Posts Tagged ‘religion’

Arab Spring Threatened By Ethnic And Religious Divisions

Recently I’ve become pretty disappointed with the New York Times, and this has all to do with their response to the Bin Laden killing. Their reporting was jingoistic, even nationalistic, up to the point of being an uncritical cheering of actions of a president clearly violating international and domestic law. When such things happen, one’s reminded that the NYT is basically nothing but an establishment newspaper that will never really be a truly critical government watchdog (and think about their refusal to call the Bush torture methods what they are: torture).

That aside, however, sometimes they have articles that remind why despite of that the NYT, in terms of the technical craft of journalism, is still undisputedly the best newspaper in the world. Maybe not the most critical, but at least the one with the ability to write huge pieces full of insight and a broad scope, sometimes even being almost literary in style.

The piece below, about the aftermath of the Arab Spring revolutions, is such an article. It covers the countries that have recently witnessed revolutions or failed attempts at making them, and how the legacy of that is now threatened by internal disputes based on old ethnic and religious divisions. It’s a very sad story actually, about the promise of a new national identity and citizenship versus ancient hatreds, and one can only hope that the great civic protests of 2011 will not have been in vain.

NYT:

The revolutions and revolts in the Arab world, playing out over just a few months across two continents, have proved so inspirational to so many because they offer a new sense of national identity built on the idea of citizenship.

But in the past weeks, the specter of divisions — religion in Egypt, fundamentalism in Tunisia, sect in Syria and Bahrain, clan in Libya — has threatened uprisings that once seemed to promise to resolve questions that have vexed the Arab world since the colonialism era.

From the fetid alleys of Imbaba, the Cairo neighborhood where Muslims and Christians have fought street battles, to the Syrian countryside, where a particularly deadly crackdown has raised fears of sectarian score-settling, the question of identity may help determine whether the Arab Spring flowers or withers. Can the revolts forge alternative ways to cope with the Arab world’s variety of clans, sects, ethnicities and religions?

The old examples have been largely of failure: the rule of strongmen in Egypt, Syria, Libya and Yemen; a fragile equilibrium of fractious communities in Lebanon and Iraq; the repressive paternalism of the Persian Gulf, where oil revenues are used to buy loyalty.

“I think the revolutions in a way, in a distant way, are hoping to retrieve” this sense of national identity, said Sadiq al-Azm, a prominent Syrian intellectual living in Beirut.

“The costs otherwise would be disintegration, strife and civil war,” Mr. Azm said. “And this was very clear in Iraq.”

In an arc of revolts and revolution, that idea of a broader citizenship is being tested as the enforced silence of repression gives way to the cacophony of diversity. Security and stability were the justification that strongmen in the Arab world offered for repression, often with the sanction of the United States; the essence of the protests in the Arab Spring is that people can imagine an alternative.

But even activists admit that the region so far has no model that enshrines diversity and tolerance without breaking down along more divisive identities.

In Tunisia, a relatively homogenous country with a well-educated population, fault lines have emerged between the secular-minded coasts and the more religious and traditional inland.

The tensions shook the nascent revolution there this month when a former interim interior minister, Farhat Rajhi, suggested in an online interview that the coastal elite, long dominant in the government, would never accept an electoral victory by Tunisia’s Islamist party, Ennahda, which draws most of its support inland.

“Politics was in the hands of the people of the coast since the start of Tunisia,” Mr. Rajhi said. “If the situation is reversed now, they are not ready to give up ruling.” He warned that Tunisian officials from the old government were preparing a military coup if the Islamists won elections in July. “If Ennahda rules, there will be a military regime.”

In response, protesters poured back out into the streets of Tunis for four days of demonstrations calling for a new revolution. The police beat them back with batons and tear gas, arrested more than 200 protesters and imposed a curfew on the city.

