TruthBook Religious News Blog

Oh My God: Peter Rodger Talks Religion

by Tom Allen | Published November 13, 2009

There is one universal question that never fails to stir up passion, curiosity, self-reflection and often wild controversy: “What is God?” Peter Rodger’s film, Oh My God, opening in a dozen cities nationwide this month, asks the question in 23 countries around the world and in the process weaves a tapestry that is both breathtaking and hopeful.

By every measure a skeptical Hollywood artist, Rodger sets out to confirm his suspicion that the world’s intractable conflicts are caused by religion and religious people. He poses the question “What is God?” with a bluntness that steels some viewers for a Religulous-type neo-atheist assault. But as the film unspools we are disarmed by Rodger’s intellectual honesty. He confounds expectations by allowing the warmth of his interviews with people of faith to emerge without the derision that we’ve come to expect in an age of mocking skepticism (with one or two entertaining exceptions). The result is a non-fiction feature that affirms faith despite the moviemaker’s lingering ambivalence, and offers the best Hollywood-driven opportunity for fruitful dialogue about transcendent issues in recent memory.

With wars indeed raging over religious differences, and evil and extremism garnering all the media’s attention, it is fair game to wonder whether the religious are causing much of the world’s strife. But to push beyond that toward reconciliation after discovering that people of faith are just like everybody else, well, that requires courage, especially in Hollywood. This is the landscape Oh My God navigates.

Rodger’s quest serves as both travelogue and mini-course in world religions, spanning the United States, Africa, the Middle East and Far East and covering a stunning array of human faith expressions. Through his revealing lens we meet everyday people, spiritual leaders and celebrities, believers, fanatics and atheists. In this personal, visceral and brutally honest non-fiction feature, Rodger—and the rest of us—are moved by the light and the truths his subjects reveal. We are invited closer and come away changed, enriched, and better for the experience.

Tom Allen (MM): What was your inspiration for making your epic documentary film, Oh My God?

Peter Rodger (PR): I was frustrated with the childish schoolyard mentality that permeates this world—I call it the “My God Is Greater Than Your God” syndrome—where you have grown men flying airplanes into buildings shouting “God is Great"—where you have the leader of the free world telling the BBC in 2003 that he invaded Iraq because God told him to—where you have the constitution of a country (Iran) that dictates that its supreme leader is God’s representative on earth—where you have young men and women blowing themselves up (and innocent others) to buy a place into heaven. None of these concepts made any sense to me. Does it matter what I believe? Does it matter what you believe? And what is this entity that goes by the name of God, which seems to bring about so much friction, hurt and pain? I decided to go around the world and ask people what they think.

MM: Why did you ask, ‘What is God?’ versus ‘Who is God?,’ since most of us personalize God in some form or another?

PR: I wanted to look at God as a concept and be as objective as possible. Referring to God as “who” is already putting the concept into the image of Man and therefore the objectivity becomes lost. I wanted to get as far away from preconceived ideas as possible to see what I would find. I felt that phrasing the question as “what is...” instead of “who is...” would make the interviewee immediately look at God from the outside-in rather than the inside-out, and thereby help quench preconceptions. I wanted the film to have a wide application and ultimately get to the question, “Did God create man, or did man create God?”

PR: MM: Did you set out with a goal in mind? Did you find a common theme in the answers you received?

PR: My goal was to find out what “God” means to people, and to determine whether religion and religious people were causing all the world’s problems. There was such commonality in all the responses that at one point I didn’t even think I had a film. It was frustrating because all the answers seemed to be the same from all over the world. “God is everything...” “God is the creator...” “God is in the birds and the bees in the trees...” “God is the energy that binds us all together....” etc., etc. And then it occurred to me that if there are all these placid descriptions, why is there so much turmoil, upheaval and war in the name of God? I realized that the problem in the world may be what Man does with “God”—how he uses it to control other men, how he twists the preaching of its prophets to create politicized clubs that serve his narrow ends. When I realized that it was Man creating God in his own image, I knew I had a film.

PR: MM: What criterion were set in place for which countries you visited and interviewees you sought? Did you try to interview leaders such as the Dalai Lama or the Pope?

PR: I had to have representation from as many diverse places as possible in order to capture as wide a spectrum of faith expressions as possible. You can’t, of course, make a film about who or what people think God is without going to the Holy Land. Indigenous cultures are also important, so Australia, the United States and Tribal Africa were a must. I wanted celebrities in the film to help navigate us through, so their geographical locations and schedules became a factor. Then Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims had to be represented somewhere, so that dictated India, Bali, Rome, Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, the Palestinian Territories, UK. I wanted the Mayans in there too, so Guatemala… Put all of that in a melting pot and I passed the buck over to American Express Platinum Travel and that’s how we made the schedule!

Most religious leaders turned us down—and I am very thankful that they did, because they are all “professional God people,” so all I would have gotten was politicized rhetoric and theology. The film is not about religion and its leaders. The film is about who or what people think God is. If I had the Dalai Lama in the film, I would’ve had to have the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and then Ali Khamenei and other religious people and my film would be really, really boring.?

MM: Is that why you decided to include so many everyday people and ‘man on the street’ insights?

PR: Yes, that is precisely the intent of the film—to find out what God means to the common man—not just professional God people, politicians and celebrities, but “normal” people.

MM: How were you able to capture such personal insights about God and religion from so many notable celebrities?

PR: I asked them one simple question: “What is God?” They did the rest. Then, based upon their answers, I would take it to the next level until we were yapping away. All of them were colorful and gracious and I am very grateful for the time and effort they contributed to the film.

MM: Is it true you that encountered some difficulties when you first set out to make this film and almost gave it up?

PR: My first trip in 2006 was to Morocco and I chose the same day to fly that the British terrorist plot to blow up planes with liquid explosives was foiled by Scotland Yard. I was flying out of LAX to Tangiers via Heathrow with all my camera equipment. Normally you take the important stuff as hand luggage—phone, camera, notes, lenses, computer, stock, etc., but this was the first day in aviation history that hand luggage was completely banned. We had to check everything into the hold and needless to say, I never saw my equipment, notes, or toothbrush again. Because of the delay, however, I hit on a succession of events in which I was in the right place at the right time, something that would never have happened if I had started shooting two months earlier. In over 227 shooting days, I didn’t have a single weather problem. So I’ve come to believe that out of every negative there is a positive of exactly the same magnitude—maybe not exactly at the same time, but there always is one.

MM: What moved or surprised you the most on your moviemaking journey?

PR: How very small the world is. How similar all of us are and how blind most of us are to that fact. The similarities in belief-systems transcend time and geographical boundaries and this was the case long before the birth of the telephone, the airplane and the internet. I was also moved by the enormous desire for peace on the part of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. It is very clear to me that it is the politicians who are messing that situation up. It doesn’t seem to be a conflict of religion at all. It is a conflict of land, politics and emotion.?

This is the first of a two-page article. Please click on "external source" for the complete article.

Labels: God, movies, Peter Rodger, religion, Tom Allen

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Friday, October 02, 2009

At Czech Mass, Pope Says Societies Must Have God

At Czech Mass, Pope Says Societies Must Have God
Joe Klamar
September 27, 2009

BRNO, Czech Republic — Pope Benedict XVI warned some 120,000 worshipers at a Mass here on Sunday of the dangers of a society without God, forging ahead with his fight against secularism on the second day of a three-day trip to the Czech Republic.

Later, in an address to Czech academics in Prague, the pope inveighed against the perils of relativism. He also underlined the need to mend "the breach between science and religion."

Celebrating Mass in this southern city in the country’s Catholic heartland, the 82-year-old, German-born pope said that "history had demonstrated the absurdities to which man descends when he excludes God from the horizon of his choices and actions." He added: "Your country, like other nations, is experiencing cultural conditions that often present a radical challenge to faith and therefore also to hope."

While the pope received a warm and enthusiastic reception from the crowd — a large number of whom appeared to come from neighboring Poland, Germany and Slovakia — religious observers lamented that the Czech nation as a whole seemed unmoved.

Czech secularism was conditioned during decades of Communism, when the Roman Catholic Church was suppressed. In a recent survey by Stem, a research group, nearly half of respondents professed not to believe in God.

“We are a calm nation that drinks beer and eats dumplings, and we have strong antibodies to any kind of religious persuasion because of our history,” said the Rev. Ales Opatrny, a lecturer at the Catholic Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague. "I believe that after the pope’s visit most Czechs will act like nothing happened."

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Labels: God, Pope Benedict XVI

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Sunday, September 27, 2009

The '2009 Parents of the Year' award goes to…The Duggars

September 16,
Jackie Kass

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar were awarded the title of "2009 National Parents of the Year" by the National Parent’s Day Council. The council insists that the Duggar’s were not selected just because they have a large family of their own children, but because they have exhibited such high standards of parenting. The website states, "Their highly organized household centers around spiritual principles and is obviously filled with huge amounts of love, grace, joy and mutual respect."

However, there is no getting around the fact that the Duggar family is indeed super-sized. Michelle and Jim Bob were high school sweethearts, have been married 24 years and produced 18 biological children (with one on the way!). There are 10 boys and 8 girls ranging in age from 7 months to 20 years. The oldest son and his wife are expecting their first child, making Michelle and Jim Bob grandparents for the first time. Their grandchild is due before their own 19th child. Jim Bob states on his website, "We believe that each child is a special gift from God and we are thankful to Him for each one."

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Labels: children, family, God, parents, spiritual values, the Duggars

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Thursday, September 10, 2009

Twittering God

Charlotte White, Promotions Coordinator, www.AuthorHouse.com

SCOTTSDALE, Sept. 9 /Christian Newswire/ -- For centuries chirping was a bird thing. Not anymore. Now millions of people Twitter daily to keep in contact with friends through tweet messages that say what they are doing, much like 58% of the U.S. population who pray daily according to a recent Pew Survey. But can Twitter mesh with spirituality?

"Twitter seems to fill emptiness with short messages of 140 characters or less about what's happening in life. Tweets may provide warmth to senders and receivers like an electronic blanket," says John Groh, author of Rubbing God's Ear With His Promises, a book of prayers. "While Twitter may appeal to some who want self-affirmation, praying arcs away from self by relying on God's promises," he adds.

Like Facebook and MySpace, Twitter is a social interconnector that lets "followers" maintain contact with acquaintances. Reportedly the free service played a role in the uprising in Iran this year and the Mumbai massacre of 2008.

Tweeting makes a home in some churches. Micro-blogging raises the bandwidth in several Nashville, Seattle, Charlotte and New York City churches with tweeting during sermons. One man solicits prayers to God on Twitter and then prints, rolls and inserts them in Jerusalem's Western Wall.

Labels: Charlotte White, God, John Groh, prayer, social networking, spirituality, Twitter

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Church survey results

Church survey results

Sunday, 06 Sep 2009
Robert Hornacek

Every Sunday, many people gather at church services. But some churches are trying to focus on the people who are not coming to church.

"We want to help connect people to God," said pastor Mark Schmechel from Journey Community Church in De Pere. Schmechel is one of about two dozen pastors in the Green Bay area who will soon be using the results of an on-line survey to try to reach more souls.

"We just want to offer people the hope that we believe as a Christian church," Schmechel said.

The survey was put together by the Green Bay Pastors Network. More than 2,000 people responded to the survey this spring. While the results are still be finalized, some have been released, including some responses from people about their frustrations with local churches.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article, and to see the preliminary results of the survey

Labels: church, God, on-line survey, Robert Hornacek

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Thursday, September 03, 2009

Outside faith, a rising tide of 'nones'

Outside faith, a rising tide of 'nones'
by Jay Tokasz
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: September 03, 2009

A few years ago, Tyler Manley would have considered himself a Presbyterian.

If asked about his religion today, he will confess he doesn't have one. Nor does he believe in God.

The United States remains one of the most religious countries in the world, but Manley is part of one of the steadiest trends in the national landscape of faith … the growing number of Americans who profess no religious affiliation.

Social scientists often call them the "nones" … a broad category that includes atheists and agnostics, as well as those who believe in a higher power but don't cite a particular faith.

Studies indicate they make up as much as 16 percent of the U.S. population, and researchers expect that the numbers will continue to grow.

"You're just getting a lot of people drifting away," said Barry A. Kosmin, research professor in the Public Policy & Law Program at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

For Manley, who studies philosophy at the University at Buffalo, the drifting was the result of understanding that "human conscience comes before religion."

"It's important that you critically examine your own beliefs," he said.

Kosmin's latest American Religious Identification Survey, published in March, estimated the population of U.S. "nones" at 34 million … roughly 15 percent of the total … up from 29 million in 2001 and 14 million in 1990.

"It was quite amazing. It went up in every state," Kosmin said. Fourteen percent of New Yorkers did not associate with a religion, up from 7 percent in 1990.

A survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 16 percent of U.S. adults had no religious affiliation. Data from the General Social Surveys indicates that 16.4 percent of Americans are nonreligious, up from 5.1 percent in 1972.

Researchers once observed a familiar pattern of religious disaffiliation among young adults, who then would reaffiliate later on, said Darren E. Sherkat, a sociologist at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

But that pattern is breaking down, said Sherkat, who analyzes data from the General Social Surveys.

"We're seeing greater stability of non-affiliation, and we're also seeing greater numbers of parents raising their children without affiliation, which was really quite rare in earlier generations," he said.

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Labels: agnostic, belief, God, Jay Tokasz, Nones, religion

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Seeing the Future: Can Religion Evolve and Survive in a Changing World?

By Peter Savastano
September 2, 2009

Since the fall of Secularization Theory, which claimed that belief in God would slowly recede in the face of science and technology, we still must ask: Is there a future for formal, organized, institutionalized religion as we presently recognize it in rapidly globalizing, postindustrial and postmodern world? Here’s what religion will have to do for humans to survive and flourish.

One of the last books the Catholic mystic, social activist, poet, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton read just before his tragic death in Bangkok, Thailand on December 10, 1968, was Final Integration in the Adult Personality (1965, E.J. Brill). Written by the Iranian-born psychologist A. Reza Arasteh, the central premise of the book is that in order for a person to reach final integration of the adult personality, she or he must grow beyond their native culture and religious tradition.

In a subsequent book published twelve years after Merton’s death, Growth to Selfhood (1980, Routledge), Arasteh further develops this central idea making the paradoxical argument: that the means by which one outgrows or moves beyond the limiting worldview of one’s native religious tradition is through the practice of the religious tradition itself.

Two questions I have spent a lot of time thinking about over the last number of years is what form, structure, and expression the phenomenon we call "religion" will take in the future (that is, if "religion" is then still labeled as such); or, conversely, is there a future for religion (specifically formal, organized, institutionalized religion as we presently recognize it) in a rapidly globalizing, postindustrial and postmodern world?

Back in the 1960s, sociologists predicted that the advancement of science and technology would usher in a secular worldview and that religion would eventually fade into the past. Or if it did manage to survive, they imagined, religion would become the purview of a small segment of the population that, kicking and screaming, has refused to enter into the contemporary world.

Of course, we now know that the sociologists were wrong. Religion, it seems, is here to stay. Rather than fade into oblivion or become a private matter, religion is front and center in the new millennium, especially since the tragic events of September 11, 2001.

Still, while it isn’t going away any time soon, it is also true that if we humans are going to collectively survive and flourish living in the information age of a globalized world, our understanding and practice of religion will have to change. While we can’t know for certain what shape or form religion will take in the future, I am willing to speculate. Fortunately, there are some trends and patterns that support my speculations so they are not simply spun out of thin air.

If the recent surveys, Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S." (2009), and the "2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS)," are any indication, the process Arasteh described in his two books may be an experience common to a growing number of Americans. As the surveys suggest, this process of growing beyond one’s inherited religious tradition has become far more prevalent, sometimes spanning generations. Referred to as the Nones," these are people who identify themselves as unaffiliated with any kind of organized religion and are happy to be so. However, this does not mean that Nones have no interest in spirituality, prayer, meditation, or ritual; all areas traditionally associated with "religion."

This is just a small portion of a two-page article exploring the subject of the future of "religion." Please click on "external source" to access the entire article.

Labels: A. Reza Arasteh, ARIS, faith, God, Peter Savastano, religion, sociology

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Friday, August 14, 2009

Buddhism strengthens ties to church

By Electa Draper
The Denver Post
Posted: 08/09/2009 01:00:00 AM MDT

What in the recent past seemed exotic and foreign is now almost routinely folded into "the fold."

Buddhism is not only accepted as a mainstream American religion, it is a path increasingly trod by faithful Christians and Jews who infuse Eastern spiritual insights and practices such as meditation into their own religions.

When John Weber became a Buddhist at age 19, his devout Methodist parents were not particularly pleased.

In recent years, however, they've invited their son, a religious studies expert with Boulder's Naropa University, to speak at their church about Buddhism.

"That never would have happened before," Weber said. "They would have been embarrassed."

The Pew Forum's Religious Landscape Survey in 2007 found that seven in 10 Americans who have a religion believe there is more than one path to salvation. A growing number of people are contemplating more than one each.

And they are contemplating contemplation itself.

There are Jubus — Jews who bring Buddhism into their practice of Judaism — and Bujus, who are Buddhists with Jewish parents. Then there are UUbus, or Unitarian Universalist Buddhists, and Ebus, or Episcopalian Buddhists. There are Zen Catholics.

"There is a definite trend and movement that will not be reversed," said Ruben Habito, a laicized Jesuit priest, Zen master and professor of world religions at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "We are in a new spiritual age, an inter-religious age."

Search can lead back home

People are hungry for a deeper spiritual experience — meditation, mindfulness, personal transformation, deep insight, union with God or the universe.

Habito, who calls himself a Zen Catholic, is one of the experts who say the search is a little like Dorothy and her ruby slippers. The quest for meaning ultimately leads some, like Dorothy, to their own backyards.

Judaism, Catholicism and Islam have rich traditions in contemplative practices, yet these had all but disappeared from everyday congregational life.

For many Christians cut off from the past, or alienated from the faith of their upbringing, Buddhism has served as the bridge to ancient wisdom.

"The problem is the contemplative tradition in the Christian Church has had its ups and downs over the centuries," said Father Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk and leader in the Centering Prayer movement, a modern revival of Christian contemplative practice.

"We sensed that the Eastern religions, with their highly developed spirituality, had something we didn't have," Keating said. "In the last generation, 10 to 20 years, some didn't even think there was a Christian spirituality, just rules — do's and don'ts and dogma they didn't find spiritually nourishing. It's important to recover the mystical aspects of the gospel."

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Labels: Buddhism, Christian, Electa Draper, God, interfaith, meditation, religion, spirituality

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Friday, August 07, 2009

God on the brain at Penn’s Neuroscience Boot Camp

August 5th, 2009
Tom Heneghan

Neurotheology - the study of the link between belief and the brain - is a topic I’ve hesitated to write about for several years. There are all kinds of theories out there about how progress in neuroscience is changing our understanding of religion, spirituality and mystical experience. Some say the research proves religion is a natural product of the way the brain works, others that God made the brain that way to help us believe. I knew so little about the science behind these ideas that I felt I had to learn more about the brain first before I could comment.

If that was an excuse for procrastination, I don’t have it anymore. For all this week and half the next, I’m attending a "Neuroscience Boot Camp" at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This innovative program, run by Penn’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Director Martha Farah (photo below), aims to explain the latest research in neuroscience to 34 non-experts from fields such as law, business, philosophy and religious studies (as well as to a few journalists). The focus is not only on religion, but faith and issues related to it are certainly part of the discussion.

After only two of 8-1/2 days of lectures, one takeaway message is already clear. You can forget about the "God spot" that headline writers love to highlight (as in "'God spot' is found in Brain" or "Scientists Locate 'God Spot' in Human Brain"). There is no one place in the brain responsible for religion, just as there is no single location in the brain for love or language or identity. Most popular articles these days actually say that, but the headline writers continue to speak of a single spot.

"There isn’t a separate religious area of the brain, from what we can tell from the data," said Dr. Andrew Newberg, an associate professor of radiology and psychiatry at the Penn university hospital and author of several books on neuroscience and religion. "It’s not like there’s a little spiritual spot that lights up every time somebody thinks of God. When you look at religious and spiritual experiences, they are incredibly rich and diverse. Sometimes people find them on the emotional level, sometimes on an ideological level, sometimes they perceive a oneness, sometimes they perceive a person. It depends a lot on what the actual experience is."

Please click on "external source" for the complete article.

Labels: belief, brain, God, neuroscience, neurotheology, religion, spirituality, Tom Heneghan

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How 'hands-on' is God?

By Lynn Arave
Deseret News
Tuesday, Aug. 04, 2009

Does he or doesn't he?

And if so, how much? And why? And where?

Does God send the tsunamis? Help folks find lost keys? Clear up the skies for a wedding reception?

The amount and degree of God's intervention in the world may be the oldest theological debate. And today, more than ever, people wonder -- and worry -- about the answers.

On one end are those who believe in "God the watch maker" -- that Deity created the world, wound it up and now simply watches it run.

At the other end are people who believe the fingerprints of God are on every human action and endeavor. He rules through predestination.

Most believers stake out territory somewhere in between.

Historically, God has been seen as intervening significantly in the affairs of men. There was the Great Flood and the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis. In the New Testament, Jesus Christ is said to have taken on the sins of the world -- perhaps the most breath-taking belief in God's intervention the world has known.

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Labels: faith, God, intervention, Lynn Arave, miracles, Quakers

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PBS to air three religious documentaries in 2010

August 03, 2009

PBS will air three detailed documentaries on religion in 2010, two of which will deal directly with Christianity.

"God in America" will air in fall 2010. It will be a six-hour documentary done by the same team which produces PBS’ "Frontline" and "American Experience" news magazines. The series will start with Christopher Columbus’ voyages and go through the 2008 presidential election, showing the links between democracy and religion, exploring religious liberty and examining the role of religion in social reforms.

"The Calling" will air at a yet undetermined time in 2010. It is a four-hour documentary following eight people transitioning into the clergy in Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It will follow them through seminaries and religious instruction and explore their faith journeys.

"The Buddha" is a two-hour documentary slated for spring 2010 which will chronicle the history of Buddhism and it growing popularity in the United States.

Please click on "external source" to access the complete article, including a link to the PBS website for even more information.

Labels: 2010, Buddhism, faith, God, PBS, religion, television

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Friday, July 24, 2009

Survey: 1 in 3 Scientists Believe in God

By Michelle A. Vu
Christian Post Reporter
Thu, Jul. 16 2009

About one out of every three scientists in the United States professed believing in God, a recent survey found.

That figure is strikingly lower than the proportion of the general American public that say they believe in God (83 percent), according to the report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

However, a Christian biochemist after examining the report said the comparably small number of scientists who believe in God is nothing to be alarmed over.

Dr. Fazale Rana, vice president of research and apologetics at Reasons to Believe ministry, said the percentage of American scientists who believe in God has remained constant for more than three-quarters of a century.

In the early 1920s, he explained, there was a similar survey conducted that found a similar proportion of scientists who believe in God.

"I see a lot of reason to be very encouraged by these results," said Rana, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry with an emphasis in biochemistry and was a senior scientist in product development for Procter & Gamble, to The Christian Post on Wednesday.

"The take home message is that if science and religion are incompatible then there is no way we would still see 30-40 percent of scientists acknowledge there is a God or higher power behind everything," he contended.

Besides asking about belief in God, the survey also asked the public and scientists about their belief in a higher power. Eighteen percent of scientists said they believe in a higher power or universal spirit, while 12 percent of the public said so.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article.

Labels: belief, God, Michelle A. Vu, scientists, survey

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Thursday, July 16, 2009

Pitt survey indicates spiritual wellness aids in cancer fight

By Allison M. Heinrichs
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, July 9, 2009

Feeling angry with or abandoned by God increases depression in women with breast cancer, according to a survey by Pittsburgh doctors, which advises clinicians to ask patients questions about their religion and guide them to use spirituality to cope.

The yearlong survey of 284 patients explored the relationship between "religious coping" and well-being. The results, published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, indicate that doctors should listen for "red flag" comments such as, "Why is God punishing me?"

"That's a sign for clinicians that these patients are feeling abandoned," said Dr. Randy Hebert, medical director of Forbes Hospice and lead author of the report.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article

Labels: Allison M. Heinrichs, cancer, God, religion, spirituality, well-being

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Thursday, July 09, 2009

Pope calls for 'God-centered' global economy

THIRD ENCYCLICAL

ON A MORAL ECONOMY

Select excerpts from Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), Pope Benedict XVI's new encyclical on the economy and Catholic social teachings:

• "The dignity of the individual and the demands of justice require, particularly today, that economic choices do not cause disparities in wealth to increase in an excessive and morally unacceptable manner ..."

• "We should not be (globalization's) victims, but rather its protagonists, acting in the light of reason, guided by charity and truth."

• "... Ideological rejection of God and an atheism of indifference, oblivious to the Creator and at risk of becoming equally oblivious to human values, constitute some of the chief obstacles to development today. A humanism which excludes God is an inhuman humanism. Only a humanism open to the Absolute can guide us in the promotion and building of forms of social and civic life -- structures, institutions, culture and ethos -- without exposing us to the risk of becoming ensnared by the fashions of the moment."

• Humankind should ask for God's grace ... "to receive the daily bread that we need, to be understanding and generous towards our debtors, not to be tempted beyond our limits, and to be delivered from evil."

• "Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty."

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

Pope Benedict XVI today called for reforming the United Nations and establishing a "true world political authority" with "real teeth" to manage the global economy with God-centered ethics.

In his third encyclical, a major teaching, released as the G-8 summit begins in Italy, the pope says such an authority is urgently needed to end the current worldwide financial crisis. It should "revive" damaged economies, reach toward "disarmament, food security and peace," protect the environment and "regulate migration."

Benedict writes, "The market is not, and must not become, the place where the strong subdue the weak."

The encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) is a theologically dense explication of Catholic social teaching that draws heavily from earlier popes, particularly PaulVI's critique of capitalism 42 years ago. And echoing his predecessor John Paul II, Benedict says, "every economic decision has a moral consequence."

This is a really great article about the Pope's latest encyclical. It is well worth the read...Jesusonian ideals!!! Please click on "external source" for the entire piece.

Labels: Cathy Lynn Grossman, Charity in Truth, ethics, God, Pope Benedict XVI, United Nations

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Appalachian Trail becomes spiritual journey

Jul 6, 2009 | by Adam Miller

DAMASCUS, Va. (BP)--In about three months, several hundred hikers will summit a northern Maine mountain called Katahdin, a 5,000-foot-high peak just south of the border with Canada. Many of them will have completed an arduous 2,175-mile journey and fulfilled a dream.

Those who complete the millions of footsteps from Springer Mountain, Ga., to Mount Katahdin are forever changed with stories to tell well into retirement: encounters with bears, demanding 30-mile days, odd new acquaintances, lifelong friends.

And some might tell the story of First Baptist Church in Damascus, Va., where Southern Baptists washed their feet and provided hot showers, medical care, Internet access and a good conversation about God.

"It started as a hotdog cookout," says pastor Wayne Guynn, who credits Linda and Jeff Austin with taking over the ministry and ramping it up.

Now, Guynn says, they partner with churches in Alabama and Georgia and with the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia to simply make life more pleasant for hikers who come to the annual event known as Trail Days, which ran May 15-17 this year. In the process, they get to love hikers and tell them about Christ.

Nice kind of outreach - wonder if there are any Urantians in those churches? To read all about it, please click on "external source" for the whole article. Good reading, and a sweet idea.

