Spiritual Resource Development

The e-Advocate Quarterly

Spiritual Resource Development 2 Corinthians 9:10 | Hebrews 6:1 2 Peter 1:5-6 | Ephesians 4:15 Colossians 1:10

“Helping Individuals, Organizations & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential”

Vol. XI, Issue L – Q-2 April| May| June 2025

The Advocacy Foundation, Inc. Helping Individuals, Organizations & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential

Since its founding in 2003, The Advocacy Foundation has become recognized as an effective provider of support to those who receive our services, having real impact within the communities we serve. We are currently engaged in many community and faith-based collaborative initiatives, having the overall objective of eradicating all forms of youth violence and correcting injustices everywhere. In carrying-out these initiatives, we have adopted the evidence-based strategic framework developed and implemented by the Office of Juvenile Justice & Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP).

The stated objectives are: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Community Mobilization; Social Intervention; Provision of Opportunities; Organizational Change and Development; Suppression [of illegal activities].

Moreover, it is our most fundamental belief that in order to be effective, prevention and intervention strategies must generally be Community Specific, Culturally Relevant, EvidenceBased, and Collaborative. The Violence Prevention and Intervention programming we employ in implementing this community-enhancing framework include the programs further described throughout our publications, programs and special projects both domestically and internationally.

www.TheAdvocacyFoundation.org ISBN: ......... .........

../2015 Printed in the USA

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Dedication ______

Every publication in our many series‘ is dedicated to everyone, absolutely everyone, who by virtue of their calling, by Divine inspiration, direction and guidance, is on the battlefield dayafter-day striving to follow God‘s will and purpose for their lives. And this is with particular affinity for those Spiritual warriors who are being transformed into excellence through daily academic, professional, familial, and other challenges.

We pray that you will bear in mind: Matthew 19:26 (NIV) Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." (Emphasis added) To all of us who daily look past our circumstances, and naysayers, to what the Lord says we will accomplish: Blessings!

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The Advocacy Foundation, Inc.

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The Advocacy Foundation, Inc. Helping Individuals, Organizations & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential

The e-Advocate Quarterly

Spiritual Resource Development

“Helping Individuals, Organizations & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential 1735 Market Street, Suite 3750 Philadelphia, PA 19102

| 100 Edgewood Avenue, Suite 1690 Atlanta, GA 30303

John C Johnson III Founder & CEO

(878) 222-0450 Voice | Fax | SMS www.TheAdvocacyFoundation.org

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Biblical Authority ______

2 Corinthians 9:10 (NIV) 10

Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness.

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Hebrews 6:1 (NIV) Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God,

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Ephesians 4:15 (NIV) 15

Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.

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Colossians 1:10 (NIV) 10

so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God,

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Table of Contents e-Advocate Quarterly Spiritual Resource Development

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Biblical Authority I.

Introduction

II.

Spirituality

III.

Discernment

IV.

Religion

V.

Culture

VI.

Beliefs & Values

VII. Spiritual Gifts VIII. References Attachments A. Spiritual Gifts Assessments B. The World Values Survey C. Glossary of Spiritual Terms

Copyright Š 2015 The Advocacy Foundation, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Introduction Nurturing and developing your spirituality may be just as important as eating a healthy diet, exercising, and building strong relationships. Taking the time to reconnect with what you find meaningful in life and returning to life‘s big questions can enhance your own sense of connection with something larger than yourself.

Cultivate Empathy and Compassion

Empathy is the ability and willingness to fully understand another person‘s experience and connect it to your own—for example, rather than seeing an irritable coworker as a nuisance, you may recognize that they are reacting to stress in the workplace.

Compassion is the practice of responding to this realization with kindness—because you understand why the coworker is in a bad mood, you respond with extra patience and listen deeply when they complain, rather than snapping back.

Andrew Weil, author of Spontaneous Happiness, describes empathy and compassion as ―learnable skills that can bring greater happiness into your life and improve all of your relationships.‖ They are important to spiritual development, he explains, because they help you get out of self-centered ways of thinking and help you make connections with others. There are many ways to develop your sense of empathy and compassion, including: 

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Listening Deeply. Let go of assumptions that others feel the way you do, and allow yourself to fully listen to the way they describe their experience. Prioritize what the other person has to say above what you yourself would like to say or gain from a given conversation and just listen.

Taking Others’ Perspectives Into Account. In addition to simply listening to others, open yourself up to imagining what it would be like to be in their shoes. How would you feel if you were in their situation?

Look For The Good. Positivity researcher Barbara Fredrickson recommends boosting compassion by actively considering others‘ positive qualities. Encouraging yourself to acknowledge the whole picture of another person will help you see them as a complex, dynamic human who is worthy of kindness and compassion.

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Identify (and Live By) Your Beliefs and Values Making a list of your beliefs and values will help you live with intention. This list will be fluid, so recognize that it‘s natural to shift and revise your values throughout life. Some of the questions you may ask yourself are:   

What matters most to me?

What drives my actions?

What do I believe is right?

If you need help coming up with your values, you might try a value sort activity.

Find a Spiritual Community and Friends Join a spiritual group, whether that is a church or mosque, meditation center, yoga class, or a local group that meets to discuss spiritual issues. The benefits of social support are well documented, and having a spiritual community to turn to for fellowship can provide a sense of belonging and support.

Practice Forgiveness Letting go of blame is not easy, but the rewards of relinquishing negative feelings are aplenty. To practice forgiveness, Stanford Forgiveness Project director Fred Luskin suggests finding the right perspective—parsing out whether your feelings are coming from the actual experience of someone wronging you, or whether your anger is intensifying as you re-hash the situation. See how those feelings are affecting you, and let go of what is not helpful. Be gentle to yourself as well—you don‘t have to re-establish contact with the person who wronged you in order to forgive. As Luskin says, ―Forgiveness is for you and no one else.‖

Seek Transcendence through Nature, Art, or Music 

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Spend time outside. Feeling a connectedness to nature has been linked to decreased stress, better connections with other people, and a heightened sense of purpose and oneness with the world. Take a leisurely walk outside alone or with friends, or work in the garden, soaking in the details: the expansiveness of the sky, the wind moving through the trees.

Allow yourself to get lost in music you enjoy. Whether it‘s listening to an album on your headphones or playing the piano yourself, music can incite feelings of connectedness, purpose, meaning, faith, and hope. Close your eyes and allow yourself to fully immerse in the listening experience.

Sit with a piece of art. This could be a painting in a museum, a sculpture in a local park, or even a piece of colorful graffiti—anything that calls out to you. Ask yourself why you are drawn to this particular piece. Do you recognize something about yourself or some universal truth in its colors, shapes, or textures?

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Be Good to Yourself The nonphysical aspects of spirituality can make it feel as if it is a remote practice, separate from the rest of your life. But this isn‘t true—spirituality, just like the other aspects of wellbeing, is profoundly influenced by other factors in your lifestyle.

Exercising Regularly and Eating a Nutrient-Rich Diet with lots of vegetables and fruits is one way of reminding yourself that you care deeply about this life and this body. Paying attention to what you eat is important, too: according to Jon Kabat Zinn, practicing mindful eating ―allows you to drop right into the knowing in ways that are effortless, totally natural, and entirely beyond words and thinking. Such an exercise delivers wakefulness immediately.‖ Treating Yourself with Compassion is just as important as treating others well, says Kristin Neff. ―When we experience warm and tender feelings toward ourselves, we are altering our bodies as well as our minds. Rather than feeling worried and anxious, we feel calm, content, trusting, and secure.‖ The broadening effect of these positive emotions can enhance our sense of curiosity, wonder, and awe—all feelings that contribute to spirituality.

Make Contemplative Practice a Part of Your Everyday Life The benefits of adopting a contemplative practice—such as meditation, prayer, yoga, or journaling—have widespread effects not just on spirituality, but on physical and emotional health as well.        

Take yoga class or practice chair yoga at work Dedicate 15 minutes each day to writing in a journal Listen to a guided audio meditation Join a spiritual community, such as a church, prayer group, or meditation center to share a contemplative experience with others Eat mindfully, savoring and appreciating the food that you have and minimizing distractions during meals Set aside time for prayer or reflection each day Try a guided body scan Watch a nature-guided relaxation video

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Spirituality Spirituality is the praxis and process of personal transformation, either in accordance with traditional religious ideals, or, increasingly, oriented on subjective experience and psychological growth independently of any specific religious context. In a more general sense, it may refer to almost any kind of meaningful activity or blissful experience. There is no single, widely-agreed definition for the concept, and the term may be applied to a wide variety of practices.

Definition There is no single, widely-agreed definition of spirituality.

Surveys of the definition of the term, as used in scholarly research, show a broad range of definitions, with very limited similitude.

According to Waaijman, the traditional meaning of spirituality is a process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape of man, the image of God. To accomplish this, the reformation is oriented at a mold, which represents the original shape: in Judaism the Torah, in Christianity Christ, in Buddhism Buddha, in the Islam Muhammad."

In modern times the emphasis is on subjective experience. It may denote almost any kind of meaningful activity or blissful experience. It still denotes a process of transformation, but in a context separate from organized religious institutions, termed "spiritual but not religious".

Houtman and Aupers suggest that modern spirituality is a blend of humanistic psychology, mystical and esoteric traditions and eastern religions.

Waaijman points out that "spirituality" is only one term of a range of words which denote the praxis of spirituality. Some other terms are "Hasidism, contemplation, kabbala, asceticism, mysticism, perfection, devotion and piety".

Etymology The term spirit means "animating or vital principle in man and animals". It is derived from the Old French espirit which comes from the Latin word spiritus (soul, courage, vigor, breath) and is related to spirare (to breathe). In the Vulgate the Latin word spiritus is used to translate the Greek pneuma and Hebrew ruah.

The term "spiritual", matters "concerning the spirit", is derived from Old French spirituel (12c.), which is derived from Latin spiritualis, which comes from spiritus or "spirit".

The term "spirituality" is derived from Middle French spiritualitĂŠ, from Late Latin "spiritualitatem" (nominative spiritualitas), which is also derived from Latin spiritualis.

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Development of the Meaning of Spirituality Classical, Medieval and Early Modern Periods Words translatable as 'spirituality' first began to arise in the 5th century and only entered common use toward the end of the Middle Ages. In a Biblical context the term means being animated by God, to be driven by the Holy Spirit, as opposed to a life which rejects this influence.

In the 11th century this meaning changed. Spirituality began to denote the mental aspect of life, as opposed to the material and sensual aspects of life, "the ecclesiastical sphere of light against the dark world of matter". In the 13th century "spirituality" acquired a social and psychological meaning. Socially it denoted the territory of the clergy: "The ecclesiastical against the temporary possessions, the ecclesiastical against the secular authority, the clerical class against the secular class" Psychologically, it denoted the realm of the inner life: "The purity of motives, affections, intentions, inner dispositions, the psychology of the spiritual life, the analysis of the feelings".

In the 17th and 18th century a distinction was made between higher and lower forms of spirituality: "A spiritual man is one who is Christian 'more abundantly and deeper than others'."

The word was also associated with mysticism and quietism, and acquired a negative meaning.]

Modern Spirituality

Transcendentalism and Unitarian Universalism Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was a pioneer of the idea of spirituality as a distinct field.

He was one of the major figures in Transcendentalism, an early 19th-century liberal Protestant movement, which was rooted in English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume. The Transcendentalists emphasised an intuitive, experiential approach of religion. Following Schleiermacher, an individual's intuition of truth was taken as the criterion for truth. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the first translations of Hindu texts appeared, which were also read by the Transcendentalists, and influenced their thinking. They also endorsed universalist and Unitarianist ideas, leading to Unitarian Universalism, the idea that there must be truth in other religions as well, since a loving God would redeem all living beings, not just Christians.

Neo-Vedanta An important influence on western spirituality was Neo-Vedanta, also called neo-Hinduism and Hindu Universalism, a modern interpretation of Hinduism which developed in response to western colonialism and orientalism. It aims to present Hinduism as a "homogenized ideal of Hinduism" with Advaita Vedanta as its central doctrine. Due to the colonisation of Asia by the western world, since the 19th century an exchange of ideas has been taking place between the western world and Asia, which also influenced western religiosity. Unitarianism, and the idea of Universalism, was brought to India by missionaries, and had a major influence on neo-Hinduism

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via Ram Mohan Roy's Brahmo Samaj and Brahmoism. Roy attempted to modernise and reform Hinduism, from the idea of Universalism. This universalism was further popularised, and brought back to the west as neo-Vedanta, by Swami Vivekananda.

Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and the Perennial Philosophy Another major influence on modern spirituality was the Theosophical Society, which searched for 'secret teachings' in Asian religions. It has been influential on modernist streams in several Asian religions, notably Neo-Vedanta, the revival of Theravada Buddhism, and Buddhist modernism, which have taken over modern western notions of personal experience and universalism and integrated them in their religious concepts. A second, related influence was Anthroposophy, whose founder, Rudolf Steiner, was particularly interested in developing a genuine Western spirituality, and in the ways that such a spirituality could transform practical institutions such as education, agriculture, and medicine.

The influence of Asian traditions on western modern spirituality was also furthered by the Perennial Philosophy, whose main proponent Aldous Huxley was deeply influenced by Vivekanda's Neo-Vedanta and Universalism, and the spread of social welfare, education and mass travel after World War Two. Important early 20th century western writers who studied the phenomenon of spirituality, and their works, include William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and Rudolph Otto, especially The Idea of the Holy (1917). James' notions of "spiritual experience" had a further influence on the modernist streams in Asian traditions, making them even further recognizable for a western audience.

"Spiritual but Not Religious" After the Second World War spirituality and religion became disconnected, and spirituality became more oriented on subjective experience, instead of "attempts to place the self within a broader ontological context." A new discourse developed, in which (humanistic) psychology, mystical and esoteric traditions and eastern religions are being blended, to reach the true self by self-disclosure, free expression and meditation.

The distinction between the spiritual and the religious became more common in the popular mind during the late 20th century with the rise of secularism and the advent of the New Age movement. Authors such as Chris Griscom and Shirley MacLaine explored it in numerous ways in their books. Paul Heelas noted the development within New Age circles of what he called "seminar spirituality": structured offerings complementing consumer choice with spiritual options.

Among other factors, declining membership of organized religions and the growth of secularism in the western world have given rise to this broader view of spirituality. The term "spiritual" is now frequently used in contexts in which the term "religious" was formerly employed. Both theists and atheists have criticized this development.

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Traditional Spirituality Abrahamic Faiths

Judaism Rabbinic Judaism (or in some Christian traditions, Rabbinism) (Hebrew: "Yahadut Rabanit" eht retfa ,EC yrutnec ht6 eht ecnis msiaduJ fo mrof maertsniam eht neeb sah (‫יהדות רבנית‬ codification of the Talmud. It is characterised by the belief that the Written Torah ("Law" or "Instruction") cannot be correctly interpreted without reference to the Oral Torah and by the voluminous literature specifying what behavior is sanctioned by the law (called halakha, "the way").

Judaism knows a variety of religious observances: ethical rules, prayers, religious clothing, holidays, shabbat, pilgrimages, Torah reading, dietary laws.

Kabbalah (literally "receiving"), is an esoteric method, discipline and school of thought of Judaism. Its definition varies according to the tradition and aims of those following it, from its religious origin as an integral part of Judaism, to its later Christian, New Age, or Occultist syncretic adaptations. Kabbalah is a set of esoteric teachings meant to explain the relationship between an unchanging, eternal and mysterious Ein Sof (no end) and the mortal and finite universe (his creation). While it is heavily used by some denominations, it is not a religious denomination in itself. Inside Judaism, it forms the foundations of mystical religious interpretation. Outside Judaism, its scriptures are read outside the traditional canons of organised religion. Kabbalah seeks to define the nature of the universe and the human being, the nature and purpose of existence, and various other ontological questions. It also presents methods to aid understanding of these concepts and to thereby attain spiritual realisation.

Hasidic Judaism, meaning "piety" (or "loving kindness"), is a branch of Orthodox Judaism that promotes spirituality through the popularisation and internalisation of Jewish mysticism as the fundamental aspect of the faith. It was founded in 18th-century Eastern Europe by Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov as a reaction against overly legalistic Judaism. His example began the characteristic veneration of leadership in Hasidism as embodiments and intercessors of Divinity for the followers.[citation needed] Opposite to this, Hasidic teachings cherished the sincerity and concealed holiness of the unlettered common folk, and their equality with the scholarly elite. The emphasis on the Immanent Divine presence in everything gave new value to prayer and deeds of kindness, alongside Rabbinic supremacy of study, and replaced historical mystical (kabbalistic) and ethical (musar) asceticism and admonishment with optimism,[citation needed] encouragement, and daily fervour. This populist emotional revival accompanied the elite ideal of nullification to paradoxical Divine Panentheism, through intellectual articulation of inner dimensions of mystical thought.

Christianity Catholic spirituality is the spiritual practice of living out a personal act of faith (fides qua creditur) following the acceptance of faith (fides quae creditur). Although all Catholics are Page 19 of 138

expected to pray together at Mass, there are many different forms of spirituality and private prayer which have developed over the centuries. Each of the major religious orders of the Catholic Church and other lay groupings have their own unique spirituality - its own way of approaching God in prayer and in living out the Gospel.

Christian mysticism refers to the development of mystical practices and theory within Christianity. It has often been connected to mystical theology, especially in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. The attributes and means by which Christian mysticism is studied and practiced are varied and range from ecstatic visions of the soul's mystical union with God to simple prayerful contemplation of Holy Scripture (i.e., Lectio Divina).

Progressive Christianity is a contemporary movement which seeks to remove the supernatural claims of the faith and replace them with a post-critical understanding of biblical spirituality based on historical and scientific research. It focuses on the lived experience of spirituality over historical dogmatic claims, and accepts that the faith is both true and a human construction, and that spiritual experiences are psychologically and neurally real and useful.

Islam Five pillars The Pillars of Islam (arkan al-Islam; also arkan ad-din, "pillars of religion") are five basic acts in Islam, considered obligatory for all believers. The Quran presents them as a framework for worship and a sign of commitment to the faith. They are (1) the shahadah (creed), (2) daily prayers (salat), (3) almsgiving (zakah), (4) fasting during Ramadan and (5) the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) at least once in a lifetime. The Shia and Sunni sects both agree on the essential details for the performance of these acts.

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Sufism The best known form of Islamic mystic spirituality is the Sufi tradition (famous through Rumi and Hafiz) in which a spiritual master or pir transmits spiritual discipline to students.[36] Sufism or taṣawwuf (Arabic: ‫ )تصوّف‬is defined by its adherents as the inner, mystical dimension of Islam. A practitioner of this tradition is generally known as a ṣūfī ( ). Sufis believe they are practicing ihsan (perfection of worship) as revealed by Gabriel to Muhammad, Worship and serve Allah as you are seeing Him and while you see Him not yet truly He sees you.

Sufis consider themselves as the original true proponents of this pure original form of Islam.

They are strong adherents to the principal of tolerance, peace and against any form of violence.

The Sufi have suffered severe persecution by their coreligionist brothers the Wahhabi and the Salafist. In 1843 the Senussi Sufi were forced to flee Mecca and Medina and head to the Sudan and Libya.

Classical Sufi scholars have defined Sufism as "a science whose objective is the reparation of the heart and turning it away from all else but God". Alternatively, in the words of the Darqawi Sufi teacher Ahmad ibn Ajiba, "a science through which one can know how to travel into the presence of the Divine, purify one's inner self from filth, and beautify it with a variety of praiseworthy traits".

Jihad Jihad is a religious duty of Muslims. In Arabic, the word jihād translates as a noun meaning "struggle". There are two commonly accepted meanings of jihad: an inner spiritual struggle and an outer physical struggle. The "greater jihad" is the inner struggle by a believer to fulfill his religious duties. This non-violent meaning is stressed by both Muslim and non-Muslim authors.

Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, an 11th-century Islamic scholar, referenced a statement by the companion of Muhammad Jabir ibn Abd-Allah: The Prophet [...] returned from one of his battles, and thereupon told us, 'You have arrived with an excellent arrival, you have come from the Lesser Jihad to the Greater Jihad—the striving of a servant (of Allah) against his desires (holy war)."

Asian Traditions

Buddhism Buddhist practices are known as Bhavana, which literally means "development" or "cultivating" or "producing" in the sense of "calling into existence." It is an important concept in Buddhist praxis (Patipatti). The word bhavana normally appears in conjunction with another word forming a compound phrase such as citta-bhavana (the development or cultivation of the heart/mind) or Page 21 of 138

metta-bhavana (the development/cultivation of lovingkindness). When used on its own bhavana signifies 'spiritual cultivation' generally.

Various Buddhist Paths to liberation developed throughout the ages. Best-known is the Noble Eightfold Path, but others include the Bodhisattva Path and Lamrim.

Hinduism Hinduism has no traditional ecclesiastical order, no centralized religious authorities, no governing body, no prophet(s) nor any binding holy book; Hindus can choose to be polytheistic, pantheistic, monistic, or atheistic. Within this diffuse and open structure, spirituality in Hindu philosophy is an individual experience, and referred to as ksaitrajña (Sanskrit). It defines spiritual practice as one‘s journey towards moksha, awareness of self, the discovery of higher truths, true nature of reality, and a consciousness that is liberated and content.

Four Paths Hinduism identifies four ways - mārga or yoga - of spiritual practice. The first way is Jñāna yoga, the way of knowledge. The second way is Bhakti yoga, the way of devotion. The third way is Karma yoga, the way of works. The fourth way is Rāja yoga, the way of contemplation and meditation.

Jñāna marga is a path often assisted by a guru (teacher) in one‘s spiritual practice. Bhakti marga is a path of faith and devotion to deity or deities; the spiritual practice often includes chanting, singing and music - such as in kirtans - in front of idols, or images of one or more deity, or a devotional symbol of the holy. Karma marga is the path of one‘s work, where diligent practical work or vartta (Sanskrit, profession) becomes in itself a spiritual practice, and work in daily life is perfected as a form of spiritual liberation and not for its material rewards. Rāja marga is the path of cultivating necessary virtues, self-discipline, tapas (meditation), contemplation and selfreflection sometimes with isolation and renunciation of the world, to a pinnacle state called samādhi. This state of samādhi has been compared to peak experience.

There is a rigorous debate in Indian literature on relative merits of these theoretical spiritual practices. For example, Chandogyopanishad suggests that those who engage in ritualistic offerings to gods and priests will fail in their spiritual practice, while those who engage in tapas will succeed; Svetasvataropanishad suggests that a successful spiritual practice requires a longing for truth, but warns of becoming ‗false ascetic‘ who go through the mechanics of spiritual practice without meditating on the nature of Self and universal Truths. In the practice of Hinduism, suggest modern era scholars such as Vivekananda, the choice between the paths is up to the individual and a person‘s proclivities. Other scholars suggest that these Hindu spiritual practices are not mutually exclusive, but overlapping. These four paths of spirituality are also known in Hinduism outside India, such as in Balinese Hinduism, where it is called Catur Marga (literally: four paths).

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Schools and Spirituality Different schools of Hinduism encourage different spiritual practices. In Tantric school for example, the spiritual practice has been referred to as sādhanā. It involves initiation into the school, undergoing rituals, and achieving moksha liberation by experiencing union of cosmic polarities. The Hare Krishna school emphasizes bhakti yoga as spiritual practice. In Advaita Vedanta school, the spiritual practice emphasizes jñāna yoga in stages: samnyasa (cultivate virtues), sravana (hear, study), manana (reflect) and dhyana (nididhyasana, contemplate).

