May 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Defecting to Faith
By CHARLES M. BLOW
“Most people are religious because they’re raised to be. They’re indoctrinated by their parents.”
So goes the rationale of my nonreligious friends.
Maybe, but a study entitled “Faith in Flux” issued this week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life questioned nearly 3,000 people and found that most children raised unaffiliated with a religion later chose to join one. Indoctrination be damned. By contrast, only 4 percent of those raised Catholic and 7 percent of those raised Protestant later became unaffiliated.
(It should be noted that about a quarter of the unaffiliated identified as atheist or agnostic, and the rest said that they had no particular religion.)
So what was the reason for this flight of the unchurched to churches?
Did God appear in a bush? Did the grass look greener on the other side of the cross? Or was it a response to the social pressure of being nonreligious in a very Christian country?
None of those reasons topped the list. Most said that they first joined a religion because their spiritual needs were not being met. And the most-cited reason for settling on their current religion was that they simply enjoyed the services and style of worship.
For these newly converted, the nonreligious shtick didn’t stick. There was still a void, and communities of the faithful helped fill it.
While science, logic and reason are on the side of the nonreligious, the cold, hard facts are just so cold and hard. Yes, the evidence for evolution is irrefutable. Yes, there is a plethora of Biblical contradictions. Yes, there is mounting evidence from neuroscientists that suggests that God may be a product of the mind. Yes, yes, yes. But when is the choir going to sing? And when is the picnic? And is my child going to get a part in the holiday play?
As the nonreligious movement picks up steam, it needs do a better job of appealing to the ethereal part of our human exceptionalism — that wondrous, precious part where logic and reason hold little purchase, where love and compassion reign. It’s the part that fears loneliness, craves companionship and needs affirmation and fellowship.
We are more than cells, synapses and sex drives. We are amazing, mysterious creatures forever in search of something greater than ourselves.
Dale McGowan, the co-author and editor of the book “Parenting Beyond Belief” told me that he believes that most of these people “are not looking for a dogma or a doctrine, but for transcendence from the everyday.”
Churches, mosques and synagogues nurture and celebrate this. Being regularly surrounded by a community that shares your convictions and reinforces them through literature, art and ritual is incredibly powerful, and yes, spiritual.
The nonreligious could learn a few things from religion.
Joined: 07 May 2008 Posts: 1144 Location: AUSTIN, TEXAS. U.S.A.
Posted: Sat May 02, 2009 6:44 am Post subject: this kind study does not make any motive
If this kind study/questions would have asked amongst Ismailis than result would have lot different than The New York Times study. You should remember that the Christian/catholics are way behind in religion than us and other relgions. Their religion just limited for Sundays only, so this kind study does not make any motive specialy in Ismaili.
Posted: Sat May 02, 2009 7:08 am Post subject: Re: this kind study does not make any motive
agakhani wrote:
If this kind study/questions would have asked amongst Ismailis than result would have lot different than The New York Times study. You should remember that the Christian/catholics are way behind in religion than us and other relgions. Their religion just limited for Sundays only, so this kind study does not make any motive specialy in Ismaili.
There is nothing specific about Christianity in the article. It is about the importance of congregation in all faiths. All faiths share the same need for spirituality and places where people of same beliefs can gather and nurture strength and support.
We are living in a pluralistic environment and therefore we should also be cognisant of the general thinking in matters that impinge upon our practices.
"All cultures naturally influence each other to a greater or lesser degree; the strongest are those in which the dominant elements remain dominant and refuse to be overwhelmed by external forces. They become stronger still when they retain the ability to select, to absorb that which invigorates and enriches and to reject that which is inimicable." [MHI Speech 26 Sept. 1978]
Last edited by kmaherali on Sun May 03, 2009 5:42 am, edited 2 times in total
Posted: Sat May 02, 2009 9:11 am Post subject: Re: this kind study does not make any motive
kmaherali wrote:
If you had read the article, you would have found nothing specific about Christianity. It is about the importance of congregation in all faiths. All faiths share the same need for spirituality and places where people of same beliefs can gather and nurture strength and support.
Indeed, I attend jumu3ah at the local univeristy musalla (which is very large, as it is for all of Harvard University) for this very reason.
Does anyone else out there attend jumu'ah regularly? Admittedly there's not a lot of Ismaili action going on near me.
