TruthBook Religious News Blog

Subjects primed with words like 'spirit,' 'divine' and 'God' gave more money to strangers than control group, researchers say

David Wylie, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, August 30, 2007

Thinking about religion really does make people treat their neighbours as themselves, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of B.C. found that priming people with words, such as "spirit, divine, God, sacred and prophet," prompted them to be more generous, said post-graduate student Azim Shariff.

"I was quite surprised that something that subtle would have this big of an impact," said Shariff, 26. "This is a twist on an age-old question -- does a belief in God influence moral behaviour?"

In the study, to be published in September in the journal Psychological Science, 125 participants were asked to unscramble sentences. Then they were given $10 and had to decide how much to keep and what amount to give away to a stranger.

Sixty-eight per cent of those who unscrambled sentences with religious words gave about half the money away. Meanwhile, most members of the control group, who worked on non-religious sentences, kept nearly all the money.

"I thought there would be some effect," Shariff said. "I didn't think it would be double."

Shariff and UBC associate professor Ara Norenzayan conducted their research between September 2005 and July 2006.

The method they used is a popular one in social psychology, Shariff said.

Shariff said he was inspired to study religion because its effect is "the central debate of our age." With a rash of anti-God books being released, the psychology student said he wanted to know what effect that message would have on people.

"If you have these books telling you that God doesn't exist, will that make you cheat more?" he asked.

In a second study, researchers investigated the strength of a "religious prime" compared to a "secular prime." They obtained almost identical results using concepts of civic responsibility and social justice with words, including "civic, jury, court, police and contract."

"These are compelling findings that have substantial impact on the study of social behaviour because they draw a causal relationship between religion and acting morally -- a topic of some debate," Shariff said. "They by no means indicate that religion is necessary for moral behaviour, but it can make a substantial contribution."

Labels: David Wylie, faith, generosity, God, morality, religion, University of B.C

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The Role of Women in Sikhism

This video is a refreshing and inspiring view of the role of women in Sikhism given by Guruka Singh.

Labels: Guruka Singh, Sikhism, women

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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

A Different Take on Death From Carl Jung

In this short video, Carl Jung, one of the most eminent and well-known psychologists of the 20th century, gives his views on death. He explains that since our psyche knows no boundaries of time and space, it is therefore, able to envision life going on forever. He gives some practical advice for living in a mentally healthy way as we age.

Labels: afterlife, Carl Jung, death, psychology, video

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Einstein's God, or The Hopes for Secular Spirituality

Deepak Chopra
Posted August 27, 2007

It came as a shock when the letters of Mother Teresa, long concealed by the Church, recently came to light. Suddenly it was revealed that this saintly icon -- who is on the way to becoming an official saint -- had anguishing doubts about the existence of God.

Even though she was an outsized personality and a model of immense compassion, Mother Teresa wasn't all that different from ordinary believers who come to the conclusion that God is a myth, perhaps even a fantasy created out of whole cloth. A rash of prominent books by atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins have pounded away on the theme of delusion and fraud. Using science as their chief bulwark, they insist that religion serves the purpose of blocking reality. A rational secular society is their ideal, and their fervent hope is that religious yearning will be seen for what it is, a childish, irrational, and ultimately hopeless drive. Everyone can see the result. Neither side, the atheists or the religionists, have won the argument; they've simply become more entrenched in their original position.

All of which brings me to a revelatory chapter in another bestseller, Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe, which dwells on Einstein's view of God more completely than anything I've read before. At first the story of Einstein's spirituality conforms to any other twentieth-century skeptic. As a young man he rejected on logical grounds the literal truth of events recounted in the Old Testament. He moved beyond orthodox faith while struggling personally with his Jewishness. Being a scientist, he could have completed the easy trajectory then and there, ending up where Dawkins is, as a debunker of outworn superstition who saw the light of reason and used science as a weapon to combat the vestiges of belief in God.

Fortunately, Einstein was also a great mind, and his greatness took the form of a wider vision than either the religionists or the atheists who surrounded him. He continued his spiritual journey in a fascinating way. By stages he reconciled faith and science, not by offering a compromise that straddled the fence between these opposites, nor by saying that each side was right in its own sphere. Einstein took the bolder step of trying to understand if a single reality encompasses both drives in human beings, the drive to believe in a higher reality and the drive to explain Nature in terms of laws and processes that operate seemingly independent of God. Time, space, and gravity don't seem to need God at all, yet without God the universe seems random and meaningless. Einstein expressed this dichotomy in a famous saying: "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

I'd like to retrace Einstein's lifelong spiritual path because what he was searching for -- and never quite found -- was secular spirituality, and in many ways that is our best hope today. Instead of falling back on traditional religion, which has been shattered by science and the horrors of the twentieth century, or erasing spirituality in favor of stark materialism, secular spirituality looks at the whole of life in a different way. God and reason are allowed not simply to co-exist but to fulfill a single vision. This vision is rooted in consciousness. Either we think like God or he thinks like us. If neither is true, there cannot be a connection between us. Einstein's ultimate goal, he said, was to understand God's mind, and to do that, the human mind must be explained first. After all, our minds are the filter through which we perceive reality, and if that filter is distorted and misunderstood, there's no possibility of grasping God's mind.

Einstein's spiritual ambition was enormous but largely private. However, thanks to his world fame as the most intelligent person alive (true or not), people flocked to hear what he had to say on every great issue, scientific, religious, even political (hence his involvement in Zionism and the development of the atomic bomb). In the next few installments of this post we'll see how he came to terms with a God that was unknown to the Judeo-Christian tradition but was still alive and real. By following a great man's thought processes, we might find a way to escape the deadlock between faith and science ourselves.

(to be continued)

Labels: Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Deepak Chopra, God, Mother Theresa, religion, Richard Dawkins, science, Walter Isaacson

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Survey Reveals Biggest Spiritual Challenges for Christian Parents

by Audrey Barrick, Christian Today Correspondant
Wednesday, August 15, 2007, 8:33

The biggest spiritual challenges Christian parents identified are related to the spiritual development of their children, a new survey found.

Only four out of every 10 Christian parents of children between the ages of 3 and 18 said they do not face any spiritual challenges in their life, according to The Barna Group. Among those who do, 14 percent said the biggest personal challenge related to faith is raising moral children with a strong faith, which was the most common response.

Ten percent identified the need to personally invest more time in religious activities, such as reading the Bible or praying, as their greatest faith challenge.

When asked to rate the significance of eight specific challenges related to their faith, most do not perceive themselves to face major spiritual challenges.

Only 34 percent said having enough time to devote to their faith was a major challenge; and 30 percent said helping their children to become more spiritual was a major challenge.

"Our studies show that the faith principles and practices that a child absorbs by age thirteen boldly shapes their spirituality for the duration of their life,” said George Barna, who directed the survey. “Parents have a greater impact on that process than anyone else.

"This was a study exclusively of Christian parents with young children in their household. Given companion surveys showing that such parents often convey dismay over the eroding cultural environment for raising children, and how difficult parenting is these days, we anticipated a broader emphasis upon the challenges related to bringing up spiritually whole and healthy children.”

Evangelical Christian parents were three times more likely than other Christian segments to identify responding to the declining morals and values of society as a major challenge. They were also more likely than other Christian parents to feel they failed to devote enough time to their faith.

Among other challenges identified, 23 percent overall said enabling their spouse to be more spiritual; 21 percent said growing spiritually, personally; 20 percent identified understanding what's in the Bible; 19 percent named finding a church or faith community that's right for them; 18 percent said getting a sense of direction from God; and 18 percent identified practicing the faith principles they had learned.

Hispanics were the most likely ethnic group to identify challenges related to parenting and family matters with one out of every three Hispanic parents listing the challenge. Meanwhile, only one out of six white parents and one out of eight black parents listed the same challenge.

Black parents were much more likely than others to name faith-driven behavioral challenges. And white parents were much more likely than others to list participating in more religious activity as their major spiritual challenge. At the same time, white parents were substantially less likely than parents of other ethnic groups to indicate that growing spiritually and understanding the Bible were major challenges.

Other findings showed that notional Christians – those who are not born again but consider themselves to be Christian – were twice as likely as born-again parents to list attending church more often as a major challenge.

Regionally, Christian parents in the Northeast were the least likely to feel challenged to have enough time to devote to their faith and to feel that growing spiritually was a major personal challenge.

Those most likely to identify helping their children grow spiritually as a major challenge were parents in the South. Meanwhile, parents in the western states were among the least likely to feel that growing spiritually and finding a viable church or faith community were major challenges.

Christian parents in the Midwest were the least likely to feel that helping children grow spiritually was a major challenge; least likely to identify exhibiting spiritual-driven behavior as an issue; and least likely to say they had no faith-related or spiritual issues facing them.

"Americans focus on what they consider to be the most important matters; faith maturity is not one of them. The dominant spiritual change that we have seen – Americans becoming less engaged in matters of faith – helps to explain the surging secularization of our culture.”

The survey was conducted in October and November 2006 among 601 adults who described themselves as Christian.

Labels: Audrey Barrick, Barna Group, children, Christian, faith, morality, parents, spirituality

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Sunday, August 26, 2007

Belief in God has varying forms of expression

By DON O'BRIANT / For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 08/26/07

Americans are keeping the faith more than ever, contrary to some surveys and at least one best-selling author.

Although Christopher Hitchens denies the existence of a deity in his book, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" (Twelve Books, $24.99), 91.8 percent of Americans in a 2006 Baylor University survey said they believed in God or a higher power.

Not only is God apparently not dead, or nonexistent, he may be one of the major factors in the 2008 presidential election. In a July 23 cover story on "How the Democrats Got Religion," Time reports that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are leading their party's crusade to win over religious voters that voted for Republicans in the past.

What does all this mean? Although most of the Americans interviewed in the Baylor survey said they believe in God, less than half — figures range from 36 percent to 44 percent — attend religious services on a regular basis.

According to the Baylor survey, your image of God may depend on demographics. Fifty-three percent of African-Americans said they believed in an authoritarian God; Easterners tended to believe in a critical God, Midwesterners in a benevolent God, West Coast residents in a distant God and Southerners in an authoritarian God.

In most cases, a person's image of God is formed at an early age, but sometimes that view changes later in life. When Georgia author Tina McElroy Ansa moved to St. Simons Island more than 20 years ago, she discovered a group of older black women who taught her what it truly means to be a Christian.

"As a cradle Catholic raised in the South who had attended 12 years of parochial school, I knew all about the liturgy, the sacraments, the saints. I could follow the Mass in Latin and English, and I was familiar with the canonical calendar. However, it was these women of the Sea Islands who taught me what I now know, truly know about Christianity," says Ansa, whose fifth novel, "Taking After Mudear," will be published this fall.

"For them, belief was not something to be paraded on Sunday while wearing a new hat and outfit. It was what they lived every day of their lives, under sometimes extremely adverse circumstances. I learned the meaning of true forgiveness and grace, of service and surrender," she says.

"The God I serve and believe in not only died on the cross for my sins, but also sits in the garden alongside me and calls me, 'Baby.' "

How do others see God and his role in their daily lives? Here are what some famous as well as ordinary people had to say:

"I absolutely believe in God and I do enjoy going to church. My father taught me what I believe in the deity, about God. I don't think of God as having posed for the Sistine Chapel ceiling. My father was a naturalist. He saw God in a blade of grass, in how plants come out of the ground. My concept of God was the constancy of life, the renewal of life.

"The real issue is: Do you believe? That Christmas book of mine, 'To Whom the Angel Spoke,' is what it's all about. Here are three shepherds who heard the same thing and saw the same thing, yet came away with a different interpretation."

TERRY KAY

author of "To Dance With the White Dog"

"Protecting me and holding me tight in an embrace of unconditional love. God is like that to me. I also believe that only God knows the true possibility and potential of me. So he leads and I do my best to follow."

LEAH WARD SEARS

Georgia Supreme Court chief justice

"My relationship with God affects everything I do — from the way I raise my children, to the reason I took a job paying less to the way I view my role as a wife."

TISA WASHINGTON

writer in Conyers

"I see the Lord as an ever present help in time of need. Being in a war zone brings that need to the forefront. I see God as someone as gracious. Not punitive or distant or absent.

"My observation in the war zone is that people seem to be taking incremental steps toward God. If they haven't been going to church or chapel, they're starting to go. War changes the way they view life. They have questions about the separation from home and family, good and evil, war and peace. There's a lot of grief and anger and a search for meaning."

MARK ROBERTSON

Air Force chaplain from Decatur

"I never want to impose my religion on anybody else. But when I make decisions I stand on principle. And the principles are derived from who I am. I believe we ought to love our neighbor like we love ourself. That's manifested in public policy through the faith-based initiative where we've unleashed the armies of compassion to help heal people who hurt. I believe that God wants everybody to be free. That's what I believe. And that's one part of my foreign policy. ... And so my principles that I make decisions on are part of me. And religion is part of me."

PRESIDENT BUSH

during 2004 presidential debate

"I believe in a benevolent God who loves us and wants the best for us. God is a stabilizing force in the chaotic world in which we live. God is the rock, the foundation of life's many challenges. I seek God and his purpose each day. As I strive to make each experience of the day complete, I am mindful of God's presence — in a person, a kitten, a lily. Each is precious to God and has a place in the context of the universe. I believe there is a place within our inner being that is sacred and protected by God's presence."

"My job is helping visually impaired persons get a job and go to work. I feel like my vocation is part of my everyday life, my ministry. God is omnipresent, but also present in each of the people I encounter at church or anywhere. I go to church because it's part of our covenant that we come together as a community. We experience good through each other, through nature, through the arts, through worship. God is in many things, not just when you're sitting in a pew."

PATRICIA MCNULTY

vocational rehab worker

"I have nothing like a clear picture of God, but if I had to distill all of my many notions into one characteristic, about the best I could do is describe God as some sort of originating principle, or creating force, which has been envisioned by folks of different times and cultures in a great many ways.

"I've always wondered what was behind the impulse to write serious literature, the drive to create art of any kind. For me, an interesting clue comes from Robert Penn Warren. He suggested that this impulse was, in his case, the quality of spiritual yearning.

"The quality of yearning that Warren identified in himself is, indeed, the characteristic that fuels the drive behind all good poetry and perhaps all profound art and science. It's the simple but insistent longing to discover meaning in the world, the need to understand not only how the world works, but why.

"The poet is an explorer, a seeker who scavenges both the outer world and the inner for clues to the big mysteries. Actually, at the most fundamental level, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet are all trudging along toward the same city. They're only taking different roads. The poet chooses the scenic route — the path of story, metaphor, myth — and the poem, I think, is the best vehicle here because it's the most intimate literary form, the form the soul loves best."

DAVID BOTTOMS

state poet laureate of Georgia

"For me, religion is not so much about a belief in dogma and traditions. It must be a spiritual experience, and I find it impossible to have that experience when I cannot reconcile myself to the Judeo-Christian assumption that man was God's principal creation, with woman [Eve, fashioned from Adam's rib] a mere derivative afterthought.

Nor can I accept woman as the cause of man's downfall, an assumption that has permitted men through the ages to regard women with suspicion and misogyny. Women were anything but an afterthought for the Jesus I believe in. His acceptance of a friendship with women was truly revolutionary at a time when the male-dominated status quo had severed religion's connection to the prepatriarchal ancient goddess and to nature."

Labels: Baylor survey, Don O'Briant, God

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Kids today ... find a new way to shock adults

Could it be that the kids get it and the adults don't?

A long, long time ago, in a decade known as the "'60s," many young people who were not in college ROTC or the Young Republicans club had a visceral distrust of anyone over, oh, say ... 30.

These were ... are, the baby boomers, perhaps the most self-indulgent generation in the long, often futile, history of humankind [I yam what I yam. ...]

The boomers have been followed by generations mostly known by chromosomal letters: "X" and "Y"

Anyway, since the boomers had a visceral distrust of the generations that went before them and thought they had invented the world and thus deserved to dominate it ...

And since succeeding generations have had to find their own difficult niches outside the distortions of the Me Generation ...

You would think ...

That kids today ... kids today ... would be rebelling against an adult world that can produce a lot of wealth but can come up pretty short on things that really count.

Then again, you might have missed a recent news story about an MTV/Associated Press study of young people between the ages of 13-24 and what makes them happy.

And the reason you might have missed it? Well, look no further than yet another news story about yet another survey — on the reading habits of Americans ... which found one in four adults read no books at all during the past year.

Of course, if you're reading this you probably are not one of those folks for whom the act of picking up a book and getting lost, lost, lost in it is a lost, lost, lost art.

"Religious" works and popular fiction were the most popular choices according to the poll, with the Bible, the Good Book itself, the most widely read book.

I'll admit to checking out the Bible now and then, and I do read a lot, which led me to the questions asked by MTV on what, if anything, makes kids today happy.

The shocking, shocking answer to what made the most young people happy is ... spending time with their families.

Don't know for sure about generations X, Y, Z, but where I come from — when Visigoths walked the earth — happiness was getting as far away from my family as possible.