Sikhism Sikhism considers spiritual life and secular life to be intertwined: "In the Sikh Weltanschauung...the temporal world is part of the Infinite Reality and partakes of its characteristics." Guru Nanak described living an "active, creative, and practical life" of "truthfulness, fidelity, self-control and purity" as being higher than a purely contemplative life.

The 6th Sikh Guru Guru Hargobind re-affirmed that the political/temporal (Miri) and spiritual (Piri) realms are mutually coexistent. According to the 9th Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadhur, the ideal Sikh should have both Shakti (power that resides in the temporal), and Bhakti (spiritual meditative qualities). This was developed into the concept of the Saint Soldier by the 10th Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh.

According to Guru Nanak, the goal is to attain the "attendant balance of separation-fusion, selfother, action-inaction, attachment-detachment, in the course of daily life", the polar opposite to a self-centered existence. Nanak talks further about the one God or Akal (timelessness) that permeates all life). and which must be seen with 'the inward eye', or the 'heart', of a human being.

In Sikhism there is no dogma, priests, monastics or yogis.

African Spirituality In some African contexts, spirituality is considered a belief system that guides the welfare of society and the people therein, and eradicates sources of unhappiness occasioned by evil.

Contemporary Spirituality The term "spiritual" is now frequently used in contexts in which the term "religious" was formerly employed. Contemporary spirituality is also called "post-traditional spirituality" and "New Age spirituality". Hanegraaf makes a distinction between two "New Age" movements: New Age in a restricted sense, which originated primarily in mid-twentieth century England and had its roots in Theosophy and Anthroposophy, and "New Age in a general sense, which emerged in the later 1970s ...when increasing numbers of people [...] began to perceive a broad similarity between a wide variety of "alternative ideas" and pursuits, and started to think of them as part of one "movement"".

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Those who speak of spirituality outside of religion often define themselves as spiritual but not religious and generally believe in the existence of different "spiritual paths," emphasizing the importance of finding one's own individual path to spirituality. According to one 2005 poll, about 24% of the United States population identifies itself as spiritual but not religious.

Characteristics Modern spirituality is centered on the "deepest values and meanings by which people live." It embraces the idea of an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality. It envisions an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being.

Not all modern notions of spirituality embrace transcendental ideas. Secular spirituality emphasizes humanistic ideas on moral character (qualities such as love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, responsibility, harmony, and a concern for others).:22 These are aspects of life and human experience which go beyond a purely materialist view of the world without necessarily accepting belief in a supernatural reality or divine being. Nevertheless, many humanists (e.g. Bertrand Russell) who value the non-material, communal and virtuous aspects of life reject this usage of the term spirituality as being overlybroad (i.e. it effectively amounts to saying "everything and anything that is good is necessarily spiritual") Personal well-being, both physical and psychological, is an important aspect of modern spirituality.

Contemporary authors suggest that spirituality develops inner peace and forms a foundation for happiness. Meditation and similar practices may help any practitioner cultivate his or her inner life and character. Ellison and Fan (2008) assert that spirituality causes a wide array of positive health outcomes, including "morale, happiness, and life satisfaction." Spirituality has played a central role in self-help movements such as Alcoholics Anonymous: ...if an alcoholic failed to perfect and enlarge his spiritual life through work and self-sacrifice for others, he could not survive the certain trials and low spots ahead....

Spiritual Experience "Spiritual experience" plays a central role in modern spirituality. This notion has been popularized by both western and Asian authors.

William James popularized the use of the term "religious experience" in his The Varieties of Religious Experience. It has also influenced the understanding of mysticism as a distinctive experience which supplies knowledge.

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Wayne Proudfoot traces the roots of the notion of "religious experience" further back to the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who argued that religion is based on a feeling of the infinite. The notion of "religious experience" was used by Schleiermacher to defend religion against the growing scientific and secular critique. It was adopted by many scholars of religion, of which William James was the most influential.

Major Asian influences were Vivekananda and D.T. Suzuki. Swami Vivekananda popularised a modern syncretitistic Hinduism, in which the authority of the scriptures was replaced by an emphasis on personal experience. D.T. Suzuki had a major influence on the popularisation of Zen in the west and popularized the idea of enlightenment as insight into a timeless, transcendent reality. Another example can be seen in Paul Brunton's A Search in Secret India, which introduced Ramana Maharshi and Meher Baba to a western audience.

Spiritual experiences can include being connected to a larger reality, yielding a more comprehensive self; joining with other individuals or the human community; with nature or the cosmos; or with the divine realm.

Spiritual Practices Waaijman discerns four forms of spiritual practices: 1. Somatic Practices, especially deprivation and diminishment. The deprivation purifies the body. Diminishment concerns the repulsement of ego-oriented impulses. Examples are fasting and poverty.

2. Psychological Practices, for example meditation.

3. Social Practices. Examples are the practice of obedience and communal ownership reform ego-orientedness into other-orientedness.

4. Spiritual. All practices aim at purifying the ego-centeredness, and direct the abilities at the divine reality.

Spiritual practices may include meditation, mindfulness, prayer, the contemplation of sacred texts, ethical development, and the use of psychoactive substances (entheogens). Love and/or compassion are often described as the mainstay of spiritual development.

Within spirituality is also found "a common emphases on the value of thoughtfulness, tolerance for breadth and practices and beliefs, and appreciation for the insights of other religious communities, as well as other sources of authority within the social sciences."

Science Antagonism Since the scientific revolution, the relationship of science to religion and spirituality has developed in complex ways. Historian John Hedley Brooke describes wide variations:

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The natural sciences have been invested with religious meaning, with antireligious implications and, in many contexts, with no religious significance at all."

It has been proposed that the currently held popular notion of antagonisms between science and religion has historically originated with "thinkers with a social or political axe to grind" rather than with the natural philosophers themselves. Though physical and biological scientists today avoid supernatural explanations to describe reality, many scientists continue to consider science and spirituality to be complementary, not contradictory, and are willing to debate.

A few religious leaders have also shown openness to modern science and its methods. The 14th Dalai Lama has proposed that if a scientific analysis conclusively showed certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then the claims must be abandoned and the findings of science accepted.

Holism During the twentieth century the relationship between science and spirituality has been influenced both by Freudian psychology, which has accentuated the boundaries between the two areas by accentuating individualism and secularism, and by developments in particle physics, which reopened the debate about complementarity between scientific and religious discourse and rekindled for many an interest in holistic conceptions of reality.:322 These holistic conceptions

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were championed by New Age spiritualists in a type of quantum mysticism that they claim justifies their spiritual beliefs, though quantum physicists themselves on the whole reject such attempts as being pseudoscientific.

Scientific Research

Health and Well-Being In keeping with the growing scientific interest in spirituality and complementary and alternative treatments, prayer has garnered particular attention among some behavioral scientists. Masters and Spielmans conducted a meta-analysis of the effects of distant intercessory prayer, but detected no discernible effects.

Although psychology of religion research findings have led many to suggest that spirituality might protect believers' mental health, most of this research is of a poor scientific standard. Both supporters and opponents of this claim agree that past statistical findings are difficult to interpret–in large part because of the ongoing disagreement over how spirituality should be defined and measured and also because of evidence that positive emotions might be a necessary precursor for having a spiritual experience in the first place. If true, this implies that spirituality is not the cause of higher well-being, but rather both well-being and spirituality may result from positive emotionality and a sociable disposition.

Nevertheless, a negative correlation between spiritual well-being and depressive symptoms has been found among the elderly — that is, those who felt "good" spiritually were less depressed.

Similarly, cancer and AIDS patients who were more spiritual had lower depressive symptoms than religious patients. If spirituality is a cause of health and well-being it may possibly be because spiritual individuals tend to be optimistic and also report greater social support, higher intrinsic meaning in life, strength, and inner peace. These factors are all especially important for very ill patients. However recent research shows the claimed association between spirituality and social support is spurious. Specifically, the positive correlation between spirituality and social connectedness found when examined in isolation can no longer be found if the effects of agreeableness and conscientiousness — personality traits common in many non-spiritual people yet known to be slightly more common among the spiritual — are also taken into account.

Similarly, the health and well-being effects typically attributed to spirituality have been found to be moderated by these same personality traits.

Additionally, some studies have reported beneficial effects from spirituality in the lives of patients with schizophrenia, major depression, and other psychological disorders. Indeed a few cross-sectional studies have shown that more religiously involved (which is not necessarily identical to spiritual) people had less instance of psychosis, but again this may reflect little more than the well-established health effects of having close social ties and/or religious directives regarding health behaviors (i.e. not to use drugs etc.) and may not be due to spiritual experiences themselves. This possibility cannot be dismissed lightly because a recent study that separately measured virtues (such as hope, kindness, etc.) and spiritual experiences found that although spirituality was positively correlated with well-being, this association vanished (even became

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negative) after controlling out the effects of virtues. That is, virtue (not spirituality) predicted well-being.

In summary the underlying associations among well-being, other psychological, and spiritual variables appear especially complex. This makes the task of identifying the true causal relationships among them particularly onerous. Nevertheless, presently the science seems to be indicating that living a purposeful, conscientious and sociable life, whether this be done in relation to some form of spirituality or not, may be sufficient to explain the health and well-being benefits many mistakenly believe arise from spiritual experience and practice.

Spiritual Experiences Neuroscientists have examined how the brain functions during reported spiritual experiences finding that certain neurotransmitters and specific areas of the brain are involved. Moreover, experimenters have also successfully induced spiritual experiences in individuals by administering psychoactive agents known to elicit euphoria and perceptual distortions. These results have led some leading theorists to speculate that spirituality may be a benign subtype of psychosis.

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Discernment dis·cern·ment (di sərn mənt) 1.

the ability to judge well. "an astonishing lack of discernment"

2.

(in Christian contexts) perception in the absence of judgment with a view to obtaining spiritual direction and understanding. "without providing for a time of healing and discernment, there will be no hope of living through this present moment without a shattering of our common life"

______ Discernment is the ability to obtain sharp perceptions or to judge well (or the activity of so doing). In the case of judgment, discernment can be psychological or moral in nature. In the sphere of judgment, discernment involves going past the mere perception of something and making nuanced judgments about its properties or qualities. Considered as a virtue, a discerning individual is considered to possess wisdom, and be of good judgment; especially so with regard to subject matter often overlooked by others.

Christianity In Christianity, the word may have several meanings. It can be used to describe the process of determining God's desire in a situation or for one's life. In large part, it describes the interior search for an answer to the question of one's vocation, namely, determining whether or not God is calling one to the married life, single life, consecrated life, ordained ministry or any other calling.

Discernment of Spirits Discernment of Spirits is a term used in both Roman Catholic and Charismatic (Evangelist) Christian theology to indicate judging various spiritual agents for their moral influence. ______ What Is Biblical Discernment and Why Is It Important?

By John MacArthur In its simplest definition, discernment is nothing more than the ability to decide between truth and error, right and wrong. Discernment is the process of making careful distinctions in our thinking about truth. In other words, the ability to think with discernment is synonymous with an ability to think biblically.

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First Thessalonians 5:21-22 teaches that it is the responsibility of every Christian to be discerning: "But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good; abstain from every form of evil." The apostle John issues a similar warning when he says, "Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world" (1 John 4:1). According to the New Testament, discernment is not optional for the believer-it is required.

The key to living an uncompromising life lies in one's ability to exercise discernment in every area of his or her life.

For example, failure to distinguish between truth and error leaves the Christian subject to all manner of false teaching. False teaching then leads to an unbiblical mindset, which results in unfruitful and disobedient living-a certain recipe for compromise.

Unfortunately, discernment is an area where most Christians stumble. They exhibit little ability to measure the things they are taught against the infallible standard of God's Word, and they unwittingly engage in all kinds of unbiblical decision-making and behavior. In short, they are not armed to take a decidedly biblical stand against the onslaught of unbiblical thinking and attitudes that face them throughout their day.

Discernment intersects the Christian life at every point. And God's Word provides us with the needed discernment about every issue of life. According to Peter, God "has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence" (2 Peter 1:3). You see, it is through the "true knowledge of Him," that we have been given everything we need to live a Christian life in this fallen world. And how else do we have true knowledge of God but through the pages of His Word, the Bible? In fact, Peter goes on to say that such knowledge comes through God's granting "to us His precious and magnificent promises" (2 Peter 1:4).

Discernment -- the ability to think biblically about all areas of life -- is indispensable to an uncompromising life. It is incumbent upon the Christian to seize upon the discernment that God has provided for in His precious truth!

Without it, Christians are at risk of being "tossed here and there by waves, and carried about by every wind of doctrine" (Ephesians 4:14).

______

Discernment

By Peter Kreeft Does God have one right choice for me in each decision I make?

When we pray for wisdom to discern God's will when it comes to choosing a mate, a career, a job change, a move, a home, a school, a friend, a vacation, how to spend money, or any other choice, big or little, whenever there are two or more different paths opening up before us and we have to choose, does God always will one of those paths for us?

If so, how do we discern it?

Many Christians who struggle with this question today are unaware that Christians of the past can help them from their own experience. Christian wisdom embodied in the lives and teachings of the saints tells us two things that are relevant to this question.

First, they tell us that God not only knows and loves us in general but that he cares about every detail of our lives, and we are to seek to walk in his will in all things, big and little. Second, they tell us that he has given us free will and reason because he wants us to use it to make decisions. This tradition is exemplified in Saint Augustine's famous motto "Love God and [then] do what you will." In other words, if you truly love God and his will, then doing what you will, will, in fact, be doing what God wills.

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Do these two pieces of advice pull us in opposite directions, or do they only seem to? Since there is obviously a great truth embodied in both of them, which do we emphasize the most to resolve our question of whether God has one right way for us?

I think the first and most obvious answer to this question is that it depends on which people are asking it. We have a tendency to emphasize one half of the truth at the expense of the other half, and we can do that in either of the two ways. Every heresy in the history of theology fits this pattern: for instance, emphasizing Christ's divinity at the expense of his humanity or his humanity at the expense of his divinity; or emphasizing divine sovereignty at the expense of free will or free will at the expense of divine sovereignty.

Five general principles of discernment of God's will that apply to all questions about it, and therefore to our question too, are the following: 1.

Always Begin with Data, with what we know for sure. Judge the unknown by the known, the uncertain by the certain. Adam and Eve neglected that principle in Eden and ignored God's clear command and warning for the devil's promised pig in a poke.

2.

Let Your Heart Educate Your Mind. Let your love of God educate your reason in discerning his will. Jesus teaches this principle in John 7:17 to the Pharisees. (Would that certain Scripture scholars today would heed it!) They were asking how they could interpret his words, and he gave them the first principle of hermeneutics (the science of interpretation): "If your will were to do the will of my Father, you would understand my teaching." The saints understand the Bible better than the theologians, because they understand its primary author, God, by loving him with their whole heart and their whole mind.

3.

Have A Soft Heart But A Hard Head. We should be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves," sharp as a fox in thought but loyal as a dog in will and deed. Soft-heartedness does not excuse soft-headedness, and hard-headedness does not excuse hard-heartedness. In our hearts we should be "bleeding-heart liberals" and in our heads "stuck-in-the-mud conservatives."

4.

All God's Signs Should Line Up, by a kind of trigonometry. There are at least seven such signs: (1) Scripture, (2) church teaching, (3) human reason (which God created), (4) the appropriate situation, or circumstances (which he controls by his providence), (5) conscience, our innate sense of right and wrong, (6) our individual personal bent or desire or instincts, and (7) prayer. Test your choice by holding it up before God's face. If one of these seven voices says no, don't do it. If none say no, do it.

5.

Look For The Fruits Of The Spirit, especially the first three: love, joy, and peace. If we are angry and anxious and worried, loveless and joyless and peaceless, we have no right to say we are sure of being securely in God's will. Discernment itself should not be a stiff, brittle, anxious thing, but—since it too is part of God's will for our lives—loving and joyful and peace-filled, more like a game than a war, more like writing love letters than taking final exams.

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Religion A Religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence. Many religions have narratives, symbols, and sacred histories that aim to explain the meaning of life, the origin of life, or the Universe. From their beliefs about the cosmos and human nature, people may derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle.

Many religions may have organized behaviors, clergy, a definition of what constitutes adherence or membership, holy places, and scriptures. The practice of a religion may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of a deity, gods, or goddesses), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service, or other aspects of human culture. Religions may also contain mythology.

The word religion is sometimes used interchangeably with faith or set of duties; however, in the words of Émile Durkheim, religion differs from private belief in that it is "something eminently social". A global 2012 poll reports 59% of the world's population as "religious" and 36% as not religious, including 13% who are atheists, with a 9% decrease in religious belief from 2005. On average, women are "more religious" than men. Some people follow multiple religions or multiple religious principles at the same time, regardless of whether or not the religious principles they follow traditionally allow for syncretism.

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Etymology Religion (from O.Fr. religion "religious community," from L. religionem (nom. religio) "respect for what is sacred, reverence for the gods," "obligation, the bond between man and the gods") is derived from the Latin religiĹ?, the ultimate origins of which are obscure. One possibility is an interpretation traced to Cicero, connecting lego "read", i.e. re (again) + lego in the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully". Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from ligare "bind, connect", probably from a prefixed religare, i.e. re (again) + ligare or "to reconnect," which was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius. The medieval usage alternates with order in designating bonded communities like those of monastic orders: "we hear of the 'religion' of the Golden Fleece, of a knight 'of the religion of Avys'".

According to the philologist Max MĂźller, the root of the English word "religion", the Latin religio, was originally used to mean only "reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety" (which Cicero further derived to mean "diligence"). Max MĂźller characterized many other cultures around the world, including Egypt, Persia, and India, as having a similar power structure at this point in history. What is called ancient religion today, they would have only called "law".

Many languages have words that can be translated as "religion", but they may use them in a very different way, and some have no word for religion at all. For example, the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes translated as "religion", also means law. Throughout classical South Asia, the study of law consisted of concepts such as penance through piety and ceremonial as well as practical traditions. Medieval Japan at first had a similar union between "imperial law" and universal or "Buddha law", but these later became independent sources of power.

There is no precise equivalent of "religion" in Hebrew, and Judaism does not distinguish clearly between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities. One of its central concepts is "halakha", sometimes translated as "law"", which guides religious practice and belief and many aspects of daily life.

The use of other terms, such as obedience to God or Islam are likewise grounded in particular histories and vocabularies.

Definitions There are numerous definitions of religion and only a few are stated here. The typical dictionary definition of religion refers to a "belief in, or the worship of, a god or gods" or the "service and worship of God or the supernatural". However, writers and scholars have expanded upon the "belief in god" definitions as insufficient to capture the diversity of religious thought and experience.

Peter Mandaville and Paul James define religion as "a relatively-bounded system of beliefs, symbols and practices that addresses the nature of existence, and in which communion with others and Otherness is lived as if it both takes in and spiritually transcends socially-grounded Page 35 of 138

ontologies of time, space, embodiment and knowing". This definition is intended, they write, to get away from the modernist dualisms or dichotomous understandings of immanence/transcendence, spirituality/materialism, and sacredness/secularity.

Edward Burnett Tylor defined religion as "the belief in spiritual beings". He argued, back in 1871, that narrowing the definition to mean the belief in a supreme deity or judgment after death or idolatry and so on, would exclude many peoples from the category of religious, and thus "has the fault of identifying religion rather with particular developments than with the deeper motive which underlies them". He also argued that the belief in spiritual beings exists in all known societies.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined religion as a "system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." Alluding perhaps to Tylor's "deeper motive", Geertz remarked that "we have very little idea of how, in empirical terms, this particular miracle is accomplished. We just know that it is done, annually, weekly, daily, for some people almost hourly; and we have an enormous ethnographic literature to demonstrate it". The theologian Antoine Vergote also emphasized the "cultural reality" of religion, which he defined as "the entirety of the linguistic expressions, emotions and, actions and signs that refer to a supernatural being or supernatural beings"; he took the term "supernatural" simply to mean whatever transcends the powers of nature or human agency.

The sociologist Durkheim, in his seminal book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, defined religion as a "unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things". By sacred things he meant things "set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them". Sacred things are not, however, limited to gods or spirits. On the contrary, a sacred thing can be "a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred". Religious beliefs, myths, dogmas and legends are the representations that express the nature of these sacred things, and the virtues and powers which are attributed to them.

In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, the psychologist William James defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine". By the term "divine" James meant "any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not" to which the individual feels impelled to respond with solemnity and gravity.

Echoes of James' and Durkheim's definitions are to be found in the writings of, for example, Frederick FerrĂŠ who defined religion as "one's way of valuing most comprehensively and intensively". Similarly, for the theologian Paul Tillich, faith is "the state of being ultimately

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concerned", which "is itself religion. Religion is the substance, the ground, and the depth of man's spiritual life." Friedrich Schleiermacher in the late 18th century defined religion as das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl, commonly translated as "a feeling of absolute dependence". His contemporary Hegel disagreed thoroughly, defining religion as "the Divine Spirit becoming conscious of Himself through the finite spirit."

When religion is seen in terms of "sacred", "divine", intensive "valuing", or "ultimate concern", then it is possible to understand why scientific findings and philosophical criticisms (e.g. Richard Dawkins) do not necessarily disturb its adherents.

An increasing number of scholars have expressed reservations about ever defining the "essence" of religion. They observe that the way we use the concept today is a particularly modern construct that would not have been understood through much of history and in many cultures outside the West (or even in the West until after the Peace of Westphalia).

Theories Origins and Development The origin of religion is uncertain. There are a number of theories regarding the subsequent origins of organized religious practices.

According to anthropologists John Monaghan and Peter Just, "Many of the great world religions appear to have begun as revitalization movements of some sort, as the vision of a charismatic prophet fires the imaginations of people seeking a more comprehensive answer to their problems than they feel is provided by everyday beliefs. Charismatic individuals have emerged at many times and places in the world. It seems that the key to long-term success – and many movements come and go with little long-term effect – has relatively little to do with the prophets, who appear with surprising regularity, but more to do with the development of a group of supporters who are able to institutionalize the movement."

The development of religion has taken different forms in different cultures. Some religions place an emphasis on belief, while others emphasize practice. Some religions focus on the subjective experience of the religious individual, while others consider the activities of the religious community to be most important. Some religions claim to be universal, believing their laws and cosmology to be binding for everyone, while others are intended to be practiced only by a closely defined or localized group. In many places religion has been associated with public institutions such as education, hospitals, the family, government, and political hierarchies.

Anthropologists John Monoghan and Peter Just state that, "it seems apparent that one thing religion or belief helps us do is deal with problems of human life that are significant, persistent, and intolerable. One important way in which religious beliefs accomplish this is by providing a set of ideas about how and why the world is put together that allows people to accommodate anxieties and deal with misfortune."

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Social Constructionism One modern academic theory of religion, social constructionism, says that religion is a modern concept that suggests all spiritual practice and worship follows a model similar to the Abrahamic religions as an orientation system that helps to interpret reality and define human beings. Among the main proponents of this theory of religion are Daniel Dubuisson, Timothy Fitzgerald, Talal Asad, and Jason Ānanda Josephson. The social constructionists argue that religion is a modern concept that developed from Christianity and was then applied inappropriately to non-Western cultures.

Daniel Dubuisson, a French anthropologist, says that the idea of religion has changed a lot over time and that one cannot fully understand its development by relying on consistent use of the term, which "tends to minimize or cancel out the role of history". "What the West and the history of religions in its wake have objectified under the name 'religion'", he says, " is ... something quite unique, which could be appropriate only to itself and its own history." He notes that St. Augustine's definition of religio differed from the way we used the modern word "religion".

