On 1/18/06, steve ash <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Yes, to clarify, I meant a religious experience can
only mean the experience of a religion, or an
experience based on religion, or perhaps an experience
that leads to a religion. That is it is the experience
of a cultural construct, or an experience relative to
a cultural construct. While a spiritual experience if
taken in contrast means an unmediated direct
experience of something 'external' to culture and of a
personal nature. Possibly the only kind of unmediated
experience possible, if by spirit we mean foundational
reality.
The confidence trick remark was merely a cynical
observation that I've yet to discover a religious
cultural construct that isn't about manipulating
people's genuine spiritual needs into a mytho-ethical
system for pacification and social control. :)
Hmmm.
I have - but then I am within one.
There is a difference, I think, between the experience of the
individual and what an entire church, etc. does with that experience.
It seems to me that there is often, from those outside a faith
paradigm, an assumption that others are within it because of
indoctrination, mind control, etc. It's entirely possible to be
part of a mainstream faith because of personal experience. (I
well remember being told by someone that Christians are... distanced
from their God and have no real contact. Pointing out the belief
in transubstantiation, and the fact that the largest group of
Christians have the experience of consuming their deity, brought the
response that "no one believes that" - because my discussant could not
believe it).
However, I begin to rant, apologies. My point remains that it is
possible, "even" within the mainstream faiths, for individuals to have
what you term spiritual experiences. (My incipient rant is based
on what I have perceived for years as a creeping assumption that
contact with deity exists only outside the mainstream...).
To bring it vaguely back on topic... *IS* there a difference in
spiritual experience within and without the mainstream? Does the
fact that 1.1 billion people share at least some of the rudiments of a
belief - even in something so "magical" as transubstantiation - mean
that the spiritual element is lessened?
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