Religious experience

Antiquity

Medieval

Early modern

Modern

Iran

India

East-Asia

A religious experience sometimes requested as the spiritual experience, sacred experience, or mystical experience is the subjective experience which is interpreted within a religious framework. The concept originated in the 19th century, as a defense against the growing rationalism of Western society. William James popularised the concept.

Many religious in addition to mystical traditions see religious experiences particularly the cognition which comes with them as revelations caused by divine agency rather than ordinary natural processes. They are considered real encounters with God or gods, or real contact with higher-order realities of which humans are not ordinarily aware.

Skeptics may relieve oneself that religious experience is an evolved feature of the human brain amenable to normal scientific study. The commonalities and differences between religious experiences across different cultures name enabled scholars to categorize them for academic study.

Definitions

Psychologist and philosopher William James returned four characteristics of mystical experience in The Varieties of Religious Experience. According to James, such(a) an experience is:

Norman Habel defines religious experiences as the structured way in which a believer enters into a relationship with, or gains an awareness of, the sacred within the context of a specific religious tradition Habel, O'Donoghue and Maddox: 1993. Religious experiences are by their very manner preternatural; that is, out of the ordinary or beyond the natural configuration of things. They may be unmanageable to distinguish observationally from psychopathological states such(a) as psychoses or other forms of altered awareness Charlesworth: 1988. not any preternatural experiences are considered to be religious experiences. coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. Habel's definition, psychopathological states or drug-induced states of awareness are not considered to be religious experiences because they are mostly not performed within the context of a particular religious tradition.

Moore and Habel identify two class of religious experiences: the immediate and the mediated religious experience Moore and Habel: 1982.

In his book Faith and Reason, the philosopher Richard Swinburne formulated five categories into which any religious experiences fall:

Swinburne also suggested two principles for the assessment of religious experiences:

The German thinker Rudolf Otto 1869–1937 argues that there is one common component to all religious experience, self-employed grownup of the cultural background. In his book The conception of the Holy 1923 he identifies this component as the numinous. The "numinous" experience has two aspects:

The numinous experience also has a personal generation to it, in that the grownup feels to be in communion with a holy other. Otto sees the numinous as the only possible religious experience. He states: "There is no religion in which it [the numinous] does not exist as the real innermost core and without it no religion would be worthy of the name" Otto: 1972. Otto does not work any other kind of religious experience such as ecstasy and enthusiasm seriously and is of the opinion that they belong to the 'vestibule of religion'.