One of the unfortunate stereotypes in all academia is that anyone who tries to combine two different fields in their graduate or professional work is probably weak at both fields.  For instance, a person who gets a combined PhD in psychology and religion (they do exist out there) is kind of weak in psychology and kind of weak in religion, because there’s no way to fully study both in the same time another person can study one or the other.  Perhaps some of that stereotype is deserved, but I don’t think it’s necessarily true.  Beck’s post does give some pointers on how such a combination is possible – though he calls his model the “trainwreck model,” presumably because whatever structure might exist at the nexus between two fields has to be created by you out of the chaos.

He also very interestingly recommends that psychologists study not just clinical/counseling psychology and religion, but also more applied fields of psychology – which may include social, developmental, behavioral, cross-cultural, and cognitive psychology.  I think this is very good advice.  It is probably tempting for clinical/counseling students to find a theoretical orientation and only learn enough to be an expert on mental health outcomes and therapy; this is like building a house without a foundation – I have seen complaints that clinical/counseling psychologists don’t know enough about experimental psychology to be good consumers of general psychology research.  By “the basics” I mean things like classical and operant conditioning, theories of social influence, cognitive dissonance theory, stage development theories of cognition and moral thinking (Piaget, Kohlberg, etc.), reinforcement schedules, etc.  Though I am moving to a doctoral program in counseling or clinical psychology this fall, I did get a MS degree in experimental psychology and found my experience in applied psychology to be invaluable.

Kindly read the 19th discourse, concerning a Christian’s duty to force himself to do good. There it is written, “One must force oneself to pray, even if one has no spiritual prayer.” And, “In such a case, God, seeing that a man earnestly is striving, pushing himself against the will of his heart (that is, his thoughts), He grants him true prayer.” By true prayer, St. Macarius means the undistracted, collected, deep prayer that occurs when the mind stands unswervingly before God. As the mind begins to stand firmly before God, it discovers such sweetness, that it wishes to remain in true prayer forever, desiring nothing more.

I have stated more than once exactly what efforts must be made: Do not allow your thoughts to wander at will. When they do involuntarily escape, immediately turn them back, rebuking yourself, lamenting and grieving over this disorder. As St. John of the Ladder says, “We must lock our mind into the words of prayer by force.”

Interestingly, this approach seems quite different from the general approach outlined in my previous post by Orthodox Fr. Meletios Webber on “brushing away” sinful thoughts.  Webber specifically stated not to treat unwanted thoughts as “fire-breathing dragons” but to take a more mindful approach.  The difference is that in mindfulness, all thoughts are simply observed without prejudice, and allowed to come and go.  Mindful meditators are not supposed to react with frustration, anger, or grief over unwanted thoughts, they are simply taught to observe, then return, to the desired object (a sensation, mental image, etc.).

Both of these teachers are Orthodox, but they seem to take very different approaches to unwanted cognitions.  Certainly some would favor one method over the other, but if practitioners wish to reap the benefits of mindful thinking (which have been demonstrated in psychological research previously) the more mindful approaches would be favorable.

In fact, it would be an interesting research question to test each approach empirically.  Instruct some people to pray or meditate mindfully while another group is instructed to “fight” against unwanted thoughts.  But what would the dependent variable be?  Perhaps the two kinds of thinking are intended for different ends.

I know I have not been a faithful poster lately, but there are still lots of cool links I want to post for people to read.  So I decided to add a del.icio.us widget to my sidebar with interesting links.  You should check them out!

An Orthodox priest once told me a joke about his religion:

Q:  How many Orthodox does it take to change a light bulb?
A:  Change?  What’s that?

Now I’m not going to say the views of the Orthodox church on homosexuality are wrong or right, I just find it’s interesting that a person would join a church that seems to be at variance with his identity.  Many people in this world suffer when their religious identities and personal identities conflict.

That is not to say that Orthodoxy is completely at odds with Bryce Rich, as his post illustrates nicely.  He certainly “clicks” with Orthodoxy’s liturgy, history, and theology.  It is just that for many congregants, teachings on sexuality can be a deal breaker, even if they like everything else about the religion.

