TruthBook Religious News Blog

HAVANA, Cuba, Sep 20 "This concert is the greatest dream of peace and love I have experienced after the birth of my children," affirmed on Sunday Colombian singer Juanes before over one million Cubans enjoying the Peace without Borders presentation in this city.

With his songs, Juanes raised the temperature of the concert, which was broadcast live from Havana.

Undoubtedly, the appearance on stage of Juanes, with his songs “Tengo la camisa negra” (I Have a Black Shirt) and “A Dios le pido” (I Ask God), was the greatest attraction of this peace and fraternity meeting that opened the doors to the world for cultural exchange among the peoples.

Juanes was very pleased by the presence of so many people, especially youngsters, and said that despite all differences “we are all brothers and sisters”.

In addition, the main promoter of the initiative sent his best wishes of peace to the whole world, and added that music should fly everywhere freely, despite differences of religion, ideology or race.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article

Labels: Cuba, culture, Juanes, music, peace

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Thursday, July 09, 2009

Does Religion Ever Retard Moral Growth?

by Paul Sunstone
Sunday, July 05, 2009

Lately, I’ve been wondering whether some religions — some forms of Christianity in particular — retard people’s moral growth.

Of course, it would be ironic if it turned out Christianity retarded people’s moral growth since many Christians seem to believe they have a monopoly on morals. But nonsense like that one aside, I’ve been wondering if some religions don’t for the most part do exactly the opposite of what they boast of doing. That is, instead of promoting our moral growth, they actually discourage it.

I have a little story that might illustrate the point. Some long time ago when I was attending university, I had a three or four male friends from the Middle East. Nothing in their own countries had prepared them for the sight of “half-naked” American women. My friends would ask me how I and other American males managed to contain ourselves with so many of our American women walking around “half-naked”.

I was sympathetic to their problem. It seemed to me the ordeal they were describing was something I myself had gone through. But not, like them, at 19 and 20. Instead, I had gone through much the same thing at puberty — that time in the life of males when everything female turns electric.

Yet, there was a difference between myself and my friends. I had gone through puberty in a culture that told me girls have a right to go around “half-naked”, and that, if there was a problem with it, it was my problem. My culture forced me to psychologically adapt to the sight of female thighs and cleavage. And, before I was 19, I was reasonably well adapted.

This is an opinion piece with some thoughtful ideas. Please click on "external source" for the complete article.

Labels: culture, men, morality, Paul Sunstone, religion

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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The End of Christian America

The End of Christian America

The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.

By Jon Meacham | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 4, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Apr 13, 2009

It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler—a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life—the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, "this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified." As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America's religious culture was cracking.

"That really hit me hard," he told me last week. "The Northwest was never as religious, never as congregationalized, as the Northeast, which was the foundation, the home base, of American religion. To lose New England struck me as momentous." Turning the report over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. "A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us," Mohler wrote. "The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture." When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. "Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society," he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.

There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.

According to the American Religious Identification Survey that got Mohler's attention, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008—roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)

While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called "the garden of the church" from "the wilderness of the world." As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America's unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.

NB: This is only a small excerpt of a four-page article which can be accessed by clicking on "external source" at the bottom of this snippet.

Labels: ARIS, Christianity, culture, Jon Meacham, Newsweek magazine, politics, post-Christian, religion

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Friday, November 21, 2008

Trying to measure faith, health link

Some scientific studies show religion and spirituality offers benefits

By JANUARY W. PAYNE
THE WASHINGTON POST

Published: Saturday, November 15, 2008

An integral part of many people's lives, religion defines patterns of worship and socialization, but its impact, if any, on health is unclear. Some studies show a benefit to religious practice, while others -- including much of the research into prayer -- fail to prove its health value.

The question of the role something as unquantifiable as religious belief might play in health troubles some scientists in an age when mainstream medicine is turning ever more toward epidemiological science to define research protocols and to determine the validity of treatments.

That said, it's not hard to understand why being religious might be good for the body, experts say. Religious people often attend regular services; this puts them in a socially supportive environment, which has widely acknowledged health advantages. And some religions promote healthful diets and discourage unhealthy behaviors such as drinking alcohol and smoking

Among that research is some evidence that religion and spirituality offer health benefits and even longer life spans. A national survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ...found that people who did not attend religious services were 1.87 times more likely to have died during an eight-year period than those who attended services more than weekly.

The life expectancy for infrequent attendees was age 75, and it was 83 for those who attended frequently.

