Religious Experience

• Personal experiences of God for many people show that God does exist
• This is shown in the lives of both St Paul in Christianity and Mohammad in Islam
• Many people see evidence of God in their everyday lives and in ordinary events or many interpret some event as having religious significance
• These experiences often have lasting effects on how people lead their lives
• Religious experience


  When a person has, or believes that he has had, an encounter with God
• Religious experiences


  • They cannot be like meeting another human being
  • No one knows what God looks like
  • We have no identification even for his human form if we believe that Jesus is God
• The ever-present danger of delusion is always with us
• Bertrand Russell: 'Some people drink too much and see snakes, while others fast too much and see God'
• Thomas Hobbes: 'When a man says that God spoke to him in a dream it '... is no more than to say he dreamed that God spoke to him.''
• We are well aware of the mind-altering effects of drink or drugs as well as mental illness
• We know that all of us are capable of mistaken perception, as when we call to a friend in the street only to find a stranger turning to us
• We make mistakes and misremember, misunderstand or see things not really there
• We are sometimes tricked by the light, occasionally by deliberate fraud
• We are troubled also by the question of the privacy of experience
• I can never experience things as you do – I do not even know whether when we both call something 'blue' or 'sweet' that the experience you have – the 'what it feels like to me' is the same as mine
• I cannot share your religious experience – I can only feel mine
• Even when a group claims to have experienced God, for each person in the group, it remains an individual experience
• Honest people are sometimes sincere in holding beliefs quite contrary to those held by other equally sincere and honest persons
• Any policeman will tell many tales of wholly honest witnesses giving wildly different accounts of the same event
• No one gives an unvarnished description of an event – the act of putting it into words is itself an act of interpretation, a translation with all the attendant difficulties
• That act of translation is itself affected by the witness' prior experience, understanding, intelligence, vocabulary and so on
• It does not follow from these doubts that every account a witness gives will be untrue, nor that it does not have any basis in fact
• There remains a truth behind my misrepresentation
• Direct religious experiences


  Cases where a person encounters God in a direct way
• Numinous


  (according to Rudolph Otto) the world that is beyond the physical observable universe in which we live
• Mysterium tremendum et fascinans

  (according to Rudolph Otto) an experience so far beyond the normal range of human existence, experienced on the emotional level and leaving the person aware of their own smallness in the face of an all-powerful God
• Albert Einstein: 'The most beautiful thing that we can experience is the mysterious and that this knowledge and feeling is the centre of true religiousness'
• Kant rejected the possibility of such experiences as he argued that we do not have the senses to experience God as God belongs to the noumenal realm and is not an object in space and time
• People who have religious experiences describe them with words such as awe, wonder, beauty, but the actual nature of the experience was ineffable
• Direct religious experiences


  Involve an experience of God / the numinous / the divine and they are ineffable
• Indirect religious experiences


  Experiences in which the mind of an individual focuses on God, but God is not directly revealed
• Some people have suggested that indirect experiences are not necessarily different from ordinary experiences; they are made significant by the person who has the experience and for who the experience has religious meaning
• Even when an experience is corporate, each member of the group will directly know only her own experience
• Group hysteria is a recognized effect in social psychology
• The Toronto Blessing was taken by many to be a certain sign of God's action
• Others have been more sceptical, arguing that people were already inclined to behave in such a way because they had already chosen and evangelical and charismatic form of faith
• Some critics pointed to the way in which an atmosphere had already built-up within the congregation through prayers, hymns and preaching about the work of the spirit
• Some evangelical believers argued that such manifestations might simply be the work of malicious demons holding up believers to ridicule
• In the Acts of the Apostles, the Apostles, after their Pentecost experience, go out to the assembled crowds and speak to them in such a way that every member of the crowd, regardless of this own language, can hear and understand the message
• The gift of tongues in the Toronto experience was incomprehensible gibberish, unlike the biblical account