Episode #240 ... Varieties of Religion Today (Charles Taylor)

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize This. Patreon.com/philosophize this to help keep a show like this going. Hope you love it today. So when Charles Taylor writes a book in 2002 called The Varieties of Religion Today, It's a reference to a book written a hundred years before that by the philosopher William James called The Varieties of Religious Experience. Now this book by James has become world famous for a few big things that he does in it, one of which is gonna be him laying out a famous description right near the beginning of the book of what a religious experience even is. William James says essentially, look, if we're talking about religion, going to church on Sunday and getting a sermon delivered to you by a pastor, that's wonderful and all, but that's not the core of what it is to have a religious experience. That's not what religion really is. Religion, he says, is something that goes on in the heart of an individual. It's a personal experience when an individual feels a connection to whatever it is they call the divine, and when they feel this transcendent moment connected to something that's beyond this world, he's saying that's where a religious experience really goes on. It's certainly not in some building down the street where a bunch of people meet up and like to sing songs together. In fact, most religions start in the same way, James says. There's some religious genius that comes along, you know, some individual that gains some really powerful spiritual insight. And as they do their thing, they start to attract attention. They get followers and then groups of sympathizers, and eventually enough time passes that in order to spread the message of this spiritual breakthrough they had, the story has to get retold, which means it gets watered down. Eventually, it needs to get written down, eventually turned into a doctrine, a doctrine that has to apply to everybody now in some way. I mean, eventually, this goes on long enough. If your religion's really successful, you can even have people preaching it to lost human beings in strip malls all over the world. In fact, in some circles, I think that's when they'd say, you made it, my boy. You made it. In other words, to William James, any institutional or public form that a religion takes can easily become a distortion of the actual religious insights at the base of it. And more than that, just in practice, organized religion often becomes a site for corruption or for abuse. For James, religion even sometimes becomes corporate or tribal. It becomes a site for all the things that make people skeptical of mass religion when they see it produce bad things. But again, to William James, a person doesn't even need this mass form of religion to be able to connect to God anyway. That, again, is something they can do completely on their own through, …