It also seems to remind me of the American tradition of “church shopping,” which is a process where people “shop around” to different denominations to find one that suits them the best.  This usually means the church that they agree with the most, or the church where they are the most comfortable.  However, I wonder if this is really the best way to do things.  If I wanted to join a church that believed everything I believed, I would imagine I would have to start that church, and I’d be the only congregant!  Perhaps there is something special about worshiping with those we disagree with, or who challenge our conceptions about spirituality.

When I created the blog I had a burst of creative energy and was able to write several pieces a week.  Now I don’t have the time to maintain that type of work, since I’ve created several other blogs this year as well, including Aristotle’s Revenge, and have begun to work on my Master’s thesis.  My purpose in starting the blog was to create a forum to discuss psychology and religion, with a perspective that was largely scholarly but slightly biased in favor of spirituality in general (I don’t argue that any one particular religion is best, but rather that spirituality, broadly defined, is a good thing).  This is sort of a blend between my two other favorite psychology and religion blogs, Epiphenom (which is very scientific and secular) and Experimental Theology (which is Christian and discusses more advanced theology). I wanted to provide some resources in which I feel that I demonstrate that psychology does not necessarily mean the end of faith, but wanted to do it in a scholarly way, without sacrificing the fact that some aspects of religion are not positive.

Here are some links to a few of my favorite posts that I’ve done over the past year.  A few of them involve psychological research:

Spiritual Meditation and Pain Tolerance

Child Abuse: Leave God Out of It!

Moral Proportions

Some of my favorites were simply discussions of religious issues based on psychological perspectives:

The Catholic, Mormon, Atheist, and Islamic “Threat”

Atonement Theories and Psychology

Happy Jesus, Sad Jesus

Some involved one of my favorite Christian religions, Eastern Orthodoxy:

On My First Visit to an Orthodox Church

As A Man Thinketh: Fr. Meletios Webber on Addiction, Psychotherapy, and Hesychasm

I’ve also written some controversial posts that drew both arguments and discussions.  The first one was picked up and reposted by John Dehlin (Mormon Stories, etc.), the other involved a philosophical debate with an engineer:

Just Answer the Question

Know Your Tools (and Their Limitations)

Finally, the most popular post I’ve written that has driven the most traffic to my blog was a brief overview of several visualizations of Christian History.  I created it partly because I couldn’t find anything like it, and it seems that many people find it a useful discussion (I’m pretty proud of it myself):

Visualizations of Christian History

I can’t wait to see where the next year takes this blog.  Hopefully I will still have periodic insights into psychology and religion that I can post here.  Since I’ve had more success with this blog than my other ones (generally), I’m also considering purchasing a dot-com for the website.  It’s not too expensive to do that, but I would have to offset the cost with ads, and I’m not particularly keen on that, so we’ll see.  Thank you so much to all my regular readers who find value in The Value of Saintliness, and please subscribe or stay tuned for more psychology and religion posts in the future!

Many people use the existence of Evil in the world as some kind of evidence that God does not exist, with the assumption that a loving God who wants the best for his children would not allow them to suffer.  This is a naive restatement of that position, I realize – the debate has more to do with unnecessary suffering.  But what is unnecessary suffering and what is necessary suffering?

Seery (2011) has shown that there might be an adaptive level of suffering that provides benefits to the person experiencing it.  Previous research in adversity suggested that negative life events and mental health problems have a generally positive linear relationship.  In other words, the more adversity people experience, the more mental health problems they develop.  However, Seery suggests that this is not entirely accurate.  By examining the relationship between self-reported cumulative number of adverse life events and four mental health indicators (global distress, functional impairment, life satisfaction, and PTS symptoms), Seery found that there is actually a U-shaped curve involved, as we see from the chart to the right.

You’ll notice that those with extremely low and extremely high numbers of adverse experiences in their lives are the ones with the worst mental health (according to those four domains), but those in the middle actually do the best.  This means that there is actually an optimal amount of adversity that is beneficial to a person – people who have experienced some adversity are more satisfied with their lives than those who have experienced no adversity!

According to Seery, this may be because experiencing some distress allows people the opportunity to “master” their reactions and emotions, thus honing their coping skills.  This allows them to experience the normal ups and downs in life much better than those who never had those opportunities.

