Religious Experience and Islam

Religious Experience

• Religious experience is any experience believed to be religiously significant by the person having it.
• It encompasses various experiences such as enlightenment, prophetic calls, visions, voices, conversions, and revelations.
• Experiences include sensations, emotions, conceptual thought, intuitions, hallucinations, dreams, ecstatic states, and moments of calm.

Islam and Mohammed

• Mohammed heard a voice telling him to recite while sleeping in a cave
• He consulted with a Christian, who identified him as a prophet sent by Angel Gabriel.
• Mohammed's revelations were compiled into the Quran, forming the basis of Islam.
• Central to Islam are the Five Pillars:
  • Witnessing that there is no God but Allah and Muhammed is a prophet
  • Praying five times a day.
  • Giving alms to the poor
  • Fasting from sunrise to sunset during Ramadan
  • Making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once.
• Hadith: Narratives of Mohammed's actions and sayings.
• The Kaaba is a sacred shrine and holy site.
  • Angel Gabriel washed Muhammad's heart and bowels in a golden basin while he was sleeping
• Sufism is an Islamic mystical movement.
• Meditation is a general term for conscious altering practices.

Types of Religious Experiences

• Revelational Experiences: Human becomes an agent or spokesperson of the divine.
  • Revelations can be personal (individual life) or communal (wider group).
  • Max Weber distinguished between emissary and exemplary prophets.
    • Emissary prophets convince others of revealed messages.
    • Exemplary prophets help others have spiritual experiences.
• Ecstatic Experiences: Involve intimate contact with a deity where one loses self-control.
  • Common forms include possession by a spiritual force and out-of-body journeys.
• Finity Experiences:
  • Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher posited that experience precedes teachings.
• Religious experiences share a common core: a feeling of dependency on God.
• Numinous Experiences:
  • Rudolf Otto described these as unexplainable, terming them "mysterium tremendum et fascinans," involving fear and fascination.
• Mystical Experiences:
  • Ninian Smart stated that unity, not duality, is central, where subject and object become intimately related.
• Confirming Experiences: Intuitions that beliefs are true.

Shamanistic Ecstasy

• Shamans: Religious functionaries in tribal societies who use spirit guides for healing and community activities.
  • A method for entering trance.

Stace's Typology of Mysticism

• Walter T. Stace identified two types of mystical experiences:
  • Extrovertive: A unifying vision perceiving unity behind the world's multiplicity.
    • Acknowledgement that everything is one
  • Introvertive: Sensory and conceptual content disappears, leading to pure consciousness.
    • Introvertive experiences are superior because they transcend subject/object dualism and the sense of time/space.

Additional Mysticism Types

• R. C. Zaehner expanded on Stace's typology:
  • Nature Mysticism: Mystical self expands to include the universe or dissolves into nature, similar to extrovertive.
  • Soul/Monistic Mysticism: Transcendence of subject/object distinctions, identifying with ultimate reality, similar to introvertive.
  • Theistic Mysticism: Ecstasy of union without identity with the divine.
    • Theistic mysticism is superior due to its strong moral sense.

Mystical Techniques

• Yoga: Spiritual disciplines and paths.
  • Raja Yoga: Described by Patanjali as the cessation of the mental whirlwind for uniting with the supreme spirit.
    • Eight-limbed yoga:
      • Restraint (ethical prohibitions).
      • Practice of cleanliness, studiousness, and serenity.
      • Concentration, meditation, absorption or samadhi.
        • Mastering the concentration stages leads to "superpowers" called siddhis.
  • Bhakti Yoga: Devotion to the divine, involving hearing the lord, glorifying in song, remembering, worship, adoration, servanthood, friendship, and self-offering.
  • Karma Yoga: Discipline of action, now seen as liberation from selfishness through self-sacrifice.
    • Mohandas Gandhi interpreted nonviolent resistance as a type of karma yoga.
  • Jnana Yoga: Discipline of knowledge, aimed at overcoming ignorance to realize nondualism or monism.

Psychoanalytic Theories

• Sigmund Freud believed religious experiences are projections of unconscious wishes and desires.
  • Ecstatic experiences substitute for repressed sexual desires.
  • Religious rituals stem from unconscious guilt feelings related to parents.
  • Liberation comes when humans outgrow religious illusions and face reality.
• Carl Jung critiqued Freud, stating:
  • The unconscious is filled with creative energy and archetypes, recurring patterns related to the collective unconscious.
• Jung proposed three life stages: dependency, autonomy, and integration, corresponding to levels of religious experience and mythological expressions.

Explaining Evil

• Elie Wiesel questioned why God allows suffering in a world with evil.
• Moral evil: Suffering inflicted by humans on others.
• Natural evil: Suffering caused by natural events.
• Nomos: Orderly world according to understanding laws.
• Anomic: Lawless.
• Theodicy: Proposed solution to the problem of evil that reconciles a powerful god's existence with evil.
• Eschatology: Theories about the end reassure that justice will prevail.

Types of Theodicies

• Karma Theodicies: Actions in past lives affect current life.
• Eschatological Theodicies: Suffering will be made meaningful in the end.
  • Can be this-worldly or otherworldly.
• Theodicies of participation: Suffering is part of a grand scheme.
• Dualistic Theodicies: A superpower is responsible for evil.

Theological Problem of Evil

• The common problem of evil questions the compatibility of an all-good, divine creator with the existence of evil.
• Thomas Aquinas argued that the existence of evil is a reason against God's existence.
• Two arguments about God and evil:
  • Deductive or logical argument.
    • J.L. Mackie believed this problem is exclusive to those who believe in God.
    • Centers on clarifying and reconciling different beliefs.
  • Inductive or evidential argument.
    • Suggests the degree of evil makes God's existence improbable.
    • Questions why an all-powerful, all-knowing God would allow so much suffering.

Theodicies Approaches

• Recompense Theodicy: (free will defense) It is better to live in a world where humans have free will even if it leads to sin and evil
• Soul making Theodicy: God allows evil because it is important for moral development Process
• Theodicy: There is a limit to Gods power. If we modify our understanding it disappears
• Denying the existence of evil Theodicy: If evil does not exist the problem of evil is nonexistent

Anti Theodicies

• Theodicy of submission: We submit to the mystery of divine rule
• Theodicy of Protest: Opposing to God

Religion and Morality

• Socrates considered 'how should one live?' the most important question.

Morality & Ethics

• Morality is a set of norms for regulating human conduct with each other and the environment.
• Ethics is the philosophical study of morality.

Religion and Moral Norms

• Religions identify, legitimize, and motivate moral norms, and help renew moral commitments and criticize moral norms.
• Duty ethics (deontological ethics) emphasize doing one's duty while Virtue ethics emphasize becoming a morally excellent person.

Identifying and Legitimating Moral Norms

• Natural Law: Morality is built into the universe.
  • Thomas Aquinas said natural law derives from God's eternal law.
• Unnatural law is morally wrong.
• Ronald Greene identified three elements to religious morality:
  • Method of moral reasoning
  • Beliefs affirming moral retribution
  • Ways to overcome moral paralysis and despair
  • Radical impartiality in decision-making.
  • The golden rule is important.