Labels: Adam Miller, Appalacian Trail, God, hiking, Jesus, service, Trail Days

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Monday, July 06, 2009

Majority think it is possible to believe in God and Darwin

Most people feel it is possible to believe in God and evolution, according to a survey.

01 Jul 2009

The poll carried out by the British Council found that 54 per cent thought that science and religion are compatible.

Only 19 per cent of those questioned said it is impossible to believe in a God while also holding the view that life on earth evolved as a result of natural selection. This is the theory proposed by Charles Darwin exactly 150 years ago in his groundbreaking book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

The study, which surveyed the opinions of more than 10,000 people across 10 countries worldwide including Great Britain, also uncovered wide regional variations in the acceptance of evolutionary theory.

Please click on "external source" for the complete results from the survey

Labels: Charles Darwin, evolution, God, Great Britain, religion, science

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Book Review: Does quantum mechanics show a connection between the human mind and the cosmos?

'Quantum Gods' analyzes purported link between physics and cosmic consciousness

Does quantum mechanics show a connection between the human mind and the cosmos? Are our brains tuned into a "cosmic consciousness" that pervades the universe enabling us to make our own reality? Do quantum mechanics and chaos theory provide a place for God to act in the world without violating natural laws?

Many popular books and films make such claims and argue that key developments in twentieth-century physics, such as the uncertainty principle and the butterfly effect, support the notion that God or a universal mind acts upon material reality. Physicist Victor J. Stenger, author of New York Times bestseller God: The Failed Hypothesis, examines these contentions in QUANTUM GODS: CREATION, CHAOS AND THE SEARCH FOR COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS (Prometheus Books, $26.98), a carefully reasoned and incisive analysis of popular theories that seek to link spirituality to physics.

"The public understanding of modern physics is seriously out of whack, thanks largely to pop junk like The Secret and What the BLEEP Do We Know? [that] promote a bogus version of quantum mechanics—the belief that 'you create your own reality' by controlling the laws of physics with your mind…," said Geoff Gilpin, author of The Maharishi Effect: A Personal Journey Through the Movement That Transformed American Spirituality. "The world has needed a book like this for a long time. If you care about scientific literacy, Quantum Gods is not optional."

Throughout the book Stenger alternates his discussions of popular spirituality with a survey of what the findings of twentieth-century physics actually mean. Thus he offers the reader a useful synopsis of contemporary religious ideas as well as basic but sophisticated physics presented in layperson's terms.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article

Labels: God, quantum physics, spirituality, Victor J. Stenger

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Friday, June 26, 2009

Two-thirds of [English] teenagers don't believe in God... and think reality TV is more important

Mail Foreign Service
22nd June 2009

Nearly two-thirds of teenagers don't believe in God and think that reality television is far more important than religion, new research has revealed.

The survey showed that 66 per cent of teens do not believe a deity exists while 50 per cent have never prayed and 16 per cent have never been to church.

Teenagers rated family, friends, money, music and even reality TV shows above faith.
Children from a London school take part in a service at Westminster Abbey: The numbers of teenagers who believe in God has dwindled

Children from a London school take part in a service at Westminster Abbey: The numbers of teenagers who believe in God has dwindled

Other statistics which emerged from the report included:

* 59 per cent of children believed religion has had a negative influence on the world
* 60 per cent only go to church for a wedding or christening
* Only 30 per cent of teenagers think there is an afterlife...
* ... while 10 per cent believe in reincarnation
* 47 per cent said organised religion had no place in the world
* 60 per cent don't believe Religious Studies should be compulsory in schools
* However, 91 per cent agreed they should treat others the way they wished to be treated themselves

Please click on "external source" for the complete article...the one bright spot - the overwhelming percentage of these teens do believe in some form of the "Golden Rule..."

Labels: church, God, prayer, Reality TV, religion, teenagers

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Friday, June 19, 2009

Christian Belief Through the Lens of Cognitive Science: Part 4 of 6

by Valerie Tarico

Tue Jun 16, 2009 at 10:45:05 AM PDT

The Iranian election. Muslim charities. "God hates fags" at Garfield High. Imprecatory prayers for the death of Obama. Papal dialogue with First Nations. To understand the politics of our world you have to understand religion. It's gotten to the point that cognitive science has a lot to say.

IV: The Born-Again Experience

Valerie Tarico's diary :: ::

I prayed harder and just then I felt like everything I was saying was being sucked into a vacuum. When I stood up, I felt like thin air; I had to brace myself. I felt this energy, it was a kind of an ecstasy." --Cathy "Something began to flow in me—a kind of energy . . . Then came the strange sensation that water was not only running down my cheeks, but surging through my body as well, cleansing and cooling as it went." --Colson "It was a beautiful feeling of well-being, warmth and loving . . . I went home and all night long these warm feelings kept coming up in my body." --Jean "I felt something real warm overwhelming me. It was in just a moment, yet it was like an eternity. . . . a joy, such a joy hit me with such a tremendous force that I jumped . . . and ran." --Helen. (From Conway & Siegelman, Snapping, pp 24, 32, 12, 31)

For many Christians, being born again is unlike anything they have ever known. A sense of personal conviction, yielding or release followed by indescribable peace and joy – this is the stuff of spiritual transformation. Once experienced it is unforgettable, and many people can recall small details years later. In the aftermath of such a moment, an alcoholic may stop drinking or a criminal fugitive may hand himself in to the authorities. A housewife may sail through her tasks for weeks, flooded by a sense of God’s love flowing through her to her children. A normally introverted programmer may begin inviting his co-workers to church.

This experience, more than any other, creates a sense of certainty about Christian belief and so makes belief impervious to rational argumentation. A believer knows what he or she has experienced and seen. Even converts who don’t feel radically transformed after praying "the sinner’s prayer" may feel overwhelmed by God’s presence during subsequent prayer or worship. Evangelical and Pentecostal forms of Christianity that are gaining ground around the world particularly emphasize emotional peaks such as faith healing or speaking in tongues. Worshipers may get caught up in exuberant singing, shouting, dancing and tears of joy.

What most Christians don’t know is that these experiences are not unique to Christianity. In fact, the quotations that you just read come from two born again Christians, a Moonie, and an encounter group participant. Their words are similar, because the born again experience doesn’t require a specific set of beliefs. It requires a specific social/emotional process, and the dogmas or explanations are secondary.

To access this whole series of articles, and the rest of this article, please click on "external source."

Labels: born again, Christianity, conversion, God, Snapping, Valerie Tarico

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Brain waves or beatific vision?

Tue, Jun. 16, 2009

Mystical experiences under the microscope
By David O'Reilly

Inquirer Staff Writer

As mystical experiences go, Barbara Bradley Hagerty's transcendent moment was not the kind that launches a new world religion. Still, it changed her forever.

The day was June 10, 1995. Hagerty, religion reporter for National Public Radio, was interviewing a terminally ill melanoma patient, Kathy, whose sunny outlook and trust in Jesus seemed to have prolonged her life, inexplicably, for years.

Then, as they talked, "I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end," Hagerty writes in her new book, Fingerprints of God, a survey of modern scientific investigation into religious experience.

"The air grew warmer and heavier, as if someone had moved into the circle [of lamplight] and was breathing on us. I glanced at Kathy." She, too, felt something and had "fallen silent in mid-sentence."

"I felt an unseen caress, engulfed by a presence I could feel but not touch," Hagerty continues. "I was paralyzed. . . . After a minute, although it seemed longer, the presence melted away."

What was it she sensed? Jesus? An angelic being? Or, as one researcher later suggested, had the temporal lobe of her brain been briefly hyperstimulated? This, he told her, likely induced the illusion of an unseen presence.

Whatever it was, it proved the "continental divide in my life," Hagerty said during a recent interview. "I decided I should investigate, the way we journalists do."

Her investigation grew into Fingerprints of God, a lucid overview of an essential question: Is mystical experience truly a glimpse of the divine, the eternal, the absolute? Or are the seemingly transformative moments known variously as "enlightenment" or "beatific vision" or cosmic bliss merely swells and quells in brain activity, signifying nothing beyond ourselves?

Please click on "external source" for the complete article.

Labels: Barbara Bradley Hagerty, brain, David O'Reilly, God, religion, science, transcendence

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This is your brain on religion - OpEd

Faith can bring out the best in people (love, generosity, compassion) — and the worst (fear, hatred, violence). Whether people are the former or the latter depends on how they view the God they worship.

By Andrew Newberg

When I was in high school, I dated a girl whose family regarded themselves as "born-again" Christians. It was my first encounter with devoutly religious people who strongly disagreed with my perspective on faith. They were always pleasant to me, but they were quite clear that in their view I had deeply sinned by not turning to Jesus. Oh, and because of this, I was going to hell.

It's tough enough being a teenager, but this was too much. The family's judgment disturbed me on two levels. First, I didn't like the thought of going to hell, but at the same time, their beliefs also challenged me to evaluate my own beliefs vigorously.

Distress and anxiety followed, and I realized that this was the first time that I had ever experienced such strong negative feelings about religion. And 30 years later, this episode still resonates as I conduct extensive research on religious practices and beliefs and their impact on the human person.

The research that I have come across, if not definitive, seems clear: Religion and spiritual practices generally have a positive effect on one's physical, emotional and neurological health. People who engage in religious activities tend to cope better with emotional problems, have fewer addictions and better overall health. They might even live longer than those who lead more secular lives. Indeed, many studies document that religious and spiritual individuals find more meaning in life.

Our studies at Penn's Center for Spirituality and the Mind (in conjunction with colleague Mark Waldman) of the effects of different spiritual practices, such as meditation and prayer, also reveal significant improvements in memory, cognition and compassion while simultaneously reducing anxiety, depression, irritability and stress (even when done in a non-theological context). One might come to the conclusion, then, that being religious or spiritual is a good thing. Perhaps God is great.

But not so fast. We also discovered that religion's influence on people depends very much on how they view their God.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article

Labels: Andrew Newberg, God, mind, religion, spirituality

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Saturday, June 13, 2009

OBITUARIES: Thomas Berry dies at 94; cultural historian became a leading thinker on religion and the environment

Thomas Berry saw Earth’s ecological crisis as essentially a crisis of the spirit.
Described as an 'eco-theologian,' he was an early advocate of the notion that Earth's ecological crisis was basically a crisis of the spirit.

By Jon Thurber
June 13, 2009

Thomas Berry, a cultural historian and specialist in Asian religions who in his later life became a leading thinker on religion and the environment, has died. He was 94.

Berry died June 1 at the Well-Spring Retirement Community in Greensboro, N.C., according to an announcement on his website. The cause of death was not reported, but Berry was known to have been in failing health in recent years after suffering two strokes.

Described by Newsweek magazine in the late 1980s as "the most provocative figure among the new breed of eco-theologians," Berry was an early advocate of the notion that Earth's ecological crisis was basically a crisis of the spirit.

"Thomas Berry contributed to the realization in our times that environmental issues are more than science or policy. They are also issues of the spirit," said Mary Evelyn Tucker, who with her husband, John Grim, heads the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology and directs the Thomas Berry Foundation. "How well we respond to the planetary challenges that face us now will be determined by our ability to form an Earth community with a common future for all species."

Calling the universe God's "primary revelation," Berry wrote in his book "The Dream of the Earth" that "the natural world is the larger sacred community to which we all belong." In his view, Earth's natural elements -- trees, forests, mountains -- had as much right to exist as humans. "We bear the universe in our being even as the universe bears us in its being."

Please click on "external source" for the complete article.

Labels: eco-theology, environmentalism, God, Jon Thurber, religion, the universe, Thomas Berry

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Friday, May 22, 2009

Book Review: " Fingerprints of God"

NPR reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty uses journalism’s tools to explore the intersection of spirituality and science.
By Gregory M. Lamb | May 19, 2009 edition

Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality By Barbara Bradley Hagerty Riverheard Books 323 pp., $33.50

Using the reporting and explanatory skills of a talented veteran journalist, Barbara Bradley Hagerty has written a compelling account of her quest to answer an age-old question: Is this all there is?

The result is Fingerprints of God, a book that sails the roiling waters between religion and science and is unlikely to make quick friends among either evangelical Christians or those in the scientific community who conclude that God cannot exist. But for readers who consider themselves to be spiritual seekers, Hagerty treads some fascinating territory.

Rather than dismissing science as the enemy of spirituality, she engages with it, seeking out scientific pioneers, the outliers who are doing intriguing work on the nature of the brain and consciousness. She also talks with ordinary people who’ve had extraordinary personal encounters, such as near-death or out-of-body experiences, that have changed their views of themselves, reality, and on the existence of an afterlife.

Hagerty, the religion correspondent for National Public Radio, comes to a less-than-startling conclusion: Science can neither prove nor disprove these great questions. But she also sees hints of a “paradigm shift” in science now under way – akin, perhaps, to the early 20th century when the work of Einstein and others took a quantum leap away from a universe based solely on 18th-century Newtonian physics.

“Hard science does not mean petrified science,” Hagerty posits. “The paradigm to exclude a divine intelligence, or ‘Other,’ or ‘God,’ to reduce all things to matter, has reigned triumphant for some four hundred years, since the dawn of the Age of Reason,” she continues. “Today, a small yet growing number of scientists are trying to chip away at the paradigm, suspecting that its feet are made of clay.”

Please click on "external source" for complete article.

Labels: Barbara Bradley Hagerty, God, Gregory M. Lamb, religion, science, spirituality

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'God Is Back' tracks a religious surge in an age of science

By Hanna Rosin

New York Times
Posted: 05/14/2009

Not that long ago, great minds predicted a future with little or no religion.

Science would make us highly skeptical of miracles. Psychiatry would direct all of our awe and wonder inward. Changing roles for women would weaken the patriarchal structure that props up clerics. Whatever script for modernity one followed, it had God playing a bit role.

It didn't happen that way. Modernity arrived and improvised new starring roles for God. The Americans led the way by becoming both "the quintessentially modern country" and a very devout one, write John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in their new book, "God Is Back," and most of the world has followed that model.

In rich countries and poorer ones, democratic and undemocratic, primarily Islamic and primarily Christian — everywhere, basically, except Europe — devotion to God is robust.

This is a review of the book "God is Back." Please click on "external source" for the complete article.

Labels: Adrian Wooldridge, God, Hanna Rosin, John Micklethwait, religion

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Friday, May 08, 2009

Francis Collins: A Scientific Basis for God

May 04, 2009 04:32 PM ET |
Dan Gilgoff | Permanent Link | Print

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Is there a scientific basis for the existence of God? Many believers think so, even as they often dismiss science because they think it's incompatible with their religious beliefs. A recent Gallup Poll, for instance, found that 45 percent of Americans reject evolution, believing that human beings were created more or less in our present form within the past 10,000 years. Despite objections from scientists, many believers argue that there's scientific evidence
for such "Young Earth" creationism.

Francis Collins, director of the human genome project, is an atheist turned Christian who sees a scientific basis for God that not only embraces modern science
but actually relies on it. Collins has just launched a new website and a foundation called biologos, which "emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with what science has discovered about the origins of the universe and life."

Unless Christians—evangelicals, in particular—learn to integrate modern science with their religious faith, Collins believes, they are either stuck clinging to untruths about scientific ideas like evolution or, once they do accept evolution, are in danger of having to abandon their faith out of the mistaken belief that evolution and Christianity are incompatible.

Collins was raised without religion. He began questioning his atheism during medical school, when he witnessed patients who were near death but who were deeply comforted by their religious faith. Collins became a Christian in his 20s. "I believe in the literal rising of the body of Christ," he says today. "It's the cornerstone of my Christian faith."

In this very interesting article, Francis Collins' talking points for God's existence are enumerated...please click on "external link" for the complete article.

Labels: atheism, Dan Gilgoff, Francis Collins, God, human genome project, science

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Monday, April 27, 2009

RD10Q: Thinking About God Makes Your Brain Bigger

RD10Q: Thinking About God Makes Your Brain Bigger
By Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
April 24, 2009

A new book argues that spiritual practices, be they secular or religious, are inherently good for you. Meditation and prayer—be it about God, or evolution, or peace, or the Big Bang—will actually change your brain.

Ten Questions for Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman on How God Changes Your Brain, (Ballantine, 2009).

What inspired the two of you to write How God Changes Your Brain? What sparked your interest?

Our newest brain-scan research showed that different forms of meditation and spiritual practice can actually improve memory, and it may even slow down the aging process itself. We had also gathered enough data to draw a more comprehensive picture of how spiritual practices affect and change different parts of the brain, and we wanted to share this new perspective with the general public. We also wanted to present evidence showing how the religious landscape of America is moving from traditional values to a more spiritual and science-based vision of the universe.

What’s the most important take-home message for readers?

Spiritual practices, secular or religious, are inherently good for your body, and especially your brain. Meditation and prayer—be it about God, or evolution, or peace, or the Big Bang—will strengthen important circuits in your brain, making you more socially aware and alert while reducing anxiety, depression, and neurological stress. And meditation can be adapted in endless ways. You can use it to become more motivated to succeed in business. You can apply it to communication to reduce relationship conflicts. You can do a sixty-second meditation involving yawning to quickly relax your body and mind. Indeed, you can use the same technique to bring a roomful of children, students, or CEOs to attention with their brains becoming acutely attuned to each other: a fancy way of saying that yawning can actually evoke social empathy with many living species on this planet.

Please click on "external source" to access the entire interview with the authors.

Labels: Andrew Newberg, brain, God, How God Changes Your Brain, Mark Robert Waldman, science

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Major points of convergence within great spiritual traditions

Friday, April 24, 2009
By Rev. Ronald Rolheiser, OMI

When we look at all the major world religions, we see that they are more similar than dissimilar in how we understand the spiritual quest...we can draw out these major points of convergence:

---First, in all of them the aim of the spiritual quest is the same: union with God and union with everyone and everything else.

---Second, in all the great spiritual traditions the path to union is understood as coming through compassion.

---Third, in every great spiritual tradition, the route to compassion and union with God is paradoxical, requiring that somehow we have to lose ourselves to find ourselves, die to come to life, and give so as to receive.

---Fourth, every great spiritual tradition is clear that spiritual progress requires hard discipline and some painful renunciations, that the road-more-traveled won't get you home.

---Fifth, every great spiritual tradition tells us that the spiritual quest is a life-long journey with no short-cuts, no quick paths, no hidden secrets, and no appeal to privilege that can short-circuit the discipline and renunciation required.

All the great religious traditions agree: The road is narrow and hard and there are no short-cuts.

Please click on "external source" for the remainder of the similarities between religions, and an expanded understanding of these important points of religious convergence.

Labels: compassion, faith, God, Rev. Ronald Rolheiser, spirituality, unity, world religions

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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Book Review: Perceptions of God will shape future of religion

By Ray Waddle • April 18, 2009

We've got God on the brain. The Master of the Universe comes as a storm of neurological impulses that can change the brain for better or for worse.

Thinking of God as All Compassionate can do you good. It makes you more empathetic and improves brain health. Extremist religion only increases anger, risking brain damage.

Such conclusions and more arise from the much-discussed research collected in a new book, How God Changes Your Brain, by neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and therapist Mark Robert Waldman.

Please click on "external source" for complete book review.

Labels: Andrew Newberg, God, Mark Robert Waldman, neuroscience, Ray Waddle

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Book Review: Solution to "The God Wars" Found in Award-Winning Book

WEBWIRE – Saturday, April 18, 2009

RETURN TO MEANING: THE AMERICAN PSYCHE IN SEARCH OF ITS SOUL redefines religious meaning and its importance for a Scientific Age. (http://www.andrewcort.com)

"Renaissance man” Andrew Cort (science and mathematics teacher, attorney, and doctor of chiropractic), has written an inspirational and scholarly book that “rescues philosophy from the mathematicians, sex from the hedonists, religion from empty sanctimony, and science from barren materialism,” says George Gilder, noted social commentator.

If there is a God, and God is all-powerful and good, why would God create such a painful and difficult world? Does religion have a credible answer? Morality, as secularists know, does not require a deity. Blind faith, as atheists know, often leads to hatred and violence. Taking scriptural stories as literal accounts of history, as scientists know, borders on the nonsensical. There has to be more.

Please click on "external source" for complete article, and a link to the author's website.

Labels: Dr. Andrew Cort, God, philosophy, religion, science, soul

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10 Minutes with … the Rev. John Polkinghorne

April 15, 2009
NEWS FEATURE
10 Minutes with … the Rev. John Polkinghorne
By Daniel Burke

(UNDATED) Christian thinkers have long employed insights from sociology, literature, and other fields to augment their ideas of how God works in the world.

Yet despite the world-changing insights of science, very few theologians have drawn on physics, biology or geology in the same way.

Renowned Anglican physicist-theologian John Polkinghorne wants to change all that. His new book, “Theology in the Context of Science,” examines what topics like space and time can teach us about God, and how a scientific style of inquiry can benefit theologians.

Polkinghorne, who was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2002 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his work reconciling science and faith, spoke about his new book from his home in England. Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Theology and science are highly specialized, often complex disciplines. Is it feasible for someone to become fully versed in both?

A: I’m not saying that every theologian has to approach theology through the context of science any more than a liberation theologian would say that everyone has to live in base community in South America. I wrote the book to encourage theologians to take the context of science more seriously ... without having to master all of the technical details.

This is a transcript of an interview with renowned Anglican physicist-theologian John Polkinghorne, who was the winner of the Templeton Prize in 2002. It is a worthwhile read. Please click on "external source" for complete article.

Labels: Daniel Burke, God, Rev. John Polkinghorne, science, Templeton Prize, theologians

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God and the Multiverse

April 14, 2009, 6:14 am
God and the Multiverse

Please click on "external source" to access the original article in "Seed" magazine. Interesting juxtaposition with Urantia Book revelation.

Today’s idea: Multiverse?theory —?the idea that many universes lie beyond what we can observe — doesn’t really undermine the argument for God as creator as some Christian thinkers contend, scientists and theologians say.

Science and Religion | New “multiverse” theories challenge both humanity’s uniqueness and our central place in the cosmos, Nathan Schneider writes in Seed magazine — so it looks like they could join evolution as another battleground in the culture wars. Christian thinkers have criticized such ideas as “motivated by a refusal to accept evidence of God’s handiwork in the cosmos.”

But among scientists and theologians focused on multiverse theory, many believe that it simply expands the job description for God.

Labels: God, multiverse, religion, science, Seed

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Easter: Sign of Our Faith in Renewal

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Please click on "external source" for complete article.

Polls over the recent decades have consistently shown that nine in 10 Americans believe in the existence of God. A Harris Poll in 2003 indicated that roughly 84 percent professed a belief in miracles, the same number as those who believed in the survival of the soul after death. (Nearly 70 percent also believed in the devil and hell.)

A Pew Forum survey in 2007 indicated 78 percent saw the Bible as being the word of God, either literally (35 percent) or not (43 percent).

A current poll conducted by Newsweek found basic religious beliefs have varied little in decades. According to Newsweek, 78 percent still found prayer to be “an important part of daily life,” and 85 percent said religion was “very important” or “fairly important” in their lives.

No matter our specific spiritual doctrines, humans do exhibit a need to maintain hope and a faith in revival. We say that it’s only natural, and we see the basis for that belief in the continual renewal of the natural world around us.

Change is a constant.

Newsweek also reported its latest poll found that only 48 percent of those surveyed thought faith would “help answer all or most of the country’s current problems.” That’s down from 64 percent in 1994. Presumably, that means we tend to see fewer possibilities for specific spiritual beliefs solving the convoluted problem of toxic assets, bundled mortgage securities and such.

Labels: belief, Bible, faith, God, Newsweek magazine, spirituality

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Friday, April 10, 2009

After 4,000 Comments, Taking the Pulse on Modern Christianity

Kurt Soller

...Newsweek proclaimed "The Decline and Fall of Christian America" on its cover. The Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" blog featured a post that belittled the significance of Jesus' death and resurrection. The Discovery Channel aired a documentary that painted Jesus as little more than an opportunistic politician who caught a bad break in a trial."

Whether valid or not, it's portrayals like these that have you readers -- especially Christians -- up in arms. The majority were using our forum to share their beliefs on where Christianity is headed. And as Christians, there were some great first-hand accounts of life in an increasingly "post-Christian" society. "As an Evangelical Christian from Africa, I should say this article was long overdue... I have always been bothered by Political Evangelical Christianity in America and the spreading of the same Political Christian dose in Sub Saharan Africa," wrote commenter Katm. "Any thinking and discerning evangelical Christian should take the critique in this article as a positive." Many agreed, echoing an overarching idea that Christianity in America has long been too political, and that this post-Christian America may be well-warranted. "Raised as I was, I am very familiar with the teaching of Christianity, and I am painfully aware of the holes my parents conservatism left in my education," echoed one reader."But, my favorite bible verse is the one about man being created in the image of God. Isn't that another way of saying that God and man are the same? To me it's just that simple."

With the numbers of believers down in this year's American Religious Identification Survey -- the inspiration for our cover -- I was surprised by the commenting Christians who were open about why the left organized religion. "People are not abandoning Christianity so much as abandoning organized religion," offered commenter xargaw. "Many of us have found a deeper faith in our own searching and in our communities outside of the church where irrelevant doctrine and hypocrisy are hard to ignore. There is often more of God at work in volunteerism in your town and being a true friend to someone in need than in the church building. Many are striving to live as Jesus directed rather than simply warming a pew once a week." But why forget organized Christianity? Others were quick to explain: "Most Americans still believe in God. But the last several decades the most visible voices of Christianity have been those who preach judgment, hatred, anger and violence."

Getting even more specific, there seemed to be an overwhelming amount of blame placed on the previous administration and the effect it had on politicizing religion. "I watched with dismay as the religious right hijacked the political process and decisions that were previously individual became part of a movement to impose a group's religious views on all of us," wrote Bookfan. "Abortion, intelligent design, stem cell research, and gay marriage became the property of voters' sectors--rather than a personal moral decision." Even Christians agreed, many of whom were unwilling to refute Meacham's assertion that we've entered a new era when discussing how the church interacts with the state: "Although I was raised in the US and in the Christian faith, I have come to see it primarily as something very ugly and divisive," wrote the reader 'Meditating.' "Instead of concentrating on loving one another, the Old Testament Christians (yes, it's an oxymoron) seem to have taken over the religious dialogue of my faith and turned it into a weapon intended to wound anyone who disagrees with them. What moral person would want to identify themselves with a faith like that? I don't and I am now one of those people who would not want to be identified as a Christian. It seems no one injures the name of Christ like the Christian have done."

That's certainly a harsh response, and it's worth pointing out that many Christians who read the piece were justifiably worried that Meacham and the magazine were dismissing Christianity. That's not the case; since the cover's publication, Meacham has published a follow-up -- asserting that faith, regardless of how it interacts with politics and American society, will never disappear. "The Newsweek of my childhood would have included historical data on church affiliation/attendance in America over the last two centuries," wrote Bobsf_94117. And others agreed that they wish our article had provided more context into how we've been approaching this post-Christian status." With that, came myriad arguments explaining what the Founding Fathers intended, as Christians or non-Christians, when they wrote The Constitution. But obviously, constitutional interpretation -- even as it interacts with religion -- is a different, and very huge, topic. Another time? On that note, I won't address the hundreds of comments that went back and forth arguing whether Hitler was a Christian. Not relevant...

