Notes on Religious Experiences in accordance with the OCR Religious Studies specification. The notes provide information, scholars, ideas and quotes compiled from various resources from both within and outside of the curriculum.
Nature of Religious Experience
Religious experiences point a spiritual part of reality, rather than it being purely
material.
- Swinburne’s 5 categories: 2 public, 2 private, 1 worldview
Indirect V Direct: feeling God through other things/people or acknowledging
evidence of God vs having an encounter with God
- ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ Gerard Manly Hopkins
- supported by the idea of all of creation reflecting God. ‘any creatures reflect
you, the flowers your colour, the tides the precision of your
calculations.’ RS Thomas
Mystical Experience
- when a person believes they have become one/in touch with the ultimate
reality
- ‘mystical experience is an intuitive understanding and realisation of
the meaning of existence.’ Gerald James Larson
- ‘in mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become
aware of our oneness.’ William James
Conversion Experience
- an experience that consists of adopting a new religious belief from a
previously held belief (or no belief at all)
- James saw these as a transformation from a divided, unhappy self to a more
unified consciousness which is happier
Corporate Experience
- a religious experience that a group of people all simultaneously have together
- examples: the hajj, Toronto Blessing in 1994, Acts 2:13-15 the disciples are
‘filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues.’
William James
- James uses the analogy of a magnet to illustrate RE: magnets can be impacted
without touch/awareness, in the same way people can be impacted without
an awareness of the source
- PINT (passive, ineffable, noetic, transient)
- contradictions often arrive from RE as they’re ‘outside’ our common
observations, they should be seen as separate from other a posteriori
evidence
How RE is understood
Union with a Greater Power
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