A 1996 study looked at the association of Jewish religious observance with mortality by comparing secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel. Belonging to a religious group appeared to prolong life, and the lower mortality rates seen in the religious group were consistent for all causes of death, the authors wrote. And a 2003 study published in Psychosomatic Medicine found that meditation might alter brain and immune function in positive ways, an effect similarly seen in research involving Buddhist monks.

It's hard to show conclusively whether or how a belief system affects one's health; other life experiences might provide benefits to health so similar to religion and spirituality that it's hard to differentiate.

Despite the lack of scientific evidence, some common religious practices are widely thought to enhance health.

Power of prayer

It's not unusual for people to pray for their own health and for that of others. In a 2004 survey of more than 31,000 people, 45 percent said they'd prayed for health reasons, 43 percent prayed for their own health, and 25 percent reported that others had prayed for them. About 10 percent said they'd participated in a prayer group for their health, according to the results, released by the National Center for Health Statistics and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

But science says that prayer might not help a person who is ill. A 2003 update to an earlier systemic review of clinical trials on distant healing found that intercessory prayer, which involves someone praying for the healing of a person located elsewhere, with or without that person's knowledge, probably doesn't offer specific therapeutic healing effects.

Any benefit seen from prayer might come from the fact that "knowing that your friends and family are praying for you is part of social support, ... and (that is) probably really helpful to people, independent of if there is a higher being that answers those prayers," said David Schlundt, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, who has researched the connection between faith and health.

Although religion might provide social support, purpose, a belief system, a moral code -- and even happiness -- these benefits can also come from other sources, notes a 2007 study by Eckersley published in the Medical Journal of Australia. Future examination of the health benefits of religion and spirituality should be done in a broader context, he said, especially with regard to how cultural influences affect faith and health.

Cultural context

That cultural context could be key to understanding how people's beliefs factor into their health outcomes, experts note, because religion and spirituality don't seem to produce a uniform effect on everyone. Differences are apparent between groups of varying socioeconomic and racial and ethnic backgrounds.

A dangerous aspect of the purported faith-health connection is fatalism, the belief that health is predetermined and is not within a person's control. Research shows that people who hold such beliefs are less likely than others to participate in health promotion programs and to seek health care.

Research shows that African Americans are more likely to endorse fatalism than whites. A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Health Behavior reported that such beliefs could be a reaction to chronic illness or poor health rather than something that inhibits beneficial health behavior from the outset.

FAITH HEALING

Research suggests that religion offers health benefits, including longer life spans. Is that because of the healing benefits of prayer or because people of faith enjoy supportive, healthful lifestyles? Some statistics:

83: The life expectancy of people who frequently attended religious services; for infrequent attendees, the estimate was 75.

70 percent: The percentage of churches that provide health-care services to their communities, according to a survey of 6,000 congregations.

40 to 60 percent: The percentage of hospital patients who want their doctors to pray with them. But fewer than 5 percent of doctors say they do so.

2,500: Number of Maryland kindergartners exempted from vaccine mandates on religious grounds, up from 1,300 in 2004.

Labels: belief, Buddhists, culture, faith healing, health, January W. Payne, Jewish, prayer, religion, spirituality

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Monday, June 09, 2008

African American Muslim Women are a Rare Gift

Given our unique perspective on history, we are prepared to engage in struggles for social justice both within the Muslim community as well as for all Americans, and indeed, every global citizen, says Aisha al-Adawiya.

New York - African American Muslim women are a rare gift in that we have a unique perspective on what it means to be Muslim in the United States. Our historical references as women are specifically honed and readily available to address issues of oppression and struggle for liberation as well as opportunity and success.

We have experience communicating with those different from us in faith and culture; we have the stamina needed for a sustained struggle in the interest of social justice. Our lives are intertwined with those who oppress and those who seek to liberate.

Most of us were not raised by Muslim parents; we grew up in predominantly Christian households and were schooled in ethics, community service and self-reliance. But we were looking for a new spirituality. We wanted a new way of life that would speak to our current existence while taking into consideration our exigent past. Islam was the answer.

When we adopted Islam, the teachings that were already ingrained in us – such as the respect of parents and elders, responsibility to family, kin and neighbours, a strong work ethic and commitment to self-improvement – became even more pronounced. Our new religion provided us with a structure for the lessons we'd been taught throughout our lives.

We continue to be nourished by the daily practice of Islam. We lay claim to the strong women who surrounded the Prophet Muhammad, such as his wife Khadija, as our role models. They forged a clear path for us since they were among the first Muslims and, like us, had embraced Islam while living in a predominantly non-Muslim society.