In Cairo, the sense of national identity that surged at the moment of revolution — when hundreds of thousands of people of all faiths celebrated in Tahrir Square with chants of “Hold your head high, you are an Egyptian”— has given way to a week of religious violence pitting the Coptic Christian minority against their Muslim neighbors, reflecting long-smoldering tensions that an authoritarian state may have muted, or let fester.

At a rally this month in Tahrir Square to call for unity, Coptic Christians were conspicuously absent, thousands of them gathering nearby for a rally of their own. And even among some Muslims at the unity rally, suspicions were pronounced.

“As Muslims, our sheiks are always telling us to be good to Christians, but we don’t think that is happening on the other side,” said Ibrahim Sakr, 56, a chemistry professor, who asserted that Copts, who make up about 10 percent of the population, still consider themselves “the original” Egyptians because their presence predates Islam.

In Libya, supporters of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi acknowledge that his government banks on fears of clan rivalries and possible partition to stay in power in a country with deep regional differences.

Officials say that the large extended clans of the west that contribute most of the soldiers to Colonel Qaddafi’s forces will never accept any revolution arising from the east, no matter what promises the rebels make about universal citizenship in a democratic Libya with its capital still in the western city of Tripoli.

The rebels say the revolution can forge a new identity.

“Qaddafi looks at Libya as west and east and north and south,” said Jadella Shalwee, a Libyan from Tobruk who visited Tahrir Square last weekend in a pilgrimage of sorts. “But this revolt has canceled all that. This is about a new beginning,” he said, contending that Colonel Qaddafi’s only supporters were “his cousins and his family.”

“Fear” is what Gamal Abdel Gawad, the director of the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, called it — the way that autocrats win support because people “are even more scared of their fellow citizens.”

Nowhere is that perhaps truer than in Syria, with a sweeping revolt against four decades of rule by one family and a worsening of tensions among a Sunni Muslim majority and minorities of Christians and heterodox Muslims, the Alawites.

Mohsen, a young Alawite in Syria, recounted a slogan that he believes, rightly or not, was chanted at some of the protests there: “Christians to Beirut and the Alawites to the coffin.”

“Every week that passes,” he lamented, speaking by telephone from Damascus, the Syrian capital, “the worse the sectarian feelings get.”

The example of Iraq comes up often in conversations in Damascus, as does the civil war in Lebanon. The departure of Jews, who once formed a vibrant community in Syria, remains part of the collective memory, illustrating the tenuousness of diversity. Syria’s ostensibly secular government, having always relied on Alawite strength, denounces the prospect of sectarian differences while, its critics say, fanning the flames. The oft-voiced formula is, by now, familiar: after us, the deluge.

“My Alawite friends want me to support the regime, and they feel if it’s gone, our community will be finished,” said Mohsen, the young Alawite in Damascus, who asked that only his first name be used because he feared reprisal. “My Sunni friends want me to be against the regime, but I feel conflicted. We want freedom, but freedom with stability and security.”

That he used the mantra of years of Arab authoritarianism suggested that people still, in the words of one human rights activist, remain “hostage to the lack of possibilities” in states that, with few exceptions, have failed to come up with a sense of self that transcends the many divides.

“This started becoming a self-fulfilling myth,” said Mr. Azm, the Syrian intellectual.

“It was either our martial law or the martial law of the Islamists,” he added. “The third option was to divide the country into ethnicities, sects and so on.”

Despite a wave of repression, crackdown and civil war, hope and optimism still pervade the region, even in places like Syria, the setting of one of the most withering waves of violence. There, residents often speak of a wall of fear crumbling. Across the Arab world, there is a renewed sense of a collective destiny that echoes the headiest days of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and ’60s and perhaps even transcends it.

President Obama, in his speech on Thursday about the changes in the Arab world, spoke directly to that feeling. “Divisions of tribe, ethnicity and religious sect were manipulated as a means of holding on to power, or taking it away from somebody else. But the events of the past six months show us that strategies of repression and strategies of diversion will not work anymore.”

