Religious Experience

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  • RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
    • MAIN TYPES
      • Awareness Experience
        • seeing the work of God when looking at the world
      • Regenerative Experience
        • A conversion experience
      • Numinous Experience
        • encountering the holiness of God
      • Interpretive Experience
        • having prayers answered
      • Mystical Experience
        • a sense of the ultimate reality
      • Quasi-Sensory Experience
        • having a vision or other inner experience of God
      • Revelatory Experience
        • receiving enlightenment and knowledge, perhaps through a revelation from God
    • OTHER TYPES
      • Understanding of nature
        • associated with claim that God is guiding to make sense of lives and the world, therefore we understand nature because God prompted us to do so
      • Prayer
        • can be seen as a direct request for Gods intervention
      • Music and Atmosphere
        • most religions use music in contribution to worship
          • e.g. dance - expression of joy - representation of religious faith and devotion to such - e.g. 'whirling dervishes' of Sufi tradition in Islam
    • RICHARD SWINBURNE
      • it is reasonable to believe God is loving and personal
      • Principles
        • Principle of testimony
          • whether we believe the claim or not depends on our relationship with the person making it
            • e.g. we are more likely to believe a family member than a stranger
      • Proof
        • own experiences of people around us (something bigger) + accounts of those around us
    • OTHER PHILOSOPHERS
      • AGAINST
        • RICHARD DAWKINS
          • religious experiences do not exist, they are merely an expression of a persons psychological needs
        • FREUD
          • psychological reaction
      • FOR
        • WITTGENSTEIN
          • 'seeing as'
            • each person sees their own experiences in a different way
        • MARTIN BUBER
          • a religious experience is a result of God revealing himself to us on a personal level
      • NINIAN SMART
        • "involves some kind of 'perception' of the invisible world, or a perception that some visible person or thing is a manifestation of the invisible world"
      • HARE
        • 'blik'
          • unverifiable and unfalsifiable way of looking at the world
    • cumulative argument
      • different arguments put together are more convincing than a single argument alone
    • AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE DIVINE
    • Yellow patch
      • stating that God exists has no literal significance
    • NO PROOF
    • a posteriori
      • we must experience a religious event ourselves before understanding its correlation to God and his existence

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