Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

"As a fact, the mystical tendency in religion is not the last, the mature, result, not yet the last refuge of piety. Mysticism is the always young, it is the childlike, it is the essentially immature aspect of the deeper religious life. Its ardor, its pathos, its illusions, and its genuine illuminations have all the characters of youth about them, characters beautiful but capricious." -- Josiah Royce, THE PROBLEM OF CHRISTIANITY (1913), from chapter viii, "The modern mind and the Christian ideas".  The brief passage, something of an aside in context, reminds me of another work from my postulated golden age, PETER AND WENDY (1911) by J.M. Barrie.  In both instances, our author was reacting against the earlier romantic idealization of childhood. At one point, Barrie wanted to call his novel The boy who couldn't grow up. Not "wouldn't".  Couldn't.  Pan's magical condition is not a choice of his and is at least as much a curse as a blessing.  ...

I was thinking recently about the different ways that different theists complete the phrase "I believe in God because...."  Thinking here of the reflective believers, those who are interested in answering the question, not those who, say, simply adopted the beliefs passed on to them as children and have never questioned them. Adopting the pronoun "Him" from convention and for convenience. 1. Mystics: "I believe in God because I am personally in touch with Him." 2.  Mysticists: "I believe in God because the last guy who spoke is credible, and until I have my own such experience I rely upon his." 3. Rationalists: "I believe in God because logically sound proofs, from plausible premises, lead to the inference that He exists." 4. Fideists: "I choose to believe in God despite the fact that there is no very powerful because." The fideists can presumably be subdivided further. Even if there is no overpowering "bec...

A dialogue. MYSTIC: I know there is a God. I have attained cosmic consciousness and have touched His face. ATHEIST: There are lots of problems with that, but I'll start with this -- the rest of us have no way of knowing that you aren't lying. MYSTIC: I don't care, dude. EPISTEMOLOGIST: But I care. If only a small portion of the human race has mystical experiences, and if they are locked up, so to speak, inside the consciousness of each one, then do they inform the rest of us at all? ATHEIST: That's what I said. EPISTEMOLOGIST: I heard you. BUT ... since our friend has gone off into his reveries and only you and I can talk.... MYSTIC:  Om mani padme hummmmmmm EPISTEMOLOGIST: I'd like to point out that there is another side to this.  The point in favor of an argument from mysticism to the existence of a God is that it IS an argument from experience. It is possible that some of them are lying, but it seems unlikely that all of them are lying. And if a...

"Mysticism may be either primitive or developed. Primitive mysticism has not yet risen to a conception of the universal, and is still confined to naive views of earthly and super-earthly, temporal and eternal. The entry into the super-earthly and eternal takes place by means of a 'mystery,' a magical act. By means of this the participant enters into communion with a divine being in such a way that he shares the latter's supernatural mode of existence....But when the conception of the universal is reached and a man reflects upon his relation to the totality of being and to Being in itself, the resultant mysticism becomes widened, deepened, and purified." The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle