But this flies in the face of the facts. Mystics the world over can
recount their many encounters with divine beings. Also, in many cul-
tures we find cases of possession. Someone falls into a trance or some
other strange state and starts to talk gibberish or says sensible things
in a very strange voice. Everyone around says that this strange behav-
ior is caused by some god or spirit who is "possessing" the person. All
these people seem to have a direct experience of what happens when a
god or spirit is around. Even without considering such exceptional cir-
cumstances, many people in the world have seen ghosts or dreamed of
their ancestors. So many religious concepts are about things and per-
[56] sons that people encounter, or at least think they encounter, that it is
perverse to call these "strange." Second, if this account were true, reli-
gious concepts would be indefinitely variable. This is because the
domain of what is notpart of everyday experience is in principle infi-
nite. But as we saw above, some concepts, however strange, sound like
nonstarters for religious belief. Take this one, for example:
(11) There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But He exists only on
Wednesdays.
This is certainly "strange" or "surprising" and departs from every-
day experience. Lectures and concerts and farmers' markets may well
happen only on Wednesdays. But gods and people are continuous.
They cannot exist at some point and again some time later and not
exist in the meantime. So the concept is indeed strange, remote from
everyday experience. However, this kind of extraordinary belief is not
widespread—indeed I would be surprised if it were taken as a literal
description of a god anywhere; so mere strangeness is not really a
good criterion for inclusion in a list of possible religious concepts.
The "strangeness" account has yet another serious flaw. It is bla-
tantly circular. How do we establish that some notion is or is not part
of "ordinary" experience? It is not always clear whether our idea of the
"ordinary" is the same as other people's. It is tempting to say that the
idea of invisible people drinking cologne mustbe outside of the ordi-
nary, otherwise people would not find the notion fascinating enough
to include it in their supernatural concepts. But here we are assuming
precisely what we had set out to demonstrate.
Why pick apart this half-baked theory? Because it shows what hap-
pens when you compare religious phenomena in this mindless way.
Many people in the past tried to describe "themes" or "ideas" orRELIGION EXPLAINED