Many Muslim women struggle against cultural oppression within their societies. But while immigrant Muslim women struggle as new minorities in the dominant culture, the African American Muslim woman has a knack for understanding the terrain that must be scaled due to our historical knowledge of how oppression manifests itself.

We carry the scars of centuries of enslavement and the residual effects that persist to this day. We have lost – and continue to lose – our children and loved ones to pernicious institutional racism manifested through policies of abuse and neglect, such as economic deprivation, criminalisation of our youth, substandard health care, and inferior education. Based on these experiences, we can offer lessons learned to Muslim immigrants struggling to realise the promises America makes to new arrivals. At the country's doorstep, Ellis Island, we say to them, "Give me your tired, your poor huddled masses yearning to be free".

Many of us have come to feel that Islam has been a vehicle of empowerment for African Americans, and African American women specifically. We can thus speak concretely about the vast potential the religion offers not only to women, but all humanity, in the realm of personal spirituality, community, equality and justice.

Given our unique perspective on history, we are prepared to engage in struggles for social justice both within the Muslim community as well as for all Americans, and indeed, every global citizen. But we cannot call for constructive change in the larger society and not address the social ills within our own ranks.

Issues such as honour killings and domestic violence must be addressed and resolved. We must help break down the cultural barriers that prevent all Muslim women from seeking education, attending mosque, and participating in Islamic organisations and civic projects. Failing to do so would be in direct contradiction to the examples of those very women we have taken as our mentors.

At the same time, we also seek opportunities to build coalitions with others across racial, religious, ethnic and socio-economic lines to bring about equality, equity and harmony not only for ourselves but also our neighbours. The historical experiences of African Americans, combined with those of Muslim women, have taught us the value of collective effort for peace and social justice.

Aisha H.L. al-Adawiya is the founder and executive director of Women in Islam, Inc., an organisation of Muslim women that focuses on human rights and social justice. This article is written for the Common Ground News Service and can be accessed at GCNews.

Labels: African-Americans, Aisha H.L. al-Adawiya, culture, faith, Muslims, women

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Friday, September 21, 2007

Faith on campus

Arelis Hernandez
Issue date: 9/20/07

Before junior Adil Zaman came to college, he said saying prayers five times a day during his Muslim upbringing was more of a holy nuisance than a religious duty.

During high school, Zaman said, his Islamic faith took a backseat to girls, friends and trying to fit in. That changed when he stepped onto the campus: Outside the reach of parental pressure, it was suddenly a choice whether to practice his faith - not a requirement.

"When Ramadan came" during freshman year, Zaman said, "I promised myself to do things right."

Zaman is far from alone when it comes to faith and spirituality among college students. Although it was once thought that previous generations of devout college students risked eroding their faith after being exposed to secular academic communities, a new study conducted on the campus shows otherwise.

For all the liberal viewpoints so commonly espoused in the university setting - evolution, gay rights and existential philosophy included - many students are flocking to pews and prayer rugs. More than 63 percent of students here reported attending a religious service frequently or occasionally and 55 percent said that they pray.

Only a tiny number of the 524 randomly selected students surveyed - just 6 percent - said they don't consider themselves on a "spiritual quest."

The results of the survey surprised Office of Campus Programs Director Marsha Guenzler-Stevens, who conducted the survey last year with graduate student Andrew Publicover.

"More students talk about faith than what we would've anticipated, more students pray more than we anticipated and more students discuss religion," Guenzler-Stevens said. "There is a growing interest in faith" on the campus.

Paolo Ugolini, who leads the Disciples of Christ campus ministry, said that the popular view that secular campus life is a powerful influence that leads religious students astray is a mischaracterization.

"When students leave their homes and no longer have a family atmosphere to prop up their beliefs, I think many students simply find that their 'faith' was more a product of the home culture," Ugolini said. "It was not really a faith of their own to begin with."

But it isn't just students who were brought up religious that are finding a spiritual awakening during their college career, Guenzler-Stevens' survey shows...

Labels: Arelis Hernandez, college, culture, faith, religion, youth

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Wednesday, August 15, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: Christiane Amanpour, Christianity, culture, Islam, Judaism, politics, religion

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Friday, August 10, 2007

Inter-faith dialogue

LIVE’N’LEARN

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

? Inter-faith dialogue is possible and desirable;

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

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

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

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

What is inter-faith dialogue?

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

A changing world

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

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

New visions

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

Religion and secularism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sunday, August 05, 2007

Interview With Jeffrey J. Kripal, Author of Esalen

by Paul Comstock
August 1st, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No one captures the flag.”