Now what does this say about the Problem of Evil?  It does indicate that some amount of suffering can be beneficial.  This reminds me of Saint Irenaeus, who developed a set of ideas that was later made into a complete theodicy which included the idea that suffering was something needed to build one’s soul and progress.  However, certainly it can be admitted that the very existence of the curve in this study shows that there are some people who suffer more (or less) than what is necessary to have good mental health – at least on these four indicators.  In fact, the mean is actually a bit higher than the optimal amount of adversity, meaning that more people experience a greater-than-optimal amount of suffering in their lives!  So perhaps a study like this might show why some suffering is necessary for humans, but it doesn’t answer why all suffering is (especially the most extreme).

As a side note, this study also makes me wonder about cultures that have difficult, painful, or tedious “rites of passage” for children to pass into adulthood (the example I immediately thought of was the Satere-Mawe people of the Brazilian Amazon).  It would seem that cultures recognize that some adversity is beneficial, so much so that adversity is intentionally inflicted on young people to prepare them for being productive adults in their societies.  However, some (like the Satere-Mawe bullet ant initiation) seem so extreme that any beneficial result from this inflicted adversity would seem unlikely.  More research needs to be done across cultures on this subject.

References

Seery, M. D. (2011). Resilience: A silver lining to experiencing adverse life events? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20, 390-394.

Esam Omran Al-Fetori / Reuters

As many of you know, I am a big advocate of peace and religious tolerance in the world.  Ever since the 10th grade when I watched the news of 9/11 in French class at my high school, I have made it a significant part of my life’s journey to identify the factors that contribute to religious violence and hatred, and try to promote the positive aspects of religion.  Instead of holding some naive view of Islam informed only by Wikipedia and hate-chain-emails I get from others, I decided to attach an Islamic Studies minor to my undergraduate degree.  I wanted to know why someone would love Islam, not from an outsider’s point of view, but, to the best of my ability, from a Muslim’s point of view.

On this blog, on my Facebook page, in my conversations with others, and in my personal life I try to defend Islam against what I see are unwarranted attacks and bigotry.  I sometimes worry that perhaps I give off the impression that I hold a naive overestimation of the peaceful aspects of Islam, but I do this because I think it provides a modicum of balance in the discourse.

So when something like this happens, perhaps my readership or even my friends might get the idea that I don’t have the same indignant, angry response at this kind of violence that they do. That for some reason, my theologically liberal tendencies prevent me from the same tribalistic anger that occurs within most other people when their countrymen are murdered by angry mobs over something as miniscule as a dumb YouTube video created by a guy that basically nobody in the United States knows about.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.  Of course I get mad.

And of course, at first, that anger is directed right at Islam.  If I could have a conversation with Islam as an anthropomorphic entity this morning, I might have said something like this:  ”Islam, I try so hard to defend you.  I try to tell people that the majority of Muslims are peaceful, and don’t support violence.  I try to give you the same charity that I give all religious groups in America.  I have spent so long sticking up for you, and then you go and keep doing things like this.  Someone creates a ridiculous – and blasphemous, but ridiculous – YouTube video, and you use that as an excuse to whip up an angry mob and commit murder against an honorable government employee who took a dangerous assignment because he believes in what he was doing.  He didn’t make the video, and he certainly wasn’t even aware of it.  Yet now he’s dead, because you can’t even take a little criticism against your religion.  Don’t you know how this looks from the outside?  Don’t you know this is really, really bad for everyone in the long run?”

I am going to guess that I’m not the only one out there with that reaction.

In fact, I constantly have to analyze violent acts all over the world and through history.  This is just violence against Americans, but religious violence of some sort happens every day in some part of the world, and some of this involves Muslims (and sometimes Sikhs, atheists, Hindus, Buddhists, Protestants, Christians, Mormons, etc.).  But let me tell you a little something about studying psychology.  The great thing about psychology is that studying it causes one to gain insights into the way people think.  It means that you’re constantly on guard, making sure your thoughts and emotions bear some kind of affinity to rationality, and you are very much aware of all the systematic ways that human brains malfunction.  When I see headlines like the one above, and they make me angry, I have to stop, step back from my own thoughts, and really think about the causes of my anger, and even the causes of the violence in the Middle East.  Libyans and Egyptians are not a different species from Americans.  Their brains basically work the same way.  They are human beings.  They are not categorically evil, good, or neutral.  They are just as varied and diverse and awesome and horrible as we are.