I used to scoff at the people who turn up at church twice a year, but it turns out we are hard-wired for faith AFP/Getty Images
I lost my faith in God when I was 13. It wasn't as if I hadn't tried. Before my confirmation in the Episcopalian Church of Wilmette, Ill., I spent months in ardent prayer, longing for a conversion experience that would erase my growing doubts. Sadly, it didn't happen. By the time I walked down the aisle to be accepted into the Church, I couldn't even rustle up enough uncertainty to settle for being an agnostic. I was pretty sure that God was no more real than Santa Claus. I felt like a fraud, but I went through with it anyway.
Later on, I read Bertrand Russell and Ayn Rand. I learned that religion was stupid and evil, the source of endless misery in the world. I adopted the rational, enlightened belief that we'd all be better off without it. This brand of militant atheism is much in fashion these days. For years, I never set foot inside a North American church, except when somebody I knew was married or buried.
But the faith instinct stubbornly refused to die.
I fell in love with Renaissance art, and made pilgrimages to Assisi to see the Giottos. It was hard to overlook the fact that the most transcendent art in human history is faith-based. It was impossible to dismiss the roots of this art as nothing more than primitive superstition. I was drawn to ancient churches, synagogues and mosques, and found their spaces deeply moving.
I used to scoff at Christmas-and-Easter Christians – the people who turn up at church twice a year in a sort of last, nostalgic grasp at faith, or who take their children “so they'll be exposed to it.” But now, I'm one of those people too. It started a few years ago, when we decided to go to Christmas Eve services at a little picture-postcard church near us in the country. It doesn't get much use the rest of the year, but everyone turns out for Christmas. The minister's wife pounded on the organ as we belted out the old favourites. The minister read the Christmas story, which I knew by heart. On an impulse, I knelt at the altar for communion and took the wine and wafer. The congregation recited the Lord's Prayer. We all sang Silent Night, lit candles in the dark and wished our neighbours Merry Christmas.
I didn't believe a word of it, not a word. But it didn't matter. I was so affected that I could scarcely speak. And so, although I would never call myself a believer, “atheist” doesn't sound right either. “Reluctant nonbeliever” is more like it.
After that, I began to wonder if people might be hard-wired for faith. It turns out that we are. In his illuminating new book, The Faith Instinct, Nicholas Wade points out that religiosity is deeply embedded in every human culture. It confers enormous evolutionary benefits. The most important thing it does is bind people together through collective rituals so that they can take collective action. There is no church of oneself.
By strengthening the social fabric, religion makes people extraordinarily co-operative. It governs self-restraint in a society by ensuring that people do not deviate from common codes of conduct (because the gods will punish them if they do). It also organizes people for aggression against other societies, even at the risk of self-sacrifice.
Back at the dawn of humankind, the groups of people who were best at taking collective action – including warfare – were the ones who survived. “That is why human nature is part angel and part brute,” the author writes. “An individual may be either one or the other, but societies and nations are inextricably both.”
Religion tends to wane as countries modernize. But its value systems endure. You don't have to be religious to endorse the Ten Commandments. And the religious instinct – the longing for ritual, belonging and belief – is wired into our brains as much as it ever was. Although many of us rational, enlightened people have our doubts about the supernatural, we're still in search of some larger purpose. We long to belong to a community of believers, and if we can't find that belonging in religion, we look somewhere else.
I envy people of faith. By all accounts, they are happier, healthier and more emotionally secure than the rest of us. They give away more money and do more good works. They are kinder, more generous and more community-minded. We secular humanists, by contrast, tend to be stingy, lonely folks. I wouldn't choose to be a nonbeliever if I could help it, but I can't.
Yet I've discovered (to my surprise) a deep appreciation for the rituals of religion. I am thrilled by the Muslim call to prayer. I actually enjoy Passover seders, even when they last till 2 a.m. I think it is important to say grace (okay, a brief one) before a big family dinner. I hate the modern loss of ritual and solemnity surrounding death. Something's lost when people get together and have a party and pretend the loved one has done nothing more dramatic than move to Cleveland. These are serious matters, and we shouldn't pretend they're not.
I really can't tell you exactly why I go to church on Christmas Eve. It's partly to honour my faith instinct, I suppose. It's to pay respect to my Christian roots, and to acknowledge all those flinty, rock-ribbed, practical, churchgoing Protestant ancestors of mine whose values largely shaped our culture. It's to sing loud and out of tune together with a lot of other people (music is as primal as religion, it turns out). It's to pay homage to the importance of tradition and continuity, and to experience the extraordinary power and solace and comfort of community.
