The Varieties of Religious Experience Complete and Unabridged (Illustrated)

I went to read William James' book, A Variety's of Religious Experience. It is the most heartfelt and rational approach to religion that has ever been written.

In fact I think James Charles Taylor has a very interesting book revisiting James the varieties of religious experience and he talks about this idea that James looks at people who have religion in this sanguine sense.

For the record, it is the Varieties of Religious Experience 1902.

Now think about the fact that both of these different ways of orienting yourself with reality imply the possibility of action.

We can see how great an antagonism may naturally arise between the healthy minded way of viewing life and the way that takes all this experience of evil as something essential.

To this latter way, the morbid minded way, as we might call it, healthy mindedness, pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow to the healthy minded way.

On the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased with their grubbing and rat holes instead of living in the light, with their manufacturer fears and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery.

we must therefore from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi godless creeds religions. And accordingly, when in our definition of religion, we speak of the individual's relation to what he considers the divine. We must interpret the term divine very broadly as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not.