Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Exploring a strange yet familiar landscape: a strategy for interpreting religious and spiritual experiences
- 2 Spirituality and the brain: a revolutionary scientific approach to religious and spiritual experiences
- 3 A smorgasbord of dangers and delights: the phenomenology of religious and spiritual experiences
- 4 Gateway to ultimacy: the importance of intense experiences
- 5 Can you trust your instincts? The cognitive reliability of religious and spiritual experiences
- 6 The brain-group nexus: the social power of religious and spiritual experiences
- 7 Make it start, make it stop! Religious and spiritual experiences in the future
- 8 Brains in bodies, persons in groups, and religion in nature: an integrative interpretation of religious and spiritual experiences
- Glossary of key terms
- References
- Index
8 - Brains in bodies, persons in groups, and religion in nature: an integrative interpretation of religious and spiritual experiences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Exploring a strange yet familiar landscape: a strategy for interpreting religious and spiritual experiences
- 2 Spirituality and the brain: a revolutionary scientific approach to religious and spiritual experiences
- 3 A smorgasbord of dangers and delights: the phenomenology of religious and spiritual experiences
- 4 Gateway to ultimacy: the importance of intense experiences
- 5 Can you trust your instincts? The cognitive reliability of religious and spiritual experiences
- 6 The brain-group nexus: the social power of religious and spiritual experiences
- 7 Make it start, make it stop! Religious and spiritual experiences in the future
- 8 Brains in bodies, persons in groups, and religion in nature: an integrative interpretation of religious and spiritual experiences
- Glossary of key terms
- References
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
We have come to the end of a long journey of exploration, filled with rich disciplinary vistas. The journey has been complicated by the recurring challenges of absorption and synthesis forced upon us by the multidisciplinary framework of the inquiry. In this concluding chapter, having arrived back home, so to speak, I attempt to fulfill the obligations of an integrative interpreter of many disciplinary perspectives on RSEs by weaving together the main strands of the inquiry into the theoretical equivalent of a tapestry that recalls where we have traveled. The tapestry records the many ways the interpretation has been knotted tightly to relevant data, and illustrates the affiliations among valid insights that might otherwise seem unrelated or even opposed. In fact, most of the tapestry was finished on the journey, but it is important to pause at the end, step back, and see what we have wrought.
I proceed first by crystallizing five controversies that the unfolding argument has held in suspension and indicating their bearing on my conclusions. Subsequently, I shall summarize the argument by restating the five affirmations that express in the most substantive way the interpretative conclusion of the book about the nature, functions, and value of RSEs.
FIVE KEY CONTROVERSIES
Five controversial themes run through the argument of this book. These are: Definitive proof versus hypothesis correction; Ideological extremity versus multidisciplinary balance; Supernaturalism versus naturalism; Instinctive innocence versus self-critical responsibility; and Natural law versus social engineering.
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- Religious and Spiritual Experiences , pp. 244 - 265Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011