Abstract:To get beyond the solely negative identities signaled by atheism and agnosticism, we have to conceptualize an object of study that includes religions and non-religions. We advocate a shift from "religions" to "worldviews" and define worldviews in terms of the human ability to ask and reflect on "big questions" ([BQs], e.g., what exists? how should we live?). From a worldviews perspective, atheism, agnosticism, and theism are competing claims about one feature of reality and can be combined with various answers to the BQs to generate a wide range of worldviews. To lay a foundation for the multidisciplinary study of worldviews that includes psychology and other sciences, we ground them in humans' evolved world-making capacities. Conceptualizing worldviews in this way allows us to identify, refine, and connect concepts that are appropriate to different levels of analysis. We argue that the language of enacted and articulated worldviews (for humans) and worldmaking and ways of life (for humans and other animals) is appropriate at the level of persons or organisms and the language of sense making, schemas, and meaning frameworks is appropriate at the cognitive level (for humans and other animals). Viewing the meaning making processes that enable humans to generate worldviews from an evolutionary perspective allows us to raise news questions for psychology with particular relevance for the study of nonreligious worldviews.
Although many researchers in psychology, religious studies, and psychiatry recognize that there is overlap in the experiences their subjects recount, disciplinary silos and challenges involved in comparing reported experiences have left us with little understanding of the mechanisms, whether biological, psychological, and/or sociocultural, through which these experiences are represented and differentiated. So-called mystical experiences, which some psychologists view as potentially sui generis, provide a test case for assessing whether we can develop an expanded framework for studying unusual experiences across disciplines and cultures. Evidence for the special nature of “mystical experience” rests on the operationalization of a metaphysically untestable construct in two widely used self-report scales: the Mysticism Scale and the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire. Consideration of the construct in light of research on alterations in sense of self induced by psychoactive drugs and meditation practices suggests that “positive experiences of undifferentiated unity” are not sui generis, but rather a type of “ego dissolution.” To better understand the nature and effects of unusual experiences, such as alterations in the sense of self, we need self-report measures that distinguish between generically worded experiences and the way they are appraised in terms of valence, significance, cause, and long-term effects in different contexts.
We argue that EVENT is a basic concept that humanists, social scientists, and cognitive psychologists can use to build a consilient research platform for the study of experiences that people deem religious. Grounding the study of experience in event cognition allows us to reframe several classic problems in the study of "religious experience": (1) the function of culture-specific knowledge in the production of experiences; (2) the relationship between original experiences and later narratives; and (3) the role of appraisal processes in experience. At the same time, construing experiences as events allows us to integrate disparate lines of research in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) in a unified framework for studying both existing and emergent phenomena. ARTICLE HISTORY
The study of "nonreligion" helpfully expands our focus beyond atheism and "nonbelief" (Lee, 2012), while at the same time introducing new problems. In characterizing our object of study as nonreligion, we are indicating that we want to think about it-whatever it is-in relation to religion. This means that the study of nonreligion faces the same definitional problems that have long plagued the study of religion. Moreover, the binary contrast between religion/nonreligion suggests that there is a clear, stable distinction between them, something that has been questioned in a number of NSRN blog posts (see, for example, Hutchings (2016) on angels and the afterlife, and Baker (2017) on the paranormal). In expanding the study of religion to include nonreligion, scholars are pushing our already troubled relationship with our key terms to the breaking point. That is not necessarily a bad thing, however, as it challenges us to try to solve some of these long-standing definitional problems. Thinking about the religion/nonreligion binary as setting up a tacit comparison suggests a possible way forward. Structurally, a comparison involves two or more items, in this case religion and nonreligion, that the scholar juxtaposes based on a similarity that s/he perceives between them. The perceived similarities may be a similar feature or a set of features that define a larger category that encompasses them both. We can compare a red apple and a red ball based on their common feature Taves: What is Nonreligion? On the Virtues of a Meaning Systems Framework for Studying Nonreligious and Religious Worldviews in the Context of Everyday Life
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