By age 13, I was firmly convinced my parents were not only uncool, but hopelessly lacking in any skills that I as an all-knowing teen might find useful or necessary.

Yeah, there was a rather significant level of what we today call "dysfunction" in my "family of origin" [another psycho-babble term popularized in the 'aughts], but still ...

Anyway, this AP/MTV survey also showed that white kids call themselves happier than blacks and Latinos; that many, especially females, feel themselves just totally and irrevocably stressed out — and, get this, that money is not something that makes them happy.

Maybe this is because of the mind-boggling prosperity that has inflicted this country over the past couple of decades, so kids just take it for granted.

Sex? Kids 13-17 showed a lot of wisdom in saying that being sexually active at that age leads to diminished happiness; while the 18-24s were cautious. Yes, sex can lead to momentary happiness, they said, but hardly provides much of a foundation for anything lasting.

Drugs and alcohol — more unhappy than happy.

School makes many respondents in the poll happy, and they also said they believe in the institution of marriage and want to have kids of their own. Significantly more kids from families whose parents have remained married reported waking up happy, compared to kids from divorced families.

Nearly half named their parents as their heroes and three-quarters said their relationship with their parents is what makes them happy.

Family, friends and God, that's who they want to be with.

Nearly half said religion and spirituality are important to them and more than half said they believe God influences what makes them happy. Being part of a religious group also was seen as happiness-inducing.

Of active believers in God, 80 percent said they are happy, compared to 60 percent of the young people who said faith is not important to them.

Perhaps the young people surveyed by MTV already have already learned the spirituality of happiness.

Maybe some have already learned where true joy resides.

This brought to mind a passage written some 1,950 years ago, by Paul of Tarsus, who perhaps was addressing a group of young people in the ancient Greek city of Phillipi.

Paul wrote:

"I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

"I can do everything through Him who gives me strength"

Want to comment on this column or other topics? Check out Don Miller's blog at http://www.santacruzlive.com/blogs/donmiller. Contact Don Miller at dmiller@santacruzsentinel.com.

Talkin' 'bout your g-g-g-generations:

Back in the day, Gen X-ers were known as '20-Somethings,' 'slackers' and 'Baby Busters' and turned away from anything smacking of Baby Boom self-indulgence or narcissism.

Of course, Gen X-ers are now parents and have their own disaffected youths to worry about ...

Generation Y.

'Why, why, why' they might cry, are we going to have to foot the bill for boomers when they start tapping Social Security? Y-ers, also known as 'millennials,' have birthdates between 1984-1993. Naturally, the kids born after 1993 are now being called Gen Z.

The people who mark such things say hallmarks of Y are apathy, childhood obesity, a predilection for pharmaceuticals and, oh yeah, an intimate, sometimes consuming, relationship with all things digital.

Or so they say.

Labels: Associated Press, Baby Boomers, Don Miller, family, Gen X, Gen Y, God, happiness, MTV, teenagers

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Friday, August 24, 2007

Secularists, what happened to the open mind?

Many of the leading voices among atheists and the ‘unreligious’ reveal a disdain for religion that can only damage today’s dialogue. Speaking with people of faith, instead of about them, would enrich both sides of this philosophical divide.

By Tom Krattenmaker

Critical thinking might be to secularism what faith is to devout religious believers. Thinking rationally, questioning assumptions, embracing complexity and eschewing the black-and-white — these habits of mind are, to the champions of non-belief, a keystone of the secular worldview and a crucial part of what separates them from religious people.

So why, when it comes to matters of religion, do secularists so frequently leave their critical thinking at the door?

As the atheist writer and religion scholar Jacques Berlinerblau recently put it, "Can an atheist or agnostic commentator discuss any aspect of religion for more than 30 seconds without referring to religious people as imbeciles, extremists, mental deficients, fascists, enemies of the common good ... conjure men (or) irrationalists?"

The behavior is unbecoming a school of thought that emphasizes rational complex thinking — and that has so much to offer if its practitioners can only live up to their own ideas about the value of an open mind.

The worst tendencies of atheists (who, by definition, believe God does not exist) and secularists (who are best described as "unreligious") were framed for me during a recent e-mail exchange I had with a staff member of a humanist organization.

Discussing the relationship between science and religion, I had expressed my view that religion should leave scientific research to the scientists and devote itself, along with the fields of ethics and philosophy, to the mighty issues of the human condition: good and evil, the meaning of life, the nature of love and so forth. To which my correspondent replied: Why would something as inherently foolish as religion deserve a place at the table for discussions of that magnitude?

As someone who has studied religion and attended progressive churches, I was aghast. I had expected an articulate and intelligent advocate for the non-religious worldview to display a more nuanced understanding of that which she stood against.

But, sadly, this is how the conversation often goes when secularists take up the issue of religion. The tendency has perhaps reached its crescendo — or low point — with the appearance and best-selling success of Christopher Hitchens' book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Like earlier books by atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, Hitchens holds up the worst tendencies and misdeeds of religious people like an ugly piñata, on which he then performs the predictable act. But his demolition of religion dishonors the tradition of critical thinking and intellectual seriousness that supposedly define secularism. Berlinerblau suggests that Hitchens and other in-your-face atheist authors are becoming the "soccer hooligans of reasoned public discourse."

Not that Hitchens and his like-minded fans don't have a point. They are correct in criticizing those who have used religion to create suffering in the world. And those acting in the name of their faiths have indeed furnished far too many case studies. Unfortunately, the forms of religion most often in the spotlight these days lend credence to the idea that religion is a dark-ages anachronism that must be eradicated if the human race is to advance.

Nevertheless, I find myself wanting to leap to religion's defense when I encounter broadsides against all religion. Yes, many religious people behave in foolish and obnoxious ways, and some do cause harm in the name of their belief system. Yet the same could be said of non-believers. When a Stalin, Pol Pot, or Hitler commits monstrous deeds in connection with an ideology opposed to religion, does that somehow prove the inherent delusion and danger of non-belief?

My point is not to demonize secularists or atheists. There is too much of that already. According to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll conducted in February, fewer people would vote for a well-qualified atheist for president (45%) than an African-American (94%), a Jew (92%), a woman (88%), a Hispanic (87%), a Mormon (72%), a thrice-married person (67%) or a homosexual (55%).

It is unfair and just plain wrong to equate secularism with immorality or insufficient patriotism. Nevertheless, secularists would do well to listen to Berlinerblau, one of the few atheist voices calling for secular engagement with religious believers and more rigorous understanding of their religions.

Berlinerblau, a Georgetown University professor and author of The Secular Bible: Why Non-believers Must Take Religion Seriously, says he has made little headway in persuading his fellow atheists to try understanding religion in its full complexity and to make alliances with moderate religious believers around issues of mutual concern. Apparently, it's more satisfying and commercially advantageous to preach to the converted and launch one-sided diatribes against religion.

Yet both achieving a more constructive national dialogue and making progress on our most pressing problems depend on just the opposite happening. Neither the secular nor the religious camp is going to drive the other out of business. So how's this for an idea: Cooperate.

Yes, it is highly unlikely that non-believers will soon join hands with theologically conservative believers for a round of John Lennon's Imagine (which imagines a world with "no religion"). But couldn't they engage with religious moderates and progressives, who tend to approach their faith in non-literal ways that do not require the suspension of rational thought, and who frequently lean in the same political direction as secularists do on the big issues of the day? Do secularists really want to antagonize these potential allies by sneering at their faith?

I hope not. Secularism's clear thinking has much to offer a world riven by unthinking ideologies and hatreds. And even though it defines itself in opposition to religion, surely secularism is capable of understanding that religion is more — at least capable of more — than irrational indulgence in supernatural fantasies. Learning more about religion would be a good start.

Secularists put their "faith" not in a god, but in the finest capabilities of the human mind. It would be a shame if their defining faculties failed them now.

Tom Krattenmaker, who lives in Portland, Ore., specializes in religion in public life and is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. He is working on a book about Christianity in professional sports.

Labels: atheism, cooperation, faith, reason, religion, science, secular, Tom Krattenmaker

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Kids Happy To Hang With Families: Survey Finds Teens’ Heroes Are Often Mom And Dad

Wednesday, August 22, 2007 — Time: 8:18:23 AM EST
By Erin E. O’Neill

When it comes to their children, many adults probably think being able to drive the family car, hang out with friends at the mall and play the latest video games are the keys to happiness.

Little do they know that a large percentage of today’s youth would much rather spend time with mom and dad than listen to music, watch TV or, yes, even hang out with friends.

Kyle Newhart, 13, of Marietta thinks quality time with his family is very important but his dad, Rod, is pleasantly surprised by the results of a recent Associated Press/MTV survey that puts spending time with family at the top of the heap of things that make young folks happy.

Kyle Newhart does count video games among his favorite pastimes but he also enjoys playing board games with his dad and mom, Anita. Dinner together, reading and road trips are also important to their family dynamic, according to Anita Newhart.

The survey of 1,280 young people, ages 13 to 24, included an extensive list of questions ranging from “What one thing in life makes you most happy?” to “Who would you say are your heroes?”

The top answer when young people were asked what makes them happy was their families. When asked to name their heroes, Spider-Man, Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods couldn’t compete with mom, who squeaked by dad by a mere 8 percent. Together, parents fared better than anyone else, including Martin Luther King Jr. and George Bush, as influences on their kids’ lives.

The nationwide survey was conducted online from a random sampling of households with landline telephone numbers, both listed and unlisted, according to The Associated Press. Web access was provided to those who needed it by the company Knowledge Networks, which conducted the survey.

The results of the survey aren’t as surprising to some people, however.

Cathy Harper, coordinator for The Right Path, works with many area youth and says the survey shows what she knew all along.

“Family time is very important,” Harper said. “Kids really do want parents and adults involved in their lives.

“Everybody needs to feel supported, even as we get older,” she said.

Overall, the survey is positive. However, a little more disheartening are results showing white youth to be happier than blacks and Hispanics and that overall stress levels are up compared to a similar study conducted in 1996.

What stresses kids out? For 18 to 24-year-olds, the major stressor is finances. For teens, it’s school that is the greatest concern.

The Newharts made the decision to take their son out of school in the fourth grade and homeschool him to the end of the year. Beginning in the fifth grade, Kyle was enrolled in online classes, which he continues. They said school stress was a major factor in their decision and now he is much less stressed over school work.

When it comes to family finances, Rod Newhart believes full disclosure is the only way to let kids know what is going on.

“Kids are a lot smarter and more aware,” he said. “Not talking about (finances) is a detriment.”

Harper agrees.

“Kids worry about finances because they hear their parents talking about it,” she said. “Parents need to talk to their kids to make them feel less stressed.”

And while money doesn’t rank among the things that make kids happiest, it does play a major role when it comes to funding education and recreation.

“Money can’t provide happiness,” said Harper, “but it does provide opportunities.”

A lot of activities are available for area youth, regardless of their financial abilities, due in part to programs through The Right Path, Ely Chapman Education Foundation and the Marietta Family YMCA. Harper does caution against spreading yourself too thin.

“Don’t be in 500 things,” she said. “One or two activities is fine. Have good family time. Even if you have dinner at 9 o’clock at night, do it together.”

Spiritual fulfillment also seems to play a big role in determining happiness, with 62 percent of those polled saying they believe that a higher power has influence over the things that make them happy.

These figures are encouraging to Roger Rush, minister of the Church of Christ at Sixth and Washington streets in Marietta.

“The survey is right on. Kids will be happiest when we give ourselves. Time with family coupled with religion helps to keep families together,” he said. “We try to focus on that.”

Rush has seen many of his young parishioners grow into successful adults in his 22 years with the church and he attributes that to a strong family unit.

“Kids that come from families who spend time together, worship together — those kids are thriving,” he said.

Labels: Erin E. O’Neill, family, happiness, money, spirituality, teenagers

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Why Being Out Of The Body Is All In The Mind

August 24, 2007
Mark Henderson, Science Editor

To many people who have had an out-of-body experience, they are profoundly spiritual events that reveal how the mind extends beyond the material confines of the body and strengthen beliefs in religion or the paranormal.

The sensation of watching your own body from a distance, however, need owe nothing to the supernatural, research has proved.

With a combination of virtual-reality goggles and tactile stimulation, researchers in Britain and Switzerland induced volunteers to feel that they have left their bodies to view themselves from a few metres away. The illusion is said to feel as if the subject’s consciousness has been “teleported” elsewhere.

The results could eventually have commercial, medical, scientific and military applications. Similar virtual-reality technology could help surgeons to operate on patients in distant hospitals, and scientists to control humanoid robots on the Moon or Mars. Though scientists behind the experiments said they had no ties to military research, the work could be used to improve remote-controlled weaponry.

Henrik Ehrsson, of University College London, who performed one of the two studies published in the journal Science, said they shed important light on the nature of consciousness.

“Out-of-body experiences have fascinated mankind for millennia,” he said. They raised fundamental questions about the relationship between human consciousness and the body, and had been much discussed in theology, philosophy and psychology. “Although out-of-body experiences have been reported in clinical conditions, the neuro-scientific basis of this phenomenon remains unclear.

“The invention of this illusion is important because it reveals the basic mechanism that produces the feeling of being inside the physical body. This represents a significant advance . . . the experience of one’s own body as the centre of awareness is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness,” Dr Ehrsson said. “If we can project people so they feel and respond as if they were really in a virtual version of themselves, just imagine the implications.”

In his study, volunteers wore goggles, and cameras were placed 2m (6ft) behind the subject, with the feeds connected to the subject’s eyes. The participant thus saw an image of his or her back. Dr Ehrsson stood behind the subject and held two rods. He used one to prod the subject and the other to jab underneath the camera. The participants said they felt they were sitting where the cameras were placed, and that the figure they were watching was another person or a dummy.

“This was a bizarre, fascinating experience for the participants - it felt absolutely real for them and was not scary. Many giggled and said, ‘Wow, this is so weird’.” He said that when he took part, he felt himself move suddenly out of his body. “I see the object coming towards me, feel the touch, then ‘boof!’, I feel a striking sensation that I’m over there looking at myself.”

Out-of-body experiences are often associated with neurological conditions such as migraines and epilepsy, as well as with drug abuse and serious injuries, particularly to the head. They probably come about because the brain is misled by circuits that are not working properly.

In the second experiment, a team at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne fitted volunteers with similar goggles, then trained the cameras on a mannequin. The backs of the subject and the mannequin were stroked - though the subject could see only the mannequin. They were blindfolded and moved away, then asked to walk to return to their position. They tended to move towards where they had seen their “virtual bodies”.

Susan Blackmore, of the University of the West of England, said: “Out-of-body experiences should be understood not as evidence for the supernatural, but as a fascinating experience that potentially we can all have.”

Labels: consciousness, Mark Henderson, mind-body connection, science

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Poll: For Christians' identity, it's faith first, U.S. second

Editor's note: This is part of a series of reports CNN.com is featuring for "God's Warriors," a documentary hosted by CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour.

(CNN) -- Most Christians are more likely to describe themselves as Christian first and American second, according to a new CNN poll examining religious views in the United States.

A new poll finds that Christian respondents would describe themselves as "Christian" before "American."

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll found that of the 750 Christians in the survey, 59 percent identify themselves first by their faith, then as Americans, while 36 percent described themselves in the reverse.

CNN's findings are not that different from those in a recent Pew Research Center poll on Muslim-American attitudes. In that poll, 47 percent of Muslims in America say they are Muslim first, American second. Younger Muslims were especially likely to feel that way: 60 percent of them responded they were Muslim first.

CNN's research also found that Americans are now less likely to see the possibility for peace between Islam and Christianity. Of the total 1,029 adult Americans polled, 53 percent say conflict is inevitable between the two religions, up from 45 percent in 2003. Explore Americans' views on religions »

Those polled also said Islam was the religion most likely to use violence. Sixty-eight percent believe Islam is the religion most likely to have followers who would use violence to spread their religion, compared to 11 percent for Christianity and 4 percent for Judaism.

When asked about religion-related violence in the United States, about nine in 10 said they personally would not be willing to kill another person to uphold a religious belief or advance a religious cause. But asked how many other Americans would do so, more than a third responded "many" and "some;" a third said "few" and a quarter said "almost no Americans."

The CNN poll also found that 62 percent say that American society has strayed too far from its religious foundation in the past 50 years, while answers were split almost evenly on religion as a factor in government policy. Forty-five percent said religion should have no influence on government decisions, while 36 percent say it should have some influence, but not the major factor.

When it comes to the Bible, CNN's poll found that 57 percent say they believe the Book of Revelations' description of the violent end of the world, where all but Christians perish. Nearly one in five believes it will happen in their lifetime.

But of the 750 Christians in the poll, nearly eight in 10 said that people of other beliefs could get into heaven, while only 17 percent believe that only Christians can.

