William James on Religion | The Varieties of Religious Experience | psychology of religion 

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Really good stuff, finally I have some time to watch it. Happy new year and I hope things go well in 2024!

Nice video

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I'm going to be writing this comment as I watch so I don't forget to comment on things, pardon me if it ends up a bit discordant or redundant. 1. Despite being called "The Varieties of Religious Experience" it does seem a bit insincere and has a pretty Abrahamic-centric perspective. Viewing the divine as a discrete external entity that you relate to is a property of popular Western religions but definitely not a default property of all religions humans have ever come up with and are practiced in various places to do this. Not that a study of a handful of religions doesn't have its own merit, but at least from how it sounds on the surface it's more a recollection of a specific kind of Western memetic "encounter with a divine entity". From a quick google it even sounds like his definition of mystical experiences conspicuously would *exclude* the results of meditation due to it being a result of deliberate focus instead of spontaneously onset. I of course wouldn't begrudge someone for studying that which is most available to them, especially over a century ago, but his definitions specifically excluding non-Christian traditions makes it a lot less useful in the grand scheme of things. If you narrow your study subject that much, you might end up trying to extrapolate when in reality all you've studied is that people in a certain religious tradition tend to expect and tend towards a certain kind of spontaneous religious experience, and that it actually says more about what that religious doctrine teaches people to expect than anything inherent about the human condition. 2. I figured out how to do the whole "just clear your mind and keep it clear" thing as a teenager for pretty mundane reasons, only finding out later that what I figured out had a lot of overlap with meditation techniques. At least, I think so - being an entirely internal phenomenon means it's hard to know if my mind is "really clear" or if it just meets my own definition thereof that happens to be a lower standard than what others have in mind. 3. Wrapping up the video, a lot of the criticisms are along the lines of what immediately jumped to my mind in the first half. Although perhaps I'm not the best audience for this video - I've always begrudgingly-at-best learned about the long-supplanted pioneers of various intellectual disciplines. I find it some mix of frustrating and embarrassing to see the way a lot of people floundered lacking modern knowledge. I can of course appreciate the value of knowing how things ended up the way they did, but it's still something I always found uncomfortable. Seeing people who are wrong despite having full access to the truth is something I can find amusing and enjoy watching their ideas debunked - but for people a century past, it's something I more find a bit pitiful and depressing. I find the question of "does religion improve people's lives" interesting, in large part due to the absurdly large variety of what falls under the religious banner - anything from the most lip-servicey American Christian who just uses heaven to wave off fears of death, all the way to monastic orders where people gather to spend their entire lives dedicating to understanding the world and molding themselves through the lens of their faith. It doesn't even have to be religious, it applies to any beliefs that are either "wrong as far as we know" or simply "unfalsifiable." Does a person believing the world is inherently good and just make their life better? Does it make OTHERS' lives better? If somebody believed that the universe was just when it in fact wasn't, it would make them more likely to believe that victims of misfortune "had it coming", for instance. There's also a lot of complex intertwining - for instance, decent amount of the positive influence religion can have on someone's life comes from the bonds a religious community would offer. In theory, you could have those same bonds through non-religious means, but in practice, religious institutions tend to be the predominant providers of a certain kind of local community. There's a lot of facets and nuance to discuss... and to be honest, I'm not sure if William James's narrow definition of mystical experiences has much to contribute to my own curiosity on the matter.