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

Atman, Brahman and “Atman = Brahman”

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

“The enlightenment of the body”

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

Tantra and “Tantric transmission”

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

“Evolutionary mysticism”

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

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

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

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

Paul Comstock is the Editor of the California Literary Review.

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

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Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Survey: Christians Worldwide Too Busy for God

By Audrey Barrick
Christian Post Reporter

Mon, Jul. 30 2007

Christians worldwide are simply becoming too busy for God, a newly released five-year study revealed.

In data collected from over 20,000 Christians with ages ranging from 15 to 88 across 139 countries, The Obstacles to Growth Survey found that on average, more than 4 in 10 Christians around the world say they "often" or "always" rush from task to task.

Busyness proved to be the greatest challenges in Japan, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Indonesia. Christians in Uganda, Nigeria, Malaysia and Kenya were least likely to rush from task to task. But even in the less-hurried cultures, about one in three Christians report that they rush from task to task. In Japan, 57 percent agreed.

About 6 in 10 Christians say that it's "often" or "always" true that "the busyness of life gets in the way of developing my relationship with God." Christians most likely to agree were from North America, Africa and Europe. By country, Christians in South Africa, Nigeria, Canada, Singapore, Ireland, Philippines, the United States, and the United Kingdom, are more distracted from God, respectively, than those in other countries.

While across gender lines, busyness afflicts both men and women, the distraction from God was more likely to afflict men than women in every surveyed continent except North America, where 62 percent of women reported busyness interfering with their relationship with God compared to 61 percent of men.

By profession, pastors were most likely to say they rush from task to task (54 percent) which adversely also gets in the way of developing their relationship with God (65 percent).

"It's tragic. And ironic. The very people who could best help us escape the bondage of busyness are themselves in chains," said Dr. Michael Zigarelli, associate professor of Management at the Charleston Southern University School of Business who conducted the study.

Managers, business owners, teachers and salespeople were among Christians most likely to say they rush from task to task. And professionals whose busyness interferes with developing their relationship with God include lawyers (72 percent), managers (67 percent), nurses (66 percent), pastors (65 percent), teachers (64 percent), salespeople (61 percent), business owners (61 percent), and housewives (57 percent).

"The accelerated pace and activity level of the modern day distracts us from God and separates us from the abundant, joyful, victorious life He desires for us," said Zigarelli.

While the study does not explain why Christians are so busy and distracted, Zigarelli described the problem among Christians as "a vicious cycle" prompted by cultural conformity.

"[I]t may be the case that (1) Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to (2) God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to (3) a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to (4) Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to (5) more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload. And then the cycle begins again."

Zigarelli, who believes busyness and distraction may be a global pandemic, suggested breaking the cycle by "re-ordering our thinking," including "the way we think about who God is and how He wants us to live our lives."

The Obstacles to Growth Survey was conducted on 20,009 Christians – the majority of whom came from the United States, from December 2001 to June 2007. With small sample sizes (less than 30 people) used in Germany, Ireland, Mexico and Japan, Zigarelli urges caution when drawing conclusions about those countries.

Labels: Audrey Barrick, Christian, conformity, culture, God, Michael Zigarelli, Obstacles to Growth Survey

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Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Díos Ha Muerto?

Peggy Levitt

"God is Dead," declared Nietzche, or if he wasn't yet, many people were certain he would be soon. So, when the Pew Survey finds that more and more Hispanics claim no religious identity and that their rates of church attendance decline the more time they spend in the United States, it should come as no surprise. Becoming more secular is what they are supposed to do.

Such surveys, while extremely valuable, are based on an incomplete view of religion. They assume that religion can be compartmentalized -- that just as we go to work from nine to five, so we pray on Friday or Sunday and that is that. But, for many people, religion is an all encompassing way of life. They don't just put it back in the box when they put their prayer book back in the pew. Faith guides how they live their everyday lives, who they associate with, and the kinds of communities they belong to, even among people who claim they are not religious.

Most people could not separate Irishness from Catholicism, Indianness from being Hindu, or what it means to be Pakistani from what it means to be a Muslim because they believe that religion and culture go hand and hand. They have a much broader understanding of what religion is and where to find it than many Americans. They see religion and spirituality as routinely spilling over into the workplace, the schoolyard, the health clinic, and the law office.

When people put up "saint magnets" on their refrigerator doors, light candles in honor of the Vírgen, or decorate their dashboards with photographs of their gurus, they imbue the quotidian with the sacred. When a Latino family celebrates its daughter's fifteenth birthday or a Hindu son invites his elderly parents to live with him, it is a religious as well as a "cultural" act.

