Admitting You're a Sinner

[vulcanlogician]

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?  

I think that it is on this account that James has made his best points thus far. What he points out is that reality can be harsh, and religion can provide a context for one's difficulties other than the apparent world. A commentator on James, whose name I forget said something like "Once we understand that the locus of meaning is situated beyond our egos, we can transcend the difficulties peculiar to the ego."

We shall see how infinitely passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does come—a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God’s grace, the theologians say —is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject’s range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste.

If anything, James expresses something which we nonbelievers ought to take into account. This is a viable method of transcendence, a "new sphere of power" for one who cannot find sufficient inspiration from mundane sources of enthusiasm.

Keep in mind also that James does not chain religious experience to theism of any kind, as one might expect of one contemporary to his epoch.

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for
us THE FEELINGS, ACTS, AND EXPERIENCES OF INDIVIDUAL MEN
IN THEIR SOLITUDE, SO FAR AS THEY APPREHEND THEMSELVES
TO STAND IN RELATION TO WHATEVER THEY MAY CONSIDER
THE DIVINE.