Beauregard Bottomley's Reviews > The Varieties of Religious Experience

Testimonials belong inside a comic book and offer nothing but anecdotal curiosities for those who already believe without sufficient reason or for those who like to pretend to know things they don’t really know. This is clearly one of the worst books I’ve ever read and I can’t believe that I had such high esteem for the author before having read this.

The book is an incredibly dangerous approach to understanding a topic. Over a hundred different case studies of personal experiences are mentioned in detail with all of them dealing with an individual’s devotional, sacramental, or mortification relationship to the divine. All of the stories are about the individuals feelings arising from intense sensations from within the individual. Feelings are not things (I don’t usually shout, but I’m going to for the sake of emphasis: FEELINGS ARE NOT THINGS!). All of the various testimonials concerning people's feelings excruciatingly detailed in this book add nothing to my understanding about the divine.

Sufficient reasons for our beliefs proportional to the credulity of the statement under consideration are the only standard I’m currently aware of for determining my beliefs. Because something makes me feel good or helps me deal with the world or accept my live on this blue dot I inhabit is not a reason for believing in it. I do everything in my power to not believe in false things and to limit my beliefs to justified true beliefs.

James does not understand Hegel to a first approximation when he characterizes him as a mystic. Hegel is not a mystic. There are two things that he could have learned from Hegel but clearly did not. The great hidden joke within Hegel is that he knows what Peter O’Toole in the ‘Ruling Class’ knew when asked by the reporter why did he think he was God, he responded ‘because I finally realized that when I was praying to the divine, I only heard myself’. All of the testimonials presented in this book suffer from not accepting that realization. Hegel also knows that humans differ from all other creatures because we have second order volition and only children and narcissist lack that capability.

That segues into why this book is so flawed. Imagine, if I were to write a book on narcissists and their special abilities for their intuitive truths they possess, and I used James’ approach. I would have hundreds of testimonials from various people testifying to such statements as ‘I grab women inappropriately and they love it’, ‘only I can solve that problem for you’, ‘we need to torture people way more than we have in the past’, ‘I know how to fix that problem and I’m the world’s greatest negotiator and I have a big brain’, ‘you can’t trust brown people to act as judges because they aren’t like me’, ‘anything that disagrees with me comes from fake media’, ‘and ‘there is such a thing as alternative facts’, and so on. Every single one of those statements are true within the world view of at least one narcissist and helps him reaffirm his self centered egocentric world view and works for him in a ‘pragmatic’ framework, but does not comport to reality that exist outside of his mind.

This book used the same approach for religion as I did for narcissism. Yes, it’s possible that world view can work for the narcissist and maybe even one day he can become president of the US, but that doesn’t mean they possess intuitive truths worth possessing or that their world view is a sane one or I should give special consideration for their world view because it works for them. In the end, the narcissist is not capable of seeing the other as a human being and therefore cannot see himself in relationship to others as a human and lacks the basic characteristic of being human. My imaginary book on narcissism would add nothing but anecdotal curiosities on an interesting topic and with testimonials from narcissists on how it works for them pragmatically, but the untold story is that narcissism belongs in the DSM V as a behavioral problem without an exception for belonging to a large group of other people having that same narcissistic belief.

My overall point and distaste for this author’s book is that his methodology is flawed (and tedious), and one should not generalize anecdotal evidence outside of the framework under consideration and make conclusions based on people’s feelings as ones sole criterion. If I used the author’s methodology, I would conclude narcissism was a good thing, and it gives special insights into intuitive truths about the world and is defendable because it works for the narcissist who provided the testimonials. (The narcissist’s world view is skewed by their inability to have second order volitions and to be quite frank, I don’t want to be living such a lie even if it buys me that ‘pragmatic’ happiness but the price of not seeing the other as a human being is too high for me to pay).