Of all the thousands of comments though, the story about declining Christian identification focused squarely -- and nicely -- on one topic: the purpose of Christianity in society. I'm obviously not the right person to answer that, but I was intrigued by the hundreds of readers who wished religion away in sum, despite it's long history in American society. "This can only be good for the United States," argued one commenter. "We have lost our competitiveness in Science and the quality of our Education has been declining thanks in part to religious minded people who have been corrupting both Science and Education with nonsensical concepts such as Intelligent Design." In a less-specific away, hundreds agreed: "I am pleased!," wrote commenter Thevail. "How wonderful that humans have chosen once again to think for themselves, rather than depending on "the big book of answers." Religion is supposed to inspire us to be better people, make us aspire to higher goals, make us think before we act. But the truth is that if Christianity is wounded..it's a self-inflicted wound." Immediately, a committed Christian took it a step futher: "Another sensational title by Newsweek; however, as Christianity goes, so does America....maybe, that's why this country is going into the toilet."

As I'm sure you realize, it's impossible to cull more than 4,000 thoughts on Christianity into a few concise paragraphs. But from all these viewpoints, we can glean a few things: Faith isn't headed away, but our country an impasse between what Christians want from their government, and how the rest of non-Christian America views Christianity. Whether you believe Christianity is impure, or that our Democracy itself is faulted, it's clear that both politics and religion are in a time of flux. When do you think it will settle? And how will both religion and democracy -- even in a post-Christian society -- intersect? Your comments below.

Please click on "external source" for a look at a collection of reader comments...

Labels: 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, believers, Christianity, faith, God, Kurt Soller, Newsweek magazine, organized religion, politics

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Sunday, April 05, 2009

More Than Medicine to Heal

Reported by: Liz Bonis

Researchers say what some call “The God Cure” seems to play a critical role in recovery.

Cole Jackson is an active college student now, but several years ago he needed serious surgery for condition called Chron's. It's an inflammatory bowel disease [IBD] where the immune system attacks the gastrointestinal tract. It is extremely painful.

“Before surgery I lost about 30 pounds,” Cold said. Medically, he has recovered so well that he now trains to run marathons.

At that time however, he said it wasn't just about the medical recovery; he made what you might call a sort of deal with God, and in the end, he says it may have played a significant role in his recovery.

“Lying in the hospital bed the night before surgery, I prayed to God and I asked him to show me my purpose in life. I placed all my pain and all my worries in the hands of God…to this day, I believe I will never have to endure as much pain as I did.”

A medical team has just published a new study which says he may be right. When Dr. Michael Yi and health psychologist Sian Cotton studied 155 adolescents with IBD and asked them about things like--how often they attended religious services, how often they prayed, whether they considered themselves to be spiritual--sure enough, they found when it comes to health and healing, with IBD or even without: “Spirituality had the biggest impact on quality of life,” Dr. Yi said.

That was found to be true not just for physical health but for mental health too. Researchers are now following up on this research to see if it applies to common childhood illnesses such as asthma.

“In general, the higher spiritual well-being was related not only to quality of life, but better emotional feeling…so less depression, less anxiety,” Yi said.

Cole said anyone who wants a spiritual connection can have one. The new study shows it helps well being, even without a chronic disease.

Cole said, “It's basically talking to God, and talking to Him like He's your best friend, say anything that's on your mind, that's what I did, and ever since, my life has changed for the better.”

Labels: Dr. Michael Yi, God, healing, Liz Bonis, mental health, Sian Cotton, spirituality

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Friday, March 27, 2009

Shaky economy forces Americans to rediscover community

Fri March 27, 2009
By John Blake

(CNN) -- Leslie Gage knew it was coming, but that didn't take away the pain.
Atlanta Community ToolBank volunteers build playground, and relationships, in their community.

Atlanta Community ToolBank volunteers build playground, and relationships, in their community.

She was working as an architect for a small company in Atlanta, Georgia, when the company's founder asked her into his office. He took off his glasses and rubbed his hand against his forehead.

"We just can't afford to keep you..."

She eventually joined a nonprofit group that renovated homes in her neighborhood, but she also built something else: a place in her community.

Now she wonders whether more Americans will arrive at the same conclusion that she has: We have to rebuild our sense of community, not just our banking system, if we're going to survive.

According to one perspective, more Americans turn to their remote, not their neighbor, in bad times. Netflix officials reported a 45 percent jump in profits during the end of 2008. Gross movie ticket sales are up 18.8 percent this year, according to BOXOfficeMojo.com. And home entertainment business sales are surging, according to sales figures.

Yet there are other signs that the economy is also inspiring Americans to turn to one another for everything from solace to stew.

Making stew for the neighbors

Nonprofit groups report a surge in volunteers. Peace Corps applications are up 16 percent from last year. Online applications for AmeriCorps, a federal program where volunteers tutor needy children and build housing for the poor, have increased three times faster than a year ago.

Thousands of Americans have organized Economic Recovery House Meetings in all 50 states at the urging of President Obama to talk about the stimulus plan and help one another get through the economic crisis.

Turning to Google instead of God

The duty to one's neighbor is a fundamental belief in most religions. It would seem natural that more people would turn to their church, mosque or synagogue for community in tough times.

But don't expect a shaky economy to lead to a national religious awakening, said Nancy Dallavalle, chairwoman of the Department of Religious Studies at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut.

While individual communities of worship may see some uptick in their numbers, Dallavalle said, fewer Americans depend on traditional religion for support.

Some studies reinforce her point. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, almost all religious denominations have lost members since 1990. Membership in mainline Protestant denominations has fallen for the past 30 years and has been widely documented.

The Internet also siphons people away from traditional religious communities during tough times, she said. Americans who have grown up outside organized religion prefer to get their inspiration through the Internet: online motivational tracts, inspirational speakers and self-help gurus.

Whether people turn to God or Google, this economic crisis will shift people's values, said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a commentator and political science professor at Princeton University.

An economic crisis may even cause Americans to rethink what's worth admiring, she said. Instead of watching the "Real Housewives of Orange County," more might become drawn to the real families of ordinary America, where couples lose jobs and get sick, but they still stick together, she said.

Gage, the Atlanta architect, had to do the same for herself. After she was laid off, she experienced an emotional tailspin. For several weeks, she refused to apply for unemployment benefits because she didn't want to get more depressed shuffling along an unemployment line.

Then she volunteered at the Atlanta Community ToolBank. The nonprofit group lends tools and renovates home for the elderly and disabled. She quickly realized that people weren't just inviting her into their homes. They were inviting her into their lives.

She still remembers the first neighbor she visited on behalf of ToolBank. The woman offered her breakfast in her living room and directed Gage's attention to her "Wall of Fame," which held portraits of her children.

"She had 13 children, all of them grown and several with college degrees," Gage said. "She was so proud of each and every one of them because, as she said, education of any kind was hard to come by when she was a girl. ... I won't ever forget that."

Why economic uncertainty is 'awful' for bringing people together

David Putnam is the author of "Bowling Alone," a 2000 book that argued that many Americans are living more isolated lives. The book concluded, after wide-ranging interviews and numerous studies, that Americans belong to fewer civic groups, know their neighbors less and meet less often with family and friends.

That solitary impulse in Americans actually gets worse during hard economic times, Putnam said.

He said economic uncertainty has an "awful" effect on social connections because people become depressed and lose their sense of self-esteem when they lose a job, he said.

One study looking at the Great Depression demonstrated this, Putnam said. He said that civic engagement, measured by involvement in groups such as local PTA groups and Elks lodges, steadily rose in the U.S. from the turn of the 20th century.

But between 1930 and 1935, during the height of the Great Depression, many civic organizations lost half of their membership, he said.

Americans eventually recovered their engagement in community. He said the country's greatest civic book occurred between 1940 and 1965. That boom was driven by "the Greatest Generation," the men and women who came of age during World War II.

"They had just been exposed to five years of war bond drives, scrap metal drives and Boy Scouts asking people to give up rubber mats in their car for the war," Putnam said. "They lived with a sustained notion of we're all in this together."

Perhaps that will happen now. Gage said she's seen it happen in the United States before.

Gage lived in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina demolished much of the city. What she remembers most is not what was destroyed by Katrina but what was borne out of it: a luminous sense of community.

As she walked through the neighborhoods, she said, she kept encountering people who were cleaning up and looking to help others.

Gage has found a job at an ecofriendly architectural firm in Atlanta. But her memories of her neighbors in New Orleans, and the people she met through the ToolBank, convince her that Americans won't live by Netflix alone in the days ahead.

"It was a tough time, but I saw the entire city come together," Gage said. "I don't see why we can't do that."

Labels: Atlanta, community, faith, God, Internet, John Blake, recession, the economy

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America's faltering faith

March 20, 2009

By Ken Connor

Americans appear to be losing faith in God and in our cultural institutions. Is the loss of confidence in one related to a loss of confidence in the other? The answer is unequivocally yes.

How we view God inevitably determines how we view our fellow man. And how we view our fellow man, in turn, determines how we treat him. Created in God's image or creature of chance? The answer makes a difference because what we believe determines how we behave.

America's Founders recognized the important role that a shared belief in God contributed to the stability of our society. Our second President, John Adams, said, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Adams' son, John Quincy Adams (our sixth President), declared, "This form of government... is productive of everything which is great and excellent among men. But its principles are as easily destroyed, as human nature is corrupted.... A government is only to be supported by pure religion or austere morals. Private and public virtue is the only foundation of republics." Both presidents — father and son — understood that a shared belief in God is necessary to produce the shared values required for a stable society. Belief in God was the foundation of the republic. The very freedoms and republican form of government we embrace today require society's acknowledgment of "the laws of nature and of nature's God" acknowledged by the Founders in our Declaration of Independence.

Unfortunately, shared belief in a transcendent God — the cornerstone of our stable society — seems to be eroding in America today. The recently-released American Religious Identification Survey is an overview of religious demographics in America. Preliminary results show an America rapidly losing its religious faith. Since the survey began in 1990, the number of self-identified Christians has dropped from 86.2% to 76%, and the number of people claiming no religion has risen from 8.2% to 15%. People are losing faith in God at a rapid rate.

As our shared belief in a transcendent God disappears, our shared moral values inevitably give way to a pervasive relativism. We no longer believe in common moral values, so social norms begin to disappear. Every man is a law unto himself. Radical individualism reigns. We should, therefore, not be surprised when our cultural abandonment of shared values manifests itself in the caveat-emptor business practices which have produced our current financial crisis or the forked-tongued politicking of politicians who will spin any lie or reverse any position in order to pass the buck and keep their jobs. Without shared moral values, every person makes their own morality.

Likewise, we should not be surprised to find that Americans' faith in our cultural institutions is also faltering. Without shared belief in God, social values disappear, social norms are abandoned, and we no longer know what to expect from institutions like the family, church, or state. According to the General Social Survey of 2008, Americans have lost trust in nearly every single major American institution. The recent poll asked Americans whether or not they have confidence in several cultural and political institutions. The preliminary results have just been released, and the picture is not pretty. Since 1976, Americans have lost confidence in every major cultural institution except for the military. This list includes the scientific community, financial institutions, organized religion, the federal government, the media, medicine, education, and major companies. The percentage of Americans expressing a "great deal" of confidence in organized religion has dropped from 32% in 1976 to 20% in 2008. Over that same period, confidence in the media fell from 29% to 9%. Confidence in Congress fell from a dismal 14% to an even more dismal 11%. Clearly we Americans are losing faith in our cultural institutions.

A shared belief in a transcendent God produces shared moral values which provide people with social norms that give them confidence in their culture. Without this core belief, the structure of society is undermined by man-centered relativism. An increasingly unbelieving people also suffer from a loss of confidence in one another. Having replaced faith in a transcendent God with faith in flawed human beings, they inevitably set themselves for disappointment and abandon the only moral basis for a stable society.

Only by regaining our shared faith in a transcendent Law Giver will Americans be able to recover our faith in our society.

Labels: ARIS, belief, faith, God, Ken Connor, morality, relativism

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Friday, March 20, 2009

Poll examines faith's role in parenting

Posted on Mar 17, 2009 |
by Mark Kelly

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--The vast majority of parents hope their children grow up to live good lives but, for many, parental success does not include faith in God -- even among parents who are evangelical Christians, according to a new study from LifeWay Research, the research arm of LifeWay Christian Resources.

The national survey of 1,200 adults with children under 18 at home found the most common definitions of successful parenting include children having good values (25 percent), being happy adults (25 percent), finding success in life (22 percent), being a good person (19 percent), graduating from college (17 percent) and living independently (15 percent). Being godly or having faith in God is mentioned by 9 percent of respondents.

Parents who attend religious services weekly are particularly likely to emphasize faith in God, but only 24 percent of them identify that as a mark of parenting success, the research found.

INFLUENCES AND GOALS

While the vast majority (83 percent) believes parents should be most responsible for a child's spiritual development, only 35 percent say their religious faith is one of the most important influences on their parenting, according to the study. This leaves nearly half (48 percent) who acknowledge their role in their child's spiritual development, but fail to consider their own religious faith among the most important influences on their parenting.

Pushing out to either end of the religious spectrum, the study found that almost a third of all parents either have no religious faith or say religious faith has little or no influence on their parenting. Conversely, among born-again Christians, 29 percent say faith is not among the most important influences on their parenting.

Asked if they have a written plan or goal for what they want to accomplish as parents, a full 33 percent say they have no plan or goal at all. Among those who attend religious services weekly and evangelicals, 76 percent say they have a plan, either written or unwritten.

FEARS AND REGRETS

In contrast to visions of success, many parents are fearful for their children's futures and some harbor regrets about their parenting, according to the research. A full 82 percent agree they feel fearful when they think about what kind of world their children will face as adults. Asked if they feel a lot of regret about what they've done as parents, 28 percent of parents agree, although only 5 percent feel strongly about it.

Almost six in 10 parents (59 percent) indicate they want their children to experience pain and disappointment so they can learn from it, but about three in four parents (74 percent) say they try to keep their own pain hidden from their children. More than one in three parents (34 percent) say they worry when they think about their children 'leaving the nest.' A full 15 percent say the prospect of their children growing up and leaving home is simply too painful to think about.

Only 14 percent of all parents say they feel they are very familiar with what the Bible has to say about parenting, even though 77 percent identify themselves as Christians. Among those who attend religious services weekly, that number rises to 36 percent.

Labels: children, faith, God, LifeWay Research, Mark Kelly, parenthood

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Worldly religions find their way to Franklin

By VICTORIA GRAY
Sunday, March 15, 2009

FRANKLIN — Those interested in learning about world religions don't need to go to Harvard Divinity School, or even a closer university or college. They only have to go as far as West Main Street, where a series of interfaith dialogues begins today at Franklin Congregational Christian Church.

Rev. Jeff Stevens, pastor, said as part of the church's adult education program he has invited speakers representing various religions and members of the public to participate in these discussions.

The first of these dialogues is today at the church hall at 1 p.m. and features Mohamed Ebrahim, PhD, an Imam and director of the Dover-based Islamic Society of the Seacoast Area, as the guest speaker.

The next discussion is scheduled for Thursday, March 19, when Manitonquat, an elder of the Assonet Band of the Wampanoag Nation, will speak about his culture's spiritual traditions.

Manitonquat, whose name translates to Medicine Story, is a counselor and lecturer with a Ph.D. in Religious Counseling. He is a retired ceremonial leader and is currently involved in a prison spirituality program in New England, including at the Concord State Prison for Men.

Manitonquat, who lives in Greenville, said he is looking foward to Thursday's discussion in Franklin.

"I'm always interested in interfaith dialogues," Manitonquat said. "It's very exciting for me to connect with people from various faiths and talk to them about Native American spiritual beliefs."

He added that Native American spiritual beliefs do not constitute a religion or religions and that there are many different traditions among the various tribal councils and nations in North America.

One universal belief is that of respect — that everything in creation, including every person, deserves respect.

He said that, in his prison programs, this concept resonates with inmates, many of whom have neither been given nor seen examples of respect in their lives before.

The next common belief is in "the primacy of the circle as the form in which people should gather together."

The circle, also an important symbol of the life and death cycle, symbolizes the equality of members in gatherings, as there is no head or end.

The third belief is one of continually thanking the spirit and natural world.

Manitonquat has written a book that is soon to be published, called "The Original Instructions," which he said is based "on a lifetime of listening to elders and trying to figure things out."

He said the title comes from a frequent answer elders gave when he asked, "What is wrong with human beings today?"

The answer he often got was "They have forgotten the original instructions."

Manitonquat says this means that the earliest inhabitants of world, including on the North American continent, lived more in harmony with the natural and spiritual world than people do today.

He said since Europeans settled the continent it has been their religions and spiritual traditions that have dominated and been propagated.

"No one really understands the wealth of spiritual understanding that existed here before," Manitonquat said.

Stevens said that, as the population in New Hampshire becomes more diverse, it is increasingly important that people learn about and respect each other's cultural, spiritual and ethnic backgrounds.

He added that there is a Buddhist population in the state and a growing number of Sikhs and members of the Bahá'í faith.

Sikhism is a religion that formed in India approximately 500 years ago. Followers believe in a single, formless God who can be known through deep meditation. They believe in samsara, karma and reincarnation as Hindus do, but reject the caste system.

Stevens has been pastor at the church since December 2007.

Originally from Williamstown in Western Massachusetts, Stevens received a master's degree from Harvard Divinity School and has always been interested in world religions.

He said one of the professors at the school, Diana Eck, started and still directs the "Pluralism Project," which began in 1991 to explore America's changing religious landscape. The project has recorded the growth of religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism in the U.S. as a new wave of immigration that began 30 to 40 years ago continues.

"The Lakes Region is sort of on the edge of the movement toward more religious diversity, this wave of great change," Stevens said.

He said he is excited that the first speaker will be discussing Islam, as he worked with Muslim (followers of Islam) communities in the greater Boston area while at Harvard.

Stevens said despite the substantial Muslim population in the U.S., many people still know little about Islam, though the religion, along with Judaism, shares some of the same history as Christianity.

He noted that Thomas Aquinas, in the 1100s, wrote a letter to Christians, Jewish people and Muslims about the things their religions shared in common.

Islam began in the Middle East more than 1,400 years ago and is the second largest religion in the world with more than 1 billion followers. The word Islam means "submission to the will of God (Allah in Arabic)".

Muslims believe there is only one God and that God sent a number of prophets to humanity to teach them how to live, including Jesus, Moses and Abraham.

The final Prophet was Muhammad, who Muslims believe most perfectly delivered God's message, therefore they follow his example (called the Sunnah) and base their laws on the holy book, the Qur'an.

The five basic Pillars of Islam are a declaration of faith, praying, fasting, charity and undertaking a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in one's lifetime.

The Islamic Society of the Seacoast Area is located in Dover and serves more than 300 Muslim families in coastal communities in New Hampshire and Southeastern Maine.

...Amala Dharmacharini, program director of the Aryaloka Buddhist Retreat Center, will lead a discussion on Buddhism.

Buddhism developed out of the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama who, in 535 BCE, reached enlightenment and assumed the title of Buddha.

He promoted 'The Middle Way' as the path to enlightenment rather than the extremes of mortification of the flesh or hedonism. Buddhists believe in reincarnation and that, after many lives, a person can attain nirvana by releasing their attachment to desire and the self.

Stevens said he also is working on booking a speaker from the Bahá'í Faith, a faith that arose from Islam in the 1800s. Bahá'í beliefs promote gender and race equality, freedom of expression and assembly, world peace and world government.

Other speakers may include representatives from neopagan traditions and from the Jainist religion.

Jainism is one of the oldest religions in India and its followers believe that the way to true bliss is through lives of harmlessness and renunciation. Followers believe every living thing in the universe is sacred and has a soul. Because of this, they follow a strict vegetarian diet and live in a way that minimizes their impact on the environment.

Labels: Bahá'í, Buddhism, Christianity, God, interfaith, Islam, Jainism, Native American Church, Pluralism Project, religion, Sikhism, Victoria Gray

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Religious Thoughts and Feelings Not Limited to One Part of Brain

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: March 9, 2009

Brain researchers trying to understand the neural basis of religious belief have concluded that the brain has no special region or network for this task. Rather, it depends on general networks that exist for other purposes.

A team led by Dr. Jordan Grafman of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke questioned volunteers about their religious beliefs while monitoring the blood flow in their brains with a scanning machine. Extra blood flow is assumed to reflect the activity of neurons in a specific region of the brain.

Different networks of neurons sprang into action when subjects were asked their view of three sets of statements about the religious beliefs, Dr. Grafman and colleagues report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In all three cases the neural activity in the subjects’ brains corresponded to brain networks known to have other, nonreligious functions. These include the theory of mind networks, used to predict other people’s intentions.

Dr. Andrew Newberg, director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania, said Dr. Grafman’s findings were in line with other research that has so far failed to find any specific structure in the brain that is dedicated to religious belief. “Religion has so many different aspects that it would be very unlikely to find one spot in the brain where religion and God reside,” Dr. Newberg said.

But he expressed doubt as to whether the biological correlates of religious belief, as visualized in brain scans like those taken by Dr. Grafman, in fact captured all of what religion is. “There may be other elements that science is not capable of measuring,” Dr. Newberg said.

In his own work Dr. Newberg looks at subjects undergoing religious experiences, like speaking in tongues or meditating. In “How God Changes Your Brain,” a book being published later this month, Dr. Newberg reports that certain regions of subjects’ brains have enlarged areas of neural activation after many months of intensive meditation.

He questioned whether asking subjects questions about religion when they were not in a religious frame of mind would capture much of interest about religious belief.

Dr. Grafman said that religious cohesion for a common purpose, and the ability to infer what others are thinking, would each have been favored by evolution, along with the theory of mind networks that serves both systems.

Labels: belief, brain, God, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Nicholas Wade, religion, science

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Religion Reduces Anxiety—A Matter of Faith or Fact?

March 06, 2009
by Rachel Balik

This article reference a number of studies, and provides links for further exploration of this most interesting topic.

Two studies show that the brains of religious people have less intense responses to error, suggesting that faith in God can reduce anxiety.

God on the Brain

Many previous studies have tried to determine whether religion has a positive effect on mental health. In February 2008, the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion and the Centre for Anthropology and Mind at Oxford began a three-year study to develop a scientific understanding of why humans believe in God. Researchers will look for evidence that faith in God is a desirable evolutionary trait, and attempt to discover what aspects of religion can be attributed to nature, and which must be taught.

Psychologists compared a group of students trained for a month in mindfulness meditation with another that was taught somatic relaxation. Both techniques reduced stress, but meditation was more effective at reducing “distractive and ruminative thoughts and behaviors,” indicating that it offered a “unique” method for minimizing distress.

Mindful meditation has also been found to alter the structure and functioning of monks’ brains, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2004. Five neuroscientists visited the Dalai Lama to explore neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to rewire itself) and its relation to meditation. The brains of novice and experienced monks were scanned as they meditated; the experienced monks showed a significantly higher level of gamma waves, a type of brain activity that plays a key role in consciousness.

Religion’s effect on the brain has yet to be fully assessed. However, research suggests that incorporating spirituality into children’s lives can help them navigate the difficult choices of adolescence. Several studies have shown that children raised with a spiritual or religious tradition are less likely to make poor choices about drugs and alcohol.

And in hard times, many find comfort in religion. In September, as the foundation of Wall Street began to crumble, many financiers turned to God and organized religion for support. Churches and synagogues throughout New York City reported a higher number of congregants in business suits.

Labels: believers, God, meditation, mental health, Rachel Balik, religion, science, Stroop

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Friday, March 06, 2009

Women More Religious Than Men

By Robert Roy Britt, Editorial Director
28 February 2009

A new analysis of survey data finds women pray more often then men, are more likely to believe in God, and are more religious than men in a variety of other ways.

The latest findings, released Friday, are no surprise, only confirming what other studies have found for decades. Still, the new numbers illustrate interesting and stark differences. They come from a fresh review of data that was collected in a 2007 survey and initially released last year by the Pew Research Center. The percent of women (and then men) who:

* Are affiliated with a religion: 86 (79).
* Have absolutely certain belief in a God or universal spirit: 77 (65).
* Pray at least daily: 66 (49).
* Have absolutely certain belief in a personal God: 58 (45).

The survey involved interviews with more than 35,000 U.S. adults by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

George H. Gallup, Jr., in an analysis for the Gallup polling organization back in 2002, wrote that the differences in religiosity between men and women have been shown consistently across the previous seven decades of polls.

Among the reasons women tend to be more religious:

* Mothers have tended to spend more time raising children, which often means overseeing their involvement in church activities.
* Though two-income households are more common today, in the past women often had more flexible daily schedules, permitting more church involvement during the week.
* Women tend to be more open about sharing personal problems and are more relational than men. Other Gallup research shows a higher proportion of women than men say they have a "best friend" in their congregation, he wrote.

Lastly, Gallup argued, "More so than men, women lean toward an empirical [depending on experience or observation] rather than a rational basis for faith."

There may be another reason. Rodney Stark, a professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington, flips the question around: Why are men less religious?

"Studies of biochemistry imply that both male irreligiousness and male lawlessness are rooted in the fact that far more males than females have an underdeveloped ability to inhibit their impulses, especially those involving immediate gratification and thrills," Stark argued in a 2002 paper in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

The upshot is that some men are shortsighted and don't think ahead, Stark said, and so "going to prison or going to hell just doesn't matter to these men."

Stark may have purposely overstated the case, but you get the point. My wife suggested another reason: Life is simply harder for women. While I can't argue with that, I also can't find any research connecting that to prayer or church attendance.

Labels: faith, George Gallup, God, Pew Research Center survey, prayer, religion, Robert Roy Britt, spirituality, women

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Friday, February 27, 2009

OPINION: Rick Warren's 10 Reasons Why We Need Spiritual Connections

By LifeWay Christian Resources , Biblical solutions for life -
February 26, 2009

LAKE FOREST, Calif. --- Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church led one of the general sessions during the Feb. 19-21 NEXT conference at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.

Warren is author of the best-selling books, The Purpose Driven Church and The Purpose Driven Life. He is a self-proclaimed big believer in small groups and attributes much of Saddleback’s health, growth and development to small groups. He said the spiritual connections – vertical (believer to God) and horizontal (believer to believer) – lead to personal and church health and growth.

He outlined 10 reasons why people need to be spiritually connected to others.

1. Connections are the essence of life. Each person’s body has to connect muscle to bone to nerves for it to work.

2. We were created for connections. The pain of loneliness proves this. Love God and love each other – that’s the Cliffs Notes of the Bible.

3. Love is the ultimate connection. The No. 1 secret of church growth is not marketing or advertising, it’s love. If your church genuinely loves others, you’ll have to lock the doors to keep people out.

4. Connections help us understand life. The more you understand connections, how things fit together, the better you understand life.

5. Connections empower us. Power flows through connections.

6. Connections keep us growing. Knowing the right thing to do is rarely enough. To keep doing it over the long term you need partners.

7. Connections help us balance our lives. Memory is our connection to the past; awareness is our connection to the present.

8. Connections increase our confidence. We gain confidence knowing that others are going with us through this journey called life.

9. Connections make us more productive. The better connected we are to God and others, the greater the impact on our ministry.

10. Connections must be learned. Connecting is neither natural nor automatic. That’s why God sent Jesus.

Labels: God, Jesus, love, Rick Warren, spiritual connection, spiritual growth

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Friday, January 23, 2009

Author Recommends 'Writing Down Your Soul'

Cheryl Bentley
January 23, 2009

Updated:

'I want you to find me." That was Janet Conner's message to God on New Year's Day 1996.