The poll was conducted between June 22-24, 2007, with a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Labels: "God's Warriors", Americans, Christian, CNN, Islam, Judaism, Muslims, Pew Research Center survey

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AP Poll: God Vital to Young Amercians

Friday August 24, 2007 5:16 AM
By ERIC GORSKI and TREVOR TOMPSON

Associated Press Writers

Among America's young people, godliness contributes to happiness.

An extensive survey by The Associated Press and MTV found that people aged 13 to 24 who describe themselves as very spiritual or religious tend to be happier than those who don't.

When it comes to spirituality, American young people also are remarkably tolerant - nearly 7 in 10 say that while they follow their own religious or spiritual beliefs, others might be true as well.

On the whole, the poll found religion is a vital part of the lives of many American young people, although with significant pockets that attach little or no importance to faith.

Forty-four percent say religion and spirituality is at least very important to them, 21 percent responded it is somewhat important, 20 percent say it plays a small part in their lives and 14 percent say it doesn't play any role.

Among races, African-Americans are most likely to describe religion as being the single most important thing in their lives. Females are slightly more religious than males, and the South is the most religious region, the survey said.

Eighty percent of those who call religion or spirituality the most important thing in their lives say they're happy, while 60 percent of those who say faith isn't important to them consider themselves happy.

Sociologists have long drawn a connection between happiness and the sense of community inherent to most religious practice. Lisa Pearce, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, said religion can indeed contribute to happiness, but she cautioned that the converse also can hold true.

``It's easier for kids who are happy and have things going well in their life to find the time and energy to participate in religion,'' said Pearce, co-principal investigator for the National Study of Youth and Religion. ``It could be kids who have bad experiences in church end up leaving and being unhappy with religion.''

The poll also asked young people to choose between two statements about their views of other faiths.

Sixty-eight percent agree with the statement, ``I follow my own religious and spiritual beliefs, but I think that other religious beliefs could be true as well.'' Thirty-one percent choose, ``I strongly believe that my religious beliefs are true and universal, and that other religious beliefs are not right.''

The latter statement is more likely to be the position of young teens - 13 to 17 - and those who attend religious services weekly.

However, tolerance is the rule overall. That doesn't surprise the Rev. Paul Raushenbush, associate dean for religious life at Princeton University and author of ``Teen Spirit: One World, Many Faiths.''

Young people eat lunch and play soccer with peers from other belief backgrounds, while adults tend to self-segregate with others of like mind, he said. Sweeping immigration reform in 1965 transformed America into the world's most religiously diverse nation, and young people grew up with the second generation of the immigrant wave, he noted.

``This shows that it doesn't require a lack of conviction in your own faith tradition to think someone else might have a similar type of conviction in their own,'' Raushenbush said. ``There is no sense of, 'This diminishes my faith.'''

About 75 percent of those surveyed say God or a higher power has some impact on their happiness. At the same time, 90 percent believe happiness is at least partly under their own control.

``I think you do have control over how you are going to feel on a particular day,'' said David Mueller of Lockport, N.Y., a 20-year-old college student who attends an evangelical Christian megachurch called The Chapel.

``When it comes to events in your whole life, it's already somewhat laid out for you,'' he said. ``You can stray off to another path. But where God wants you to go, you are going to get there.''

---

The AP-MTV poll was conducted by Knowledge Networks Inc. from April 16 to 23, and involved online interviews with 1,280 people aged 13 to 24. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

Labels: Americans, Associated Press, Eric Gorski, God, MTV, religion, spirituality, teenagers, Trevor Tompson

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Wednesday, August 22, 2007

The Stained Glass Ceiling

Aug. 20 - Decades after the ordination of women in most Protestant churches, women still find it difficult to get senior positions in big congregations. (Producer: Brent McDonald)

To view this video, please click on "Link to external source."

Labels: Brent McDonald, ministry, ordination, Stained Glass Ceiling, video, women

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Monday, August 20, 2007

Religion in the news

By Jay Lindsay, Associated Press Writer
Fri Aug 17, 7:13 AM ET

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - National Guard Capt. Jeffrey Cox watched soldiers lose sight of God in the violence and daily grind of the war in Iraq.

He's hoping they can find their faith again in an Episcopal monastery along the Charles River.

Prodded by Cox, the Society of Saint John the Evangelist is offering a "healing retreat" weekend in October to help soldiers returning from war adapt to life back home and reconnect with their faith.

The retreat aims to give soldiers space to reflect, worship and share their experiences.

"I'm not saying a weekend is going to solve any problems, but what it can do is it can give people a respite," he said. "Not only are they able to talk about their heart and their mind, but they're able to talk about their soul."

Cox, who is studying to be an Episcopal priest, was a social worker for troops in Iraq and is now a contractor for the Army's Wounded Warrior program, which assists severely injured or disabled soldiers. War can wear out faith, he observed.

War "seems like, at times, the absolute opposite of what our natural being is," Cox said.

The retreat, which is not affiliated with the military, is open to anyone affected by war, and members of other faiths are welcome, Brother Roy Cockrum said. His hope is that those who attend find a place of rest where they know that God and others care about them.

"We want to make the space available, to see if what we have to offer is valuable," he said. "We suspect it is, and we suspect there's a great need for healing out there."

The society was founded in England in 1870 and has 22 brothers today, including 18 living in Cambridge and at a retreat center in West Newbury. Among the Cambridge residents is Thomas Shaw, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.

Over the stone walls of the compound — which is modeled after an early Christian monastery — rowers slide along the Charles River. Inside, day lilies grow on a courtyard strewn with bark shed by towering sycamore trees. Its Spartan rooms offer little more than a bed and silence.

The monks dress in long, brown robes and take vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience. One of their chief ministries is hospitality, and Cox has experienced it firsthand. He went on retreat there after serving in Iraq for a year beginning in October 2005.

The stress of living in a war zone is about more than the violence, Cox said. Often, it's the wait for your next mission, for the next phone call from family, for the day when you can go home. It can leave people feeling lost and spiritually adrift when they return, he said.

"Some places are unsure about how to address the soul," he said. "What we're going to do, is we're going to use the wisdom of the monks and the wisdom of each other to address it straight on."

The monastery can fit about 16 people for the free retreat Oct. 4-7. A "healing service" will be open to the public on Oct. 6, and Cockrum says he will share the liturgy used there with the wider church.

Applicants will be chosen based on their explanation of why they want to come. The weekend's agenda will be open-ended, with plenty of time to talk and worship. If a run along the Charles is more appealing, that's fine, Cockrum said.

"It's not about fixing anybody," he said. "It's about creating a space that's apart from and separate from the business of their lives, where they have a chance to reflect and pray if they care to."

Cockrum said he'll know whether to plan a second weekend after he sees how the first one works. But he does hope their group's efforts spark other religious communities to do more for people damaged by war.

"If we could actually spark other people to get involve with this, that would be great," he said.

Labels: God, Jay Lindsay, Jeffrey Cox, retreat, Society of Saint John the Evangelist, war

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Navajo Cub Scout: Religion emblem needed

By Felicia Fonseca, Associated Press Writer
Wed Aug 15, 6:28 AM ET

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - When Kinlichiinii John set out to earn a religious emblem for his uniform like other Cub Scouts, he learned that none exists to acknowledge his Navajo beliefs.

Neither the traditional Navajo spiritual way of life nor the Native American Church are among the 35 religious affiliations represented in emblems approved by the Boy Scouts of America.

So 9-year-old Kinlichiinii, with the help of his family, Navajo medicine men and others, has embarked on a quest to establish Scouting's first American Indian religious emblem.

"This is just another tool we need to raise them in order for them to hang on to their tradition, their culture, to who they are," said his mother, Melvina John.

Living in Clermont, Fla., Kinlichiinii is far from the Navajo Nation — the country's largest Indian reservation, spanning parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. But he wants to be closer to his faith and learn about tools used in ceremonies, how to pray, and the significance of sheep and sand paintings to the Navajos, his mother said.

As a Cub Scout, he takes an oath to be reverent toward God, to be faithful in his religious duties and to respect the beliefs of others.

"The religious component is a very important part of a boy's life," said David Richardson, director of religious relationships for the Boy Scouts of America.

Religious emblems earned by scouts are issued by churches, not the Boy Scouts of America, though the organization approves the wearing of them, he said.

There are some rules, Richardson said. At least 25 scouts must be members of the Native American Church for the Boy Scouts to consider approving an emblem for it.

Kinlichiinii's family has been working on the emblem's design and the guidelines to earn it.

Melvina John said her son has spent recent weeks learning about prayer, preparations for medicine men and how the Navajo language fits into his faith.

"His time is definitely not his anymore, and he hasn't complained," she said. "But we have been telling him, this is how leaders are made."

Labels: Boy Scout emblem, Felicia Fonseca, Native American Church, Navajo, religion

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Amanpour's `God's Warriors' airs on CNN

By David Bauder, AP Television Writer
Mon Aug 20, 8:47 AM ET

NEW YORK - Christiane Amanpour's work on the documentary series "God's Warriors" took her directly to intersections of extreme religious and secular thinking.

She watched, fascinated, as demonstrators in San Francisco accused teenagers in the fundamentalist Christian group BattleCry of intolerance in a clash of two cultures that will probably never understand each other.

Understanding is what Amanpour is trying to promote in "God's Warriors," which takes up six prime-time hours on CNN this week. The series on religious fundamentalism among Christians, Muslims and Jews airs in three parts, 9 p.m. EDT Tuesday through Thursday.

"I'm not interested in drumming up false fears, or falsely allaying fears," CNN's chief international correspondent told The Associated Press by phone from France, where she added last-minute touches to the series. "I just want people to know what's going on."

Amanpour traveled extensively over eight months to work on the series. The trips to Amanpour's native Iran are most fascinating. She explored the ancient roots of the conflict between Shiites and Sunnis, and talked with one of the country's most accomplished female politicians about how Muslim women are treated.

Another segment tried to explain why so many devout Muslims are willing to give their lives to a cause.

"To the West, martyrdom has a really bad connotation because of suicide bombers who call themselves martyrs," she said. "Really, martyrdom is actually something that historically was quite noble, because it was about standing up and rejecting tyranny, rejecting injustice and rejecting oppression and, if necessary, dying for that."

Finishing the project didn't leave her with a sense of fear over the implications of stronger fundamentalist movements.

"I did come away with a sense that we — or those people who don't want to see religion in politics and culture — if we don't look into it and see what is going on, we're in danger of missing it and not be able to react to it properly," she said.

Amanpour was one of the last reporters to talk to the Rev. Jerry Falwell. She interviewed him a week before he died about the legacy of the Moral Majority, the organization that thrust evangelical Christians onto the political stage.

The segment on Christians explores BattleCry in some depth, digging at the roots of an organization that fights against some of the cruder elements of popular culture and urges teenagers to be chaste. In noting how girls at some BattleCry events are encouraged to wear long dresses, Amanpour asks the group's leader how it is different from the Taliban.

In a nonjudgmental way, she visits a family that is home-schooling its children and explores the influence of Evangelicals on the courts.

"There is so much nuance, so much information, so much to talk about, by no means were we able to talk about it all," she said, "and by no means do I claim this is the definitive project. It is one of the fullest, one of the most ambitious and one of the most complete."

Amanpour, 49, is no longer CNN's most visible reporter, as she was when skipping from one war zone to another. She received a lot of attention for her documentary "In the Footsteps of bin Laden" last year, and said she's enjoying the opportunity to put day-to-day news in greater perspective.

She's frequently criticized American television networks, including her own, for not spending enough time on international news.

Amanpour was recently named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. She's leaving her home base of London to move to New York with her husband, former U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin.

"This is really a personal move for my husband,who has lived eight years out of his own country and wants to come back," she said.

Labels: "God's Warriors", BattleCry, Christiane Amanpour, Christianity, David Bauder, fundamentalism, Jewish, Muslims, politics, religion

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Sunday, August 19, 2007

Olympic City in Midst of Revival?

By George Thomas
CBN News
August 18, 2007

CBNNews.com - BEIJING - Seven days a week, the machines at the Nanjing Amity Printing Company churn out copies of what some claim is one of China's best-selling books - the Bible.

Forty-three million Bibles have been printed legally in Communist China since 1987. Once a banned book, today some 3 million copies are printed and distributed each year across the country.

And this year, Chinese Christian leaders are hoping to print a special edition of the Bible to make available to the hundreds of thousands of athletes and visitors expected to attend next year's Olympic Games.

Dr. Cao Shengjie of China Christian council oversees the printing of Bibles in China. He said, "And so for this very important occasion, we hope we can print a special edition, maybe the four Gospels in English and Chinese, bilingual."

Lui Bainian, a top leader of China's officially sanctioned Catholic organization, wants to take it a step further and place these Bibles in some of the major hotels in Beijing.

"I want our visitors to know that we have religious freedom here and this is a small step to meet their religious needs during the Olympic," Bainian said.

The Chinese capital has hundreds of hotels. One of the biggest in town, the Minzu hotel, is entertaining the idea of making the Bibles available to Olympic guests.

"We are doing our preparations and once we know where our guests are coming from, we will be ready to meet their spiritual needs," Minzu Hotel General Manager Chen Guoyao said.

The Beijing Olympic Committee is also getting religious. It plans to provide Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim services.

CHINA CONNECTION:
China's Great Bible Debate

"I think the needs of various religious groups will be taken into consideration and as a matter of fact, for example, inside the Olympic Village, we are going to set up a religious service center," Sun Weide, deputy director of communications for the Beijing Olympic committee said.

Shengjie says it is important for people outside of China, especially Christians, to know the real situation of Christianity in China.

And what they will see is a China that's experiencing unprecedented religious fervor. When athletes and visitors arrive in Beijing next year for the Olympic Games, they will find a city and a nation in the middle of what some are calling a spiritual awakening.

Despite the government's official doctrine of atheism, millions of Chinese are turning to religion.

"People now feel more freer, more open to express their religious convictions," said Tong Shijun, professor of philosophy at East China Normal University.

Tong Shijun teaches at a prominent university in Shanghai. He's just completed the first major survey on religious beliefs in China. And according to his findings, 31.4 percent of those surveyed said they were religious - putting the number of believers in China at about 300 million.

Christianity is also growing fast. Twelve percent, or 40 million people, described themselves in the poll as followers of Christianity, much higher than official figures given by the Chinese government.

What is fueling these conversions? Chinese experts say that a growing number of people are turning to religion to better cope with the country's rapid social and economic changes.

He Hong is an economics student in Shanghai who recently spent an afternoon at a local Christian bookstore.

"Today in our country, more and more people, especially the young people have a yearning for spirituality" Hong, a Shanghai university student, explained. "So many of my friends feel empty in their hearts. We feel so much pressure to get a job, have a better education."

According to Shengjie, so many of them are turning up at church looking for answers.

"People can easily think that to have a better living and to earn more money is the goal of life but the church, we will tell people that the man does not live by bread alone, we need the Word of God," Shengjie said.

Buddhism, Taoism, and other religions are also experiencing growth. Shijun believes that the government is starting to recognize the role religion could play in society.

"In the last couple of decades the situation is that religious life is recognized to have a positive role in society, generally speaking, as long as these religious groups abide by the national and local laws," he said.

Strict limitations on religion remain, however. For example, China only recognizes government registered churches and considers unregistered house churches illegal.

Still Chinese Christian leaders hope next year's Olympic Games will be an opportunity to showcase China's diverse and growing religious tapestry.

"Our expectation is to have more friendship and fellowship," Shengjie said.

Labels: Bible, China, Christian, George Thomas, Olympic Games, religion, Tong Shijun

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For Fun: In Praise of Scoops on Heaven, Hell and, Yes, God

By Peter Steinfels
Published: August 18, 2007

The next time laments are heard and verdicts rendered about the media’s lack of attention to religion, will someone please remember Weekly World News?

As everyone whose life experience has not been limited to upscale food stores or buying groceries online knows, Weekly World News was the supermarket tabloid printed only in black and white but carrying articles as colorful as the most fevered imaginations could produce.

When those articles did not feature a resurrected Elvis, the love life of Bigfoot or space aliens meeting secretly with leading politicians, they often dealt with religion: “Baby Born With Angel Wings” (accompanied by photo). “Quick Test Tells If You’re Going to Heaven or Hell!” “Adam & Eve’s Skeletons Found — in Colorado!”

In newspapers like this one, the flamboyant tabloid’s demise has been duly noted, with nostalgic tributes to its fondness for swamp monsters and its high moments of creativity (“Florida Man Screams From the Grave, My Brain Is Missing!”).

In The Washington Post on Aug. 7, Peter Carlson provided an unusually full and amusing account of the tabloid’s rise and fall, the cast of characters on its staff and its “unique philosophy of journalism: Don’t fact-check your way out of a good story.”

But no one has sufficiently mourned the loss to religion reporting.

Fifteen years ago, this column hailed Weekly World News’s unusual achievements in this area. The column was the result of an epiphany — O.K., the tabloid would have found another word — that occurred halfway between a hotel room and a Midwestern convention center where delegates of one of the nation’s Christian denominations were debating some policy, probably about the Bible and homosexuality.

