More Varieties of Religious Experience
I like to give credit where credit is due, and therefore I will point out a place that I agree with William James. He writes, When I read in a religious paper words like these: "Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_," I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? I appreciate that, because many people who study religion try to reduce it to something easily explainable, something where they do not have to grapple with the question of divinity, and here James shows how little sense it makes to ignore divinity, or to add it in only as something inescapable but not really tangible. On the other hand, James himself reduces the mystical union with God to a person's union with his own unconscious, which seems to be going in the same directionl. He says, Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whateve...