"Of course, I had every idea if God finds you, it was going to be pretty," Conner wryly notes.

It has become just that - after a lot of traumatic bumps down the spiritual path. She meets spirit daily through writing, Conner says.

Her book, "Writing Down Your Soul," recently published by Conari Press, describes a process Conner developed in which, she says, spirit can be accessed through writing. The practice is readily available to anyone with pen and paper.

Conner appears to be an atypical messenger for the divine. She is a bundle of nervous energy, with words coming out in dramatic torrents accompanied by self-deprecating humor and hands fluttering as busily as Tibetan prayer flags.

The Ozona home of this woman who was raised a Roman Catholic in Chicago sports a variety of items representing different spiritual traditions. They include an Islamic prayer rug, icons of the Christian archangels Michael and Gabriel and pictures of Native American animals.

In addition, a lily-themed painting by artist Linda Renc hangs on a wall. The work by Renc, co-owner of the Painted Fish Gallery, in Dunedin, was a 60th birthday present from friends, Conner explains.

At a time when finances were tight, Conner asked spirit, through her writing, how she could support herself. "Lilies," she found herself writing. She knew immediately she was being referred to the passage in the New Testament Gospel of Matthew advising trust and faith that begins, "Consider the lilies in the field and how they grow."

Still, coming into contact with the divine definitely had its rough side. Conner describes a painful divorce in the 1990s that involved possible physical danger for her and her son.

A former vice president and general manager of a division of the international staffing firm Robert Half International, Conner could no longer work because of the chaos in her life. To try to understand her pain, she began writing to God. Her first writing was mostly venting.

Her trauma over her marital difficulties caused her to employ some of the techniques that would later become important in what she terms soul writing. Conner wrote fast, asked plenty of questions and didn't edit her words. The fast writing seems to allow the writer to bypass the conscious mind, she explains.

The writing eventually led her to forgive her former husband. Unknown to her until his death, this man who had once hated her had made her the beneficiary of his life insurance.

In one of the many incidents Conner considers a gift from spirit, the money came at a time when she most needed it.

The writing also caused her to write her book. In 2006, at a time when she was involved in another project, the idea for the book came up while she was soul writing.

By that time, she had developed enough respect for the process not to ignore ideas that arose in her writing. Conner half-heartedly decided to contact a publisher, thinking her query would be rejected.

Even though Conner has developed trust in soul writing, she is the first to admit she is still left gasping at the sweetness of what she considers its results. Her latest miracle is a possible interview with National Public Radio her publisher has arranged.

While not the same blockbusters sales boost as becoming a selection of Oprah's Book Club, coverage on NPR does get an author's work before a major section of the book-buying public.

"I'm waiting for NPR to call," she says. "I've been writing for 11 years, and I'm still blown away."

Labels: Cheryl Bentley, God, soul, Writing Down Your Soul

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Prayers for the president-elect

January 18, 2009

President-elect Barack Obama is one of a long line of leaders who has invited God to the inaugural ceremonies. Yet never in recent history has there been such a fuss. Setting the issue of public prayers aside, shouldn’t we all be ushering in a new era with a prayer or at least keep our fingers crossed—whether we’re religious or not?

Before public prayers during the inauguration became an issue, nearly 300 faithful organized to pray for Obama.

Members of the Obama Prayer Team have been gathering online, asking God to protect the president-elect and guide him through the next four years. On Sunday, some traveled to Washington on Sunday to attend a prayer service. Others set their clocks to pray at the same time, so God would hear their voices in one accord.

But the prayers didn’t stop with Obama’s victory on Election Day. Overman recalls standing in Grant Park that night, thanking God and shedding tears as the crowd recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

Even after the inauguration, members of the team will continue to keep the First Family and the Oval Office in their conversations with God.

"Oh, the battle has just begun," said Jordan, "We can’t just leave him stranded ... He needs all of us to help hold him up."

Labels: Barack Obama, God, inauguration, prayer

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By PAUL ABELSKY BLOOMBERG
Jan. 16, 2009,

Across all age groups, the number of those inclined to believe in God has risen by 8 percentage points from four years ago, according to the poll by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, or VTsIOM.

About 18 percent believe in “omens,” while 13 percent accept “retribution for sins.” Twenty-eight percent have “faith in destiny,” down from 42 percent two years ago.

Among those 18 to 24 years old, 22 percent do not believe in any supernatural force, the highest percentage of all age groups.

The survey of 1,600 Russians was conducted Nov. 15-16. The margin of error was 3.4 percentage points.

Labels: faith, God, Paul Abelsky Bloomberg, Russians

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Launch of New Church Promises to Change the Face of Religion

The Vibe in Fullerton, Ca announces the February 1st launch of an unorthodox church that chooses inclusion over religion in an attempt to reach those who find the traditional church irrelevant.

Fullerton, CA, January 15, 2009 --(PR.com)-- The Vibe announces the February 1st, 2009 launch of a church with a whole new groove.

Super Sunday, The Vibe’s launch day celebration, is designed to provide a non-threatening environment for people to test drive this new kind of church. This new church firmly believes that people really want to make meaningful contact with God but religion keeps getting in the way.

“Religion sucks”, said Steve Brown, The Vibe’s Lead Pastor, “it sucks the life right out of the most liberating lifestyle imaginable. Jesus didn’t come to this planet to enslave us with a bunch of rules. He came to free us. That’s our message.”

The Vibe presents those exploring faith with an alternative to religious rules, regulations and rituals. They believe that the perfect church is filled with imperfect people - a "sinners only club". They believe that the church was established to include everyone – a belief supported by their mantra: come as you are and bring your baggage with you.

The Vibe’s optimistic enthusiasm is well founded. They began with informal, open-air meetings at Lemon Park in Fullerton, California. From the onset they appealed to people that have been marginalized by traditional religious groups. The homeless, those suffering from addictions as well as the “tattooed and pierced crowd” are embraced as family right along with those from mainstream middleclass America.

However, Brown is quick to add that the ministries of The Vibe are not solely relational or spiritual but also practical. “Prayer is powerful”, Brown said, “but prayer supported by action changes lives.” The action Brown refers to comes in the form of feeding and clothing the homeless, the establishment and support of recovery programs, assistance in obtaining suitable living conditions for those without as well as financial and job placement assistance wherever practical or possible. To this Brown added, “We can’t do everything, but we have to do something.”

Brown himself is not what one would expect. He has two tattoos and can often be spotted with the cigarette-smoking crowd on Sunday mornings. With Brown as its Pastor, one is compelled to agree that a very different kind of church has been planted in this community.

Yet, this unlikely foundation seems to explain the down-to-Earth feel of this new church. According to Brown this traditionally unorthodox version of church makes it easier for people to “catch God” – The Vibe’s primary mission. Through their Super Sunday event, The Vibe hopes to show this community what a real connection to God looks and feels like.

“It is our sincerest hope that people will find a connection to God that they never dreamed possible”, said Brown. Then he commented on The Vibe’s dress code. “Just wear what you’ve got on. God isn’t impressed by what you wear.”

Labels: church, faith, God, Jesus, religion, Steve Brown, The Vibe

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God and Science: An Inner Conflict

By Robin Lloyd, LiveScience Senior Editor
15 January 2009

God and science are inherently at odds, or so goes the story with roots that reach back nearly 400 years to the Inquisition's trial of Galileo on suspicion of heresy.

The ongoing effort of U.S. creationists to inject doubt about evolution into science classrooms in public schools is an example of that conflict, not to mention the polarizing arguments over the decades offered by numerous members of the clergy, politicians, and some atheist scientists and scholars including Richard Dawkins.

Now a new study suggests our minds are conflicted, making it so we have trouble reconciling science and God because we unconsciously see these concepts as fundamentally opposed, at least when both are used to explain the beginning of life and the universe.

But what is the source of this seeming "irreconcilable difference" — are we hard-wired for it, or is it tenacious cultural baggage?

The experiments

Experiments headed up by psychologist Jesse Preston of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her colleague Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago provide some data to support the argument that the conflict is inherent, or hard-wired. They found that subjects apparently cannot easily give positive evaluations to both God and science as explanations for big questions, such as the origin of life and the universe, at the same time.

To see the rest of this very interesting article, please click on "external link" at the end of this edit.

Labels: evolution, God, Jesse Preston, Nicholas Epley, Robin Lloyd, science

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Randy Sheridan: American culture and religion: Is it on the rise or in decline?

January 14, 2009 06:10 pm

In the mid 1700s the Age of Enlightenment was sweeping across Europe like an Oklahoma grass fire.

The European culture’s love affair with liberation theology or better yet, no theology at all was in full bloom. Its theme is akin to the modern day slogan, “If it feels good, do it!”

Some progressive thinkers and prognosticators suggest that America has reached a similar point where religion is no longer a vital part of the fabric in our culture, and its time has come and gone.

Some recent studies might offer some validity to that observation.

A recent Harris Interactive poll suggests a decline of belief in key religious concepts. In 2003, upwards of 90 percent of the post 9-11 populace expressed their belief in God, while five years later that number dropped by 10 percent.

Such decline begs the question: Is the American culture prone to foxhole religion, or is it simply human nature to turn to God more readily during hard times, while holding loosely to our religion during periods of prosperity?

Sounds a bit “Old Covenant like” doesn’t it?

The poll shows even more disturbing trends as Americans continue to discount their belief in heaven, down from 82 percent to 73 percent in that same five-year period. Believing the devil is more mythical than real, a 9 percent drop to 59 percent. Bringing up the bottom, pun intended, the view of hell being real dropped from 69 percent to 62 percent.

What does all this mean? Does it have any bearings on our culture today? And how does this affect you, the average John and Jane Doe of America? Little or much, it all depends on your perspective.

An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life details statistics on religion in America and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape. Many of these new paradigms are the basis for greater spiritual interests.

Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid.

More than one-quarter of American adults, 28 percent, have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion or no religion at all.

Just as it was during the Age of Enlightenment, a torrential uprising of spiritual fervor was sweeping across the European continent, so here in America there appears to be a sustaining devotion to all things spiritual in spite of the latest polls.

Simultaneous to Europe’s liberal utopia, America was experiencing the first Great Awakening. Department of Delaware historian Christine Heyrman writes of what historians call “the first Great Awakening” can best be described as a revitalization of religious piety that swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s:

Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Methodists alike experienced an increase in seekers in unprecedented numbers. In emotionally charged sermons, all the more powerful because they were often delivered extemporaneously, preachers such as Jonathan Edwards, famously known for “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” evoked dramatic, terrifying images of the utter corruption of human nature and the terrors awaiting the unrepentant in hell.

Although our nation has sunk into a recession, is fighting two wars, and humanism is alive and well — you might be surprised to know that church attendance is holding steady and is even on the rise in many parts of our country. An average of 42 percent of adults in America, say they attend worship services weekly.

On the decline? Possibly, but American psyche has been so thoroughly “blood washed” for the last 300 years, I don’t think we are going away anytime soon!

Randy Sheridan of Burleson is a speaker, counselor and mediator. He can be reached at drsheridan@aol.com.

Labels: America, church, God, Harris Interactive, heaven, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Randy Sheridan, religion

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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Time-crunched believers find ways to squeeze in God

Jan. 7, 2009
Los Angeles Times

So you're racing through another jam-packed day, late picking up the kids from basketball practice because you got stuck at the office. Then you pay the bills, walk the dog and perhaps grab cold pizza before collapsing into bed.

When do you ever find time for God?

One publisher has the answer: The One-Minute Bible, Day by Day, whose brief readings promise to inspire your "daily walk with the Lord."

Or check out 5 Minute Theologian: Maximum Truth in Minimum Time.

Because man does not live by bread alone - and might be tempted to eat on the run - there's Aunt Susie's 10-Minute Bible Dinners: Bringing God into Your Life One Dish at a Time.

The American style of worship, like everything else in overloaded lives, is speeding up. Call it God on the go.

This hurried search for the Almighty partly explains the rise of a niche industry of books, DVDs, podcasts, text messages and e-mail blasts that distill the essentials of faith.

The materials offer bite-size spiritual morsels that can be digested in minutes, or even seconds, on the daily commute, aboard airplanes or at the dinner table. As 7 Minutes With God promises, "Learn how to plan a daily quiet time that takes just 7 minutes." And what about your over-programmed 10-year-old? Again, religious publishers have an answer: The Kid Who Would Be King: One Minute Bible Stories About Kids.

Publishers aren't the only ones adjusting to the time pressures on modern religious life. Rabbis and ministers, aware that worship is just another weekend option for many parishioners, are shortening their sermons and taking other steps to entice worshipers

Traditionalists say that quick-hit spirituality can be useful but that it's no substitute for true learning or involvement in a religious community. Even some of the die-hard faithful, however, see the prophetic writing on the wall.

The Rev. Leith Anderson leads a 2,900-member church in suburban Minneapolis and is president of the National Association of Evangelicals. He also produces a daily radio segment - FaithMinute - that is heard throughout the Midwest.

"It's preaching to people who have never been in the choir," Anderson said.

Even as traditional worship attendance languishes, an appetite for spirituality has created new opportunities for alternative forms of religious communication, publishers say. Podcasts and other electronic adaptations are leading the way.

Only about one-quarter of Americans attend weekly religious services, a figure that has remained relatively steady over most of the past century, according to sociologists who study religion. Yet many Americans feel a need to connect regularly with a supreme being.

A recent national survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 71 percent of people were absolutely certain about their belief in God and that 58 percent said they prayed daily outside of religious services.

Labels: church, God, Pew forum on Religion, religion, spirituality

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Friday, January 02, 2009

Is anyone watching you?

Religion's link to altruism grows from a believer's desire to look good in God's eyes, a new study finds
By J. Peder Zane - Staff Writer
Published: Thu, Dec. 25, 2008

After analyzing three decades of research, Canadian scholars have concluded that religion can make people more honest while inspiring them to help people they don't know, even when that exacts a personal cost.

While most people are willing to put themselves out for their families, their friends and even their country, religion makes them more likely to make sacrifices for strangers, to engage in what the authors call "prosocial" behaviors.

"Experimentally induced religious thoughts reduce rates of cheating and increase altruistic behavior among anonymous strangers," University of British Columbia social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff report in the journal Science. "Experiments demonstrate an association between apparent profession of religion and greater trust."

It is not empathy or compassion that makes the religious more likely to do unto others, the authors conclude, but a heightened concern about their own reputation. It is this "egoistic" desire to look good in the eyes of others or to avoid feelings of guilt that drives their admirable conduct.

To illustrate this, they cite a classic good Samaritan study. In this experiment, a lone subject lay on the ground in obvious need of attention. As prescreened people passed by on their way to participate in another study, researchers noted who stopped to lend a hand.

"Recorded offers of help," the authors write, "showed no relation with religiosity in this anonymous context."

On the other hand, in experiments where people's actions were not anonymous, where they were seen and judged by others, the religious were more likely to do the right thing. This helps explain studies that have found that believers tend to be more charitable than atheists -- more likely, for example, to donate blood or give money to the homeless.

The definition of ethicseth

The key dynamic in play here is the age-old definition of ethics: It's not what you do when everybody is watching but how you act when nobody is.

The religious, the authors contend, are more likely to be good in certain situations because they believe they are being watched by an omnipresent eye in the sky.

"The cognitive awareness of gods is likely to heighten prosocial reputation concerns among believers," they write. Even when no people are around, they want to look good in the eyes of God.

The Science paper also reports that the mention of religious ideas encourages truthfulness. When students were asked to unscramble faith-based words before taking a test, they were less likely to cheat. They were also more generous when religious ideas were invoked before experiments involving money.

Labels: altruism, Ara Norenzayan, Azim Shariff, ethics, God, J. Peder Zane, prosocial behavior, religion

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Thursday, December 18, 2008

Virgin Birth More Believable Than Darwin's Theory, Say Americans

By The Staff at wowOwow.com

God may be loving some recent religion-related poll results. A Harris Interactive survey released today shows that more Americans believe in an Almighty presence than in Darwin’s theory of evolution and that the majority of the public believes that the Virgin Mary gave birth to baby Jesus.

The findings, compiled from 2,126 U.S. adults, included:

— 80% of adult Americans believe in God

— 75% believe in miracles

— 73% believe in heaven

— 71% believe in angels

— 71% believe that Jesus is God or the Son of God

— 70% believe in the resurrection of Jesus

— 62% believe in hell

— 61% believe in virgin birth (Jesus born to Virgin Mary)

— 47% believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution

— 36% believe in UFOs

Click here for more of the poll’s findings.

American’s aren’t the only ones to believe in virgin birth. Another poll out today from theology think-tank group Theos has found that more than a third of Britons believe that the virgin birth of Jesus Christ really happened. In the poll carried out by ComRes on behalf of Theos, 34% of people agreed that the statement "Jesus was born to a virgin called Mary" was historically accurate, while only 32% said they believed it was fictional.

What’s also interesting is women — who experience the agonizing pains of birthing — were more likely to believe in the virgin birth (39%), compared to 29% of men, who just stand in the hospital room sweating.

Labels: Americans, angels, Darwin, God, heaven, Jesus, miracles, virgin birth

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Friday, December 12, 2008

God and man at Yale

Eboo Patel

Chicago, Illinois - The Commons at Yale University looked like a cross between Hogwarts and Medina. Over 500 students, staff and faculty had gathered for a university-wide iftar, the meal where Muslims break their dawn-to-dusk fast during the month of Ramadan. Linda Lorimer, Yale’s Vice President, gave an opening talk, expressing the University’s commitment to religious inclusivity and interfaith activity.

Omar Bajwa, the University’s recently-hired Coordinator of Muslim Life, thanked Yale for its efforts to accommodate the unique dietary and prayer needs of Muslim students.

And when the Muslims left the dining area for the evening prayer, most of the seats were still occupied. Hundreds of Jews, Sikhs, Christians, Hindus, agnostics, Unitarian Universalists and others had come to support their fellow Muslim students, partake in some excellent South Asian food and celebrate the religious devotion and diversity that are increasingly a part of campus life at Yale.

It is a remarkable shift from when I was a student 15 years ago. Identity politics were all the rage then, but they were almost always about race, class, gender and sexuality. Academic departments, leadership programmes and residence halls – prompted by the Los Angeles riots [sparked by the acquittal of police offers charged with beating African American motorist Rodney King] – put on hundreds of diversity programmes every year intended to create a more inclusive campus environment.

Faith might play a role in some people’s private lives, we figured, but it barely registered in our campus discourse. Even as newspapers told of strife in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, South Asia, the Middle East, West Africa, the multicultural movement hardly turned its head. As Harvard professor Diana Eck wrote in Encountering God, “Religion (was) the missing ‘r’ word in the diversity discussion” at universities.”

This is the result of what I call secularisation theory hangover, a condition that afflicted universities long after the rest of society recovered. Secularisation theory emerged from lecture halls in the 1960s, advanced by scholars like Peter Berger and Harvey Cox who stated that as societies modernised they would necessarily secularise.

But an important segment of student life on college campuses was actually heading in the opposite direction. Groups like InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Campus Crusade for Christ continued to grow, bolstered by a powerful Evangelical movement in the broader society.

Finally, the past two decades have seen the American-born children of the 1965-era immigrants arrive on campus in significant numbers and bring their Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist faiths with them. Sharon Kugler, the Chaplain at Yale, told me that the number of religious organisations at her previous post, Johns Hopkins, skyrocketed from eight to 27 during her 14 years there.

This combination of devotion and diversity occurred on campus just as religion emerged as a central force in the broader culture. 9/11 has done to religion what Rodney King did to race – put it front and centre on the campus agenda.

One way that universities are responding is by hiring leaders like Sharon Kugler – the first lay, Catholic woman in her position at Yale – to transform their historically liberal protestant chaplaincies into fully-fledged multi-faith programs. This means working with the existing Jewish, Catholic and Protestant (both evangelical and mainline) ministries, hiring new staff to work with Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu students, and organising interfaith service projects and multi-faith student councils.

We live in a society starkly polarised around religion. A 2007 Pew Survey found that twice the number of respondents had a negative view of Muslims than a positive view. If the colour line was the problem of the 20th century, as W.E.B. DuBois famously observed, it appears that the faith line will be the challenge of the 21st. And just as decades of campus activism on the issue of the colour line has helped to produce a more racially inclusive society, so will initiatives like Yale’s Ramadan Banquet ultimately produce one characterised by religious pluralism.

Labels: college, diversity, Eboo Patel, God, interfaith, religion

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Sunday, December 07, 2008

Famed monk Thomas Merton lived what he wrote

This article highlights a prime-time TV program dedicated to Thomas Merton to be aired on Dec 19th. It looks like a worthwhile program, but you'll have to look for it in your time-zone.

By RAY WADDLE • December 6, 2008

America's most famous monk lived up the road in Kentucky at Gethsemani monastery, writing books and wrestling with his own questions and impulses, until his sudden death 40 years ago next week.

People read him today because he lived what he wrote about, seeking to renounce futile self-centeredness in order to discover the freedom of living with God. As one commentator put it, he thrilled at the life of prayer the way others thrill at Notre Dame football.

A fine new documentary, Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton (prime-time debut on Channel 8 is 7 p.m. Dec. 19), gives insight into a remarkable man's conversion to God and solitude, and his struggle against fame. (The helpful companion book, $39.95, includes the DVD.)

Convinced that secular success is a sham, he entered the monastery's disciplines. He entered, also, out of self-disgust, after a destructive college year in England (rumors were he fathered a child) and a bohemian embrace of New York City. At Gethsemani, he surrendered to something new, the peace of God, which emboldened him to speak against forces of modern war and modern despair.

He lived often as a hermit at the monastery but corresponded with popes, poets, laypeople and children. He believed contemplation was not just for monks but available to anyone in the turbulent world.

He dreamed of peace

Fearless belief in God gave him confidence that he had something to learn from Asian spirituality. He attended a conference of Christian and Buddhist monks in Thailand when, on Dec. 10, 1968, he was electrocuted by a faulty electric fan in his hotel room. He was 53.

The 21st century has yet to live up to this 20th-century risk-taker and his dreams of reconciliation and peacemaking. But let's not make a cult of Merton. Instead, seek his books, like New Seeds of Contemplation, where he says, "If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed — but hate these things in yourself, not in another.''

Labels: Gethsemani, God, monk, Ray Waddle, Thomas Merton, TV

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Friday, December 05, 2008

Being Grateful is Good for Us

Here’s an encouraging note as Thanksgiving gatherings give way to Christmas shopping during the current economic meltdown:

When older adults feel grateful for what they have in tough financial times, they’re less likely to be depressed than fellow seniors or middle-aged Americans who don’t feel grateful. And when older adults frequently go to church or otherwise are more deeply involved in their faith, they’re more likely to be grateful during tough times than peers who aren’t.

So, clinging to your faith is good for your mental health?

That’s what the evidence shows, says Neal Krause, Ph.D., professor of health behavior and senior research scientist at the Institute of Gerontology, University of Michigan School of Public Health.

“Given the very difficult economic times that confront our nation,” Krause writes in a new paper, “it is imperative that we find ways to help those individuals who are confronted by ongoing financial problems.”

His study, Krause adds, suggests “one potentially important option may be found through religion.”

Many middle-aged and elderly Americans believe God has a purpose and a plan for their lives, Krause notes. This plan often includes difficult experiences, or trials, but their faith teaches that God’s goal is to promote personal and spiritual growth.

“If religion helps people feel grateful, and older people are more likely to be involved in religion,” Krause suggests, “it follows that church-based interventions that are designed to enhance feelings of gratitude may be especially effective for our aging population.”

But hold on, it’s not just your mother’s faith. The mental health of young adults also gets a boost from the religious practices of their families, according to another participant in the “Religious Practice and Health” conference, Elizabeth C. Hair, Ph.D., senior research scientist at Child Trends, which — along with Baylor Institute for the Studies of Religion — is a Heritage research partner for the event

Specifically, Hair says, her study found parents’ strong faith is associated with their children’s own strong religious beliefs, “which are, in turn, associated with positive mental health in young adulthood.”

Labels: Elizabeth C. Hair, faith, God, gratitude, Ken McIntyre, mental health, Neal Krause

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Friday, November 28, 2008

Children are born believers in God, academic claims

Children are "born believers" in God and do not simply acquire religious beliefs through indoctrination, according to an academic.

By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent

24 Nov 2008

Children are born believers in God

Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind, claims that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose.

He says that young children have faith even when they have not been taught about it by family or at school, and argues that even those raised alone on a desert island would come to believe in God.

"The preponderance of scientific evidence for the past 10 years or so has shown that a lot more seems to be built into the natural development of children's minds than we once thought, including a predisposition to see the natural world as designed and purposeful and that some kind of intelligent being is behind that purpose," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"If we threw a handful on an island and they raised themselves I think they would believe in God."

In a lecture to be given at the University of Cambridge's Faraday Institute on Tuesday, Dr Barrett will cite psychological experiments carried out on children that he says show they instinctively believe that almost everything has been designed with a specific purpose.

In one study, six and seven-year-olds who were asked why the first bird existed replied "to make nice music" and "because it makes the world look nice".

Dr Barrett said there is evidence that even by the age of four, children understand that although some objects are made by humans, the natural world is different.

He added that this means children are more likely to believe in creationism rather than evolution, despite what they may be told by parents or teachers.

Dr Barrett claimed anthropologists have found that in some cultures children believe in God even when religious teachings are withheld from them.

"Children's normally and naturally developing minds make them prone to believe in divine creation and intelligent design. In contrast, evolution is unnatural for human minds; relatively difficult to believe."

Labels: anthropology, belief, children, Dr Justin Barrett, faith, God, Martin Beckford

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Thursday, November 27, 2008

People Said to Believe in Aliens and Ghosts More Than God

By Robert Roy Britt, Editorial Director
24 November 2008

More people believe in aliens and ghosts than in God, a new survey finds, according to a British newspaper.

The survey, however, was done by a marketing firm in conjunction with the release of an X-Files DVD, and details of how the poll was conducted were not reported in the Daily Mail. Survey questions, depending on how they are written, can greatly skew results, along with how subjects are sampled.

That said, the poll of 3,000 people found that 58 percent believe in the supernatural, including paranormal encounters, while 54 percent believe God exists. Women were more likely than men to believe in the supernatural and were also more likely to visit a medium.

A survey of U.S. college students done in 2006 found 23 percent of freshmen had a general belief in paranormal concepts — from astrology to communicating with the dead. Interestingly, the number jumped to 31 percent among seniors and 34 percent among graduate students.

Researchers who have compared various human belief systems say our tendency to believe is deeply rooted.

Religion and belief in the paranormal are not linked as one might imagine. A handful of surveys show just the opposite, in fact.

Labels: aliens, belief, ghosts, God, paranormal, Robert Roy Britt

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Friday, November 07, 2008

Global survey: youths see spiritual dimension to life

In the most ambitious such review to date, young people in 17 countries most often defined spirituality as belief that life has a purpose, belief in God, and being true to one's inner self.
By Jane Lampman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the November 6, 2008 edition

Around the globe, the vast majority of young people share a conviction that life has a spiritual dimension. Seventy-five percent in a recent survey believe in God or a higher power. And while some can't easily define spirituality, the majority say they have had a transcendent experience, believe in life after death, and think it's "probably true" that all living things are connected.

For two years, a project involving some 7,000 youths ages 12 to 25 in 17 countries has explored spiritual beliefs and experiences – and found youths eager to discuss them. It's the most ambitious such project to date.