But no less pronounced are the old fears of zero-sum power, where one side wins and the other inevitably loses. From a Coptic Christian in Cairo to an Alawite farmer in Syria, discussions about the future are posed in terms of survival. Differences in Lebanon, a country that celebrates and laments the diversity of its 18 religious communities, are so pronounced that even soccer teams have a sectarian affiliation.

In Beirut, wrecked by a war over the country’s identity and so far sheltered from the gusts of change, activists have staged a small sit-in for two months to call for something different, in a plea that resonates across the Arab world.

The Square of Change, the protesters there have nicknamed it, and their demand is blunt: Citizenship that unites, not divides.

“We are not ‘we’ yet,” complained Tony Daoud, one of the activists. “What do we mean when we say ‘we’? ‘We’ as what? As a religion, as a sect, as human beings?”

Tags: Arab Spring, Beirut, Cairo, Christianity, citizenship, Coptics, Damascus, demonstrations, division, Egypt, ethnicity, Gadaffi, identity, Islam, Jews, Libanon, Libya, Middle East, muslims, North Africa, particularism, protest, religion, revolution, Syria, Tripoli, violence
Category politics |

‘An Agnostic Looking For Love In The Bible Belt’

A girl (22) from secular, mundane Michigan moves to Nashville, Tennessee, and learns that here, religion is everywhere – lowering her chances on the dating market. Meanwhile, she pens down an interesting and well-written story about religion in contemporary America.

Kinda reminds me of the Dutch book Zwarte dauw that just came out – about a 28-year old girl from Amsterdam who temporarily moves to the strictly Protestant village of Genemuiden. She similarly encounters a faith-imbued world that is not her own.

If you got time and are interested in this subject, read this nice piece by Maggie Flynn on Salon.com:

I’d only been in Nashville a few months when I met this guy – let’s call him Matthew — at a downtown honky-tonk through friends of friends. He was sweet and charming, teaching me the two-step over a shared pitcher of beer. The following weekend, he took me on our first date to the Sunset Grill, one of Nashville’s hippest dining destinations, despite being named after a Don Henley song. In his sexy Southern twang, he ordered a bottle of wine to go with the meal.

After the waiter departed, Matthew leaned across the table, almost apologetically, and said, “You don’t mind that I ordered a bottle of wine, do you?”

I assured him that I approved of his choice. Still, he looked bothered.

“I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I like to unwind with a drink now and then, but I don’t drink all of the time,” Matthew said. “I bet you don’t either.”

“Not in the morning.” I laughed.

“Oh, a joke. That’s funny. But seriously, do you think you’ll drink after you have children?”

I was certain he was putting me on. I was 22, freshly graduated from college and unaccustomed to this line of questioning, especially on a first date. But he persisted. He’d enjoyed our tipsy two-step, he explained, but he was looking to plan his future. He believed in getting the serious business out of the way on a first date. I wondered how many second dates Matthew ever had.

“I don’t even know that I’ll have children,” I said.

“Is that another joke?”

“No.”

The wine arrived. As if to demonstrate how moderation worked, Matthew poured me half a glass, which I definitely saw as half-empty.

“Are you religious?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“But you believe in God?”

I drained my wine glass and reached across the table for the bottle. I gave him an honest answer, though I suspected I would never see Matthew again. I said that I really wasn’t sure. I certainly didn’t believe that the Bible was the literal word of God, nor did I buy into stories about building giant arks and visiting whale’s bellies. While I didn’t consider myself a Christian or a practitioner of any other religion, I wasn’t an atheist, either. To say definitively that God didn’t exist seemed as restrictive as saying that he did. I was a skeptical agnostic, I concluded.

Matthew listened carefully and nodded, conceding my logic, if not my position. Maybe he was an OK guy after all.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said.

“Sure.”

“What do you have against God?”

More here.

