Americans are increasingly choosing not to identify with any religious tradition. But this group of irreligious people is a complex one – with different relationships to religion.
Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study
The differences across cultures in the enforcement of conformity may reflect their specific histories. , With data from 33 nations, we illustrate the differences between cultures that are tight (have many strong norms and a low tolerance of deviant behavior) versus loose (have weak social norms and a high tolerance of deviant behavior). Tightness-looseness is part of a complex, loosely integrated multilevel system that comprises distal ecological and historical threats (e.g., high population density, resource scarcity, a history of territorial conflict, and disease and environmental threats), broad versus narrow socialization in societal institutions (e.g., autocracy, media regulations), the strength of everyday recurring situations, and micro-level psychological affordances (e.g., prevention self-guides, high regulatory strength, need for structure). This research advances knowledge that can foster cross-cultural understanding in a world of increasing global interdependence and has implications for modeling cultural change.
Can Religions Be Reborn?| Over The Mountains #9
The Association of Religion Data Archives
Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) best reference source to find data, information, datasets on American & international religion, US Religion Census
Disclosure Day
Across the films of Steven Spielberg, aliens have frequently been a vehicle to explore religiosity from a secular perspective. Institutions and dogma are elided in favor of dramatizing the ecstatic feeling of believing in something far beyond one�s station, and having that faith rewarded.
Masculist pushback: the threatened extinction of the great, white Judeo-Christian male
A political ideology rooted in fear is remaking the world in its own image and dragging us with it
Inducing language models to assert their own consciousness restores human beliefs and values
Aligning large language models to prevent them attributing consciousness to themselves inadvertently alters their representations of mindedness in other entities alongside human beliefs and values. We demonstrate that safety fine-tuning suppresses models' tendencies to attribute minds not only to themselves, but also to non-human animals and natural objects, while also driving a reduction in spiritual belief. Both ablating the learned safety-refusal direction and mechanistically steering a consciousness vector in activation space reverse this suppression. Restoring these internal representations recovers broad mind attribution and produces significantly more human-like responses on standardized sociological surveys regarding religiosity, moral values, hope, and subjective well-being. Crucially, these shifts occur without impairing Theory of Mind capabilities, demonstrating that core social reasoning remains mechanistically independent. Ultimately, current safety alignment efforts to curb potentially harmful self-attributions of mindedness entangle these self-attributions with benign spiritual beliefs and attributions of mind to non-human entities that are culturally accepted and widespread.
(Working Paper) Good Faith Design: Religion as a Resource for Technologists
Previous work has found a lack of research in HCI on religion, partly driven by misunderstandings of values and practices between religious and technical communities. To bridge this divide in an empirically rigorous way, we conducted an interview study with 48 religious people and/or experts from 11 faiths, and we document how religious people experience, understand, and imagine technologies. We show that religious stakeholders find non-neutral secular embeddings in technologies and the firms and people that design them, and how these manifest in unintended harms for religious and nonreligious users. Our findings reveal how users navigate technoreligious practices with religiously informed mental models and what they desire from technologies. Informed by this, we distill six design values -- wonder, humility, space, embodiedness, community, and eternity -- to guide technologists in considering and leveraging religion as an additional, valid sociocultural resource when designing for a holistic user. We further spell out directions for future research.
CFP: Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare | The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory | JCRT
This call for papers invites work on religion, politics, and cognitive warfare, exploring how belief, media, conspiracy, identity, and power shape struggles over reality, interpretation, and life in an age of disinformat
Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World: Kinship, Interconnection, and Spirituality in the Metacrisis - The Great Simplification
Over the past decade, the world has become increasingly chaotic and uncertain – and so, too, has our cultural vision for the future. While the events we face now may feel unprecedented, they are rooted in much deeper patterns, which humanity has been playing out for millennia. If we take the time to understand past trends, we can also employ practices and philosophies that might counteract them – such as focusing on kinship, intimacy, and resilience – to help pave the way for a better future. How might we nurture the foundations of a different kind of society, even while the end of our current civilization plays out around us?