The initial findings were released Wednesday by the Search Institute, a Minneapolis-based independent research group. The group intends to plumb the results further and carry out additional research in countries around the world.

"I was surprised by the similarities we found across different cultures, even though they may have different languages and worldviews," says Eugene Roehlkepartain, the Search Institute's vice president. The institute hopes to encourage a broader look at the impact of spiritual development on other aspects of life.

Along with partner organizations, the institute conducted surveys in eight countries, focus groups in 13 nations, and in-depth interviews with young people whom others consider to be "spiritual exemplars." The youths represented more than a dozen faiths as well as nonbelievers.

The results of the report – "With Their Own Voices: A Global Exploration of How Today's Young People Think About and Experience Spiritual Development" – can't be considered representative of the countries or traditions, Mr. Roehlkepartain cautions.

Religion has trumped spirituality as a topic of study in the past, says Roehlkepartain. A study released last spring by the German research firm Berthlesmann Stiftung found that 85 percent of young people in 21 nations called themselves religious, and 44 percent said they were deeply religious.

In the US, a UCLA study of undergraduates from 2003 to 2007 broke some ground on spirituality. It found that while attendance at religious services decreased dramatically for most, their overall level of spirituality – defined as seeking meaning in life and developing values and self-understanding – increased.

When asked what it means to be spiritual, young people in the Search survey most commonly responded: believing there is a purpose to life, believing in God, or being true to one's inner self. In Thailand and Cameroon, "being a moral person" made the top three. "Having a deep sense of inner peace and happiness" was highly valued in Canada and the US.

Young people see spiritual development as both "part of who you are" and an intentional choice, the study shows. As a young man from South Africa puts it, "The more spiritual you are, the more you understand. It's like sport, everyone can do sport, but the more you do it, the better you get at it."

Some 55 percent felt their spirituality had increased over the past two or three years. Emma, a young Christian in the United Kingdom, said that "the ideal spiritual person is somebody who spends as much time as possible with God," which she does through daily prayer, devotional reading, and social activism.

Young people say they engage in a range of activities and practices to nurture spiritual growth. The most common include reading books, praying or meditating alone, and helping others.

On several scales measuring spiritual concerns, Australia, the UK, and Ukraine showed much lower values than other countries. For instance, while only 7 percent of youths overall did not see a spiritual dimension to life, among young Australians, that figure was 28 percent.

More than three-quarters of those surveyed said their spiritual development was enhanced by time in nature, from music, and from helping other people in their community. The project revealed that "serving people out of your spiritual conviction" holds young people together and can bridge differences," says Roehlkepartain.

While the youths see a difference between religion and spirituality, the great majority said they view both as "usually good." An Australian teen explains the difference this way: "Religion is kind of knowing the things in your head, but 'spiritual' is knowing them in your heart."

When asked which people, groups, or institutions were most helpful in their spiritual life, 44 percent named family. Between one-third and one-half, however, had not engaged in spiritual or religious activities with parents in the past year. Just 14 percent mentioned their religious institution as helpful, and close to 20 percent said "no one."

The institute wants to encourage parents, friends, and others to fill this vacuum. "Young people expressed to us some hunger to talk about spiritual development," Roehlkepartain says, "and we want people to say, 'If that's what kids in the survey think, what about the kids I know?'

Labels: A Global Exploration of How Today's Young People Think About and Experience Spiritual Development, God, Jane Lampman, religion, Search Institute, spirituality, youth

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Thursday, October 23, 2008

Survey: Most Americans Believe God Uniquely Blessed U.S.

By Michelle A. Vu
Christian Post Reporter
Thu, Oct. 23 2008

This is page one of a two-page article. Please click on "external link at the end of this page.

WASHINGTON - Most Americans strongly believe that God has uniquely blessed America, and a similar majority believe that the United States should set the example as a Christian nation to the rest of the world, a survey, released Wednesday, found.

Sixty-one percent agree that America is a nation specially blessed by God, and 59 percent believe the United States should be a model Christian nation to the world, according to a poll conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research Inc. for the PBS news program Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and the United Nations Foundation.

Support for the idea that America is uniquely blessed by God was highest among people who attend religious services weekly (80 percent), with 86 percent of evangelical Christians sharing this belief. In comparison, less than half (48 percent) of those who attend religious services less regularly held the same view.

The nationwide survey of 1,400 adults, including an oversample of 400 evangelical Christians aged 18-29, was conducted to find how religion shapes people’s view of America’s role in the world and its foreign policy.

People who strongly believe that America is blessed by God and should set a strong Christian example are also more likely to say that the United States is morally obligated to play a significant role in world affairs.

Overall, most Americans also believe the United States has a responsibility to be very engaged (24 percent) or moderately involved (70 percent) on the global stage. However, most Americans believe (67 percent) the United States’ relation with the rest of the world is on the wrong track.

In terms of foreign policy priorities, there was not much of a difference between what the general American public and what white evangelicals consider most important issues. They both agree that controlling nuclear weapons around the world and fighting global terrorism are the two top agendas for Washington.

There were also no significant differences between the two groups on other issues such as fighting global disease, preventing genocide in countries like Sudan, improving the standard of living in less developed nations, and promoting democracy in other nations.

What the general American public and white evangelicals most sharply contrast on in terms of foreign policy priorities is supporting Israel - 65 percent of white evangelicals consider this extremely or very important compared to 46 percent of the general American public; promoting religious freedom in other nations (67 percent white evangelicals vs. 53 percent); combating global warming (43 percent vs. 59 percent); and providing women with reproductive healthcare (53 percent vs. 60 percent).

Differences can be explained by religious views held by evangelical Christians, who largely see Israel as the birthplace of Christianity and link abortion to reproductive healthcare.

In addition to examining faith groups as a whole, the survey also looked in particular at young white evangelicals.

Labels: America, evangelicals, God, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research Inc, Michelle A. Vu

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Friday, October 17, 2008

A Car Crash, A Five-Year Coma, and The Inner Voice

This video is the story of a young girl who suffered a brain injury in a car crash, after which she endured a five-year coma. During that period of time, she was sustained in her inner self by her relationship with God. In the video, she relates her experience, during which she maintained much of her consciousness, and she expresses a desire to help others who are searching for assurance of God and the assurances of faith.

Labels: Allison Zopel, coma, consciousness, God, healing, inner peace, spirituality, The Urantia Book, video

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Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Teens have 'feel-good' type of faith

By Carrie A. Moore
Deseret News
Saturday, Oct. 04, 2008

The majority of American teens have embraced an informal, "feel good" view of God and religion that not only emphasizes personal happiness as the central goal of life but has become something of a new religion in and of itself.

That is according to researchers examining teens over an 11-year time span as part of the National Study of Youth and Religion. In explaining the study's findings on Friday, Holli M.H. Eaton of Azusa Pacific University told members of the Association of Mormon Counselors and Psychotherapists that the "feel good" view of faith has five identifiable characteristics and has been dubbed "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."

Its "tenets" are as follows:

* There is a God who created human life and watches over human beings.

* God wants people to be kind, caring and good.

* The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about one's self.

* God doesn't need to be involved in one's life except when needed to solve a problem -- "kind of a heavenly butler."

* Good people go to heaven when they die.

Beyond these generalizations, teens in general "can't verbalize the basics of their faith," Eaton said, noting there are exceptions but that the majority are unable to do so.

"When you ask about grace, they automatically think you're talking about 'Will and Grace,"' a TV sitcom that is popular with teens and young adults. "When you talk about honor (in religious terms), they think of honors classes at school."

When hundreds of teens were interviewed at length about the principles of their faith, none mentioned self-discipline, "but feeling happy was mentioned more than 2,000 times," Eaton said.

"Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a new religion in researchers' view. It's taking over in kids' lives."

The study, conducted by sociologist Christian Smith, began in 2000 based out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Smith addressed students and faculty at Brigham Young University earlier this year to share his findings, which also include data showing that LDS teens are the most highly religious by denomination of all the groups in the study, with 71 percent saying they attend a religious service at least once a week.

While Latter-day Saint teens see their faith as central to their lives, the majority of American teens see it as highly dispensable, Eaton said. "It's the first thing many teens are willing to let go when there are competing demands in their lives," she said. "Nearly all American youth are profoundly individualistic, and they think that 'what I think is right is right for everybody."'

She said most share the view that "it's okay to be somewhat religious, but it's important not to be too religious. They don't want to talk about specific beliefs. That's too religious," she said.

"Most teens say they pray, but it's usually when they want something. Very few read the Bible and even fewer engage in other religious practices."

Marilyn S. Wright, a psychologist at Pepperdine University, said the vast majority of teens are "incredibly inarticulate" about their own faith, even as they mature into young adults. The initial survey of more than 3,300 teens in 2000 has been followed by subsequent phases of questioning for 10 percent of those studied, and age doesn't change the ability to express their feelings about faith, she said.

Yet teens whose parents put religion at the center of their lives differ from the overall survey group in significant ways, mirroring the religious attitudes and practices of their parents, she said -- something that is encouraging to parents who often believe peer influence is more powerful.

She said LDS teens are "more involved in youth groups for more years and are more likely to claim to be youth leaders in their groups" than other teens. The survey also showed LDS teens are "the most Bible-believing and the least likely to believe in the occult."

Labels: Carrie A. Moore, God, happiness, Holli M.H. Eaton, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, National Study of Youth and Religion, religion, teenagers

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Religion makes people helpful and generous -- under certain conditions: UBC researchers

Lorraine Chan

University of British Columbia

Belief in God encourages people to be helpful, honest and generous, but only under certain psychological conditions, according to University of British Columbia researchers who analyzed the past three decades of social science research.

Religious people are more likely than the non-religious to engage in prosocial behaviour – acts that benefit others at a personal cost – when it enhances the individual's reputation or when religious thoughts are freshly activated in the person's mind, say UBC social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff

Their paper "The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality" appears in the October 3, 2008 issue of the journal Science.

The two-part paper first reviews data from anthropology, sociology, psychology and economics. Norenzayan and Shariff then go on to explore how religion, by encouraging cooperation, became a factor in making possible the rise of large and stable societies made of genetically unrelated individuals.

To date, says Norenzayan, the public debate whether religion fosters cooperation and trust has largely been driven by opinion and anecdote.

"We wanted to look at the hard scientific evidence," says Norenzayan, an associate professor in the Dept. of Psychology.

The investigators found complementary results across the disciplines:

* Empirical data within anthropology suggests there is more cooperation among religious societies than the non-religious, especially when group survival is under threat
* Economic experiments indicate that religiosity increases levels of trust among participants
* Psychology experiments show that thoughts of an omniscient, morally concerned God reduce levels of cheating and selfish behaviour

"This type of religiously-motivated 'virtuous' behaviour has likely played a vital social role throughout history," says Shariff, a Psychology PhD student.

Shariff adds, "One reason we now have large, cooperative societies may be that some aspects of religion – such as outsourcing costly social policing duties to all-powerful Gods – made societies work more cooperatively in the past."

Across cultures and through time, observe the authors, the notion of an all-powerful, morally concerned "Big God" usually begat "Big groups" –large-scale, stable societies that successfully passed on their cultural beliefs.

The study also points out that in today's world religion has no monopoly on kind and generous behaviour. In many findings, non-believers acted as prosocially as believers. The last several hundred years has seen the rise of non-religious institutional mechanisms that include effective policing, courts and social surveillance.

"Some of the most cooperative modern societies are also the most secular," says Norenzayan. "People have found other ways to be cooperative – without God."

Labels: Ara Norenzayan, Azim Shariff, God, Lorraine Chan, prosocial behavior, psychology, religion, University of British Columbia

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Hunt for God particle

By ROSS FREAKE

"The most important thing is to clear your mind so you don't expect anything in particular. You really have to be ready to see absolutely anything."

Who would say something like that: A psychologist, a preacher, or a physicist?

And does it make a difference because the rift separating the three is becoming increasingly narrow and each could be the high priest in the other's "religion".

They use different methods and a different language, but they all delve into the Big Reality beneath the apparent to find a larger Truth.

In this case, the speaker is Hulya Guler, a postdoctoral fellow at the universities of Montreal and McGill who is working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

He's part of a Canadian team working on a project to find the Higgs boson, called the God Particle, which is believed to give everything mass, allowing the universe to exist.

Scientists hope the largest machine in the world will let them peer into nature, to see a reality that existed during the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, to see the platform on which reality is constructed.

The Higgs boson, named after British physicist Peter Higgs who concocted the theory 40 years ago, is hypothetical, but scientists believe it exists because it helps explain the universe we see, which is five per cent of the universe that is.

Like scientists seeking the truth, we can delve into the depths of self. While most of us don't have a spare $9 billion to build a collider, we can perform our own experiment and observe the collisions happenings within us, and why we act the way we do. We can learn to act consciously and choose to walk the mystic path "to the One, with the One, in the One."

Anyone who peers into nature or the nature of self, asking why, is just as much a mystic as Plotinus, St. Francis or Rumi.

We only "see" part of who we are because most of us are below the line of our consciousness. But just as the stuff we can't see, the dark energy and dark matter that make up 95 per cent of the universe, influences what we can see, so the stuff below the line of awareness affects what's above.

Science looks for facts, while religion attempts to clothe them in wisdom, wonder and awe. Religion is the glue of life for billions of people, while science investigates the gluons - the force that holds the quarks in the atomic nucleus together and allows us to have life.

We need to emulate the scientists and the sages mesmerized by the wonder and awe as they search for the really Real, and not be dazzled by the apparently real, the trinkets and beads of a society more concerned with the outward than the inward.

We need to marry the sensual and the spiritual.

Labels: God, God particle, Higgs particle, Large Hadron Collider, Ross Freake

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Friday, September 19, 2008

Church of England issues 'apology' to Darwin

By Mary Frances Schjonberg, September 17, 2008

[Episcopal News Service] A spokesman for the Church of England has said the church misunderstood Charles Darwin's work nearly 150 years ago and that "by getting our first reaction wrong," has continued an on-going misunderstanding.

The Episcopal Church has said that the theory of evolution does not conflict with Christian faith. In 2006, the General Convention affirmed, via Resolution A129, that God is creator and added that "the theory of evolution provides a fruitful and unifying scientific explanation for the emergence of life on earth, that many theological interpretations of origins can readily embrace an evolutionary outlook, and that an acceptance of evolution is entirely compatible with an authentic and living Christian faith."

The previous year, the Episcopal Church's the Episcopal Church Network for Science, Technology and Faith released a Catechism of Creation. In its section on creation and science, the catechism says, in part, scientific researchers since Darwin have refined and added to his ideas, "but never thrown out his basic theoretical framework."

In response to the question of whether accepting biological evolution conflicts with the biblical statement that humans are created in the image and likeness of God, the catechism notes that "image and likeness" have often be described as "those divine gifts of unconditional love and compassion, our reason and imagination, our moral and ethical capacities, our freedom, or our creativity."

"To think that these gifts may have been bestowed through the evolutionary process does not conflict with biblical and theological notions that God acts in creation," the catechism says. "Scripture affirms that God was involved (Gen. 1:26-27)."

Robert Schneider, a retired Berea College professor who was the catechism's lead author, wrote in June 30 essay here that the catechism grew out of a concern that "Episcopalians by and large shared [an American] ignorance about science, and even more distressing, showed little understanding of the doctrine of creation, even though we profess it every time we recite the Nicene Creed."

Schneider wrote that "it is incumbent upon all Episcopal educators to learn the basics about the doctrine of creation and its relationship to the work of science."

"God's two books, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature, come from the same source, the creating Word of God, and we need to help the faithful develop a better understanding and appreciation of this fundamental truth," he wrote.

Brown's essay is part of a new section of the Church of England's website developed to mark the approaching bicentenary of Darwin's birth in 1809, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species" in 1859.

The Darwin pages include ones that explore Darwin's faith and his relationship with the Church of England. Diocese of Swindon Bishop Lee Rayfield, a former biological scientist, contributed a welcome page to the section in which he comments that "theology and science each have much to contribute in the assertion of the Psalmist that we are 'fearfully and wonderfully made.'"

The website also includes sections titled Darwin and the Church, Darwin and Faith, and Brief History of Darwin, as well as a list of further reading, and an events page listing how various bodies are celebrating Darwin's bicentenary over the coming months.

Darwin attended a Church of England boarding school in Shrewsbury and trained to be a clergyman at Cambridge. He married into an Anglican family and was inspired to follow his calling into science by another clergyman who was fascinated by the study of botany.
However, Darwin is said to have lost his faith, in part due to the death of a daughter and an increasingly need for evidence to back up belief.

"There is no reason to doubt that Christ still draws people towards truth through the work of scientists as well as others, and many scientists are motivated in their work by a perception of the deep beauty of the created world," Brown writes in his essay, adding that "for the sake of human integrity -- and thus for the sake of good Christian living -- some rapprochement between Darwin and Christian faith is essential."

Labels: Charles Darwin, Church of England, evolution, faith, God, Mary Frances Schjonberg

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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Faith and Values: Your World Is Colored by Who Your God Is

By Sally Santana
Saturday, September 13, 2008

Last month, Pastor Rick Warren got Barack Obama and John McCain to sit down with him and answer some questions on faith because "we do not believe in the separation of faith and politics because faith is just a world view and everybody has some kind of world view and it's important to know what they are."

You can have a world view about God, too.

In 2006, some findings from The Baylor Religion Survey were released. Long story short, it produced four views, or filters, of God. In 2008, many of us are familiar with them. They are called Authoritarian, Benevolent, Critical and Distant (see www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2006-09-11-religion-survey_x.htm) Writer Cathy Lynn Grossman says, "These Four Gods tell more about people's social, moral and political views and personal piety than the familiar categories of Protestant/Catholic/Jew or even red state/blue state."

The kind of God you're trained to believe in doesn't have to be the kind of God you end up with.

What kind of God do you believe in, and how does that color your world?

Labels: Authoritarian, Baylor Religion Survey, Benevolent, Critical, Distant, God, Sally Santana, worldview

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Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Sacramento’s Self-Realization Fellowship

By Keleigh Friedrich

Indian yogi Paramhansa Yogananda, founder of Self-Realization Fellowship, argues that we are all one spirit. “When you experience the true meaning of religion, which is to know God, you will realize that He is your Self, and that He exists equally and impartially in all beings.”

Yogananda founded SRF in the United States in 1920, to make available worldwide the sacred spiritual science called Kriya Yoga—methods of concentration and meditation designed to attain “direct personal experience of God.” The yoga techniques are described in detail in Yogananda’s famous life story Autobiography of a Yogi.

One of the cornerstones of the SRF religion is that we are all connected by underlying unity, and that the benefits of yoga and meditation can be enjoyed by anyone, regardless of faith. SRF honors a long line of masters, and addresses God as Heavenly Father and Divine Mother, Beloved and Friend. Sunday readings and service typically consists of a passage from the both the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita.

The service ended with a few moments of meditation, an offertory and a prayer for healing and world peace, closing with “Om, peace, amen.” Folks milled into the book shop, socialized in the dining area and ate brunch on the back patio. I talked with Michael, who hailed from Scotland, and a man named Robert, originally from the South, who explained that the organization is run by volunteers and loaded me up with information on upcoming events, like visiting monastics, India Night and weekend retreats. I told them I was sorry there wasn’t more chanting, but that I loved the sense of inclusiveness.

“Yoga means ‘unity,’” Robert said as he led me out to the creek. After pointing out the crayfish with the excitement of a country kid, he added, “With things like yoga and meditation becoming more mainstream, I’m hoping the world is catching on.”

Labels: God, Keleigh Friedrich, meditation, Paramhansa Yogananda, religion, Self-Realization Fellowship, yoga

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Wednesday, August 27, 2008

VIDEO: Madeleine Albright Discusses “The Mighty and The Almighty: United States Foreign Policy and God”

VIDEO: Madeleine Albright Discusses “The Mighty and The Almighty: United States Foreign Policy and God”

By ReligiousLiberty.TV ? August 24, 2008

From Fora.TV - Recorded May 7th, 2006 - Madeleine Albright talks about The Mighty and The Almighty: United States Foreign Policy and God. The former secretary of state offers a provocative and very personal look at the role of religion in America’s foreign policy. She argues that understanding the place and power of religion, and knowing how best to respond to it, is essential if America is to lead successfully around the world.

Labels: America, foreign policy, God, Madeleine Albright, religion, video

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Science was once part of religious study

Jerry Bergman
Mennonite Sunday school teacher

Many people today are unaware that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all historically have taught that God has given his people two books, his word, the Bible, and his works, the book of nature. It is for this reason that for centuries clergy were required to study science as part of their seminary training. This is also why many scientists – until recently – were originally trained as clergy and later became scientists. Examples include Charles Darwin, Rev. Adam Segwick, a prominent geologist “who interpreted all sciences as aids to religion” and Rev. Jon Henslow who devoted his life to observing nature “for evidence of divine handiwork.”

This history explains why all branches of science were once called – not science, a word coined relatively recently – but natural theology. Old book lovers soon learn that when looking for old, pre-1900, books on chemistry physics, or biology, they often contain the words “Natural Theology” in the title.

In fact, our modern university system was originally established to train pastors. Only much later did theology – once called “queen of the sciences” – break off into a separate area of study. The language that science uses today to name everything from animals to body parts, as anyone who has studied biology or anatomy knows, is Greek and Latin. This is just one legacy of the ecclesiastical past of science. Even today the No. 1 reason people give for their belief in God is the existence of the wonders and beauty of the natural world, especially the living world.

Some people feel closer to God when communing with nature, leisurely strolling in a forest, or even resting by a stream or river enjoying the sounds of nature. This is a major reason why modern science was birthed in Christian Europe. Cathedrals were designed to imitate an old growth forest, and stained-glass windows designed not only to tell a biblical story but also to mimic the sun shinning through the trees as well.

This other book is important because the dominant reason, even today, why people hold to theism is the argument best articulated by William Paley in his 1802 book appropriately titled “Natural Theology.” Paley argued that if one came across a watch lying on the road, he would conclude that the watch had an intelligent designer. Likewise, one who studies science is led to ask the same question: Who is the intelligent designer of the universe and the life in it? Paley’s book of science argued in over 400 pages that, after studying the wonders of creation, one could only conclude that, like the watch, it must have had an intelligent watchmaker to explain its origin.

Likewise, the living creation must also have a creator behind it. Thomas Aquinas, often regarded as the greatest Christian philosopher who ever lived, eloquently argued that wherever complex design exists there must have been an intelligent designer. Life, the most specified complex machine in the universe, likewise must have had an intelligent designer. The key is not complexity, but specified complexity. A junkyard is complex, as is a modern jet airplane, but only the airplane is complexity specified for a purpose, to rapidly carry passengers in the air from one point to another.

And it is for this reason why ministers throughout history have preached from the book of nature, called science today, and should continue to do so.

As studying an artist’s art works is an important way to learn about the artist as a person, so, too, studying the works of God is an important way to learn about the Creator.

As Proverbs 3:19 says “The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath He established the heavens.” Likewise, we can better understand the Lord by understanding the products of his wisdom.

Labels: God, Jerry Bergman, natural theology, nature, religion, science

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Thursday, August 21, 2008

Remodeling Hell: Americans Redefine the Doctrine

by Albert Mohler
http://www.crosswalk.com/pastors/11580607/
8/18/2008

Is belief in hell disappearing? "Absolutely," says Barnard College professor Alan Segal, author of Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion. Segal's remark is found within a news story released by Religion News Service. In "Belief in Hell Dips, But Some Say They've Already Been There," Charles Honey traces the transformation of hell in contemporary America.

That figure, Honey reports, is down from 71 percent "who said they believed in hell" as recently as a 2001 Gallup poll.

He writes:

Skepticism about hell is growing even in evangelical churches and seminaries, says one theologian here, a bastion of conservative evangelicalism.

"In a pluralistic, post-modern world, students are having a more difficult time with (the idea of) people going to hell forever because they didn't believe the right thing," says Mike Wittmer, professor of systematic theology at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary.

"That's the biggest question out there right now: 'Would God send someone to hell if they were someone as good as me, but didn't believe what I believe?"'

It was easier to believe in hell 20 years ago when missionaries tried to convert people in far-flung places, Wittmer says. In today's global village, many live next to good, non-Christian neighbors and wonder why an all-powerful, loving God wouldn't eventually empty out hell, Wittmer says.

"I've noticed in the last five years how that view is making inroads even in conservative churches, whereas five years ago it wasn't even uttered or discussed," he adds.

Undoubtedly, much of this can be traced to currents in the larger culture, where non-judgmentalism, a therapeutic view of life, and a thoroughly modern view of fairness lead many to reject hell as a place of everlasting torment and punishment for those who never come to faith in Christ.

As Professor Segal observed, "They believe everyone has an equal chance, at this life and the next." Thus, "hell is disappearing, absolutely."

Labels: Alan Segal, Albert Mohler, church, God, hell

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Friday, August 15, 2008

Hell: Some believe it exists, others fear it, many do not

Posted by Charles Honey | The Grand Rapids Press
August 09, 2008

Believers in hell decline

...for more and more Americans, hell is a myth. In a survey released this summer by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, just 59 percent of 35,000 respondents said they believe in a hell "where people who have led bad lives, and die without being sorry, are eternally punished."

That's down from the 71 percent who said they believed in hell in a 2001 Gallup survey. And it is lower than the 74 percent who said they believe in heaven in the recent Pew poll.

The heaven-hell gap is reflected locally. In a 1999 Press survey of West Michigan residents, 84 percent said they believed in heaven compared to 72 percent for hell.

Skepticism about hell is growing even in evangelical churches and seminaries, says one local theologian.

"In a pluralistic, post-modern world, students are having a more difficult time with (the idea of) people going to hell forever because they didn't believe the right thing," says Mike Wittmer, professor of systematic theology at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary.

"That's the biggest question out there right now: 'Would God send someone to hell if they were someone as good as me, but didn't believe what I believe?' "

It was easier to believe in hell 20 years ago when missionaries tried to convert people in far-flung places, Wittmer says. In today's global village, many live next to good, non-Christian neighbors and wonder why an all-powerful, loving God wouldn't eventually empty out hell, Wittmer says.

"I've noticed in the last five years how that view is making inroads even in conservative churches, whereas five years ago it wasn't even uttered or discussed," he adds.

Americans' optimism and tolerance for diversity complements a growing view of God as benevolent, not judgmental, other experts say.

The believers

The Pew survey showed the biggest believers in hell are evangelical Protestants, African-American Protestants and Muslims. Sizable majorities of Jews, Buddhists and Hindus, as well as atheists, agnostics, and the rest of the unaffiliated, say they do not believe.

Islamic beliefs

At the Islamic Center and Mosque of West Michigan on Burton Street SE, Imam Sharif Sahibzada also listens for the devil's footsteps. Though faithfully following God, Sahibzada says he nevertheless fears hell.

Jewish viewpoint

Although many Jews believe in neither hell nor heaven, others have varied views of the afterlife, says Rabbi David Krishef of Congregation Ahavas Israel.

One is that souls go to a place called Gehenna, often translated as hell in the Bible. It is derived from a burning valley south of Jerusalem where garbage was dumped and children sacrificed. Their souls are purified in a kind of purgatory before most go to heaven, but some are so evil they are punished or utterly destroyed, Krishef says.