Tags: Bible Belt, Christianity, dating, God, love, Maggie Flynn, Michigan, Nashville, religion, Tennessee, The South, United States
Category spirituality |

'Life Is More Meaningful Than Facts Can Convey'

In a neat little essay, Adam Frank writes something that resonates to some extent with some blatterings I wrote down almost a year ago. It is about the good old science versus religion debate, and about how both sides (in their simplistic form) get it wrong.

I think Frank gets it right. On both sides, to some extent, there is too great a stress on ‘knowing’ - that is, the idea that we can grasp something like ‘objective’ reality. For example, traditional, monotheistic, doctrinal religion revolves all around ‘knowing’ – with certainty – that God exists, and that all the religious and moral doctrines flowing from that fact are always and everywhere correct. There is no place for any spiritual, direct experience of the divine; it is essentially about following the literal ‘truth’ of a book. This can be seen at its worst in calvinism – which is why I think this is one of the most flawed versions of religion.

On the other hand, in positivist, materialist science a similar stress on objective ‘knowing’ can be discerned. Here, too, there is no place for something like experience, at it is reduced to whatever happens in atoms. Mankind is seen as nothing more than essentially a big machine. At its other end, there is a zeal for discovering what the universe is composed of; whether there are parallel universes, whether there is a Theory of Everything, etc. At some hypothetical endpoint of science, we are supposed to ’know’ everything and then be happy with it. This is a sort of ‘nihilism’ that, to me at least, is not only unsatisfying, but also a misrecognition of what it is like to ‘experience’ the world.

The fact that I can experience myself and my own consciousness for me at least is a sort of wonder for which science has no adequate explanation in terms of its meaning (that is, it can describe how it mechanically comes into being, but the experience in itself is idiosyncratic). Frank says something similar. Quoting Sartre, who said ”Even if God did exist, that would change nothing” (interpreted as meaning that even if we would have ‘knowledge’ of a God, that would still leave the mystery of existence untouched), he proposes that we should focus on the act of being rather than the act of knowing.

This is where ‘spirituality’ (screw that word) comes in. But rather than having to do with ridiculous New Agey stuff, this is a call for abandoning the bastions of certainty, found in monotheistic religion and science, which only lead to needless disputes, and focusing on the immediate experience of the self. And then maybe with its connection to other parts of being. I think this is in a nutshell what Heidegger is about. But you can also find it in the eradication of the Cartesian mind-body divide in tenets of Eastern thinking. And in mysticism. Or do drugs.

Anyway, here’s Frank’s essay:

What exactly are we looking for? What fuels so much of the passion and intensity behind the debates over religion, the debates between religions and the debates surrounding science and religion? At the heart of these debates you will often find the issue of “knowing.”

Knowing if God exists, or not.  Knowing how the Universe began and if a creator was necessary, or not.  Knowing how human beings “became” and what constitutes appropriate moral codes in light of that becoming. Always and again, the emphasis is on knowledge, on the certainty of understanding something, of knowing some fact and its meaning. What a tragic mistake.

The great comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, “People don’t want the meaning of life, they want the experience of life.” He could not have hit the nail more firmly on the head.

One thing I have never understood in the vitriol that people manage to dredge up in these science vs. religion battles is their lack clarity about goals. Is human spiritual endeavor really about “knowing” the existence of a superbeing?  Does this academic “knowing”, as in “I can prove this to be true,” really what lies behind the spiritual genius of people like the ninth century Sufi poet Rumi, the 13th century Zen teacher Dogen, or more modem examples like Martin Luther King or Ghandi?

There are many reasons human beings institutionalized their spiritual longing into religions. Those reasons often devolved into considerations of power, control and real estate.  Those institutions certainly have needed to enforce creed and doctrine, i.e. “knowledge.”

But the reasons individuals find their lives transformed by spiritual longing are intimate and deeply personal affairs having little to do with dusty “proofs for the existence of God.” As all those “spiritual but not religious” folks popping up in surveys on religion will tell you, the essence of the question is about experience, not facts.

