Admitting You're a Sinner

[The Grand Nudger]

He approaches religious experience alone (as the title suggests)... first he circumscribes the topic. He does his best to remove cultural precepts from religious experience and evaluate it accordingly. First he argues that religious experience has "morbid origins" (aka physiological causes) but should not be dismissed on that account. He makes some good points. I found the passage from Theologia Germanica that I quoted to Steve in there.

Yeah, it's a good (if maybe good/trivial?)point.  Its real to the religious, regardless.  

I'll have to dig up the quote, but he makes a case for the pragmatic utility of religious feelings to carry one through difficulties when a strictly clinical interpretation of one's circumstances may not be capable of spurring the requisite enthusiasm to overcome tribulations.

A bridge I haven't had to cross.  I can see why religion would be usueful to a person who can believe in that context..though that use seems necesarrily limited in scope and time.   
What do you think?  

The third lecture is rather weak. It tries to make the case that religious feelings (for all we know) are caused by extant entities. He says that the holder of religious feelings can sense the presence of such an unseen entity in the same way a holder of a magnet may sense metal which he cannot perceive with his senses.

The pipes...the pipes are calllin.  "Paddy, there aint no fuckin pipes, you're drunk."  

I'm into a part where he begins to differentiate "healthy minded" religious individuals from sick souls; he thinks that both types of religious individuals seek a method to overcome pessimism. That's where I'm at in the book (Lecture IV-V).

https://csrs.nd.edu/assets/59930/williams_1902.pdf

Thx, I'll give it a read. But, continue, obviously.