It is necessary to have a religious experience in order to understand fully what a religious experience is. How far do you agree?

This essay will hold that it is not necessary to have a religious experience in order for people to understand fully what a religious experience is, as those who have not had a religious experience can still understand them, since they can be partly explained by other causes such as science. Both James and Swinburne identify some religious experiences to be ineffable to others, particularly in terms of mysticism, since they are private and personal sensations of God, and experiences deep within the mind, which makes it difficult to explain to those who have not experienced them. rguably, this does not mean that the recipient themselves are unable to understand what it is due to the personal challenge of explaining it to others, it simply means that those who have not had a religious experience cannot fully understand what it is, due to the sub!ective nature of the experiences. "tto also claims that religious experiences are of the numinous realm, and so if this is true, it seems reasonable that experience cannot be transferred. #owever, if they are indescribable, this indicates that the recipient has not understood the experience themselves, because surely if they had understood what it was then they would have been able to explain it. $oreover, it is not necessary to have a religious experience to understand fully what one is because there can be other natural explanations, meaning those who do not experience them can still understand them. %or example, &ersinger's helmet was designed to demonstrate that temporal lobes have a significant role in understanding religious experiences. &ersinger claimed that by stimulating the temporal lobes with magnetic fields, using the helmet, a religious experience could be artificially induced in almost anyone wearing it. Thus, if one can explain what a religious experience is through naturalistic causes, there is no need to have a religious experience to understand what one is. (onversely, one could argue that, considering God's characteristics of omni)benevolence and omnipotence, the temporal lobes were created deliberately to provide some people with the ability to have religious experiences, and to bridge the gap between the finite and the infinite. So even if humans share the ability to have the sensations of a religious experience, this does not mean that they can understand fully what it is unless God has allowed their temporal lobes to be stimulated. "verall, although religious experiences are sub!ective and of the numinous realm, this does not mean that it is necessary to have a religious experience in order to understand fully what it is, since there can be alternative, naturalistic causes that can partly explain them, although neither can provide a full understanding to what a religious experience is.