Religious Experience

• "The divine can mean no single quality" - William James
• "The founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communication with the divine" - William James
• "[Religion is] a sense and taste for the infinite... a feeling of absolute dependence" - Friedrich Schleiermacher
• "[Religious experience is] self authenticating" - Friedrich Scheliermacher
• "[religion is] The feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine" - William James
• William James' 4 Characteristics (PINT)

  • Passive - "grasped and held by a superior power
  • Ineffable - "defies expression"
  • Noetic - "states of insight into depths of truth"
  • Transient - "cannot be sustained for long"
• "Mysterium tremendum et facinas" - a tremendous and fascinating mystery - Rudolf Otto
• "[numinous means] The deepest and most fundamental element in all strong and sincerely felt religious emotion" - Rudolf Otto
• "We come upon something inherently 'wholly different', whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own and before which we therefore recoil in wonder that strikes us chill and numb" - Rudolf Otto
• "Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God." - the burning bush
• "The distinctive experience of God, at once ineffably transcendent, remote, yet stirring a recognition that here is a primary source of beauty and love" - Ruldolf Otto
• “It is reasonable to believe that God would seek to interact with his creatures. God loves us and so may simply show himself to particular individuals” - Swinburne 
• “What man is in need of, he makes his God” - Ludwig Feuerbach 
• “Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls with our instinctual desires” - Freud 
• “Invited or not God is present” - Carl Jung 
• “They are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever are” - William James 
• “It is wholly impossible for me to doubt that I have been in God and God in me” - St Theresa of Avila