Religious Experience

Religious Studies: KS3, topic 2.6.11

Religious Experiences

Religious experiences are when someone has a direct encounter with God. This is why some religious believers have faith in God.

Empiricism is the idea that knowledge comes from experience through the senses.
One way religious believers know that God exists is by having an experience of God.
If someone could see God or hear God, for example, then they would know for certain that God exists.

The experience might not have to be of God, but of someone closely associated with God.
In Christianity, for example, Mary the mother of Jesus is sometimes called the Mother of God.
An experience of Mary, long after she died, might be enough to convince people that there is life after death. This could be enough to prove to them that God must exist.

Here are two well-known examples of religious experiences:
Moses had a religious experience in the Book of Exodus.
This is a book that is part of Jewish and Christian Scripture, in the Old Testament.
It says that Moses both saw and heard God on Mount Sinai when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments.
More recently, in a place called Lourdes in France, a girl called Bernadette said that she saw and spoke with Mary.
Lourdes is now considered a very holy place in Christianity!