Explain what is meant by the term religious experience

Explain what is meant by the term ‘a religious experience’. (45 marks) In 1969 Alister Hardy set up the Religious Experience Research Unit (RERU) with the aim of examining the extent and nature of the religious experiences of people in the UK. The experiences recorded were quite different from other types of experiences that people had. According to Alister Hardy the religious experience ‘… usually induces in the person concerned a conviction that the everyday world is not the whole of reality; there is another dimension to life … awareness of its presence affects the person’s view of the world, it alters behaviour and changes attitudes.’
Its features include:
1) an experience that has religious insight – usually, the unseen dimensions of existence and God, or Ultimate Reality, are the object of the experience.
2) some kind of perception of the invisible world, or a perception that some person or thing is a manifestation of the invisible world.
3) an awareness of some supernatural being/God or a being related to God, or some indescribable Ultimate Reality.
Hence religious experiences can be theistic (where God is the source and content of the experience) or monistic (where inner being/consciousness is experienced).
Given the wide variety of experiences, it is not surprising that people have attempted to find some way of grouping them or have tried to collate features that are common. For instance, a basic grouping is that of experiences where there is contact with a transcendent being. The features are awe and dependence. This is in contrast to those experiences that feature a more inward and immanent awareness.
Richard Swinburne identifies five types of religious experience classified according to how the experiences come about:
1) Experiencing a perfectly normal non-religious object or event, for example, a sunset. God is encountered through the event.
2) Experiencing a very unusual public event, for example, the resurrection appearances of Jesus.
3)