Memory fails to recover the exact headline of Weekly World News on sale that morning at the coffee shop. It was something along the line of “Angels Discovered Piloting UFO’s.” Now here, it was suggested to bleary-eyed fellow reporters (no doubt from a long night of prayer), was a real religion story.

Even in 1992, the otherworldly revelations had not gone entirely unnoticed by religion scholars. Two years earlier, The Christian Century had published an article documenting how much remarkable religious information could be gleaned from the tabloid.

Q.: What does God look like?

A.: God “has fiery green eyes, flowing brown hair and stands 9 feet tall.”

Q.: What does God sound like?

A.: “A hundred baritones and a symphony orchestra rolled into one,” as recorded by a Soviet space probe.

Q.: Where is heaven?

A.: Heaven is 28,000 light-years from Earth, according to another space probe.

Q.: Where is hell?

A.: Nine miles below the surface of Earth, according to Soviet engineers drilling in Siberia (the Soviets played a curiously large part in these discoveries). Weekly World News reassured readers that those engineers had capped the hole after smelling smoke and hearing the cries of the damned.

Q.: How do you get to heaven?

A.: Through the Bermuda Triangle — did you have to ask? This was attributed to a Dutch physicist, who also reported that the passage to heaven was open 16 times a year.

Q.: How much does the human soul weigh?

A.: “The human soul weighs 1/3,000th of an ounce.” This detail was not the discovery of Soviets but the next best thing, East German scientists.

In describing the tabloid’s challenges in recent years, Mr. Carlson mentions that real news “frequently rivaled anything that WWN writers could concoct”: Hollywood actors catapulted to high office, a president’s sex life spelled out in a government document, religious fanatics flying hijacked airplanes into buildings.

Weekly World News held a kind of funhouse mirror up to much popular American belief. Without meaning to, it offered a far more effective critique of the nation’s religious literalism than anything the so-called New Atheism, burdened by its obvious animosity, has served up.

The tabloid’s writers matter-of-factly exaggerated literalism’s demand for factual detail to the point of parody: God’s exact height and hair color, the soul’s exact weight, the exact distance to heaven and hell and, as those excavated skeletons of Adam and Eve indicate, the exact location of the Garden of Eden — about 40 miles south of Denver.

Articles also captured the complex relationship of religious literalism in the United States with science. Rather than being antiscience, that strand of Christianity looks to science for confirmation of its beliefs, to the point it seems of implicitly accepting science’s claim to be the ultimate measuring stick of reality.

So the tabloid’s fantastic religion articles, no less than its reports of extraterrestrial visitors or grasshoppers the size of bobcats, were full of quotations from anonymous “experts.” Sometimes these were clergy members, like the ones who allegedly but not very imaginatively declared the baby born with angel wings “a sign from God.” Sometimes they were “famed” biblical scholars.

But scientists were much better, those Soviet physicists, for example, or the “atheist” East German medical types who determined the weight of the soul. Or if the phenomenon at issue was in defiance of all known science, the tabloid could at least conjure “a baffled scientist” to attest to its truth.

Mr. Carlson reports that Weekly World News writers “quoted sources identified as ‘a baffled scientist’ so often they started joking about an institution called the Academy of Baffled Scientists.”

In 1992, Sal Ivone, then the managing editor, was willing to explain his tabloid’s unusual fondness for religion articles in terms of “post-industrial culture” and “a hunger for myth.” Then Mr. Ivone got practical. “Adam and Eve,” he said, “aren’t going to sue us.”

Labels: Peter Carlson, Peter Steinfels, religion, religious literalism, science, Weekly World News

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Why has pentecostalism grown so big, so fast?

by Joseph Serwadda

With 500 million followers, Pentecostalism has grown to be the second largest Christian denomination, after Roman Catholicism. With a distinctive worship style, a literal biblical interpretation and energetic preaching, this sect of the Christian faith has attracted large numbers searching for meaningful spiritual purpose.

The term “Pentecostal” alludes to the day when first-century Christians were given the Holy Spirit, marking the beginning of the Church. Multi-million dollar church complexes are sprouting up around the world. Why and how has this faith grown so big, so fast?

From the day of Pentecost, history has recorded empirical evidence that for over 1,500 years, the church has eluded obliteration and braved persecution including Nero and other Roman emperors’ madness that competed for worship as gods.

In the late 1870s, Charles Parham preached revival in the face of a Protestant world that had lost its zeal. Parham encouraged disciples to seek God through prayer, fasting and studying the Bible, awaiting His blessings of the Spirit. Many who accepted the message were thrown out of the traditional churches, which forced the movement to start its own churches.

Pentecostalism’s influence around the world is phenomenal. It is estimated (Encyclopaedia Britannica) that over 100 million Americans are Pentecostals. According to the World Christian Database, 147 million Africans are either Pentecostals or Charismatics (Reuters). The Charismatics are believers in Protestant and Catholic churches (Bazuukufu) who believe that the Pentecostal worship style should be incorporated into their churches.

A 2006 survey conducted by the PEW Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that 70 percent of Protestants in Kenya are Pentecostal or Charismatic. The same survey also found that 60 percent of Nigeria is Pentecostal and one-third of South Africans are.
The Red Pepper recently reported that Uganda has seven million Pentecostals leaving 23 million to be shared by the rest. This faith is also making gains in predominantly Protestant Europe and multi-religious Asia.

The survey revealed that 75 percent of Protestants in Latin America are Pentecostals. The churches have adopted music-driven, concert-style services to reinvigorate their worship, and confront flagging enthusiasm among its membership. This is not an isolated case. The Catholic priest, Fr. Musaala, has introduced a new sound in the papal domain raising eyebrows for his music and dance style.

Pentecostalism’s popularity is attributed to its leaders, missionaries who travel the world conducting mass healing campaigns. From the late fifties, T.L. Osborn was a household name. Reinhard Bonnkhe became famous for tent crusades. When T.D. Jakes visited Nairobi, the service attracted 250,000. In Uganda, Benny Hinn’s recent visit saw 40,000 flocking the Mandela Stadium crusade. Several local events, such as the Passover Festival at every close of year, pull crowds in their thousands.

Pentecostalism is the ultimate “people’s faith” providing something for everyone, all encouraged to “come as they are.” Pentecostal messages speak to the needs of the disenfranchised and the poor. Many come to these services seeking hope, and view this denomination as a return to the roots of early and original Christianity.

Allan Anderson, Professor of Global Pentecostal Studies at England’s Birmingham University, put it this way: “The success of Pentecostalism is the focus on people’s problems. In countries where people are living on the breadline, Pentecostalism gives hope” (Reuters). Healing occupied two-thirds of Jesus earthly ministry. With healings, speaking in tongues, energetic services, and a focus on prophecy, many see the fruits of Pentecostal teaching and rightly conclude, “God must be here.”

Luis Lugo, Director of the Pew Forum, said he initially questioned some of the survey results, but came to realise the numbers were valid. “I don’t think it's too far-fetched to imagine that Christianity is close to "being pentecostalised. These folks are as engaged as they come, not only talking the talk, but walking the walk," Lugo said.

Labels: Africans, Americans, Christianity, Holy Spirit, Joseph Serwadda, Pentecostalism, Pew Forum

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Articles of Faith: Conflict between religion, science seems everlasting

Last updated August 17, 2007

By Anthony B. Robinson
GUEST COLUMNIST

Who would have thought that on a summer Saturday night in Seattle a professor of philosophy could pack the house?

Alvin Plantinga, a professor at Notre Dame, did just that for a talk on science and religion last weekend. The crowd turned up at Rainier Beach Presbyterian Church in southeast Seattle where Plantinga's daughter, Jane Pauw, is the pastor. The topic was, "Science and Religion: Why Does the Debate Continue?"

... the topic of science and religion remains a hot one. Moreover, Seattle audiences have been treated to a string of appearances by authors such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennettand Christopher Hitchens. All three represent the popular, if simplistic to the point of silly, viewpoint that religion is the source of the world's problems and getting rid of it is the path to salvation.

Religion and science are two different ways of knowing. Both have a place. Religion tends to deal in the "Why?" questions. Why is there a world? Religion answers, "God." No one has to accept that answer, but it is an answer that science can neither confirm nor deny. Science works on the "How?" questions. How have the world and its diverse life forms come to be? Science answers that the world has evolved slowly over time through the mechanism of natural selection. There's nothing about that answer that rules faith in a Creator out or in. After all, for believers, there's no reason that God can't make use of natural selection.

Plantinga argued that there is no intrinsic conflict between religion and science. Conflicts arise when spokespersons for one or the other make claims on behalf of science or religion that are exaggerated. For example, said the professor, it is perfectly appropriate that scientific work proceed without religious assumptions or references. Plantinga called that "secularism with respect to science."

But that's different than "scientific secularism," which argues that scientific method and knowledge are enough for all human understanding and that a secular approach to all of life is either satisfactory or required. In making the argument of "scientific secularism," that science is enough and that anything else is illegitimate, people go too far.

Turning to the hot button topic of evolution, Plantinga, who described himself as a "serious Christian," again saw no intrinsic conflict between religion and science. He argued that it is perfectly possible to credit Darwin's thesis of evolution through natural selection by genetic mutation and still hold to the Christian doctrine of creation, which believes that God created life and humans in God's image.

Plantinga said that scientists such as Dawkins who want to read religion out of the picture offer a faulty argument. In his book "The Blind Watchmaker," Dawkins argues that we know of no irrefutable objections to the possibility that all of life has come into being by way of unguided Darwinian process. But from this premise Dawkins jumps to an unwarranted conclusion, namely, "All of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes." Dawkins claims too much.

Some proponents of religion also claim too much. For example, they argue the Genesis story of creation over a seven-day period is a factual account of how the world came to be. Plantinga noted that a Christian as eminent and ancient as Augustine cautioned fellow believers not to treat the Genesis story of creation as a factual explanation or to waste their time developing calculations based on it.

So why does the conflict between religion and science rage on? Misunderstanding and exaggerated claims for either science or religion by their more zealous proponents is one explanation. Another is what's at the root of many, perhaps most, of our world's conflicts: fear and the lust for power. Religion has a word for that, "sin." And that is one religious doctrine, perhaps the only one, which is empirically, that is to say scientifically, verifiable.

Anthony Robinson's column appears Saturdays. He is a speaker, consultant and writer. His recent books include "Common Grace: How to be a Person and Other Spiritual Matters," and "Leadership for Vital Congregations."

Labels: Alvin Plantinga, Anthony B. Robinson, evolution, God, religion, science, secular

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Friday, August 17, 2007

Three surveys & some good news

The “whoosh” you hear is another crop of young adults leaving church. Many of them won’t be back.

Their departure has been documented by a disturbing—but not surprising—national survey. The LifeWay Research study revealed:

• More than two-thirds of young adults stop attending U.S. Protestant churches for at least a year from age 18 to 22.

• Seventy percent of 23- to 30-year-olds drop out of church.

• Eighty percent of the dropouts didn’t plan to quit attending; they just quit.

• Of the dropouts, only about 35 percent return and attend church regularly, defined as at least twice a month.

The departed blamed their absence on several reasons: 26 percent cited hypocrisy or judgmentalism in the church, 25 percent quit when they moved to college, 22 percent moved “too far away” from their home church and didn’t find one closer and 20 percent said they no longer feel “connected” to their church.

Meanwhile, another national poll helps explain why children who grow up in Christian homes reach adulthood without a sustaining faith foundation. The Barna Group surveyed Christian parents of children between the ages of 3 and 18. What those parents said is both disturbing and surprising.

When asked to list their “spiritual challenges”—the tasks they see as sacred duties—only one out of every seven Christian parents (14 percent) mentioned raising moral children with a strong faith. If guiding their children to faith in Christ and building a strong moral foundation is not Christian parents’ No. 1 task, what is?

About twice as many parents could pick that duty out of a lineup, but that’s small comfort. When given a list of six parental duties, 30 percent of Christian parents said helping their children “become more spiritual” was a major task. Researcher George Barna said the gap between the two items is significant. A gap occurs when people are not conscious of such parental challenges and consequently are not seriously engaged in addressing them.

So, only one in seven American Christian parents regularly considers spiritual formation of children a parent’s job. Worse, even when prompted, fewer than one in three of those parents owns up to the task. Small wonder the kids skip out of church as soon as they get the chance. If they never see that a relationship with Christ is important to Mom and Dad—except, possibly, as a cosmic Genie when things go wrong—why should faith abide and sustain them?

Fortunately, a third study reveals a postive way forward. The Baylor University School of Social Work conducted a nationwide survey of U.S. teenagers from various Protestant denominations. The results are both logical and encouraging.

The Baylor research shows teenagers who express their faith through ministry in their communities are significantly more mature in their faith and more involved in daily faith practices than their uninvolved counterparts. The teens who showed the most mature and vibrant faith regularly participated directly in ministry that meets human needs, received opportunities to reflect upon their faith in the context of serving others, and worked alongside adults who explain their ministry involvement as an expression of their faith.

An obvious corollary to the study speaks to the two dispiriting surveys: Meaningful hands-on ministry to human need translates into strong faith, which in turn will strengthen and sustain teenagers when they become young adults.

And this life-transforming opportunity is available to every church. Notes Diana Garland, dean of the Baylor School of Social Work: “The opportunities to help our youth grow in their faith literally are as close as the neighborhoods outside the church’s door.”

Marv Knox is editor of the Baptist Standard.

Labels: Barna Group, Baylor University School of Social Work, Christian, church, LifeWay Research, Marv Knox, parents, spirituality, teenagers

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Thursday, August 16, 2007

Professor says religion is key to global view

Knowledge of faiths is central understanding of world events, according to university teacher

By Jean Prescott
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
08/11/2007

BILOXI, Miss. -- As the world grows smaller, and it does so every day, we find "the neighborhood" overrun with new and different people expressing unfamiliar ideas about which we understand little and care not at all.

What to do? Some advise: get smarter.

I don't care what field of endeavor you happen to be in," said Allan Eickelmann, a professor of religion at the University of Southern Mississippi-Gulf Coast Campus and an ordained United Church of Christ minister, "in this day and age, you'd better have some understanding of human diversity, because the fact is that globalization is not going away, and America is not going to become less diverse. In fact, it is going to become more diverse, if that's possible."

A recent count places the number of religions in America today at about 1,800, Eickelmannsaid. He hasn't had time to keep up with them all.

"Knowledge leads to understanding, and understanding human diversity is absolutely essential for our society to function," Eickelmann said.

He deals in knowledge -- about the religions of the world and the people who practice them.

"there is no better way to come to an understanding of human diversity than to understand the diversity of religious expression."

In fact, he and a couple of colleagues recently drew a standing-room-only crowd to an Issues=Answers lecture in downtown Gulfport, Miss. Several hundred people turned out to hear them talk about religion and violence, a hot-button topic. The question-and-answer segment that followed their presentations not only did not dissolve into a riotous affair, but many in the audience seemed reticent, unsure of how to frame a question for which they wanted, perhaps desperately needed, answers.

How do we become better informed? "Take a class" is the logical answer, though that can be expensive at the university level (we provide a thumbnail of what's available locally when fall sessions begin).

Why not begin before university? Why not offer courses in religion, something like basic world religions, in high school?

"There are several practical reasons why it's not done broadly," Eickelmannsaid, notable among them being the difficulty of fitting a religion elective into the overall curriculum.

"History, English, math, science all are offered for four years. ... And when you have one or two spots for electives, you probably can offer only one course for religion." A certified instructor is needed, nevertheless, and unless the school has thousands of students who could fill a day with religion classes, "one course wouldn't keep the teacher busy."

And high schools are quite concerned about indoctrination, "which is verboten," Eickelmann said. "The issue of equal access under the law comes up.

"It's all related to the First Amendment," he said, "which has two clauses tied together. The first is freedom of speech, which people in (journalism) know about, and freedom of religion." The framers of the Constitution, he said, declared that if the government (and by extension, public schools) were to favor one particular form of religious expression over another, it would disallow the free exchange of religious ideas. That's indoctrination, and the Constitution prohibits it.

Eickelmann stands by his claim, though, that at this time in human history it is imperative that we understand what motivates even those whom we observe to be least like ourselves.

"If you don't understand diversity, you don't understand how to be an American in the 21st century; you don't understand how to be a citizen of the world."

Labels: diversity, faith, first amendment, Jean Prescott, knowledge, religion

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Feel-good religion without concern lacks relevance in real world

by Roger Ray

"Do you think you will ever go to church again?" My daughter's question was more than a casual dinner query, even though she tried to present it that way. After 28 years as a parish pastor, conducting three or four religious services a week, now that I am taking a sabbatical, the decision to go back to church is anything but a certainty. "I think so," was the best that I could muster for my daughter. The truth is, I have no idea of where we could go and find what our hearts really long for.
At a lunch meeting with a group of retired clergy and professors, each bemoaned the state of the modern church, "I go week after week," one offered, "and you would never know that the nation was at war." Another added, "All I hear about is how to have a happier life, nothing about poverty, nothing about injustice ... I can barely make myself go."

