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( Religious experience)
Religious Experience (also known as a spiritual, sacred, or mystical experience) is an altered state of consciousness where an individual reports contact with a transcendent reality, an encounter or union with the divine. Many religious and mystical tradition see religious experience as real encounters with God or Gods or real contact with other realities[1], while the scientific view holds that religious experience is only a normal property of the human brain that evolved sometime in the human evolution.[2] Habel defines religious experiences as the structured way in which a believer enters into a relationship with, or gains an awareness of, the sacred within the context of a particular religious tradition (Habel, O'Donoghue and Maddox 1993).Religious experiences are by their very nature preternatural; that is, out of the ordinary or beyond the natural order of things. They may be difficult to distinguish observationally from psychopathological states such as psychoses or other forms of altered awareness (Charlesworth 1988). Not all preternatural experiences are considered to be religious experiences. Following Habel's definition, psychopathological states or drug-induced states of awareness are not considered to be religious experiences because they are mostly not performed within the context of a particular religious tradition. Moore and Habel identify two classes of religious experiences the immediate and the mediated religious experience (Moore and Habel 1982). In his book Faith and Reason, the philosopher Richard Swinburne formulated five categories into which all religious experiences fall
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