Along a similar vein, in the pro-science/anti-religion camps one often hears the quest for understanding the universe put in equally ultimate, quasi-theological terms. Finding the final theory, the Theory of Everything, is held up as a kind of moment “when the truth shall be revealed once and for all.” While many practicing scientists might not see it this way, the scientific knowledge/enlightenment trope has been there in popular culture for a long time reaching all the back to Faust and up through movies like Pi.

As the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said “Even if God did exist, that would change nothing.”  One way to interpret his meaning was that a formulaic “knowledge” of a superbeing’s existence is beside the point when the real issue before us every day, all day is the verb “to be.”

It’s the act of being that gives rise to our suffering and our moments of enlightenment. Right there, right in the very experience of life, is the warm, embodied truth we long for so completely.

Spirituality, at its best, points us away from easy codifications when it shows us how to immerse ourselves in the simple, inescapable act of being.  Science at its root is also an expression of reverence and awe for the endless varied, resonantly beautiful experience we can find ourselves immersed in.  So knowing the meaning of life as encoded in a religious creed on a page or an equation on a blackboard is not the issue. A deeper, richer experience of this one life: that is the issue!

So, can we stop thinking that discussions about science and religion have to focus on who has the best set of facts?

When it comes to the natural world, it’s hard to see how science is not going win the “facts” war hands down. But if we broaden our view to see being as the central issue, then connections between science and spiritual longing might be seen in an entirely different light.

Tags: Adam Frank, consciousness, Eastern philosophy, epistemology, facts, fundamental ontology, Jean-Paul Sartre, knowing, Martin Heidegger, materialism, monotheism, NPR, positivism, reality, religion, Science, self-consciousness, spirituality, the self
Category philosophy, spirituality |

Religion And Liberal Democracy

The Economist interviews The New Republic writer Damon Linker about his new book, The Religious Test, on the compatibility of  certain types of religious beliefs with the basic tenets of liberal democracy. The entire interview is very interesting, as it covers the subjects of the positive-negative equation in the contribution of religion to American democracy, the theocon and evangelical movements, the role of religion in the backlash against Obama, the new atheism, and the religious views of the Founders.

I thought this citation particularly interesting:

History shows us that traditionalist religion can be compatible with various forms of non-liberal government (theocracy, absolute monarchy). The same can be said for strident atheism and totalitarianism. Conversely, when religion is liberal—when it makes few supernatural claims, when it is doctrinally minimal, and when it serves mainly as a repository of moral wisdom—it can play a significant role in a liberal society. But the relationship between traditionalist religion and liberal politics is far more contentious—especially as we approach the most intense forms of piety and the most exalted forms of citizenship (which involve serving in high political office). A deeply devout Christian—someone who places his faith at the centre of his life—will tend to think of himself first and foremost as a member of the one true church working toward the establishment of the kingdom of God under Jesus Christ, if not in this life, then in the next. His ultimate loyalty will be to Christ, just as the ultimate loyalty of the most observant Jew will be to God and the Torah, while a Muslim’s will be to Allah and the Koran. Liberal citizenship at its peak, by contrast, requires devotion to the liberal institutions and democratically-enacted laws of the political community above all else. That’s why American presidents and other high officials swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and not natural or divine law of any kind.

These divergent loyalties may not come into direct conflict every day, but they nonetheless stand in deep and abiding tension with one another, forever threatening to pit the theological duties of the devout believer against the political duties of the citizen.

I’m conflicted between two views regarding this statement. On the one hand, I very much agree with it, as it reinforces the view that absolute certainty in religion (or anything else, for that matter) is a folly, and that one should always let a measure of doubt permeat one’s world views. This automatically leads to a more liberal religion that is more flexible in its interpretations, and hence can – probably – function well in a political system that revolves around structures to resolve or live with fundamental disagreements (i.e., liberal democracy).

