Religious Experience

[steve_bank]

There are spiritual experiences, but nothing supernatural. You could say spiritual is a class of experince.

Sex is part emotion and part physical. If you never had sex and said well, you just insert part a into part b that would not quite communicate the experience.

We have a soul, it is the sum of our feelings, experiences, and emotions. Blacks have a term 'soul food'. Food that also feeds your spirit.

I expect most know what human spirit is.

 

[rousseau]

We see the adjective "spiritual" qualifying a noun "experience" or "emotion" and then start wondering which experiences and emotions are inherently spiritual and which aren't. IOW, we blur the adjective into the noun.

I would argue that no emotion is inherently spiritual. The adjective merely qualifies the emotion/experience/behavior, according to context.

If I understand her right, southernhybrid's making the same or similar point. We don't have spiritual emotions. We have emotions. Sometimes they occur in a "spiritual" or religious context. Sometimes they don't. My awe of a mountain and some religious fellow's awe in a church are basically the same emotion, but only one experiencing of the emotion is religious/spiritual.

And "spiritual"... I think there must be enough adjectives in existence we can be more specific. There are a 1000 different ways to use the word. So if we mean "serene" by it, then maybe we should say "serene" so the spiritist baggage doesn't confuse folks?

I mostly agree, but I think this line falls slightly shy of the mark of the meaning of the word. A spiritual experience, imo, has a very specific meaning, mainly connotating the perception of a presence, a living force tied up with the experience. Either affecting one's own inner essence, or the perception of an outward essence. So while some other terms might get us in the ballpark, I believe the word 'spirit' is very specific here.

Where this thread seems to be getting mixed up, imo, is mistaking spiritual experiences as fundamentally religious, and not religious experiences as fundamentally spiritual. Spirituality comes first in the hierarchy, and is the cause of religion, not vice versa. As I've argued throughout this thread, spirituality is intrinsic to human nature, which is the spur of religion, but doesn't necessarily have to be associated with the supernatural.

I work in a hospital and here we have 'spiritual care' departments. Maybe not suggesting something intrinsic to human physiology, but maybe our perception of each other, other living things, and maybe even beautiful inanimate things.

 

[southernhybrid]

Unfortunately, we haven't had any Christians describe their concept of a religious experience. And, I think the atheists on this thread are pretty much in agreement. We're just using different terms to describe particular emotional experiences. Some of you prefer to use the term spiritual to describe these experiences. Fine. I just don't use that term to describe the numerous things that happen in our brains when we experience certain emotions.

We have some wonderful neurotransmitters that cause us to feel certain emotional highs. They are released during satisfying sex, when we fall in love, when we bond with a newborn child, and when we experience other types of satisfying things. I'm more interested in the science behind these "awesome" experiences than I am borrowing a word that has traditionally been associated with religion to describe what it perfectly natural and biological. The fact that these things are a part of our biological makeup, doesn't make them any less enjoyable or meaningful to us as individuals.

 

[Politesse]

Unfortunately, we haven't had any Christians describe their concept of a religious experience. And, I think the atheists on this thread are pretty much in agreement. We're just using different terms to describe particular emotional experiences. Some of you prefer to use the term spiritual to describe these experiences. Fine. I just don't use that term to describe the numerous things that happen in our brains when we experience certain emotions.

I don't know if including religious voices will necessarily help pin anything down; "spiritual" is such a woobly and flexible term it ends up getting applied to nearly everything, driving this poor anthropologist of religion nuts if we're being honest. It means what someone intends it to mean. Though I think the general implication is that what's under discussion is to some degree "numinous" -- more than what meets the eye, more than what the senses tell you.

 

[rousseau]

I'd also add that I'm not using a different term to describe an emotional experience, that hasn't been my argument at all.

You could say spiritual is a class of experience.

^^^

This is along the lines of what I'm arguing. Spiritual is an adjective of experience, it is a particular type of experience that people have. A spiritual experience can also be emotional, but the spiritual side suggests something more is happening than just emotion.

Though I think the general implication is that what's under discussion is to some degree "numinous" -- more than what meets the eye, more than what the senses tell you.

Which is that ^^^.

An atheist is going to tend to emphasize the part of spiritual experience where it's just an irrational perception, an anthropologist is going to emphasize the part where a particular class of experience is happening. That is not to say that the atheist is wrong, just that their explanation isn't complete.

 

[Politesse]

I'd also add that I'm not using a different term to describe an emotional experience, that hasn't been my argument at all.

You could say spiritual is a class of experience.

