Religious belief and intelligence: Worldwide evidence

Is there a positive impact of intelligence on religious disbelief after we account for the fact that both average intelligence and religious disbelief tend to be higher in more developed countries? We carry out four beta regression analyses and conclude that the answer is yes. We also compute impact curves that show how the effect of intelligence on atheism changes with average intelligence quotients. The impact is stronger at lower intelligence levels, peaks somewhere between 100 and 110, and then weakens. Bootstrap standard errors for our point estimates and bootstrap confidence intervals are also computed.     

Religious belief,values, and psychotherapy

Conclusion Conflicts between religious values, personal needs, and the demands of society are inevitable in the lives of all. The healthy person is able to resolve these conflicts, or he learns to live with them. The unhealthy person incorporates them into his neurotic personality. They can become such as to block all progress in therapy. Unless they are handled in some direct fashion, the patient may never attain that inner freedom needed to reorient his distorted values and ideals. In some cases, therefore, the therapist may be forced to take an open approach to religious and moral values, even if this means influencing the patient's values in the direction of the therapist's value system.     

Honesty: One Effect of Primed Religious Representations

Most demonstrations of the automatic activation of mental representations and resulting behavioral effects have been conducted in the context of specific stereotypes. The main purpose of these studies was to test whether primed religious representations can have automatic influences on relevant (prosocial) behavior (Study 1) regardless of prior religious belief (Study 2). Study 1 found that participants primed with religious representations (religious words) cheated significantly less on a subsequent task. Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1 with subliminal presentations of religious words and further found that participant's intrinsic religiosity had no influence on rates of cheating with the prime received. These results provide the first known demonstration of religious representations automatically influencing behavior. Implications for the psychology of religion are discussed.     

Religious pluralism and justified Christian belief: A reply to Silver

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Religious Communities and Their Mission

In the past thirty years, religious orders of men and women within the Roman Catholic Church have witnessed both the graying of its members and a decrease in the number of new vocations. Research has shown that only those communities with a clear focus in terms of charism and mission will survive. The present study reports the results of survey research conducted with 484 Roman Catholic religious which investigated three research questions: the uniqueness of the stated mission of seven religious communities, the awareness and experience of each community's unique charism, and an understanding of those lived experiences within community life which contribute to and predict a community's charism. The findings indicate that, while each of the religious communities surveyed can both identify and experience their community's stated charism, their mission statements poorly reflect the charism which is unique to each community. The data also indicates that time spent in prayer, both personal and communal, as well as the level of one's formal education, contribute to and predict and community's charism.     

Religious belief,ethics, biological principles and assisted conception

New reproductive technologies present ethical challenges to religious believers. In order to distinguish beneficial applications from harmful ones, believers should be guided by religious teachings and also be aware of current scientific knowledge. In this paper relevant spiritual principles from Baha'i writings are outlined and it is suggested that Christians and Muslims may identify similar principles in their own sacred texts and religious authorities. Medical procedures in assisted conception are also described, and it is explained that biological development from gametogenesis to birth is a continuum of processes rather than a series of events. It is suggested that ethical debates about the moral status of the embryo and related ethical issues do not lead to agreement on a single spiritually significant point in development, but in the current state of knowledge it can be argued that individuation at about fourteen days is of major significance. Striving for an absolute position should be avoided as scientific knowledge is relative and will change in the future.     

Policy Attitudes,Ideological Values and Social Representations

This article reviews research on policy attitudes and ideological values from the perspective of social representations theory. In the first part of the paper, key features of lay political thinking are presented, its pragmatic imperative, its focus on communication and the social functions of shared knowledge. Objectification transforms abstract and group‐neutral ideological values into concrete and socially useful knowledge, in particular stereotypes of value‐conforming and value‐violating groups. Such shared understandings of intergroup relations provide citizens with common reference knowledge which provides the cognitive and cultural basis of policy attitudes. Social representations theory further suggests that lay knowledge reflects the social context in which it has been elaborated (anchoring), an aspect which allows conceptualising aggregate‐level differences in policy attitudes. In the second part of the paper, a model of lay conceptions of social order is outlined which organises four shared conceptions of social order, along with the stereotype‐based thinking associated with each conception: Moral order, Free Market, Social diversity and Structural inequality. We conclude by arguing that policy attitudes are symbolic devices expressed to justify or to challenge existing social arrangements.     

Women and Ideology: Representations of Women in Religious and Secular Turkish Media1

The present research examined representations of women in Turkish religious and secular daily newspapers. Based on social identity theory, it was predicted that religious and secular newspapers would differ with respect to evaluative references to mother/homemaker, career woman, and vamp subtypes. Secular and religious newspapers were examined every other day for a month. Analyses reveal that secular newspapers included higher proportions of positive references to the career woman and vamp subtypes than did religious newspapers. The 2 types of newspapers also differed with respect to the proportion of women mentioned as agents and targets, and with respect to actions performed by women agents and items related to victimization of women.     

