Do you identify as

A. Religious and spiritual
B. Spiritual but not religious
C. Not Religious or Spiritual
D. Religious but not spiritual

Is there another category?

E. ‘deeply religious, non-believer’

I’m E

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/06/more-americans-now-say-theyre-spiritual-but-not-religious/



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/05/2023 04:52PM by schrodingerscat.

The introspection illusion means we can't really know...

How about religiomisic and unconvinced that "spiritual" is a word that can be adequately defined?

I'm with you Humberto. I looked for the article to define its terms. Didn't see anything. For such a survey the meanings of the two words need to be defined.

The word spiritual rents itself out to everybody and anybody and accepts all definitions equally. The dictionary is of no help either as it leaves spirituality more wide open to any interpretation at all. Then compounds the situation with its second definition which totally links it back to religion--which thing makes the whole religious vs spiritual debate ridiculous, and, oddly perfect for a Schodie post.

Done & Done Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm with you Humberto. I looked for the article to
> define its terms. Didn't see anything. For such
> a survey the meanings of the two words need to be
> defined.
>
> The word spiritual rents itself out to everybody
> and anybody and accepts all definitions equally.
> The dictionary is of no help either as it leaves
> spirituality more wide open to any interpretation
> at all. Then compounds the situation with its
> second definition which totally links it back to
> religion--which thing makes the whole religious vs
> spiritual debate ridiculous, and, oddly perfect
> for a Schodie post.

If you can’t define common words in the English language that speaks more to your intelligence than mine.

I like Einstein’s ‘deeply religious, non-believer’ identity.
That’s how I identify.
It’s also how Dawkins identified in ‘The God Delusion’
That was the Title of the first chapter.

What a wonderful lesson on the perils (if not the downright scientific illegitimacy) of social psychology!

Notice that responses to these survey questions depend fundamentally upon how a respondent defines "religious" and "spiritual." For one person a necessary condition for being "religious" might be to be affiliated with a religious organization; to another, it might require Church attendance; to yet another it might mean adherence to some family religious tradition. Examples are, well, legion, when all the possible nuances of the word "religious" are considered. The same is true of the word "spiritual." For one person, "spiritual" might require faith in God; for another, a belief in the paranormal; and for yet another just an appreciation of nature.

So, where does that leave us.

It is perfectly legitimate for a social psychologist (or affiliated research group) to conduct a survey and simply *report* the responses and provide a statistical data as related to such responses. But, as in the present case, that alone is rarely helpful, and rarely the end of the matter.

So, what happens? As in the present case, there is an immediate conflation between the simple verbal *responses* to questions (objective) and the mental states corresponding to such responses (subjective). That is:

(1) Reporting responses to a given questionnaire, is one thing, However, (2) Drawing conclusions as to the *mental states* underlying such responses, is another thing entirely.

Since (1) involves merely statistics and only (2) is 'psychology,' surprise, surprise, a jump is immediately made from (1) to (2).

Notice that in considering (1) in isolation, the 'study' is completely trivial, in that no meaningful information is provided because of the problems and ambiguities of the questionnaire. The appropriate response is therefore, "So what?" The search for a meaningful answer to this rhetorical question calls for an illegitimate leap to (2), invoking mental states.

In (2), however, any such mental state conclusions are deceptive, unsupported, and likely just false, because of the definitional, and other problems associated with the survey. It becomes much worse when the 'study' goes on to draw conclusions (and comparative conclusions) as to the general mental states (or changing mental states) of American society at large as it relates to "religion" and "spirituality." One obvious observation is that the steady decline in church attendance (an objective measurement) might itself expand the scope of how people view the word "religious," while perhaps also expanding how they view the word "spiritual."

In short, this is all an intellectual 'slight-of-hand," and similar examples occur everywhere in social psychology: The data is often interesting, at best, and the conclusions either completely illegitimate or weak, at best.

One final comment: When people report their 'feelings' as related to their own religiosity or spirituality, it is NOT subject to the so-called 'introspective illusion' phenomenon. Within their own definitions, people are no more wrong about their reports of such subjective feelings, than they are about being in pain. (Assuming they are telling the truth.) So, that is not the problem. The introspective illusion comes into play when a person not only reports such feelings, but then tries to causally explain them by appealing to prior experiences, or perhaps other mental states. In other words, a person might report that they are depressed. This is a subjective mental state that cannot be challenged on empirical grounds; it is just how they feel. But if they say it is because they were abused as a child, such a conclusion *can* be challenged by appealing to third-person evidence, for example by showing that such abuse did not occur, or by showing that the depression was caused by some other factor or experience.

P.S. I had to laugh at SC's characterization of himself as an E: a ‘deeply religious, non-believer.’ It seems that even when reporting his own subjective feelings, he cannot avoid what appears on its face to be a blatant inconsistency. After all, if "religious" in this context is not connected to belief in God, I do not know what word is! ("Godish?")