Approaches to the Study of Religion (Connolly 1999)

posted: 971 days ago, on Sunday, 2009 Jun 14 at 24:16
tags: atheism, psychology of religion.

The trans-empirical as a reality

"Psychological studies of religious phenomena have the potential for profound influence upon the beliefs and practices of religious people. Consequently they will continue to be regarded as a threat by many religionists and as vehicle for exposing the pretensions of religious people by many psychologists. This may well lead to religionists who have some psychological training to attempt protective strategies to shield religion from the full penetration of psychological scrutiny. Similarly psychologists antagonistic towards religion may well develop thoroughgoing critiques which fail to recognize the real benefits that many people gain from accepting the trans-empirical as a reality."

Connolly, P. (1999) (ed.) Approaches to the Study of Religion. Cassel: London. pp. 137–138

via: Krynauw du Toit

 comments

2010 March 09 at 12:20 by Martin Foster

Psychology as a subject is as much a delusion as contemporary religion. A study of General Semantics by Alfred Korzybski would go a long way to rectifying this.

2010 March 09 at 21:21 by Auke

Martin,

I can be happily dismissive of your comment as it stands simply because psychology studies human behaviour (and both humans and their behaviour are known to exist), whereas contemporary religion studies gods (which are as likely to exist as any other figment of my imagination). [Which of course makes religion a perfectly valid subject for psychologists to study.]

To rather belabour the point: why should humans in principle be unsuitable for systematic study?

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