From: Sam Norton (elizaphanian@kohath.wanadoo.co.uk)
Date: Mon Oct 25 2004 - 11:35:37 BST
Hi Erin,
Erin said:
> See breaking this apart would really help me understanding what "faith" means and what it applies
to. There are experiences that are observable and there are experiences that are not unobservable.
Mystic experience would be an unobservable experience and so I thought it might fall under faith
(even though for me personally it is an experience) but now I am told I am *allowed* to lump it
under experience rather than faith So how do you draw the line....e.g., if somebody claimed to
"experience" connection with a God. Since it wasn't observable to anybody but that person I
thought it was faith. But how can I claim MY mystic experience is experience not faith but their
experience is faith-based. I just don't get what criteria people are using to clearly distinguish
whether an unobservable experience is lumped as an experience or as faith.
Sam says:
I think the whole hang up with 'experience' is a SOMish neurosis - it's all about defending religion
as something 'objective' and therefore respectable (this is the William James link, it was the
motivating and organising factor in his 'varieties of religious experience' and it's had all sorts
of pernicious effects as the wider SOMish culture has accepted it).
Think of it like this. A friend tells you that she has fallen in love with a particular man, let's
call him 'Mr Handsome'. Yet after telling you this, she never refers to him again. She never tries
to communicate with Handsome, she doesn't try and be in the same room as Handsome, in fact she
carries on her life in exactly the same way as before, including talking about other men she likes,
other men she tries to be with, and she eventually meets Mr Right, settles down with him, raises a
family, lives happy ever after etc etc. Now, in the absence of other evidence (eg diaries left after
her death and so on) what meaning can be given to her expression that she has 'fallen in love' with
Mr Handsome? I would say none. (I follow Wittgenstein on this, this isn't a theological point, it's
to do with the nature of our language).
Faith relates to 'mystical experience' in the same way. The hang up about mystical experience
focusses on a particular event in a person's life, but it is the way that experience is embedded in
a change of behaviour that gives it it's meaning, ie it is the _embedding_ that makes it mystical,
not the experience itself (ie, that makes it a 'true' description of what has occurred). So, if your
friend, after telling you that she had fallen in love with Handsome spent all her time on the phone
to you talking about him, made sure she saw him a lot, went on dates, got married, lived happy ever
after etc etc then you could quite happily agree that she had had the 'experience' of falling in
love. It would be uncontentious.
What I am wanting to bring out is that the concentration on 'experience' is literally meaningless.
Faith is a way of life, a commitment to a framework of understanding and value, which is more or
less coherently expressed through the choices we make and the path we follow, and the language and
mythology and doctrine which religious people depend on are the tools and practices which enable
that way of life. So to describe someone as 'faithful' is necessarily linked into choices and
behaviour in exactly the same sort of way as describing someone as 'in love' has. Faith has a
concrete expression, it's not 'hidden' and mysterious and arcane. It's actually very simple.
Hope that's helpful.
Regards
Sam
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