He tends to believe in the latter as the fate of unrepentant evil-doers such as Hitler, Osama bin Laden and Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In any case, the morality by which one lives is the key, he says.
Press Photo/Lance WynnCarmella Conway, 85, a Dominican Sister at Marywood Health Center, said she believes in a gracious God who relies on people to help save others from hell.

Helping others

How we live can keep a lot of people out of hell, if you ask Sister Carmella Conway.

She is a Grand Rapids Dominican Sister who spent 55 years teaching religion. She believes in a gracious God who relies on people to help save others from hell, both on earth and beyond.

"We can transform the world by helping others," Sister Conway says following a morning Mass at Marywood, the Dominican motherhouse. "We're kind of guilty if anybody goes to hell."

Starvation, war, lack of charity: These sins make life hellish for many, she argues. Between God's grace and people's faithful work, very few if any will go to hell, she says.

"I think we're going to be surprised when we get there," she adds with a smile.

So does Sister Marjorie Vangsness, 91, who flatly says she does not think about hell.

"I think about the fact God loves us unconditionally, and that God has given us union with God," says Sister Vangsness, a native of Iron Mountain who taught at Aquinas College. "I'm inclined to go along with those who think maybe there's nobody in hell, that God helps all of us to be with him."

Ultimately, we need to accept the mystery of life after death, she says. Sister Emma Kulhanek agrees, but is confident about where she will go.

"If we live as we can best live, then I'm going to heaven," says Sister Kulhanek, 78, a former teacher and principal. "There's a lot of pain just in this world. It's what we do with it that makes the difference."

-- The New York Times News Service contributed to this story

Labels: Americans, evangelicals, God, heaven, hell, Islam, Judaism, Pew survey, religion

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Monday, August 04, 2008

Nature or nurture? Religion is the natural state, atheism is learned according to psychologist

Babies are hard-wired to believe in God, and atheism has to be learned, according to an Oxford University psychologist. Dr Olivera Petrovich told a University of Western Sydney conference on the psychology of religion that even pre-school children constructed theological concepts as part of their understanding of the physical world.

Psychologists have debated whether belief in God or atheism was the natural human state. According to Dr Petrovich, an expert in psychology of religion, belief in God is not taught but develops naturally. She told The Age newspaper that belief in God emerged as a result of other psychological development connected with understanding causation.

It was hard-wired into the human psyche, but it was important not to build too much into the concept of God. “It’s the concept of God as creator, primarily,” she said.

Dr Petrovich said her findings were based on several studies, particularly one of Japanese children aged four to six, and another of 400 British children aged five to seven from seven different faiths. “Atheism is definitely an acquired position,” she said.

Dr Petrovich is partly funded by the Templeton Foundation, which is devoted to making a connection between “faith and science” – in other words, in progressing religion at the expense of science.

NSS Chief Executive Keith Porteous Wood commented: "We will be hearing a lot more from Dr Petrovich on such matters if she attains her ambition for “a proper, funded post in academic psychology of religion within a psychology department”. The most enthusiasm I found on the web for her research was in a curious website called Science and Spirit - exploring things that matter

I note Dr Petrovich was described as a "member of the Faculty of Theology at Wolfson College, Oxford University” on a web page describing her credentials in relation to the conference in Australia.

Labels: atheism, Dr Olivera Petrovich, God, John Templeton Foundation, nature, religion

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Saturday, August 02, 2008

Belief in God drops among educated, but 'universal spirit' prevails

by Elizabeth Tenety
Jul 30, 2008

Religious Beliefs by Education Levels

WASHINGTON -- At first glance, a study from Gallup released Monday seems a victory for atheists: Belief in God declines as education increases. Yet something more nuanced is taking place in academia because while belief in God declines, belief in a ‘universal spirit’ increases significantly during college.

Among Americans with a high school diploma or less, 88 percent believe in God, 8 percent believe in a “universal spirit or higher power” and 5 percent say they do not believe in either. For college graduates, belief in God is at 73 percent, but another 20 percent believe in a ‘universal spirit’ and only 6 percent say they do not believe in either.

The Gallup telephone survey of 1,017 American adults between May 8 and May 11 confirms the findings of a six-year study conducted at UCLA on spirituality in higher education released earlier this year. It found that while participation in religious services declines from 44 to 25 percent between students’ freshman and junior years, students also report nearly a 10 percent increase in “integrating spirituality” into their lives between those two years.

Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, a Catholic organization that works to strengthen the religious identity of Catholic colleges and universities in the United States, is among those not thrilled with the move away from traditional religion.

“We’re losing so much of the great thought and theology that has developed over centuries” when society emphasizes spirituality without the grounding of religion, Reilly said.

Reilly said two forces impact the religiosity of young adults. “In American society, we’ve relied much less on religious education so fewer young people and young adults are getting education in a particular faith.” Reilly added: “The education they are receiving at all levels is much more secularized than what was traditionally provided. Young people continue to have a sense of the divine but very little by way of religious formation.”

But Reilly said the survey did show that, “despite the increasing secularization of American culture,” Americans generally still recognize a higher power, which shows a tendency toward recognizing there is a God.

Labels: education, Elizabeth Tenety, Gallup Poll, God, spirituality, youth

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Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Valley's religions seek 'common good'

By Jason Monaco, Robert B. Lennick and Sharon Joseph
July 25, 2008

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Every major religion in the world has this concept among its teachings. Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and other faiths share this imperative. At its heart, this teaching is about finding the common good.
Is
Working together for the common good promotes ethical, moral, and spiritual values into all areas of our common lives -- economics, commerce, trade, and international relations -- as well as personal virtues, to advance understanding and action on major local and global issues by civil society, private enterprise, the public sector, governments, and national and international institutions, leading to the promotion of collaborative policy solutions to the challenges posed at the present times to all of the humanity.

In Islam, you can find volumes upon volumes of practices, laws and recommendations, the application of which perpetuate and enhance the common good of all, as is commanded by Allah (God) in verse 104 of chapter 3 of Holy Quran: ''Let there be among you a community who enjoin good and forbid evil; it is they that shall be successful.'' That is further emphasized by the Prophet Mohammad in a narration reported by Jabir bin Abdullah in Sahih Bukhari: ''Enjoining all that is good is charity.''

Among Christian teachers, perhaps it was the great St. Paul who best described the common good. In his letter to a young church in Corinth, he talked about working together as different parts of the body -- each part being important, each part having a job to do, each job essential to the body working as a finely tuned instrument. And, he reminds us that no one is left out: ''To each is given a gift of the spirit for the common good.''

In Judaism, we find a living ethic of social justice where the verse, ''Remember the heart of the stranger,'' is repeated no less than 36 times in the Torah. The common good begins with empathy for others and a recognition that unless each individual internalizes the challenges of others we become a collection of private experiences, rather than a caring and committed community.

We must step outside of our comfort zone. We must join hands with others and develop systems that ease the pain and suffering of those facing hardships. What purpose does religion serve if it does not awaken an individual's concern for all human life; for the ''common good?''

God is the author of creation. In this life, all human beings face difficulties and hardships. We must look at the difficulties of this life as an opportunity to become better human beings; to become closer to the Creator of the heavens and the earth. We must cultivate our hearts, and by serving others, we can strive toward this end.

Jason Abdullah Monaco of Allentown is outreach coordinator for the Muslim Association of the Lehigh Valley. The Rev. Sharon Solt Joseph is pastor of Church of the Manger UCC Church in Bethlehem. Robert B. Lennick is rabbi at Congregation Keneseth Israel in Allentown.

Labels: Christianity, God, Golden Rule, interfaith, Islam, Jason Monaco, Judaism, religion, Robert B. Lennick, Sharon Joseph

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Thursday, July 17, 2008

The Shack--Some Preliminary Observations - Book Review

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

It isn’t often that a self-published book rises to the top of the bestseller lists. In fact it is so rare that when it does happen, we ought to stand back and take notice.

Several years ago William P. Young set out to write a story for his children. Some friends found out about the story and encouraged him to publish it. After being turned down by both secular and Christian publishers, he and his friends founded their own company to publish the book. Starting with an initial advertising budget of only $300, the book took took off for the stratosphere.

As of this morning, The Shack is currently #2 on the Amazon bestseller list. It is #1 in the Religion and Spirituality category (beating out Eckardt Tolle’s A New Earth at # 2), and #1 in the Christianity category, coming in ahead of Tim Keller, Gary Chapman, Rick Warren, C. S. Lewis, Jim Tressel (Ohio State football coach), Don Piper (author of 90 Minutes in Heaven), Joel Osteen, Tony Dungy, Randy Alcorn and John Eldredge. It is also #1 on the New York Times Paperback Trade Fiction bestseller list. “The Shack” has already sold over 1 million copies, and the number is rising daily.

That’s impressive, and take it from someone who’s been in the book writing business for a while, numbers like that are what authors dream about at night. And to have this happen for what is essentially a self-published book, well, that’s just plain amazing.

So what’s going on here?

I don’t propose to write a full-scale review, but I do want to offer some comments both on the book and its popularity. Clearly the author has touched a chord with many people. I’m wondering to myself what it all means and what we might learn from it.

So for the moment, here are three preliminary observations. First, the book is mostly about the question of how to maintain your faith in God in the face of unimaginable tragedy. It’s about a father’s virtual loss of faith after his daughter is abducted and murdered on a camping trip. Second, the “shack” in the story is both a literal and a metaphorical place. The shack is the place where the daughter was killed. It is also the place where the man returns to meet God. Third, the book attempts to paint a picture of the Trinity that emphasizes God’s love. I think that message resonates with many readers, especially those who have been deeply hurt. To be told that there is a God who loves you and is in fact quite fond of you (a phrase used several times in the book) even when your heart is filled with despair and confusion gives hope to many people. And taken in and of itself, that message is true and needs to be shared.

But the way in which that message is delivered matters almost as much as the message itself. And it is for this that “The Shack” has sparked so much controversy. I want to consider some of these issues in the next several days.

You can reach the author at ray@keepbelieving.com . Click here to sign up for the free weekly email sermon.

Labels: book review, Dr. Ray Pritchard, faith, God, The Shack, tragedy, Trinity

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Saturday, July 12, 2008

Sir John Templeton: iconic innovator in finance and religion

He was a shrewd stock picker. But his priority was spiritual wealth.

By Gary Moore

from the July 11, 2008 edition

Sarasota, Fla. - Sir John Templeton was many things to many people.

To the general public, he was one of the past century's greatest investors and philanthropists – a man who revolutionized both mutual fund investing and the effort to explore the nexus between science and religion.

After his passing this week, he will likely be remembered by the rational and affluent West as a poor boy from Tennessee turned Rhodes scholar and Dean of Global Investing.

Christians might remember him for his Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, and as someone who puts first things first: Faith, patience, prudence, and ethics were foremost in his thought.

Scientists might remember him most for his Templeton Foundation, which gives millions to study the links between science and religion.

Traditional Europe might remember Sir John, as his friends called him, as a great philanthropist who was knighted by Her Majesty as he valued historic treasures such as Oxford and Westminster Cathedral enough to invest in their futures. And the East will probably remember John as a spiritual creature who valued his Creator above all else, as he'd "been convinced that nothing exists except God."

I will remember him as a good Samaritan who paused to help me during a painful time on Wall Street. His historical and global perspective assured me that markets assuredly rebound – and that it's most wise to, as the poem goes, "keep your head when all about you are losing theirs." That was sage advice then, and it's sage advice today.

We would all be correct in our differing memories of John Templeton. Yet we live in an age of strained relationships, where differences seem intractable. So we might be most enriched if we remember his holistic approach to life.

John worked very intentionally to live the spiritual qualities he prized. And while he may have valued reason, prosperity, tradition, and spirituality, he gave top priority to love, the connecting force that holds us together despite our differences – even the largest ones.

He once startled me by describing how difficult it had been to love Joseph Stalin. He later worked at loving Saddam Hussein. That effort showed how seriously he took the biblical injunction to love his neighbors, including enemies, as himself.

That began with humbly loving God. The Jewish scriptures, which John loved and studied late in life, tell us: "As [a man] thinketh in his heart, so is he."

In the West, it is common to think of science as being about this world and religion about the next. But John saw reality as a single whole. So his foundation now invests his wealth in scientifically testing that proposition, just as the scriptures say Solomon "tested truth."

We financial types often think of investing as a selfish activity and charity as an altruistic one, so we leave ministry to the ordained clergy. John thought of us as "ministers of prosperity."

The Christian Scriptures say to put your mind on those things that are good, pure and lovely. So John refused to read or watch most media as he knew they might fill his mind with negativity.

But John wasn't just a contrarian for the sake of being different. He simply understood a truth that still escapes most investors: "The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell."

That perspective proved prescient in the late 1990s when he predicted that 90 percent of the new Internet companies would be bankrupt within five years. He added that US stock markets would likely stagnate for a decade. Those were enriching lessons in the school of life.

Yet John was ever hopeful about financial and spiritual progress. A few years ago, he asked me to co-write an article about why the Dow Jones Industrial Average might rise to 1 million by the year 2100.

I was skeptical at first. But then I remembered that John often spoke to us in financial parables, and I realized that the Dow would only need to rise about five percent per year in order to achieve that goal. He was saying that America will be fine but developing nations may also achieve greater parity during this century.

He would be even more pleased if his foundation helps us achieve even greater spiritual progress, the most important progress of all. That is more likely as we now have his example that the ancient values of faith, hope, and especially love still promise a more abundant life for our modern world.

• Gary Moore is an investment adviser who wrote two books about John Templeton, including "Spiritual Investments: Wall Street Wisdom from the Career of Sir John Templeton."

Labels: finance, Gary Moore, God, John Templeton, love, science, spirituality

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Templeton's Legacy of Humility

Billionaire investor John Templeton, who died Tuesday at age 95, might have had more money than God, but he knew better than to mistake wealth for wisdom.

"We should admit that no human being has ever known one percent of the infinity of God. We are terribly ignorant," Templeton told me in 2002.

Humility is a wonderful trait in a billionaire, or any person of faith. How do we find more of it? Templeton spent a good deal of his fortune trying to figure that out.

The Wall Street Legend was the first and only billionaire I ever met. I interviewed him in his hometown, Winchester, Tenn., better known as the birthplace of Dinah Shore.

I wanted to ask him for a stock tip. He wanted to talk about science and religion. Just my luck.

"When new discoveries are made about science, do we not merely discover more about God?" he said. "All of nature reveals something of the Creator."

I've always thought so. Like Templeton, I've never thought of science and faith as rivals. Science can tell us how, faith can tell us why. Science deals with facts, faith deals with truths.

But I didn't grow up in the shadow of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, which pitted religion against science a mere four counties east of where Templeton was being raised in the Cumberland Presbyterian church.

Templeton said he was fascinated by the trial, but he was equally enthralled by the natural wonders around him. He began to wonder Why couldn't God create an evolving universe that operated on both physical and spiritual laws.

After he made his fortune, he set out to make a contribution. In 1987, he established the John Templeton Foundation to encourage the use of scientific methods to discover more about the spiritual realm. Foundation grants are being used to study such virtues as forgiveness, gratitude and humility.

What Templeton wanted more than money was meaning. What he wanted more than certainty was wisdom -- knowledge tempered by humility.

"I grew up as a Presbyterian," he told Business Week in 2005. "Presbyterians thought the Methodists were wrong. Catholics thought all Protestants were wrong. The Jews thought the Christians were wrong. So what I am financing is humility. I want people to realize you shouldn't think you know it all."

That's more valuable than any stock tip.

Labels: faith, God, John Templeton, science

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Friday, July 11, 2008

God's OK, it's just the religion bit we don't like

Linda Morris
July 11, 2008

AUSTRALIA is one of the least devout countries in the Western world, although two-thirds of its population identifies itself as Christian, an international survey comparing religious expression in 21 countries has found.

Religion does not play a central part in the lives of many Australians: 48 per cent of Australians surveyed said they did not partake in personal prayer and 52 per cent said they rarely attended a place of worship for religious reasons.

The survey by Germany's Bertelsmann Foundation questioned 21,000 adults. It found that levels of religious identity in Australia were on par with Germany and Switzerland, significantly less than the US but greater than Britain.

Forty-four per cent of Australians considered themselves religious but said religion did not play a central role in their lives, a third said they did not believe in a divine power or in life after death. Half the Australians surveyed considered religion the least important when compared with family, partners, work and career, leisure time and politics.

Worldwide, the young are more religious than reputed, with only 13 per cent having no appreciation for God or faith in general, so expressions of faith during World Youth Day should come as no surprise.

Australians had a largely positive perception of God. Most thought of God as a loving, kind-hearted being and there was a strong religious vitality among the nation's youth, with one in five considered to be deeply religious, the survey found. This suggested that the Pope's mission to rejuvenate the Catholic faith in Australia may fall on fertile ground.

Census results show Mass attendance is continuing to fall. The percentage of Catholics attending Mass during a typical weekend dropped to just under 14 per cent in 2006, compared with 18 per cent in 1996. Rates of Mass attendance among young people are now thought to be less than 10 per cent. On average, Mass attenders are older, better educated and more likely to be female, married and born overseas.

Labels: Australia, Bertelsmann Foundation, God, Linda Morris, religion

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Wednesday, June 25, 2008

God, Up Close And Personal

by Steve Lipman

The idea that God is a “person with whom people can have a relationship” seems right out of Evangelical Christianity.

Yet a new study of religion in America finds that a full quarter of Jews believe in such a personal relationship.

Is that figure high or low, and is it good for the Jews?

It’s lower than the percentage of such believers in the country’s other major faith groups, according to a major survey of religious beliefs released this week. But it’s probably on the rise, and it’s good if Jews with such a personal belief become active in synagogues and other Jewish organizations, says a spokesman for a prominent outreach organization.

It may be bad, however, if personal piety comes at the expense of connections with the wider Jewish community, says a representative for another national Jewish organization.

The release of the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life holds few surprises about American Jewry, showing the American Jewish community on the liberal — nearly secular — end of the spectrum on such issues as the importance of religion in one’s life, frequency of attending religious services and divine authorship of Scripture. (Pew interviewed some 36,000 people nationwide during the spring and summer of 2007. The Jewish sample was 682.)

Twenty-five percent of Jews in the Pew study said they believe in a personal God; 50 percent said God is “an impersonal force.” The Protestant figure for a personal God was 72 percent; Catholic, 60; Muslim, 41.

People who develop a sense of personal spirituality, in any faith, often tend to disassociate from communal life ...

Rabbi Yitzchak Rosenbaum, associate director of the National Jewish Outreach Program, says he does not share those fears. “I don’t think the broader Jewish community will suffer if Jews develop a personal relationship with God. It brings them closer — they need a community.”

And, the rabbi says, the concept of a personal relationship with God has roots in the Torah. “It was a Jewish idea before it was a Christian idea. We believe that every Jew prays directly to God.”

Labels: Christianity, God, Jewish, Jews, personality, prayer, Steve Lipman

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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Americans believe in miracles, heaven, power of prayer: report

Americans believe in miracles, heaven, power of prayer: report

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Around three-quarters of Americans believe in miracles, more Americans believe in heaven than in hell, and nearly six in 10 pray every day, a report based on a survey of 35,000 US adults showed Monday.

Of those who pray regularly, around a third -- 31 percent -- say God answers their prayers at least once a month, and one in five Americans said they receive direct answers to prayer requests at least once a week, the report by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said.

Seventy-four percent of those surveyed for the report, called the US Religious Landscape Survey, said they believed in heaven as a place where people who have led good lives are rewarded, while only around six in 10 believed in hell, where unrepentant evil-doers languish in eternal punishment.

Nearly eight in 10 American adults (79 percent) believe that miracles occur, the survey, conducted between May and August last year, showed.

But perhaps most striking in the report was the near unanimous belief in God, held by more than nine out of 10 Americans.

"While this survey finds that more than nine in 10 Americans believe in the existence of God or a universal spirit, it also shows that there are considerable differences in the nature of this belief," Pew research fellow Greg Smith said.

"Six in 10 adults believe God is a person with whom people can have a relationship, but one in four, including about half of Jews and Hindus, see God as an impersonal force," he said.

Oddly, one in five of those who identified themselves as atheists in the survey said they believe in God.

"But this also shows us the complicated way that people think about their faith. Many people who identify as atheists may not be telling us they don't believe in God, but that they don't like organized religion," he said.

"There is a lot of complexity in American religion," Greene summarized.

The survey also showed that religious affiliation tends to translate into social and political leanings.

"Mormons and members of evangelical churches tend to be more conservative in their political ideology, while Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists tend to be more politically liberal than the population overall," the report says.

As the United States gears up to elect a new president in November, that translates to the simple fact that "there are votes to be had by the Democratic and Republican candidates by making appeals to religious groups," said Greene.

Labels: God, heaven, miracles, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, prayer

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Monday, June 23, 2008

Part II of U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

WASHINGTON, June 23

Part II of U.S. Religious Landscape Survey details Americans' religious
beliefs and behaviors as well as their social and political attitudes

WASHINGTON, June 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life today released its second report on the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, which finds that while many Americans are highly religious, most are not dogmatic in their approach to faith. This new analysis examines the diversity of Americans' religious beliefs and practices as well as their social and political attitudes. It follows the first report of the Landscape Survey, which was published in February 2008 and detailed the size, internal changes and demographic characteristics of major religions in the United States.

"The fact that most Americans are not exclusive or dogmatic about their religion is a fascinating finding," said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum. "Most people will be surprised that a majority of adherents in nearly all religious traditions, including a majority of evangelical Protestants, say that there isn't just one way to salvation or to interpret the teachings of their own faith."

Based on interviews conducted in English and Spanish with a nationally representative sample of more than 35,000 adults, part two of the Landscape Survey includes a wealth of information on the religious beliefs and practices of the American public. It also explores the social and political attitudes of religious groups, including members of many small religious traditions - such as Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and agnostics - not typically analyzed in public opinion surveys.

"This report illustrates, chapter and verse, the amazing diversity and dynamism both between and within religious traditions in America," noted John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum. "And this diversity of affiliation, belief and practice matters when it comes to social and political questions."

The second report of the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds:

* Although many Americans are highly religious, they are not dogmatic in their faith. Seventy percent of Americans with a religious affiliation say that many religions - not just their own - can lead to eternal life. Most also think there is more than one correct way to interpret the teachings of their own faith.

* This does not mean, however, that Americans take religious matters lightly. Most, in fact, say they rank the importance of religion very highly in their lives, and a plurality wants to preserve the traditional beliefs and practices of their faith, while only a small minority wants to accommodate their religion to modern culture.

* There is tremendous diversity of religious beliefs and practices in the U.S. Important religious differences exist between the major religious traditions, but there are also important differences within religious traditions.

* While more than nine-in-ten Americans (92%) believe in the existence of God or a universal spirit, there are considerable differences in the nature of this belief. Six-in-ten adults believe that God is a person with whom people can have a relationship; but one-in-four - including about half of Jews and Hindus - see God as an impersonal force. Similarly, seven-in-ten Americans say that they are absolutely certain of God's existence, while roughly one-in-five (22%) are less certain in their belief.

* Three-quarters of Americans report praying at least once a week, with large majorities among most religious traditions saying they pray on at least a weekly basis. Even among the unaffiliated, roughly one-in-three pray on a weekly basis. At the same time, however, there are those among all faith groups who pray much less frequently; overall, one quarter of the public says they pray a few times a month or less often.

* Almost two-fifths of Americans report meditating at least once a week. This practice is particularly common among Buddhists, but nearly half of evangelical Protestants and Muslims say they meditate at least weekly. About one-quarter of the unaffiliated report weekly meditation. These patterns may incorporate elements of both Christian and non-Christian traditions.

* Politics and religion in the United States are intertwined, and religion is highly relevant to understanding politics in the U.S. Yet while the diversity of religious affiliation, belief and practice translates into important differences on many social and political issues, differences on other issues are less pronounced.

* Religion is closely linked to political ideology. The survey shows that Mormons are among the most politically conservative groups in the population. Jews, Buddhists and Hindus, by contrast, are among the most likely to describe their ideology as liberal.

* People who regularly attend worship services and say religion is important in their lives are much more likely to identify as conservative, and this pattern extends to many religious traditions. For example, within the evangelical, mainline Protestant, historically black Protestant, Catholic, Mormon and Orthodox Christian traditions, those who attend church weekly are significantly more likely than those who attend less often to describe themselves as political conservatives. And among Jews, those who say religion is very important to them or pray every day are more likely than others to be politically conservative.

* The connection between religious engagement and political attitudes appears to be especially strong when it comes to hot button social issues such as abortion or homosexuality. For instance, about six-in-ten Americans who attend religious services at least once a week say abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, while only three-in-ten who attend less often share this view. This pattern holds across several religious traditions.

* On other topics covered in the survey, such as views on the role and size of government and foreign policy attitudes, the role of religion is less clear and there appears to be greater consensus across and within religious traditions. For instance, a majority of nearly every religious group supports stricter environmental regulations and believes the government should do more to help Americans in need. Similarly, most Americans, including majorities of most faiths, say it is more important to focus on problems here at home than to be active in world affairs.

In conjunction with the release of this report, the Pew Forum is updating its online presentation of the findings at religions.pewforum.org. Updated features include interactive mapping by state, dynamic charts and a variety of other tools that allow users to explore the beliefs and practices as well as social and political views of major religions in the United States.

Subsequent releases will include a re-contact survey that delves deeper into the relationship between religious and political identity, issues related to conversion and attitudes toward religious pluralism in America.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life delivers timely, impartial information on issues at the intersection of religion and public affairs. The Forum is a nonpartisan, non-advocacy organization and does not take positions on policy debates. Based in Washington, D.C., the Forum is a project of the Pew Research Center, which is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

SOURCE Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life

Labels: beliefs. practices, God, meditation, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, politics, prayer, religion, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

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Friday, June 20, 2008

Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life to Release Part II of U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

Posted : Thu, 19 Jun 2008
Author : Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life

Study details Americans' religious beliefs and behaviors as well as their social and political attitudes

WASHINGTON, June 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In a noon EDT conference call for journalists on Monday, June 23, 2008, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life will release the second report of a landmark survey that examines the tremendous diversity of Americans' religious beliefs and practices as well as their social and political views. This new analysis follows the first report of the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, which was published in February 2008 and detailed the size and demographic characteristics of religious groups in the U.S.

Based on interviews conducted in English and Spanish with a representative sample of more than 35,000 adults, part two of the Landscape Survey includes a wealth of information on the religious beliefs and practices of the American public. It also explores the social and political attitudes of religious groups, including groups that are as small as three-tenths of 1 percent of the adult population.

Topics explored in the report include the importance of religion in people's lives; belief in God and the afterlife; attitudes toward the authority of sacred writings; frequency of worship attendance, prayer and meditation; and views of religion and morality, among others. The report also examines ideological and partisan orientation; attitudes on abortion, homosexuality, evolution and other social issues; views on helping the needy, the environment, and the size and proper role of government; and opinions on foreign affairs.

Subsequent releases will include a re-contact survey that delves deeper into religious-political identity, issues related to conversion and attitudes towards religious pluralism in America.

Labels: afterlife, Americans, God, morality, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, prayer, religion, social issues

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Fortitude and the U.S. Open

A Christian Science perspective on daily life.

from the June 20, 2008 edition

There's an old saying that when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

This was exemplified earlier this week when Tiger Woods won the US Open Golf Championship, his 14th major championship. Because he'd had knee surgery, he hadn't had tournament play or even much practice in two months. During the US Open he struggled, often limping, but his indomitable spirit of never giving up sustained him, bringing him to victory in a playoff. When asked afterward if he'd been tempted to give up, he replied, "You just deal with it, giving it your best, no excuses, whether 100 percent or not, it's just get up and go. I wasn't going to bag it. It's not my nature to give up."