The violence that happened there is the result of many factors.  Some of those factors are certainly religious, but is “Islam” really the culprit here, or is it an interaction between Islam, a history of dictatorship and class struggles, poverty, an incredible amount of civil unrest in Egypt and Libya, and a group of people who really feel like their way of life is being destroyed?  If I was born in Libya into a lower class, would I have reacted the same way?  Is my personal, angry reaction a result of stereotyping, prejudice, generalizing, not knowing the whole picture, and scapegoating?

Am I justified in being upset?  Absolutely, I believe I am.

But am I justified in letting that anger control how I feel about all Muslims?  Does this violence change what I know about Muhammad, Islam, Rumi, Al-Ghazali, the Qur’an, or the Sufis?  Am I justified in letting that anger spill out onto my relationships with Muslims in my city?  Am I justified in thinking that the solution is to carpet bomb the entire Middle East, or invade Libya or Egypt, or committing subtle acts of relational violence towards anyone wearing a hijab or even a Sikh around me?  No.  These are weak, small-minded, and short-sighted reactions that don’t really provide the best solutions over time.  If what we want is peace, then we need to work at creating peace.  Peace is not achieved through dehumanization, otherizing, and reactionary bloodshed.  We should take the high road, not to prove that we’re better than anyone else, but because we truly believe the high road is the best way to get what we want in the end – a harmonious world where people can disagree without hurting each other.

I’m not suggesting or advocating any particular response to the violence that has occurred overseas.  I’m not advocating any political party, nor am I advocating a candidate for president.  What I’m advocating is a sincere and informed analysis of our own reactionary feelings to outrageous, violent, horrible acts against Americans.

I know this is incredibly hard, because I have to do it on a regular basis.

The movement of white supremacist modern rock, metal, and punk bands in America is pretty fascinating in itself, actually – worth a few pages of analysis at least.  Page was a member of a band called End Apathy (Myspace link), which was formed in 2005.  I almost hesitate to link to his music because I don’t want it to be seen in any way as an endorsement or support of his music, so please keep that in mind if you decide to go to their Myspace page.  Here’s a hint though, you probably won’t like their tunes.

In my previous post I wondered why anyone would target Sikhs in America?  All hate crimes have a kind of twisted logic to them, but since I actually don’t know of any previous recent conflicts regarding Sikhs in America, I have to wonder what Page was thinking when he chose this target?  Many people are suggesting that perhaps Page thought that Sikhs are Muslims or related to Muslims in some way (including the son of one of the victims in this interview with Matt Lauer, who seemed to be trying to present the suggestion as diplomatically as possible).  There is a lot of anti-Islamic hatred and rhetoric in America, and anti-Islamic violence would make more sense, for lack of a better word.  That doesn’t make this crime any more or less tragic, but it does highlight the real irony in most hate crimes – the groups that are targeted in hate crimes are very rarely the real perpetrators of perceived “offenses.”

However, this is just speculation.  Page might have actually had some kind of antipathy towards Sikhs for some reason, or perhaps he was simply targeting anything he thought was foreign.  I’ll keep updating as I learn more.

The recent shooting by James Eagan Holmes was more deadly, but this one has obvious religious overtones, since it happened at a place of worship.  They have not yet released any information about the shooter, other than he was not known to be connected to any hate groups.  However, the article above mentions that this is being treated as a terrorist incident by a single individual.  This is what is known as “lone wolf” terrorism, and can be the most difficult to stop or trace before it happens (larger organizations have a bigger footprint and communications within the group can be traced, tapped, or intercepted; larger organizations are also easier to infiltrate).

Because of my interest in religious extremism and terrorism, I am going to report as much as I can about this.  Most terrorist incidents seem totally out of the blue, but this one especially so.  A lone wolf terrorist attack against Sikhs in America?  What did the Sikhs ever do to harm white Americans?