What's more, many people never enter a formal house of worship to express their faith. They have no experience belonging to a single religious community with whom they pray on a regular basis. They are comfortable worshipping at any temple or mosque because faith is an individual rather than a collective affair. You can do it at home or in the park just as well as in an official sanctuary.

And, just as the walls of religious buildings are permeable, so are the boundaries between faith traditions. Many people come from countries where they have always combined elements from different faiths. Brazilian Catholicism, for example, has always incorporated indigenous, African, and Christian practices, giving followers permission to be many things at one time. Though loathe to admit it, Dominican Catholicism integrates many Haitian practices. For many people, then, boundary crossing, or combining elements from different faiths, is the rule not the exception. So when surveys sound alarms that Latino Catholics are defecting to Pentecostalism, we can safely assume that at least some people belong to two congregations at once.

While it is clear that more Hispanics claim "no religion" after they have lived for some time in this country and that their church attendance declines, this doesn't necessarily signal they are becoming less religious. Faith takes many shapes and sizes it. It rears its head in many places. To really understanding the changing dynamics of religious life, we need to know where to look.

Labels: culture, faith, Hispanics, Pew survey, religion, tradition

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Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Toppling A Taboo: Businesses Go ‘Faith-Friendly’

Religion comes knocking at the workplace.

Knowledge@Wharton

Evidence of faith percolating through the workforce abounds. Prayer breakfasts, once confined to Capitol Hill, are now popular among executives in unexpected sectors such as technology and real estate. Companies are hiring corporate chaplains to do everything from performing marriage ceremonies to visiting sick employees and offering drug and alcohol counseling. The Academy of Management's five-year-old interest group on spirituality and religion has attracted nearly 700 members, and a quick trawl through Amazon or your local bookstore reveals enough spirituality-at-work titles to fill a small chapel.

Is this just evangelical Christians flexing their business muscles? Or members of non-Western religions appealing for recognition? It's all that and more, argues Miller. It's a genuine social movement, a confluence of forces including an increase in non-Western immigration, rising religiosity among management-level baby boomers, and a search for meaning prompted by 9/11. This faith-at-work movement, says Miller, will ultimately shape business culture as profoundly as the push for civil rights and equal pay has shaped the environment for minority workers and women.

"The old paradigm of leaving your beliefs behind when you go to work is no longer satisfying," says Stew Friedman, practice professor of management and director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project. "More than ever, people want work that fits in with a larger sense of purpose in life. For many people, that includes a concept of God, or something like it."

Do Ask, Do Tell

At Fannie Mae, a leader in the diversity and inclusion field, recognizing religion has been a natural outgrowth of responding to employee needs, according to Emmanuel Bailey, vice-president and chief diversity officer at the Washington, D.C.-based home finance giant. In addition to conducting a biannual employee survey, the diversity office also initiates conversations with its 16 employee network groups, five of which are religiously based.

"We want a corporate culture that retains employees, so that they value Fannie Mae as a great place to work," says Bailey. "We ask, 'From your own perspective, what could we do to improve the culture here?' We had the Jewish, Muslim and Hindu groups say, 'We always see an acknowledgement of Christmas, but we never see any acknowledgement of Rosh Hashanah, Ramadan or Diwali,'" says Bailey.

The issue came up again recently, when Fannie Mae was rushing to complete its financial restatement following charges that it misstated earnings from 2001 to 2004, among other allegations. "Some of our divisions had to work on a six-day-a-week, 12-hour-a-day schedule," recalls Bailey. "From our employee network groups we learned that this decision cut into certain people's religious observances. That's what led us to the multicultural calendar."

The calendar, available company-wide, notes religious celebrations throughout the year. When holidays approach, says Bailey, employee groups write an article about the holiday's meaning and history, which is then posted on the company intranet; at the bottom is a note directing managers on how to accommodate employees celebrating the holiday.

Avoiding Bad Business Decisions

Whether it's prayer breakfasts, study groups or workplace ministries, much of the faith-at-work movement has evolved outside of the church - in large part because churches in recent decades have been uninterested in, if not hostile towards, the business world, according to Miller, a former senior executive in the financial sector. "Although there are pockets of interest in some churches, it's fair to say that churches, whether evangelical, mainline Protestant or Catholic, have abdicated their theological and pastoral interest in the workplace," Miller says.