If we can glimpse the fact that we are spiritual, expressing strength, courage, and fortitude as ideas of God, infinite Mind, the source of all energy, then we won't allow anything to hinder or limit our expression of God's qualities. Denigrating, restrictive thoughts would suggest otherwise, sometimes so persistently that they may mesmerize us or make us afraid. But we can put them out of consciousness by turning to God for a rundown on our real status and condition.

Another example of fortitude was a woman who'd been told by the doctors who were caring for her that she had only a short time to live. That was 10 years ago, and she's now in her 90s. She said that when the doctor told her she was dying, she said to herself, "Well, I have had a good life, I have helped many people, and as far as I know have not done anyone any wrong, so I may as well just pass on." Then she suddenly became aware of the implications of consenting to death in that way. She thought, "If I do, I am committing suicide, and I am not going to commit suicide. I am not going to give up."

She remembered this statement by Mary Baker Eddy: "He is bravely brave who dares at this date refute the evidence of material sense with the facts of Science, and will arrive at the true status of man because of it" ("Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896," p. 183). She realized that she could be "bravely brave" and indeed refute the mortal evidence with what she knew to be true about her true identity as the child of God. And, within a short time, she was completely healed.

So often we are tempted to stop trying – to just give up – but we have the capacity to reject all such notions, and with this rejection come progress and victory.

For whatsoever is born of God
overcometh the world:
and this is the victory
that overcometh the world,
even our faith.
I John 5:4

Labels: fortitude, God, golf, Mary Baker Eddy, spirituality, Tiger Woods, US Open

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Saturday, June 14, 2008

Christian Theologians Prepare for Extraterrestrial Life

By Brandon Keim 06.13.08

Little green men might shock the secular public. But the Catholic Church would welcome them as brothers.

That's what Vatican chief astronomer and papal science adviser Gabriel Funes explained in a recent article in L'Osservatore Romano, the newsletter of the Vatican Observatory (translated here). His conclusion might surprise nonbelievers. After all, isn't this the same church that imprisoned Galileo for saying that the Earth revolves around the sun? Doesn't the Bible say that God created man -- not little green men -- in his image?

From within, theologians have debated the implications of alien contact for centuries. And if one already believes in angels, no great leap of faith is required to accept the possibility of other extraterrestrial intelligences.

Since God created the universe, theologians say, he would have created aliens, too. And far from being weakened by contact, Christianity would adapt. Its doctrines would be interpreted anew, the aliens greeted with open -- and not necessarily Bible-bearing -- arms.

"The main question is, 'Would religion survive this contact?'" said NASA chief historian Steven J. Dick, author of The Biological Universe. "Religion hasn't gone away after Copernican theory, after Darwin. They've found ways to adapt, and they'll find a way if this happens, too," Dick says.

The central conundrum posed to Christianity by alien contact would involve the Incarnation -- the arrival of Jesus Christ as God's representative on Earth, his crucifixion and the absolution of humanity's sins through his forgiveness.

Some propose that the Earthly incarnation of Jesus some 2,000 years ago redeemed all intelligent creatures, in all places and -- since a space-faring race is likely older than us -- in all times. Others have suggested that Jesus could take multiple forms.

"Just as Jesus is human like you and I, you would find an alien-specific Jesus," said Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary professor Ted Peters.

But Peters and others also say that aliens may not have fallen into sin, instead existing in a state of grace, neither having nor needing Jesus. In that case, missionaries would have no call to convert them.

All this, however, assumes that humanity not only encounters new forms of life but also understands them. Other intelligences may be incomprehensible to us, thus intensifying another doctrinal question: What does it mean to be made, as the Bible proclaims, in God's image?

Many astrotheologians argue that God's image refers to our spiritual nature, with our physical forms being irrelevant. Not everyone, however, agrees.

"If there are aliens, the Bible specifically does not say that they were created in his image," said Mark Conn, pastor of the Noble Hill Baptist Church in Springfield, Missouri. "God created many other intelligent beings on this planet, and they were not created in His image."

Conn's church recently met to discuss the issues posed by extraterrestrial contact, ultimately deciding that "if they're there, they're there. It doesn't change a whole lot."

Unlike Peters, Conn suggested that missionary work may be required, something the aliens may not welcome -- especially if, as many postulate, they are technologically superior to humanity and do not have religions of their own.

"Maybe they'll say that they used to need religion but have outgrown it. Some people say that would be a great blow to religion, because if an advanced civilization doesn't need it, why do we?" said Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at SETI.

"I don't buy it, though. I think religion meets very human needs, and unless extraterrestrials can provide a replacement for it, I don't think religion is going to go away," he continued. "And if there are incredibly advanced civilizations with a belief in God, I don't think Richard Dawkins will start believing."

Labels: Brandon Keim, Christianity, extraterrestrials, God, religion

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Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The Surprising Spirituality of SETI

By Brandon Keim June 09, 2008 |

There's a surprising amount of overlap between seekers of extraterrestrial life and seekers of God.

Not that the folks at SETI are actually hoping to detect the deep-space transmissions of a bearded deity from SGR 1900+14, handing them off to Vatican astronomers for inscription on silicon tablets. Far from it. But in my reporting for an article on the religious implications of finding extraterrestrial intelligence, I noticed that much research was produced in collaboration between scientists and theologians.

Why this partnership between parties whose relationship typically amounts to a truce, and an uneasy one at that?

In part it's practical: Christianity boasts a small but rich history of so-called astrotheology, particularly within the Catholic Church. It makes sense that they'd run in some of the same circles as the SETI crowd. And since discovering aliens would prompt religious self-examination -- if God is universal, maybe the image of God isn't a hairless biped called homo sapiens -- and perhaps devotion, it's probably good that they're already talking.

But after speaking this morning to Lutheran theology professor Ted Peters and then to Douglas Vakoch, the generally secular (he's Unitarian) director of interstellar message composition at SETI, I couldn't shake the feeling that something else was going on -- some union of the like-minded, nominally separated by their titles and duties.

Towards the end of the interview, after Vakoch had explained the incredible unlikelihood of both receiving and comprehending interstellar signals, I asked him what it's like to dedicate a career to something that would almost certainly not be realized in his own life, and perhaps not ever.

"One of the greatest misconceptions about SETI is that we know in our hearts that there is life out there, and the question is whether we're going to be the generation that finds it. That's false," he said. "SETI requires an acceptance of ambiguity. If there's a virtue to SETI, it's that it's making ambiguity acceptable at a time when people are focused on the concrete and short-term. It is very often uncomfortable not having the answers, but we need to accept that. We try to recognize that, in this domain, with what we now know, the best we can do, the most honest thing we can do, is live with a sense of ambiguity."

"That sounds deeply spiritual," I told Vakoch. He asked what I meant. "The act of coming to peace with the unknowable," I said.

"It's not necessarily a matter of being at peace with it," he replied. "There's a passage in the Bible -- 'Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.' In a sense, I think science and religion are not ultimately in opposition to one another. They are both attempting to understand things as they are. They understand different aspects of what is."

Now, before those of us conditioned by ugly fights against anti-evolution classroom sabotage paint Vakoch as a young earth creationist who stole a SETI lab coat, he's certainly not insisting that religious principle trump testable hypothesis. He's talking humbly about the Big Questions, and acknowledging the difficulty of answering them -- something that truly religious people tend to do, too.

Labels: astrotheology, Brandon Keim, extraterrestrials, God, religion, science, SETI

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Monday, June 09, 2008

Book Review: Science from a different perspective

Jonathan Davies
Gauntlet News

June 05, 2008

Book Review: A University of Calgary professor is trying to bring science and religion closer together. In his latest book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, Dr. Stuart Kauffman argues society needs a new worldview that accepts the inability to fully understand the universe through science alone.

For over four centuries, pioneering scientists such as Galileo, Newton and Descartes promoted a philosophy called reductionism, the view that all phenomena can be reduced to and understood in terms of interactions between basic particles governed by natural law. This view suggests that life can be reduced from biology to biochemistry to chemistry and eventually to physics. However, Kauffman finds a problem with this view.

"Our biosphere cannot be completely understood or predicted by natural law," explained Kauffman. "Science leaves a gap in our understanding."

The problem with reductionism, he argues, is that it cannot predict biocomplexity-- when biological systems emerge that are not created by a single pattern or rule. Darwinian preadaptation, an example in his book, is when existing anatomical features evolve to serve a new purpose that cannot be predicted based on biological, biochemical or physical laws. In nature, this has been illustrated by dinosaurs using feathers for insulation or sweat glands evolving into mammary glands. Thus, argues Kauffman, science alone is an inadequate tool to explain our evolving universe.

"If we accept that Darwinian preadaptations cannot be reduced to physics, then what we've believed for the past 400 years is wrong," he said.

As the world becomes smaller, the rift between science and religion seems to widen. Religious and scientific fundamentalism is becoming increasingly common as cultures and ideals clash. Kauffman maintained recent books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, which have been highly critical of religion, even suggesting that a belief in God is a delusion, are not helping matters.

"These books aren't doing any good," he suggested. "It's time to move past some of these old ideas and find the middle ground. We have to rethink everything. We need a second enlightenment."

Traditional Christianity credits a creator God as the sculptor of our world. By contrast, Kauffman believes that honoring the emergent creativity of the universe is far more awe-inspiring than believing that a supernatural God created the universe in six days.

"Do we need the Creator or just the creativity?" he asked. "We need to consider that emergence and biocomplexity is the creativity of a fully natural God."

He added that the concept of God and the sacred values that God represents have also evolved along with what devotees collectively consider sacred.

"The [book] title is controversial as hell," said Kauffman. "But how many gods have we worshipped down the eons? It seems to me that we're telling God what we consider sacred, not the other way around. Perhaps it's time to consciously consider what we hold sacred for ourselves."

A recent book launch tour in the United States has received a warm reception. Afterwards, Kauffman will be returning to Canada to continue his research as director of the U of C's Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics. He plans to expand on his theories with research of biocomplexity and the physics of the origins of life. For the moment, Kauffman hopes that his proposal of a marriage between science and God will provide a starting point for a new scientific world view, although he acknowledges that this concept may upset some.

"If this view holds, we will undergo a major transformation in our understanding of science," he said. "If we reinvent the sacred to mean the creativity in the universe, biosphere, human history and culture, are we not also inevitably invited to honour all life on the planet that sustains it?"

Labels: Darwin, God, Jonathan Davies, reductionism, sacred, Stuart Kauffman

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Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Marvelling at God's handiwork

As religion-versus-science debate rages, 3 physicists come out on side of God

Don Lajoie, Windsor Star
Saturday, May 31, 2008

Page 1 of 2: Please click on external link for complete article

God versus science. That most ancient of debates has been raging in academic circles, popular culture and in the media with increasing ferocity since the fundamentalist religion-inspired attacks of 9-11.

Three scientists from the University of Windsor, professors Gordon Drake, Mordechay Schlesinger and Tim Reddish of the school's physics department, have stepped gingerly on to the slippery rocks of the discussion, coming out -- some might say surprisingly -- on the side of God.

The religiosity of the three scientists may be surprising, since some statistics, including a Scientific American study in 1999, show that, while up to 90 per cent of the general North America population profess some belief in a God, only about 40 per cent of scientists do. And the numbers of scientists believing in God keep dropping, particularly among "eminent" scientists, with as few as 10 per cent believing.

However, poll results on the topic vary. A Rice University survey in 2005 demonstrated that only 38 per cent of natural scientists polled considered themselves to be "non-believers."

"Why should a physicist, studying the laws of nature, countenance a belief in God?" asked Drake, a practising Anglican, recently named principal of Canterbury College. "Because, as physicists, we're more aware of what we don't know. And the book of the unknown keeps getting larger."

Added Schlesinger, a Jew: "You can look at it another way. Our modest success in scientific research allows us to marvel at God's handiwork."

Reddish, a Christian with a Protestant background who does not adhere to any particular denomination, said God gave him a mind to use and "it would be a disservice to not use it to the fullest extent." His rumination, he said, leads him back to God. "My faith enhances my life."

Their declarations of faith out of the way, the three doctors of science sat down recently to state their case.

Drake began by suggesting the latest flareup in the old debate has its roots in the terrorist attacks of 9-11 on New York and Washington.

The fact the suicide pilots claimed to be acting out of Islamic fundamentalist zeal led to a backlash against all religion as an abomination to mankind, leading to intolerance, violence and war, he suggested. The backlash resulted in a spate of books such as God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris.

The atheist point of view has become ever more visible on cable news and talk radio, usually countered by an equally animated "believer's" position.

"The debate has existed since creation," said Drake. "But 9-11 intensified it, gave it focus, the idea that religion could do more harm than good, that God could make you fly into a building.... But should you throw out religion because of 9-11? It's the same as asking should you throw out science because of the atomic bomb."

They said that the debate has been framed on the premise that science and religion are polar opposites used to explain existence and the two ideas cannot be reconciled. But, they say, that premise, put forward in Dawkins' book, is flawed.

Labels: atheism, Don Lajoie, God, Gordon Drake, Mordechay Schlesinger, religion, science, Tim Reddish

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Friday, May 30, 2008

Putting Faith Under the Microscope

By Christy Hall Robinson Thursday, May 29, 2008

Has science made belief in God obsolete? Two scholars debate the Templeton Foundation’s latest ‘Big Question.’

When confronted with the inexplicable and uncontrollable, people often invoke a higher power to make sense of the world around them. But at a time of staggering advances in areas such as genetics and reproductive technology, has science made belief in God obsolete?

The Templeton Foundation posed that question as the third in its series of “Big Questions.” It asked 13 leading scientists, scholars, and commentators—from across the religious and political spectrum—to respond in essay form. At a recent American Enterprise Institute event, two of the essayists, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and William D. Phillips, a professor at the University of Maryland and a Nobel Laureate in physics, squared off in person.

Shermer, who wrote in his essay that the “veracity of a proposition is independent of the number of people who believe it,” said that, while science probably makes God obsolete, it certainly has not made belief in Him obsolete. According to a 2007 Harris Poll, 82 percent of adult Americans believe that there is a God. In 1916, Shermer noted, a survey found that 40 percent of practicing scientists believed in God. That figure is roughly commensurate with the percentage of scientists today who affirm faith in God.

Phillips, himself a scientist and a practicing Christian who talks openly about his faith, wrote in his essay that “a scientist can believe in God because such belief is not a scientific matter.” At the AEI conference, he was eager to find common ground with Shermer, particularly on the lack of empirical proof of God’s existence. Phillips said that examining belief in God from a scientific vantage point was the wrong approach, since one cannot measure God scientifically. “I do not believe that science is ever going to prove the existence of God,” he explained, “nor do I believe that science is ever going to disprove the existence of God.” The real question, Phillips said, is not a scientific one, and it should not be dealt with in a scientific paradigm. He maintained that people want to experience religion the way they do art, music, or love.

Shermer, however, insisted that religion cannot be separated wholly from science, because “at some point, if you believe in God, you just have to believe that he’s…entering our world. And if he’s entering our world, isn’t he doing it in some measurable way? And now we’re back to the natural world.” Phillips, while assuring Shermer that he believes God does work in the world—he is a theist, not a deist—said that he “has a hunch” that God does so in “undetectable” ways.

If one cannot trace God’s actions or presence in the world, “what’s the difference between an invisible God and a nonexistent God?” asked Shermer.

“For you, none,” Phillips replied. “But for me, I claim that I can feel God’s presence in my life.”

He continued: “The problem here is that you’re thinking . . . the whole question is about whether or not God exists. I already have an answer to that. It’s not a scientific answer. My question is: what does God want me to do?” Shermer, recognizing that Phillips’s insistence about the question not being a scientific one was a refusal to engage the issue on the given terms—whether science makes belief in God obsolete—suggested that the conversation was at an end.

Shermer said that he understands the draw of transcendence, of finding “something grander than me.” Religion is the ultimate source of explanation, Shermer added, and while he may not need it, he understands why other people do. Phillips was unflappable. “It’s not like I’m without my doubts, but I’m comfortable with those doubts,” he said.

Christy Hall Robinson is an associate editor at the American Enterprise Institute.

Labels: belief, Christy Hall Robinson, faith, God, Michael Shermer, science, Templeton Foundation, William D. Phillips

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Friday, May 23, 2008

With age come happiness and improved self-esteem

By Richard Griffin/Growing Older
Mon May 19, 2008

Happiness, it turns out, increases with age.
At least, that’s what a new study has found. Older people are happier than any other age group.

And the main reason why this holds true? According to what Professor Yang Yang, the study’s leading researcher, has told Reuters News Service, it’s largely due to an increase in self-esteem.

She also found that “happiness in later life is closely related to early-life conditions and formative experiences.”

You may have your doubts, but the study looks solid. It comes from the University of Chicago and is based on surveys of Americans conducted over a 30-year period.

The researchers interviewed between 1,500 and 3,000 people each year. So the findings do not rest on a slim sample.

That it began three decades ago suggests that happiness has been a subject of interest for a lot longer than one might have thought. I had considered it something of a fad that sprouted only recently.

For the past few years, it has been of serious interest to social scientists, part of the so-called Positive Psychology movement.

Defining happiness, however, turns out to be difficult.
Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches a course about happiness to packed rows of Harvard undergrads, sees it as a combination of pleasure and meaning. For him, you need both to make you happy.

In his delightful book “Stumbling on Happiness,” another Harvard psychologist, Daniel Gilbert, writes: “The you-know-what-I-mean feeling is what people ordinarily mean by happiness.”

He then shows in detail how the subject is a lot more complicated than this definition (and this column) might lead you to believe.

The findings of the Chicago researchers run counter to received opinion. Left to themselves, most Americans might have classified old people as basically unhappy. Don’t they have to put up with a lot more grief than young people?

Though not myself a researcher, I judge these findings consistent with experience of many of my age peers. An oft-repeated sentiment that one hears from people from 30 on up: I wouldn’t ever want to go through my 20s again.

(Incidentally, that is not a sentiment I exactly share. I would welcome another shot at it. Of course, this time I would get it right.)

In my more rational moments, however, I do relate to the findings of the survey. My happiness quotient has indeed increased, and I now claim higher marks than previously.

For fear this be mere grade inflation, however, let me qualify this claim. Almost surely, my current happiness will undergo serious tests and resulting ups and downs. I fully expect things to go wrong.

But that belongs to the uncharted future. The present looks quite good to me, despite the ongoing chagrin I harbor over many events. The damage the neo-cons have done to this country, for example. And the grief I feel for the people of Burma/Myanmar, of China, and those living in other parts of this troubled world.

Like many others among my age peers, I got off to a good start with happiness. One of the first things I read as a child came in Sunday school from a little book full of questions and answers.

The second question asked why God made me.
And the answer, if I may here abridge the words a bit, told me it was for me to be happy.

Of course, the slings and arrows of actual living tend to weaken our hold on happiness. Life surprises us with unexpected blows that move us off course. The deaths of dear ones, for example, make happiness sometimes feel remote.

But, even then, self-esteem continues to promote happiness. That means openness to loving and being loved. And that loving begins with loving yourself and being ready to forgive and be patient with yourself.

As suggested above, I think that spirituality promotes happiness. Among human goods, having an interior life rich in spirit surely deserves a high rank.

Among other ingredients for happiness, one of the most important is being at peace with others. It astonishes me how many people are at odds with their relatives or former friends and associates.

It is hard to imagine anyone being happy without a sense of humor. Unless you can laugh at certain human predicaments, you will almost surely become unhappy.

Closely related to a sense of humor is a sense of perspective. If every little happening can upset you, how in the world can you stay even reasonably happy?

Do something for other people. Almost by itself, I have found, being willing to reach out to others will promote happiness. Even if you are largely incapacitated, a word or gesture directed toward another person has the potential to make you feel better.

Finally, writing makes me feel happy. You may not feel the same way about this activity but to make something — a sweater, a bookshelf, a garden — can prove a powerful source of happiness.

Richard Griffin of Cambridge is a regularly featured columnist in Community Newspaper Company publications. He can be reached by e-mail at rbgriff180@aol.com or by calling 617-661-0710.

Labels: Americans, God, happiness, humor, meaning, Richard Griffin, self-esteem, spirituality, survey, Yang Yang

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Friday, May 16, 2008

The quest for happiness is no laughing matter

Elizabeth Farrelly
May 14, 2008

Thirty thousand people die in a cyclone, messaged my friend, and you're off to a happiness conference? You can see his point, though there's no real connection. But the thronging happiness delegates in Sydney last week would probably answer thus: you help the world best by first being happy yourself. Like the bit in the flight blurb that says, "Mothers of small children should don their own oxygen mask first, before assisting the child."

But how selfish is happiness, actually? And is it, as most conference speakers insisted, not just a basic human right but almost a duty?

For the Austrian psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl, happiness was only ever a by-product. "Don't aim at success," he advised, "… for success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue … as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself … Happiness must happen … You have to let it happen by not caring about it." Frankl spoke from experience. A four-year Auschwitz survivor, he noted that, even there, the most enduring were those most able to help others.

But for last week's conference, happiness was no byproduct, no don't-look-now kind of accident. Happiness was it; not just a product but the product. Everything else, it was argued, from love to wealth to brilliant career, we desire for the happiness so promised. Happiness alone do we desire in and of itself.

There's a sophistry here, of course, since it means even melancholics are really seeking the happiness sadness brings. It also makes happiness, as product, the ultimate easy sell, the one thing we all reliably want.

But a conference? Can a conference deliver happiness? Or was the Reverend Bill Crews right when declaring from the stage: "Don't worry about happiness. You lot should throw away your notes and just go out and do it."

Crews - notwithstanding the happy-clappy, back-slappy feel to the, uh, congregation -was the conference's token Christian. Most speakers were either Buddhists (like Tenzin Palmo, an East-Ender who spent 12 years in a high-altitude Himalayan cave and still craved more) or high-profile circuit-psychologists such as Martin Seligman, Stephen Post, Richard Davidson and Daniel Gilbert. Some, like B. Alan Wallace, were both.

All fastidiously avoided mentioning God, morality or the afterlife carrot. There was no trace of a suggestion you should act thus because it's right, or written, or expected and no sense of authority - except, of course, science.

It's as though some marketing genius somewhere has decided that this well-off secular-humanist baby-boomer audience - the market, if you will, for happiness - having been cured of all pressing fears except the fear of death, will comfortably swallow Eastern religion and Western science but never, never Western religion.

Yet the wildly dominant take-home message, from all persuasions and professions, was, if you'll pardon the term, Christian; that to be happy is to be good, and to be good is to be compassionate, loving and altruistic.

The difference is in the packaging. Where once the message could be forced home, now it has to be packaged to appeal to self. So speaker after speaker detailed the personal benefits of happiness: better health, longevity, acuity, earning-power and career, each effect repeatedly demonstrated by science.

Plus all the old Thatcherite shibboleths about hard-wiring for selfishness and genetic destiny are once again up for query. The implication, it will not have escaped your notice, is that happiness is something we can choose.

The Pennsylvania academic Dr Martin "I'm a pessimist and a depressive" Seligman is revered as the father of positive psychology. He scientised morality further still, postulating three categories of happiness: the Pleasant Life, the Engaged Life and the Meaningful Life.

The Pleasant Life runs on emotional pleasure, what Seligman calls "happyology". The Engaged Life means entangling your finest self with the world, what he calls "being one with the music". And the Meaningful Life means dedicating these same strengths to some greater cause.

Each happiness-type, he says, is measurable and buildable, but while there are "pleasure shortcuts" to happyology, there are no shortcuts to the Engaged or Meaningful Life. Which is a shame, because these kinds of happiness are not only more reliable and redemptive, but also lend meaning to ordinary base-level pleasure.

Seligman's Engaged and Meaningful Lives closely parallel theology's traditional distinction between the immanent and transcendent view of god; the god of good works and the god of mystic communion. But drop even a hint, a whiff of old school theology at such a conference and the best-willed happiness-seeker will stop clapping, hold her nose and run.

The market demands wisdom, to salve its remaining fear, but such wisdom must be either control-tested, dot-pointed and peer-reviewed, or couched in lyrical cave and water metaphors. It must also demonstrably benefit the self.

So, full-circle: if happiness requires altruism but is motivated by self-benefit, is it, or isn't it, selfish? TS Eliot's Thomas Beckett describes this as "the greatest treason, to do the right deed for the wrong reason." But the happiness push has a market to consider. Fine, it answers. Forget it. For each year of proven happiness your health premium will halve. That'll make ya happy.

Labels: Christianity, Elizabeth Farrelly, God, happiness, happyology, selfishness

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“Neural Buddhism” as religion’s future

Written by Clint Rainey
May 14, 2008 14 Comments

In his column yesterday, The New York Times’s David Brooks, lately on a neuroanthropological kick, tackles the religious implications of modern neuroscience, saying its research portends disaster for orthodox believers—Christians, Jews, Muslims—although perhaps accommodating a generalized belief in some non-God supreme being.

“This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism,” he writes. “Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.” According to Brooks, neuroscience is moving the atheism-theism debate from culturally entrenched—thanks to the tireless militancy (and bestselling polemics) of antitheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and the other Four Horsemen—to irrelevant.

Because neuroscientific advances take what Christians call religious experiences and demystify them physiologically into, say, an increase in blood flow and synaptic activity in one’s prefrontal and parietal cortices, a worldview informed by modern neuroscience doesn’t have to be averse to God per se—just to a personal, miracle-working God like Christianity’s.

These recalibrated emphases on neuroscientific studies could shift the atheism-theism debate from believer and nonbeliever to Bible (or Quran) believer and Buddhist (or Wiccan, or Scientology) believer. That is, writes Mary Martin at Animal Person, cognitive scientists are “merely explaining that the feelings associated with god might not come from outside us,” and, in turn, helping to validate nontheistic religions.

Brooks maintains that, right now, “[i]n their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God.” But that “was the easy debate”: He predicts the real challenge will come “from people who feel the existence of the sacred”—i.e., again, like Buddhist nontheists—“but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”

Though Jewish, Brooks demurs from joining the hand-wringing, saying he’s “not qualified to take sides” even though he is watching the neuroscience science community “joining hands” with mysticism “in unexpected ways”—by which he presumably means “any at all.” The result, he argues, is a new science-based movement that emphasizes “self-transcendence” over “divine law or revelation.”

Orthodoxy will be under attack more than ever, as a defense is laid for neural Buddhism. “Orthodox believers,” he says, are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. . . . We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.”

As proof of where this path leads, Brooks cites a prescient Tom Wolfe essay from Forbes in 1996, written well ahead of the curve, lamenting neuroscience’s Nietzschean move to bury God and make science soulless, sending “modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze”—the very move cheered by Hitchens and the anti-Expelled crowd, particularly Dawkins, who appears in the film.

Labels: David Brooks, God, neural Buddhism, neuroscience, religion, religious experience

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Thursday, May 08, 2008

The Spiritual Brain

Is there a specific part of the brain for feelings of spirituality? Many lines of evidence suggests it is the temporal lobes. Dr. David Comings, a renown human geneticist, neuroscientist and physician proposes that spirituality is genetically hardwired into a specific part of the brain, is pleasurable, is critical to the evolution and survival of man, and will never go away. Understanding the biology of the spiritual brain can help us to develop a rational spirituality where are rational brain and spiritual brain can live in peace.

