Emotional experiences in the context of religion and sport

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the relationship between religion and sport. The aim of my considerations is to criticise the position presented by the American philosopher Eric Bain-Selbo, according to which sporting experiences may quite rightly be described as religious experiences. In the first part of the article, I reconstruct Wayne Proudfoot’s concept of religious experience that underlies Bain-Selbo’s analysis. I then discuss the research conducted by Bain-Selbo and the conclusions he draws from it. In the next part of the article, referring to Charles Taylor’s hermeneutical approach, I show that Proudfoot’s and Bain-Selbo’s methodology leads to a theoretically unjustified reductionism. I argue that an in-depth articulation of individual self-interpretation allows for an insight into the dynamics of sporting and religious experiences, and thus to see the differences that separate them. In the last part of the article, I invoke the considerations of William James, John Hick and Robert Roberts and try to show that, given the moral consequences of our experiences and their phenomenological description (intentionality), the experiences evoked by sport and religion can by no means be identified with each other.