Believing but not religious
From a session at Human Flourishing
“The qualities that define a flourishing life such as meaning and purpose are foundational to how we all will thrive – not merely survive – in a challenging world.” Dr. Andrew Serazin, Templeton World Charity Foundation
The Global Flourishing Conference 2023 was held to explore what it means to be human and how we can use our innate capacities to unlock humanity’s full potential. One of the sessions explored how religious faith can positively affect outcomes that are indicative of flourishing at a communal and social level.
Within that session, there was a 'setting the scene' video which contained some interesting insights especially about the effect of individualism. Here is an abridged transcript:
Humans want to feel a part of something larger than themselves. Something beyond immediate experience and religion can be wrapped up in three words - belonging, becoming and beyond.
In the last 20 years, we've seen a really drastic decline in the traditional indicators of religious belonging. More and more people are less religious. There's decline both in membership and affiliation. We're seeing the decline in the number of congregations and the decline in the number of religious vocations. However, you still have incredibly high numbers of people who believe in God or a higher power.
What's happening in this moment more and more, is that people are unbundling particular practices out of the context of religion. A really obvious example that we're all familiar with is meditation, which has gained a secular language - practitioners could never tell you what the Noble Truths of Buddhism are. So you're seeing aspects of religion and spirituality travel into the secular places.
Fitness communities are also an interesting place to examine the dynamic because they're about a person establishing goals that they go to that place to try to meet and a lot of them are about changing the way they look and feel. In some respects, these fitness communities begin to resemble traditional religious communities in the devotion that they inspire and the fidelity that they have for certain leaders and certain elements of those practices.
Another thing we see changing is that more people choose 'their own adventure'. This is a troubling diminishment from the experience that they might get in traditional religious communities. Where are you finding community in that? Or are you just ending up in a pretty isolated experience because no one else has exactly the same mix as you do.
We're seeing a set of data emerge that point to the impact of the spiritual practices on our brains, on our health, as well as on the quality of our relationships with one another. There's work looking at why rituals are effective at helping people feel a sense of control in their life or a sense of rhythm. It therefore is a great disservice to spiritual exercises to think of them just in terms of their functional value. This is one of the challenges in the science of spiritual flourishing - how to study the mechanics of why certain spiritual exercises work without decontextualized those practices so much that they become unrecognisable parts of that much larger thing.
There's not going to be any change to the fundamental human questions e.g, Who am I? What do I do with suffering? How do I understand my place in the order of things? So in the midst of all the changes above, there is a kind of immutable human need at the centre that will not change or never change.
Don't we have answers to those fundamental human questions?
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From a session at Human Flourishing, 20/02/2024