What Do Humans Believe?

This topic submitted by Matt Salter, Alex Beougher, PJ Gassman ( salterdm@muohio.edu ) on 2/17/06. [ Human Nature Team: Matt Salter, Alex Beougher, PJ Gassman-Section: Cummins/Wolfe]

Our hypothesis is that there is a crucial disconnect between the professed religion of individuals and the way they actually perceive and live in the world around them. We intend to employ the techniques of literary analysis, empirical study and psychological methods to create an interdisclipary understanding of the relationship between religion and human behavior. Religion determines human behavior from the daily activities of individuals to the policy decisions of nations. By analyzing the ways in which institutional doctrine and human behavior intersect and differ, we hope to produce a synthetic understanding of religion's place in human nature.
Our project naturally addresses a number of important issues associated with the religion aspect of our course. Firstly, we hope to construct an answer to whether religion is more fundamentally social or personal; a major disparity between beliefs professed in private and the official doctrines of the faith or a greater predominance of individual spiritual experience over traditional religious observance would indicate supremacy of the personal read, while the converse would indicate the opposite. Also, the social implications of religion touch on issues from economics to sexuality. Considerations of "natural" human behavior are fundamentally altered when the observer grants a large external influence predicated on a relationship with the divine.
There are a number of classic works of empirical religious analysis, most notably James Frazer's Golden Bough and The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Both of these works addressed the same question to which we are applying ourselves: to what extent religion is institutional and to what extent it is personal. The former did so by cataloguing specific religious and mystical behaviors according to anthropological means, while the latter constructed his analysis on a qualitative basis of open-ended analysis of religious experiences. We hope to unite these two techniques and achieve a more synthetic understanding thereby. The following works also address issues important to our study:

Religiology
Hideo Kishimoto
Numen, Vol. 14, Fasc. 2. (Jul., 1967), pp. 81-86.

The Academic Study of Religion
Sam Gill
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 62, No. 4, Settled Issues and Neglected Questions in the Study of Religion. (Winter, 1994), pp. 965-975.

Reason and Authority in Religion
J. MacBride Sterrett
The Old and New Testament Student, Vol. 14, No. 1. (Jan., 1892), p. 51.

Einfuhrung in die Religionsphilosophie
Ulrich Mann
Review author[s]: R. Panikkar
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 44, No. 1. (Mar., 1976), p. 184.

College Courses in Religion
Paul E. Johnson
Journal of Bible and Religion, Vol. 10, No. 3. (Aug., 1942), pp. 147-150+183-184.

An Operational Definition of Religion
Hideo Kishimoto
Numen, Vol. 8, Fasc. 3. (Dec., 1961), pp. 236-240.

Education and Religion
J. B. Shouse
Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 12, No. 5. (Mar., 1935), pp. 209-213.

The Social Function of Religion
Charles A. Ellwood
The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 19, No. 3. (Nov., 1913), pp. 289-307.

www.sacred-texts.com

The Bible

The Qu'ran

Varieties of Religious Experience
William James
Viking Penguin, 1982.

The Golden Bough
James Frazer
Touchstone, 1995.

The Bhagavad Gita
Anonymous, tr. Juan Mascaro
Penguin Classics, 2003.

The Power of Myth
Joseph Campbell
Anchor, 1991.

Mere Christianity
C.S. Lewis
Harper San Francisco, 2001.

We will primarily base our study on data taking and psychological analysis thereof, with an additional focus on analysis of important texts on the subject. In that regard, our materials will be limited to surveys and texts important to the study. Our survey will consist of questions as to the subject's views on basic religious, social and ethical issues, such as the creation/evolution controversy, hypothetical moral questions of the "you find $20 on the sidewalk" type and personal views on the subject of importance of religion in society and the subject's own life. We intend to start by sampling self-professed believers by asking members of Campus Crusade for Christ and Hillel to disseminate our surveys. Then we hope to acquire a representative sample of nonreligious, agnostic and atheistic students, to whom we will administer the same survey. Once we have analyzed the results, we will compare the answers given by the individuals who self-identify as religious to the teachings of their faith, and interview the nonbelievers as to what the origin of their ethical stance was. We will review our results both in light of the implications of their numeric structure and in that shed by the other works we had analyzed. In the final project, we will include a thorough breakdown of our data and conclusions in both written and numeric form.

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