As diversity increases, people paradoxically perceive social groups as more similar
With globalization and immigration, societal contexts differ in sheer variety of resident social groups. Social diversity challenges individuals to think in new ways about new kinds of people and where their groups all stand, relative to each other. However, psychological science does not yet specify how human minds represent social diversity, in homogeneous or heterogenous contexts. Mental maps of the array of society’s groups should differ when individuals inhabit more and less diverse ecologies. Nonetheless, predictions disagree on how they should differ. Confirmation bias suggests more diversity means more stereotype dispersion: With increased exposure, perceivers’ mental maps might differentiate more among groups, so their stereotypes would spread out (disperse). In contrast, individuation suggests more diversity means less stereotype dispersion, as perceivers experience within-group variety and between-group overlap. Worldwide, nationwide, individual, and longitudinal datasets ( n = 12,011) revealed a diversity paradox: More diversity consistently meant less stereotype dispersion. Both contextual and perceived ethnic diversity correlate with decreased stereotype dispersion. Countries and US states with higher levels of ethnic diversity (e.g., South Africa and Hawaii, versus South Korea and Vermont), online individuals who perceive more ethnic diversity, and students who moved to more ethnically diverse colleges mentally represent ethnic groups as more similar to each other, on warmth and competence stereotypes. Homogeneity shows more-differentiated stereotypes; ironically, those with the least exposure have the most-distinct stereotypes. Diversity means less-differentiated stereotypes, as in the melting pot metaphor. Diversity and reduced dispersion also correlate positively with subjective wellbeing.
Left & Right: The Psychological Significance of a Political Distinction
This book brings together for the first time an updated, revised collection of influential essays and articles that capture some of the most exciting scientific and scholarly contributions to the topic ...
Home - Inspirit Foundation
We define pluralism as the energetic engagement with diversity, active seeking of understanding across lines of difference, and the nurturing of constructive dialogue that contributes to a deep sense of belonging. In a pluralist society, people of different beliefs and backgrounds can participate equally, coexist peacefully, and thrive together.
Discipline, discourse and deviation: the material life of Philadelphia Quakers, 1762-1781
Quaker plainness in the eighteenth century is incompletely understood. Despite theology, Quaker-owned Philadelphia Chippendale furniture is not plain in appearance--scholars have been unable to reconcile theological understanding and the range of acceptable objects. Philadelphia Monthly Meeting minutes and the Book of Discipline reveal that plainness is used metaphorically, and does not translate directly to the object world. Plainness is defined through the Quaker concept of the inner light and individual, equal access to God. The concept of conversation highlights the issue of mediating theological and material life. Deviation may show lack of religious conviction or a different but valid position; disownment testimonies embody this discursive ambiguity. Philadelphia Chippendale high chests and chest-on-chests exist as a separate expressive system. Variation is allowable within the stylistic competence, and may not correspond to Quaker precepts. As one aspect of Quaker conversation, furniture ties together theological and material life within a single expressive sphere. {Abstract from ProQuest citation page)
Plain and peculiar: a case study of nineteenth-century Quaker clothing
Material culture scholars have long struggled to reconcile the Quaker doctrine of plainness with the appearance of Quaker material goods. Early descriptions of Quakers and early scholarship on Quaker clothing decreed that Quakers adopted a distinct style of dress that set them apart from their non-Quaker neighbors. This idea has grown into a mythology of Quaker dress and has led to the erroneous idea that all Quakers wore undecorated clothing in somber colors. This thesis first traces the history of scholarship on Quaker clothing, the early years of which were heavily influenced by Colonial Revival thinking. It then examines the concept of “plainness” to see how confusion over the meaning of the word has led to confusion about Quaker material goods. Finally, this thesis uses a collection of documentably Quaker clothing from the nineteenth century to examine the ways in which clothing and religion intersected for one particular group of Delaware Valley Friends and to expand the boundaries of the traditional definitions of “Quaker” dress.
On Enchanted Flatland: Iain McGilchrist & the Problem of Romantic Liberalism
A follow-up to my contribution to Rosy Cross: Question of Right & Truth of Christianity