Here's what former Harvard psychologist, Gordon Allport says about ritual in The individual and his religion (1960, pp. 134-135):
"Besides prayer, ritual focuses and expresses intention. Usually ritual may be viewed as a prayer of virtual intention, running its complex course under the domination of an initial reverent idea. The symbols involved in rituals (including liturgies, hymns, religious dances) are fascinating in their origins, drawn often from feeding or death, from sex or from inebriation, with their original grossness eliminated and directed by intention toward the perfecting of the human sources from which they took rise.
For the great majority of people the solitariness of the religious quest becomes a burden. They long to fuse their religious insights with those of their fellows under a common set of symbols. Indeed, in many cases they first learned these insights in the company of their fellows. Hence both ritual and dogma develop. The expressive symbols of ritual aid the individual by eliciting intentions that would otherwise lie mostly dormant. In psychological parlance, ritual is a form of social facilitation which intensifies the comparable attitudes and sentiments of all the participants.
At the same time dogma aims to improve and socialize the inadequate intellectual formulations of the individual. He may accept it gladly because it binds him with his fellows in a common search, and
because it serves as a clarifying model to his own thought. Yet, deep inside, the individual may likewise know that the meaning he derives from the dogma is not identical for him and for all believers. At best,
as Whithead points out, dogmas allow comparable experiences to be identified, while their statements are of necessity broad enough to include many varieties of individual thought. Furthermore, the dogmatic model that clarifies for one fails to clarify for another. And this why freedom of worship in any community is essential, and why, if we prize personality at all, religious tolerance is imperative."
In U.S., Churchgoers Boast Better Mood, Especially on Sundays
Those who don't attend religious services often see their mood decline
by Chaeyoon LimPage:
12 WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans who attend a church, synagogue, or mosque frequently report experiencing more positive emotions and fewer negative ones in general than do those who attend less often or not at all. Frequent churchgoers experience an average of 3.36 positive emotions per day compared with an average of 3.08 among those who never attend. This relationship holds true even when controlling for key demographic variables like age, education, and income.
April 7, 2012
Learning to Respect Religion
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
A FEW years ago, God seemed caught in a devil of a fight.
Atheists were firing thunderbolts suggesting that “religion poisons everything,” as Christopher Hitchens put it in the subtitle of his book, “God Is Not Great.” Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins also wrote best sellers that were scathing about God, whom Dawkins denounced as “arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction.”
Yet lately I’ve noticed a very different intellectual tide: grudging admiration for religion as an ethical and cohesive force.
The standard-bearer of this line of thinking — and a provocative text for Easter Sunday — is a new book, “Religion for Atheists,” by Alain de Botton. He argues that atheists have a great deal to learn from religion.
“One can be left cold by the doctrines of the Christian Trinity and the Buddhist Eightfold Path and yet at the same time be interested in the ways in which religions deliver sermons, promote morality, engender a spirit of community, make use of art and architecture, inspire travels, train minds and encourage gratitude at the beauty of spring,” de Botton writes.
“The error of modern atheism has been to overlook how many aspects of the faiths remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed,” he adds, and his book displays an attitude toward religion that is sometimes — dare I say — reverential.
Edward O. Wilson, the eminent Harvard biologist, has a new book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” that criticizes religion as “stultifying and divisive” — but also argues that religion offered a competitive advantage to early societies. Faith bolstered social order among followers and helped bind a tribe together, he writes, and that is why religion is so widespread today. And he tips his hat to the social role of faith:
“Organized religions preside over the rites of passage, from birth to maturity, from marriage to death,” Wilson writes, adding: “Beliefs in immortality and ultimate divine justice give priceless comfort, and they steel resolution and bravery in difficult times. For millennia, organized religions have been the source of much of the best in the creative arts.”
Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, also focuses on the unifying power of faith in his new book, “The Righteous Mind.” Haidt, an atheist since his teens, argues that scientists often misunderstand religion because they home in on individuals rather than on the way faith can bind a community.
Haidt cites research showing that a fear of God may make a society more ethical and harmonious. For example, one study found that people were less likely to cheat if they were first given a puzzle that prompted thoughts of God.
Another study cited by Haidt found that of 200 communes founded in the 19th century, only 6 percent of the secular communes survived two decades, compared with 39 percent of the religious ones. Those that survived longest were those that demanded sacrifices of members, like fasting, daily prayer, abstaining from alcohol or tobacco, or adopting new forms of clothing or hairstyle.
“The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship,” Haidt writes.