Dubuisson prefers the term "cosmographic formation" to religion. Dubuisson says that, with the emergence of religion as a category separate from culture and society, there arose religious studies. The initial purpose of religious studies was to demonstrate the superiority of the "living" or "universal" European world view to the "dead" or "ethnic" religions scattered throughout the rest of the world, expanding the teleological project of Schleiermacher and Tiele to a worldwide ideal religiousness. Due to shifting theological currents, this was eventually supplanted by a liberal-ecumenical interest in searching for Western-style universal truths in every cultural tradition.

According to Fitzgerald, religion is not a universal feature of all cultures, but rather a particular idea that first developed in Europe under the influence of Christianity. Fitzgerald argues that from about the 4th century CE Western Europe and the rest of the world diverged. As Christianity became commonplace, the charismatic authority identified by Augustine, a quality we might today call "religiousness", exerted a commanding influence at the local level. As the Church lost its dominance during the Protestant Reformation and Christianity became closely tied to political structures, religion was recast as the basis of national sovereignty, and religious

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identity gradually became a less universal sense of spirituality and more divisive, locally defined, and tied to nationality. It was at this point that "religion" was dissociated with universal beliefs and moved closer to dogma in both meaning and practice. However there was not yet the idea of dogma as a personal choice, only of established churches. With the Enlightenment religion lost its attachment to nationality, says Fitzgerald, but rather than becoming a universal social attitude, it now became a personal feeling or emotion.

Asad argues that before the word "religion" came into common usage, Christianity was a disciplina, a "rule" just like that of the Roman Empire. This idea can be found in the writings of St. Augustine (354–430). Christianity was then a power structure opposing and superseding human institutions, a literal Kingdom of Heaven. It was the discipline taught by one's family, school, church, and city authorities, rather than something calling one to self-discipline through symbols.

These ideas are developed by S. N. Balagangadhara. In the Age of Enlightenment, Balagangadhara says that the idea of Christianity as the purest expression of spirituality was supplanted by the concept of "religion" as a worldwide practice. This caused such ideas as religious freedom, a reexamination of classical philosophy as an alternative to Christian thought, and more radically Deism among intellectuals such as Voltaire. Much like Christianity, the idea of "religious freedom" was exported around the world as a civilizing technique, even to regions such as India that had never treated spirituality as a matter of political identity.

More recently, in The Invention of Religion in Japan, Josephson has argued that while the concept of "religion" was Christian in its early formulation, non-Europeans (such as the Japanese) did not just acquiesce and passively accept the term's meaning. Instead they worked to interpret "religion" (and its boundaries) strategically to meet their own agendas and staged these new meanings for a global audience. In nineteenth century Japan, Buddhism was radically transformed from a pre-modern philosophy of natural law into a "religion," as Japanese leaders worked to address domestic and international political concerns. In summary, Josephson argues that the European encounter with other cultures has led to a partial de-Christianization of the category religion. Hence "religion" has come to refer to a confused collection of traditions with no possible coherent definition.

George Lindbeck, a Lutheran and a postliberal theologian (but not a social constructionist), says that religion does not refer to belief in "God" or a transcendent Absolute, but rather to "a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought ... it is similar to an idiom that makes possible the description of realities, the formulation of beliefs, and the experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings, and sentiments."

Comparative Religion Nicholas de Lange, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Cambridge University, says that "The comparative study of religions is an academic discipline which has been developed within Christian theology faculties, and it has a tendency to force widely differing phenomena into a kind of strait-jacket cut to a Christian pattern. The problem is not only that other 'religions' may have little or nothing to say about questions which are of burning importance for Christianity, but

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that they may not even see themselves as religions in precisely the same way in which Christianity sees itself as a religion."

Types A map of major denominations and religions of the world

Categories Some scholars classify religions as either universal religions that seek worldwide acceptance and actively look for new converts, or ethnic religions that are identified with a particular ethnic group and do not seek converts. Others reject the distinction, pointing out that all religious practices, whatever their philosophical origin, are ethnic because they come from a particular culture.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the academic practice of comparative religion divided religious belief into philosophically defined categories called "world religions." However, some recent scholarship has argued that not all types of religion are necessarily separated by mutually exclusive philosophies, and furthermore that the utility of ascribing a practice to a certain philosophy, or even calling a given practice religious, rather than cultural, political, or social in nature, is limited. The current state of psychological study about the nature of religiousness suggests that it is better to refer to religion as a largely invariant phenomenon that should be distinguished from cultural norms (i.e. "religions").

Some academics studying the subject have divided religions into three broad categories: 1. world religions, a term which refers to trans-cultural, international faiths; 2. indigenous religions, which refers to smaller, culture-specific or nation-specific religious groups; and 3. new religious movements, which refers to recently developed faiths.

Interfaith Cooperation Because religion continues to be recognized in Western thought as a universal impulse, many religious practitioners have aimed to band together in interfaith dialogue, cooperation, and religious peacebuilding. The first major dialogue was the Parliament of the World's Religions at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which remains notable even today both in affirming "universal values" and recognition of the diversity of practices among different cultures. The 20th century has been especially fruitful in use of interfaith dialogue as a means of solving ethnic, political, or

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even religious conflict, with Christian–Jewish reconciliation representing a complete reverse in the attitudes of many Christian communities towards Jews.

Recent interfaith initiatives include "A Common Word", launched in 2007 and focused on bringing Muslim and Christian leaders together, the "C1 World Dialogue", the "Common Ground" initiative between Islam and Buddhism, and a United Nations sponsored "World Interfaith Harmony Week".

Religious Groups The list of still-active religious movements given here is an attempt to summarize the most important regional and philosophical influences on local communities, but it is by no means a complete description of every religious community, nor does it explain the most important elements of individual religiousness.

The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism) and traditional folk religion.

Five largest religions Buddhism Christianity Folk religion Hinduism Islam Total

2010 (billion) 0.5 2.2 0.4 1.0 1.6 5.8

2010 (%) 7% 32% 6% 15% 23% 84%

2000 (billion) 0.360 2.0 0.385 0.811 1.2 4.8

2000 (%) 5.9% 33% 6.4% 13.4% 19.6% 78.3%

Demographics Buddhism by country Christianity by country Hinduism by country Islam by country

Abrahamic Abrahamic religions are monotheistic religions which believe they descend from Abraham.

Judaism is the oldest Abrahamic religion, originating in the people of ancient Israel and Judea.

Judaism is based primarily on the Torah, a text which some Jews believe was handed down to the people of Israel through the prophet Moses. This along with the rest of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud are the central texts of Judaism. The Jewish people were scattered after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Today there are about 13 million Jews, about 40 per cent living in Israel and 40 per cent in the United States.

Christianity is based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (1st century) as presented in the New Testament. The Christian faith is essentially faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, and as Savior and Lord. Almost all Christians believe in the Trinity, which teaches the unity of Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead. Most Christians can describe their faith with the Nicene Creed. As the religion of Byzantine Empire in the first millennium and of Western Europe during the time of colonization, Christianity has been

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propagated throughout the world. The main divisions of Christianity are, according to the number of adherents:   

Catholic Church, headed by the Pope in Rome, is a communion of the Western church and 22 Eastern Catholic churches.

Eastern Christianity, which include Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Church of the East.

Protestantism, separated from the Catholic Church in the 16th-century Reformation and split in many denominations.

There are also smaller groups, including:   

Restorationism, the belief that Christianity should be restored (as opposed to reformed) along the lines of what is known about the apostolic early church.

Latter Day Saint movement, founded by Joseph Smith in the late 1820s.

Jehovah's Witnesses, founded in the late 1870s by Charles Taze Russell.

Islam is based on the Quran, one of the holy books considered by Muslims to be revealed by God, and on the teachings (hadith) of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, a major political and religious figure of the 7th century CE. Islam is the most widely practiced religion of Southeast

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Asia, North Africa, Western Asia, and Central Asia, while Muslim-majority countries also exist in parts of South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Europe. There are also several Islamic republics, including Iran, Pakistan, Mauritania, and Afghanistan.    

Sunni Islam is the largest denomination within Islam and follows the Quran, the hadiths which record the sunnah, whilst placing emphasis on the sahabah.

Shia Islam is the second largest denomination of Islam and its adherents believe that Ali succeeded Muhammad and further places emphasis on Muhammad's family.

Ahmadiyya adherents believe that the awaited Imam Mahdi and the Promised Messiah has arrived, believed to be Mirza Ghulam Ahmad by Ahmadis.

There are also Muslim revivalist movements such as Muwahhidism and Salafism.

Other denominations of Islam include Nation of Islam, Ibadi, Sufism, Quranism, Mahdavia, and non-denominational Muslims. Wahhabism is the dominant Muslim schools of thought in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The Bahá'í Faith is an Abrahamic religion founded in 19th century Iran and since then has spread worldwide. It teaches unity of all religious philosophies and accepts all of the prophets of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as well as additional prophets including its founder Bahá'u'lláh.

Smaller regional Abrahamic groups also exist, including Samaritanism (primarily in Israel and the West Bank), the Rastafari movement (primarily in Jamaica), and Druze (primarily in Syria and Lebanon).

Iranian Iranian religions are ancient religions whose roots predate the Islamization of Greater Iran.

Nowadays these religions are practiced only by minorities.

Zoroastrianism is based on the teachings of prophet Zoroaster in the 6th century BC. Zoroastrians worship the creator Ahura Mazda. In Zoroastrianism good and evil have distinct sources, with evil trying to destroy the creation of Mazda, and good trying to sustain it.

Mandaeism is a monotheistic religion with a strongly dualistic worldview. Mandaeans are sometime labeled as the "Last Gnostics".

Kurdish religions include the traditional beliefs of the Yazidi, Alevi, and Ahl-e Haqq. Sometimes these are labeled Yazdânism.

Indian Indian religions are practiced or were founded in the Indian subcontinent. They are sometimes classified as the dharmic religions, as they all feature dharma, the specific law of reality and duties expected according to the religion.

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Hinduism is a synecdoche describing the similar philosophies of Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and related groups practiced or founded in the Indian subcontinent. Concepts most of them share in common include karma, caste, reincarnation, mantras, yantras, and darśana. Hinduism is the most ancient of still-active religions, with origins perhaps as far back as prehistoric times.

Hinduism is not a monolithic religion but a religious category containing dozens of separate philosophies amalgamated as Sanātana Dharma, which is the name by which Hinduism has been known throughout history by its followers.

Jainism, taught primarily by Parsva (9th century BCE) and Mahavira (6th century BCE), is an ancient Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence for all forms of living beings in this world. Jains are found mostly in India.

Buddhism was founded by Siddhattha Gotama in the 6th century BCE. Buddhists generally agree that Gotama aimed to help sentient beings end their suffering (dukkha) by understanding the true nature of phenomena, thereby escaping the cycle of suffering and rebirth (saṃsāra), that is, achieving nirvana. 



 

Theravada Buddhism, which is practiced mainly in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia alongside folk religion, shares some characteristics of Indian religions. It is based in a large collection of texts called the Pali Canon.

Mahayana Buddhism (or the "Great Vehicle") under which are a multitude of doctrines that became prominent in China and are still relevant in Vietnam, Korea, Japan and to a lesser extent in Europe and the United States. Mahayana Buddhism includes such disparate teachings as Zen, Pure Land, and Soka Gakkai.

Vajrayana Buddhism first appeared in India in the 3rd century CE. It is currently most prominent in the Himalaya regions and extends across all of Asia (cf. Mikkyō).

Two notable new Buddhist sects are Hòa Hảo and the Dalit Buddhist movement, which were developed separately in the 20th century.

Sikhism is a monotheistic religion founded on the teachings of Guru Nanak and ten successive Sikh gurus in 15th century Punjab. It is the fifth-largest organized religion in the world, with approximately 30 million Sikhs.[82][83] Sikhs are expected to embody the qualities of a SantSipāhī—a saint-soldier, have control over one's internal vices and be able to be constantly immersed in virtues clarified in the Guru Granth Sahib. The principal beliefs of Sikhi are faith in Waheguru—represented by the phrase ik ōaṅkār, meaning one God, who prevails in everything, along with a praxis in which the Sikh is enjoined to engage in social reform through the pursuit of justice for all human beings.

East Asian Religions East Asian religions (also known as Far Eastern religions or Taoic religions) consist of several religions of East Asia which make use of the concept of Tao (in Chinese) or Dō (in Japanese or Korean). They

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include:  



Taoism and Confucianism, as well as Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese religion influenced by Chinese thought.

Chinese folk religion: the indigenous religions of the Han Chinese, or, by metonymy, of all the populations of the Chinese cultural sphere. It includes the syncretism of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, Wuism, as well as many new religious movements such as Chen Tao, Falun Gong and Yiguandao.

Other folk and new religions of East Asia and Southeast Asia such as Korean shamanism, Chondogyo, and Jeung San Do in Korea; Shinto, Shugendo, Ryukyuan religion, and Japanese new religions in Japan; Satsana Phi in Laos; Cao Đài, Hòa Hảo, and Vietnamese folk religion in Vietnam.

African Traditional African traditional religion encompasses the traditional religious beliefs of people in Africa. In north Africa, these religions have included traditional Berber religion, ancient Egyptian religion, and Waaq. West African religions include Akan religion, Dahomey (Fon) mythology, Efik mythology, Odinani of the Igbo people, Serer religion, and Yoruba religion, while Bushongo mythology, Mbuti (Pygmy) mythology, Lugbara mythology, Dinka religion, and Lotuko mythology come from central Africa. Southern African traditions include Akamba mythology, Masai mythology, Malagasy mythology, San religion, Lozi mythology, Tumbuka mythology, and Zulu mythology. Bantu mythology is found throughout central, southeast, and southern Africa.

There are also notable African diasporic religions practiced in the Americas, such as Santeria, Candomble, Vodun, Lucumi, Umbanda, and Macumba.

Indigenous and Folk Indigenous religions or folk religions refers to a broad category of traditional religions that can be characterised by shamanism, animism and ancestor worship, where traditional means "indigenous, that which is aboriginal or foundational, handed down from generation to generation…".[84] These are religions that are closely associated with a particular group of people, ethnicity or tribe; they often have no formal creeds or sacred texts.[85] Some faiths are syncretic, fusing diverse religious beliefs and practices.[86] 

Australian Aboriginal religions.

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Folk religions of the Americas: Native American religions

Folk religions are often omitted as a category in surveys even in countries where they are widely practiced, e.g. in China.

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New Religious Movements 

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Shinshūkyō is a general category for a wide variety of religious movements founded in Japan since the 19th century. These movements share almost nothing in common except the place of their founding. The largest religious movements centered in Japan include Soka Gakkai, Tenrikyo, and Seicho-No-Ie among hundreds of smaller groups.

Cao Đài is a syncretistic, monotheistic religion, established in Vietnam in 1926.

Raëlism is a new religious movement founded in 1974 teaching that humans were created by aliens. It is numerically the world's largest UFO religion.

Hindu reform movements, such as Ayyavazhi, Swaminarayan Faith and Ananda Marga, are examples of new religious movements within Indian religions.

Unitarian Universalism is a religion characterized by support for a "free and responsible search for truth and meaning", and has no accepted creed or theology.

Noahidism is a monotheistic ideology based on the Seven Laws of Noah, and on their traditional interpretations within Rabbinic Judaism.

Scientology teaches that people are immortal beings who have forgotten their true nature.

Its method of spiritual rehabilitation is a type of counseling known as auditing, in which practitioners aim to consciously re-experience and understand painful or traumatic events and decisions in their past in order to free themselves of their limiting effects.

Eckankar is a pantheistic religion with the purpose of making God an everyday reality in one's life.

Wicca is a neo-pagan religion first popularised in 1954 by British civil servant Gerald Gardner, involving the worship of a God and Goddess.

Druidry is a religion promoting harmony with nature, and drawing on the practices of the druids.

Satanism is a broad category of religions that, for example, worship Satan as a deity (Theistic Satanism) or use "Satan" as a symbol of carnality and earthly values (LaVeyan Satanism).

Sociological classifications of religious movements suggest that within any given religious group, a community can resemble various types of structures, including "churches", "denominations", "sects", "cults", and "institutions".

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Issues Economics The national income of countries correlates negatively with their religiosity.

While there has been much debate about how religion affects the economy of countries, in general there is a negative correlation between religiosity and the wealth of nations. In other words, the richer a nation is, the less religious it tends to be. However, sociologist and political economist Max Weber has argued that Protestant Christian countries are wealthier because of their Protestant work ethic.

Health Mayo Clinic researchers examined the association between religious involvement and spirituality, and physical health, mental health, health-related quality of life, and other health outcomes. The authors reported that: "Most studies have shown that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes, including greater longevity, coping skills, and health-related quality of life (even during terminal illness) and less anxiety, depression, and suicide."

The authors of a subsequent study concluded that the influence of religion on health is "largely beneficial", based on a review of related literature. According to academic James W. Jones, several studies have discovered "positive correlations between religious belief and practice and mental and physical health and longevity."

An analysis of data from the 1998 US General Social Survey, whilst broadly confirming that religious activity was associated with better health and well-being, also suggested that the role of different dimensions of spirituality/religiosity in health is rather more complicated. The results suggested "that it may not be appropriate to generalize findings about the relationship between spirituality/religiosity and health from one form of spirituality/religiosity to another, across denominations, or to assume effects are uniform for men and women.

Violence Charles Selengut characterizes the phrase "religion and violence" as "jarring", asserting that "religion is thought to be opposed to violence and a force for peace and reconciliation. He acknowledges, however, that "the history and scriptures of the world's religions tell stories of violence and war as they speak of peace and love."

Hector Avalos argues that, because religions claim divine favor for themselves, over and against other groups, this sense of righteousness leads to violence because conflicting claims to superiority, based on unverifiable appeals to God, cannot be adjudicated objectively.

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Critics of religion Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins go further and argue that religions do tremendous harm to society by using violence to promote their goals, in ways that are endorsed and exploited by their leaders.

Regina Schwartz argues that all monotheistic religions are inherently violent because of an exclusivism that inevitably fosters violence against those that are considered outsiders. Lawrence Wechsler asserts that Schwartz isn't just arguing that Abrahamic religions have a violent legacy, but that the legacy is actually genocidal in nature.

Byron Bland asserts that one of the most prominent reasons for the "rise of the secular in Western thought" was the reaction against the religious violence of the 16th and 17th centuries.

He asserts that "(t)he secular was a way of living with the religious differences that had produced so much horror. Under secularity, political entities have a warrant to make decisions independent from the need to enforce particular versions of religious orthodoxy. Indeed, they may run counter to certain strongly held beliefs if made in the interest of common welfare. Thus, one of the important goals of the secular is to limit violence."

Nonetheless, believers have used similar arguments when responding to atheists in these discussions, pointing to the widespread imprisonment and mass murder of individuals under atheist states in the twentieth century: And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of a Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic? Who can dispute that they did their bloody deeds by claiming to be establishing a 'new man' and a religion-free utopia? These were mass murders performed with atheism as a central part of their ideological inspiration, they were not mass murders done by people who simply happened to be atheist. —Dinesh D'Souza In response to such a line of argument, however, author Sam Harris writes: The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable. —Sam Harris Richard Dawkins has stated that Stalin's atrocities were influenced not by atheism but by dogmatic Marxism, and concludes that while Stalin and Mao happened to be atheists, they did not do their deeds in the name of atheism. On other occasions, Dawkins has replied to the argument that Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were antireligious with the response that Hitler and

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Stalin also grew moustaches, in an effort to show the argument as fallacious. Instead, Dawkins argues in The God Delusion that "What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does." Dawkins adds that Hitler in fact, repeatedly affirmed a strong belief in Christianity, but that his atrocities were no more attributable to his theism than Stalin's or Mao's were to their atheism. In all three cases, he argues, the perpetrators' level of religiosity was incidental. D'Souza responds that an individual need not explicitly invoke atheism in committing atrocities if it is already implied in his worldview, as is the case in Marxism.

Law The study of law and religion is a relatively new field, with several thousand scholars involved in law schools, and academic departments including political science, religion, and history since 1980. Scholars in the field are not only focused on strictly legal issues about religious freedom or non-establishment, but also study religions as they are qualified through judicial discourses or legal understanding of religious phenomena. Exponents look at canon law, natural law, and state law, often in a comparative perspective. Specialists have explored themes in western history regarding Christianity and justice and mercy, rule and equity, and discipline and love. Common topics of interest include marriage and the family and human rights. Outside of Christianity, scholars have looked at law and religion links in the Muslim Middle East and pagan Rome.

Studies have focused on secularization. In particular the issue of wearing religious symbols in public, such as headscarves that are banned in French schools, have received scholarly attention in the context of human rights and feminism.

Science Religious knowledge, according to religious practitioners, may be gained from religious leaders, sacred texts, scriptures, or personal revelation.

Some religions view such knowledge as unlimited in scope and suitable to answer any question; others see religious knowledge as playing a more restricted role, often as a complement to knowledge gained through physical observation.

Adherents to various religious faiths often maintain that religious knowledge obtained via sacred texts or revelation is absolute and infallible and thereby creates an accompanying religious cosmology, although the proof for such is often tautological and generally limited to the religious texts and revelations that form the foundation of their belief.

In contrast, the scientific method gains knowledge by testing hypotheses to develop theories through elucidation of facts or evaluation by experiments and thus only answers cosmological questions about the universe that can be observed and measured. It develops theories of the world which best fit physically observed evidence. All scientific knowledge is subject to later refinement, or even outright rejection, in the face of additional evidence. Scientific theories that have an overwhelming preponderance of favorable evidence are often treated as de facto verities in general parlance, such as the theories of general relativity and natural selection to explain respectively the mechanisms of gravity and evolution.

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Regarding religion and science, Albert Einstein states (1940): "For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action; it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts‌Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determine the goals, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up."

Animal Sacrifice Animal sacrifice is the ritual killing and offering of an animal to appease or maintain favour with a deity. Such forms of sacrifice are practiced within many religions around the world and have appeared historically in almost all cultures.

Related Forms of Thought Superstition Superstition has been described as "the incorrect establishment of cause and effect" or a false conception of causation. Religion is more complex and includes social institutions and morality.

But religions may include superstitions or make use of magical thinking. Adherents of one religion sometimes think of other religions as superstition. Some atheists, deists, and skeptics regard religious belief as superstition.

Greek and Roman pagans, who saw their relations with the gods in political and social terms, scorned the man who constantly trembled with fear at the thought of the gods (deisidaimonia), as a slave might fear a cruel and capricious master. The Romans called such fear of the gods superstitio. Early Christianity was outlawed as a superstitio Iudaica, a "Jewish superstition", by Domitian in the 80s AD. In AD 425, when Rome had become Christian, Theodosius II outlawed pagan traditions as superstitious.

Ancient greek historian Polybius described superstition in Ancient Rome as an instrumentum regni, an instrument of maintaining the cohesion of the Empire.

The Roman Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful in the sense that it denotes a lack of trust in the divine providence of God and, as such, is a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that superstition "in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion" (para. #2110). "Superstition," it says, "is a deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand is to fall into superstition. Cf. Matthew 23:16-22" (para. #2111)

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Myth The word myth has several meanings.

1. A traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon; 2. A person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence; or 3. A metaphor for the spiritual potentiality in the human being.