A thriving evangelical culture is gradually reversing this trend, however. David Roth was a vice president for business development and marketing at J.B. Hunt Transport when he attended a leadership conference at his Arkansas megachurch several years ago. When the conference ended, Roth's pastor announced the creation of a new ministry to bridge the gap between faith and work.

"That message penetrated me like a laser beam. I spent 25 years of my career as Christian on Sunday, but come Monday, it was all about success and money," Roth recalls. When the church ministry was spun off to form a separate, non-profit organization called WorkMatters, Roth quit his VP post to become its first president. Today, the organization advises companies large and small on how to integrate religion and spirituality into their corporate values, and provides individual employees with a template for starting faith-based groups at work.

Meanwhile, leveraging employee religious knowledge to assist product design "can help companies avoid a lot of dumb mistakes," such as Liz Claiborne's decision to embroider verses from the Quran on the rear end of its DKNY jeans, says Georgette Bennett, president of the New York City-based Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, a pioneering organization in the field of religious diversity in the workplace. "Cultural competence is a big buzz word right now. But you can't be culturally competent without understanding something about religion, because religion is the largest component of culture. You have to figure out how to tap into your internal diversity resources."

Corporate leaders resistant to the idea of being faith-friendly may be persuaded by evidence that religion and spirituality already exist in their workplace, says Bennett, pointing to a 2005 NBC poll in which nearly 60% of respondents said religious beliefs played some role in making decisions at work, and an even higher number said such beliefs influenced their interactions with co-workers. Similarly, recent figures from the U.S. Census show a dramatic rise in the rate of immigration from non-Western countries; one-third of human resources professionals surveyed in 2001 by the Tanenbaum Center and the Society for Human Resource Management said the number of religions in their company increased in the past five years.

Legal Hot Spots

Proselytizing in the workplace is one legal hot spot, according to Deborah Weinstein, who teaches employment law for managers in Wharton's legal studies and business ethics department. "Courts across the country have interpreted this issue very differently. In a 2006 case in California, the court said persistent and blatant proselytization is prohibited because it could constitute harassment. But other courts, in Colorado, for example, have said employers need to bend over backwards to accommodate those who [believe they] need to proselytize," says Weinstein, whose Philadelphia-based Weinstein Firm provides legal and consultancy services on workforce issues.

Employers may be surprised to learn the extent of religious expression legally protected in the workplace by the Constitution and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from discriminating on religious grounds and requires them to make "reasonable accommodations" for employees' "sincerely held beliefs."

Another contentious issue right now is what Bennett calls "diversity backlash," in the form of Christian employee affinity groups opposing domestic partner benefits, hrefusing to sign diversity statements that include homosexuality, or asking management not to recognize Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgender (GLBT) affinity groups. While Bennett says these conflicts make some companies "scared to death" of religion in the workplace, Nicole Raeburn, a University of San Francisco sociologist, says many of these disputes have been successfully resolved, sometimes with the help of outside mediators.

"It's a red herring to presume that evangelical Christians are by definition going to be at odds with GLBT groups," says Miller. "Yes, [companies] will stub their toes sometimes. But they need to be realistic: Good outcomes require struggle."

Taking the "Faith-Friendly" Plunge

For managers used to keeping religious belief - or non-belief - under wraps from nine to five, talking about religion in terms of company policy can feel as strange as wearing your underwear on top of your slacks. Miller suggests leaders use the term "faith-friendly" to ease into the topic, because it accommodates both popular, general spirituality and more specific, orthodox religion.
Like underwear, faith-at-work is not a one-size-fits-all product: Companies have to choose the approaches that fit best. The menu of options for meeting religious and spiritual needs is short but growing. Popular picks right now include allowing employees to swap holiday time; modifying cafeteria food to meet religious dietary restrictions; providing spaces for prayer or meditation; and allowing employees to start faith-based affinity groups.

Hiring corporate chaplains, who do everything from conducting weddings to visiting sick or injured employees in the hospital to advising managers on meeting ethical standards, is another possibility. Tyson, for example, has a director of Chaplain Services, a manager of Chaplain Operations and 122 part-time chaplains working throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Becoming "faith-friendly" is "not a formula; it's a mind-set," Miller adds. He encourages companies to make faith-friendliness an explicit part of company policy - a move that could heighten a company's appeal to potential employees.

Wharton's Friedman advises companies, when introducing any work/life integration program, to encourage a "grass-roots approach," in which employees take responsibility for asking the company to meet their individual needs. "Let's say you need to pray several times during the work day. How does your being able to pray during the day make the company more effective? If it's something you really care about, you'll find a convincing way to make your case. This inverts the normal antagonistic way of thinking about your company meeting your needs," he says.

