ON THE WHAT‐IT‐IS‐LIKE‐NESS OF EXPERIENCE

It is common for philosophers to hold that experience can be characterized in a basic way as being something it is like for someone to undergo. In the paper it is argued that when this slogan is examined it is in some respects trivial and in others mistaken. It is concluded that the slogan should be abandoned.     

THE VARIETIES OF NON‐RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

I want to consider the suggestion that certain essential components of human experience are by their nature distinctively religious, and thus that the atheist is either debarred from participating fully in such experiences, or fails to understand their real nature. I am going to look at five kinds of experience:

• ? the experience of the moral ‘ought’;
• ? the experience of beauty;
• ? the experience of meaning conferred by stories;
• ? the experience of otherness and transcendence;
• ? the experience of vulnerability and fragility.

These seem to me to be integral features of any meaningful human life. They are aspects of what it is to be human. Some theists would simply agree with that statement. Others, however, would say that though essentially human they are also essentially religious, and that the secular humanist's participation in such experiences is in some way defective. That is the claim which I want to consider and contest.     

SELF‐DECEPTION AND THE EXPERIENCE OF FICTION

Sartre's commentary on bad faith is the starting‐point for an exploration of self‐deception: what it is not, what it is, and whether it's always wrong. The proffered analysis of self‐deception parallels a certain theory of our experience of fiction. In essence, it is argued that the self‐deceiver creates a kind of fiction in which he is a character, a fiction that he nonetheless believes to be real.     

“THE PEOPLE OF THIS COUNTRY HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF EXPERTS”: IN DEFENSE OF THE “ELITES” OF THE SCIENCE‐AND‐RELIGION DEBATE

This article takes a critical stance on John H. Evans's 2018 book, Morals Not Knowledge: Recasting the Contemporary U.S. Conflict between Religion and Science. Highlighting the significance of the book for the science‐and‐religion debate, particularly the book's emphasis on moral questions over knowledge claims revealed in social‐scientific studies of the American public, I also suggest that the distinction between the “elites” of the academic science‐and‐religion field and the religious “public” is insufficiently drawn. I argue that various nuances should be taken into account concerning the portrayal of “elites,” nuances which potentially change the way that “conflict” between science and religion is envisaged, as well as the function of the field. Similarly, I examine the ways in which the book construes science and religion as distinct knowledge systems, and I suggest that, from a theological perspective—relevant for much academic activity in science and religion—there is value in seeing science and religion in terms of a single knowledge system. This perspective may not address the public's interest in moral questions directly—important as they are—but nevertheless it fulfils the academic function of advancing the frontiers of human knowledge and self‐understanding.     

MISUNDERSTOOD IN THE DIASPORA: THE EXPERIENCE OF ORTHODOX SIKHS IN VANCOUVER

Heroism and martyrdom are central values in contemporary Sikh historiography and primary symbols in their collective memory. Both are replete with the stories of numerous heroes and martyrs who faced death, unflinchingly fighting in defense of the Sikh faith and its believers (constituting the Panth or community) against overwhelming odds. Conversely, it is considered shameful for Sikhs to become mere victims, succumbing to attacks against faith and community without fighting to the death. It is also insisted that true Sikhs do not themselves attack those who are weak or harmless; on the contrary true Sikhs come to the defense of such persons even if they are not of the same faith. However, during the last half century, Sikhs have many times become victims, as well as perpetrators of violence, being unable to act in a way consistent with their central values. The consequence has been an inability to integrate their modern history successfully into a narrative consistent with those values and to find appropriate ways of memorializing what has been done to many Sikhs and what many Sikhs have done to others.     

REREADING THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IN TRANSATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE

William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience is one of the world's most popular attempts to meld science and religion. Academic reviews of the book were mixed in Europe and America, however, and prominent contemporaries, unsure whether it was science or theology, struggled to interpret it. James's reliance on an inherently ambiguous understanding of the subconscious as a means of bridging between religion and science accounts for some of the interpretive difficulties, but it does not explain why his overarching question was so obscure, why psychopathology and unusual experiences figured so prominently, or why he gave us so many examples and so little argument. To understand these persistent puzzles we need to do more than acknowledge James's indebtedness to Frederic Myers's conception of the subconscious. We need to read VRE in the context of the transatlantic network of experimental psychologists and psychical researchers who provided the primary intellectual inspiration for the book. Doing so not only locates and clarifies the underlying question that animated the work but also illuminates the structural and rhetorical similarities between VRE and Myers's Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. In contrast to the individual case studies of hysterics, mediums, and mystics produced by others in this network, both Myers and James adopted a natural-history approach in which they arranged examples of automatisms to produce a rhetorical effect, thus invoking science in order to evoke a religious response. Where Myers organized his examples to make a case for human survival of death, James organized his to make a case for the involvement of higher powers in the transformation of the self. Read in this way, VRE marks a dramatic shift from a religious preoccupation with life after death to a religious preoccupation with this-worldly self-transformation.     

IN DEFENSE OF THE BODY: THE EFFECT OF MORTALITY SALIENCE ON FEMALE BODY OBJECTIFICATION

Previous research has illustrated the negative psychological consequences of female body objectification. The present study explores how female body objectification may serve as a defense against unconscious existential fears. Drawing from terror management theory, an experiment was designed to test the potential functionality of female body objectification. Men and women were primed to think about either their own mortality or an aversive control topic, and levels of body objectification were then assessed for both self- and other (women)-objectification. Findings supported the hypothesis that priming mortality would increase both self- and other-objectification among women, and self-objectification among those who derive self-esteem from their body. Implications for this research are discussed.