Religious Experience

Religious Experience

1. Swinburne

   • Swinburne Identified five different types of religious experiences
     • Public
       • 1. A normal event interpreted in a religious way e.g. seeing the face of the Virgin Mary on the moon
       • 2. Witnessing a very unusual event with others e.g. the resurrection of Jesus
     • Private
       • 3. A private experience which may be explained using normal language e.g. the Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary
       • 4. A private experience which may not be explained using normal language e.g. mysticism
       • 5. An ongoing impression of a presence based upon no specific experience – just a sense that God is guiding one’s life

2. William James

   • William James defined Mysticism as: ‘feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude of whatever they consider to be the divine’.
     • In the book ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’ James categorised those forms of religious experience that cannot be explained using normal language:
       • THE FORMS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE CAN BE REMEMBERED USING THE WORD PINT
       • PINT = Passive, Ineffable, Noetic, Transient
         • P = Passive
           • Experiences that cannot be actively sought or created. Often people describe their bodies being ‘taken over’ by a superior presence.
         • Ineffable
           • Those experiences that are so extraordinary they cannot be described in a way that would make them intelligible to anyone who has not had such an experience
         • Noetic
           • These experiences provide some kind of insight or carry a message of revelation of truth
         • Transient
           • Brief experiences that do not last more than half an hour
     • William James argued that religious experiences can range from experiences that have little religious significance to those that are completely life changing.
     • He reasoned that most religious experiences happen when a person is in a conscious state rather than in a dream state.

3. Freud

   • Freud offered a secular explanation for religious experience.
   • For Freud, religious experience is a reaction to the hostile world
     • we feel helpless and seek a father figure in our lives and this leads us to project an image God who is able to provide us with security.
   • However, even if people do need a father figure – this does not mean that God does not exist.
   • This might be an inbuilt mechanism programmed by God in order to bring us closer to him.

4. Marx

   • Marx argued that society could be divided into two groups – the working class or proletariat and the ruling class or bourgeoisie.
     • The bourgeoisie owns the means of production and exploits the proletariat in what Marx described as dehumanising acts.
       • Marx reasoned that all this could be resolved in a revolution, when the thesis of capitalism is challenged by the anti-thesis of anti-capitalism to produce synthesis – socialism.
   • Marx defined religion as the “opiate of the masses,” a form of social control that dulls the pain of oppression for the proletariat whilst preventing them from seeing what needs to be done to stop their exploitation:
     • “People can’t really be happy until the abolition of the illusion of religion”
   • Marx concluded that mystical experiences are the outward manifestations of this drug induced state
   • The weakness of Marxism is that people have at least as much self-interest as they do altruism. Therefore, there is no motivation to work towards a utopian society that ultimately will only benefit future generations.
   • For most, the obligation to work for the good of future society is not good enough to lend authority to morality.