The famous Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, railed against the church in Europe 150 years ago for being nearly totally irrelevant, diluting the powerful message of Jesus with self-serving religion (yippee! I get to go to heaven when I die!) and superstition. The French philosophers of the Enlightenment thought that religion had served its purpose and would pass out of existence, unmourned. In the last century, communist experiments tried to replace devotion to religion with a devotion to the ideals of the state, believing that religion served only to make people complacent about the abuses of the rich and promoted an unscientific world view (i.e. creationism: n. 1. A world view unfit for a science fiction comic book).

For centuries, thinkers of many different ilk have been ready to say the last words at the graveside of the church and now, even many of we members of clergy are left to wonder if there is any reason left to care about the institution we once pledged to serve for our whole lives. At a recent national meeting of my denomination, I and a few friends tried to force ourselves to attend the worship and business meetings without much success. "Darwin's waiting room" has become my most common description of such meetings, which seem to primarily waste our time.

Still, there is something about the message of the one who said, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" that we cannot let go of. And yet it seems that when we go to church, this message of advocacy for liberation and justice gets turned into a message that tells people to not be gay, to favor the rich, to support inexcusable war and to build big buildings with basketball gymnasiums. And when people begin to become disillusioned and start staying away, rather than returning to the message quoted above (either from Jesus or Isaiah) they tell themselves that what they must urgently do is change the style of music they are singing or improve their buildings. Forgive me for using such strong language, but spirituality which does not respond directly to the message of concern for the poor and liberation of the oppressed is little more than idolatry, fine for people whose real interests are narcissistic anyway but not much to offer to anyone who is sincerely seeking a relationship with the Divine. If the modern church had existed in the first century, Rome would never have bothered to persecute it, nor would they have likely noticed that it existed.

Bob Edgar's recent book, "Middle Church," is an attempt by the former congressman turned National Council of Church's director to offer a word of hope for the recovery of relevance in the modern church. If people like me and my lunch friends as well as my daughter's generation are going to try to find our way back into a pulpit or pew, then the substance of the experience is going to have to dramatically change. Edgar says that a relevant church will seek to "achieve peace, the end of poverty, and the healing of planet earth... (this) must be our immediate moral agenda." He points out that the Bible does not mention abortion a single time, homosexuality only twice and poverty more than 10,000 times. The religion of the people who authored our sacred Scriptures had a relevant faith, but that voice has been all but silenced in the modern era.

That this column is referenced as being "from the left" would seem incomprehensible to the biblical prophets. But in our religious culture, to speak up for the poor, to advocate for peace, to defend the planet from exploitation and ruin are seen as "liberal" only because we have lost our moral compass.

Edgar quotes the late President John F. Kennedy who said, "If by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties... If that is what they mean by a 'liberal,' then I'm proud to say I'm a liberal." If that is what makes a person a liberal in the minds of conservatives, then so be it. To me, it just means that you are really trying to be a person of meaningful faith. If there are others like me who would like to start a conversation group around Edgar's book and the whole issue of relevant faith, then please be in touch with me at RevDrRay@aol.com.

Labels: Bob Edgar, church, faith, Liberal, religion, Roger Ray, spirituality

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Iraq attack strikes ancient religious sect

Wednesday, August 15, 2007 3:23 PM
By Jane Arraf, NBC News Correspondent

For Iraq's small and secretive Yazidis community, Tuesday's attack was one of the worst massacres in the living memory of a community that believes they were the first people God created.

"We want the world to know us better," the sheikh known as the Prince of the Yazidis told me in northern Iraq well before the war when his diminishing community decided that they could no longer afford to be known as devil worshippers.

That label is believed to be part of the reason for the simultaneous suicide bombs that have killed 250 people - many of them women and children - in what will likely be deadliest suicide attack since the war began. Officials say the Yazidis, members of a secret pre-Islamic religion considered infidels by fundamentalist Muslims, received letters from al-Qaida in Iraq telling them to leave.

Ancient culture

There are likely fewer than a million Yazidis in the world - by some estimates as few as 400,000. They are believed to be ethnically Kurds but they don't consider themselves Kurdish. Almost half of the entire community has become refugees in Germany and other parts of Europe.

They've been persecuted for centuries because they're mistakenly considered by many Muslims to be devil worshipers - a perception fueled by the secrecy of their ancient religion.

Visiting traditional Yazidis communities is like stepping into another world. Their temples-have cone-shaped roofs - the same shape as the wool felt hats worn by religious elders, who wear locks of hair in long braids. The ceremonies include elements of Zoroastroanism, the ancient Persian religion, and include the worship of fire and sun. At a temple in the Sinjar Mountains before the war, I watched the keeper of the temple light an oil lamp with four wicks and pray to each direction of the flame. In one of the temples, there was an etching of a serpent – in another the moon and the stars.

Like the religion, the temples are often hidden. The Yazidis elders have long worried that as young people become assimilated into Western culture, their religion could essentially disappear. It's an unforgiving faith - Yazidis are only allowed to marry other Yazidis.

In April, police say, members of one Yazidi community stoned to death a teenage Yazidi girl who had converted to Islam to marry a Muslim. Dozens of Yazidis were killed by Muslim extremists in retaliation.

Secretive religion

In northern Iraq a few years ago, the "Prince of the Yazidis" a sheikh who spends his time in Germany when he's not in northern Iraq, told me they had decided that they could no longer be as secretive - that they had to persuade the world that they were God-fearing people. They translated their secret "black book" and even opened some of their ceremonies to outsiders.

Still, every time I asked what they believed I got somewhat different answers. While they had decided they needed to make their secret religion less secret, some were not so convinced.

I watched a ceremony in a village in the Sinjar Mountains surrounding a brass peacock - one of the seven the Yazidis believed God handed the first Yazidis directly - a representation of the archangel Michael in his form as the peacock angel. It's an oral tradition in which many of the rituals and beliefs are entrusted only to males - and only when they come of age. But one thing they firmly believe is that they were the first men.

Even more than most religions, they have a complicated relationship with God - the bottom line is that they know God is forgiving but Satan is not - and while they don't worship him, they make clear that they respect his power. So much so that Yazidis don't ever say his name or utter words starting with the letters 'sh' - the same sound that begins the word for Satan. They also don't wear the color blue, eat lettuce or wear ties with collars - all going back to their beliefs about the fallen angel to whom they pay homage.

"Science is our enemy," one of the elders told me. In some of the most traditional of Yazidi communities, education is discouraged. A 14-year-old girl in one village I went to told me she'd never been to school. It was considered "shameful" for girls to be educated, she said.

They've been persecuted for centuries and in times of trouble they retreat to the mountains and the caves. During the war near Dohuk, close to the Turkish border, when I was looking for Yazidi communities,

I found some had literally moved underground - in caves underneath villages that had been leveled by Saddam Hussein's forces during his attacks against the Kurds.

Under Saddam Hussein they survived by not making waves. Saddam, whose Baath party was originally secular, didn't care what religion they were as long as they weren't a threat to him. Now there's a new threat to these people practicing a religion they believe is as old as man.

Labels: God, Iraq, Jane Arraf, persecution, Yazidis, Zoroastroanism

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Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Exclusive global CNN documentary 'God's Warriors' examines religion, power and politics

Protestors who kill for their religious beliefs. "Patriot Pastors" who seek to change American culture through the ballot box. Zealots who target prime ministers and presidents with assassination for "subverting God's will." Parents who reject science education in conflict with their religious principles. Suicide martyrs who are revered as iconic heroes. These are "God's Warriors" of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. They see contemporary society as corrupt and view themselves as the front line of defense in a battle for cultural supremacy and political power. They are changing the world.

CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour journeyed to eight countries over eight months to report for God's Warriors, an exclusive global CNN documentary about the global phenomenon of religious fervor upon politics, culture and public life . During six hours broadcast over three consecutive nights, CNN will reveal how "God's Warriors" want to bring religion back from the periphery to the center of public life – and how far they are willing to go to transform modern society.

God's Warriors includes thought-provoking interviews with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter; the late Rev. Jerry Falwell in his last television interview; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim women's rights advocate; Yehuda Etzion, a founder of the Israeli settlement movement; and Israeli President Shimon Peres.

A companion website to God's Warriors offers users show excerpts from the documentary, an audio podcast and an exclusive video diary that goes behind-the-scenes. This online content will be available at http://edition.cnn.com/godswarriorsopk . The podcast will also be available for download from iTunes.

Labels: "God's Warriors", Christiane Amanpour, Christianity, culture, Islam, Judaism, politics, religion

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Diversity may not be the answer

Gregory Rodriguez:

Just existing together won't erase mistrust; instead, we should work toward creating an identity that includes everyone.

August 13, 2007

People all over the planet are on the move, and whether anyone likes it or not, with each passing year Western nations will become more racially and ethnically diverse. But is that a good or a bad thing?

I've always suspected that what's beneath all that celebrating is a deep fear and an article of faith. Armed with hate crime statistics and gang stories, the media love to keep us informed of all types of racial and ethnic conflict. But through it all, assorted do-gooders, foundation program officers and government functionaries still promote the belief that the best solution to the conflicts created by social diversity is diversity itself. That's why they arrange those cheesy multiculti community events and tiresome inter-ethnic "dialogues" in which the African American activist meets the Korean American activist, white kids go to day camp with kids of color, etc., etc. The idea is that more contact breaks down barriers and helps us achieve Rodney King's dream that we'll all just get along.

But according to a provocative new study by Robert Putnam, one of America's preeminent political scientists, it's just not true. No, Putnam isn't regurgitating so-called conflict theory -- the notion that diversity strengthens group identities, thereby increasing ethnocentrism and conflict. He's not predicting racial Armageddon. What he did find in analyzing a massive survey of 30,000 Americans, however, is a whole lot more interesting and complex than either "Kumbaya" or "Crash." Diversity, he argues, is turning us into a nation of turtles, hunkered down with our heads in our shells.

According to the study, there is a strong positive relationship between interracial trust and ethnic homogeneity. In other words, the less diverse your community, the more likely you are to trust the people in it who are different from you. The flip side is also true: The more ethnically diverse the people you live around, the less you trust them. So interracial trust is relatively high in homogenous South Dakota and relatively low in wildly diverse Los Angeles. But don't think it's just because we don't trust people of different races.

In addition to asking respondents what they thought of people from different backgrounds, the survey inquired about whether respondents trusted people of their own race. The answer was surprising. It turns out that in the most diverse places in the country, Americans tend to distrust everyone, those who do look like them and those who don't. Diversity, therefore, does not result in increased conflict or increased accommodation, but in good old-fashioned anomie and social isolation.

According to Putnam, residents of diverse communities "tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less" and to spend more time sitting in front of the television.

Putnam considered and had to reject all kinds of other explanations for his findings. In the end, some adhere to this pattern more than others, but the numbers are discouraging all around: Diversity depresses trust and sociability somewhat more in poorer neighborhoods, but altruism suffers somewhat more in richer areas. It seems to affect sociability more among conservatives, but it's also a problem among liberals. The effect is felt more among whites, but nonwhites are not immune. Twentysomethings seem a bit less distrustful than older generations but not enough to alter the overall pattern. Women are equally as affected as men.

None of this means that we are doomed by diversity. But it does suggest that simply celebrating it and promoting it is not going to help us get along. Putnam points to a need for everyone to construct new social identities. He recalls growing up in a Midwestern town in the 1950s, when religious affiliations acted as strong social barriers between neighbors. Three decades later, he says, Americans had "more or less deconstructed religion as a salient social division." Although it was still personally important, religion's power as a social identity had diminished significantly.

More important, perhaps, whites and nonwhites alike will have to create a more generous and expansive sense of "we." If, as the study suggests, increased diversity leads us to withdraw even from our own kind, we may indeed find some sense of togetherness and common purpose in a truly broad, overarching identity called American. Maybe once we achieve that, we'll volunteer more, vote more and be more willing to pay to fix our bridges.

Labels: altruism, diversity, Gregory Rodriguez, religion, Robert Putnam

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Holistic medicine adds tools to cancer fight

Holistic medicine adds tools to cancer fight

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the Institute of Health has issued some facts on complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM. These facts might bring up more questions than they will provide answers, but I hope we all think holistically.

Some familiar tools for the treatment of cancer are chemotherapy, radiation and surgery provided by physicians. Holistic medicine expands the tools with which to work and adds mental, social and spiritual aspects to physical needs.

Conventional medicine includes medical doctors and doctors of osteopathy, plus physical therapists, physiologists and registered nurses. Integrative medicine offers diverse medical and health-care systems, practices and products that are not yet considered to be a part of conventional medicine.

Integrative medicine combines both conventional medicine and CAM without distinguishing which is primary.

CAM is used by 36 percent of adult Americans. But when megavitamin therapy and prayer for health reasons are included when defining CAM, that figure grows to 62 percent. The use of integrative medicine was especially high among those who had a serious illness like cancer.

These statistics are from a 2002 National Health Interview Survey, supported by NCAM and the National Center for Health Statistics, a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the December 2004 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, 88 percent of the 102 people with cancer who participated in research at the Mayo Comprehensive Cancer Center had included at least one CAM therapy. This research showed that of these who used CAM, 93 percent used supplements such as vitamins and minerals, 53 percent used prayer/spiritual practices or chiropractic care and almost 47 percent used both.

Some CAM therapies are now used as cancer treatments, not so much as a cure, but as a therapy which can help one feel better or recover faster. Acupuncture can help with the side effects of chemotherapy and to relieve the pain which follows surgery.

"I used to believe that we must choose between science and reason on one hand, and spirituality on the other, in how we lead our lives. Now I consider this a false choice. We can recover the sense of sacredness, not just in science, but in perhaps every area of life." Dr. Larry Dossey wrote in Reinventing Medicine. Dossey's research, intended to dispute the power of prayer, revealed that prayer has power. Both he and his wife, Dr. Barbara Dossey, are authors and pioneers in the field of holistic healing and provide a broader view and better understanding through their books.

People of all ages, from all walks of life and every culture, do healing work. Many live here in Acadiana. Holistic practitioners are nurses, traiteurs, massage therapists, acupuncturists, nuns, refloxologists, priests, counselors, lay people, iridologists, psychologists, trained in Reiki and healing touch.

Tell your doctor if you are working with a CAM practitioner. Ask the same questions you would of a physician when looking for one. Ask for what you want. It might be within you.

Becca Begneaud is a traiteur and two-time cancer survivor and regularly coordinates this column.

Labels: Becca Begneaud, health, holistic, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, prayer, religion, spirituality

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Saturday, August 11, 2007

Repression of Freedom of Religion in Tibet Continues Unabated

Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Amanda Abrams

Washington, D.C.August 10, 2007

Efforts by the Chinese government to limit the succession of Tibetan spiritual leaders, part of a comprehensive campaign to control the Tibetan people, is a fundamental violation of freedom of religion and belief, Freedom House said today.

Last week, China's State Administration for Religious Affairs posted a new set of regulations on its website declaring that reincarnations of “living Buddhas”—Tibetan monks of the highest order—must first seek approval from Chinese authorities. In an apparent effort to target the current Dalai Lama, who is living in exile in northern India, the rules prohibit any Buddhist monk living outside of China from recognizing a “living Buddha.” The new regulations take effect September 1.

“The new rules issued by the Chinese government are both deeply offensive and in violation of basic religious freedom principles,” said Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House. “The selection of spiritual leadership should remain solely in the hands of the religion’s own hierarchy and outside the purview of the state.”

The Chinese government has long insisted that it must have the final say over the appointment of the most senior Tibetan monks. In 1995, the Dalai Lama and Chinese authorities chose rival reincarnations of the 10th Panchen Lama, who died in 1989. After the Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama is the most important figure in Tibetan spiritual hierarchy, and will identify the next Dalai Lama, when the current one, now 72 years old, dies. As a result, Beijing could control the eventual selection of the fifteenth Dalai Lama.

“China’s repression of Tibetans, like that of its own people, is extremely strategic,” said Paula Schriefer, director of advocacy at Freedom House. “Chinese authorities are keenly interested in the selection of Tibetan spiritual figures due to the tremendous reverence with which they are held by their followers.”

Religious freedom in Tibet is strictly limited by the Chinese government. While some religious practices are tolerated, officials forcibly suppress activities viewed as vehicles for political dissent or advocacy of Tibetan independence. Possession of pictures of the Dalai Lama can lead to imprisonment, and Religious Affairs Bureaus continue to control who can study religion in Tibet. Only boys who sign a declaration rejecting Tibetan independence, expressing loyalty to the Chinese government, and denouncing the Dalai Lama are allowed by Chinese officials to become monks.

Freedom House has long advocated for Tibetans’ freedom. In 1979, at a time when U.S. officials had refused a formal relationship with the Dalai Lama for fear of annoying Chin, Freedom House arranged his first visit to the U.S. In 1991, on another visit to the U.S., the Dalai Lama accepted Freedom House’s Freedom Award.

