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Chapter 9:

Chapter 9:. Religious experience. 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

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Chapter 9:

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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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