Currently, I teach H.S. Psychology, H.S Journalism and Special Education English classes. I was in private practice for 16 years.
Due to my newness to journalism, I belong to a listserv for the Journalism Education Association. The listserv has been so very outstanding and helpful to my teaching and the future of our student newspaper. For this reason, I decided I could benefit from a listserv regarding Psychology as well...even though my education in the field of psychology is much more extensive. I have been quite disappointed in these discussions regarding religion. What I believe regarding religion is what I believe and irrelevant to my teaching. How I treat other people is not. Until I read the email below, I sincerely wondered why I would remain on this mailing list. Laura Russell, Ph.D. Moriarty High School -----Original Message----- From: Paul Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2003 9:48 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences Subject: Re: Religion -- is this conversation going anywhere? Rod Hetzel wrote: > I'm all for discussing the psychology of religion on this listserve, but > right now our conversation doesn't seem to be going in that direction. > People are giving examples of supposedly "empirical" evidence that > supports their position and proves the other side wrong. I'm with Rod on this. Our past experience with these discussions here hasn't been very good, and this current discussion shows all the sure signs of being a discussion based on the wrong question. As behavioral scientists, I assume that we're all aware that all behaviors have multiple causes within an individual and across individuals. In focusing on establishing a single cause, this discussion seems to ignore that. Of course I don't think that anyone is arguing that religion is the only cause of violence, but even in arguing that it is the foremost cause in recent times, we seem to drift away from a more appropriate focus on the violence itself. At the same time, I think that the focus on religion as the cause "enables" the counterargument that one's right to free practice of religion entitles one to commit acts of that sort (acts that in fact one has no right to commit - obviously I'm thinking of Hill and Moore here). A proposal for better questions - how does religious belief serve to justify bad behavior? Do other kinds of beliefs work in the same way? Here I'm thinking about what it is that Stalinism, the Cultural Revolution, the Crusades, Naziism, and the Khymer Rouge have in common, and how those motivations and justifications might play out in somewhat less dramatic ways in the behaviors of people like Hill and Moore and McVeigh and Kaczynski (sp?) and McCarthy and even perhaps PETA members and people who vandalize SUVs. I certainly think it's a little silly to look at Stalin and Hitler and the Crusade instigators as though their differences wrt religious faith mean that their actual motivations were opposites. If anything, those "-isms" illustrate the need to look beyond religious belief or nonbelief in explanations of these kinds of movements and behaviors. Counting and weighing examples of "religious" and "other" seems like an exercise in distraction from the real problem. Personally, if I had to put my money on a contender for main cause of violence in history, I'd say something having to do with our natural responses to limited resources, including competition, and the need to form in-groups and out-groups so that we don't have to compete as individuals and so that we can improve the chances that our offspring will be successful, and then in turn the need to demonize the out-groups. Here's a completely unrelated question I was wondering about this morning. It seems to me that the advent of war films has produced something that didn't really exist a hundred years ago: a popular image of "soldier" ("sailor", "airman", etc.) based largely on fictional ideals (pretty uniform depictions, if you'll pardon the pun) rather than on our interactions with the real thing (surely far more varied). I wonder what effect, if any, this has had on the actual behavior and attitudes of those entering the military. I imagine that people come to the military with certain fiction-based ideas about the role they're going to take on. But I could be completely wrong - perhaps the contact with reality overwhelms the fictional ideals immediately, or perhaps people who actually enter the military these days have enough contact with real military before entering that the fictional role is already replaced by a more realistic one. Paul Smith Alverno College Milwaukee --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
