“Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.”

— William O. Douglas

United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78 (1944)
Judicial opinions

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William O. Douglas 52

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States 1898–1980

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“Religious intuition is a unique form of experience. Religious intuition is more than simply the confluence of the cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical sides of life. However vital and significant these sides of life may be, they are but partial and fragmented constituents of a greater whole, a whole which is experienced in its fullness and immediacy in religious intuition.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

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“Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good.”

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Context: Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.

“We should not argue with the blind man who maintained that sight was an illusion to which some abnormal people were subject. Therefore in speaking of religious experience I do not attempt to prove the existence of religious experience…”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Source: Science and the Unseen World (1929), Ch. IV, p.48-49

“Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.”

Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) Italian poet, philosopher and writer

“The frontier of the higher life is everywhere contiguous to the common life, and we can cross the border at any moment. The higher life is as real as the grosser things in which we put our trust. But our eyes must be anointed so that we may see it.
The office of the religious teacher is to be a seer, and to make others see, and thus to win them into the upward way.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

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“If religious liberty includes, as it must, the right to communicate such experiences to others, it seems to me an impossible task for juries to separate fancied ones from real ones, dreams from happenings, and hallucinations from true clairvoyance. Such experiences, like some tones and colors, have existence for one, but none at all for another. They cannot be verified to the minds of those whose field of consciousness does not include religious insight. When one comes to trial which turns on any aspect of religious belief or representation, unbelievers among his judges are likely not to understand, and are almost certain not to believe, him.”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

78 U.S. 93
Judicial opinions, United States v. Ballard (1944)

“As with emotionally drawn-out religious initiations, neurobiological studies of stress disorders indicate that subjects become intensely absorbed by sensory displays. The mystical experiences of schizophrenics and temporal lobe epileptics, which may be at the extreme end of the "normal" distribution of religious experience, also exhibit intense sensory activity. These may help to inspire new religions. There is no evidence, however, that more "routine" religious experiences that commit the bulk of humanity to the supernatural have any characteristic pattern of brain activity.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 16
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“There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.”

Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792–1856) Russian mathematician of Ukrainian origin

As quoted in George Edward Martin, The Foundations of Geometry and the Non-Euclidean Plane, Springer (1998 [1975]), p. 225; also in Stanley Gudder, A Mathematical Journey, McGraw-Hill (1976), p. 36.

“Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

pg 151.
Against Method (1975)

“May the conscience and the common sense of the peoples be awakened, so that we may reach a new stage in the life of nations, where people will look back on war as an incomprehensible aberration of their forefathers!”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, The World As I See It (1949)

“Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.”

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William O. Douglas 52

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