And how does one create an environment where employees feel this sense of personal responsibility? "That's the job of a progressive, smart company: motivating people to bring what they've got so it can help both them and you," says Friedman. "Most people want to have more of themselves alive and active in their work. The more they can be a whole person at work, the more energy, focus and motivation they have to offer.

Labels: church, culture, faith-friendly, religion, religiosity, social movement, workplace spirituality

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Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Another Confrontation With Ourselves

Issue Date: April 27, 2007

Virginia Tech.

A new name on the roster of senseless slaughter. We have seen so much of this.

We are violent.

In the past half-century we have witnessed the assassinations of a president, his presidential candidate brother and a civil rights leader, and attempted assassinations of other presidential candidates and presidents. We have witnessed the murders of civil rights workers and antiwar protesters, including the killing of four on the Kent State University campus.

There was Columbine, where 13 students were gunned down in 1999 before the shooters killed themselves. In 2006, in the quiet of Pennsylvania’s Amish country, 11 youngsters were shot and 5 killed, execution style, in an elementary school.

Twelve years ago this month, a truck bomb destroyed half a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and injuring more than 800.

We’ve puzzled over snipers from university towers and killers who haunted Maryland and Virginia, and a highway sniper in the upper Midwest, picking off the unsuspecting, one at a time, from a distance.

* * *

The concession one makes in these moments is that so much is beyond our control. We cannot, as Jesuit Fr. William Byron said, inure ourselves against or forever avoid malice, but we can rely on "faith and religion to ready the human spirit to withstand any assault."

Relying on faith as the ultimate protection against life’s disruptions, however, should not leave us helpless. There are things we can do.

Two days after the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, President Clinton declared: "We must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons."

That same day he ordered intense bombing of Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia.

Anyone who’s raised a child knows that they don’t learn well when behavior contradicts teaching. One thing we can do is more deeply examine who we are and how accepting we are of state-sponsored violence. Does it square with who and what we say we are?

* * *
The day of the shooting massacre on the Virginia Tech campus, President Bush said in a TV interview that he expected a debate on gun control policy, but argued that now is not the time.

We can’t think of a better time.

According to a 2007 Small Arms Survey, the United States ranks first in the world in gun ownership with 90 weapons per 100 people. By contrast, the rate in France, for instance is 32 per 100 people, and 31 per 100 in Canada, Sweden and Austria.

The numbers themselves would be insignificant, save for the fact that guns account for so much carnage among our children.

These statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are posted on the Web site of the National Education Association:

The rate of firearm deaths among kids under age 15 is almost 12 times higher in the United States than in 25 other industrialized countries combined. The number of U.S. kids killed by gunfire in 2002 was 3,012. American children are 16 times more likely to be murdered with a gun, 11 times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from a firearm accident than children in 25 other industrialized countries combined.

* * *
Lax enforcement of existing gun control laws and consistent erosion of those laws have allowed the deadly gun culture to flourish. Even the 1994 ban on assault weapons, essentially battlefield grade weapons that have no use other than killing humans quickly, efficiently and in great numbers, was allowed to expire three years ago.

The gun lobby -- rich, unconscionable and unscrupulous in manipulating public fear -- has most politicians in a stranglehold. The stranglehold is maintained even as survey after survey, including gun owners and members of households where guns are available, show that a majority of Americans approve of reasonable controls.

We may not be able to hold off malice in the world, or predict the actions of the deranged among us. But we all can do something to foster a culture less accommodating of violence and less friendly toward those who make the violence possible.

Who are we, really, and what kind of culture do we want? How much state-sponsored violence are we willing to tolerate and pay for? How much will we allow the purveyors of arms to dictate our politics? What actions are we willing to place behind the instructions on nonviolence that we attempt to pass on to our children?

Labels: Columbine, culture, gun culture, gun lobby, guns, Oklahoma City, snipers, violence

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Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Global Poll Finds that Religion and Culture are Not to Blame for Tensions between Islam and the West

Source: GlobeScan

The global public believes that tensions between Islam and the West arise from conflicts over political power and interests and not from differences of religion and culture, according to a BBC World Service poll across 27 countries.

While three in ten (29%) believe religious or cultural differences are the cause of tensions, a slight majority (52%) say tensions are due to conflicting interests.

The poll also reveals that most people see the problems arising from intolerant minorities and not the cultures as a whole. While 26 percent believe fundamental differences in cultures are to blame, 58 percent say intolerant minorities are causing the conflict with most of these (39% of the full sample) saying that the intolerant minorities are on both sides.

