Religious experience is the self witness or experience of God’s Holy Spirit, or other mystical experiences. It is a non empirical occurrence and may be super natural. It can be an experience such as a phenomenon or a sense of mystery of a divine power.

It is argued as direct evidence of an individual's relationship with God. It can also be described as a mental event which is undergone by an individual. Such an experience can be spontaneous or can be brought about as a result of intensive training and self discipline. Recipients of a religious experience usually have a deeper knowledge of God.

There are many types of religious experience;

• Prayer – the individuals feeling of a divine presence whilst praying and the relationship that seems to grow between the individual and the Divine through prayer.

• Conversion – This involves changing from one set of beliefs to another. Leo Tolstoy, for example had explained his conversion to Christianity when he was in a state of long-term depression when he thought there was no point in living.

• Vocation – is a term the experiences many people feel of being “calle

d” to a special task or job. This is not only true of religious people such as priests, nuns and missionaries but of doctors and teachers and others too.

The argument from religious experience is the argument that God must exist because he is the object of certain experiences. It is only possible to experience that which exists and so the phenomenon of religious experience is taken to demonstrate the existence of God. This argument assumes that religious experiences are a type of perceptual experience, i.e. a type of experience in which something external is perceived. Some, though, would argue that religious experiences are more similar to thoughts or dreams, that the object of the experience is not something that exists in the world but rather is something that exists personally in the mind of the person having that experience.

The basic issues James discusses here remain of a vital concern to people in psychology and religion today. James was convinced that experience rather than theory is the key to our understandings of the world in reality. He says that we think only in order to solve problems in our experience. Therefore theories should be assessed on their ability to success in dealing with practical problems. The only way of assessing this is by judging them in relation to their effect on our experience. If they have no effect they are meaningless.

There are of course some experiences that are invented or induced by believers. There are some unstable people e.g. schizophrenics hearing voices or visions, or people on drugs. For this reason the church is very strict on how they difine a religious experiences. Lourdes is a very common place for people to have such experience, so guide lines are strictly followed. Even with these lines, there are such experiences which can’t be explained by modern science.

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