Perceptualization and the enjoyment of religious practice: a response to commentators

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Notes

1. Generally I prefer to speak of “value-rich experience” rather than “enjoyment” to avoid connotations of superficiality (“having fun”) and to include emotions besides joy. However, a good case can be made for the central importance of religious joy and even for playfulness and fun. Also, it is possible within certain contexts to “enjoy,” in a sense, negative emotions such as fear and sorrow.

2. Functional explanations are indispensable to religious studies and I have no intention of displacing them. My point is that religious practice is one of the many spheres of human life that can be intrinsically motivated, and it needs to be studied as such.

3. In fact it does preclude some kinds of justification, namely the claim that the experiences of supernatural presence count as prima facie evidence for the existence of a supernatural being (Barrett & Wildman, 2009).

4. I started using this term before I found out that it is already used in psychology to apply to a similar, though involuntary, phenomenon among schizophrenics. I do not mean to claim any particular connection to schizophrenia, but the coincidence does raise some interesting questions, especially for Luhrmann's current research.