Religious Experience

Question 1

Hard to prove individually cause:

Answer 1

Drugs, drink, delusion, dreams, disease, people genuinely believing something false, only one person experienced the specific thing and no-one else can

Question 2

Otto’s types of religious experience:

Answer 2

Direct - take a wild guess, it’s a camel case Religious Experience, the typical one you’d imagine, very ineffable
Indirect - personal, e.g. seeing a tree and thinking of God, or prayer - ordinary events made significant

Question 3

Hard to prove corporate cause:

Answer 3

No two people have the experience, group hysteria is a thing, peer pressure is a thing, can only assume what others are thinking, leaders have been known to actually abuse people into pretending they are having an experience

Question 4

Charismatic worship:

Answer 4

Contemporary, no set liturgy, encouraged to sing/dance, no division between regular and religious life, often most associated with corporate religious experience

Question 5

The Toronto Blessing:

Answer 5

1994, Toronto airport church, evangelical speaker visited and suddenly everyone started uncontrollably laughing/roaring/dancing from the sermon, spread across America and Canada and then the UK, became the mark of a ‘true church’, also healed mentally and physically and in relationships (wonder how long that lasted), some say it came from the devil, questions about how engineered it was, how susceptible the recipients were, why a small church in Toronto

Question 6

Test of Avila:

Answer 6

1. Are the experiences in line with scripture?
2. Do they have historical precedent?
3. Have they caused significant and lasting changes?

Question 7

Swinburne’s types of religious experience:

Answer 7

Public:
Ordinary - someone interpreting a normal event to have religious significance
Extraordinary - events that seem to break the laws of nature
Private:
Describable - like dreams
Non-describable - direct experiences of the divine that are somewhat beyond human comprehension
Non-specific - looking at the world from a religious perspective

Question 8

Vision experiences:

Answer 8

Noetic, revelatory, awake or in a dream, intellectual are not necessarily visual but perception, corporeal are your basic visions, imaginative are dream ones

Question 9

Auditory experiences:

Answer 9

Tends to be communicating knowledge, disembodied, authoritative, but is it just schizophrenia y’know?, people have injured/killed based on ‘God told me to’, Teresa of Avila said it had to be in line with Scripture and leave you feeling happy

Question 10

William James:

Answer 10

Tried to define religious experiences, his book based on a series of lectures is considered a masterpiece, found 4 characteristics - ineffable, noetic, transient (outside time), passive (the people lose control of themselves for a hot second) - and 4 fruits - transcendence (leaves the person with awareness beyond the physical world), self-surrender (the reaction to finding a benevolent power being that), elation, change in life emphasis

Question 11

What about drugs tho:

Answer 11

According to James, they’re still valid - a subset rather than a requirement

Question 12

Conversion:

Answer 12

Some people are too cynical to ever be converted, even by a religious experience, some do it subconsciously, some do it suddenly, some have inhibitions they have to get over first

Question 13

Near death experiences:

Answer 13

Some consider them religious experiences, have lots in common with each other though not everyone gets so far, 5 stages - peace, detachment from body, the tunnel, emerging into bright light, entering the light. A J Ayer had one and decided it wasn’t enough proof - it made him question whether the afterlife was nothingness or not, but nothing about God