On the other hand, recent trends in philosophy and sociology acknowledging that we live in a “post-secular” world in which religion is here to stay seem to run against this “submission” of religion to a substantive form of liberalism. Indeed, I can imagine the citation above feeling a little downgrading to people who adhere to a more strict form of religion and yet want to live in a democracy – as if their religion is only good enough when it’s filtered down to suit the secularist’s tastes. Instead, some post-secular thinkers advocate a “radical pluralism” that accepts the place of, for example, fundamentalism in a political system as well. But then still you’ll need a measure of (religious) toleration on both sides to function in one and the same system.

Tags: Damon Linker, democracy, fundamentalism, liberalism, post-secularism, radical pluralism, religion, religious toleration, the postsecular
Category politics, spirituality |

Pope's Astronomer Would Baptise Alien, If It Asked

(A still from the sci fi series Babylon 5 episode “The Parliament of Dreams“)

I always thought that the moment extraterrestrial life is discovered, that would be the end of organized religion on Earth. For one, the discovery of life from other worlds would immediately invalid any literal reading of holy scriptures such as the Bible and the Quran, which in their creation stories hold that life was created exclusively on Earth (Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden). It also discredits to a large extent the universal message of Christianity based on the exclusive pact of God with man through the human Jesus Christ (at that point, you have two options: you go with the idea that humanity is some sort of chosen people, or maybe that on every world God would plant a son). By now I think that religion is probably flexible enough to incorporate the discovery of aliens in its theology, but it would definitely create major theological challenges, and probably require some move towards a less localized, more universal creed. With all the implications that has.

Anyway, one of the pope’s astronomers, Guy Consolmagno, thinks differently. He would baptize aliens, because they are likely to have a soul. Which I thought was a brilliant remark, because there you already go with the theological debate.

The Guardian:

An alien – ‘no matter how many tentacles it has’ – could have a soul, says pope’s astronomer.

Aliens might have souls and could choose to be baptised if humans ever met them, a Vatican scientist said today. The official also dismissed intelligent design as “bad theology” that had been “hijacked” by American creationist fundamentalists.

Guy Consolmagno, who is one of the pope’s astronomers, said he would be “delighted” if intelligent life was found among the stars. “But the odds of us finding it, of it being intelligent and us being able to communicate with it – when you add them up it’s probably not a practical question.”

Speaking ahead of a talk at the British Science Festival in Birmingham tomorrow, he said that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. “Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul.” Would he baptise an alien? “Only if they asked.”

More.

Tags: aliens, Babylon 5, Christianity, extraterrestrial life, Guy Consolmagno, organized religion, Pope, religion, theology, universality
Category science, spirituality |

The Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR)

Laura Olson at The Immanent Frame explores the demographic characteristics of the group of Americans who identify as ”spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). SBNR individuals have in common that they describe themselves as “spiritual” (whatever that may mean), yet do not take part in organized religion. This demographic group, while growing in numbers, has received far less academic (and journalistic) attention than their organized counterparts in the Christianist-Republican corner have.

Olson pays particular attention to the political outlook of SBNR individuals; and they lean clearly to the left on a number of social and political issues. Thus, questions that emerge from this small descriptive analysis are, first, how SBNR individuals translate their belief “system” into political attitudes and behaviours, and second, in which way, if any, they take part in organized political life more specifically: which issues or politicians they support, how they participate, and so on.

The Immanent Frame:

An increasing variety of scholars and other observers seem to be noticing the growing social significance of Americans who identify as “spiritual but not religious” (hereafter SBNR). SBNR individuals insist on carving out their own approaches to understanding the divine and the transcendent, refusing for the most part to participate in culturally hegemonic religious traditions.

(…)

Who are the Americans who identify as “spiritual but not religious”? What unifying characteristics, qualities, and beliefs might they share? And to what extent might their distinctive approach to religion, or to systems of meaning, have relevance to political discourse, electoral campaigns, and public policy?