云南少数民族女性与宗教研究述评

宗教作为一种社会意识形态,隐含着人类历史的文化基因.男女两性共同创造了历史,也创造了文化.近年来随着女性主义视角下社会性别研究的兴起,学术界对宗教的研究也开拓了新的理论视角与学术旨趣,如女性与宗教这一新动向的出现.云南民族众多,由于其地域文化的多样性和历史发展的不均衡性,其宗教类型齐全,信仰内涵丰富.在此背景下,本文拟对近些年来云南少数民族女性与宗教的相关研究情况,分别作一宗教人类学理论视角下的概述.     

Religious Problem Solving and the Complexity of Religious Rationality Within an Iranian Muslim Ideological Surround

Comparative rationality analysis formally examines the incommensurable social rationalities that theoretically exist within religions and the social sciences according to the ideological surround model (ISM) of the psychology of religion. This study extended these procedures to a new cultural context: 220 Iranian university students responded to the Religious Problem‐Solving Scales developed by Pargament et al. (1988). As hypothesized, the Collaborative Problem‐Solving Style was consistent, and the Self‐Directing Style inconsistent, with Iranian Muslim religious and psychological adjustment. The Deferring Style had ambiguous implications. Comparative rationality analysis demonstrated that sample interpretations of these styles explained greater variance in adjustment than did the original scales. These procedures also yielded the unexpected discovery that the Deferring Style included a secular as well as a religious form of Iranian rationality. These data most importantly support the ISM claim that “future objectivity” requires empirical analyses of the incommensurable rationalities operating within the psychology of religion.     

中国西南的傈僳族及其宗教信仰

傈僳族具有悠久的历史,是中国西南边疆的古老民族.本文考察傈僳族传统宗教的巫师,傈僳族宗教信仰系统的神灵及图腾崇拜、祖先崇拜的特色傈僳族民间流传的祭歌、创世史诗,记录反映了傈僳人古朴的宗教信仰认为傈僳族丰富的祀神祭歌,不仅在民间文学领域具有研究价值,对宗教学的少数民族传统宗教研究,也有着重要的学术价值。     

Skepticism about Practical Reason: Transcendental Arguments and Their Limits

Transcendental arguments offer a particularlypowerful strategy for combating skepticism. Such arguments, after all, attempt to show thata particular skepticism is not simply mistakenbut inconsistent or self-refuting. Whilethus tempting to philosophers struggling withskepticism of various sorts, the boldconclusions of these arguments have longrendered them suspicious in the eyes of many. In fact, in a famous paper from 1968 BarryStroud develops what is often taken to be adecisive case against transcendental argumentsin general. Recent work in the area of practical reason,however, suggests that such arguments stillhave their defenders. Theorists such as JamesDreier and Christine Korsgaard have reliedexplicitly on transcendental arguments tojustify certain principles of practical reason. Can such arguments overcome Stroud's objection? In what follows, I argue that they can. However effective Stroud's general criticismmay be in other areas, it does not apply in therealm of practical reason. Nevertheless, thereare strict limits on how far transcendentalarguments can take us. In particular, despiteKorsgaard's efforts, they cannot succeed inestablishing a rational foundation formorality.     

Social,Political, and Institutional Constraints on Religious Pluralism in Central Asia

During the second half of the 1990s, many of the post-Soviet states, after a brief flirtation with a religious free market, began to approve laws that curtailed some of the freedoms acquired in the first flush of independence. The paper examines the ways in which the five Central Asian States have handled the issue of religious freedom. Although many of the initial demands for restrictions on religious pluralism came from leaders of 'traditional' religions, these arguments have been reinforced by other arguments. On the one hand, the urge to control religious diversity is a product of an old Soviet mentality, but it also reflects wider religious and political concerns. These encompass public anxieties about the activities of poorly understood religious movements, political manipulation of religious 'threats' to justify authoritarianism, and nationalist concerns about religious diversity as a threat to social stability and the nation-building process. This paper explores the growing pressures on religious pluralism in Central Asia (with special reference to the experience of Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan) focusing on the social, political, and institutional constraints that appear to be driving the revitalisation of state control over religious life.     

Practical and transcendent wisdom: Their nature and some longitudinal findings

A self-report Adjective Check List (ACL) Practical Wisdom Scale (PWS) and external ratings of Transcendent Wisdom (TWR), based on subjects' examples of personally important wisdom, were used to study the personality correlates and life implications of two types of wisdom among participants in their 50s in a longitudinal study of women. High scorers on both the PWS and the TWR were cognitively complex, perceptive, insightful, and healthily self-directed. Only the PWS was associated with social initiative and leadership, empathy, and generativity. Only the TWR correlated with openness to experience, intuition, and creativity. ACL data from young adulthood were used to show that both the women and their spouses increased on the PWS from early to mature adulthood. For women, we demonstrated how occupation (psychotherapy) and traumatic life events (divorce) contributed to these agerelated gains.