What is religious experience?
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Question
Religious experience?
Answer
A moment a person takes to be a direct encounter with the divine or sacred — a felt encounter, not just a belief.
Question
Three main types of religious experience?
Answer
Mystical union (e.g. Sufism), near-death experiences, and the quieter sense of presence in prayer or worship.
Question
Mystical union?
Answer
A sense of merging with the divine or with all things — like the Sufi report of dissolving into God's love.
Question
Ineffability?
Answer
The feeling that an experience is beyond words — you'd have to feel it to understand.
Question
Transcendence?
Answer
A sense of touching something beyond the ordinary world, outside normal time and space.
Question
Why is 'deeply personal' a key feature?
Answer
It happens to one person from the inside and often reshapes their whole life afterwards.
Question
Belief vs experience?
Answer
A belief is something you hold to be true; a religious experience is a moment you feel you lived through.
Question
Why treat religious experience as ONE category?
Answer
Unconnected cultures describe these moments with the same features — words fail, something vast, life-changing.
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Topic 5.3 hub
Religious experience and behaviour
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