The idea that violent conflict is inevitable between Islam and the West is mainly rejected by Muslims, non-Muslims and Westerners alike. While more than a quarter of all respondents (28%) think that violent conflict is inevitable, twice as many (56%) believe that "common ground can be found."

The survey of over 28,000 respondents across 27 countries was conducted for the BBC World Service by the international polling firm GlobeScan together with the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland. GlobeScan coordinated the fieldwork between November 2006 and January 2007.

Respondents were also asked whether tensions arise from fundamental differences between the cultures as a whole or from intolerant minorities. Only 26 percent say they are due to differences in culture, while 58 percent attribute these tensions to intolerant minorities - with 39 percent saying that these intolerant minorities are on both sides, 12 percent saying they are primarily on the Muslim side, and 7 percent saying they are mostly on the Western side. The view that the problem arises from intolerant minorities is found in 24 of the 27 countries surveyed, with two countries (Brazil and the UAE) equally divided between the two points of view and with one in two Nigerians (50%) saying fundamental differences are the cause."

Asked whether "violent conflict is inevitable" between Muslim and Western cultures or whether "it is possible to find common ground," an average of 56 percent say that common ground can be found between the two cultures, which is the most common response in 25 countries. On average almost three in ten (28%) think violent conflict is inevitable; Indonesia is the only country where this view predominates, while views are divided in the Phillipines

The belief that it is possible to find common ground between Islam and the West rises with education from 46 percent among those with no formal education to 64 percent among those with post secondary education.

The minority of people who believe that tensions between Islam and the West arise from differences of religion and culture are much more likely to believe that violent conflict is inevitable compared to those who think the problem derives from issues of political power or intolerant minorities.

A belief that violent conflict is inevitable is somewhat more common among Muslims (35 percent) than Christians (27 percent) or others (27 percent). But overall, 52 percent of the 5,000 Muslims surveyed say it is possible to find common ground, including majorities in Lebanon (68%) and Egypt (54%) as well as pluralities in Turkey (49%) and the United Arab Emirates (47%). Even in religiously divided Nigeria, a large majority of Muslims (63%) believe it is possible to find common ground, while Christians are divided on the question. Only in Indonesia do a slim majority (51%) of Muslims take the view that violent conflict is inevitable.

Countries with the largest majorities believing that Islam and the West can find common ground include Italy (78%), Great Britain (77%), Canada (73%), Mexico (69%) and France (69%). A strong majority of Americans (64%) also think it is possible to find common ground, though about a third (31%) believe violent conflict is inevitable. Pluralities in the Philippines (42%) and India (35%) agree that common ground can be found, despite the former's Muslim insurgency and the latter's history of sectarian strife.

In all but three countries, citizens are more likely to think that tensions between Islam and the West arise from conflicts about political power and interests than from differences of religion and culture. A majority (56%) in Nigeria - a country that has suffered clashes between its Muslim and Christian communities - say that tensions primarily arise from religion and culture, including 51 percent of Christians and 59 percent of Muslims. Kenyans and Poles are divided on the question.

Worldwide, Muslims (55%) are somewhat more certain than Christians (51%) that the problem mostly derives from political conflict. This is a widely held view in Lebanon (78%), Egypt (57%), Indonesia (56%) and Turkey (55%) as well as in the United Arab Emirates (48% vs. 27% cultural differences).

Respondents were asked not only their religious affiliation but also the extent to which their religion plays a strong role in how they approach political and social issues. Results were then analyzed to assess whether the views of people who are more religious (regardless of their affiliation) differ from people who are less so.

The analysis shows no consistent pattern. In a few countries, those who are more religious are somewhat more likely to say that conflict is inevitable (Turkey, Hungary), but in more countries such people are slightly more likely to say that it is possible to find common ground (Argentina, Chile, Nigeria, Poland). Those who are more religious are more likely to see the problem arising from culture in France, South Korea, and Turkey, but more likely to attribute it to conflicts of power in Hungary, UAE and the Philippines. So globally, there is no consistent effect.

In total 28,389 citizens in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and the United States were interviewed between 3 November 2006 and 16 January 2007. Polling was conducted for the BBC World Service by the international polling firm GlobeScan and its research partners in each country. In 10 of the 27 countries, the sample was limited to major urban areas. The margin of error per country ranges from +/-2.5 to 4 percent. For more details, please see the Methodology section or visit www.globescan.com or www.pipa.org

Labels: culture, GlobeScan, minorities, politics, religion, violence