiring, fascinating mystery
Religious experience - Otto’s three main characteristics of the divine
- A quality pf mystery
- A quality of ultimate importance
- A quality that is both attractive and dangerous
Religious experience - Swinburne’s principles of credulity and testimony
> Wrote a book called Is There a God? (1979)
Argued that people should take religious experience just as seriously as other experiences
Principle of credulity- we should be prepared to trust our own experiences unless we have good reason not to
Principle of testimony - we should trust other people when they tell us they have had an experience unless we have a reason not to
Religious experience - Psychological interpretations of RE
> Feuerbach argued that God was an invention of the human mind
People transfer all their highest ideals and hopes on to this made-up God and imagine him to be all the things they wish upon themselves
Freud used similar ideas in his interpretation of religion
The mind was made up of the id, ego, and superego
Subconscious layers of the mind lead to people believing in God (an ‘infantile neurosis’)
Religious experience happens when this subconscious invention takes over the imagination
Religious experience - Physiological interpretations of RE
> Neurophysiology - study of the brain and the nervous system
Suggest that such experiences could have a natural cause
’Persinger’s helmet’ induces feelings similar to that of religious experience - religious experience caused by magnetic fields
Studies of NDE show that these sensations can be cause artificially - caused by endorphins and other hormones
