When I read Rudolf Otto or Mircea Eliade, both of whom circle around the experience of the divine or the holy, in order to gain an understanding of that experience and to define it, and when I read the writings of Christian mysticism or the Church Fathers, pervaded as they are with the rapture of religious excitement, I find myself confronted by something utterly alien to me, which does not occur at all in my life or in the world around me, other than the occasional glimpse offered by TV into some ecstatic religious movement. This weakens an otherwise fundamental conviction of mine that says
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