Religious Experience: SQA Advanced Higher RMPS quiz quiz

Awe before a wholly other power

A sense of union or oneness with the divine or ultimate reality

A shared group event only

A transformation of belief and life

Credulity, testimony, fruits, evidence

Ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity

Awe, dread, fascination, surrender

Conversion, numinous, corporate, revelatory

As a purely psychological illusion

As union with the divine

As an encounter with the holy as 'wholly other', the mysterium tremendum, evoking awe and fascination

As a group revival meeting

An a priori deductive proof

An ontological argument

An inductive argument that experiences are best explained by a real divine object

A purely emotional appeal

In the absence of special reasons to doubt, believe that things are as they seem

Only trust what science can verify

Never trust your own experiences

Believe whatever a religious authority says

We should believe what others sincerely report, absent special reasons to doubt

Reports must be scientifically repeatable

Only first-person experience counts

Testimony is always worthless

It rejects all religious experience

It relies only on the ontological argument

It proves God deductively

It treats experiences as data and judges them partly by their good effects (fruits)

As genuine encounter with God

As illusion: the projection of unconscious needs, especially a wish for a protective father figure

As temporal-lobe activity only

As corporate suggestion

That experiences are never reported

That experiences correlate with brain states and can be induced, suggesting a natural cause

That experiences are always shared

That experiences prove God

That Freud was correct

That all experience is divine

That genes cause belief

That explaining the cause or correlate of an experience does not show it is false

Experiences across religions support incompatible objects, so they cannot all be veridical

Experiences are always identical

Religions agree on everything

There are too few religious experiences

That only one religion has experiences

That experiences cannot be reported

That the experiences share a common core differently interpreted through cultural lenses

That all religions are false

They are subjective, private and unrepeatable, with no neutral public test

They are always recorded on video

They are too common

They never have any effects

Because testimony is stronger than experience

Because others cannot have beliefs

Because the subject is always right

The subject has direct experience and may apply credulity; others rely on testimony about a private, unverifiable experience

It shows all experiences are false

It applies only to corporate experience

Good effects give some reason to take an experience seriously, but do not guarantee a true cause

It proves a divine cause