1. ‘Religious Experience’?
What is a
‘Religious Experience’?

2. Religious Experience Can we define what a ‘religious experience’ is?
Is it ‘a unitive/monistic or numinous experience that belongs to the practice of a religious tradition’ (Gellman)?
Is it ‘a category of experiences ranging from a dramatic direct (non-inferential) experience of God to the experience of one or another feature of mundane reality as ‘of God’.’ (Clack)?

3. Religious Experience
I / William James :: The Varieties of Religious Experience
Religion involves fitting oneself to the unseen order of things
Religious experiences reflect out personal temperaments
:: some are religiously vigorous, active and optimistic
:: some are religiously weak, passive and pessimistic
For James the essential religious experience was of a distinctively ‘mystical’ kind. Such experiences are, he says:
Escape our ability to articulate and explain them (ineffable)
Come upon us, rather than being brought about by out actions (passive)
Last for only certainly limited periods of time (transient)
Change the way we understand ourselves and our world (noetic)

4. Religious Experience II/ Rudolf Otto :: The Idea of the Holy
Religious Experience as uniquely numinous in character
An experience of a ‘simultaneously terrifying and fascinating mystery’ (Mysterium tremendum et fascinans)
Such experience, Otto, says is:
of the ‘Wholly Otherness of the Holy’ marked by ineffable transcendence
paradoxical in nature, being at once glorious, beautiful, and horrifying and unnerving
morally ambiguous, as the power of the Holy is an overwhelming power, for good or for ill
Awful, in the sense of being an experience that fills one with awe

5. Ludwig Feuerbach—Projecting Human Ideals
Religious Experience
Ludwig Feuerbach—Projecting Human Ideals
The Essence of Christianity (1841)
In religion we ‘alienate’ the ideal traits of the human species / humankind and project these ideal traits onto a ‘divine other’
Religion is thus a strange way of ‘telling the truth’ about ourselves and our aspirations, albeit with unknowing indirection
For this reason, all ‘theology is anthropology’
Religious experience is an experience with and of ourselves and our ideals as a species refracted through alienating projection of a religious object

6. Sigmund Freud—A Psychological Illusion
Religious Experience
Sigmund Freud—A Psychological Illusion
The Future of an Illusion (1927)
Religion is liable to psychological explanation :: religious experiences are products of human psychology
As children we ‘introject’ the image of the our parent(s) and then later imaginatively ‘project’ this image as a ‘God image’’
Religious experiences and ideas express our unconscious desire for order, security, responsivity of the other for us (our parents)
Religion is thus an illusion and a mark of psychological immaturity
Religious experience is an experience within our psyches of the world as fragile and fearful human beings would wish it to be

7. Thinking about Religious Experience
Is religious experience like our other sense experiences? Is it on analogy with experience of mundane things? Or is a religious experience different in kind from our regular experiences?

8. Thinking about Religious Experience
Are claims to religious experience veridical (i.e., claims about the truth of the world as such) or purely perspectival? Is a religious experience a matter of ‘seeing of’ or of ‘seeing as’?

9. Thinking about Religious Experience
Should we approach claims to religious experience with a ‘principle of credulity’ or a ‘principle of scepticism’? Why?

10. Thinking about Religious Experience
Do we hold religious beliefs because we have religious experiences or do we have religious experiences because we hold religious beliefs?