The Non-Exclusivity of Religious Experience

Paul Theroux, in his book ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’, recounts a conversation he had with a Mr Peeraswamy in the dining car on a night train to Singapore in 1974. He told him of a Tamil festival he had participated in called Thaipusam, in which devotees of the faith parade down the streets with metal skewers through their cheeks and arms. He was there to give thanks to his god Murugam. He said “the god comes inside! We hurry, cannot wait. The padre take the tongue and pop! Pop with the knives, pop with the hooks ready – no blood from knives, not hurting – can even kill me! I not care! The song come and the god come and we don’t know anything. We want to go out, not want to stop. They put knives, hooks, what, and we just walk ready.” His experience, and the mental and physical phenomena that go with it, are not unique. Members of countless faiths, and even some of no specific leaning, have experienced similar ‘spiritual’ moments, in which they are overcome by strong emotion from no apparent source. These are invariably considered to be religious experiences, and accounts like this are proof that they are not exclusive to any one religion. The new brand Evangelist Christianity conducts worship in a way as to prompt such experiences in as many people as often as possible, and it is these experiences that many of their followers give as the power behind their faith. They know God exists, because as far as they are concerned, they have felt his presence. Yet the experience seems not to respect the boundaries of faith or denomination. Two separate conclusions can be drawn from this. Either God appears to anyone who has any faith of any kind, in which case religious boundaries are redundant human illusions, and squabbles between faiths over small differences in doctrine are pointless, or the experience is a kind of self induced drug trip triggered by an endorphin overload, in which case religious experiences of this type are nothing more that psychological illusions. Personally I lean towards the latter, but the other outcome could reasonably be drawn, particularly by someone calling for greater inter-faith tolerance.