Richard Beck strikes a chord with me again, discussing Thoreau and The Narrowness of My Experience
For my own part, I’ve always felt that philosophy and theology is a form of coping. A way of making sense of my experience. As I experience, I think. Often theologically.
Some people, it seems, have no experience of God. At least no experience they trust. Thus, they feel no need to “make sense” of an experience they lack. These persons are agnostics and atheists. And to be clear, I don’t fault my skeptical friends for “making sense” of their experience in this particular way. Their experience is their experience. I can’t argue them out of what they feel to be true in their bones.
In a related way, there are those of us who have (and continue to have) experiences that we can only “make sense” of by labeling them as holy, sacred, transcendent, divine, or spiritual. William James called these experiences “ontological emotions,” a feeling of thereness. And in light of these experiences people often “make sense” of their lives in ways that we might label “religious.”