Religious experience

Question 1

Define religious experience

Answer 1

a subjective experience where a person believes they have encounetered the divine or a trancendant reality

Question 2

William James

the varieties of religious experience 1902

Answer 2

mystical experiences are at the heart of religion
mystical ecperiences have 4 things in common
ineffable
noetic
passive
transcieny
cross -cultural experinces all have this in common and this cannot be by chance
effect of religious experiences prove their validity

Question 3

Freud

Answer 3

religion is an unconscious need for wish-fulfillment
RE’s are ahllucinations of soomethig you desperately want
e.g. thirsty person hallucinating water in a desert and someone hallucinating God out of fear of dying - this would fulfill their wish of their being an afterlife

Question 4

Swinburne

Answer 4

Religious experiences are evidence for God
principle of credulity and testimony
if there is no better evidence against the religious experience then it should be taken as evidence for God in itself

Question 5

Persinger

Answer 5

‘God helmet’ - brain stimulating device that targeted temporal lobes
subjects had mystical experiences
religious experiences can just be brain-generated illusions

Question 6

Hick

Answer 6

pluralism
religious experiences are true but are not exclusive to one being
all religious experiences encounter the same divine being
Eschatological verifacation - know the truth in the afterlife

Question 7

Rudolph Otto

Answer 7

religious experience is an encounter with the numinous
mysterium, tremendum et facinas
RE is not like any other experineces and so cannot be understood through reason or emotion it must just be accepted

Question 8

Coorperate religious experiences

Answer 8

The Toronto blessing - canada church collectively feeling the presence of the holy spirit and hysterically laughing
cannot be a shared hallucination as these psycological occurances are individual to one’s brain