Tibet ranks as Not Free in the 2007 edition of Freedom in the World, Freedom House’s annual survey of political rights and civil liberties. The country received a rating of 7 (on a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 as the lowest) for political rights and a 7 for civil liberties.

Freedom House, an independent non-governmental organization that supports the expansion of freedom in the world, has monitored political rights and civil liberties around the world since 1972.

Labels: Amanda Abrams, China, Freedom House, religious freedom, Tibet

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A non-believer - say it isn't so

A non-believer - say it isn't so
August 11, 2007

You can be gay, black or even a woman, but America will not tolerate a president who has no religion.
Anne Davies

Pete Stark found himself in a unique and slightly uncomfortable position earlier this year. The longtime Democrat congressman for the Oakland district near San Francisco had responded to a survey from the Secular Coalition for America which offered a $1000 prize to the person who could identify the "highest-level atheist, agnostic, humanist or any other kind of 'nontheist' currently holding elected public office in the United States".

To his surprise, that was him. Stark was the only one of 535 federal politicians prepared to admit he had no religion. For a few brief weeks he was the poster-boy for the humanists in a nation where, according to Pew Foundation research, eight out of 10 people say they have "no doubt God exists" and that "prayer is an important part of their daily lives".

In the immediate aftermath, Stark's staff worried about the backlash. Would his office be targeted by fire-and-brimstone Christians, prophesying his imminent damnation? One or two callers promised to pray for Stark's soul, but for the most part, the callers felt Stark was championing a position held by a significant but silent minority.

Fortunately, at 75, Stark is not planning to seek higher office. If he had been, he had just committed political suicide.

Being an atheist is the biggest handicap a person could have to being elected US president - worse than being gay or a woman, according to a Gallup poll in February.

More than 53 per cent of people surveyed said they would not vote for an atheist. They would prefer a homosexual president - 43 per cent said they would not vote for a homosexual - or a woman president (11 per cent said they would not vote for a woman).

And it seems that these days being black or Catholic or Jewish is hardly a barrier at all, with each of these factors being named as a bar by fewer than 7 per cent of voters.

That the US remains so concerned that its leaders be people of faith is surprising.

In most industrial societies, the level of religiosity declines as the society becomes wealthier and more sophisticated, according to John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which regularly surveys attitudes towards religion in the US.

Yet the US remains a highly religious place. Not the most religious place on the planet, but certainly more religious than Europe and Australia.

Labels: Anne Davies, atheism, God, Pew survey, politics, prayer, Unites States

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Friday, August 10, 2007

Line between religion and medicine blurring

Melissa McEver
August 7, 2007 - 7:10PM

Dr. Bruce Leibert makes no apologies for who he is: a devout, outspoken, Christian doctor who asks to pray with patients and asks them about their spiritual beliefs.

Leibert, program director of Valley Baptist Family Residency in Harlingen, openly incorporates spirituality into his practice because he believes it makes a difference in patients’ physical and mental health.

“Health must address not only body, not only the mind, but the undying soul. … If I can’t minister to the soul, then I can’t do medicine.”

In the past, a clear boundary has existed between religion and medicine: chaplains and pastors visited hospitals to tend to patients’ spiritual needs, while doctors and other healthcare providers were expected to solely treat the physical.

But that line between faith and science is starting to blur, as more healthcare providers and hospitals incorporate spirituality into patient care.

From Bible studies for healthcare workers to prayer time with patients and meditation classes at hospitals, faith is playing a more prominent role in the healthcare setting — and for a good reason, experts say.

“Science is telling us clearly that when you activate your spirituality, various things happen in the body that help you heal better in times of disease and distress,” said Dr. R. Murali Krishna, president of the James L. Hall Center for Mind, Body and Spirit in Oklahoma City. Krishna and others founded the center 10 years ago, hoping to increase patient awareness about the mind-body connection, he said.

The center offers seminars on meditation, guided imagery and relaxation, in part to help people achieve that connection, he said.

“It helps you access the healing power within yourself,” Krishna said.

Connecting mind, body and spirit

Researchers have actively studied the mind-body connection since the 1960s, according to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Studies have suggested that mind-calming practices like meditation, yoga and visualization can help reduce chronic pain, improve immunity, speed wound healing and reduce stress, which in turn improves health.

More researchers are now looking into whether similar results come from prayer, church attendance or strong belief in a religion. Some studies have indicated that spiritual beliefs and practices can improve the mental and physical health of the chronically ill and the sick elderly, improve patients’ ability to cope with pain and distress and protect against depression.

Patients seem to want to talk about spirituality and faith with their doctors, according to a 2004 survey that appeared in the Annals of Family Medicine. The survey found that 83 percent of respondents wanted their doctors to ask about their spiritual beliefs, and a majority wanted those beliefs to be considered when planning treatment.

Some local doctors routinely take a “spiritual history” of their patients.
Leibert, for example, often asks questions like “Do you go to church regularly?” and “Do you pray?”

A spiritual history can help doctors tailor treatment to the individual patient, said Dr. Linda Villarreal, an Edinburg internist.

If a patient is suffering from symptoms related to stress, for example, she’ll suggest prayer or meditation depending on what the patient believes, she said.

Faith is important to many of her patients, Villarreal said.

“In our Hispanic culture, there’s a strong faith component,” she said. “Talking about that with my patients … there’s a sense of comfort in it.”

Leibert said his patients rarely turn down the chance to pray with him when asked. He has prayed with people of all faiths and doesn’t try to change their beliefs, he said.

Separation of church and medicine?

Some experts, however, are concerned about doctors bringing religion into office visits and the possible ethical implications.

When questions about religion turn into evangelism, or when a patient feels pressured to pray or conform to the doctor’s beliefs, that’s when the inquiries cross the line, said Richard P. Sloan, psychiatry professor at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. Sloan is the author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine.

“That’s capitalizing on the vulnerable status of patients,” Sloan said. “We want patients to do what physicians say when it comes to medical matters. … When (doctors) pursue a different agenda, a religious agenda, it’s a real danger.”

Questions about religion can invade patients’ privacy and also cause feelings of guilt and remorse — hardly a burden a sick person needs, Sloan said.

“There are substantial ethical concerns in trying to link religion to medicine,” he said.

Krishna said he thinks prayer in the doctor’s office is a good idea only if the patient’s beliefs are consistent with that practice.

“If we’re imposing our belief system on them, then it’s crossing the boundary,” he said. “We live in a world where people believe different things, and boundaries are important.”

Doctors should inquire about patients’ spiritual beliefs, whatever they are, Krishna said.

Having that information can help doctors offer better advice and help establish a connection with the patient, he said.

Properly used, spirituality is a valuable tool in health care that could improve outcomes for many people, Krishna said.

“It has enormous healing potential,” he said. “It’s a complement for modern medicine, not a replacement.”
____
Melissa McEver covers health and environment issues for Valley Freedom Newspapers. .

Labels: Dr. Bruce Leibert, medicine, Melissa McEver, mind-body connection, religion, spirituality

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Inter-faith dialogue

LIVE’N’LEARN

Tariq Ramadan took part in a debate on inter-faith dialogue two weeks ago.
The dialogue between the panel of three (Tariq Ramadan, Soondursun Jugessur, Michael Atchia) some days ago and the audience (at Q-Bornes Town Hall under the auspices of the Conseil des religions) pointed to these:

? Inter-faith dialogue is possible and desirable;

? it is a vehicle for the spiritual and moral dimension in society, the family and an important factor for peace in the world;

? it must include everyone, even those with no declared faith and agnostics;

? it must go to villages and suburbs, to those in need, the masses, the young, and not remain among the elite and already convinced.

?Rooted in one’s own faith (which each must deepen), inter-faith dialogue enables each one to reach out, know, understand and share in other faiths, with huge results for everyone’s ability to better serve society and live in peace.

What is inter-faith dialogue?

The term refers to “co-operative and positive interaction between people of different religious traditions”. Its aim is to unite global communities by sharing common elements, while accepting the differences (in religion and culture) to achieve harmony and enable people to live in peace.

A changing world

The face of religion on Planet Earth is rapidly changing. As a result of world-wide movements of people (whether for tourism, international workforces or immigration), most cities and many countries are fast becoming environments of multicultural and multi-faith environments, not to mention multilingual, as is the case in that inner London primary school where there are kids totalling 56 mother tongues, besides English! This worldwide movement of people has provoked a meeting of cultures and religions, a new phenomenon in history.

This historic encounter of religions is accompanied by another remarkable process: the interfaith dialogue movement. People belonging to the great faiths of the world are now talking to one another and understanding one another as never before, rather strongly contrasting with the set image of religion as a source of friction, conflict, terrorism (refer to the times of conflicting relationships in history between Christians-Muslims, Muslims-Hindus, Jews-Muslims, Catholics-Protestants, Christianity and science, etc.

New visions

I will take the concept of peace as an example: a typical western definition is that peace equals “freedom from war or violence” (Oxford dictionary). Peace activists in the west (and indeed the world over) prefer the eastern view of peace as a state of accord, understanding, harmony, fellowship, tranquillity, serenity, order, a state of non violence, unaggressiveness and uncontentious behaviour, as a state of plenty, of health, of happiness, etc. That definition combines elements from different religious traditions, as a sort of inter-faith, operational and multi-faceted. The former (Oxford definition) understandably arises from the aftermath of two World Wars, at the end of which peacetime was celebrated, after 80 million unnecessary deaths!

Religion and secularism

We must differentiate here between lip-service to religion (or the blind practices of formulae/rites, whether in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism or any of the hundreds of new faiths-sects-religions) and being a true believer in search of meaning to life, essential values to live by and the intimate relationship with God. This is a paramount difference between wearers of the signs and badges of a religion and believers, who are always humble in the face of the immensity of the universe and the universal.

Modern society is fast replacing all references to revelations from sacred books or guidance for life obtained from divine inspiration by a huge set of secular laws, rules and regulations. But these belong to two different spheres, which can certainly co-exist. For example, most states are secular, meaning that affairs are conducted without reference to one or any religion. This is the case in France, India, the USSR of old, China, Mauritius, according to the Constitution. But surely and certainly those men and women elected or appointed to do the job can be (and should be) people of faith (not necessarily religious people).

The difficulty arises when a state defines itself as an Islamic State (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan), a Jewish state, a Hindu kingdom (Nepal until recently), a Buddhist one (Tibet, until 1950) or any of the numerous Christian kingdoms of Europe from the middle ages into the 20th century, with sequels showing in the struggle between Catholic and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

So, homage must be paid to movements like those of Mother Teresa or that of the Brahma Kumaris. Each is inspired by one religion (Christianity and Hinduism respectively) but are universal in their openness to all and service to all.

We therefore see the necessity of inter-faith as well as inter-cultural dialogue in modern society. This dialogue can be a determinant factor for the ability of communities to live in peace and harmony, especially important in multi-religious societies like ours and in recent years in very many societies.

As a man of science, I am searching for truth, I try to understand the mechanisms and processes operating in nature. I do this purely by using the experimental method of observation, detached, neutral objective. Such is the scientific method, the example par excellence of secularism. It is only at this price that science can produce results which can then be applied to improve the quality of life of man. As a believer, I have neither nightmares nor conflicts between my work as a scientist and the grace of God in my life. The key word that comes to mind is complementarity.

The spiritual dimension is an integral part of true and complete education, no doubt about that! How does this operate in school systems is an ongoing and difficult subject. Extremes are regrettable, such as in French state schools where religion is ”out-of-bounds” or in some religious schools where adhesion to a given faith is a must. In both cases faith (which is a way of life “proposed”, not “imposed’ ) can develop freely. The experiment conducted by some of us (including Henri Souchon) in the QEC of the 1970s is still vivid in the minds of many: side by side with sectoral religious education (each one in her own faith), we devised and proposed courses in the encounter of religions, an attempt to learn the “facts and deeper meaning” of the religions of others. This was in a small way a good beginning to inter-faith dialogue. Where has this dialogue reached now?

Labels: culture, interfaith, Michael Atchia, peace, religion, science, society

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The Dilemma of Spiritual Healing

If only my mother would remember that she's God's perfect child--and so is her doctor--maybe she wouldn't feel so guilty.

By Susan Sherman

I lay in the dark with a headache, praying to know that it wasn't real. My mother told me I was God's perfect child, made in His likeness. I was His reflection, she said, like an image in a mirror. I couldn't have a headache because God couldn't have a headache. I fell asleep, and the headache lifted. I was three.

Spiritual healing has long been part of my family on my mother's side. It was normal for my mother and grandmother, who had continued the family drift away from Judaism, to talk about illness as error, an illusion, to "un-see" anything negative because God could never have made it. My mother followed my grandmother into Christian Science, the religion founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy, a New England woman who was healed of a serious injury by studying the way Jesus healed--seeing the allness of God and the nothingness of evil.

Although the church does not directly prohibit anyone from getting medical help, in reality there's a good deal of social pressure not to seek it. If you're under a doctor's care, you can't visit a Christian Science practitioner or hold church office, and you feel guilty even sitting in church or doing the weekly lesson readings. You're not radically relying on God, and it's your own fault that you're not being healed. As Mrs. Eddy writes, "If patients fail to experience the healing power of Christian Science, and think they can be benefited by certain ordinary physical methods of medical treatment, then the Mind-physician should give up such cases, and leave invalids free to resort to whatever other systems they fancy will afford relief." (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures page 443). Emphasis on "think" and "fancy."

For years, we had many healings in my family. And sometimes we didn't.
My grandmother died of breast cancer in 1968. Years later, at age 67, my mother developed lymphoma. When the tumor grew noticeable, she went to a doctor, who told her unequivocally, "This is fatal if not treated." Fearing to go through what my grandmother did, she was treated medically. She didn't die. But her guilt at becoming ill in the first place (through the sin of false belief), and then resorting to materia medica for healing, brought on a serious depression and panic disorder. It was an agitated kind of depression that raged for five years, wreaking as much havoc in her life and ours as the cancer. The depression abated for 12 years, then returned full force following another treatable bout of cancer this year.

My mom has tried desperately to get her faith back. At times she will renounce medicine, then obsessively worry about minor symptoms and go to the doctor. She will take half-doses of antidepressants and then read her Bible. She will call her Christian Science practitioner many times a day, but the words offered by this saintly woman don't sink in. Swinging back and forth between medicine and spiritual healing, never feeling confident in either, she has become undone by guilt. Constantly denying and "un-seeing" material conditions are too great a strain on her mind.

This story doesn't have a happy ending (yet). But for me, it does have a big lesson. I've learned that having to choose "either/or" cuts us off from the manifold blessings of God. I believe now that God created us, body and soul; that God created many kinds of healers--physicians, nurses, medical researchers, massage therapists, medical intuitives, acupuncturists, and psychotherapists, as well as purely spiritual healers. Why is it OK to accept all the scientific advances of the 21st century, except in the field of medicine? Because Jesus was evolved enough to heal without drugs? Jesus also said that the lilies of the field don't toil or spin. Yet we still work and wear clothing.

I believe in spiritual healing, and sometimes I can get to a deep place within, that place that I first located as a child when I had a headache. I get there by closing my eyes and picturing myself diving down, down into a vast ocean beneath the pain, and just resting there in God's arms. I call it "my place of healing." But if I can't get there, I don't feel guilty about reaching for an aspirin.

Labels: Christian Science, health, illness, Susan Sherman

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New field of neurotheology opens door for scientific study of belief

By Hannah Elliott
Published August 8, 2007

NEW YORK (ABP) -- If scientists could chart physical changes that happen in the brain during prayer, would it mean that prayer is something that happens only in the mind? And if brain scans show unique molecular activity during meditation, does that mean all religious belief is imaginary?

Scientists -- and some theologians -- are studying those questions using neurotheology, an emerging discipline that addresses the correlation between neurological and spiritual activity.

Some say neurotheology proves that God created the brain. Others believe "the brain created the god." At the root of the debate, some say, is the threat that faith could be reduced to nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain.

The coupling of science and belief has become increasingly prominent in popular media. Time and Newsweek magazines have both recently run long stories exploring the newly recognized discipline. And current studies at Wheaton College, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania are using neuroimaging to locate brain regions activated during emotional or spiritual events.

The quest is to find a neurological basis for out-of-body or enlightenment experiences, including trances, time perception, oneness with the universe and altered states of consciousness. But neurotheology can also help explain the more mundane habits of a religious life: prayer, beliefs, meditation and senses of the presence of the supernatural.

Paul Simmons, a clinical professor of family and community medicine at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, said the brain is intimately related to relationships with and perceptions of God -- so neurotheology is a good way to help theologians use all of their capacities to study God. The underlying question, the former pastor and ethics professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary said, is whether that experience is "just a mental state or have you gotten in touch with a transcendence?"

"Our brain is basic to all that we are, all that we understand, all that we perceive," Simmons said. "We can't avoid that in theology any longer. At least, we must be aware of the fact that many of our claims made about religion are actually based on science."

