The Phronetics of Religious Experience

The Evolvemental challenge to traditional Religious Cosmogony does not imply a denial in principle of any Phronetic value to practical Religious experience. For example, it does not necessarily endorse actions that Scriptures proscribe, but, rather, finds the Morality entailed by them to be, as a whole, incoherent and ungrounded--in one place killing a human is Divinely forbidden, while in another, it is Divinely commanded, with obedience to Divine power in either case being contrary to Idionomy. Furthermore, there is more to 'Religious experience' than subscribing to a Cosmogonic doctrine or adhering to a Scriptural formula. In fact, it seems to be rarely appreciated that there are two very different types of Religious experience--private and social, the grounds of which are suggested by Nietzsche's Apollinian/Dionysian, respectively, distinction, but never developed by him in his critique of conventional Religion. Private Religious experience, e. g. prayer, is an escape from environing society, an attempt to strengthen what is most personal. In contrast, public Religious experience, e. g. Dionysian frenzy, is an escape from one's particularity, an attempt to dissolve it into the collective. In the Individual, these are extreme instances of Propriation and of Exposition, which have Phronetic value when they are appropriately combined. Ecstasy is the harmonization and mutual enhancement of Internalization and Externalization, not the elimination of one, the other, or the difference between them. It is an Evolvemental episode.