Religious Experience:

Question 1

What is a religious experience?

Answer 1

A religious experience is often an experience between a person and a divine being.

Question 2

What are the two types of religious experience?

Answer 2

• One that is personal: Happens to you only.

- One that is corporate: Happens to multiple of people at the same time.

Question 3

What are some of the general issues regarding religious experience?

Answer 3

The difference in perception and the inability to accept that a viewpoint can just be a viewpoint and it doesn’t always have to be the ultimate truth.

Question 4

Thomas Hobbes:

Answer 4

Hobbes raised an interesting question asking the difference between a man saying that God spoke to him in a dream and a man dreaming that God spoke to him.

Question 5

Wittgenstein:

Answer 5

Wittgenstein developed the concept of ‘seeing-as’, where we interpret our experience in our particular way. For example, two people may see a beautiful sunset, both agree of it’s beauty. However, one experiences it as mediating the greatness of God, and feels touched by the divine. Whereas the other believes the world as it really is.

Question 6

Wittgenstein using puzzle picture to justify his argument:

Answer 6

The illusion of the duck/rabbit picture is of neither a duck or rabbit. It is just a line drawing. Wittgenstein’s points that people would go further than just state they interpreted an event religiously. They instead attempt to make their claim a fact, which would be unsuccessful as its a matter of viewpoint.

Question 7

Who developed this theory?

Answer 7

The publisher of The Varieties of Religious Experiences: William James.

Question 8

The nature of experience: William James:

Answer 8

William James found that there were four common characteristics found in a genuine religious experience:

Question 9

What are the four characteristics of religious experiences?

Answer 9

1. Passivity
2. Ineffability
3. Noetic Quality
4. Transience.

Question 10

Passivity:

Answer 10

The idea that the experience just happens to them. This recipient feels as if his own will were in abeyance and a gift given by God or the Saints.

Question 11

Ineffability:

Answer 11

The inability to talk properly regarding the experience, due to great shock. The transcendent is revealing itself to the human mind so the experience are usually beyond the human power.

Question 12

Noetic Quality:

Answer 12

The experience gives a kind of knowledge unlike the knowledge of any other human experience.

Question 13

Transience:

Answer 13

The experience was life changing, a relatively short event results into a long lasting effect.

Question 14

Other conclusions made by William James:

Answer 14

• These religious claims should be tested and not just accepted.
• We need to discount the possibility of delusions or presence of mind-altering substances.
• Experiences are usually interpreted in ones understanding of the world. A Buddhist may interpret the same religious experience differently to a Muslim.

Question 15

EXAMPLE: Religious experiences:

Answer 15

• Jesus miracles: the ability to raise the dead, the ability to cure leprosy.
• The Qur’an being written by an illiterate man, who also experienced dreams which were sent from God and spoke nothing but the truth, or of future events.

Question 16

Richard Swinburne:

Answer 16

Swinburne attempts to answer the questions of believing ones claim about their religious experience, using:

• The Principle of Credulity.
• The Principle of Testimony.

Question 17

The Principle of Credulity:

Answer 17

• Argues that if she has experienced something then she probably has. For example, if we saw a helicopter fly past a window, there is a good chance that we did see that, and we ought to believe that, unless there is a very good reason not to do so.

Question 18

CONDITIONS WHEN TO NOT ACCEPT RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: The Principle of Credulity:

Answer 18

• When someone has been recently intoxicated with hallucinogenic drugs.
• When they have independence reasons against believing in God.
• When it’s evident that the experience isn’t true.

Question 19

The Principle of Testimony:

Answer 19

-Swinburne argues that unless someone is a liar or disturbed, her description of a religious experience is probably true. If we always believe one is lying, then the conversation would become impossible.

Question 20

What are the types of religious experiences?

Answer 20

• Corporate experience.
• Personal experience.
• Conversion experience.

Question 21

1. Corporate experience:

Answer 21

-When different people will have the same, or similar religious experience. This helps to provide more witnesses of the experience.

Question 22

What are the two types of corporate experiences?

Answer 22

• Belief.

- Suspicion.

Question 23

EXAMPLE: Corporate experience:

Answer 23

• The Toronto blessing. The people leaped, fall om the floor in ecstatic trains or make animal noises, roaring like lions or barking like dogs, uncontrollably.

Question 24

STRENGTHS:

Answer 24

• The number of people that have experienced it are more likely to believed.
• The Toronto event had caught the attention of the media.

Question 25

WEAKNESS: Corporate experience:

Answer 25

• Creates questionable ideas, as people do not behave the same way as groups.
• Critiques suggest that the kind of people attracted to evangelical/ charismatic worship are already pre-disposed to both this sort of behaviour and the effect of the group suggestion.
• They could have been drugged or possessed.
• Questions why God would allow his believers to act in such irrational way.

Question 26

2. Personal experience:

Answer 26

• The same as a corporate experience. However, this time, it is only between an individual and the divine being. Also known as a mystical experience.
• Mystical yr is an experience of something transcendent, beyond normal awareness.
• Those who have experienced this may have reached an understanding of spiritual truth. Noetic-ism.

Question 27

Personal experience: Rudolf Otto

Answer 27

• Otto explored the notion of numinous experience, which means any experience of God which transcends the everyday.
• A transience and ineffable experience.
• Long-term impact and words cannot describe the event.

Question 28

Teresa of Avila:

Answer 28

• Had a mystical experience.
• Describes a series of visions she had undergone on her 39th, and the effects it had on her life.
• Many argued that the experience was a result of sexual frustration.
• Teresa argued that if it were due to sexual frustration, then why is she left to feel disgusted.

Question 29

3. Conversation experience:

Answer 29

• Can have a transience effect.

- Can change an a non-believer into a believer.

Question 30

Recognisable stages found in conversation experience:

Answer 30

1. Individual is dissatisfied with his ‘system of ideas’.
2. Individual searches for a basis on which to make a decision.
3. There is a point of crisis where emotions and symptoms are affected, this is where God is most present.
4. A sense of peace and joy is expressed, where follower is often accompanied by a desire to share new faith.

Question 31

A Near Death experience:

Answer 31

• When a person is about to die, but doesn’t because God saved them.
• An a posteriori argument for the existence of God.
• People have religious experiences, they’re genuine, they are caused by something, God causes them, therefore God exists.

Question 32

A psychological interpretation of religious experiences: Sigmund Freud:

Answer 32

• Argued that people who felt that they were in the presence of God are deluding themselves.
• Freud argues that religious experience is a symptom of ‘infantile neurosis’, something that they ought to grow out of it order to live better with their mental heath.
• Freud believes that people create an imaginary parent- figure in their mind, tricking their super ego, their inner moral voice, into believing it is God. They do this to help to control their struggles with adult life.

Question 33

Donald Winnicott:

Answer 33

• Religious experience is best understood as an illusion, in this context; but unlike Freud, his argument instead is that illusion’s of religious experiences only becomes ‘madness’ when the person tried to impose his or her illusions on others and expects them to give it credibility as ‘real’.

Question 34

STRENGTHS:

Answer 34

• The theory is non-biased so it aims to consider finding the truth of whether the experience was real or not.
• The theory has even demonstrated its stages in which suggest that the experience was genuine and not due to drugs or being possessed or mental health.

Question 35

WEAKNESS:

Answer 35

• Should be careful with believing someone’s claim, an honest person can still justify their claim and it could still be wrong.
• The experience could be misinterpreted and understood according to what relates to the individual could personally relate to.
• The ineffability of a religious experience creates further problems, as we cannot know how much weight of change was experienced or told. There will always be some case of misinterpretation.