Labels: biology, Dr. David Comings, God, neuroscience, spiritual reality, video

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Tuesday, May 06, 2008

More doctors recommending dose of God for their patients

Tribune staff report
May 2, 2008

You might think a hospital sounds like an odd place to launch a spiritual quest. But for some patients, that's precisely where they find religion.

In fact, some doctors even rely on divine intervention to assist them in the healing process.

Tribune reporter Joel Hood's story this week about a continuous prayer week held in Adventist Bolingbrook Hospital illustrated how some hospitals recognize and embrace their role as a spiritual destination.

Dr. Yong Kim was one of the staff recruited to pray. An elder at his Korean Methodist church, Kim spent several hours praying for his patients' recovery. He told Joel that prayer is vital to a patient's recovery.

Kim is one of a burgeoning number of doctors who factor prayer into treatment, said Dr. Robert Klitzman, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. In interviews with 50 doctors, Klitzman learned that many are oblivious to patients' spiritual needs until they become patients themselves.

Has the threat of a serious illness prompted you to reassess your relationship with God? Do your doctors tend to your spiritual well-being too?

Labels: doctors, God, health, hospital, Joel Hood, prayer, spirituality

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Monday, April 21, 2008

Discovery of the God Module Results in New Field of Science: Neurotheology

Saturday, April 19, 2008
by: Barbara L. Minton

(NaturalNews) During the concentration of prayer, the encompassing peace as we draw near death, a mystical revelation, or the sense that God is talking to us, we experience the most intense experiences of our lives. Since the beginning of time, people have imbued such experiences with religious significance. But in recent years, scientists have begun to explore this spiritual realm, asking their own questions about what goes on in our brains during these extraordinary events. They have been coming up with some fascinating answers that have given birth to a new field of brain science: neurotheology, the cognitive neuroscience of religious experience and spirituality.

Early Studies and Results

In a vanguard experiment on the physical sources of spiritual consciousness, Michael Persinger, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience and psychology at Laurentian University in Canada, isolated an area of neurons in the brain's temporal lobes that repeatedly fire bursts of electrical activity when one contemplates God or has feelings of spirituality. Attempting to try to stimulate these bursts, Persinger isolated an area near the front of these temporal lobes, the amygdala, an almond shaped organ that infuses events with intense emotion and a sense of meaningfulness.

He then passed a controlled electrical current through coils on the head of his 80 subjects, creating a magnetic field that mimicked the firing patterns of the neurons in the temporal lobes. This resulted in an induced spiritual experience. The subjects reported an "opiate-like effect with a substantial decrease in anxiety, a heightened sense of well-being" that gave them the sense of not being alone. This sense was described by some as a religious experience.

At the same time While Persinger conducted his experiments, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Ph.D., director of the Brain and Perception Laboratory at the University of California at San Diego, also tuned in to the cosmic consciousness. He announced that he had discovered the 'God Module' in the brain which could be responsible for man's evolutionary instinct to believe in religion.

Ramachandran and his team studied the brains of people with an unusual type of epilepsy that affects the brain's temporal lobes. The study compared epileptic patients with normal people and a group who said they were intensely religious. Electrical monitors on their skin, a standard test of activity in the brain's temporal lobes, showed that the epileptics and the deeply religious displayed a similar response when shown words invoking spiritual belief.

According to the Ramachandran led research team, the most intriguing explanation is that the seizures cause an over-stimulation of the nerves in a part of the brain dubbed the God module. "There may be dedicated neural machinery in the temporal lobes concerned with religion. This may have evolved to impose order and stability on society." The results indicate that whether a person believes in a religion or even in God may depend on how enhanced is this part of the brain's electrical circuitry.

The idea of a single God module is regarded by most scientists, including Ramachandran, as too simplistic. A Canadian researcher, Mario Beauregard, and his student used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain activity of Carmelite nuns while they were reliving the experience of unio mystica, an intense sensation in which they report feeling the presence of God.

With fMRI imaging, changes in blood flow in the brain may be monitored in almost real time. This allows researchers to see which regions of the brain become more or less active in different conditions. Beauregard observed that the nuns' ecstatic state was associated with a distinct pattern of activity in several areas of the brain. The researchers concluded that "mystical experiences are mediated by several brain regions and systems".

Other researchers have probed the experiences of people with temporal lobe epilepsy with interesting results. In Switzerland, Olaf Blanke and his colleagues found that electric stimulation of specific brain regions can trigger repeated out-of-body experiences. Although these experiences are somewhat common, they were not rigorously studied until Blanke came upon a case of a woman he was treating for epilepsy.

A part of the woman's brain near the junction point of the temporal and parietal lobes was stimulated with an electrode, producing the experience. Every time that part of her brain was stimulated, she described the experience as floating above her own body and watching herself.

Brain Mechanisms and Religious Experience

Shahar Arzy, a colleague of Blanke's, purposed that the junction between the temporal and parietal lobes may have played a part in some of the pivotal events in world religions. As Arzy and co-authors pointed out, many of the world's religions feature revelation experiences that take place on mountains. Many non-religious, non-mystic mountaineers have also had similar experiences while in the mountains. Time spent at high altitudes may affect the brain, according to Arzy, and "facilitate the experience of a revelation".

Arzy suggests mechanisms that could be involved in this experience. High altitudes have a significantly reduced level of oxygen which can affect the temporo-parietal junction. Stays at high altitude, particularly in solitude, might lead to low resistance to stress and loss of inhibition.

History is full of charismatic religious figures. Could any of them have been epileptics? Were the visions of Bible characters like Moses or Saint Paul reflective of temporal lobe epilepsy? There is no way to know.

Researchers suggest that these issues may have played a part in one of the mystical phenomena of ancient times, the oracle of Delphi. George Papatheodorou, an emeritus professor of geology at Patras University, and his colleagues examined the narrow cave where the Delphic priestesses were believed to have delivered their messages. They found high levels of methane, ethanol and carbon dioxide in the cave's air. "The site lies on a fault where gases leak out. These gases cause an oxygen reduction that induces a mild hypnotic state that could well produce hallucinations," he told the Greek Kathimerini newspaper.

Brain Mechanisms and Near-Death Experiences

Neurophysiologist Kevin Nelson, a researcher at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, is exploring the powerful spiritual phenomena of the near-death experience. His results have led him to believe that these experiences may be dream-like states triggered by stress and a common sleep disorder known as sleep paralysis. When people with this condition begin to awake, part of their brain stays in the random eye movement (REM) phase of sleep. They experience inability to move, resulting in frightening hallucinations.

Nelson studied 55 people who experienced near-death phenomena in a range of circumstances, including heart attacks, traffic accidents, and fainting spells. He found that about 60 percent of them reported symptoms of sleep paralysis. In a matched group of 55 healthy volunteers with no near-death experiences, only 24 percent had symptoms of sleep paralysis. Nelson concluded that his findings "anticipate that under circumstances of peril, a near-death experience is more likely in those with previous REM intrusion".

Possible Conclusions

According to the Ramachandran team, it is not clear why such dedicated neural machinery for religion may have evolved. One possibility they saw was the encouragement of tribal loyalty or reinforcement of kinship ties and the stability of closely knit clans. These scientists emphasized that their findings in no way suggest that religion is simply a matter of brain chemistry. "These studies do not in any way negate the validity of the religious experience of God," the team cautioned. "They merely provide an explanation in terms of brain regions that may be involved."

As Ramachandran has said, "We are only starting to look at this. The exciting thing is that you can even begin to contemplate scientific experiments on the neural basis of religion and God."

Labels: brain, God, God Module, Michael Persinger, neurotheology, religious experience, spiritual neuroscience, Vilayanur Ramachandran

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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Religion Not Just a Private Affair, Affirms Pontiff

Encourages Prelates to Remove Obstacles to Encounter With God

WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 16, 2008 (Zenit.org).-

Benedict XVI says that any tendency to treat religion as a private matter should be resisted, and that faith should permeate every aspect of life.

The Pope affirmed this today in an address to the bishops of the United States at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. His discourse ranged in topics from immigration to the formation of priests. As he left the shrine, the prelates sang him "Happy Birthday," -- the Pope turns 81 today.

The Holy Father emphasized the key role of bishops during his address, asking how, "in the 21st century, a bishop can best fulfill the call to 'make all things new in Christ, our hope'? How can he lead his people to 'an encounter with the living God'?"

"Perhaps he needs to begin by clearing away some of the barriers to such an encounter," the Pontiff proposed.

He explained: "While it is true that this country is marked by a genuinely religious spirit, the subtle influence of secularism can nevertheless color the way people allow their faith to influence their behavior.

"Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday, and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death? Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted. Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel."

Obstacles

Benedict XVI proposed further obstacles to this "encounter with the living God," perhaps particularly faced by Americans. One such barrier is materialism, he said: "People today need to be reminded of the ultimate purpose of their lives. They need to recognize that implanted within them is a deep thirst for God.

"It is easy to be entranced by the almost unlimited possibilities that science and technology place before us; it is easy to make the mistake of thinking we can obtain by our own efforts the fulfillment of our deepest needs. This is an illusion. Without God, who alone bestows upon us what we by ourselves cannot attain, our lives are ultimately empty."

Another possible obstacle, the Holy Father affirmed, is an overemphasis on freedom and autonomy, which makes it "easy to lose sight of our dependence on others as well as the responsibilities that we bear toward them."

"This emphasis on individualism has even affected the Church, giving rise to a form of piety which sometimes emphasizes our private relationship with God at the expense of our calling to be members of a redeemed community," he noted. "If we are truly to gaze upon him who is the source of our joy, we need to do so as members of the people of God. If this seems counter-cultural, that is simply further evidence of the urgent need for a renewed evangelization of culture."

Public life

The Pontiff further encouraged the bishops to give priority to education and to participate in the exchange of ideas in the public square.

"In the United States, as elsewhere, there is much current and proposed legislation that gives cause for concern from the point of view of morality, and the Catholic community, under your guidance, needs to offer a clear and united witness on such matters," he said. "Yet it cannot be assumed that all Catholic citizens think in harmony with the Church's teaching on today's key ethical questions.

"Once again, it falls to you to ensure that the moral formation provided at every level of ecclesial life reflects the authentic teaching of the Gospel of life."

In this context, the Bishop of Rome encouraged the formation of families: "How can we not be dismayed as we observe the sharp decline of the family as a basic element of Church and society? Divorce and infidelity have increased, and many young men and women are choosing to postpone marriage or to forego it altogether.

He added: "To some young Catholics, the sacramental bond of marriage seems scarcely distinguishable from a civil bond, or even a purely informal and open-ended arrangement to live with another person. Hence we have an alarming decrease in the number of Catholic marriages in the United States together with an increase in cohabitation, in which the Christ-like mutual self-giving of spouses, sealed by a public promise to live out the demands of an indissoluble lifelong commitment, is simply absent."

"It is your task," the Pope told the prelates, "to proclaim boldly the arguments from faith and reason in favor of the institution of marriage. […] This message should resonate with people today, because it is essentially an unconditional and unreserved 'yes' to life, a 'yes' to love, and a 'yes' to the aspirations at the heart of our common humanity, as we strive to fulfill our deep yearning for intimacy with others and with the Lord."

Labels: God, individualism, materialism, morality, Pope Benedict XVI, religion

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Monday, April 07, 2008

Einstein's Idea Of Religion

5 Apr 2008

Einstein's religious views have been a matter of considerable controversy. Max Jammer, the well-known Jewish historian and philosopher of science, wrote a thoughtful book, Einstein and Religion, concluding that for Einstein 'religion' was definitely not 'atheism'. Einstein himself said that: 'You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling'. Yet in his best-selling and much-publicised atheist polemic, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, who takes most of his Einstein quotes from Jammer, categorises Einstein as 'atheistic'.

Einstein, in fact, spoke and wrote of God extremely frequently; for example his most famous way of criticising the random nature of quantum mechanics was to say 'God does not play dice'. He described himself as 'an intensely religious man', but also, equally interestingly, as 'a deeply religious non-believer'.

A crucial point is that Einstein stated categorically that he did not believe in a personal God, of the kind assumed by most practising religious people. He had not always been this way. Though brought up in a very liberal Jewish household, at the age of six he became fervently religious, obeying all the religious prescriptions. However, when he was 12, he read various scientific texts and came to believe that much in the Jewish bible could not be true. This was a crucial period in his life, in which he became an intense freethinker, first over religious matters, later over orthodox scientific beliefs.

So what was Einstein's religion? He called it 'cosmic religion' and it was a sense of awe at 'the nobility and marvellous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought'. He believed that throughout history the greatest religious geniuses have followed cosmic religion, and that exploring this order in the laws of science was the motivation for the most celebrated scientists such as Newton and Kepler. Without this feeling of confidence in order and simplicity, science, he felt, degenerated into uninspired empiricism.

Einstein felt closest to the nineteenth century Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who also rejected the idea of a personal God. Like Einstein, some considered Spinoza intensely religious while others judged him an atheist. Spinoza's firmest belief was in a universal determinism; all events, including the actions of human beings, followed a precise law of cause and effect. There was no free will, and thus no justification for punishment of offenders. Einstein broadly followed Spinoza in these beliefs. As is well known, as well as realism, he was a strong believer in determinism; one of his main arguments against quantum mechanics was that it respected neither. Spinoza's belief in the unity of nature was paralleled in Einstein's long search for a unified field theory.

Einstein's view of traditional religion was somewhat ambivalent. He detested any idea of indoctrination or fundamentalism, but admitted that conventional religions had a role in setting ethical standards. Dawkins would disagree, considering that 'the cause of all this misery, mayhem, violence, terror and ignorance is religion itself'. Einstein also venerated the founders of the major religions, especially Jesus and Buddha; Dawkins might be more sceptical. Einstein even found the elements of cosmic religion in the Psalms and the Proverbs of the bible, and particularly in Buddhism.

An interesting question is whether Einstein's beliefs, like those of Spinoza, were pantheistic, in the sense of actual worship of Nature, giving it the status of God. At times Einstein seemed close to accepting this label, but he was clear that God was to be found in the laws of the Universe, not in Nature itself. Jammer suggests that Einstein's theology may be called a naturalistic theology, in which one searches for God by study of the Universe.

So at last we reach the question: Could Einstein be considered a mystic? Awe about the Universe might lead to some direct spiritual experience of 'God', however 'God' might be defined. However Einstein explicitly rejected such ideas, saying: 'Mysticism is the only reproach that people cannot level against my theory'. Whatever his feeling of wonder about the Universe, his exploration into its laws was always entirely rational. He believed that scientific knowledge could not be obtained through direct supernatural perception, and incidentally considered any idea of personal immortality or the suggestion of any contact with the dead ridiculous.

Labels: Albert Einstein, God, Max Jammer, religion, science, Spinoza, theology

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Friday, March 28, 2008

Russians believe in God and in the Church’s role in support of social mores

03/18/2008

by Maria Anikina

A survey shows that 42 per cent of those interviewed considers themselves religious and that 16 per cent prays one or more times a day. For 45 percent the degree of influence the Church exerts on politics is satisfactory.

Moscow (AsiaNews) – Most Russians believe in God, consider themselves religious and Orthodox, view faith as the first source of meaning for life and eternity and that the Church’s main role is to support social mores, this according to a survey conducted in February by the Levada Analytical Center.

According to the findings, 42 per cent of the Russian population is religious; 33 per cent is not very religious and only 20 per cent says they are not religious at all.

Religious beliefs are stronger among people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale but also for those with high social status; among women (51 per cent vs 30 percent among men) and the elderly (29 per cent among in the 18-24 year age group; 38 per cent in the 25-39; 44 per cent in the 40-54, and 49 per cent for those 55 and over).

As for membership in the Russian Orthodox Church, 71 per cent of respondents say they feel a part of the Church (compared to 60 per cent in 2004 and 69 per cent in 2007). Muslims constitute 5 per cent; Catholics are 1 per cent; Atheists 5 per cent and 15 per cent do not follow any religion.

When it comes to specific beliefs, a third say that “God exists’ and had “no doubts” about his existence; 21 per cent “believe that God exists but sometimes have doubts” about it; another 14 per cent believe from time to time. One tenth does not believe in God’s existence; 9 per cent is not sure and does not believe one can prove his existence; 11 per cent believes in some higher power (but not in God.)

Answering the question “What do people find in religion?”, 31 per cent said “moral norms of everyday life;” 12 per cent of them gain “consolation and relief from pain;” 11 per cent of Russians find in religion “salvation, a way to eternal life;” the same number of believers chose “purification of soul. “

For 36 per cent of respondents, religion gives meaning to life; 29 per cent believe it helps people to be more tolerant and support hardships; 18 per cent believe that it is necessary for them as believers. However, for 22 per cent religion means nothing in their lives.

As for prayers, 34 per cent said they never do, compared to 7 per cent who do it several times a day and 9 per cent who do it once a day. For another 10 per cent weekly prayers are compulsory, whilst another 16 per cent prays few times a month. The remaining 24 per cent prays but rarely.

As for the Church’s social role 46 per cent believe that is has a role to play in supporting social mores; 37 per cent for spiritual needs; 31 per cent for charity and ideas of mercy; 30 per cent for help to the poor; and 29 per cent to help maintain cultural traditions.

By contrast, 15 per cent believe that religious organisations should not interfere in social life at all (compared to 11 per cent in a 1998 survey). Fewer people (22 per cent vs 27 per cent in 1998) believe the Church should support social, national and political consensus.

Overall 45 per cent of Russians view positively the Church’s influence on politics; 18 per cent believe it is excessive; another 18 per cent believe it should be greater, whilst 19 per cent could not answer.

Labels: God, Levada Analytical Center, Maria Anikina, prayer, religion, Russia, Russian Orthodox Church

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Karen Armstrong - Charter for Compassion

As she accepts her 2008 TED Prize, author and scholar Karen Armstrong talks about how the Abrahamic religions -- Islam, Judaism, Christianity -- have been diverted from the moral purpose they share to foster compassion. But Armstrong has seen a yearning to change this fact. People want to be religious, she says; we should act to help make religion a force for harmony. She asks the TED community to help her build a Charter for Compassion -- to help restore the Golden Rule as the central global religious doctrine.

Labels: Christianity, compassion, God, Golden Rule, Islam, Judaism, Karen Armstrong, religion, video

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Monday, March 24, 2008

The Creator and the Created: the 2008 Templeton Prize

By Hasan Zillur Rahim

Michael Heller, a polish theologian, cosmologist and philosopher, was awarded the 2008 Templeton Prize “For Progress toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.”

In accepting the prize, professor Heller said, “Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence. The paradox is that these two great values seem often to be in conflict. I am frequently asked how I could reconcile them with each other. When such a question is posed by a scientist or a philosopher, I invariably wonder how educated people could be so blind not to see that science does nothing but explore God’s creation.”

Heller wrote 30 books, almost all of them dedicated to the creative dialogue between science, theology, and philosophy. Heller’s seminal contribution was to see in these seemingly distinct realms of human understanding a profound synergy, and he used his considerable intellect and insight in clarifying the nature of this synergistic relationship for us.

Attention to Heller’s work comes at a critical time. Scientists such as Richard Dawkins and atheists/secularists such as Christopher Hitchens have declared a war on religion. Their books are best-sellers. Many religionists have responded in kind, polarizing the religion-science issue further. What we seem to overlook is that inflexible ideologies, both secular and religious, drive common senses away, a loss for all humankind. It is this loss that Heller is determined to stem, by engaging our collective common sense and without minimizing the complexity involved in reconciling the knowable scientific world with the mysterious, and ultimately unknowable, nature of God. Through a rare combination of scientific acumen and theological insight, Heller addresses fundamental questions of knowledge and meaning in a holistic context that go far beyond the parochial arguments of the secularists and the religionists. In doing so, he also rejects a “God of the gaps” theory that uses God to explain what science cannot.

Michael Heller’s concluding statement after winning the Templeton Prize for 2008 should become a basis for public discourse on religion and science in America and elsewhere: “When thinking about science as deciphering the Mind of God, we should not forget that science is also a collective product of human brains, and the human brain is itself the most complex and sophisticated product of the universe. It is in the human brain that the world’s structure has reached its focal point – the ability to reflect upon itself. Science is but a collective effort of the Human Mind to read the Mind of God from question marks out of which we and the world around us seem to be made. To place ourselves in this double entanglement is to experience that we are a part of the Great Mystery. Another name for this Mystery is the Humble Approach to reality … The true humility does not consist in pretending that we are feeble and insignificant, but in the audacious acknowledgement that we are an essential part of the Greatest Mystery of all – of the entanglement of the Human Mind with the Mind of God.”

Labels: 2008 Templeton Prize, God, Hasan Zillur Rahim, Michael Heller, religion, science

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Friday, March 14, 2008

Physicist-priest wins $1.7 million prize

March 13, 2008

A Polish physicist and priest has won the annual million-dollar Templeton Prize for “progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities”.

Michael Heller walks away with $1.7 million for investigating questions including whether the Universe needs to have a cause (press release). This is the largest annual prize given to an individual (just bigger than the $1.6m Nobel), and comes from the same foundation that has previously funded studies into whether prayer can heal the sick, and how a nun's religious experience looks under a brain scanner.

“I always wanted to do the most important things, and what can be more important than science and religion? Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence,” Heller told the New York Times.

According to the London Times:

His theories do not so much offer proof of the existence of God as introduce doubt about the material existence of the world around us. He specialises in complex formulae that make it possible to explain everything, even chance, through mathematical calculation.

Physics World says Heller has worked on various branches of cosmology and mathematics, and is currently working on non-commutative geometry. From Physics Today:

Heller’s current work focuses on noncommutative geometry and groupoid theory in mathematics which attempts to remove the problem of an initial cosmological singularity at the origin of the universe. "If on the fundamental level of physics there is no space and no time, as many physicists think," says Heller, "noncommutative geometry could be a suitable tool to deal with such a situation."

He says he will use the money to set up a centre for the study of science and theology in Poland.

“He’s one of the key contributors in the international scholarly community dedicated to the creative dialogue on science, theology, and philosophy,” says Robert John Russell, director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley (Christian Science Monitor).

New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science blog admits to some unease about the Templeton Prize, about which it says: “It’s as if rather than fighting against science the way some religious factions - like creationists - do, they figure, we'll just buy science and use it for our own ends.”

Labels: cosmology, God, Michael Heller, religion, science, spiritual reality, Templeton Prize, universe

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Monday, March 10, 2008

Expanding, not dumping, our definition of God

Mark Morford
March 5, 2008

...God is mutating, becoming slightly less appealing as a dogmatic force of sit-down-and-shut-up paternal scowling and becoming perhaps more dynamic, unspecified, something you actually want to take into your heart and into your mouth and lick until you find the rich, creamy center and then define that taste for yourself, blissfully independent of what your parents or priest or president tells you, until you reach that point of deeper knowing where you can't help but go aha.

It's all part of that big study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, released recently and ready to be spun a thousand different ways, the one that contains the whopper of a statistic that says 28 percent of Americans have abandoned the religion they grew up with and have taken up another one, or none at all, or maybe more than one because polytheism certainly sounds tasty and, you know, what the hell, right?

But it's always good to be reminded that 1) try as they might, no one system can ever have a lock on the divine experience, 2) more people are at play in the Wal-Mart of the lord than our leaders, preachers and godmongers might imagine, and 3) despite the disturbing number of evangelicals in America (26 percent), there might yet be hope for the nation to evolve and grow and bust out of the archaic straightjacket of religious authority once and for all.

Or maybe not.

Given the high rate of turnover, it's easy to see religious choice in America as essentially a dour marketplace, a consumer good, each system vying for your attention and your devotion and very much your dollar because, if you think it's all about deep personal enlightenment, I've got this noxious library of "Left Behind" books on tape to sell you, cheap. The pothole on the road of religiosity is obvious, and enormous. As the saying goes, most people use religion the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: as convenient support, not illumination.

Still Christian

Ah, but what of the big stunner of a number, the one that says 78 percent of Americans still identify as Christian, no matter if they actually pray or attend church or run for Congress or secretly snort meth and visit gay hookers as they run an evangelical megachurch in Colorado? It certainly seems like an impressive number - no matter how many new beliefs spring up, we are overwhelmingly, devoutly Jesus-happy.

I'm not buying it.

I suspect a huge chunk of respondents merely check the "Christian" box for lack of something else, because they felt they needed to choose something, even though they don't actually follow Scripture in the slightest, but since they're not technically atheists and they've never really ventured out on a unique spiritual quest of their own, they merely choose "Christian" as the default American position, the fallback, the safe bet, sort of like checking "average" on a customer satisfaction survey or saying "fine" when your barista asks you how you're doing today. Thoughtless, automatic, convenient.

Which brings us to perhaps the most interesting stat of all, wherein 16 percent of Americans (and 21 percent of godless, sinful, heathenistic Californians, both much larger percentages than perhaps anyone expected) don't hook into any religious affiliation whatsoever, thus making them/us the fourth largest "religious" group in America - and growing fast.

They are the unaffiliated, the wayward ones, not just agnostics and atheists but also the poets and the grazers and spiritualists, the mystics and the explorers and the cosmically, intellectually, divinely self-determined. (Or maybe they're all just actors and bass players and trust-funded art students. But let's try to be optimistic.)

A new secular age?

It's a heartening number, and it brings up a delicious question, pondered for ages and yet seemingly more pertinent than ever: Are we headed for a more secular age? Is dour organized religion finally losing its grip? Does it all point to something grander, perhaps more luminous for us as a society, as more people abandon religion's authoritarian hammers for spirituality's exquisite seeds?

And what of the other big question, the one no one really talks much about and certainly no one really teaches you? How does one actually abandon a religion? How do you dump your God and choose another, or none or the one deep inside yourself?

Tentative answer: Maybe you don't. Maybe it's not about abandoning God, and instead merely broadening your definition of the divine so as to encapsulate and swallow it all, every God, every dogma, every attempt to corner the market on belief and put it into cute little boxes and break us all up into angry tribes who stomp our feet and wave our little gilded books and launch wars over promised lands and chosen peoples and crucifixes and crusades and witches and pagans and gays.

In other words, maybe you abandon God by realizing it's all God, it's all divine, all hot, thrumming, vibrating connection in all places in all things at all times, and hence to try and parse it and restrict it and beat it into submission and claim it for one people, one history, one country or church or authoritarian body, is actually the highest form of divine insult.

Or, you know, grand cosmic joke.

Same thing, really.

Labels: Christian, God, Jesus, Mark Morford, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, religion, secular, unaffilIiated

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Saturday, March 01, 2008

Origins of belief

Sat March 1, 2008

Researchers at Oxford University have been given nearly $4 million to investigate the origins of belief in God.

The three-year project titled "Empirical Expansion in Cognitive Science of Religion and Theology” is designed to determine whether belief in a deity is instinctive or learned. It will be funded by the Pennsylvania-based John Templeton Foundation.

Justin Barrett of Oxford University's Center for Anthropology and Mind and Roger Trigg of Oxford's Ian Ramsey Center for Science and Religion will lead the investigation.

Barrett said developmental psychology has determined that faith in God is a universal human impulse, found in all cultures and grasped from a young age. Researchers will use various methods to try to determine whether faith in a deity is inherent to cultures worldwide and throughout history.

Religious believers and nonbelievers will make up the research team, Barrett said.

Labels: belief, Empirical Expansion in Cognitive Science of Religion and Theology, God, John Templeton Foundation