What the fuzz:

A scentific study Spirituality and Religion

Spirituality and Religion: Unfuzzing the Fuzzy

That must have been a pretty rusty Gillette blade the Society of Scientific Study for Religion was using to ‘unfuzz’ the definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’; especially since by the end of the study, the definitions remain obscured.

There are a number of things that simply just don’t work when trying to simplify complicated ideas. ‘Empirical studies’ that involve the surveying of public opinion through a simple binary system of consent and dissent, is nothing more but the negation of diverse opinions and emotions inherent in the complexity of ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’. The establishment of a ‘common’ definition is almost like a type of scientific hegemony.

The contradiction these tests pose is perhaps most evident when listing the ‘goal’ to de-polarize (institutional) religion and spirituality as ‘bad’ and ‘good’ respectively. Yet ironically, the entire study is dependant on the categorization of emotions and opinions, even people in to social statuses, creating a mosaic, rather than a spectrum of understanding. A stark example is the ‘danger’ of SnR mental health workers that may impose their ‘liberal’ beliefs on patients as mentioned on page 15. As if the 27 returned surveys represented the entire body of the Mental Health profession, the assumption that an SnR attitude poses a ‘danger’ only reverses the polarities of ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’, rather than subverting polarities.

The study is soaked with examples of the limitations science has to ‘unfuzz fuzzy terms’. My ‘favourite’ example is the content category key on page 9: a legend of 14 sentenced-stringed categories, each epitomizing the participants abstract ideas of the ‘Sacred’. Category 5: Hope, is treated like a bird in a cage, isolated in one category, as if all the other definitions lacked this crucial ‘emotion’, which I find hard to believe. But nothing beats category 14: Uncodable. I imagine someone writing a poem about Jesus, and having the iambic pentameter translated as a syntax error.

The only attention I’d give the Society of SSR’s, is to view their efforts as a reflection of a technological culture attempting to translate the esoteric language of spirituality and religion, to an objective numeric domination represented as ‘facts’. Aside from this, I see nothing fruitful in S of SSR’s attempts; to butcher a Habermas quotation, ‘nothing rises from a de-sublimated meaning, or a deconstructed form; an emancipatory effect does not follow’.