(…)

I took a quick statistical peek at some of the religious, demographic, and attitudinal attributes of respondents to a 2005 survey (conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for the PBS television series Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly) who self-identified as “spiritual but not religious.” Out of a sample of 1,131 respondents, 387 (34.2 percent) selected this label for themselves (49.8 percent chose “religious,” 10.1 percent chose “neither,” and the small remainder gave other responses). I found that SBNR respondents are (not surprisingly) significantly less likely than religious respondents to say “religion is important in [their lives],” to attend religious services (90 percent never attend), or to engage in other traditional religious practices. Surprisingly, religious and SBNR individuals do not differ significantly from one another in terms of age, race, gender, marital or parental status, employment status, education, or income.

How might SBNR individuals translate their belief systems, values, and practices into political attitudes and behaviors? I would like to posit several working hypotheses on this front, but first I wish to echo Joel Robbins’s assertion that the “metaphysicals” about whom Bender writes “understand their social lives in non-social terms.” We must approach the study of SBNR Americans with the understanding that (for the most part) they forego participation in the most common mode of social interaction in the United States: conventional religious worship. Thus, they voluntarily absent themselves from the social networks fostered in and by congregations and hence fail to receive the politically charged messages that many clergy deliver. This lack of connectedness, combined with the evident desire of SBNR persons to forge their own way in the world, outside of the rigid social and cultural boundaries that traditional religion tends to erect, suggests to me that SBNR Americans are unlikely to have any semblance of a clear or systematic political agenda.

Nevertheless, it makes sense to hypothesize that SBNR Americans would place themselves to the left of center politically, at a bare minimum because the Republican Party today is so widely identified as being “friendly” to organized religion. The data I analyzed bear this hypothesis out: SBNR respondents were significantly more Democratic in their party identification and liberal in their ideological orientation than their religious counterparts. Following the work of George Lakoff, we might also hypothesize the SBNR individual to be less authoritarian than one who is traditionally religious. The data support this assertion as well: SBNR survey respondents were significantly less likely than religious respondents to agree with the statement, “It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good hard spanking.” On a related note, definitions of morality might also be hypothesized to differ between religious and SBNR Americans, and, again, the data show that the two groups do differ significantly. Religious survey respondents are more likely to define “moral values” as “social issues, such as abortion or gay marriage,” “family values, such as trying to protect children from sex and violence on TV and the Internet,” and “compassion and concern for the sick and needy,” while SBNR Americans are more likely to define moral values as “social justice, such as preventing human rights abuses or discrimination,” and “personal values, such as honesty and responsibility.”

The small descriptive analysis presented here scarcely scratches the surface of the empirical work that will need to be done to achieve even a modest understanding of SBNR Americans and politics. Which issues, if any, do they prioritize? Do they take part in organized political action, and if so, around which causes? Do they wish to affect political outcomes or not?

Tags: demographics, individualism, liberalism, organized religion, political participation, religion, SBNR, spiritual but not religious
Category politics, spirituality, U.S. politics |

Temple Complex Earliest Evidence Of Human Civilization In The World

It’s 7,000 years older than Stonehenge and the pyramids. It predates villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and agriculture. So gather the implications for our view on the earliest development of human civilization. As it is a temple, moreover, it might also change our view of how civilization developed – suggesting that the urge to worship and build temples sparked the need to develop architecture, farming, writing and statecraft, rather than the other way around.

From a beautiful article in Newsweek, worth reading entirely:

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.

Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for “potbelly hill”—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a “Rome of the Ice Age,” as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community.

(…)

The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is “unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date,” according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford’s archeology program. Enthusing over the “huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art” at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: “Many people think that it changes everything… It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong.”

(…)

This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a “Neolithic revolution” 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion.

(…)

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance.

(…)

The temples thus offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts.

The Guardian also has a nice article, as has National Geographic.

Tags: civilization, Gobleki Tepe temple, prehistory, religion
Category history, science, spirituality |