?Corporate religious experiences. such as the Toronto Blessing, tell us nothing about God' discuss
Corporate religious experiences are experiences seen by a body of people. They are not just experienced by one person, but by a collective group of people who all say they experienced some supernatural event similar to one another.
However to discover what a real corporate religious experience is, it is important to delve into the meaning of what a religious experience itself actually is. In itself religious experience has a variety of definitions, one of such is:
?A religious experience is a non-empirical occurrence, sometimes perceived as supernatural. A religious experience can be described as a ?mental event' which is undergone by an individual, and of which that person is aware. Such an experience can be spontaneous, or it ay be brought about as a result of intensive training and self discipline.'
The religious experience argument is a classic a posteriori argument, which seeks to establish of the objective existence of the Divine. The argument from the religious experience starts from the premises that all our knowledge of the world relies upon existence of God. As a result of this assumption, religious experiences should be given the same basic validity as other sorts of experiences. Therefore, because of this people claiming to have experiences of God's angels and miracles should be believed, as Richard Swinburne later discusses.
The are doubts however, as William James has claimed, in The Varieties of Religious Experience that some religious experiences are self-induced either by drugs or drunkenness, they are essentially private and individualistic, therefore u ...