The Nature of Faith Essay -- Psychology Religion Papers

The Nature of opinion Faith is an crucial aspect of religious experience. Events can often be understood by some people as aesthetic or pleasant 1 earlier than religious because their frame of reference rejects the spiritual connection for a much temporal one. However, of course, there are experiences that people have that by-pass any try on their part to explain them naturally and clearly demonstrate a spiritual situation. One British scholar described his experience, like those of umteen others, that convinced him of the reality of God. He had no religion, no real experience of personal relationship to God. He went for a walk alone one day, without particular thoughts or intentions, when he became conscious of the presence of someone else and completed a feeling that the being of God surrounded him. It was no monthlong a matter of inference, it was an immediate act of spiritual... apprehension. The experience changed his whole stead of the world and himself. I had not fo und God because I had neer looked for him. But he had found me he had, I could not however believe, made himself personal to me 2. The man could interpret this experience because faith had been wake up or become functionally directed in him. Some people, and some psychologists, deem faith to be something akin to wishful thinking. The great philosopher-psychologist William pack defined faith as a belief in something concerning which motion is still theoretically possible, that the believer acts in faith by pickings steps which are not guaranteed to turn out as he thinks they should 3. If faith is not wishful thinking, or acting in desire that the right thing will happen, then it is non-rational self-affirmation. Religious assertions... r... ..., Publ., 1968. Bregman, Lucy. The Rediscovery of the Inner Experience. stops Nelson Hall, 1982. Brown, L.B. The Psychology of Religion. capital of the United Kingdom SPCK, 1988. Miller, Ed. L. Believing in God Readings on Faith and Reas on. Upper Saddle River, NJ Prentice-Hall, 1996. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy An Inquiry into the Non- cerebral Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. John W. Harvey (transl). London Oxford University Press, 1970. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. John Oman (transl). New York Harper and Brothers, Publ., 1958. Strunk, Orlo (ed). Readings in the Psychology of Religion. New York Abingdon Press, 1959. Whittaker, John H. Matters of Faith and Matters of Principle Religious right Claims and Their Logic. San Antonio, TX Trinity University Press, 1981.