Defining a Religious Experience

1. An experience with religious significance e.g. the act of worship in a religious setting

2. A person’s experience of something or a presence beyond themselves

Richard Swinburne

Swinburne classified five types of religious experience:

Public

1. A normal event interpreted in a religious way e.g. seeing the face of the Virgin Mary on the moon

2. Witnessing a very unusual event with others e.g. the resurrection of Jesus

Private

3. A private experience which may be explained using normal language e.g. the Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary

4. A private experience which may not be explained using normal language e.g. mysticism

5. An ongoing impression of a presence based upon no specific experience – just a sense that God is guiding one’s life

William James

William James defined Mysticism as: ‘feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude of whatever they consider to be the divine’.

In ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’ James categorised those forms of religious experience that cannot be explained using normal language:

1. Ineffable

• Those experiences that are so extraordinary they cannot be described in a way that would make them intelligible to anyone who has not had such an experience

2. Noetic

• These experiences provide some kind of insight or carry a message of revelation of truth

3. Transient

• Brief experiences that do not last more than half an hour

4. Passive

• Experiences that cannot be actively sought or created. Often people describe their bodies being ‘taken over’ by a superior presence.

William James argued that religious experiences can range from experiences that have little religious significance to those that are completely life changing. He reasoned that most religious experiences happen when a person is in a conscious state rather than in a dream state.

Freud

Freud offered a secular explanation for religious experience. For Freud, religious experience is a reaction to the hostile world – we feel helpless and seek a father figure in our lives and this leads us to project an image God who is able to provide us with security.

However, even if people do need a father figure – this does not mean that God does not exist. This might be an inbuilt mechanism programmed by God in order to bring us closer to him.

Karl Marx

Marx argued that society could be divided into two groups – the working class or proletariat and the ruling class or bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie owns the means of production and exploits the proletariat in what Marx described as dehumanising acts. Marx reasoned that all this could be resolved in a revolution, when the thesis of capitalism is challenged by the anti-thesis of anti-capitalism to produce synthesis – socialism.

Marx defined religion as the “opiate of the masses,” a form of social control that dulls the pain of oppression for the proletariat whilst preventing them from seeing what needs to be done to stop their exploitation: “People can’t really be happy until the abolition of the illusion of religion”

Marx thus concluded that mystical experiences are the outward manifestations of this drug induced state.

The weakness of Marxism is that people have at least as much self-interest as they do altruism. Therefore, there is no motivation to work towards a utopian society that ultimately will only benefit future generations. For most, the obligation to work for the good of future society is not good enough to lend authority to morality.