How do nonreligious people identify themselves? Most religious surveys don’t look very closely at the nonreligious — the last Pew survey didn’t include the term “humanist,” for example. Personally, I like humanist, atheist or “nothing”, depending on the context.
So it’s good that a non-religious identification survey is being conducted by Dr. Luke Galen of Grand Valley State University. It aims to be
the first ever rigorous survey instrument designed specifically to gather demographic and attitudinal information exclusively about America’s non-religious community. Past surveys have been based on religious individuals, with the non-religious being little more than an afterthought. Professor Galen will begin data analysis soon, and later in 2008, he will give [Center for Inquiry Michigan] a special presentation to us on the results of the survey.
I got an invite through CFI and posted it somewhere for others, before realizing it was a unique URL meant for a single participant. (Oops.) The invite suggested the participant pool is restricted to members of atheist/etc. organizations (including members of their email lists, apparently), but if you really want to take it, try emailing survey@cfimichigan.org.
All three above-the-fold cover stories in the NYT Science Times this week hit on different aspects of what’s becoming a major interest of mine – the interface between the harder sciences and more right-brained aspects of being human.
The main article is about mindfulness meditation being used in therapy. I find this interesting, but the article points out that the science supporting whether it is beneficial is pretty thin at this point, and there’s a risk of it becoming a fad.
Next is an article about a new curriculum at Binghamton University (NY) aimed at putting the sciences and humanities in dialogue. I was not encouraged by the inane statement by one of the creators that “There are more similarities than differences between the humanities and the sciences,” but otherwise it looks very good.
But perhaps most intriguing was an article on a woman who is marketing a placebo for parents to give to their children when all else fails (continue reading…)
I read a story once about a famous Chinese musician who was visiting the West, and was taken to a concert hall to hear the finest in European classical music. After the concert, he was asked what piece he liked the best.
– The first one, he said.
– You mean the Beethoven? his hosts asked, humming a few bars of the first piece.
– No, he said, the one before that.
Eventually, they realized he meant the period when the musicians were tuning their instruments.
Something similar happened to me at the conference I went to last weekend. (continue reading…)
The paper was a little rougher than I wanted it to be, but apparently solid enough for a good grade. I may post a synopsis here, though I’ve learned never to make blog promises.
I hope I do though, because my current classes — Social Cognition and Evidence-Based Psychotherapy (the latter just for audit, so I can have more time to play music, etc.) — overlap with the topic in interesting ways.
Still working on the paper; got a gracious extension from the professor.
The more Carl Rogers I read, the more I like him:
I love the precision and the elegance of science…. I like to create hypotheses and I like to test them against hard reality. I dislike fuzzy and personal emotional statements when they are given out as general truths, even when I respect them as expressions of the person…. But I am also a person. A therapist. An individual who has lived deeply in human relationships. Here I come up with some other values and views which have equally deep meaning for me…. such terms as personal freedom, choice, purpose, goal, have profound and significant meaning. But there are boundaries to my regard for the subjective. I find that the elaboration of the subjective alone, as in some of the more far-out existentialists, is as unacceptable to me as the rigidity of a closed, impersonal science. As I read some of these existential writers, I feel that here we are entering into a situation in which history is repeating itself. We have suffered enough from the dogmatism of an unscientific Freudianism which initially enlightened us and then bound us into a rigid straitjacket. [A]s a person I stand in both camps — the world of the precise, hard scientist, and the world of the sensitive subjective person.
I love the precision and the elegance of science…. I like to create hypotheses and I like to test them against hard reality. I dislike fuzzy and personal emotional statements when they are given out as general truths, even when I respect them as expressions of the person….
But I am also a person. A therapist. An individual who has lived deeply in human relationships. Here I come up with some other values and views which have equally deep meaning for me…. such terms as personal freedom, choice, purpose, goal, have profound and significant meaning.
But there are boundaries to my regard for the subjective. I find that the elaboration of the subjective alone, as in some of the more far-out existentialists, is as unacceptable to me as the rigidity of a closed, impersonal science. As I read some of these existential writers, I feel that here we are entering into a situation in which history is repeating itself. We have suffered enough from the dogmatism of an unscientific Freudianism which initially enlightened us and then bound us into a rigid straitjacket.
[A]s a person I stand in both camps — the world of the precise, hard scientist, and the world of the sensitive subjective person.
(“Some thoughts regarding the current philosophy of the behavioral sciences,” J. of Humanistic Psych. V:2, fall 1965, pp. 183-185)
Browsing the early issues of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology last month for my paper, I came across a review of a book by the American psychologist Eugene Gendlin. I’d seen his name once before in an unlikely place — a booklet by a British Quaker writer named Rex Ambler, whom I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre.
(continue reading…)
Describing the shift in mainstream American psychology since William James, Joseph Gilbert writes,
Philosophical spectulation was, with considerable clatter, abandoned as the ultimate in unscientificism…. By the majestically immaterial phenomena of consciousness the Behaviorists were as embarrassed as a group of slightly inebriated men carrying the insensible form of one of their companions across a fashionable hotel lobby.
Academic criticism is usually more genteel, so I found that amusing. Especially since one of my professors was a colleague of B.F. Skinner.
This is from an article in the journal I’m studying, which tries to enlist the ghost of James for the fight between humanistic and behavioristic psychology — since, while the latter was empirical and anti-phenomenological, both James and the humanists embraced idiography and philosophical speculation.
(from “William James in retrospect: 1962″, J. of Humanistic Psych. II:1, Spring 1962, p. 93.)
I’m writing a research paper on the humanistic psychology movement, due early next week. Specifically, it’s looking at the relationship of the early movement to “science,” which I’ll leave intentionally vague for now. To keep it manageable I’m restricting it to obviously relevant articles in the first 10 years of the movement’s flagship journal.
Blogging tidbits of my notes and drafts could be a colossal time-waster, but I think having an audience might keep me motivated. That’s the shame about papers written for a class — only one person gets to see your work.
For now, just a quote, from the first issue, which expresses one variation on the movement’s goal to be both holistic and scientific:
A truly humanistic psychology is an integration of the historical and contemporary data and theories of psychology…. the psychologist of man is suspicious when a collective psychologist claims that man is only a mechanistic stimulus-response organism. On the other hand, he is as suspicious when personalistic psychologists claim that man is only a personal being without an aspect that is measurable and without adjustment to a collectivity. (Adrian van Kaam, “Humanistic psychology and culture,” J. of Humanistic Psych. I:1, spring 1961, p. 100)
A truly humanistic psychology is an integration of the historical and contemporary data and theories of psychology…. the psychologist of man is suspicious when a collective psychologist claims that man is only a mechanistic stimulus-response organism. On the other hand, he is as suspicious when personalistic psychologists claim that man is only a personal being without an aspect that is measurable and without adjustment to a collectivity.
(Adrian van Kaam, “Humanistic psychology and culture,” J. of Humanistic Psych. I:1, spring 1961, p. 100)
