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Counter-cultural religious experiences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2010

TRAVIS DUMSDAY
TRAVIS DUMSDAY*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N4, Canada
*
e-mail: tjgdumsd@ucalgary.ca
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Abstract

Discussions of the evidential import of religious experiences have tended to focus on the intra-cultural variety: that is, experiences the content of which accord with the religious/cultural background of the experiencer (eg. someone raised in a Buddhist culture might experience the oneness of all, whereas someone from a Christian background might have a vision of Jesus). But what of counter-cultural experiences? That is, experiences which fall outside of the individual's religious/cultural background? Little attention has been paid to these, though such experiences are far from unheard of in the case study literature. In this paper I explore some preliminary questions surrounding the evidential import of counter-cultural religious experiences.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , September 2011 , pp. 317 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. Richard Swinburne The Existence of God, 2nd rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

2. Phillip Wiebe God and Other Spirits: Intimations of Transcendence in Christian Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

3. William Alston Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

4. See Meg Maxwell and Verena Tschudin (eds) Seeing the Invisible: Modern Religious and Other Transcendent Experiences (London: Penguin, 1990), 86–87.

5. Tal Brooke Avatar of Night (Berkeley CA: End Run Publishing, 1999).

6. Jeffrey Kripal Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 48–61.

7. Gulshan Esther and Thelma Sangster, with Noble Din (interpreter) The Torn Veil: The Story of Sister Gulshan Esther (London: Marshall Pickering, 1984).

8. See Seppo Syrjänen In Search of Meaning and Identity: Conversion to Christianity in Pakistani Muslim Culture (Helsinki: Finnish Society for Missiology and Ecumenics, 1984). For a recent and more general discussion of visionary experiences of Jesus among Muslims, see Christine Darg Miracles Among Muslims: The Jesus Visions (Pescara: Destiny Image Europe, 2007).

9. See Rabindranath Maharaj & Dave Hunt The Death of a Guru (New York NY: A. J. Holman Company, 1977).

10. Phillip Wiebe Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the New Testament to Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 82.

11. Several examples of these can be found in Maxwell and Tschudin Seeing the Invisible; see for instance the account on 48.

12. For a discussion of Shi's life and impact on the Jesuit mission effort in early modern China see Hsia, Po-Chia ‘Dreams and conversions: a comparative analysis of Catholic and Buddhist dreams in Ming and Qing China: Part I’, Journal of Religious History, 29 (2005), 223–240CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. He recounts his story in Ruth Rosen (ed.) Jesus for Jews (San Francisco CA: A Messianic Jewish Perspective, 1987), 242–276.

14. For a description of the experience in his own words see B. H. Streeter and A. J. Appasamy The Message of Sadhu Sundar Singh: A Study in Mysticism on Practical Religion (New York NY: Macmillan, 1922).

15. He discusses this experience and religious conversion in an audio interview in his John Tavener: A Portrait [audio interview, in the second of a 2-CD set] (Naxos Rights International Ltd., 2004). My thanks to Joseph Novak for drawing my attention to this source.

16. See Jeffrey Kripal, Esalen, 42–43.

17. For a sceptical treatment of the Zeitun apparitions, see Joe Nickell Looking for a Miracle (Amherst NY: Prometheus, 1998), 185–187. He dismisses them as ‘earthquake lights’, supposedly a rare form of light disturbance caused by seismic activity. For more sympathetic discussions, see for instance D. Scott Rogo Miracles: A Parascientific Inquiry into Wondrous Phenomena (New York NY: Dial Press, 1982), 252–257; Roy Abraham Varghese God-Sent: A History of the Accredited Apparitions of Mary (New York NY: Crossroad, 2000), 85–86; and Randall Sullivan The Miracle Detective (New York NY: Grove Press, 2004), 305–306. Further apparitions of the Virgin Mary have since occurred at other Coptic churches in Egypt. The most recent of these began in December 2009 and has been widely reported. See, for instance, Mona Salem ‘Virgin Mary sightings a sign of hope for Egypt's Christians’, The Ottawa Citizen, 26 December 2009. Once again, the first witness was a Muslim.