The latest wave of respectful atheist writing strikes me as a healthy step toward nuance. I’ve reported on some of the worst of religion — such as smug, sanctimonious indifference among Christian fundamentalists at the toll of AIDS among gay men — yet I’ve also been awed by nuns and priests risking their lives in war zones. And many studies have found that religious people donate more money and volunteer more time to charity than the nonreligious. Let’s not answer religious fundamentalism with secular fundamentalism, religious intolerance with irreligious intolerance.
The new wave is skeptical but acknowledges stunning achievements, from Notre Dame Cathedral to networks of soup kitchens run by houses of worship across America. Maybe this new attitude can eventually be the basis for a truce in our religious wars, for a bridge across the “God gulf.” Let us pray ...
•
Earlier this year, I reported on Lady Gaga’s campaign against bullying and learned that increasingly the Department of Education sees bullying as a serious problem. So I’d like to consult the real experts — American teenagers — by holding an essay contest for students ages 14 through 19. Please help spread the word by encouraging young people to apply by writing an essay of up to 500 words about bullying, being bullied, witnessing bullying or ideas about how to address this issue. Teenagers, help us understand the problem by sharing your experiences and insights. I’m holding the contest in partnership with The New York Times Learning Network and the national magazine Teen Ink. The only prize for the winners is eternal glory: I’ll publish excerpts from the best submissions in my column or blog. To apply, go to TeenInk.com/KristofContest.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
Posted: Tue Jun 05, 2012 10:17 am Post subject: Upanga JK Tanzania
As Received:
From Integrity
Is performing all our rites in peace and with happiness much to ask for ? This Jamat are not allowed even that. The following sent by murids regarding Upanga Khanna in Tanzania. Looks true because it is to Wazir, Mohammedali Janmohammed;
"..For a number of years, very many infact, Upanga Khane is being CONTROLLED literally by a Old Lady, name N. Saleh, originally from India, and Zanzibar. She is the mother of a welknown missionary in Toronto - K. Saleh, who we are sure knows his mother very well.
1. N.Saleh bids every Nandi in khane, morning and evening just to make sure the price is right!! She enters the Nandi section everyday, she selects and prepares the plates of fruits or other items, she wants to buy, and no Captain dare refuse her.
2. She has control of the Stores for Sukrit items, etc. and except for her, and a few of her Chamchis, everyone is a thief!!
No Mukhi Saheb will dare tell her anything, as she threatens to change her religion if she is asked to retire!!! We do not want N. Saleh to stop her Sewa but we are asking the control now be taken from her, so we can pray in peace, go home feeling good, not hurt by her sharp tongue and words.
For sure the present chalu Mukhi/Kamdia Sahebs or the Baitul Khayyal Mukhi/Kamadia Sahebs will not be able to help us as they are in N. Bai's side as they respect her for her age, and are scared of her.The Jamat was literally celebrating these past few days when N. Bai had travelled to India, now she is back and so are the end of our peaceful days!!!
The President of Eastern Council is aware of the above, so is the President of Tariqah Board. Wazir Saheb, please take our complain seriously, and get us the environment which every Jamat Khana should have
Last edited by Admin on Fri Jun 08, 2012 8:19 am, edited 1 time in total
Joined: 07 May 2008 Posts: 1144 Location: AUSTIN, TEXAS. U.S.A.
Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2012 3:52 am Post subject:
Your concern and question are solid and very important , but unfortunately not only Upanga Jamat Khana but many jamat khanas in the world also has this kind problems too, so you are not alone, there were and there are still (one or two ) some persons who rules and control all ceremonies including "Nandi" in many JK till today.
Let me share you same kind event which I witnessed my self ( I do not like disclose the name of that particular Jamat Khana nor I like to disclose the name of that person) but this story is more then decade old, that person was was a lady who was ruling and controlling every thing, every ceremonies in that particular Jk, other volunteers didn't like this therefore they draw attention of Mukhi/Kamdia Saheban but they didn't received any acceptable solution from them, so most of time they were keep complaining and verbally fighting with each other but she didn't care as she was a good volunteer, good devotee of MHI and social worker for a long time, I do not know what kind khidmat is this, when some one hate you or complaining about you!!?? but that lady dind't care about other volunteers complains at all, other volunteers were believing that it is not fair, other volunteers should have same right to serve in Nandi place too but she didn't care at all, so all volunteers went one step further and involved council in this matter and they request council to arrange vara to different volunteers every day, latter on I heard that Council took away the power from that particular lady who was ruling and controlling every thing including Nandi but after a big big hassle and big fight with council members, any way this problem has been stopped in that particular Jk for now but who knows some one else may come forward and take place of that lady,who knows? so I keep my finger crossed!!. but Good Luck in your case brother.
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