Theories about correlations between the brain and beliefs are nothing new. Historians have speculated that figures like Joan of Arc, Saint Teresa of Avila, Fedor Dostoevsky and Marcel Proust had aliments like epilepsy, which in turn led to their obsessions with the spiritual world.

Modern scientists differentiate between the brain and mind by defining the brain as physical and chemical, while the mind has to do with thoughts and ideas.

Plato's ideas focused on both the brain and the mind. Aristotle argued that God is pure mind, and since people have a brain they can think "God thoughts," Simmons said. "Aristotle thought you could think pure thoughts and thus get right in touch with God."

Beginning in the 1950s, scientists used electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to record electrical activity in the brain. By placing electrodes on the scalp, they could study brain waves concurring with elevated states of consciousness. In the 1980s, they stimulated different areas of the brain with a magnetic field, causing subjects to claim senses of ethereal presences in the room.

The first modern book published on the subject came in 1994. Called Neurotheology: Virtual Religion in the 21st Century, it was promoted in a theological journal called Zygon. And Newsweek recently citied a 1998 book -- published by MIT Press, no less -- called Zen and the Brain. Since then, scholarly journals have devoted issues to religion and the mind, including studies using data from meditating Buddhist monks and praying Franciscan nuns.

The reason for the renewed interest, according to neurotheology pioneer Brian Alston, is that the people writing about it have changed the terms of the field. This popular type of neurotheology focuses on beliefs, he said.

Studies since the 1960s have consistently reported that between 30 percent and 40 percent of people have felt "very close to a powerful, spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself," Newsweek reported. According to the Gallup Poll, 53 percent of Americans say they have experienced a "sudden religious awakening or insight" at least once.

But has the fascination with the brain and belief come from an oversimplified version of neurotheology? Some have criticized Time's article as equating science with Darwinism and religion with God -- over-generalized definitions for such complex subjects.

"It's oversimplified, but at the same time, there's a large kernel of truth in there," Simmons said. "The issue is whether a religious experience is a matter of brain circuits or God. Religiously inclined people will say, 'Well, that's God using our brain manifesting [itself] in brain activity.'"

Alston, who wrote What is Neurotheology?, said popular writing has certainly oversimplified the dialogue between science and theology. Theology does not just deal with the religious and the spiritual -- it has much broader implications, he said.

The word "neurobelief" -- instead of "neurotheology" -- is a better way to characterize the discipline, Alston said. Neurotheology should represent beliefs that are broader than just religious and spiritual, he added. It should represent beliefs that are cultural and political as well.

"What neurotheology tries to do is say, 'Look, here are ways that all this works together. Instead of seeing these things as enemies, let's look at these as things that can relate,'" he said. Part of the issue, he said, is that, "in the Western world, we have created a dichotomy between what we consider to be physical and what we consider to be spiritual."

That divide has been implicated in some of the criticisms of neurotheology. The key problem with neurotheology is its attempt to unify two strikingly different perspectives on human beings within one discipline, Alston wrote in a paper presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association last year.

Some critics believe that even if neuroscience and theology are brought together within the discipline of neurotheology, the differences will inevitably lead to one discipline -- namely theology -- dominating the other, Alston wrote.

David Wulf, a psychologist at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, has written that religious experience is actually normal brain functions happening under duress -- not communication with God.

Another prominent thinker, Massimo Pigliucci, a professor of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has published essays questioning the discipline itself. In an essay titled "Neurotheology: A Rather Skeptical Perspective," Pigliucci wrote that he had two problems with neurotheology: "First, it is no theology at all. Theology is the study of the attributes of God.... [T]he neurological study of what happens to the brain during mystical experiences cannot tell us anything about God because all we can do is to measure neural patterns...."

The other problem, Pigliucci wrote, is that it violates Occam's razor, the rule of logic that what "can be done with fewer...is done in vain with more. That is, when faced with multiple hypotheses capable of explaining a given set of data, it is wise to start by considering the simplest ones, those that make the least unnecessary assumptions."

That logic would leave God out of the equation.

For scientists to conclude that "the self and the world at large are in fact contained within and possibly created by the reality of [an] Absolute Unitary Being" leaves the "boundaries of both science and philosophy to plunge into pure metaphysical speculation," Pigliucci wrote.

If "we realize that mystical experiences originate from the same neurological mechanisms that underlie hallucinations ... I bet dollar to donut that the reality experienced by meditating Buddhists and praying nuns is entirely contained in their mind and is not a glimpse of a 'higher' realm, as tantalizing as that idea may be," he concluded.

Simmons called that criticism "on target." Neurotheology doesn't deal with theology as it is traditionally done -- trying to get religion and experience together with reasonable consistency, he said. Progress in the field will come mostly in mental health, he said.

Alston, who studied ethics and philosophy at Yale Divinity School, says criticism of neurotheology depends on who is receiving the information. Much of it has to do with the difference between the physical brain and the metaphysical mind. Some experts believe that ideas in the mind cause action, while others say chemicals in the brain cause action -- and if chemicals are altered in the brain, behaviors will change, Alston said.

Either way of thinking is okay, since neurotheologists aren't interested in changing firmly held beliefs, he said.

"What I'm trying to do with neurotheology is to explain that each of these has a way with relating to the subject matter," he said. "It once again depends on the standing point of a person in terms of if they're a biologist and what their tools are and if they are a psychologist and what their tools are."

And with the stakes so high in this new and complex discipline, there's likely to be no shortage of opinions from either camp.

Labels: brain, Brian Alston, Gallup Poll, God, Hannah Elliott, neurotheology, prayer, science, spirituality

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Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Survey Reveals Biggest Spiritual Challenges for Christian Parents

By Audrey Barrick
Christian Post Reporter
Sun, Aug. 05 2007

The biggest spiritual challenges Christian parents identified are related to the spiritual development of their children, a new survey found.

Only four out of every 10 Christian parents of children between the ages of 3 and 18 said they do not face any spiritual challenges in their life, according to The Barna Group. Among those who do, 14 percent said the biggest personal challenge related to faith is raising moral children with a strong faith, which was the most common response.

Ten percent identified the need to personally invest more time in religious activities, such as reading the Bible or praying, as their greatest faith challenge.

When asked to rate the significance of eight specific challenges related to their faith, most do not perceive themselves to face major spiritual challenges.

Only 34 percent said having enough time to devote to their faith was a major challenge; and 30 percent said helping their children to become more spiritual was a major challenge.

"Our studies show that the faith principles and practices that a child absorbs by age thirteen boldly shapes their spirituality for the duration of their life,” said George Barna, who directed the survey. “Parents have a greater impact on that process than anyone else.

"This was a study exclusively of Christian parents with young children in their household. Given companion surveys showing that such parents often convey dismay over the eroding cultural environment for raising children, and how difficult parenting is these days, we anticipated a broader emphasis upon the challenges related to bringing up spiritually whole and healthy children.”

Evangelical Christian parents were three times more likely than other Christian segments to identify responding to the declining morals and values of society as a major challenge. They were also more likely than other Christian parents to feel they failed to devote enough time to their faith.

Among other challenges identified, 23 percent overall said enabling their spouse to be more spiritual; 21 percent said growing spiritually, personally; 20 percent identified understanding what's in the Bible; 19 percent named finding a church or faith community that's right for them; 18 percent said getting a sense of direction from God; and 18 percent identified practicing the faith principles they had learned.

"In addition to making parenting a 24/7 priority, we found that parents must have an authentic and vibrant faith in order to provide meaningful spiritual guidance to their children," said Barna. "Children rarely embrace spiritual principles and practices that their parents fail to demonstrate in their lifestyle.”

Hispanics were the most likely ethnic group to identify challenges related to parenting and family matters with one out of every three Hispanic parents listing the challenge. Meanwhile, only one out of six white parents and one out of eight black parents listed the same challenge.

Black parents were much more likely than others to name faith-driven behavioral challenges. And white parents were much more likely than others to list participating in more religious activity as their major spiritual challenge. At the same time, white parents were substantially less likely than parents of other ethnic groups to indicate that growing spiritually and understanding the Bible were major challenges.

Other findings showed that notional Christians – those who are not born again but consider themselves to be Christian – were twice as likely as born-again parents to list attending church more often as a major challenge.

Regionally, Christian parents in the Northeast were the least likely to feel challenged to have enough time to devote to their faith and to feel that growing spiritually was a major personal challenge.

Those most likely to identify helping their children grow spiritually as a major challenge were parents in the South. Meanwhile, parents in the western states were among the least likely to feel that growing spiritually and finding a viable church or faith community were major challenges.

Christian parents in the Midwest were the least likely to feel that helping children grow spiritually was a major challenge; least likely to identify exhibiting spiritual-driven behavior as an issue; and least likely to say they had no faith-related or spiritual issues facing them.

“Many of the same people who claim that their faith is very important to them and that they are absolutely committed to Christianity also say that they face no spiritual challenges in life," Barna noted. "Many other adults are only vaguely aware of such challenges, and do not put much energy into addressing them.

"Americans focus on what they consider to be the most important matters; faith maturity is not one of them. The dominant spiritual change that we have seen – Americans becoming less engaged in matters of faith – helps to explain the surging secularization of our culture.”

The survey was conducted in October and November 2006 among 601 adults who described themselves as Christian.

Labels: Audrey Barrick, Barna Group, children, Christian, faith, family, parents, spirituality

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Geneva seminar opens global windows on 'religion'

7 Aug 2007

The chapel near Geneva, in which young adults from five continents gathered for an early morning meditation, seemed an unusual place of worship. The light through the stained glass windows shone on to a set of religious symbols as disparate as a simple cross, Orthodox icons, and a drum from an African Christian community - writes Annegret Kapp from the WCC.

The songs sung, the Bible text read by an American, and the text's interpretation by another Christian from Hungary did not link the worship to any denominational tradition.

But this ecumenical way of worshipping was not the most unusual thing about the moments of spirituality in Bossey at the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Institute in the Swiss countryside, from where Mount Blanc and the French Alps are visible from one side of Lake Geneva. The young people at worship were also more diverse than the spread of worldwide Christianity normally represented at the institute. Some participants wore scarves or kippots (yarmulkas) on their heads.

A month-long seminar in July 2007, entitled "Building an Interfaith Community", brought together 21 young Jews, Muslims and Christians from around the world. The annual seminar, hosted by the institute, the WCC's centre for ecumenical study and training, gave the participants the opportunity to get to know each other, including each other's spirituality, and to challenge and overcome stereotypes.

Not all the morning devotions took place in the centre's chapel. One conference room was equipped as an improvised mosque, another as a synagogue. While one faith group organised and led the moments of prayer each day, those from the other two groups were invited to assist and participate at the level with which they felt comfortable.

"Our goal is not to mix our religions and build a new global one but to understand each other’s identity better," said Morris Gagloev, a Russian Orthodox Christian.

For Steven Bell, who is awaiting ordination in 2008 as a Roman Catholic priest with the North American order of the Paulist Fathers, the experiencing of another spirituality helped to strengthen his own prayer life. He said he was impressed by the richness of song and chant in Judaism, and by the discipline of Muslim prayer.

Valeria Gatti, also Catholic, from Peru, had a similar view. "If you see your friend approaching God the way he or she does, that is so beautiful," she said.

Friendships forged allowed for frank discussions during lectures and workshops, even when touching on difficult issues like politics and gender.

The fact that the young adults lived together for a month, during which they shared moments at the beach down at the lake, prepared meals in the kitchen, and spent hours in the conference room, was essential to what some called "a unique experience".

In addition to personal and spiritual encounters, the students learned from each other in the seminar’s academic sessions, with group discussions often continuing until 9:00 p.m.

These gatherings drew on the presence of local religious experts from the three Abrahamic faiths, and included lecturers from the universities of Geneva and Lausanne; international specialists also took part.

The experts' diverse backgrounds shed light on divisions existing within each faith group, and introduced students to both Sunni and Shiite Islam, orthodox and reformed Judaism, and a variety of Christian denominations.

The participants themselves had a wealth of experience to share as well.

Following a presentation on "Affirming and living faith identity in a pluralistic world from a Christian perspective" by Rima Barsoum, who works on Christian-Muslim relations at the WCC, Saba Wallace, a participant from the two-percent Christian minority in Pakistan, asked, "How can dialogue happen when partners are not equal in any sense?"

Wallace, who works for non-governmental organisations in the areas of advocacy and interreligious dialogue, said she came to the seminar with many such questions, which she has no chance to raise in her usual context. With her multiple identities, being Pakistani, female and Christian, she feels frustrated and looked down upon both in the West and in her home country.

Gatti, on the other hand, came to see that her native Peru's dominant Christian context offers hardly any opportunity for inter-religious encounters. "This experience is like a pair of new glasses," she commented.

These participants' stories make it clear why Ioan Sauca, the director of the Ecumenical Institute, seeks to provide a "safe space" for young people from countries where interfaith relations are not always harmonious, to discuss their concerns.

Did participants succeed in building an interfaith community?

Eden Curtasan, a computer science student and collaborator of the Rumanian Muftiad, the traditional Muslim minority of Turkish-Tatars, was sceptical about speaking of community too fast in the way that politicians, he said, often do.

Still, Curtasan was positively surprised by the programme. "I actually came expecting some boring peace 'blah-blah' but finally I couldn’t even touch the books I brought because the programme was too interesting," he said.

The biggest surprise, said Bell, was that young people of all three religions face the same dilemma.

"They discover their spirituality but it is not played out in the religion's institutional building - the mosque, the church, the synagogue - because that is so steeped in traditional values which don't mesh with their personal experience," he said.

Annegret Kapp is the WCC's Web editor. This is an edited version of a story she wrote for the WCC. Link to original story: www.oikoumene.org/

[With grateful acknowledgements to ENI. Ecumenical News International is jointly sponsored by the World Council of Churches, the Lutheran World Federation, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, and the Conference of European Churches]

Labels: Annegret Kapp, ecumenism, Geneva, interfaith, religion, youth

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Young adults aren't sticking with church

TO GO OR NOT TO GO

Seventy percent of Protestants age 18 to 30 drop out of church before age 23 and give multiple reasons for their departure.
Why they leave

• Wanted a break from church: 27%

• Found church members judgmental or hypocritical: 26%

• Moved to college: 25%

• Tied up with work: 23%

• Moved too far away from home church: 22%

• Too busy: 22%

• Felt disconnected to people at church: 20%

• Disagreed with church's stance on political/social issues: 18%

• Spent more time with friends outside church: 17%

• Only went before to please others: 17%

Reasons cited by the 30% who kept attending church:

• It's vital to my relationship with God: 65%

• It helps guide my decision in everyday life: 58%

• It helps me become a better person: 50%

• I am following a family member's example: 43%

• Church activities were a big part of my life: 35%

• It helps in getting through a difficult time: 30%

• I fear living without spiritual guidance: 24%

Source: LifeWay Research survey of 1,023 Protestants, conducted April and May 2007. Margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points

By Cathy Lynn Grossman,
USA TODAY

Protestant churches are losing young adults in "sobering" numbers, a survey finds.
Seven in 10 Protestants ages 18 to 30 — both evangelical and mainline — who went to church regularly in high school said they quit attending by age 23, according to the survey by LifeWay Research. And 34% of those said they had not returned, even sporadically, by age 30. That means about one in four Protestant young people have left the church.

The statistics are based on a survey of 1,023 Protestants ages 18 to 30 who said they had attended church at least twice a month for at least one year during high school. LifeWay did the survey in April and May. Margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Few of those surveyed had kind words for fellow Christians when they reflected on how they saw church life in the four years after high school.

Just over half (51%) of Protestant young people surveyed (both the church dropouts and those who stayed on in church after age 22) saw church members as "caring" or had other positive descriptions, such as "welcoming" (48%) or "authentic" (42%).

Among dropouts, nearly all (97%) cited life changes, such as a move. Most (58%) were unhappy with the people or pastor at church. More than half (52%) had religious, ethical or political reasons for quitting.

Dropouts were more than twice as likely than those who continued attending church to describe church members as judgmental (51% for dropouts, 24% for those who stayed), hypocritical (44% vs. 20%) or insincere (41% vs. 19%)

The news was not all bad: 35% of dropouts said they had resumed attending church regularly by age 30. An additional 30% attended sporadically. Twenty-eight percent said "God was calling me to return to the church."

The survey found that those who stayed with or returned to church grew up with both parents committed to the church, pastors whose sermons were relevant and engaging, and church members who invested in their spiritual development.

These findings fit with findings by other experts.

"Unless religious leaders take younger adults more seriously, the future of American religion is in doubt," says Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow in After the Baby Boomers, due in stores in September.

The proportion of young adults identifying with mainline churches, he says, is "about half the size it was a generation ago. Evangelical Protestants have barely held their own."

In research for an upcoming book, unChristian, Barna Research Group director David Kinnaman found that Christians in their 20s are "significantly less likely to believe a person's faith in God is meant to be developed by involvement in a local church. This life stage of spiritual disengagement is not going to fade away."

