Reviews for Varieties of Religious Experience (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

The average rating for Varieties of Religious Experience (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-03-09 00:00:00 James Altomare I wanted to like this classic book, but I can't do it: too many things are wrong. A shame, because I completely approve of the idea. William James, writing around the end of the 19th century, sets out to take a cool look at how people experience religious feeling, basing his investigation on state-of-the-art psychological theory. What do we discover, and what do the findings tell us about the nature of religion? For the first two or three chapters, I enjoyed it and thought it was going in a good direction. James is evidently intelligent and well-read, and he's capable of writing excellent prose. Unfortunately, it rapidly started going off the rails in several ways. First, the style. Yes, James is able to write wonderfully, but a lot of the time he seems to have lost all sense of self-criticism. Above all, he just won't cut anything: the book could comfortably have been shortened to half its length. Looking around, I see many editions which have far fewer pages, so I'm guessing that some editors have done just that. In the original version, which I read, he has endless, repetitious quotations, often stuffed into footnotes which can go on (literally) for two or three pages. It's worse than Infinite Jest, where at least the footnotes are intentionally annoying and often funny. These are anything but. Next, the science. All well and good to say you'll use up-to-date psychological theory: but psychology at that time was barely a science at all, and it shows. The "scientific" explanations are in most cases not much more than hand-waving and fanciful ideas with Latin names. There are no experiments, no statistics, no falsifiable claims. It's just a mass of case studies, selected and reported according to criteria that are never in any way made clear. Just: oh, this is interesting, let's stick it in. When you cherry-pick your data this way, you can prove anything. To be fair, James does have an informal plan for selecting his examples, but it's one that I feel very dubious about. He says he will focus on the most extreme examples of religious feeling, since it is in such cases that we will see it in its purest form. We are thus treated to hundreds of pages of quotations from born-again converts, saints and mystics. The greater part of these passages are tedious in the extreme: few of the people in question write well. And, more important, I am not at all sure I agree that religious feeling is best studied in these extreme cases. There's an analogy which suggested itself to me more than once. Imagine that most people never experienced sexual desire, and you wanted to investigate the minority who claimed that they knew it from their own experience. I would definitely not start by reading accounts of people who were into extreme BDSM; The Story of O is interesting in its perverse way, but it would probably give you all sorts of odd ideas about what sex was like. I hate to say this, but some of the saints James discusses rather reminded me of O. At the end, I was surprised to see James unequivocally claiming that he thought religious feeling was a good thing, and that its object was some definite spiritual reality. I do wonder if he truly believed this. If he did, why pick such bizarre and unconvincing examples? I am quite capable of being moved by religious authors: for example, I love The Divine Comedy, Ash Wednesday, Jan Kjærstad's Jonas Wergeland trilogy, Flaubert's La tentation de saint Antoine and Selma Lagerlöf's Jerusalem, to name just a few. If James had actually wanted to convince his readers, I think he could have done better. He says himself that he was a person who never experienced religious feeling much at first hand; you often get the impression that he was rather sceptical about it. He is certainly quite willing to poke fun at many of the subjects he quotes. All in all, then, an annoying and frustrating book. If you're interested in these matters, I'd instead recommend reading Gide's La porte étroite and L'immoraliste , and Smullyan's Planet Without Laughter . They're shorter, better written, and, in my humble opinion, considerably more insightful.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-10-04 00:00:00 Tony Brown I had an unusually long conversation with my daughter Georgia (also now a Goodreader) once when she was seven years old (she's now 16 going on 17, just like in the song) and the matter of eschatology came up, so I asked her directly - well, what does happen when you die? So she laid out what she thinks happens, and I was so taken by the stuff she came out with that I wrote it down. As it's a variety of religious experience I thought it appropriate to include here. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE Heaven has different parts to it. In one part there are monsters, but they're good. In another part they're like orcs but they're good. In the third part there are dinosaurs, and they're bad. Jesus is not in heaven. He is above heaven. He was a normal man but he went on the cross and died and he became magic. He was alive again and turned into an angel. Now he can listen to anyone on the earth just by thinking of their name. When people die they all go to heaven. It could be the good part or the bad part. When you die you turn into a zombie, but then quite quickly you turn into a skeleton and that's when you go to heaven. The skeletons in heaven can't see the Earth at all, but to the good orcs Earth appears like the brightest star in the sky. But they have to look down to see it, because they are all upside down. If you are cremated your ashes float up and turn into your soul. It goes up into a purple porthole. It meets a sorter who asks you what age you want to be and that's what you stay at from then on. In this world everything is slightly see-through. You only spend 1000 years here and then you go to the graveyard and sleep. But one day in each 10 years you come alive again. But this world is not heaven so jesus is not there. The bad people who die become good. For five years out of 1000 they are punished in a house sized prison cell by having to eat all the food they really hate and listen to all the music they really hate. There is a feather of truth and a catch up course, but I can't remember what they are for. People have gone into space in rockets but they haven't seen heaven because it is very small. When animals die, if it's on concrete they fade away and become invisible. If it's on soil, they sink bit by bit into the earth and they become animal zombies. Our hamster Lucy became an animal zombie, but all animal zombies are good, not bad. Note : don't blame me for any of this, I never allowed her to watch any zombie films intil she was 12! I don't know where she's got any of this stuff apart from orcs.