Ancient polytheistic religions, such as those of Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, are usually categorized under the heading of mythology. Religions of pre-industrial peoples, or cultures in development, are similarly called "myths" in the anthropology of religion. The term "myth" can be used pejoratively by both religious and non-religious people. By defining another person's religious stories and beliefs as mythology, one implies that they are less real or true than one's own religious stories and beliefs. Joseph Campbell remarked, "Mythology is often thought of as other people's religions, and religion can be defined as mis-interpreted mythology."

In sociology, however, the term myth has a non-pejorative meaning. There, myth is defined as a story that is important for the group whether or not it is objectively or provably true. Examples include the death and resurrection of Jesus, which, to Christians, explains the means by which they are freed from sin and is also ostensibly a historical event. But from a mythological outlook, whether or not the event actually occurred is unimportant. Instead, the symbolism of the death of an old "life" and the start of a new "life" is what is most significant. Religious believers may or may not accept such symbolic interpretations.

Secularism and Irreligion The terms "atheist" (lack of belief in any gods) and "agnostic" (belief in the unknowability of the existence of gods), though specifically contrary to theistic (e.g. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) religious teachings, do not by definition mean the opposite of "religious". There are religions (including Buddhism and Taoism), in fact, that classify some of their followers as agnostic, atheistic, or nontheistic. The true opposite of "religious" is the word "irreligious". Irreligion describes an absence of any religion; antireligion describes an active opposition or aversion toward religions in general.

As religion became a more personal matter in Western culture, discussions of society became more focused on political and scientific meaning, and religious attitudes (dominantly Christian) were increasingly seen as irrelevant for the needs of the European world. On the political side, Ludwig Feuerbach recast Christian beliefs in light of humanism, paving the way for Karl Marx's famous characterization of religion as "the opium of the people". Meanwhile, in the scientific community, T.H. Huxley in 1869 coined the term "agnostic," a term—subsequently adopted by such figures as Robert Ingersoll—that, while directly conflicting with and novel to Christian tradition, is accepted and even embraced in some other religions. Later, Bertrand Russell told the world Why I Am Not a Christian, which influenced several later authors to discuss their breakaway from their own religious upbringings from Islam to Hinduism.

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Some atheists also construct parody religions, for example, the Church of the SubGenius or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which parodies the equal time argument employed by intelligent design Creationism.[129] Parody religions may also be considered a post-modern approach to religion. For instance, in Discordianism, it may be hard to tell if even these "serious" followers are not just taking part in an even bigger joke. This joke, in turn, may be part of a greater path to enlightenment, and so on ad infinitum.

Criticism of Religion Religious criticism has a long history, going back at least as far as the 5th century BCE. During classical times, there were religious critics in ancient Greece, such as Diagoras "the atheist" of Melos, and in the 1st century BCE in Rome, with Titus Lucretius Carus's De Rerum Natura.

During the Middle Ages and continuing into the Renaissance, potential critics of religion were persecuted and largely forced to remain silent. There were notable critics like Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for disagreeing with religious authority.

In the 17th and 18th century with the Enlightenment, thinkers like David Hume and Voltaire criticized religion.

In the 19th century, Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution led to increased skepticism about religion. Thomas Huxley, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx, Charles Bradlaugh, Robert Ingersol, and Mark Twain were noted 19th-century and early-20th-century critics. In the 20th century, Bertrand Russell, Siegmund Freud, and others continued religious criticism.

Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Victor J. Stenger, and the late Christopher Hitchens were active critics during the late 20th century and early 21st century.

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Critics consider religion to be outdated, harmful to the individual (e.g. brainwashing of children, faith healing, female genital mutilation, circumcision), harmful to society (e.g. holy wars, terrorism, wasteful distribution of resources), to impede the progress of science, to exert social control, and to encourage immoral acts (e.g. blood sacrifice, discrimination against homosexuals and women, and certain forms of sexual violence such as marital rape). A major criticism of many religions is that they require beliefs that are irrational, unscientific, or unreasonable, because religious beliefs and traditions lack scientific or rational foundations.

Some modern-day critics, such as Bryan Caplan, hold that religion lacks utility in human society; they may regard religion as irrational. Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi has spoken out against undemocratic Islamic countries justifying "oppressive acts" in the name of Islam.

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Culture Culture (/kĘŒltĘƒÉ™r/) is, in the words of E.B. Tylor, "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." (Tylor 1871:1) As a defining aspect of what it means to be human, culture is a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies.

The word is used in a general sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols and to act imaginatively and creatively. This ability arose with the evolution of behavioral modernity in humans around 50,000 years ago. This capacity is often thought to be unique to humans, although some other species have demonstrated similar, though much less complex abilities for social learning. It is also used to denote the complex networks of practices and accumulated knowledge and ideas that is transmitted through social interaction and exist in specific human groups, or cultures, using the plural form. Some aspects of human behavior, such as language, social practices such as kinship, gender and marriage, expressive forms such as music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies such as cooking, shelter, clothing are said to be cultural universals, found in all human societies. The concept material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including, practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science make up the intangible cultural heritage of a society.

In the humanities, one sense of culture, as an attribute of the individual, has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication, in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been seen to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in Class based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the lower classes and create a false consciousness, such perspectives common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical Page 55 of 138

perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.

When used as a count noun "a culture", is the set of customs, traditions and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. In this sense the concept of multiculturalism is a political ideology that values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same territory. Sometimes "culture" is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture (e.g. "bro culture"), or a counter culture.

Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism holds that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture.

Etymology The modern term "culture" is based on a term used by the Ancient Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or "cultura animi", using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a modern context, meaning something similar, but no longer assuming that philosophy was man's natural perfection. His use, and that of many writers after him "refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human".

Philosopher Edward S. Casey (1996) describes: "The very word culture meant "place tilled" in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, "to inhabit, care for, till, worship."

To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it - to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly."

Culture described by Velkley: ... originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meanings in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau's criticism of ″modern liberalism and Enlightenment″. Thus a contrast between "culture" and "civilization" is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such. Two primary meanings of culture emerge from this period: culture as the folk-spirit having a unique identity and culture as cultivation of waywardness or free individuality. The first meaning is predominant in our current use of the term "culture," although the second still plays a large role in what we think culture should achieve, namely the full "expression" of the unique or "authentic" self.

Change Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object.

Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change period", driven by the expansion of Page 56 of 138

international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors.

Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change.

These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change. (See structuration.)

Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change.

For example, the U.S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.

Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer

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from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, hamburgers, fast food in the United States, seemed exotic when introduced into China. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct Borrowing" on the other hand tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.

Acculturation has different meanings, but in this context it refers to replacement of the traits of one culture with those of another, such as what happened to certain Native American tribes and to many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and trans-culturation.

Early Modern Discourses German Romanticism The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) has formulated an individualist definition of "enlightenment" similar to the concept of bildung: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." He argued that this immaturity comes not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of courage to think independently. Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged: Sapere aude, "Dare to be wise!" In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective form of bildung: "For Herder, Bildung was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people."

In 1795, the great linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests. During the Romantic era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with nationalist movements—such as the nationalist struggle to create a "Germany" out of diverse principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities against the Austro-Hungarian Empire—developed a more inclusive notion of culture as "worldview" (Weltanschauung). According to this school of thought, each ethnic group has a distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the worldviews of other groups. Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between "civilized" and "primitive" or "tribal" cultures.

In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) argued for "the psychic unity of mankind". He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of "elementary ideas" (Elementargedanken); different cultures, or different "folk ideas" (Völkergedanken), are local modifications of the elementary ideas. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture. Franz Boas (1858–1942) was trained in this tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for the United States.

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English Romanticism In the 19th century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) used the word "culture" to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." This concept of culture is comparable to the German concept of bildung: "...culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world."

In practice, culture referred to an ĂŠlite ideal and was associated with such activities as art, classical music, and haute cuisine. As these forms were associated with urban life, "culture" was identified with "civilization" (from lat. civitas, city). Another facet of the Romantic movement was an interest in folklore, which led to identifying a "culture" among non-elites. This distinction is often characterized as that between high culture, namely that of the ruling social group, and low culture. In other words, the idea of "culture" that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within European societies.

Matthew Arnold contrasted "culture" with anarchy; other Europeans, following philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contrasted "culture" with "the state of nature".

According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the Native Americans who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between "civilized" and "uncivilized." According to this way of thinking, one could classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution. Just as some critics have argued that the distinction between high and low cultures is really an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, some critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people is really an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects.

Other 19th-century critics, following Rousseau have accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people's essential nature. These critics considered folk music (as produced by "the folk", i.e., rural, illiterate, peasants) to honestly express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as "noble savages" living authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly stratified capitalist systems of the West.

In 1870 the anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion. According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms. In the process, he redefined culture as a

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diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture.

Anthropology Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor's definition of culture, in the 20th century "culture" emerged as the central and unifying concept of American anthropology, where it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture: biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology.

Sociology The sociology of culture concerns culture—usually understood as the ensemble of symbolic codes used by a society—as manifested in society. For Georg Simmel (1858-1918), culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history". Culture in the sociological field can be defined as the ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together shape a people's way of life. Culture can be any of two types, non-material culture or material culture.

Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany (1918-1933), where sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term Kultursoziologie (cultural sociology). Cultural sociology was then "reinvented" in the English-speaking world as a product of the "cultural turn" of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and postmodern approaches to social science. This type of cultural sociology may loosely be regarded as an approach incorporating cultural analysis and critical theory. Cultural sociologists tend to reject scientific methods,[citation needed] instead hermeneutically focusing on words, artifacts and symbols. "Culture" has since become an important concept across many branches of sociology, including resolutely scientific fields like social stratification and social network analysis. As a result, there has been a recent influx of quantitative sociologists to the field. Thus there is now a growing group of sociologists of culture who are, confusingly, not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstracted postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, and instead look for a theoretical backing in the more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science. "Cultural sociology" is one of the largest sections of the American Sociological Association. The British establishment of cultural studies means the latter is often taught as a loosely-distinct discipline in the UK.

Early Researchers and Development of Cultural Sociology The sociology of culture grew from the intersection between sociology (as shaped by early theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) with the growing discipline of anthropology, wherein researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describing and analyzing a variety of cultures around the world. Part of the legacy of the early development of the field lingers in the methods (much of cultural sociological research is qualitative), in the theories (a variety of critical

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approaches to sociology are central to current research communities), and in the substantive focus of the field. For instance, relationships between popular culture, political control, and social class were early and lasting concerns in the field.

Cultural Studies In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism, such as Stuart Hall (1932-2014) and Raymond Williams (1921-1988), developed cultural studies. Following nineteenth-century Romantics, they identified "culture" with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing). Nevertheless, they saw patterns of consumption and leisure as determined by relations of production, which led them to focus on class relations and the organization of production.

In the United States, "Cultural Studies" focuses largely on the study of popular culture, that is, on the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. Richard Hoggart coined the term in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director. Cultural studies in this sense, then, can be viewed as a limited concentration scoped on the intricacies of consumerism, which belongs to a wider culture sometimes referred to as "Western Civilization" or as "Globalism."

From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with that of his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. As the field developed it began to combine political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history to study cultural phenomena Page 61 of 138

or cultural texts. In this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender. Cultural studies has a concern with the meaning and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or eating out) in a given culture. This field studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Specifically, culture involves those meanings and practices held independently of reason. Watching television in order to view a public perspective on a historical event should not be thought of as culture, unless referring to the medium of television itself, which may have been selected culturally; however, schoolchildren watching television after school with their friends in order to "fit in" certainly qualifies, since there is no grounded reason for one's participation in this practice.

Recently, as capitalism has spread throughout the world (a process called globalization), cultural studies has begun to analyse local and global forms of resistance to Western hegemony.

In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a text includes not only written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of "culture". "Culture" for a cultural-studies researcher not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups) and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, based on the disciplines of comparative literature and cultural studies.

Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies had originated in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly under the influence first of Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later that of Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as "capitalist" mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the "culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.

In the United States, Lindlof and Taylor write, "Cultural studies [were] grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition". The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom. The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded.

Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field.

This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, those who control the means of production (the economic base) essentially control a culture. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The nonMarxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the

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meaning of the product. This view comes through in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva is among influential voices at the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.

Petrakis and Kostis (2013) divide cultural background variables into two main groups: 1. The first group covers the variables that represent the "efficiency orientation" of the societies: performance orientation, future orientation, assertiveness, power distance and uncertainty avoidance.

2. The second covers the variables that represent the "social orientation" of societies, i.e., the attitudes and lifestyles of their members. These variables include gender egalitarianism, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism and human orientation.

Cultural Dynamics Raimon Panikkar pointed out 29 ways in which cultural change can be brought about. Some of these are: growth, development, evolution, involution, renovation, reconception, reform, innovation, revivalism, revolution, mutation, progress, diffusion, osmosis, borrowing, eclecticism, syncretism, modernization, indigenization, and transformation.

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Beliefs & Values Beliefs Belief is a mental representation, treated in various academic disciplines, especially philosophy and psychology, of a sentient being's attitude toward the likelihood or truth of something. From Greek two different concepts are often represented by the concept of belief: Pistis and Doxa.

Simplified we may say that the first deals in trust and confidence, the latter in opinion and acceptance.

Knowledge and Epistemology The terms belief and knowledge are used differently in philosophy.

Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge, or more literally the process of understanding. The primary problem in epistemology is to understand exactly what is needed in order for us to have knowledge. In a notion derived from Plato's dialogue Theaetetus, where the epistemology of Socrates (Platon) most clearly departs from that of the sophists, who at the time of Plato seem to have defined knowledge as what is here expressed as "justified true belief". The tendency to translate from belief (here: doxa - common opinion) to knowledge (here: episteme), which Plato (e.g. Socrates of the dialogue) utterly dismisses, results from failing to distinguish a dispositive belief (gr. 'doxa', not 'pistis') from knowledge (episteme) when the opinion is regarded true (here: orthĂŠ), in terms of right, and juristically so (according to the premises of the dialogue). Which was the task of the rhetors to prove. Plato dismisses this possibility of an affirmative relation between belief (i.e. opinion) and knowledge even when the one who opines grounds his belief on the rule, and is able to add justification (gr. logos: reasonable and necessarily plausible assertions/evidence/guidance) to it. It is important to keep in mind that the sort of belief in the context of Theaetetus is not derived from the theological concept of belief, which is pistis, but doxa, which in theological terms refers to acceptance in the form of praise and glory.

Strangely, or not, Plato has been credited for the "justified true belief" theory of knowledge, even though Plato in the Theaetetus (dialogue) elegantly dismisses it, and even posits this argument of Socrates as a cause for his death penalty . Among American epistemologists, Gettier (1963) and Goldman (1967), have questioned the "justified true belief" definition, and challenged the "sophists" of their time.

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As a Psychological Phenomenon Mainstream psychology and related disciplines have traditionally treated belief as if it were the simplest form of mental representation and therefore one of the building blocks of conscious thought. Philosophers have tended to be more abstract in their analysis, and much of the work examining the viability of the belief concept stems from philosophical analysis.

The concept of belief presumes a subject (the believer) and an object of belief (the proposition).

So, like other propositional attitudes, belief implies the existence of mental states and intentionality, both of which are hotly debated topics in the philosophy of mind, whose foundations and relation to brain states are still controversial.

Beliefs are sometimes divided into core beliefs (that are actively thought about) and dispositional beliefs (that may be ascribed to someone who has not thought about the issue). For example, if asked "do you believe tigers wear pink pajamas?" a person might answer that they do not, despite the fact they may never have thought about this situation before.

This has important implications for understanding the neuropsychology and neuroscience of belief. If the concept of belief is incoherent, then any attempt to find the underlying neural processes that support it will fail.

Philosopher Lynne Rudder Baker has outlined four main contemporary approaches to belief in her controversial book Saving Belief: 





Our common-sense understanding of belief is correct - Sometimes called the "mental sentence theory," in this conception, beliefs exist as coherent entities, and the way we talk about them in everyday life is a valid basis for scientific endeavour. Jerry Fodor is one of the principal defenders of this point of view.

Our common-sense understanding of belief may not be entirely correct, but it is close enough to make some useful predictions - This view argues that we will eventually reject the idea of belief as we use it now, but that there may be a correlation between what we take to be a belief when someone says "I believe that snow is white" and how a future theory of psychology will explain this behaviour. Most notably, philosopher Stephen Stich has argued for this particular understanding of belief.

Our common-sense understanding of belief is entirely wrong and will be completely superseded by a radically different theory that will have no use for the concept of belief as we know it - Known as eliminativism, this view (most notably proposed by Paul and Patricia Churchland) argues that the concept of belief is like obsolete theories of times Page 66 of 138



past such as the four humours theory of medicine, or the phlogiston theory of combustion. In these cases science hasn't provided us with a more detailed account of these theories, but completely rejected them as valid scientific concepts to be replaced by entirely different accounts. The Churchlands argue that our common-sense concept of belief is similar in that as we discover more about neuroscience and the brain, the inevitable conclusion will be to reject the belief hypothesis in its entirety.

Our common-sense understanding of belief is entirely wrong; however, treating people, animals, and even computers as if they had beliefs is often a successful strategy - The major proponents of this view, Daniel Dennett and Lynne Rudder Baker, are both eliminativists in that they hold that beliefs are not a scientifically valid concept, but they don't go as far as rejecting the concept of belief as a predictive device. Dennett gives the example of playing a computer at chess. While few people would agree that the computer held beliefs, treating the computer as if it did (e.g. that the computer believes that taking the opposition's queen will give it a considerable advantage) is likely to be a successful and predictive strategy. In this understanding of belief, named by Dennett the intentional stance, belief-based explanations of mind and behaviour are at a different level of explanation and are not reducible to those based on fundamental neuroscience, although both may be explanatory at their own level.

Belief-In To "believe in" someone or something is a distinct concept from "believing-that." There are at least these types of belief-in: 

Commendatory / Faith - we may make an expression of 'faith' in respect of some performance by an agent X, when without prejudice to the truth value of the factual outcome or even confidence in X otherwise, we expect that specific performance. In particular self-confidence or faith in one's self is this kind of belief.



Existential claim - to claim belief in the existence of an entity or phenomenon in a general way with the implied need to justify its claim to existence. It is often used when the entity is not real, or its existence is in doubt. "He believes in witches and ghosts" or "many children believe in Santa Claus" or "I believe in a deity" are typical examples. The linguistic form is distinct from the assertion of the truth of a proposition since verification is either considered impossible/irrelevant or a counterfactual situation is assumed.

Belief-That, Delusion Insofar as the truth of belief is expressed in sentential and propositional form we are using the sense of belief-that rather than belief-in. Delusion arises when the truth value of the form is clearly nil.

Delusions are defined as beliefs in psychiatric diagnostic criteria (for example in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Psychiatrist and historian G.E. Berrios has challenged the view that delusions are genuine beliefs and instead labels them as "empty speech acts," where affected persons are motivated to express false or bizarre belief statements due to an Page 67 of 138

underlying psychological disturbance. However, the majority of mental health professionals and researchers treat delusions as if they were genuine beliefs.

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass the White Queen says, "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." This is often quoted in mockery of the common ability of people to entertain beliefs contrary to fact.

Formation Psychologists study belief formation and the relationship between beliefs and actions. Three models of belief formation and change have been proposed: 1. The Conditional Process When people are the likelihood that true, they memory for that has

Inference

asked to estimate a statement is search their information

implications for the validity of this statement.

Once this information has been identified, they estimate a) the likelihood that the statement would be true if the information were true, and b) the likelihood that the statement would be true if the information were false. If their estimates for these two probabilities differ, people average them, weighting each by the likelihood that the information is true and false (respectively). Thus, information bears directly on beliefs of another, related statement.

2. Linear Models of Belief Formation Unlike the previous model, this one takes into consideration the possibility of multiple factors influencing belief formation. Using regression procedures, this model predicts belief formation Page 68 of 138

on the basis of several different pieces of information, with weights assigned to each piece on the basis of their relative importance.

3. Information Processing Models of Belief Formation and Change These models address the fact that the responses people have to belief-relevant information is unlikely to be predicted from the objective basis of the information that they can recall at the time their beliefs are reported. Instead, these responses reflect the number and meaning of the thoughts that people have about the message at the time that they encounter it.

Some influences on people's belief formation include: 







Internalization of beliefs during childhood, which can form and shape our beliefs in different domains. Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said that "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." Political beliefs depend most strongly on the political beliefs most common in the community where we live. Most individuals believe the religion they were taught in childhood.

Charismatic leaders can form and/or modify beliefs (even if those beliefs fly in the face of all previous beliefs). Is belief voluntary? Rational individuals need to reconcile their direct reality with any said belief; therefore, if belief is not present or possible, it reflects the fact that contradictions were necessarily overcome using cognitive dissonance.

Advertising can form or change beliefs through repetition, shock, and association with images of sex, love, beauty, and other strong positive emotions. Contrary to intuition, a delay, known as the sleeper effect, instead of immediate succession may increase an advertisement‘s ability to persuade viewer‘s beliefs if a discounting cue is present.

Physical trauma, especially to the head, can radically alter a person's beliefs.

However, even educated people, well aware of the process by which beliefs form, still strongly cling to their beliefs, and act on those beliefs even against their own self-interest. In Anna Rowley's book, Leadership Therapy, she states "You want your beliefs to change. It's proof that you are keeping your eyes open, living fully, and welcoming everything that the world and people around you can teach you." This means that peoples' beliefs should evolve as they gain new experiences.

Motivations for Belief Many motives may be manifestations of a more general one: to construct a perception of oneself and one's world to equip an individual with the ability to cope with life situations and ultimately lead a happy and successful life. Examples of motives include: Accuracy and Efficiency This motivation refers to the degree to which people are motivated to construct an accurate perception of themselves and their environments. This motivation may also be related to people's desire to make quick judgments or decisions, thus the desire for quick judgment compromises the accuracy of one's beliefs.

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Desirability People are generally motivated to think well of themselves and the people they care about.

Scholars postulate that people usually wish to maintain a positive view of themselves and the world in which they live. Consequently, people may be more likely to assume that positive events will occur and undesirable events are unlikely.

The "Just World" Studies suggest that people are motivated to believe that they possess favorable attributes and, therefore, are better able to cope within the world in which they live. For example, participants read a case in which a person was the victim of rape. Half of the participants were shown nonsexual, aggressive images before reading the case, images that should provoke the idea of an unjust world (lynchings, dead soldiers, etc.). After viewing these images, the participants in this condition were more likely to claim that they believed the rapist was apprehended and that the victim was partly to blame (as opposed to participants in another condition who did not view the aggressive images).

Consistency Consistency refers to the desire to maintain an initial consistency among one's various beliefs and opinions. This belief may be related to the motivation of constructing an accurate representation of the world. This motive may be conceptualized in multiple ways. It may be conceptualized in regards to the degree of compatibility of beliefs with constructed propositions that compose an implicit theory. This motive may also be conceptualized as a motive that only arises when cognitive inconsistency occurs and people recognize it.

Justified True Belief Justified true belief is a definition of knowledge that is most frequently credited to Plato and his dialogues. The concept of justified true belief states that in order to know that a given proposition is true, one must not only believe the relevant true proposition, but also have Page 70 of 138

justification for doing so. In more formal terms, a subject and only if: 1.

2.

3.

is true believes that is true, and is justified in believing that

knows that a proposition

is true if

is true

This theory of knowledge suffered a significant setback with the discovery of Gettier problems, situations in which the above conditions were seemingly met but that many philosophers disagree that anything is known. Robert Nozick suggested a clarification of "justification" which he believed eliminates the problem: the justification has to be such that were the justification false, the knowledge would be false. If so we can say belief becomes knowledge (accepted reality) when it is justified.