18. For an example of such an experience, see Frederica Mathewes-Green At the Corner of East and Now: A Modern Life in Ancient Christian Orthodoxy (New York NY: Penguin Putnam, 1999). Raised in a nominally Christian home, Matthewes-Green later became hostile to Christianity and turned to Hinduism. Then, as a Hindu, she had a powerful and distinctively Christian religious experience in front of a sculpture of Jesus in a Dublin church (where she and her husband had stopped for a look during their honeymoon tour of Europe). She subsequently returned to Christianity.

19. Examples of such experiences abound in the literature. A famous case study is that of Larry Flynt, the American pornographer. A longtime atheist, he temporarily came under the influence of evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton (sister of former US President, Jimmy Carter). During this time he had an experience in which ‘not only did a figure that he took to be God come to him visually and acknowledge Flynt's being, he also saw himself in a wheelchair – an incredible foretelling of events that were just months away from becoming a reality in Flynt's life’; Ted Dracos Ungodly: The Passions, Torments, and Murder of Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair (New York NY: Berkley Books, 2003), 133. Flynt would soon be shot by a sniper and crippled for life. Later, a friend, prominent atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, would convince him that the vision had been a hallucination, and Flynt returned to atheism.

20. J. L. Mackie The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 181.

21. Ibid., 187. The latter reference is to one of William James's case studies. The edition Mackie cites is William James The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Collins, 1960). Ratisbonne was a secularist of Jewish heritage who converted to Catholicism (and later became a priest) after a vision of the Virgin Mary.

22. Others, apparently unaware of the relevant case study literature, simply assume that there are no examples of genuinely counter-cultural experiences. Thus Pojman writes that ‘the religious person is already predisposed to have theistic-type religious experiences, whereas the nonreligious person is not usually so disposed (in the literature, Christians have visions of Jesus, Hindus, of Krishna, Buddhists, of Buddha; ancient Greeks, of Athene or Apollo; etc.)’; Louis Pojman ‘A critique of the argument from religious experience’, in idem and Michael Rea (eds) Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology (New York NY: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008), 132–133.

23. Though note that it need not involve sense perception. As Swinburne puts it: ‘I talk of such awareness of God as a perception without implying that the awareness is necessarily mediated via the normal senses. “Perceive” is the general verb for awareness of something apart from oneself’; Swinburne Existence of God, 296.

24. Ibid., 303.

25. Wiebe God and Other Spirits, ch. 3.

26. Alston Perceiving God.

27. William Hasker, See ‘On justifying the Christian practice’, New Scholasticism, 60 (1986), 139–140Google Scholar.

28. Alston Perceiving God, 274–275.

29. Ibid., 274.

30. For such a view see John Hick An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

31. The Religious Experience Research Centre at the University of Wales alone houses more than 6,000 accounts collected from the general public. For information on the centre and its work see www.alisterhardytrust.org.uk

32. For a decent summary of survey data collected over the past 45 years see Bernard Spilka, Ralph W. Hood, Jr. & Richard L. Gorsuch. The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach, 3rd edn (New York NY: Guilford Press, 2003), 299–312. A representative example: in a 1978 study David Hay and Ann Morisy sampled 1,865 people in Britain; 36 per cent responded affirmatively to the question ‘Have you ever been aware of or influenced by a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?’

33. Though the rationality of this practice, and its acceptable limits, are hotly debated topics in epistemology. For a good entry point to these issues as they pertain to religious epistemology, see Owen, David ‘Hume versus Price on miracles and prior probabilities: testimony and the Bayesian calculation’, Philosophical Quarterly, 37 (1987), 187–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. At least, improper for a reader qua individual materialist; it would be improper for a reader qua objective scholar of religion, though I will not attempt to press the point here.

35. A version of this paper was presented at the 2009 meeting of the Canadian Society of Christian Philosophers, and I would like to thank those in attendance for their input, and especially my commentator, Robert Larmer. My sincere thanks also to Evan Fales and Phillip Wiebe for their comments on earlier drafts, and to Peter Byrne and an anonymous referee for Religious Studies for comments and corrections.