The Government has repeatedly affirmed its support for faith schools and parents’ right to pass on their religious beliefs. At the same time, standards for independent schools, announced last year, require the promotion of “mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs”. Has the government considered cases where the promotion of respect and tolerance is incompatible with the school’s faith ethos?
Media reports have emphasised extremism in Muslim schools, but my research indicates that some evangelical Christian schools are also preaching intolerance. I am researching the approximately 50 Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) schools in the UK. Belief in the eternal damnation of unbelievers is part of ACE’s statement of faith.
In cases like this, where religion makes exclusive truth claims, other beliefs are necessarily seen as inferior. Evangelical Christianity views other religions as at best ‘man-made’ – in contrast to evangelicalism’s God-made Truth –…
I’m a big fan of Dr. Maarten Boudry, a Belgian philosopher who’s a research fellow in the Department of Philosopy & Moral Sciences of Ghent University. Boudry has spent a lot of time showing that religion and science are incompatible, attacking the distinction between “metaphysical naturalism” and “methodological naturalism” (a distinction much beloved by accommodationists), and generally pwning “Sophisticated Theologians™.”
I recently talked to some students about the term ‘Spiritual But Not Religious ‘ and my notes may, or may not, be of interest.. They are below. You may notice that I take a much more measured tone than in the book..
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We began by wondering:
Who are the SBNR?
* We don’t wholly know.. But..
* New Age..
* Agnostics
* Disillusioned with institutions
* Spiritual self-selecter
* Anxious Buddhists (for example)
Why claim to be SBNR?
* Rejection / discomfort with authority..
* Sense of something bigger, but a (postmodern) suspicion of ‘grand narratives’
* A Socio-cultural guess?
People wish to disassociate from the type of belief which is tainted by religious extremism and fundamentalism. Nonetheless, they want to identify not as a shallow egotist (with a mere mechanistic world-view) but as someone with depth and sensitivity.
Profile of the “Spiritual but not Religious” Who are the “spiritual but not religious,” and how do they compare with those who reject both labels as well as those who do consider themselves religious?
* So – of those who described themselves as SBNR – 39% also called themselves Protestant..
* See aforementioned analysis blog – but tells us that religious (or spiritual) identification is complex: people may feel affiliated with a tradition in some senses, but perhaps want to distance themselves from the ‘toxicity’ associated with being religious – in some ways..
* But then there was more – in January this year: we saw a rash of headlines:
* Dig into appendix d for the questions on religion, and things get much less clear..
* Surveys? I asked a psychologist who knows about these things to look at the data.. He blogs about ‘spiritual intelligence’, etc – http://jonathanschips.blogspot.co.uk/ so I knew he’d be interested..
The Actual Question:
By ‘religion’, we mean the actual practice of a faith, e.g. going to a temple, mosque, church or synagogue. Some people do not follow a religion but do have spiritual beliefs or experiences. Some people make sense of their lives without any religious or spiritual beliefs.
Would you say that you have a religious or a spiritual understanding of your life? CODE ALL THAT APPLY 1 Religious 2 Spiritual 3 Neither
* SO: they can be Religious, Spiritual, Both, Neither.
* Seems fair – but: IF the person says only option 2: survey treats them as not religious. They haven’t said they are – but they haven’t said that they really aren’t either.
* This is not that big an issue in original study, but when new study then uses this data – correlates with mental health and religiosity: it sees that those who said option 2 (only) have higher incidence of issues.
* Then we get news stories.. But these people may well be religious, but identified as spiritual. They may have implied SBNR by answers : BUT they never actually identifed using the term ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’…
* As my psychologist friend put it: “Their responses have been framed by the questions asked, they have not chosen to self identify as spiritual but not religious.”
Conclusions
* The mental health stories generated huge comment: be it pagans insisting they were religious, people disputing the claims / inclusions – they were very active..
* The video had “Why I Love Jesus, but Hate Religion” has had 23 Million views – maybe, whatever we think of it, it may give us some clues:
After a quiet-ish time of late – going back to work full-time has meant being really busy – Dispirited seems to have seen a sudden burst of activity..
Two weeks ago, I spoke to Gloucestershire Philosophical Society, partly about the book – but mainly about issues of ‘happiness’ – some of which overlapped with my post here: https://dispirited.org/2012/10/15/death-statistics-happiness-what-else/ – and then we went on to have a really interesting discussion about death, and how atheists go about making meaning in the face of it: I was very moved (as were others present) by some of the contributions..
Last week, I spoke to people at a seminar at SOAS, where we talked about the book, but also about what atheist ‘services’ might look like: I met some people who’d been at this event: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21319945 and we had (I think) a constructive exchange of views. I remain uncomfortable with them – but took a number of their points on board, especially the claim that they might address concerns about ‘community’.
Ok – I have said things on this topic again – but perhaps I might be clearer. I haven’t object to the term “Spiritual But Not Religious’ out of pique, or disrespect: but because I am not sure it makes sense..
Of course, we can (as I say in the book) see it as a form of social positioning (“I’m not like these mad religious people who are fundamentalists, but yet I’m deep”) – but as notion in itself? Part of the reason for this seems historical: To say one is Spiritual But Not Religious seems a radical narrowing of what ‘religious’ means that gives scant attention to the actual reality of the history of religious traditions.
If being ‘religious’ meant only being a member of a mainstream tradition, largely accepting that tradition, accepting Orthodoxy regarding textual interpretation and living according to that tradition’s socio-moral norms – then being Spiritual But Not Religious would perhaps make some sense. But this doesn’t seem to match what has happened.
The heterodox, the outsider seer, the radical reformer, the Protestant, the bhakti poet, the neo-Pagan celebrant, all these seem occupied with fundamentally what religion is about. They are about an outworking of the consequences of what they believe to be encounters with a Divinity / Spiritual Reality. They also seem Spiritual But Not Religious when it’s now used.
Surely Religion has been about humans respond (and organise themselves) in response to claims about the Spiritual. If you are spiritual, it means you are religious. You may not be religious in certain ways, and not be comfortable with certain morals, social forms, and politico-cultural associations that many forms of religion represent. But you are religious. Now, it may be that in the future being ‘religious’ comes to mean only a narrow aspect of what we have thus far used the term to denote – but that day has not yet come..
Have you ever read something and thought, “that’s prejudiced”, but without the ability to put your finger on exactly how? There are speeches and writings and quotes which seem sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic or transphobic, yet there is no exact quote that can be pulled out and easily called out for what it is.
This is because there are subtle ways of using language, barely perceptible, which reflect stereotyping and prejudice. In spotting these, one can call out the speaker or writer and address the grubby prejudice that lies beneath.
Symbolic racism
Following the Civil Rights movement and the overturning of the openly bigoted Jim Crow laws, racism in the United States took a different form: symbolic racism. Symbolic racism is characterised by three markers: a belief that minorities are being too demanding, resentment about special favours for minorities and denial of continuing discrimination. This is probably one…
I’m sometimes asked how psychology might explain events that seem so strange that they suggest the existence of paranormal activity, for example when you’re thinking about a friend and how you haven’t talked to them for a while, and then the phone rings and it’s them. These events seem so very unlikely, it seems impossible that they could happen by chance. The explanation that it’s just a coincidence doesn’t seem very persuasive. However, sometimes an unpersuasive reason is the right one, and the reason why unusual events sometimes occur comes down to the law of large numbers. Any event that can be possible, including bizarre coincidences, has some chance of it happening, even if that chance is very small. However, there are so many events, and so many people to potentially experience them, that even the most unlikely of coincidences is likely to happen now and again. Hence the picture…
Dispirited 