Modification An extensive amount of scientific research and philosophical discussion exists around the modification of beliefs, which is commonly referred to as belief revision. Generally speaking, the process of belief revision entails the believer weighing the set of truths and/or evidence, and the dominance of a set of truths or evidence on an alternative to a held belief can lead to revision.

One process of belief revision is Bayesian updating and is often referenced for its mathematical basis and conceptual simplicity. However, such a process may not be representative for individuals whose beliefs are not easily characterized as probabilistic.

There are several techniques for individuals or groups to change the beliefs of others; these methods generally fall under the umbrella of persuasion. Persuasion can take on more specific forms such as consciousness raising when considered in an activist or political context. Belief modification may also occur as a result of the experience of outcomes. Because goals are based, in part on beliefs, the success or failure at a particular goal may contribute to modification of beliefs that supported the original goal.

Whether or not belief modification actually occurs is dependent not only on the extent of truths or evidence for the alternative belief, but also characteristics outside the specific truths or evidence. This includes, but is not limited to: the source characteristics of the message, such as credibility; social pressures; the anticipated consequences of a modification; or the ability of the individual or group to act on the modification. Therefore, individuals seeking to achieve belief modification in themselves or others need to consider all possible forms of resistance to belief revision.

Partial Without qualification, "belief" normally implies a lack of doubt, especially insofar as it is a designation of a life stance. In practical everyday use however, belief is normally partial and retractable with varying degrees of certainty.

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A copious literature exists in multiple disciplines to accommodate this reality. In mathematics probability, fuzzy logic, fuzzy set theory, and other topics are largely directed to this.

Prediction Different psychological models have tried to predict people's beliefs and some of them try to estimate the exact probabilities of beliefs.

For example, Robert Wyer developed a model of subjective probabilities. When people rate the likelihood of a certain statement (e.g., "It will rain tomorrow"), this rating can be seen as a subjective probability value. The subjective probability model posits that these subjective probabilities follow the same rules as objective probabilities. For example, the law of total probability might be applied to predict a subjective probability value. Wyer found that this model produces relatively accurate predictions for probabilities of single events and for changes in these probabilities, but that the probabilities of several beliefs linked by "and" or "or" do not follow the model as well.

Systems A "belief system" is a set of mutually supportive beliefs. The beliefs of any such system can be classified as religious, philosophical, ideological, or a combination of these. Philosopher Jonathan Glover says that beliefs are always part of a belief system, and that tenanted belief systems are difficult for the tenants to completely revise or reject.

Overview The British philosopher Stephen Law has described some belief systems (including belief in homeopathy, psychic powers, and alien abduction) as "claptrap" and said that they "draw people in and hold them captive so they become willing slaves to victory... if you get sucked in, it can be extremely difficult to think your way clear again".

Gilbert A collective belief is referred to when people speak of what 'we' believe when this is not simply elliptical for what 'we all' believe.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote of collective beliefs and proposed that they, like all 'social facts', 'inhered in' social groups as opposed to individual persons. Durkheim's discussion of collective belief, though suggestive, is relatively obscure.

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Philosopher Margaret Gilbert has offered a related account in terms of the joint commitment of a number of persons to accept a certain belief as a body. According to this account, individuals who together collectively believe something need not personally believe it themselves. Gilbert's work on the topic has stimulated a developing literature among philosophers. One question that has arisen is whether and how philosophical accounts of belief in general need to be sensitive to the possibility of collective belief.

Glover Jonathan Glover believes that he and other philosophers ought to play some role in starting dialogues between people with deeply held, opposing beliefs, especially if there is risk of violence. Glover also believes that philosophy can offer insights about beliefs that would be relevant to such dialogue.

Glover suggests that beliefs have to be considered holistically, and that no belief exists in isolation in the mind of the believer. It always implicates and relates to other beliefs. Glover provides the example of a patient with an illness who returns to a doctor, but the doctor says that the prescribed medicine is not working. At that point, the patient has a great deal of flexibility in choosing what beliefs to keep or reject: the patient could believe that the doctor is incompetent, that the doctor's assistants made a mistake, that the patient's own body is unique in some unexpected way, that Western medicine is ineffective, or even that Western science is entirely unable to discover truths about ailments.

Glover maintains that any person can continue to hold any belief if they would really like to (e.g., with help from ad hoc hypotheses). One belief can be held fixed, and other beliefs will be altered around it. Glover warns that some beliefs may not be entirely explicitly believed (e.g., some people may not realize they have racist belief systems adopted from their environment as a child). Glover believes that people tend to first realize that beliefs can change, and may be contingent on our upbringing, around age 12 or 15.

Glover emphasizes that beliefs are difficult to change. He says that we may try to rebuild our beliefs on more secure foundations (axioms), like building a new house, but warns that this may not be possible. Glover offers the example of RenĂŠ Descartes, saying about Descartes that "[h]e starts off with the characteristic beliefs of a 17th-century Frenchman; he then junks the lot, he rebuilds the system, and somehow it looks a lot like the beliefs of a 17th-century Frenchman."

To Glover, belief systems are not like houses but are instead like boats. As Glover puts it: "Maybe the whole thing needs rebuilding, but inevitably at any point you have to keep enough of it intact to keep floating."

Glover's final message is that if people talk about their beliefs, they may find more deep, relevant, philosophical ways in which they disagree (e.g., less obvious beliefs, or more deeply held beliefs). Glover thinks that people often manage to find agreements and consensus through philosophy. He says that at the very least, if people do not convert each other, they will hold their own beliefs more openmindedly and will be less likely to go to war over conflicting beliefs.

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Values A Personal Value is an individual's absolute or relative and ethical value, the assumption of which can be the basis for ethical action. A Value System is a set of consistent values and measures. A principle value is a foundation upon which other values and measures of integrity are based.

Some values are physiologically determined and are normally considered objective, such as a desire to avoid physical pain or to seek pleasure. Other values are considered subjective, vary across individuals and cultures, and are in many ways aligned with belief and belief systems.

Types of values include ethical/moral values, doctrinal/ideological (religious, political) values, social values, and aesthetic values. It is debated whether some values that are not clearly physiologically determined, such as altruism, are intrinsic, and whether some, such as acquisitiveness, should be classified as vices or virtues. Values have been studied in various disciplines: anthropology, behavioral economics, business ethics, corporate governance, moral philosophy, political sciences, social psychology, sociology and theology to name a few.

Values can be defined as broad preferences concerning appropriate courses of action or outcomes. As such, values reflect a person's sense of right and wrong or what "ought" to be. "Equal rights for all", "Excellence deserves admiration", and "People should be treated with respect and dignity" are representative of values. Values tend to influence attitudes and behavior.

Personal Values According to Morris Massey, values form during three significant periods:   

imprint period - from birth to 7 years modelling period - from 8 to 13 years socialization period - from 13 to 21 years

Personal values provide an internal reference for what is good, beneficial, important, useful, beautiful, desirable, constructive, etc. Values generate behavior and help solve common human problems for survival by comparative rankings of value, the results of which provide answers to questions of why people do what they do and in what order they choose to do them.

Over time the public expression of personal values that groups of people find important in their day-to-day lives, lay the foundations of law, custom and tradition. Recent research has thereby stressed the implicit nature of value communication.

Personal values exist in relation to cultural values, either in agreement with or divergence from prevailing norms. A culture is a social system that shares a set of common values, in which such values permit social expectations and collective understandings of the good, beautiful, constructive, etc. Without normative personal values, there would be no cultural reference

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against which to measure the virtue of individual values and so culture identity would disintegrate.

Cultural Values Individual cultures emphasize values which their members broadly share. One can often identify the values of a society by noting which people receive honor or respect. In the United States of America, for example, professional athletes at the top levels in some sports receive more honor (measured in terms of monetary payment) than university professors. Surveys show that voters in the United States would not willingly elect an atheist as president, suggesting belief in a God as a generally shared value.

Values Clarification Differs from Cognitive Moral Education: 



Value clarification consists of "helping people clarify what their lives are for and what is worth working for. It encourages students to define their own values and to understand others' values."

Cognitive moral education builds on the belief that students should learn to value things like democracy and justice as their moral reasoning develops.

Values relate to the norms of a culture, but they are more global and abstract than norms. Norms provide rules for behavior in specific situations, while values identify what should be judged as good or evil. While norms are standards, patterns, rules and guides of expected behavior, values are abstract concepts of what is important and worthwhile. Flying the national flag on a holiday is a norm, but it reflects the value of patriotism. Wearing dark clothing and appearing solemn are Page 75 of 138

normative behaviors to manifest respect at a funeral. Different cultures reflect values differently and to different levels of emphasis. "Over the last three decades, traditional-age college students have shown an increased interest in personal well-being and a decreased interest in the welfare of others." Values seemed to have changed, affecting the beliefs, and attitudes of the students.

Members take part in a culture even if each member's personal values do not entirely agree with some of the normative values sanctioned in that culture. This reflects an individual's ability to synthesize and extract aspects valuable to them from the multiple subcultures they belong to.

If a group member expresses a value that seriously conflicts with the group's norms, the group's authority may carry out various ways of encouraging conformity or stigmatizing the nonconforming behavior of that member. For example, imprisonment can result from conflict with social norms that the state has established as law.[clarification needed] Furthermore, institutions in the global economy can genuinely respect values which are of three kinds based on a "triangle of coherence". In the first instance, a value may come to expression within the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as (in the second instance) within the United Nations - particularly in the Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) - providing a framework for global legitimacy through accountability. In the third instance, the expertise of member-driven international organizations and civil society depends on the incorporation of flexibility in the rules, to preserve the expression of identity in a globalized world.

Nonetheless, in a war-like economic competition, differing views may contradict each other, particularly in the field of culture. Thus audiences in Europe may regard a movie as an artistic creation and grant it benefits from special treatment, while audiences in the United States may see it as mere entertainment, whatever its artistic merits. EU policies based on the notion of "cultural exception" can become juxtaposed with the policy of "cultural specificity" on the liberal Anglo-Saxon side. Indeed, international law traditionally treats films as property and the content of television programs as a service. Consequently cultural interventionist policies get opposed to Anglo-Saxon liberal position, causing failures in international negotiations.

Founded Type

1981 [registered as the non-profit World Values Survey Association in Sweden, Stockholm] Non profit association 

Location

Key people

Presidency & Secretariat in Aberdeen, United Kingdom (Aberdeen University); External Relations Office in Stockholm, Sweden (Institute for Future Studies); Archive in Madrid, Spain (JDS Surveys); Treasurer in Cambridge, United States (Harvard University)

President: Christian Haerpfer (UK), Vice President: Alejandro Moreno (Mexico), Vice President: Christian Welzel (Germany), Secretary General: Bi Puranen (Sweden), Treasurer: Pippa Norris (US), Members: Marta Lagos (Chile), Eduard Ponarin

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Mission Website

(Russia), Founding President: Ronald Inglehart (US), Archive Director: Jaime Diez-Medrano (Spain) Explore people‘s values and beliefs, their changes over time and their social and political effects. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/

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Spiritual Gifts In Christianity, Spiritual Gifts (or charismata) are endowments which may be given by the Holy Spirit. These are the supernatural graces which individual Christians need (or did in the days of the Apostles need) to fulfill the mission of the church. They are described in the New Testament, primarily in 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12, and Ephesians 4. 1 Peter 4 also touches on the spiritual gifts. The gifts are related to both seemingly "natural" abilities and seemingly more "miraculous" abilities, empowered by the Holy Spirit. The two major opposing theological positions on their nature is that they ceased long ago or that they continue (Cessationism versus Continuationism).

Spiritual gifts are distinguished from other graces of the Holy Spirit, such as the fruit of the Spirit and the Seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, in that the charismata are to be used for the benefit of others while the fruit of the Spirit and other gifts result in personal sanctification.

Biblical and Theological Overview The New Testament contains several lists of spiritual gifts, most authored by St. Paul. While each list is unique, there is overlap.

Romans 12:6-8  Prophecy  Serving  Teaching  Exhortation  Giving  Leadership  Mercy

1 Corinthians 12:8-10  Word of wisdom  Word of knowledge  Faith  Gifts of healings  Miracles  Prophecy  Distinguishing between spirits  Tongues  Interpretation of tongues

1 Corinthians 12:28  Apostle  Prophet  Teacher  Miracles  Kinds of healings  Helps  Administration  Tongues

Ephesians 4:11  Apostle  Prophet  Evangelist  Pastor  Teacher

1 Peter 4:11  Whoever speaks  Whoever renders service[9]

Christians believe that the charismata were foretold by the Prophet Joel (2:28) and promised by Christ (Gospel of Mark 16:17,18). This promise was fulfilled on the Day of Pentecost and elsewhere as the church spread. In order to correct abuses concerning the spiritual gifts at Corinth, Paul devoted much attention to spiritual gifts in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (chapters 12-14).

In 1 Corinthians 12, two Greek terms are translated as "spiritual gifts". In verse 1, the word pneumatika ("spirituals" or "things of the Spirit") is used. In verse 4, charisma is used. This word is derived from the word charis, which means "grace". In verses 5 and 6, the words diakonia

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(translated "administrations", "ministries", or "service") and energemata ("operations" or "inworkings") are used in describing the nature of the spiritual gifts. In verse 7, the term "manifestation (phanerosis) of the Spirit" is used.

From

these scriptural passages, Christians understand the spiritual gifts to be enablements or capacities that are divinely bestowed upon individuals.

Because they are freely given by God, these cannot be earned or merited.

Though worked through individuals, these are operations or manifestations of the Holy Spirit—not of the gifted person.

They are to be used for the benefit of others, and in a sense they are granted to the church as a whole more than they are given to individuals. There is diversity in their distribution—an individual will not possess all of the gifts.[10] The purpose of the spiritual gifts is to edify (build up), exhort (encourage), and comfort the church.[11] It is generally acknowledged that Paul did not list all of the gifts of the Spirit, and many believe that there are as many gifts as there are needs in the body of Christ. The gifts have at times been organized into distinct categories based on their similarities and differences to other gifts. Some divide them into three categories using Old Testament offices. "Prophetic" gifts include any gift involving teaching, encouraging, or rebuking others. "Priestly" gifts include showing mercy and care for the needy or involve intercession before God. "Kingly" gifts are those involving church administration or government. Others categorize them into "gifts of knowledge" (word of wisdom, word of knowledge, distinguishing between spirits), "gifts of speech" (tongues, interpretation, prophecy), and "gifts of power" (faith, healing, miracles). The gifts have also been categorized as those that promote the inner growth of the church (apostle, prophecy, distinguishing between spirits, teaching, word of wisdom/knowledge, helps, and administration) and those that promote the church's outer development (faith, miracles, healing, tongues, interpretation of tongues).

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Proponents of cessationism distinguish between the "extraordinary", "miraculous", or "sign" gifts (such as prophecy, tongues, and healing) and the other gifts. Cessationism is held by some Protestants, especially from the Calvinist tradition, who believe that miraculous gifts and their operations were limited to early Christianity and "ceased" afterward. Other Protestants, mainly Pentecostals and charismatics, adhere to the continuationist position, believing that all the spiritual gifts are distributed among Christians by the Holy Spirit and that they are normative in contemporary Christianity. In addition, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy also continue to believe in and make use of all of the spiritual gifts.

Descriptions Apostle: The title apostle comes from the Greek word apostolos which means "a messenger, one sent forth with orders". It refers to one who has been delegated authority by another in a foreign land. Apostles were the first leaders of the Church; they were commissioned by Jesus to initiate and direct the preaching of the gospel. While the majority of Christians agree that the title of apostle is reserved for those among the first generation of Christians, many Christian denominations continue in one way or another to recognize a continuing apostolic ministry.

Many churches, such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, believe in the doctrine of apostolic succession, which holds that properly ordained bishops are the successors to the apostles. Other Christian groups, such as classical Pentecostals, consider the role of a missionary to be fulfilling an apostolic ministry. There are some Christians, however, who advocate restoring the Fivefold ministry, including the formal recognition of the office of apostle. Others would say that the office no longer exists.

Prophet: In the New Testament, the office of prophet is second only to the office of apostle (1 Corinthians 12:28; Ephesians 4:11). The prophet's corresponding gift is prophecy. Prophecy is "reporting something that God spontaneously brings to your mind". Many, particularly Pentecostals and charismatics, distinguish between the "office of prophet" and the "gift of prophecy", believing that a Christian can possess the gift of prophecy without holding the prophetic office.

Evangelist: An evangelist is one who devotes himself to preaching the gospel. In the New Testament, evangelists preached from city to city, church to church.

Pastor: This term derives from a Greek word for "shepherd". Pastors are gifted to lead, guide, and set an example for other Christians. The grammatical structure of Ephesians 4:11 leads many to conclude that teacher and pastor should be considered one term (pastor-teacher). Even so, the two terms are not interchangeable; while all pastors are teachers, not all teachers are pastors.

Teacher: Someone who devotes his or her life to preaching and teaching the Christian faith.

When teaching is provided for the Church by God, two gifts are actually given—to the Church is given a teacher and along with the teacher comes a divine capacity to teach.

Service: The word translated as "ministry" is diakonia, which can also be translated "service".

Since there are many types of ministries and service to the Church, this then describes a broad array of gifts rather than a single gift.

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Exhortation: The ability to motivate Christians "to patient endurance, brotherly love, and good works".

Giving: Those with this gift share their own possessions with others with extraordinary generosity. While all Christians should be givers, those possessing this gift will go beyond this normal giving.

Leading: This gift speaks to the various leadership roles found in the Church. While many think of roles such as administration, management of funds, strategy planning, etc. as functions outside of the supernatural realm, in reality individuals in these positions are just as in need of supernatural empowerment as are ministers of the gospel. Some writers consider the gifts of governments and leading to be the same gift, but others consider them closely related yet different.

Mercy: Possibly identical to the gift of helps, the mercy-shower possesses a ministry of visitation, prayer, and compassion to the poor and sick.

Word of wisdom: An utterance or message of wisdom supernaturally granted to an individual.

For Paul, wisdom refers to "the knowledge of the great Christian mysteries: the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ, and the indwelling in the believer of the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 2; Ephesians 1:17)".

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Word of knowledge: The knowledge referred to is often said to relate to understanding Christian doctrine or scriptural truth. It is sometimes said to be connected with the ministry of teachers.

Faith: This refers to that strong or special faith "which removes mountains, casts out devils (Matthew 17:19,20), and faces the most cruel martyrdom without flinching". It is distinguished from the "saving" and "normal" Christian faith.

Gifts of healings: The ability to supernaturally minister healing to others. The plural indicates the variety of sickness healed and the many forms the gift takes, such as healing by anointing with oil, by the laying on of hands, by saying the name of Jesus or by the sign of the cross.

Working of miracles: The performance of deeds beyond ordinary human ability by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Visions. An outpouring of this gift is prophesied in Joel 2: 28, and Acts 2:17 shows that early Christians believed this prophecy was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost. Visions tend to be more private experiences than the other gifts. Some researchers expand the definition of visions to include a strongly felt presence.

Discerning of spirits: The capacity to discern, distinguish, or to discriminate the source of a spiritual manifestation—whether it emanates from a good or evil spirit. It seemed to have been particularly associated with prophecy as it would be necessary to know whether a prophetic utterance was truly inspired by God. Tongues: The supernatural ability of speaking an unlearned language. Paul seems to have distinguished between the public use of the gift (which must always be interpreted) and the private use which was for the spiritual strengthening of oneself. Currently among Christians there is a dispute as to whether tongues were/are always xenoglossy (speaking an unlearned human language) or whether it also included/includes glossolalia (speaking an unlearned and allegedly non-human language of heavenly or angelic origin).

Interpretation of tongues: This gift always follows the public exercise of the gift of tongues. In 1 Corinthians 14, the Apostle Paul required that all speech in Christian worship should be intelligible. This required that speech given in an unknown tongue be interpreted in the common language of the gathered Christians.

Helps: This gift has to do with service to the sick and the poor. Possessor of this gift has a "spiritual burden and a God-given love for the needy and afflicted".

Administration: Also called the gift of governing, the Greek word translated "governments" is kubernesis, the verb form of which means "to steer" or "to be a helmsman". This gift then refers to the God-given capacity to lead or guide the Church through storms and difficult seas.

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Other Spiritual Gifts While not specifically defined as spiritual gifts in the Bible, other abilities and capacities have been considered as spiritual gifts by some Christians. Some are found in the New Testament such as:     

Celibacy (I Corinthians 7:7) Hospitality (1 Peter 4:9-10) Intercession (Rom. 8:26-27) Marriage (I Corinthians 7:7) (effective) witnessing (Acts 1:8, 5:32, 26:22, 1 John 5:6)

Others are found in the Old Testament such as:   

Craftsmanship (such as the special abilities given to artisans who constructed the Tabernacle in Exodus 35:30-33) Interpretation of dreams (e.g. Joseph and Daniel) Composing spiritual music, poetry, and prose

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References ______ 1. http://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/enhance-yourwellbeing/purpose/spirituality/develop-your-spiritual-resources 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirituality 3. http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/discernment.htm 4. http://www.gty.org/resources/questions/QA138/What-is-biblical-discernment-and-whyis-it-important 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discernment 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture 8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_%28personal_and_cultural%29 10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Values_Survey 11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_gift 12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_%28spiritual%29 13. http://www.lifeway.com/lwc/files/lwcF_PDF_Discover_Your_Spiritual_Gifts.pdf 14. http://www.cokesburystudents.com/files/cokesburystudents/COKESBURY%20Youth%2 0Spiritual%20Gifts%20Test.pdf 15. http://www.sdrock.com/files/docs/spiritual-gifts-test/spiritual_gifts_test.pdf

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Attachment A Spiritual Gifts Assessments Adult Youth

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Spiritual Gifts Survey

LifeWay Christian Resources

Discover Your Spiritual Gifts!

By Gene Wilkes Ken Hemphill defines a spiritual gift as “an individual manifestation of grace from the Father that enables 1 you to serve Him and thus play a vital role in His plan for the redemption of the world.” Peter Wagner defines a spiritual gift as “a special attribute given by the Holy Spirit to every member of the Body of Christ 2 according to God’s grace for use within the context of the Body.” I like to use this definition: A spiritual gift is an expression of the Holy Spirit in the life of believers which empowers them to serve the body of Christ, the church.

Romans 12:6-8; 1 Corinthians 12:8-10, 28-30; Ephesians 4:11; and 1 Peter 4:9-11 contain representative 3 lists of gifts and roles God has given to the church. A definition of these gifts follows.

•

Leadership—Leadership aids the body by leading and directing members to accomplish the goals and purposes of the church. Leadership motivates people to work together in unity toward common goals (Rom. 12:8).

•

Administration—Persons with the gift of administration lead the body by steering others to remain on task. Administration enables the body to organize according to God-given purposes and long-term goals (1 Cor. 12:28).

•

Teaching—Teaching is instructing members in the truths and doctrines of God’s Word for the purposes of building up, unifying, and maturing the body (1 Cor. 12:28; Rom. 12:7; Eph. 4:11).

•

Knowledge—The gift of knowledge manifests itself in teaching and training in discipleship. It is the God-given ability to learn, know, and explain the precious truths of God’s Word. A word of knowledge is a Spirit-revealed truth (1 Cor. 12:28).

•

Wisdom—Wisdom is the gift that discerns the work of the Holy Spirit in the body and applies His teachings and actions to the needs of the body (1 Cor. 12:28).

