KIERKEGAARD'S EXISTENTIAL EXPERIENCE OF RELIGION
Søren Kierkegaard is well-known for being the first founder of existential philosophy, and since he was a genuine Christian philosopher, he established the Christian's existentialism, in which he associated religion and existentialism, through an existential experience par excellence, that is, a life lived by a very distinguished person; the existential philosopher. Kierkegaard draw a distinction between the public religion; a religion of the common people or the mob, which is based on tradition only, and on superficial external practice, like various rituals and rites, which do not express the accurate essence of religion, and the religion of the philosophers, which is the religion of special people; it is founded on a completely individual experience, which reflects the self-existence of every human being, with his pains, fears, sorrows, and disappointments., this is surely the true religion for Kierkegaard; a profound inner spiritual and existential experience, which expresses the individual's own life, and is not shared by anyone else.For that, Kierkegaard's religious experience was based on the most important existential concepts, such as anxiety, despair, sin, boredom, pain, loneliness. In this paper, we seek to study Kierkegaard's religious experience as an existential experience in the first place, by examining how Kierkegaard has transformed the religious experience into an existential experience? What are the most important existential concepts on which this experience is based? Then to what extent Kierkegaard has successfully linked the Christian religion with his existential philosophy?
Keywords: Existentialism, Religion, Anxiety, Pain, Self, Individual, Sin