William James, The Varieties of Religious Experiences

[littlemissmartypants]

From Lecture One, RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence.


The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is a book by Harvard University psychologist and philosopher William James. It comprises his edited Gifford Lectures on natural theology, which were delivered at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1901 and 1902.

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience.html?id=Qi4XAAAAIAAJ

[guillaumeb]

1. James on religion:

James then proceeds in the rest of the lectures to give multitudes of examples demonstrating the mainly positive effects of religious experiences. He writes chapters on the reality of the unseen, conversion, saintliness, mysticism, philosophy and happiness. These treatments remain classics, along with his discussions of individual differences in religious temperaments, such as the healthy-minded and sick souls.
These arguments in defense of religion by James were liberating for me as a convert to Roman Catholicism. My religious mother had been afflicted by schizophrenia and in my aggressively secular family there lurked the suspicion that my ardent religious enthusiasms were signs of pathological tendencies. Yet my faith could meet James' threefold criteria of validity. I was morally helped, intellectually strengthened and joyfully blessed -- for all the long productive life to come.
James served as a sophisticated defender of the faith in atheistic academic milieus encountered. There, too, religious fervor and commitments also carried the odor of craziness. Indeed, James was quite ready to propose that a more sensitive and even neurotic temperament might be more receptive to valid religious truths than more a stolid, unimaginative nature.

https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/william-james-defense-faith-was-liberating

[littlemissmartypants]

3. My entire purpose for posting this was to possibly

Stimulate some discussion on the relationship between serious delusional mental health issues and religious experiences. But you missed the point and I don't feel like having a discussion about it with you now.

[guillaumeb]

4. I simply posted some quotes from the author.

And no, I did not miss your point.

However, if you wish to really discuss more of James' actual feelings about religion, fee free to do so.

[Voltaire2]

5. Did you read this part?

“I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life.”

He’s not talking about you or the millions of others who “have faith” in the religion they follow, he is talking about those few ( and he notes arguably nut jobs ) in history who believed they had a direct line to the divine. Of course he also wrote long before psychedelics made this sort of first hand experience readily available.

[guillaumeb]

7. I did.

But the vast majority of any group of people are not the subject of his attention.

Psychedelics have always been with us.

[Voltaire2]

19. Awareness of the connection between

Psychedelics and religious experiences western philosophy is recent.

[marylandblue]

16. This doesn't fit the dominant debate terms here, which are limited to

1) discussing whether or not proof is needed of God's existence.
2) Whether or not religion plays any role at all in religious oppression (can't believe that's an actual debate, but it is), and
3) Meta-discussions about logical fallacies.

On the actual subject of James' writings, I read The Varieties of Religious Experience a long time ago and he introduced me to the idea that religion was a refuge and a treatment for mental illness and still is today. I think people who experience depression or hallucinations have found a way to deal with and find meaning in their sufferings through religion. I also think some of the ancient prophets may have been schizhophrenic, and the Psalmist was bipolar.

I think people still use religion this way today because modern psychiatry still can't cure many mentally ill people.

[guillaumeb]

2. And from the same source:

J

ames was interested in everything to do with religion. He honed in on how individual temperament interacted with belief and religious experience, or lack of it. Some personalities were incapable of faith, he believed, because their deeper intuitive sources were "frozen," or blocked by the social circles of disbelief they inhabited.

[Act_of_Reparation]

6. The more things change...

...the more they stay the same.

[guillaumeb]

8. Mr. James did have some things to say about atheists as well as theists. eom

[Mariana]

9. I'm very glad you pointed that out, Gil.

?v=3

[guillaumeb]

10. Another gif(t)ed one.

Anything to say about the excerpt I posted from Mr. James?

[Mariana]

11. Absolutely.

Mr. James did have some things to say about atheists as well as theists.

[guillaumeb]

12. What was your reaction to the actual quote? eom

[Act_of_Reparation]

13. My reaction was that it sounds like something you'd say.

[guillaumeb]

14. The designated spokesperson?

Understood.

[Act_of_Reparation]

15. Case in point.

[littlemissmartypants]

17. So...

1) Based on the presuppositions of James, was the vision in the woods Joseph Smith reported a religious experience, an hallucination caused by a psychological dysfunction, either chronic or temporary of the type caused by metabolic disturbance, or a figment of his over active imagination?
And 2) If we start by disregarding any notion that religion is a basis for neurological dysfunction, does it exist beyond the scope of the individual?
And 3) Is organized religion just another fraternity based on imaginings that once shared with another person are devoid of religiosity and therefore no longer meaningful as religious experiences?

[Voltaire2]

18. Smith was a con man.

I don’t know if James considered that aspect.

[marylandblue]

20. I think religious experience provides a cultural context for mental dysfunction.

James treated religious experience phenomenologically, ignoring the question of whether they were physically real, only looking at the psychological aspects. I don't know what he thought of Joseph Smith, but he wrote about the "dark night of the soul," which he recognized as depression, and finding God at the end was the lifting of the depression. People who experience dark nights share their experience as a guide book to help others through their depression. I don't think organized religion is devoid of religiosity, but people who don't experience dark nights don't understand this part of the religious experience.