In his work on the holy, Rudolph Otto invited his readers “to direct [their] mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by others forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no farther; for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feeling, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feelings.”
This is the quintessential insider/outsider problem: Otto believes the nonreligious person could never know what it is to experience religion. Do you think he’s right? Can a religious experience ever be adequately described? Can a non-religious person ever hope to understand what it is like to be religious? Relatedly, what is it that designates an experience as religious?
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