•

Prophecy—The gift of prophecy is proclaiming the Word of God boldly. This builds up the body and leads to conviction of sin. Prophecy manifests itself in preaching and teaching (1 Cor. 12:10; Rom. 12:6).

•

Discernment—Discernment aids the body by recognizing the true intentions of those within or related to the body. Discernment tests the message and actions of others for the protection and well-being of the body (1 Cor. 12:10).

•

Exhortation—Possessors of this gift encourage members to be involved in and enthusiastic about the work of the Lord. Members with this gift are good counselors and motivate others to service. Exhortation exhibits itself in preaching, teaching, and ministry (Rom. 12:8).

•

Shepherding—The gift of shepherding is manifested in persons who look out for the spiritual welfare of others. Although pastors, like shepherds, do care for members of the church, this gift is not limited to a pastor or staff member (Eph. 4:11).

•

Faith—Faith trusts God to work beyond the human capabilities of the people. Believers with this gift encourage others to trust in God in the face of apparently insurmountable odds (1 Cor. 12:9).

•

Evangelism —God gifts his church with evangelists to lead others to Christ effectively and enthusiastically. This gift builds up the body by adding new members to its fellowship (Eph. 4:11).

 2003 LifeWay Christian Resources

Spiritual Gifts Survey

LifeWay Christian Resources

•

Apostleship—The church sends apostles from the body to plant churches or be missionaries.

Apostles motivate the body to look beyond its walls in order to carry out the Great Commission (1 Cor. 12:28; Eph. 4:11).

•

Service/Helps—Those with the gift of service/helps recognize practical needs in the body and joyfully give assistance to meeting those needs. Christians with this gift do not mind working behind the scenes (1 Cor. 12:28; Rom. 12:7).

•

Mercy—Cheerful acts of compassion characterize those with the gift of mercy. Persons with this gift aid the body by empathizing with hurting members. They keep the body healthy and unified by keeping others aware of the needs within the church (Rom. 12:8).

•

Giving—Members with the gift of giving give freely and joyfully to the work and mission of the body. Cheerfulness and liberality are characteristics of individuals with this gift (Rom. 12:8).

•

Hospitality—Those with this gift have the ability to make visitors, guests, and strangers feel at ease. They often use their home to entertain guests. Persons with this gift integrate new members into the body (1 Pet. 4:9).

God has gifted you with an expression of His Holy Spirit to support His vision and mission of the church. It is a worldwide vision to reach all people with the gospel of Christ. As a servant leader, God desires that you know how He has gifted you. This will lead you to where He would have you serve as part of His vision and mission for the church.

Gene Wilkes is pastor of the Legacy Drive Baptist Church, Plano, Texas. This article was adapted from Jesus on Leadership by Gene Wilkes (LifeWay Christian Resources 1998).

1

Ken Hemphill, Serving God: Discovering and Using Your Spiritual Gifts Workbook (Dallas: The Sampson Company, 1995), 22. This product is distributed by and available from LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention, and may be purchased by calling toll free 1-800-4582772.

2 Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow by C. Peter Wagner, Copyright © 1979, Regal Books, Ventura, CA 93003. Used by permission, 42.

3 These definitions exclude the “sign gifts” because of some confusion that accompanies these gifts and because they are difficult to fit into ministries within a typical church’s ministry base.

 2003 LifeWay Christian Resources

Spiritual Gifts Survey LifeWay Christian Resources

SPIRITUAL GIFTS SURVEY DIRECTIONS This is not a test, so there are no wrong answers. The Spiritual Gifts Survey consists of 80 statements. Some items reflect concrete actions; other items are descriptive traits; and still others are statements of belief.

• Select the one response you feel best characterizes yourself and place that number in the blank provided. Record your answer in the blank beside each item.

• Do not spend too much time on any one item. Remember, it is not a test. Usually your immediate response is best.

• Please give an answer for each item. Do not skip any items.

• Do not ask others how they are answering or how they think you should answer.

• Work at your own pace.

Your response choices are: 5—Highly characteristic of me/definitely true for me 4—Most of the time this would describe me/be true for me 3—Frequently characteristic of me/true for me–about 50 percent of the time 2—Occasionally characteristic of me/true for me–about 25 percent of the time 1—Not at all characteristic of me/definitely untrue for me

______ 1. I have the ability to organize ideas, resources, time, and people effectively. ______ 2. I am willing to study and prepare for the task of teaching. ______ 3. I am able to relate the truths of God to specific situations. ______ 4. I have a God-given ability to help others grow in their faith. ______ 5. I possess a special ability to communicate the truth of salvation. ______ 6. I have the ability to make critical decisions when necessary. ______ 7. I am sensitive to the hurts of people. ______ 8. I experience joy in meeting needs through sharing possessions. ______ 9. I enjoy studying. ______ 10. I have delivered God’s message of warning and judgment. ______ 11. I am able to sense the true motivation of persons and movements. ______ 12. I have a special ability to trust God in difficult situations. ______ 13. I have a strong desire to contribute to the establishment of new churches. ______ 14. I take action to meet physical and practical needs rather than merely talking about or planning to help. ______ 15. I enjoy entertaining guests in my home. ______ 16. I can adapt my guidance to fit the maturity of those working with me. ______ 17. I can delegate and assign meaningful work.  2003 LifeWay Christian Resources

Spiritual Gifts Survey LifeWay Christian Resources

______ 18. I have an ability and desire to teach. ______ 19. I am usually able to analyze a situation correctly. ______ 20. I have a natural tendency to encourage others. ______ 21. I am willing to take the initiative in helping other Christians grow in their faith. ______ 22. I have an acute awareness of the emotions of other people, such as loneliness, pain, fear, and anger. ______ 23. I am a cheerful giver. ______ 24. I spend time digging into facts. ______ 25. I feel that I have a message from God to deliver to others. ______ 26. I can recognize when a person is genuine/honest. ______ 27. I am a person of vision (a clear mental portrait of a preferable future given by God). I am able to communicate vision in such a way that others commit to making the vision a reality. ______ 28. I am willing to yield to God’s will rather than question and waver. ______ 29. I would like to be more active in getting the gospel to people in other lands. ______ 30. It makes me happy to do things for people in need. ______ 31. I am successful in getting a group to do its work joyfully. ______ 32. I am able to make strangers feel at ease. ______ 33. I have the ability to plan learning approaches. ______ 34. I can identify those who need encouragement. ______ 35. I have trained Christians to be more obedient disciples of Christ. ______ 36. I am willing to do whatever it takes to see others come to Christ. ______ 37. I am attracted to people who are hurting. ______ 38. I am a generous giver. ______ 39. I am able to discover new truths. ______ 40. I have spiritual insights from Scripture concerning issues and people that compel me to speak out. ______ 41. I can sense when a person is acting in accord with God’s will. ______ 42. I can trust in God even when things look dark. ______ 43. I can determine where God wants a group to go and help it get there. ______ 44. I have a strong desire to take the gospel to places where it has never been heard. ______ 45. I enjoy reaching out to new people in my church and community. ______ 46. I am sensitive to the needs of people. ______ 47. I have been able to make effective and efficient plans for accomplishing the goals of a group.

ď›™ 2003 LifeWay Christian Resources

Spiritual Gifts Survey LifeWay Christian Resources

______ 48. I often am consulted when fellow Christians are struggling to make difficult decisions. ______ 49. I think about how I can comfort and encourage others in my congregation. ______ 50. I am able to give spiritual direction to others. ______ 51. I am able to present the gospel to lost persons in such a way that they accept the Lord and His salvation. ______ 52. I possess an unusual capacity to understand the feelings of those in distress. ______ 53. I have a strong sense of stewardship based on the recognition that God owns all things. ______ 54. I have delivered to other persons messages that have come directly from God. ______ 55. I can sense when a person is acting under God’s leadership. ______ 56. I try to be in God’s will continually and be available for His use. ______ 57. I feel that I should take the gospel to people who have different beliefs from me. ______ 58. I have an acute awareness of the physical needs of others. ______ 59. I am skilled in setting forth positive and precise steps of action. ______ 60. I like to meet visitors at church and make them feel welcome. ______ 61. I explain Scripture in such a way that others understand it. ______ 62. I can usually see spiritual solutions to problems. ______ 63. I welcome opportunities to help people who need comfort, consolation, encouragement, and counseling. ______ 64. I feel at ease in sharing Christ with nonbelievers. ______ 65. I can influence others to perform to their highest God-given potential. ______ 66. I recognize the signs of stress and distress in others. ______ 67. I desire to give generously and unpretentiously to worthwhile projects and ministries. ______ 68. I can organize facts into meaningful relationships. ______ 69. God gives me messages to deliver to His people. ______ 70. I am able to sense whether people are being honest when they tell of their religious experiences. ______ 71. I enjoy presenting the gospel to persons of other cultures and backgrounds. ______ 72. I enjoy doing little things that help people. ______ 73. I can give a clear, uncomplicated presentation. ______ 74. I have been able to apply biblical truth to the specific needs of my church. ______ 75. God has used me to encourage others to live Christlike lives. ______ 76. I have sensed the need to help other people become more effective in their ministries.  2003 LifeWay Christian Resources

Spiritual Gifts Survey LifeWay Christian Resources

______ 77. I like to talk about Jesus to those who do not know Him. ______ 78. I have the ability to make strangers feel comfortable in my home. ______ 79. I have a wide range of study resources and know how to secure information. ______ 80. I feel assured that a situation will change for the glory of God even when the situation seem impossible.

SCORING YOUR S URVEY Follow these directions to figure your score for each spiritual gift.

1. Place in each box your numerical response (1-5) to the item number which is indicated below the box.

2. For each gift, add the numbers in the boxes and put the total in the TOTAL box.

LEADERSHIP

+ Item 6

ADMINISTRATION

+ Item 16

+ Item 1

TEACHING

Item 17

Item 2 Item 9

Item 24

Item 3 PROPHECY

Item 19 +

Item 10 DISCERNMENT

Item 25 +

Ite m 11 EXHORTATION

Item 26 +

Item 20 SHEPHERDING

Item 34 +

Item 4 FAITH

Item 21 +

Item 12 EVANGELISM

Item 28 +

Item 5 APOSTLESHIP

Item 36 +

Item 13 SERVICE/HELPS

Item 29 +

Item 14 MERCY

Item 30 +

Item 7 GIVING

Item 22 +

Item 8 HOSPITALITY

Item 23 +

Item 15

Item 32

ď›™ 2003 LifeWay Christian Resources

= TOTAL

Item 67 +

Item 60

TOTAL

Item 66

Item 53

Item 45

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 72

Item 52

Item 38 +

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 71

Ite m 58

Item 37 +

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 77

Item 57

Item 46 +

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 80

Item 64

Item 44 +

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 76

Item 56

Item 51 +

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 75

Item 50

Item 42 +

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 70

Item 63

Item 35 +

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 69

Item 55

Item 49 +

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 74

Item 54

Item 41 +

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 79

Item 62

Item 40 +

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 73

Item 68

Item 48 +

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 59

Item 61

Item 39 +

=

+

+

TOTAL

Item 65

Item 47

Item 33

=

+

+

+

+

Item 43

Item 31

Item 18

+

+

+

+

WISDOM

Item 27 +

+

KNOWLEDGE

+

= Item 78

TOTAL

Spiritual Gifts Survey LifeWay Christian Resources

GRAPHING YOUR P ROFILE 25

20

15

10

5

LE AD AD M ER IN IS SHIP TR AT I TE ON A KN CH OW IN LE G DG E W IS PR DO DI OP M SC HE ER CY EX NM HO EN T SH RTA EP TIO HE N RD IN G EV AN FAI T AP GE H L O IS SE ST M L RV ES IC E/ HIP HE LP S ME RC Y HO GIV SP ING ITA LIT Y

0

1. For each gift place a mark across the bar at the point that corresponds to your TOTAL for that gift.

2. For each gift shade the bar below the mark that you have drawn.

3. The resultant graph gives a picture of your gifts. Gifts for which the bars are tall are the ones in which you appear to be strongest. Gifts for which the bars are very short are the ones in which you appear not to be strong.

Now that you have completed the survey, thoughtfully answer the following questions.

The gifts I have begun to discover in my life are: 1. ___________________________________________ 2. ___________________________________________ 3. ___________________________________________ • •

After prayer and worship, I am beginning to sense that God wants me to use my spiritual gifts to serve Christ’s body by _____________________________________________.

I am not sure yet how God wants me to use my gifts to serve others. But I am committed to prayer and worship, seeking wisdom and opportunities to use the gifts I have received from God.

Ask God to help you know how He has gifted you for service and how you can begin to use this gift in ministry to others.  2003 LifeWay Christian Resources

Cokesbury Youth Spiritual Gifts Test Adapted from: ElevenTalents.com and SpiritualGiftsTest.com

Respond to each statement below according to who you are, not who you would like to be or think you ought to be. How true are these statements of you? What has been your experience? To what degree do these statements reflect your usual tendencies? This survey has 80 questions and each is very important, so try not to miss out on any! When you're finished, use the scoring sheet to see what your gifts are!

To save a little time you can write your answers in corresponding boxes on the scoring matrix.

Respond to each statement using this scale: 0 = Not at all; Never 1 = Some of the time; once in a while 2 = Most of the time; usually true 3 = Consistently; definitely true 1.

____ I like to organize people, tasks, and events.

2.

____ I can easily tell the difference between right and wrong, what is truth and lie and good and evil.

3.

____ I have a good understanding of the gospel, and can share it with others easily.

4.

____ I tend to see the potential in people, not their weaknesses.

5.

____ I find it natural and easy to trust God to answer my prayers.

6.

____ I am always ready to give money for an important need.

7.

____ I enjoy working behind the scenes and supporting the work of others.

8.

____ I am a very caring person and always sympathize with other people.

9.

____ I really want others to learn and grow in their faith.

10.

____ Education and knowledge are very important to me.

11.

____ I decide things based on facts, not my feelings.

12.

____ I can usually tell what a person's character is like based upon first impressions.

13.

____ I always look for opportunities to build relationships with non-Christians.

14.

____ I am able to help others when they are upset about something.

15.

____ I have confidence that God will always provide for me, even in difficult times.

16.

____ When I earn money, I always give some back to God.

17.

____ I enjoy doing routine tasks that support the ministry.

18.

____ I am a patient person, but I respond quickly to help those in need.

19.

____ I am very protective of people who need my help.

20.

____ I have a very strong desire to study the Bible on a regular basis.

21.

____ When I am given a job, I am able to recruit people to help out, and can explain what needs to be done so they understand what to do.

22.

____ I can see through phoniness or deceit before other people can.

23.

____ I feel that I have to tell my friends about Jesus, especially those who don’t go to church.

24.

____ I give hope to others by telling them about the promises of God.

25.

____ I believe that God will help me to accomplish great things.

26.

____ I am organized in all areas of my life. I can find things when I need them.

27.

____ I feel like I am a part of my church even when I do routine tasks like cleaning, painting, or yard work.

28.

____ I enjoy helping people who others think of as “undeserving” or beyond help.

29.

____ I like trying to protect others from doing bad things so that they can grow stronger in their faith.

30.

____ I pay close attention to the words, phrases, and meanings of those who teach.

31.

____ I am a leader at school and church. I can effectively share goals in such a way that others want to carry them out.

32.

____ I tend to see rightness or wrongness in situations.

33.

____ Some people think I’m too pushy when I talk about what I believe, and when I try to convince others to follow Jesus.

34.

____ I can develop a plan to solve every problem that I or my friends might have.

35.

____ I trust God even when my success seems impossible.

36.

____ Some people think I am into “things” because of the importance I place on money.

37.

____ I usually do lots of things that help people.

38.

____ It is important to me to comfort others when they are hurt.

39.

____ Relationships are more important to me than other tasks related to a job. I am a “people” person.

40.

____ I like to study the Bible one book at a time.

41.

____ I like to set goals and reach them, no matter what others think about my goals and motives.

42.

____ People usually tell me that I am a good judge of character.

43.

____ I believe salvation is the greatest gift of all.

44.

____ I strengthen those who are down in their faith.

45.

____ I am absolutely sure of God's daily presence and action in my life.

46.

____ I like knowing that the money I give makes a real difference in the lives and ministries of God's people.

47.

____ I like to find small things that need to be done and often do them without being asked.

48.

____ I can look beyond a person's handicaps or problems to see a life that matters to God.

49.

____ I think I would enjoy being given the responsibility for the spiritual growth of a group of believers, like a Sunday school class or a Bible Study.

50.

____ When I teach Scripture, others are interested and want to learn more.

51.

____ I enjoy learning how organizations function.

52.

____ I know when preaching, teaching, or communication is not true to the Bible.

53.

____ I would rather tell others about my faith and about Jesus more than anything else.

54.

____ I like motivating others to take steps for spiritual growth.

55.

____ I am regularly challenging my friends to trust God.

56.

____ When I give something, I want it to be the best that can be given.

57.

58.

____ I don’t wish to be the leader or the most popular person in school or at church. I like being one of the crowd. ____ I enjoy bringing hope and joy to people living in difficult situations.

59.

____ I can gently help wandering believers get back to faith and fellowship.

60.

____ When I teach, other people usually “get” what I am trying to say.

61.

____ I dream big dreams, but I don’t usually tell others about them.

62.

____ I can see sin when others can’t.

63.

____ I want to talk with people who don’t know Jesus even if they are total strangers, just so I can influence them for Jesus.

64.

____ When I study the Bible I am interested in what it says to me about my life and how it can help me solve problems.

65.

____ I am willing to try things that others think are not possible, if I am doing it for God.

66.

____ It really bothers me when people are in need of money or things; I want to do something about it.

67.

____ I readily and happily use any of my skills to help wherever needed.

68.

____ I act on feelings rather than facts.

69.

____ Teaching the same material over and over is boring. I like to learn and teach new things to others.

70.

____ I enjoy explaining things to people so that they can grow spiritually and personally.

71.

____ I work best under pressure.

72.

____ I see most actions as right or wrong, and feel the need to correct the wrong.

73.

____ My conversations with non-believers usually leads to me telling them about my faith.

74.

____ I consider myself to be a very practical, “down to earth� person, so I enjoy practical teaching that I can use in my everyday life.

75.

____ I live with confidence because I know that God is always at work in my life.

76.

____ It is important for me to support missions with my money and time.

77.

____ I am excited and willing to serve others when I am needed to.

78.

____ Other people know that I care about them. I always try to have a loving attitude.

79.

____ I pray a lot for other people.

80.

____ I get upset when others misuse the Bible by making it say what they want it to say, instead of what it really means.

SCORING Directions: Enter the score from the questions in the corresponding numbered box. Add up each column and write your score next to the corresponding letter. Your highest scores will be area you are gifted in. Once you have done this you can check the key below to see what gift each letter represents.

Scoring Matrix A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

E____

F____

G____

H____

I_____

J____

A____

B____

C____

A.

Administration

B.

Discernment

C.

Evangelism

D.

Exhortation

E.

Faith

F.

Giving

G.

Helps/Serving/Ministering

H.

Mercy

I.

Pastor

J.

Teaching

D____

Spiritual Gift Definitions Administration This is the spiritual gift where the Spirit enables certain Christians to organize, administrate, and promote the various affairs of the local church's ministry to direct them effectively. A local church cannot grow beyond a certain point without the ministry of these individuals. See I Corinthians 12:28 Romans 12:8, Titus 1:4-5 Discernment This is the spiritual gift where the Spirit enables certain Christians to know with without a doubt whether a statement or behavior is of God, Satan, or man. See I Corinthians 12:10, Acts 5:3-6, Acts 16:16-18, I John 4:1 Evangelism This is the spiritual gift where the Spirit enables particular Christians to share the Gospel to unbelievers and burdens Christians about soul-winning. All Christians are called to witness for Christ whether they have this gift or not. See Ephesians 4:11, Acts 8:5-12, Acts 21:8, Acts 8:2640, Matthew 28:18-20 Exhortation This is the spiritual gift where the Spirit enables certain Christians to deliver challenging and encouraging words. See Romans 12:8, Acts 11:23-24, Acts 14:21-22, Acts 15:32 Faith This is the spiritual gift where the Spirit provides Christians with great confidence to believe and expect great things from God. See I Corinthians 12:9, Romans 5:1, Romans 12:3, Hebrews 11 Giving This is the spiritual gift where the Spirit enables certain Christians to accumulate and give large amounts of their finances to the glory of God. See Romans 12:8, Acts 4:32-37, Galatians 4:15, Philippians 4:10-18, II Corinthians 8:1-5 Helps/Serving/Ministering This is the spiritual gift where the Spirit empowers certain Christians to render practical help in both physical and spiritual matters. Serving one another, like evangelism, is a calling of all Christians, but there are some who have a special desire to serve, and receive great blessing from it. See Romans 12:7, I Corinthians 12:28, Galatians 6:1-2 Mercy This is the spiritual gift where the Spirit enables certain Christians to minister to and have compassion for those who are suffering or afflicted.

See Romans 12:8, Luke 10:30-37 Pastor/Teaching This is the spiritual gift where the Spirit enables certain Christians to preach and teach the Word of God and to take responsibility for the spiritual welfare of a body of believers. See Ephesians 4:11, I Peter 5:1-11 Teaching This is the spiritual gift where the Spirit enables particular Christians to communicate and clarify the details and truths of God's Word for others to learn.

See Romans 12:7, Ephesians 4:11

Attachment B The World Values Survey

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The World Values Survey The World Values Survey (WVS) is a global research project that explores people‘s values and beliefs, how they change over time and what social and political impact they have. It is carried out by a worldwide network of social scientists who, since 1981, have conducted representative national surveys in almost 100 countries.

The WVS measures, monitors and analyzes: support for democracy, tolerance of foreigners and ethnic minorities, support for gender equality, the role of religion and changing levels of religiosity, the impact of globalization, attitudes toward the environment, work, family, politics, national identity, culture, diversity, insecurity, and subjective well-being.

The findings are valuable for policy makers seeking to build civil society and democratic institutions in developing countries. The work is also frequently used by governments around the world, scholars, students, journalists and international organizations and institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations (UNDP and UN-Habitat). Data from the World Values Survey have for example been used to better understand the motivations behind events such as the Arab Spring, the 2005 French civil unrest, the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the Yugoslav wars and political upheaval in the 1990s.

Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister of Italy and the tenth President of European Commission said about the WVS work: ―The growing globalization of the world makes it increasingly important to understand [...] diversity. People with varying beliefs and values can live together and work together productively, but for this to happen it is crucial to understand and appreciate their distinctive worldviews‖.

Key Insights The WVS has over the years demonstrated that people‘s beliefs play a key role in economic development, the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions, the rise of gender equality, and the extent to which societies have effective government. Some of the key findings of the work are described below.

Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map Analysis of WVS data made by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel asserts that there are two major dimensions of cross cultural variation in the world: 1. Traditional values versus Secular-rational values and 2. Survival values versus Self-expression values. The global cultural map (below) shows how scores of societies are located on these two dimensions. Moving upward on this map reflects the shift from Traditional values to Secular-rational and moving rightward reflects the shift from Survival values to Self–expression values.

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Traditional values emphasize the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values. People who embrace these values also reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.[2] Secular-rational values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values. These societies place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority.

Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable.

Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. It is linked with a relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance.

Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, growing tolerance of foreigners, gays and lesbians and gender equality, and rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life.

Culture Variations A somewhat simplified analysis is that following an increase in standards of living, and a transit from development country via industrialization to post-industrial knowledge society, a country tends to move diagonally in the direction from lower-left corner (poor) to upper-right corner (rich), indicating a transit in both dimensions.

