McNamara’s concept of“decentering”(McNamara, 2009, pp. 44–58) also
reflects such an understanding of religious experience. Decentering involves
the giving up or limiting of personal agency; entering a liminal state; search
for an optimal self; and integration of the old into a new self. In particular,
McNamara described how neural processes result in the“reduction of
intentionality or a turning over of the will to God”(p. 53) and culminate
with“insights and gratitude/joy”(p. 143).
(2) Ann Taves (2008, pp. 124–40, 2009, pp. 3–15), in contrast, used a
psychological concept of experience. She argued that religious experience is
not a special kind of experience but some experience that isdeemedreligious
by the subject. Further, she distinguished between ascription and attribution
(Taves, 2009, pp. 17–28, 88–118): peopleascribereligious quality to experi-
ences beforeattributingto them a particular (religious) cause. Commenting on
Newberg and his collaborators’(2003) observations about brain activations in
Buddhist meditation, Taves (2008, p. 130) noted that some experiences (such
as some dreams) might surface to consciousness already carrying a sense of
“portent”or“meaningfulness,”while certain types of experiences may have
characteristics that lend themselves to being deemed religious or mystical
more readily than others, even across cultures. She derived examples from
dream construction and auditory hallucinations to illustrate how the ascrip-
tion of qualities can occur below the level of consciousness.
(3) Further, Nina P. Azari and Dieter Birnbacher (2004) argued against
the use of attribution theory and defended an approach informed by the
above-mentioned discussions in the philosophy of mind. Their argument is
built on neuroimaging studies conducted by Azari and colleagues (Azari
et al., 2001), in which religious experience was not associated with arousal,
yet experience wasfeltuniquely religious. The feeling aspect of the experi-
ence in these experiments was bound up with the thinking aspect: religious
experience, they concluded (Azari & Birnbacher, 2004, p. 915), emerges
as“thinking that feels like something”—without a temporal or logical order
of feeling and thinking. Using the vocabulary introduced above, we can
say that some mental representations have religiousqualia,thatis,a
religious phenomenal character. We can also adopt Crick and Koch’s
notion of experience as meaning and say that some mental representations
evoke religious meanings as they are connected to such representations in
the brain.
Taves’and especially Azari and Birnbacher’s understanding of religious
experience indicates a break with the tradition of focusing on“great experi-
ences”in religion and an interest in what we can call everyday religious
experience or moderate religious experience. A programmatic statement of
the neuroscientific study of religion as a study of everyday religious experience
is found in Uffe Schjødt’s survey of thefield (Schjoedt, 2009), who warned that
“[r]eligious behavior encompasses widely different thoughts and practices,”
Religious Experience 145