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  • Religion's role in violence

    Times Colonist (Victoria, British Columbia)
    December 4, 2004 Saturday
    Final Edition

    Religion's role in violence

    by Douglas Todd, CanWest News Service

    VANCOUVER

    University of B.C. psychology professor Ara Norenzayan grew up in
    Beirut, Lebanon, during a savage religion-fuelled war between
    Christians and Muslims.

    As an altar boy in the Armenian Orthodox Church, he sensed the power
    of religion for good and evil.

    He also became familiar with death.

    Now, 15 years after emigrating to North America at the peak of
    Lebanon's bloody conflict, Norenzayan is returning to his roots to
    research the relationship between faith, thoughts of death and
    violence.

    The soft-spoken social psychologist has received a $105,000
    three-year grant from Canada's National Research Council to deepen
    his exploration into why people become religious -- and why some of
    those who turn to religion also turn to hatred.

    Devising unique psychological experiments, Norenzayan has already
    discovered that the more people are exposed to the reality of death,
    the more likely they are to believe in "supernatural agents," like
    God, angels or ancestral spirits.

    He's also concluded that prominent scientists, such as Richard
    Dawkins, are off track when they argue belief in God is, along with
    the atomic bomb, the greatest danger to world peace.

    Norenzayan's studies suggest antagonism toward outsiders is not a
    result of belief in God. It's the byproduct of people finding a sense
    of identity in a religious group.

    To find out if there is a link between thoughts of death and belief
    in the supernatural, Norenzayan devised two series of tests, one
    involving hundreds of students at UBC and another involving subjects
    in Malaysia.

    He asked one group to write essays about death, reflect on pain in
    the context of mortality and read a short story about a boy who dies.
    He asked the control group to think about pain in relation to
    visiting a dentist and read a story about a boy who

    doesn't die.

    Norenzayan and his team found subjects asked to contemplate death
    were much more likely than those who weren't to report they strongly
    believe in supernatural agents.

    Norenzayan says his experiments are the first to provide "solid
    empirical evidence" to back up theories by Soren Kierkegaard and
    Ernest Becker that humans become religious because they're capable of
    recognizing they will die.

    "One of the definitions of religion is it's a way of dealing with
    anxiety-provoking thoughts," Norenzayan says in his tidy third-floor
    office overlooking the forest and ocean surrounding UBC.

    "All religions say death is not literally death, that mortality is
    not the end of our being."

    Norenzayan -- who maintains he's not a "strict" religious believer,
    despite maintaining ties to the Armenian Orthodox Church -- says it's
    shocking how little research psychologists have done into the origins
    and effects of spirituality.

    "Most academics are blind to the power of religion."

    A typical psychology textbook, he says, contains virtually no mention
    of religion, despite the 19th-century American founder of psychology,
    William James, devoting a great deal of energy to the subject.

    "Most psychologists have no idea why two people who are probably
    equally religious -- the Dalai Lama and Osama bin Laden -- could end
    up being so different, with one teaching peace and one preaching
    violence," he says.

    With his grant, Norenzayan plans to make his first trip to Lebanon
    since he left at age 18. He'll explore more deeply the impression he
    developed as a young man in the war-torn country that spiritual
    beliefs can be exploited by leaders to foment aggression against
    outsiders.

    And he'll continue his experiments into why religion can breed both
    peace-loving tolerance and intolerant fury, both in the Middle East
    and North America.

    Norenzayan recognizes religion isn't the only cause of violence, but
    he also believes it "is at the top of the list of ideologies that can
    kill."

    Norenzayan and his graduate student, Ian Hansen, have discovered it's
    not spiritual devotion that causes violence.

    Norenzayan's work builds on studies of Palestinian Muslims by his
    alma mater, the University of Michigan, where researchers found the
    more often Palestinian Muslims attended mosque, the more they
    supported suicide terrorism.

    There was no link, however, between Palestinians' support for
    violence and how often they prayed at home.

    The goal of one of Norenzayan's experiments was to test North
    Americans on their tolerance of religious pluralism. In effect, he
    wanted to explore how subjects would respond to someone like the main
    character in Yann Martel's book, The Life of Pi, who claims he's a
    Hindu, a Muslim and a Christian.

    Norenzayan's team discovered Buddhists were most tolerant of
    followers of other religions. Christians were less tolerant and
    Muslims were the least tolerant.

    Norenzayan believes that may be because Christianity and Islam
    provide more group cohesion, leading to a belief there's only one
    true religion.

    They also found that thinking about death can foster religious
    tolerance.

    Norenzayan found study participants who were reminded frequently
    about death were more likely to believe in supernatural agents from
    not only their own religion, but from other religions.

    "There's an old saying: 'In a storm, voyagers will believe in any god
    to rescue them.' To some extent, it's hopeful that people facing
    death will consider addressing other supernatural agents," says
    Norenzayan.

    But his research also led him to a more negative side-effect tied to
    when people think often about death: They become less accepting of
    people who don't belong to their culture.

    Many Christians, for instance, became less tolerant of Jews.

    More intense thoughts about death "seemed to make people draw
    stronger cultural boundaries."

    Norenzayan is also wondering what the ramifications of his research
    are for North America since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
    which made a lot more North Americans anxious about their mortality.

    He believes the terrorist attacks created a unique experimental
    condition for a study of how increasing consciousness of death
    affects religious tolerance.

    "Sept. 11," he says, "was one humongous manipulation of North
    Americans' thoughts about death."

    GRAPHIC: Photo: Glenn Baglo, CanWest News Service; Professor Ara
    Norenzayan is a psychology instructor who has just received a grant
    to study the relationship between faith, thoughts of death and
    violence.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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