About 52% of American adults identify themselves as Protestant or other non-Catholic Christian denominations, according to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey. That's down from 60% in 1990.

Labels: Cathy Lynn Grossman, church, LifeWay Research, protestants, youth

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Sunday, August 05, 2007

Why have sex? Survey collects 237 reasons

Motivations range from greed to God

By Judy Peres
August 1, 2007

If you think people have sex for pleasure and for procreation, you're right. They also have sex to get rid of a headache, to celebrate a special occasion, to get a promotion and to feel closer to God.

New research published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior has come up with a list of 237 reasons that motivate people to have sex.

Cindy Meston, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the lead author of the paper, said most people assume there are a few simple reasons for having sex: "It feels good, you're in love or you want to have a child. We found that people are having sex for lots of other reasons."

Knowing that, she said, could boost sex education, help devise more effective strategies for preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and lead to improved treatments for people with sexual problems.

"You need to know why people are having sex if you're trying to put into place a safe-sex program," Meston said. "If you assume people have sex because they're in the heat of the moment, then you tell them to carry condoms. But if they're doing it for revenge or because they want to enhance their social status, that will require a different strategy."

Meston and co-author David Buss conducted their research in two stages. First, they asked a group of more than 400 students and volunteers to simply list "all the reasons you can think of why you, or someone you have known, has engaged in sexual intercourse in the past." That produced 715 reasons. After deleting identical or very similar entries, the researchers were left with 237.

Some were "pretty shocking," Meston said, such as: "I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease." She said she was also surprised that some people said they had sex "to get closer to God."

"Most of the literature shows that religious people have more sexual problems," she said. "But several people endorsed the idea that religion and sexuality were actually closely linked."

In the second stage of the research, they asked 1,500 other students to rate how important each of the 237 motivations was in their own sexual behavior.

The students were asked to indicate how frequently each reason had led them to engage in sexual intercourse in the past, on a scale from 1 for never to 5 for all the time. Those who had not had intercourse (27 percent of the women and 32 percent of the men) were asked to indicate the likelihood that each of the reasons would lead them to have sex in the future.

Most gave the usual reasons for having sex. "I was attracted to the person," "It feels good" and "I wanted to show my affection" were high on the lists of both men and women.

Labels: Archives of Sexual Behavior, Cindy Meston, God, Judy Peres, religion, sex

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Interview With Jeffrey J. Kripal, Author of Esalen

by Paul Comstock
August 1st, 2007

Jeffrey J. Kripal is a Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University. His most recent book is Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.

I know you’ve just written an entire book on the subject, but is there a short answer to the question “What is Esalen?”

No, there’s not. And I say that in the book. One can, of course, come up with a sound-bite, which would go something like this: “Esalen is an institute founded in 1962 in Big Sur, California, to explore and promote the Jeffrey J. Kripal.” But that leaves begging the question of “the human potential.”

I’d like to bring out some of the history and people of Esalen through the ideas that seemed to sprout from there. Let’s begin with the phrase you just alluded to, and is usually associated with Esalen: “the human potential movement.”

The human potential movement, as a phrase at least, was coined by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, in 1965. It was based on both the civil rights movement, on which George had reported as an award-winning journalist, and what the novelist Aldous Huxley had called the “human potentialities,” a phrase which appeared on the covers of the first Esalen brochures. By human potentialities, Huxley and Esalen meant to refer to all those aspects of the human being that have not been generally developed in western educational practices and culture but are nevertheless quite real. It was Abraham Maslow who gave the Esalen actors a vocabulary and psychology to express how such potentialities might be “actualized.” Hence Maslow’s notions of the self-actualized person and the peak experience.

The subtitle of your book: “The Religion of No Religion.”

I wish this were mine. I wish I had come up with this. But I didn’t. I got it from Frederic Spiegelberg, the charismatic professor of comparative religion at Stanford University who first inspired Michael Murphy with his creative readings of great religious figures, including and especially Sri Aurobindo. The Religion of No Religion was the title of Spiegelberg’s first book. It went back to a natural mystical experience he had in a Dutch wheat field in 1917 as a young theology student. Basically, he experienced a form of what the Canadian doctor and lover of Whitman’s poetry, Richard Bucke, called cosmic consciousness. A few minutes after his own experience of such a consciousness, Spiegelberg came upon a little gray church on his walk. The church horrified him, mostly because he couldn’t understand how such a cosmic Godhead could ever be contained within the physical and doctrinal walls of such a building, or indeed, by any single tradition. Because of such experiences and thoughts, Spiegelberg was both a great admirer of the religious traditions and a great critic of them. He recognized that the religions reveal something of divinity, but he also insisted that they distorted this divinity to the extent that they separated the Godhead from the natural world and claimed some monopoly on its unfathomable richness and mystery. Hence his call for a “religion of no religion,” that is, a way of being religious that is not bound to any single tradition and that, perhaps most of all, appreciates the fundamentally paradoxical relationship that exists between the natural and divine orders. I hear strong echoes of Spiegelberg’s gnosis today in a phrase like “I am spiritual but not religious.”

“No one captures the flag.”

This was one of dozens of Esalen mottos or sayings (others included “Mother Esalen permits,” “We hold our dogmas lightly,” “Spooks run the place,” and so on). It meant that there would be no single religious authority at Esalen, that there would be no single guru, as it were. Basically, it was a colloquial and administrative expression of “the religion of no religion.” On the positive side, the result was a wide-open space of religious experimentation. On the negative side, the result was a certain difficulty in forming consensus and community. Real pluralism is tough to manage. It’s like herding cats.

Atman, Brahman and “Atman = Brahman”

These were the Sanskrit terms of Michael Murphy’s meditation. They come from the Upanishads, a set of canonical scriptural texts from the first millennium BCE. Brahman can be translated, very loosely, as “cosmic essence”; atman, quite literally as “the Self” (the usually unconscious spiritual center, core soul, or divine spark, as distinguished from the social ego). This desire to arrive finally at a deeper strata of reality beyond the subjective and objective levels was later translated at Esalen into a thousand different forms, including but by no means restricted to: an interest in psychical phenomena, a desire to unite religion and science, an abiding interest in the physics of consciousness (or mysticism and quantum physics), a decade-long symposia (still running) on the survival of bodily death, and so on.

“The enlightenment of the body”

This is my phrase, whose literal terms I borrowed (and altered slightly) from the teachings of a contemporary Tantric guru named Adi Da, who wrote a quite amazing book back in the late 70s entitled The Enlightenment of the Whole Body. As I employ the phrase in my own book, it does not refer to the teachings of Adi Da, but to that whole stream of practices and teachings that have run through Esalen that turn to the body, and often the sexual body, to encounter the divine. It is an intentionally jarring or paradoxical phrase designed to break down and finally collapse another dualism of the religions: that posited between body and soul, spirit and sex, God and cosmos. A full enlightenment, a mature spirituality here at least is an enlightenment of the body, that is, a fundamentally paradoxical religious experience of the universe as God’s body. We are back to Frederic in the wheat field. I am anyway.

Tantra and “Tantric transmission”

This is the one “altered category” I employ that does not reflect the self-understandings of Esalen. I use it to analyze how the counterculture, and Esalen in particular, embraced certain aspects of traditional Asian religions (which are often socially and sexually conservative, to put it mildly) but refused or rejected others. Basically, I argue that whereas the first half of the twentieth century saw American intellectuals embracing highly ascetic or world-denying Asian traditions (like Advaita Vedanta or Theravada Buddhism), the second half, catalyzed by psychedelics and the sexual revolution, saw a dramatic shift or “flip” over to the embrace of erotic, transgressive, and world-affirming traditions (like Shakta Hinduism, Chinese Taoism, Zen Buddhism, etc.). This, of course, is a generalization, and there are many exceptions, but there is nevertheless much truth here, I think.

“Evolutionary mysticism”

Michael Murphy lost his Christian faith to Darwin at Stanford. He then found it again, still at Stanford, through Sri Aurobindo’s employment of evolution as the centerpiece of his own “life divine.” For Murphy, evolution is the life of the divine cosmos expressed first on astrophysical, then biological, then cultural, and now occult or spiritual levels. Evolution, as metaphor, as biological science, as general worldview, became one of the key terms of the human potential movement. It is again a kind of religion of no religion (to the extent that it is bound by no traditional religions, and indeed offends many of them). Theologically speaking, it is a panentheistic vision of divinity that sees the universe as an evolving embodiment of an involved Godhead. The same vision is particularly interested in siddhis, a Sanskrit term for “powers” that include what we in the modern West would classify under parapsychological or psychical categories. Murphy, following Aurobindo, sees such psychical phenomena as “evolutionary buds,” that is, as early signs of the species’ future evolution. You would not be wrong to see a certain X-Men scenario here. I have anyway.

Finally, how strong an effect has Esalen had on American culture and even world culture? And do you see it having any kind of permanent influence on the way society will evolve?

My own sense is that Esalen has had a profound effect on American culture, but usually indirectly. One of the things I noticed researching the book is how many of the figures who got their start there or went through there ended up writing not one, not two, but three or four books, each of which then had their own cultural life, as it were. So the textual history of the place is immense. There are also all those behind-the-scenes activist roles that Esalen has played over the decades, from being one of the nodal points of the counterculture in the 60s, through its citizen diplomacy efforts with the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s (which were really quite major and very successful), to its catalytic and supportive role in the ecological movement. I am also terribly impressed with Esalen’s ability and commitment to anomalous research agendas, foremost among them rigorous psychical research, a subject which is still more or less “repressed” in both our public and intellectual cultures.

As for the future, I do not have any crystal ball, and I am not a political scientist, but my own personal hope is that American culture will “swing back” from our present right-wing fundamentalist moment to something more liberal and sane, not, mind you, to a 60s-style counterculture (there were too many casualties there), but to a vibrant public culture that is much more open to radical intellectual and spiritual inquiry, that is metaphysically deeper, and that is genuinely pluralistic and free—basically, a space not bound by the religious certainties and absolutisms that now rule so much of our world. In essence, I share Professor Spiegelberg’s dream of a mystical “religion of no religion.”

Paul Comstock is the Editor of the California Literary Review.

Labels: culture, Esalen, human potential, Jeffrey J. Kripal, Paul Comstock, religion

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How do you pray?

Aug 02, 2007
By Terry Lee Goodrich/McClatchy Newspapers
FORT WORTH, Texas

Prayer is getting a lot of attention these days: in polls, in labyrinths, in conferences to fine-tune prayer skills. Bloggers muse about such matters as their favorite postures for praying. Some Web sites post prayer requests.

No matter how often people pray or to whom, when it comes to private prayer, "people say that the most recent time they prayed, it was about family," said Christopher Bader, a researcher in a random survey about religion in America.

The survey of 1,721 people, released by Baylor University and the Gallup Organization, showed that three-fourths of Americans pray at least once a week. More than one-fourth prayed several times a day. Of those who prayed regularly, 77 percent prayed for relatives.

"We couldn't get too specific about what people pray about, like, 'I need to get rid of this bunion on my foot' or 'I need to get this job,'" Bader said. "But we found that the least likely thing they were to pray about is what is listed as a prayer concern in a church program or newsletter. People are thinking about their issues."

He said researchers got a surprise when they asked to whom people prayed.

"Given the evangelical focus on Jesus and the rhetoric about having a personal relationship with him, only 5 percent said they prayed to Jesus," Bader said. "Most prayed to God and sometimes to Jesus. But when they pray, they are thinking more broadly, about the big boss, so to speak."

Fourteen respondents noted that God and Jesus are, according to the New Testament's explanation of the Trinity, the same, along with the Holy Spirit.

Depending on religious affiliation or the lack of it, people also prayed to the Virgin Mary, Buddha, Allah, angels, saints, spirits and "a higher power."

"Nine percent said, 'No one special,'" Bader said.

Here is a look at the prayer lives of some in the United States.

Religion survey

The Baylor Institute for Studies on Religion asked about 400 questions in the survey. They included whether respondents think God takes sides in politics, what God's personality is like, whether they watch TV shows like "Touched by an Angel," even whether they believe in the paranormal and such creatures as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.

On the matter of prayer, the survey found:

Women are more likely than men to pray several times a day.

People with high incomes are less likely to pray several times a day than those with low incomes.

About 45 percent of respondents say a table grace on certain occasions; 19 percent do so at all meals.

Senior citizens are more likely than younger people to pray often.

About 53 percent of respondents pray about world affairs.

About 28 percent pray for financial security.

When it came to prayer by religious affiliation and tradition, black Protestants outdid any other group: 74 percent of those surveyed said they pray once or more a day.

Labels: Baylor University, Christopher Bader, Gallup Poll, God, prayer, religion, Terry Lee

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New keys to religion

Posted on Sat, Aug. 04, 2007

By MELISSA VARGAS
Star-Telegram staff writer

Large and small congregations in Fort Worth, Arlington and Northeast Tarrant County are beginning to join social networking sites to help bridge the Sunday-to-Sunday gap for members. Even more are creating their own Web pages in an attempt to appeal to a younger audience and make themselves more accessible.

Fellowship Web-site users can submit prayer requests, get more information on the church and watch excerpts of sermons and video blogs by the Rev. Ed Young. Some are linked through his Web page, Edyoung.com, or trimmed to present on YouTube. One YouTube sermonette had been viewed 6,282 times in just five weeks.

Sites like Mychurch.org, modeled after Facebook and MySpace, are slowly popping up to cater to younger, more computer-savvy users who spend time on the Internet to communicate with friends.

Online in numbers

More than 141 million Americans use the Internet, according to a 2006 survey by Pew Internet. Of those, 30 percent were using the Internet for religious or spiritual information.

The study found "that the Internet has become a vital force in many faith communities," the report states.

Religion researcher George Barna found that people are warming up to the idea of "cyberfaith." Currently, the most popular spiritual-related activities online are listening to archived religious teachings, reading "devotionals" and buying religious products and resources, according to a Barna nationwide survey in 2000 of 1,017 adults, 605 teenagers and 604 Protestant pastors.

Churches are vigorously adapting to the trend, and many local congregations such as St. Michael's Catholic Church in Bedford and Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth maintain Web pages and offer podcasts and e-mail contact with clergy.

Some religious leaders believe an online presence could replace the church experience for many congregants.

"By the end of the decade, we will have in excess of 10 percent of our population who rely upon the Internet for their entire spiritual experience," Barna wrote in his research. "Some of them will be individuals who have not had a connection with a faith community, but millions of others will be people who drop out of the physical church in favor of the cyberchurch."

Mychurch.org

The idea for Mychurch.org was sparked one Sunday morning when Suh and his wife were sitting in church and realized they didn't know any other parishioners.

Launched in September, the social networking site is viewed 3 million times a month, with 200,000 unique visitors, Suh said. Mychurch.org hosts 6,921 churches and 35,798 members worldwide. In Texas, 538 churches are registered, including a handful in the Dallas/Fort-Worth area.

Parishioners can search for their church by name or ZIP code and can connect with the pages of up to three churches. Once at the site, they can collect friends, share pictures and write blogs. Churches can even upload audio sermons, so people who couldn't make it to a service can listen to it.

As with other social-networking sites, Mychurch.org allows parishioners and church representatives to create their own personal profile on the site.

Cyberfaith

On mychurch.org, you can do the following:

Create a site for your church

Join a church's site

Communicate with your friends

Post and read others' blogs

Share your pictures

Coordinate church events

msanchez@star-telegram.com

Labels: Barna Group, church, information, Internet, Melissa Vargas, Pew survey

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Confidence in afterlife increases with age, study says

Saturday, August 4, 2007
JOURNAL WIRE REPORT

As Americans get older, their confidence in an afterlife increases, according to a recent survey of people over 50 conducted by the AARP, the advocacy group for seniors.

Seventy-three percent of older people believe in life after death, and two-thirds of those believers say that confidence has grown with age, according to the survey.

But although 86 percent of respondents say that there is a heaven (70 percent believe in hell), they were split on what it looks like and if humans go there. Forty percent of those who believe say that heaven is a place, while 47 percent think heaven is a “state of being.”

“Americans see life after death as a very dynamic thing,” said Alan F. Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College, in the AARP article. “You don’t really hear about angels and wings, sitting on clouds playing melodies.... They talk about humor in the afterlife, continuing education, unifying families — like a retirement without financial needs.”

Although most people say they believe that heaven exists and about nine in 10 of them say they’ll end up there, they are less sure about others. People who believe in heaven say that an average of 64 percent of others will get there, too.

Other findings in the survey:

? Women are more likely to believe in an afterlife (80 percent) than men (64 percent).

? Income matters: Of those who believe in an afterlife, 90 percent of those earning $25,000 or less believe in heaven, compared to just 78 percent of people with an income of $75,000 and above.

? 29 percent of those who believe in a heaven think that one must “believe in Jesus Christ” to enter. Twenty-five percent believe “good people” go to heaven, and 10 percent think that everyone is admitted.

Labels: AARP, afterlife, heaven

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