THE ROLE OF COGNITION AND FEELING IN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
December 1, 2004 N. Azari, D. Birnbacher
Emotions are richer than either pure feeling or pure thought, and this understanding is crucial for analyzing religious experience. Drawing on points of convergence between psychological, philosophical, and neuroscientific accounts of emotion, and on two recent human brain imaging studies of religious experience, the authors argue that religious experience cannot be reduced to pure feeling or pure thought. Instead, religious experience emerges as "thinking that feels like something." The lack of an adequate interdisciplinary account of emotions has left the role of cognition and feeling in religious emotional states poorly conceived, and consequently the concept of religious experience itself remains unclear.