My undergraduate and postgraduate studies in religion and philosophy both Western and Eastern amounted to a total of 40 units of study. My religious studies focussed on Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism. The thesis topic deals with an ontology of religious experience revealed in Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism.
I see, your interest is in comparative religion, very interesting. There's been a huge amount of work done in this particular field, and from perusing the various journals in the study of religion, I can see that the literature is quite vast. What philosophical framework do you ground your study in? Do you contrast the differing way various approaches explain religious experience in a set of major religious traditions (assessing the relative merit of these approaches, such as that of Hegel), or do you go with one particular approach to probe more deeply into the relationship between belief and feeling in different religious traditions? I would like to hear some of your conclusions, or perhaps some of your more specific research questions (because what you described is quite vast). Does your research assume that religious feeling and the "rational" dictates of religious law, doctrine, dogma are at some level independent (or that one is primary over the other), or are interconnected at all levels? What you do think of postmodern approaches that radically depart from an assumption of primacy in religious feeling in the individual (which according to Hegel is then dialectically incorporated into an individual's learned systems of belief) and view all subjectivity as semiotically constituted? And if you are studying religious experience as situated within Christianity, Buddhism, etc., which traditions do you take as being representative of Christianity, Buddhism, etc.
I have not studied this area in religious studies (tho I have studied various philosophical approaches), and so please correct any mistaken assumptions you may find in my questions. The most curious question I have, however, relates to the JWs. I have been to Pentacostal and American black Baptist church services where the "worship" mostly consists of practices that critically involve emotional experience (in my black church experience, more than half the service involved singing), while the focus of JW meetings was almost entirely on knowledge, on learning certain rules and how to behave appropriately, how to improve one's preaching, and various doctrines and beliefs, with very, very little appeal to religious feeling. The former discussed explictly how we were all "feeling God's Spirit," while in the latter, the Spirit was presumably something that the Annointed mysteriously and privately experience. And the Annointed are defined not in terms of feeling but of knowledge (e.g. they just "know" they have a heavenly hope). In the non-JW services I went to, there were many overt markers of feeling: singing with full-bodied voices, dancing, clapping while singing, raising of the hands, crying, touching each other, etc. All of these would be highly marked at the JW services I went to, and if I sang with all my heart while dancing, clapping, and holding my hands out to God while singing a Kingdom Melody while everyone else sang in the usual muted way, I know I would really, really stand out. Maybe it's different in black-dominant JW congregations, where there might be more influence from traditional black church experience. In fact, I might even wonder if there is real uniformity in this around the world, considering the natural tendency for native practices to enter adopted religious traditions. But within most JW assemblies and congregations I have gone to in the United States, I see a real qualitative difference which is also reflective of (or the result of) the ideology espoused by the WTS, which defines worship as through evangelism and observing rules governing conduct and not through a personal experience of receiving God's Spirit and through the conduct that results from such an experience, etc. As a JW, how would you characterize or approach the ontology of religious experience within the JW tradition?