However, the attitudes among the population are also highly correlated with the philosophical, political and religious ideas that have been dominating in the country. Secular-rational values and materialism were formulated by philosophers and the left-wing politics side in the French revolution, and can consequently be observed especially in countries with a long history of social Page 93 of 138

democratic or socialistic policy, and in countries where a large portion of the population have studied philosophy and science at universities. Survival values are characteristic for easternworld countries and self-expression values for western-world countries. In a liberal postindustrial economy, an increasing share of the population has grown up taking survival and freedom of thought for granted, resulting in that self-expression is highly valued.

Examples    

Societies that have high scores in Traditional and Survival values: Zimbabwe, Morocco, Jordan, Bangladesh.

Societies with high scores in Traditional and Self-expression values: the U.S., most of Latin America, Ireland.

Societies with high scores in Secular-rational and Survival values: Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Estonia.

Societies with high scores in Secular-rational and Self-expression values: Sweden, Norway, Japan, Benelux, Germany, France, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, and some English speaking countries.

Aspirations for Democracy The desire for free choice and autonomy is a universal human aspiration, but it is not top priority when people grow up feeling that survival is uncertain. As long as physical survival remains uncertain, the desire for physical and economic security tends to take higher priority than democracy. When basic physiological and safety needs are fulfilled there is a growing emphasis on self-expression values. Findings from the WVS demonstrate that mass self-expression values are extremely important in the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions in a society.

With industrialization and the rise of postindustrial society, Generational Replacement makes self-expression values become more widespread, and countries with authoritarian regimes come under growing mass pressure for political liberalization. This process contributed to the dramatic Third Wave Democracy in the late 1980s and early 1990s and is one of the factors contributing to more recent processes of democratization.

Empowerment of Citizens WVS researchers have identified how the empowerment of ordinary citizens can lead to democracy. This process of human development enables and motivates people to demand democracy, leading to regime changes that entitle people to govern their lives. Growing action resources (such as education), and the spread of self-expression values leads to the emergence of democratic institutions, that enable people to gain growing freedom of choice in how to live their own lives, and to choose their political regime.

Globalization and Converging Values During the past 30 years, the world has witnessed profound changes in political, economic and social spheres and increasingly rapid technological advances. This is often attributed to the phenomenon of globalization. Capital markets are today integrated around the globe and movies Page 94 of 138

and books circle the world in seconds. Hundreds of millions of people visit the same websites, watch the same TV channels and laugh at the same jokes. These examples have contributed to the belief that globalization brings converging values, or a McDonaldization of the world. In fact, analysis of data from the World Values Survey demonstrate that mass values have not been converging over the past three decades. Norms concerning marriage, family, gender and sexual orientation show dramatic changes but virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving in the same direction, at roughly similar speeds. This has brought a parallel movement, without convergence. Moreover, while economically advanced societies have been changing rather rapidly, countries that remained economically stagnant showed little value change. As a result, there has been a growing divergence between the prevailing values in low-income countries and high-income countries.

Gender Values Findings from the WVS indicate that support for gender equality is not just a consequence of democratization. It is part of a broader cultural change that is transforming industrialized societies with mass demands for increasingly democratic institutions. Although a majority of the world‘s population still believes that men make better political leaders than women, this view is fading in advanced industrialized societies, and also among young people in less prosperous countries.

Religion The data from the World Values Survey cover several important aspects of people‘s religious orientation. One of them tracks how involved people are in religious services and how much importance they attach to their religious beliefs. In the data from 2000, 98% of the public in Indonesia said that religion was very important in their lives while in China only three percent considered religion very important. Another aspect concerns people‘s attitudes towards the relation between religion and politics and whether they approve of religious spokesmen who try to influence government decisions and people‘s voting preferences.

Happiness and Life Satisfaction The WVS has shown that from 1981 to 2007 happiness rose in 45 of the 52 countries for which long-term data are available. Since 1981, economic development, democratization, and rising social tolerance have increased the extent to which people perceive that they have free choice, which in turn has led to higher levels of happiness around the world. The popular statistics website Nationmaster publishes a simplified world happiness scale derived from the WVS data.

The WVS website provides access to the WVS data, allowing users to carry out more complex analyses, such as comparing happiness levels over time or across socio-economic groups. One of the most striking shifts measured by the WVS was the sharp decline in happiness experienced in Russian and many other ex-communist countries during the 1990s.

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Catalogue of Findings Supplementing and further detailing these insights, here follows a catalogue summarizing the 30 most crucial findings of the WVS: 1. Much of the variation in human values between societies boils down to two broad dimensions: a first dimension of ―traditional vs. secular-rational values‖ and a second dimension of ―survival vs. self-expression values.‖ 2. On the first dimension, traditional values emphasize religiosity, national pride, respect for authority, obedience and marriage. Secular-rational values emphasize the opposite on each of these accounts.

3. On the second dimension, survival values involve a priority of security over liberty, nonacceptance of homosexuality, abstinence from political action, distrust in outsiders and a weak sense of happiness. Self-expression values imply the opposite on all these accounts.

4. Following the ‗revised theory of modernization,‘ values change in predictable ways with certain aspects of modernity. People‘s priorities shift from traditional to secular-rational values as their sense of existential security increases (or backwards from secular-rational values to traditional values as their sense of existential security decreases).

5. The largest increase in existential security occurs with the transition from agrarian to industrial societies. Consequently, the largest shift from traditional towards secularrational values happens in this phase.

6. People‘s priorities shift from survival to self-expression values as their sense of individual agency increases (or backwards from self-expression values to survival as the sense of individual agency decreases).

7. The largest increase in individual agency occurs with the transition from industrial to knowledge societies. Consequently, the largest shift from survival to self-expression values happens in this phase.

8. The value differences between societies around the world show a pronounced culture zone pattern. The strongest emphasis on traditional values and survival values is found in the Islamic societies of the Middle East. By contrast, the strongest emphasis on secularrational values and self-expression values is found in the Protestant societies of Northern Europe.

9. These culture zone differences reflect different historical pathways of how entire groups of societies entered modernity. These pathways account for people‘s different senses of existential security and individual agency, which in turn account for their different emphases on secular-rational values and self-expression values.

10. Values also differ within societies along such cleavage lines as gender, generation, ethnicity, religious denomination, education, income and so forth.

11. Generally speaking, groups whose living conditions provide people with a stronger sense of existential security and individual agency nurture a stronger emphasis on secularrational values and self-expression values.

12. However, the within-societal differences in people‘s values are dwarfed by a factor five to ten by the between-societal differences. On a global scale, basic living conditions differ still much more between than within societies, and so do the experiences of existential security and individual agency that shape people‘s values.

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13. A specific subset of self-expression values—emancipative values—combines an emphasis on freedom of choice and equality of opportunities. Emancipative values, thus, involve priorities for lifestyle liberty, gender equality, personal autonomy and the voice of the people.

14. Emancipative values constitute the key cultural component of a broader process of human empowerment. Once set in motion, this process empowers people to exercise freedoms in their course of actions.

15. If set in motion, human empowerment advances on three levels. On the socio-economic level, human empowerment advances as growing action resources increase people‘s capabilities to exercise freedoms. On the socio-cultural level, human empowerment advances as rising emancipative values increase people‘s aspirations to exercise freedoms. On the legal-institutional level, human empowerment advances as widened democratic rights increase people‘s entitlements to exercise freedoms.

16. Human empowerment is an entity of empowering capabilities, aspirations, and entitlements. As an entity, human empowerment tends to advance in virtuous spirals or to recede in vicious spirals on each of its three levels.

17. As the cultural component of human empowerment, emancipative values are highly consequential in manifold ways. For one, emancipative values establish a civic form of modern individualism that favours out-group trust and cosmopolitan orientations towards others.

18. Emancipative values encourage nonviolent protest, even against the risk of repression.

Thus, emancipative values provide social capital that activates societies, makes publics more self-expressive, and vitalizes civil society. Emancipative values advance entire societies‘ civic agency.

19. If emancipative values grow strong in countries that are democratic, they help to prevent movements away from democracy.

20. If emancipative values grow strong in countries that are undemocratic, they help to trigger movements towards democracy.

21. Emancipative values exert these effects because they encourage mass actions that put power holders under pressures to sustain, substantiate or establish democracy, depending on what the current challenge for democracy is.

22. Objective factors that have been found to favour democracy (including economic prosperity, income equality, ethnic homogeneity, world market integration, global media exposure, closeness to democratic neighbours, a Protestant heritage, social capital and so forth) exert an influence on democracy mostly insofar as these factors favour emancipative values.

23. Emancipative values do not strengthen people‘s desire for democracy, for the desire for democracy is universal at this point in history. But emancipative values do change the nature of the desire for democracy. And they do so in a double way.

24. For one, emancipative values make people‘s understanding of democracy more liberal: people with stronger emancipative values emphasize the empowering features of democracy rather than bread-and-butter and law-and-order issues.

25. Next, emancipative values make people assess the level of their country‘s democracy more critical: people with stronger emancipative values rather underrate than overrate their country‘s democratic performance.

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26. Together, then, emancipative values generate a critical-liberal desire for democracy. The critical-liberal desire for democracy is a formidable force of democratic reforms. And, it is the best available predictor of a country‘s effective level of democracy and of other indicators of good governance. Neither democratic traditions nor cognitive mobilization account for the strong positive impact of emancipative values on the critical-liberal desire for democracy.

27. Emancipative values constitute the single most important factor in advancing the empowerment of women. Economic, religious, and institutional factors that have been found to advance women‘s empowerment, do so for the most part because they nurture emancipative values.

28. Emancipative values change people‘s life strategy from an emphasis on securing a decent subsistence level to enhancing human agency. As the shift from subsistence to agency affects entire societies, the overall level of subjective well-being rises.

29. The emancipative consequences of the human empowerment process are not a culturespecific peculiarity of the ‗West.‘ The same empowerment processes that advance emancipative values and a critical-liberal desire for democracy in the ‗West,‘ do the same in the ‗East‘ and in other culture zones.

30. The social dominance of Islam and individual identification as Muslim both weaken emancipative values. But among young Muslims with high education, and especially among young Muslim women with high education, the Muslim/Non-Muslim gap over emancipative values closes.

A coherent overview of all these findings can be found in Welzel's Freedom Rising (for a full citation, see bibliography below).

History The World Values Surveys were designed to test the hypothesis that economic and technological changes are transforming the basic values and motivations of the publics of industrialized societies. The surveys build on the European Values Study (EVS) first carried out in 1981. The EVS was conducted under the aegis of Jan Kerkhofs and Ruud de Moor and continues to be based in the Netherlands at the Tilburg University. The 1981 study was largely limited to developed societies, but interest in this project spread so widely that surveys were carried out in more than twenty countries, located on all six inhabited continents. Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan played a leading role in extending these surveys to be carried out in countries around the world. Today the network includes hundreds of social scientist from more than 100 countries.

Findings from the first wave of surveys pointed to the conclusion that intergenerational changes were taking place in basic values relating to politics, economic life, religion, gender roles, family norms and sexual norms. The values of younger generations differed consistently from those prevailing among older generations, particularly in societies that had experienced rapid economic growth. To examine whether changes were actually taking place in these values and to analyze the underlying causes, a second wave of WVS surveys was carried out in 1990–91. Because these changes seem to be linked with economic and technological development, it was important

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to include societies across the entire range of development, from low income societies to rich societies.

A third wave of surveys was carried out in 1995–97, this time in 55 societies and with increased attention being given to analysing the cultural conditions for democracy. A fourth wave of surveys was carried out in 1999–2001 in 65 societies. A key goal was to obtain better coverage of African and Islamic societies, which had been under-represented in previous surveys. A fifth wave was carried out in 2005–07 and a sixth wave is being carried out during 2011–12.

Due to the European origin of the project, the early waves of the WVS were eurocentric in emphasis, with little representation in Africa and South-East Asia. To expand, the WVS adopted a decentralised structure. in which social scientists from countries throughout the world participated in the design, execution and analysis of the data, and in publication of findings. In return for providing the data from a survey in their own society, each group obtained immediate access to the data from all participating societies enabling them to analyse social change in a broader perspective.

The WVS network has produced over 1,000 publications in 20 languages and secondary users have produced several thousand additional publications. The database of the WVS has been published on the internet with free access.

The official archive of the World Values Survey is located in [ASEP/JDS] Madrid, Spain.

Methodology The World Values Survey uses the sample survey as its mode of data collection, a systematic and standardized approach to collect information through interviewing representative national samples of individuals. The basic stages of a sample survey are Questionnaire design; Sampling; Data collection and Analysis.

Questionnaire Design For each wave, suggestions for questions are solicited by social scientists from all over the world and a final master questionnaire is developed in English. Since the start in 1981 each successive wave has covered a broader range of societies than the previous one. Analysis of the data from each wave has indicated that certain questions tapped interesting and important concepts while others were of little value. This has led to the more useful questions or themes being replicated in future waves while the less useful ones have been dropped making room for new questions.

The questionnaire is translated into the various national languages and in many cases independently translated back to English to check the accuracy of the translation. In most countries, the translated questionnaire is pre-tested to help identify questions for which the translation is problematic. In some cases certain problematic questions are omitted from the national questionnaire.

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Sampling Samples are drawn from the entire population of 18 years and older. The minimum sample is 1000. In most countries, no upper age limit is imposed and some form of stratified random sampling is used to obtain representative national samples. In the first stages, a random selection of sampling points is made based on the given society statistical regions, districts, census units, election sections, electoral registers or voting stations and central population registers. In most countries the population size and/or degree of urbanization of these Primary Sampling Units are taken into account. In some countries, individuals are drawn from national registers.

Data Collection and Field Work Following the sampling, each country is left with a representative national sample of its public.

These persons are then interviewed during a limited time frame decided by the Executive Committee of the World Values Survey using the uniformly structured questionnaires. The survey is carried out by professional organizations using face-to-face interviews or phone interviews for remote areas. Each country has a Principal Investigator (social scientists working in academic institutions) who is responsible for conducting the survey in accordance with the fixed rules and procedures. During the field work, the agency has to report in writing according to a specific check-list. Internal consistency checks are made between the sampling design and the outcome and rigorous data cleaning procedures are followed at the WVS data archive. No country is included in a wave before full documentation has been delivered. This means a data set with the completed methodological questionnaire. and a report of country-specific information (for example important political events during the fieldwork, problems particular to the country). Once all the surveys are completed, the Principal Investigator has access to all surveys and data.

Analysis The World Values Survey group works with leading social scientists, recruited from each society studied. They represent a wide range of cultures and perspectives which makes it possible to draw on the insights of well-informed insiders in interpreting the findings. It also helps disseminate social science techniques to new countries.

Each research team, that has contributed to the survey, analyses the findings according to its hypotheses. Because all researchers obtain data from all of the participating societies, they are also able to compare the values and beliefs of the people of their own society with those from scores of other societies and to test alternative hypotheses. In addition, the participants are invited to international meetings at which they can compare findings and interpretations with other members of the WVS network. The findings are then disseminated through international conferences and joint publications.

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Usage The World Values Survey data has been downloaded by over 100,000 researchers, journalists, policy-makers and others. The data is available on the WVS website which contains tools developed for online analysis.

Governance and Funding The World Values Survey is organised as a network of social scientists coordinated by a central body - the World Values Survey Association. It is established as a non-profit organization seated in Stockholm, Sweden, with a constitution and mission statement. The project is guided by an Executive Committee representing all regions of the world. The Committee is also supported by a Scientific Advisory Committee, a Secretariat and an Archive. The WVS Executive Committee provides leadership and strategic planning for the association. It is responsible for the recruitment of new members, the organization of meetings and workshops, data processing and distribution, capacity building and the promotion of publications and dissemination of results.

The WVS Executive Committee also raises funds for central functions and assists member groups in their fundraising.

Each national team is responsible for its own expenses and most surveys are financed by local sources. However, central funding has been obtained in cases where local funding is not possible. Presently, the activities of the WVS Secretariat and WVS Executive Committee are funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Other funding has been obtained from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), the Volkswagen Foundation, the German Science Foundation (DFG) and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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Attachment C Glossary of Spiritual Terms

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Glossary of Spiritual Terms A 

Afterlife: (or life after death) A generic term referring to a continuation of existence, typically spiritual and experiential, beyond this world, or after death. This article is about current generic and widely held or reported concepts of afterlife.



Ahimsa: A religious concept which advocates non-violence and a respect for all life.

Ahimsa (ahiṁsā) is Sanskrit for avoidance of himsa, or injury. It is interpreted most often as meaning peace and reverence toward all sentient beings. Ahimsa is the core of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Its first mention in Indian philosophy is found in the Hindu scriptures called the Upanishads, the oldest dating about 800 BC. Those who practice Ahimsa are often vegetarians or vegans.



Aikido: (合気道 Aikidō, also 合氣道 using an older style of kanji) Literally meaning "harmony energy way", or with some poetic license, "way of the harmonious spirit", is a gendai budo – a modern Japanese martial art. Practitioners of aikido are known as aikidoka. It was developed by Morihei Ueshiba (植芝盛平) (also known by aikidoka as o-sensei (大先生)) over the period of the 1930s to the 1960s. Technically, the major parts of aikido are derived from Daitō-ryū Aiki-jūjutsu (大東流合気柔術), a form of jujutsu with many joint techniques, and kenjutsu (剣術), or Japanese sword technique (some believe the tactics in Aikido are especially influenced by Yagyū Shinkage-ryū). Aikido is also considered to contain a significant spiritual component.



Akashic Records: (Akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning "sky", "space" or "aether") Said to be a collection of mystical knowledge that is stored in the aether; i.e. on a non-physical plane of existence. The concept is common in some New Age religious groups. The Akashic Records are said to have existed since the beginning of the planet. Just as we have various specialty libraries (e.g., medical, law), there are said to exist various Akashic Records (e.g., human, animal, plant, mineral, etc.). Most writings refer to the Akashic Records in the area of human experience.



Ancestor worship: (拜祖), also ancestor veneration (敬祖) A religious practice based on the belief that one's ancestors possess supernatural powers.



Anomalous phenomenon: An observed phenomenon for which there is no suitable explanation in the context of a specific body of scientific knowledge (e.g. astronomy or biology).



Asceticism: Denotes a life which is characterised by refraining from worldly pleasures (austerity). Those who practice ascetic lifestyles often perceive their practices as virtuous and pursue them to achieve greater spirituality.

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B 

Bagua (concept): (Chinese: 八卦; pinyin: bā guà; Wade–Giles: pa kua; literally: "eight trigrams", Korean 한국어: 팔괘) A fundamental philosophical concept in ancient China.

It is an octagonal diagram with eight trigrams on each side. The concept of bagua is applied not only to Chinese Taoist thought and the I Ching, but is also used in other domains of Chinese culture, such as fengshui, martial arts, navigation, etc.



Bahá'í Faith: An emerging global religion founded by Bahá'u'lláh, a nineteenth-century Iranian exile.



Blessing: (from to bless, Old English bleodsian or bletsian) Originally meant "sprinkling with blood" during the pagan sacrifices, the Blóts (reference: AHD). A blessing, (also used to refer to bestowing of such) is the infusion of something with holiness, divine will, or one's hopes. Within Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and similar traditions, formal blessings of the church are performed by bishops, priests, and sometimes deacons, but as in many other religions, anyone may formally bless another.



Chakra: In Hinduism and its spiritual systems of yoga and in some related eastern cultures, as well as in some segments of the New Age movement—and to some degree the distinctly different New Thought movement—a chakra is thought to be an energy node in the human body.



Chant: The rhythmic speaking or singing of words or sounds, either on a single pitch or with a simple melody involving a limited set of notes and often including a great deal of repetition or statis. Chant may be considered speech, music, or a heightened form of speech which is more effective in conveying emotion or expressing ones spiritual side.

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Channelling: The act of having spirits enter or possess one's body in order to speak and act through one as practised in many cultures and religions.



Creation myth: The term creation myth refers to myths that describe the beginnings of humanity, earth, life, and the universe (cosmogony). Creation myths may explain that the beginnings of the universe were a deliberate act of "creation" by a supreme being. As with any set of beliefs, opinions regarding the validity of particular creation myths differ—points of view on these subjects vary widely.



Consciousness: A quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. Many philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness which is experience itself and access consciousness which is the processing of the things in experience.

C

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Many cultures and religious traditions place the seat of consciousness in a soul separate from the body. Conversely, many scientists and philosophers consider consciousness to be intimately linked to the neural functioning of the brain dictating the way in which the world is experienced. This aspect of consciousness is the subject of much debate and research in philosophy of mind, psychology, brain biology, neurology, and cognitive science. 

Contemplation: A type of prayer or meditation in the Christian, especially Catholic, tradition. It is an attempt to experience God directly. It is connected to Christiam mysticism, and authors such as Teresa of Avila, Margery Kempe, Augustine Baker and Thomas Merton have written about it extensively. It is briefly described in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 2709 onwards, where the Song of Songs is quoted.



Cosmogony: [Gr. Kosmogonia from Kosmos the world and root of gignesthai to be born] The coming into existence, the creation and origination of the universe. It is also the study of these aspects. So a cosmogony describes how the Universe came to be; hence, the creation myth in the Book of Genesis is one such cosmogony, and there are many others, both scientific and mythological. This contrasts with cosmology, which studies the Universe at large, throughout its existence.



Deism: Historical and modern deism is defined by the view that reason, rather than revelation or tradition, should be the basis of belief in God. Deists reject organized religion and promote reason as the essential element in making moral decisions. This "rational" basis was usually founded upon the cosmological argument (first cause argument), the teleological argument (argument from design), and other aspects of what was called natural religion. Deism has become identified with the classical belief that God created but does not intervene in the world, though this is not a necessary component of deism.



Deity: (or a god) A postulated preternatural being, usually, but not always, of significant power, worshipped, thought holy, divine, or sacred, held in high regard, or respected by human beings. They assume a variety of forms, but are frequently depicted as having human or animal form. Sometimes it is considered blasphemous to imagine the deity as having any concrete form. They are usually immortal. They are commonly assumed to have personalities and to possess consciousness, intellects, desires, and emotions much like humans. Such natural phenomena as lightning, floods, storms, other "acts of God‖, and miracles are attributed to them, and they may be thought to be the authorities or controllers of every aspect of human life (such as birth or the afterlife). Some deities are asserted to be the directors of time and fate itself, to be the givers of human law and morality, to be the ultimate judges of human worth and behavior, and to be the designers and creators of the Earth or the universe. Some of these "gods" have no power at all-they are simply worshipped.

D

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

Dhammapada: (Pali, translates as Path of the Dharma. Also Prakrit Dhamapada, Sanskrit Dharmapada) A Buddhist religious scripture, containing 423 verses in 26 categories. According to tradition, these are answers to questions put to the Buddha on various occasions, most of which deal with ethics.



Dharma: (sanskrit, roughly law or way) The way of the higher Truths. Beings that live in harmony with Dharma proceed quicker towards moksha, nirvana, or personal liberation, a concept first taught in Indian religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism).



Dhikr: Arabic. ("pronouncement", "invocation" or "remembrance") also spelled zikr based on its pronunciation in Turkish and Persian.

Dhikr is the remembrance of God commanded in the Qur'an for all Muslims. To engage in dhikr is to have awareness of God according to Islam. Dhikr as a devotional act includes the repetition of divine names, supplications and aphorisms from hadith literature, and sections of the Qur'an. More generally, any activity in which the Muslim maintains awareness of God is considered dhikr.

