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Exploring Religious Experience Diversity

This chapter delves into the definitions and categories of religious experiences, exploring their characteristics, challenges, and differentiation between real experiences and delusions. It discusses mystical experiences and challenges in justifying religious beliefs.

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Exploring Religious Experience Diversity

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  1. Chapter 9: Religious experience

  2. Definitions • What is religious experience? • In a broad sense, religious experience refers to any experience of the sacred within a religious context, including religious feelings, visions, and mystical and numinous experiences • Three common features • Universality – significant portion of population • Diversity – some similarities, many differences • Importance – can result in world view change

  3. Categories • Regenerative • Experience in which the experiencer undergoes life transformation or conversion • Charismatic • Experience in which special abilities, gifts, or blessings are manifested • Mystical • Ineffability • Noetic quality • Transiency • Passivity

  4. Characteristics of mystical experience • Ineffability: the experience cannot be adequately described, if it can be described at all • Noeticquality: the experiencer believes that he or she has learned something important from the experience • Transiency: the experience is temporary, and the experiencer soon returns to a “normal” state of mind • Passivity: the experience occurs without conscious decision or control, and it cannot be brought to happen at will

  5. Types of mystical experiences • God/Absolute Reality • Identity or union with God or Absolute Reality • Natural • Experience with nature, even an atheist can have one • Numinous • An encounter with a separate self , will, or power which unexpectedly and profoundly forces itself upon the consciousness of the experiencer

  6. Experience and justification

  7. Challenges • Lack of verifiability • Either religious experiences are corrigible, or they are incorrigible • If religious experiences are corrigible, then people could be mistaken • If religious experiences are incorrigible, then they are subjective, personal, and worthless as justification for other’s religious beliefs

  8. Challenges (continued) • Conflicting claims • Religious experiences are widely divergent, conflicting, and even contradictory • The reliability of religious experiences seems to be shaken

  9. Challenges (continued) • Circularity of reasoning • A person’s worldview seems to dictate the kind and focus of the religious experience that is experienced • In other words, people have religious experiences in line with what they already believe to be true

  10. Questions for discussion • Briefly explain the three categories of religious experience described in this chapter. Do you think the variety of religious experiences fall neatly within them? Is there overlap? • How might a person having religious experiences differentiate between real experiences of God or the Absolute on one hand, and delusion or hallucination on the other?

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