^^^

This is along the lines of what I'm arguing. Spiritual is an adjective of experience, it is a particular type of experience that people have. A spiritual experience can also be emotional, but the spiritual side suggests something more is happening than just emotion.

Though I think the general implication is that what's under discussion is to some degree "numinous" -- more than what meets the eye, more than what the senses tell you.

Which is that ^^^.

An atheist is going to tend to emphasize the part of spiritual experience where it's just an irrational perception, an anthropologist is going to emphasize the part where a particular class of experience is happening. That is not to say that the atheist is wrong, just that their explanation isn't complete.

Guilty as charged. Truthfully anthropology as a field has tended to struggle with the mystical elements of society. Imesn, we're interested, but our methods hsve generslly skewed toward the physically observable- interview, observation of behavior, ritual, medicalization of experience. Interpretation of entirely subjective experiences creates a problem of the tool not meeting up with the job. Especially since people who have religious experiences often struggle to put those experiences into words. There are, I would argue, genuinely physiological elements to these experiences. But it's also true that cultural and social expectation seem to impact us not just at the interpretive level, but right down to how and what we perceive in the first place, especially when the regular neural network starts to function differently.

 

[rousseau]

I'd also add that I'm not using a different term to describe an emotional experience, that hasn't been my argument at all.



^^^

This is along the lines of what I'm arguing. Spiritual is an adjective of experience, it is a particular type of experience that people have. A spiritual experience can also be emotional, but the spiritual side suggests something more is happening than just emotion.



Which is that ^^^.

An atheist is going to tend to emphasize the part of spiritual experience where it's just an irrational perception, an anthropologist is going to emphasize the part where a particular class of experience is happening. That is not to say that the atheist is wrong, just that their explanation isn't complete.

Guilty as charged. Truthfully anthropology as a field has tended to struggle with the mystical elements of society. Imesn, we're interested, but our methods hsve generslly skewed toward the physically observable- interview, observation of behavior, ritual, medicalization of experience. Interpretation of entirely subjective experiences creates a problem of the tool not meeting up with the job. Especially since people who have religious experiences often struggle to put those experiences into words. There are, I would argue, genuinely physiological elements to these experiences. But it's also true that cultural and social expectation seem to impact us not just at the interpretive level, but right down to how and what we perceive in the first place, especially when the regular neural network starts to function differently.

Strangely enough, I come from a medical science background so tend to use evolution as a heuristic to understand some of this stuff, which I think often gets to the interior that the subject themselves may not be able to explain.

On some level I believe spirituality can be tied up with our psychological propensity to assume agency where there is none, but that's probably not the complete story. Another part of it is that we've also evolved to experience particular emotions and thoughts about other life (or in this case agents). Consider something as simple as sexuality - just seeing an attractive person invokes a reaction. The same is true of our reactions to various emotional contexts. The loss of a loved one, marriage, reasons to be jealous.

You can view this in a kind of rationalistic, scientific way, but the emergent description of it is spiritual behavior. A hard line scientist might get angsty about it, but in my view this is just who and what we are. There's no rising above loneliness.

 

[southernhybrid]

I just remembered something that, according to the person who had the experience, it would labelled a religious or spiritual experience.

About ten or more years ago, there was a poster here, who went from Christian to atheist over a fairly short period of time. I actually met him in person in Atlanta once, and he and I corresponded for awhile. I think part of the reason he abandoned his fundamentalist Christian beliefs was because he was gay and his fellow Christians thought that was a sinful choice. I guess that got him to thinking more deeply about his beliefs.

For a few months he identified as an atheist, but then something happened to change his mind. His grandmother died and according to him, she came to him in a dream and told him there was an afterlife. He didn't become a Christian again, but he did believe in gods, and some supernatural elements. I'd simply call that a dream or perhaps an hallucination, maybe similar to what happens in the so called near death experiences that some people have. But, to him, it was real.

Our minds our capable of fooling us into thinking that imaginary things are real. Imo, the former poster had a very difficult time believing that there were no gods or supernatural elements, so when he had a dream about his grandmother, who he obviously loved very much, that gave him a reason to reject his atheism and find some new woo.

I tend to think that a lot of people simply can't accept their own mortality and these people often need organized religion or some other form of supernatural woo to get them through life. I understand that. I just don't agree that there is really such a thing as spiritual experiences. To me, they are either emotional or things that we imagine to be real, when in fact, they are just manufactured by our complex brains and neurotransmitters. That's just the way I see it. I don't expect everyone else to agree with me.