I wouldn’t be a Christian

[vulcanlogician]

The other issue not being addressed (not addressed in Varieties by James) is the tribal group think psychology that comes from belief in a god, a god of superiority. You can't just put forward the potential positive individual aspects of belief without looking at the effect(s) across the group and society as a whole.

James is careful to say that an examination of the religious experience is the primary focus of his project. He almost begins with the assumption that materialistic atheism is the most rational position to take and then tries to argue "from scratch" the value of religious experience. On numerous occasions along the way he reminds his reader that he is speaking of the religious experience as it pertains to the individual, almost admitting (at times) what kind of a trivial farce mainstream religious beliefs and practices are. I guess another way of putting it is: he's is trying to urge us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He sees something psychologically valuable in belief, a means through which an individual may turn negative mental states into positive ones... something that a purely materialistic worldview often fails to do.

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.

He has these three points to make about mystical states of consciousness. Pay special attention to the second item. This is a theme he sounds again and again throughout the book, that the value (or authority) of a religious experience should exist only for the one who experiences them, and ought not, in any way shape or form, be imposed upon "those who stand outside them."

(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right
to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.
(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for
those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.
(3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic
consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They
show it to be only one kind of consciousness.

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

Meh, if I find the energy, I might create a thread on it. I think James makes several excellent points on the matter. But (in so many ways) Varieties is such a piece of lofty 19th century intellectualism, maybe discussion of it ought to be confined to the "High-Level Philosophy" thread.