E 

Emanationism: Technically is a henotheism component in the cosmology of certain religious or philosophical systems that argue a Supreme Being did not directly create the physical universe, but instead emanated lower spiritual beings who created the world.



Enlightenment: As a concept is related to the Buddhist Bodhi but is a cornerstone of religious and spiritual understanding in practically all religions. It literally means being illuminated by acquiring new wisdom or understanding.



Entheogen: A modern term derived from two Ancient Greek words, ἔνθεος (entheos) and γενέζθαι (genesthai). Entheos means literally "in God", more freely translated "inspired". The Greeks used it as a term of praise for poets and other artists. Genesthai means "to cause to be". So an entheogen is "that which causes (a person) to be in God".

The translation "creating the divine within" that is sometimes given is not quite correct -entheogen implies neither that something is created (as opposed to just perceiving something that is already there) nor that that which is experienced is within the user (as opposed to having independent existence).



Epigenesis: The philosophical/theological/esoteric idea that since the mind was given to the human being, it is this original creative impulse, epigenesis, which has been the cause of all of mankind's development.



Epiphany: (Greek: επιφάνεια, "the appearance; miraculous phenomenon") A Christian feast intended to celebrate the 'shining forth' or revelation of God to mankind in human form, in the person of Jesus. The observance had its origins in the eastern Christian churches, and included the birth of Jesus; the visit of the three Magi (Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar) who arrived in Bethlehem; and all of Jesus' childhood events, up to his Page 106 of 138

baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist. The feast was initially based on, and viewed as a fulfillment of, the Jewish Feast of Lights. This was fixed on January 6. 

Eschatology: (from the Greek eschatos meaning "last" + -logy) A part of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or the ultimate fate of human kind, commonly phrased as the end of the world. In many religions, the end of the world is a future event prophesied in sacred texts or folklore. More broadly, eschatology may encompass related concepts such as the messiah or messianic era, the afterlife, and the soul.



Esotericism: Refers to knowledge suitable only for the advanced, privileged, or initiated, as opposed to exoteric knowledge, which is public. It is used especially for mystical, occult and spiritual viewpoints.



Eternal return: (or sometimes eternal recurrence) A concept originating from ancient Egypt and developed in the teachings of Pythagoras.

Eternity: While in the popular mind, eternity often simply means existing for an infinite, i.e., limitless, amount of time, many have used it to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside of time. There are a number of arguments for eternity, by which proponents of the concept, principally, Aristotle, purported to prove that matter, motion, and time must have existed eternally.





Eutheism, dystheism, and maltheism: Eutheism and dystheism are dialectic opposites within the spectrum of theistic religious beliefs.  

Eutheism is the belief that God exists and is good.

Dystheism is the belief that God exists but is not good.



Existence: There is no universally accepted theory of what the word existence means.

The dominant (though by no means universal) view in twentieth-century and contemporary Anglo-American philosophy is that existence is what is asserted by statements of first-order logic of the form "for some x Fx". This agrees with the simple and commonsensical view that, in uttering "There is a bridge across the Thames at Hammersmith", or "A bridge crosses the Thames at Hammersmith", we are asserting the existence of a bridge across the Thames at Hammersmith. The word "existence", on this view, is simply a way of describing the logical form of ordinary subject-predicate sentence.



Exorcism: The practice of evicting demons or other evil spiritual entities which are supposed to have possessed (taken control of) a person or object. The practice, though ancient in roots, is still part of the belief system of many religions. The word "exorcism" means "I cause [someone] to swear," referring to the exorcist forcing the spirit to obey a higher power.

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F 

Faith healing: The use of solely spiritual means in treating disease, sometimes accompanied with the refusal of modern medical techniques. Another term for this is spiritual healing. Faith healing is a form of alternative medicine.



Fasting: The act of willingly abstaining from all food and in some cases drink, for a period of time. Depending on the tradition, fasting practices may forbid sexual intercourse, (or any sexual desire), masturbation, as well as refraining from eating certain types or groups of food (e.g. meat).

Fasting for religious and spiritual reasons has been a part of human custom since prehistory. It is mentioned in the Qur'an, in the Mahabharata, in the Upanishads, and in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testament.

G 

Glossolalia: (from the Greek, "γλώζζα" (glossa), tongue and "λαλώ" (lalô), to speak) Comprises the utterance of what appears (to the casual listener) either as an unknown foreign language (xenoglossia), simply nonsense syllables, or utterance of an unknown mystical language; the utterances sometimes occur as part of religious worship (religious glossolalia).

Certain Christians (see below) regard the act of speaking in tongues, as a gift of God through the Holy Spirit; one of the Gifts of the Spirit. Other religions also use glossolalia as a component of worship.



Gnosticism: A blanket term for various mystical initiatory religions, sects and knowledge schools, which were most prominent in the first few centuries AD. It is also applied to modern revivals of these groups and, sometimes, by analogy to all religious movements based on secret knowledge gnosis, thus can lead to confusion.



God: The term God is capitalized in the English language as a proper noun when used to refer to a specific monotheistic concept of a supernatural Supreme Being in accordance with Christian, Jewish (sometimes as "G-d" - cf. Names of God in Judaism), and more recently (in the U.S.A) Muslim and some Hindu traditions.



Great Awakenings: Commonly said to be periods of religious revival in AngloAmerican religious history. They have also been described as periodic revolutions in American religious thought. The Great Awakenings appear to form a cycle, with a period of roughly 80 years. There are three generally accepted Great Awakenings in American history: The First Great Awakening (1730s - 1740s); The Second Great Awakening (1820s - 1830s); The Third Great Awakening (1880s - 1900s).

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

Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji (Punjabi: ਸ੍ਰੀ ਗੁਰੂ ਗਰੰ ਥ ਸ੍ਾਹਿਬ ਜੀ): Granth is Punjabi for book; Sahib is Hindi meaning master, from Arabic, meaning companion, friend, owner, or master – is more than a holy book of the Sikhs. The Sikhs treat this Granth (holy book) as a living Guru. The holy text spans 1430 pages and contains the actual words spoken by the founders of the Sikh religion and various other Saints from other religions including Hinduism and Islam.



Guru: (Sanskrit: गुरू, Punjabi: ਗੁਰੂ) A teacher in Hinduism, Buddhism or Sikhism. Based on a long line of philosophical understanding as to the importance of knowledge, the guru is seen in these religions as a sacred conduit, or a way to self-realization. In India and among people of Hindu, Buddhist, or Sikh belief, the title retains a hallowed meaning.

Guru also refers in Sanskrit to Brihaspati, a Hindu figure analogous to the Roman planet/god Jupiter. In Vedic astrology, Jupiter/Guru/Brihaspati is believed to exert teaching influences. Indeed, in many Indian languages, such as Hindi, the occidental Thursday is called either Brihaspativaar or Guruvaar (vaar meaning period or day).

In contemporary India and Indonesia, guru is widely used within the general meaning of "teacher". In Western usage, the original meaning of guru has been extended to cover anyone who acquires followers, and not necessarily in an established school of philosophy or religion. In a further metaphorical extension, guru is used of a person who has authority because of his or her perceived knowledge or skills in a domain of expertise.

The importance of discerning between a true guru and a false one is explored in scriptures and teachings of religions in which a guru plays a role. The assessment and criticism of gurus and the Guru-shishya tradition are espoused in the discourse about cults and new religious movements by Western secular scholars, theologians, anticultists, and by skeptics both in the West and in India.

H 

Hymn: A song specifically written as a song of praise, adoration or prayer, typically addressed to a god.

A writer of hymns is known as a hymnist or hymnodist, and the process of singing a hymn is called hymnody; the same word is used for the collectivity of hymns belonging to a particular denomination or period (e.g. "nineteenth century Methodist hymnody" would mean the body of hymns written and/or used by Methodists in the nineteenth century).

Books called hymnals are collections of hymns, which may or may not include music.

Ancient hymns include the Great Hymn to the Aten, composed by the pharaoh Akhenaten, and the Vedas, a collection of hymns in the tradition of Hinduism. The Western tradition of hymnody begins with the Homeric Hymns, a collection of ancient Greek hymns, the oldest of which were written in the 7th century BCE in praise of the gods of Greek mythology.

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I 

I Ching: The oldest of the Chinese classic texts. It describes an ancient system of cosmology and philosophy which is at the heart of Chinese cultural beliefs. The philosophy centers on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change (see Philosophy, below). In Western cultures, the I Ching is regarded by some as simply a system of divination; others believe it expresses the wisdom and philosophy of ancient China.



Iconolatry: (from the two Greek terms eikon denoting simply a picture or image, and latreia to adore or worship) Icon in Greek simply denotes a picture but has now come to be closely associated with religious art used by the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches. Icons are used by Orthodox Churches to assist in prayer and worship of God. Icon (image) is the same word used in the Bible in Genesis 1:27, Colossians 1:15.



Inner peace: (or peace of mind) A colloquialism that refers to a state of being mentally or spiritually at peace, with enough knowledge and understanding to keep oneself strong in the face of discord or stress. Being "at peace" is considered by many to be healthy (homeostasis) and the opposite of being stressed or anxious. Peace of mind is generally associated with bliss and happiness. Most religious people believe that it is only truly possible to achieve inner peace with divine intervention of some form or another.

Peace of mind, serenity, and calmness are descriptions of a disposition free from the effects of stress. In some cultures, inner peace is considered a state of consciousness or enlightenment that may be cultivated by various forms of training, such as prayer, meditation, T'ai Chi Ch'uan or yoga, for example. Many spiritual practices refer to this peace as an experience of knowing oneself.



Integrity: Comprises the personal inner sense of "wholeness" deriving from honesty and consistent uprightness of character. The etymology of the word relates it to the Latin adjective integer (whole, complete). Evaluators, of course, usually assess integrity from some point of view, such as that of a given ethical tradition or in the context of an ethical relationship.



Involution: In integral theory, the process by which the Divine manifests the cosmos is called involution. The process by which the creation rises to higher states and states of consciousness is the evolution. Involution prepares the universe for the Big Bang; evolution continues from that point forward. The term involution comes from the idea that the divine involves itself in creation.

After the creation, the Divine (i.e. the Absolute, Brahman, God; all these essentially mean the same thing) is both the One (the Creator) and the Many (that which was created).

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J 

Japa: (or Japam) A spiritual discipline in which a devotee repeats a mantra or the name of the God. The repetition can be aloud or just the movement of lips or in the mind. This spiritual practice is present in the major religions of world. This is considered as one of the most effective spiritual practices.



Jihad: (Arabic: ‫ جهاد‬jihād) An Islamic term, from the Arabic root jhd ("to exert utmost effort, to strive, struggle"), which connotes a wide range of meanings: anything from an inward spiritual struggle to attain perfect faith to a political or military struggle to further the Islamic cause. The meaning of "Islamic cause" is of course open to interpretation. The term is frequently mistranslated into English as "holy war", although jihad can apply to warfare. Mainstream Muslims consider jihad to be the most misunderstood aspect of their religion by non-Muslims. The Islamic religious legitimacy of the goals or methods of various Islamist movements who adopt the terminology of jihad is often brought into question, usually by moderate and liberal Muslims.



Karma: (Sanskrit: from the root kri, "to do", meaning deed) or Kamma (Pali: meaning action, effect, destiny) A term in several Indian religions that comprises the entire cycle of cause and effect. Karma is a sum of all that an individual has done and is currently doing. The effects of those deeds actively create present and future experiences, thus making one responsible for one's own life. In religions that incorporate reincarnation, karma extends through one's present life and all past and future lives as well.



Koan: A story, dialog, question, or statement in the history and lore of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet that may be accessible to Intuition. Koans are often used by Zen practitioners as objects of meditation to induce an experience of enlightenment or realization, and by Zen teachers as testing questions when a student wishes to validate their experience of enlightenment.



Lataif-e-Sitta: Drawing from Qur'anic verses, virtually all Sufis distinguish Lataif-eSitta (The six subtleties), Nafs, Qalb, Sirr, Ruh, Khafi & Akhfa. These lataif (sing : latifa) designate various psychospiritual "organs" or, sometimes, faculties of sensory and suprasensory perception. In a rough assessment, they might appear to correlate with glands, organs, Chinese traditional or vedic chakras.

K

L

In general, sufic development involves the awakening in a certain order these spiritual centers of perception that lie dormant in every person. Each center is associated with a particular color and general area of the body, as well as ofttimes with a particular prophet, and varies from Order to Order. The help of a guide is considered necessary to Page 111 of 138

help activate these centers. The activation of all these "centers" is part of the inner methodology of the Sufi way or "Work". After undergoing this process, the dervish is said to reach a certain type of "completion" or becomes a Complete Man. 

Love: Has many different meanings in English, from something that gives a little pleasure ("I loved that meal") to something one would die for (patriotism, pairbonding).

It can describe an intense feeling of affection, an emotion or an emotional state. In ordinary use, it usually refers to interpersonal love. Probably due to its psychological relevance, love is one of the most common themes in art.

Just as there are many types of lovers, there are many kinds of love. Love is inherent in all human cultures. It is precisely these cultural differences that make any universal definition of love difficult to establish. See the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

Expressions of love may include the love for a "soul" or mind, the love of laws and organizations, love for a body, love for nature, love of food, love of money, love for learning, love of power, love of fame, love for the respect of others, et cetera. Different people place varying degrees of importance on the kinds of love they receive. Love is essentially an abstract concept, easier to experience than to explain.

M 

Mantra: A religious syllable or poem, typically from the Sanskrit language. Their use varies according to the school and philosophy associated with the mantra. They are primarily used as spiritual conduits, words and vibrations that instill one-pointed concentration in the devotee. Other purposes have included religious ceremonies to accumulate wealth, avoid danger, or eliminate enemies. Mantras originated in India with Vedic Hinduism and were later adopted by Buddhists and Jains, now popular in various modern forms of spiritual practice which are loosely based on practices of these Eastern religions.



Meaning of life: The question ―What is the meaning of life?‖ means different things to different people. The ambiguity of the query is inherent in the word ―meaning‖, which opens the question to many interpretations, such as: “What is the origin of life?”, “What is the nature of life (and of the universe in which we live)?”, “What is the significance of life?”, “What is valuable in life?”, and “What is the purpose of, or in, (one's) life?”.

These questions have resulted in a wide range of competing answers and arguments, from practical scientific theories, to philosophical, theological and spiritual explanations.

Similar questions people ask themselves about the origin and purpose of life are ―Why am I here?‖ and ―Why are we here?‖.



Meditation: Refers to any of a wide variety of spiritual practices (and their close secular analogues) which emphasize mental activity or quiescence. The English word comes from the Latin meditatio, which could perhaps be better translated as "contemplation."

This usage is found in Christian spirituality, for example, when one "meditates" on the sufferings of Christ; as well as Western philosophy, as in Descartes' Meditations on First

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Philosophy, a set of six mental exercises which systematically analyze the nature of reality.

In the late nineteenth century, Theosophists adopted "meditation" to refer to various spiritual practices drawn from Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions. Thus the English word "meditation" does not exclusively translate any single term or concept from the sacred languages of Asia, such as the Sanskrit dhyana, samādhi, or pranayama.

(Note that whereas in Eastern religions meditation is often a central part of religious/spiritual practice, in Christianity it is rather a fringe activity if practised at all.) 

Metaphysics: (Greek words meta = after/beyond and physics = nature) A branch of philosophy concerned with the study of "first principles" and "being" (ontology).

Problems that were not originally considered metaphysical have been added to metaphysics. Other problems that were considered metaphysical problems for centuries are now typically relegated to their own separate subheadings in philosophy, such as philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. In rare cases subjects of metaphysical research have been found to be entirely physical and natural, thus making them part of physics.

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Mind's eye: (or third eye) A phrase used to refer to one's ability to "see" things (such as visions) with the mind. This is, essentially, a reference to imagination and memory, although it can have religious or occult connotations. Also, the term "third eye" has been associated with the Pineal gland. It is a commonly held belief that in some practices (such as the ones described below) are actually referring to and studying the Pineal Gland.

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Miracle: According to many religions, a miracle, derived from the Latin word miraculum meaning 'something wonderful', is a striking interposition of divine intervention by God in the universe by which the operations of the ordinary course of Nature are overruled, suspended, or modified. One must keep in mind that in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and in other faiths people have substantially different definitions of the word miracle. Even within a specific religion there is often more than one usage of the term.

Sometimes the term miracle may refer to the action of a supernatural being that is not a god. Then the term divine intervention refers specifically to the direct involvement of a deity.

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Moksha: (Sanskrit: liberation) or Mukti (Sanskrit: release) Refers, in general, to liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. In higher Hindu philosophy, it is seen as a transcendence of phenomenal being, of any sense of consciousness of time, space, and causation (karma). It is not seen as a soteriological goal in the same sense as in, say, a Christian context, but signifies dissolution of the sense of self, or ego, and the overall breakdown of nama-roopa (name-form). It is, in Hinduism, viewed as analogous to Nirvana, though Buddhist thought tends to differ with even the Advaita Vedantist reading of liberation. Jainism and Surat Shabda Yoga traditions also believe in Moksha.

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Muraqaba: The Sufi word for meditation. Literally it means "to watch over", "to take care of" or "to keep an eye". Metaphorically, it implies that with meditation, a person watches over or takes care of his spiritual heart (or soul), and acquires knowledge about it, its surroundings and its creator.

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Mysticism: From the Greek μυω (mueo, "to conceal"), is the pursuit of achieving communion with or conscious awareness of ultimate reality, the divine, spiritual truth, or God through direct, personal experience (intuition or insight) rather than rational thought; the belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible through personal experience; or the belief that such experience is a genuine and important source of knowledge. In the Hellenistic world, "mystical" referred to secret religious rituals.

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Nasma: A body made of the purest form of light (called Noor) which is more pure than any visible color. Hazrat Shah Wali Ullah was the first who give hints about this body.

Hazrat Qalandar Baba Auliya give its more details while Khwaja Shamsuddin Azeemi thoroughly described that body. This body is actually that is controlling the human physical body. The lights coming from Nasma to material body are visible only through Kirlian photography. These visible lights are called Aura.

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Neopaganism: (sometimes Neo-Paganism) Describes a heterogeneous group of new religious movements which attempt to revive ancient, mainly pre-Christian and often preJudaic Indo-European religions. As the name implies, these religions are Pagan in nature, though their exact relationship to older forms of Paganism is the source of much contention.

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New Age: Describes a broad movement of late twentieth century and contemporary Western culture characterised by an individual eclectic approach to spiritual exploration.

It has some attributes of a new, emerging religion but is currently a loose network of spiritual seekers, teachers, healers and other participants. The name "New Age" also refers to the market segment in which goods and services are sold to people in the movement.

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Nirvana: In the Indian religions Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism, nirvāna (from the Sanskrit , Pali: Nibbāna -- Chinese: 涅槃; Pinyin: niè pán), literally "extinction" and/or "extinguishing", is the culmination of the yogi's pursuit of liberation.

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, described the Dharma as a raft which, after floating across a river, will enable the passenger to reach nirvana. Hinduism and Jainism also use the word nirvana to describe the state of moksha, and it is spoken of in several Hindu tantric texts as well as the Bhagavad Gita.

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Nondualism: The belief that dualism or dichotomy are illusory phenomenae. Examples of dualisms include self/other, mind/body, male/female, good/evil, active/passive, and many others. A nondual philosophical or religious perspective or theory maintains that

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there is no fundamental distinction between mind and matter, or that the entire phenomenological world is an illusion (with the reality being described variously as the Void, the Is, Emptiness, or the Mind of God).

O 

Oneness: A spiritual term referring to the 'experience' of the absence of egoic identity boundaries, and, according to some traditions, the realization of the awareness of the absolute interconnectedness of all matter and thought in space-time, or one's ultimate identity with God (see Tat Tvam Asi). Its meaning may be synonymous to that of nonduality, though some claim that non-duality implies 'not one' and 'not two', i.e. nonduality is analogous to the Hindu formula of negation, Neti Neti, used in describing the absolute.

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Pandeism: (Greek pan=all, en=in and Latin Deus=God; "all-in-God") is a term generally used to describe philosophical systems, often mixing elements of pantheism and deism.

This use has been inconsistent over time.

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Panentheism (Greek words: pan=all, en=in and Theos=God; "all-in-God") is the view that God is both immanent within all creation, and also maintains a transcendent character.

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Pantheism: (Greek: pan = all and Theos = God) Literally means "God is All" and "All is God". It is the view that everything is of an all-encompassing immanent God; or that the universe, or nature, and God are equivalent. More detailed definitions tend to emphasize the idea that natural law, existence and/or the universe (the sum total of all that is was and shall be) is represented or personified in the theological principle of 'God'.

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Parapsychology: The study of the evidence involving phenomena where a person seems to affect or to gain information about something through a means not currently explainable within the framework of mainstream, conventional science. Proponents of the existence of these phenomena usually consider them to be a product of unexplained mental abilities.

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Physical universe: The part of the universe composed of matter, as opposed to a spiritual or supernatural essence.

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Pilgrimage: A term primarily used in religion and spirituality of a long journey or search of great moral significance. Sometimes, it is a journey to a sacred place or shrine of importance to a person's beliefs and faith. Members of every religion participate in pilgrimages. A person who makes such a journey is called a pilgrim.

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Plane (cosmology): In metaphysics and esoteric cosmology, a plane of existence (sometimes called simply a plane, dimension, vibrating plane, or an inner, invisible,

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spiritual, supraphysical world or egg) is a theoretical region of space and/or consciousness beyond the known physical universe, or the region containing the universe itself. Many esoteric teachings (e.g., theosophy and rosicrucianism) propound the idea of a whole series of subtle planes or worlds or dimensions which, from a center, interpenetrate themselves and the physical planet in which we live, the solar systems, and all the physical structures of the universe. This interpenetration of planes culminates in the universe itself as a physical structured, dynamic and evolutive expression emanated – through a series of stages, becoming progressively more material and embodied – from The Supreme Being: which allows from Itself the irruption of auto-Singularities, as the Big Bang, originated from Its unintelligible Chaos. 

Prayer: An effort to communicate with God, or to some deity or deities, or another form of spiritual entity, or otherwise, either to offer praise, to make a request, or simply to express one's thoughts and emotions.

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Prophecy: In a broad sense, is the prediction of future events. The etymology of the word is ultimately Greek, from pro- "before" plus the root of phanai "speak", i. e. "speaking before" or "foretelling", but prophecy often implies the involvement of supernatural phenomena, whether it is communication with a deity, the reading of magical signs, or astrology. It is also used as a general term for the revelation of divine will.

Throughout history, people have sought knowledge of future events from special individuals or groups who were thought to have the gift of prophecy, such as Oracles at Delphi in ancient Greece. Cultures in which prophecy played an important role include the North American Indians, Mayans, Celts, Druids, Chinese, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Egyptians, Hindus, Hebrews, Tibetans, Greeks, and many in the Christian tradition, among others.

Q 

Qi: Also commonly spelled ch'i, chi or ki, is a fundamental concept of everyday Chinese culture, most often defined as "air" or "breath" (for example, the colloquial Mandarin Chinese term for "weather" is tiān qi, or the "breath of heaven") and, by extension, "life force" or "spiritual energy" that is part of everything that exists. References to qi or similar philosophical concepts as a type of metaphysical energy that sustains living beings are used in many belief systems, especially in Asia.

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Qigong: (simplified Chinese: 气功; traditional Chinese: 氣功; pinyin: qìgōng; Wade– Giles: ch'i4 kung1) An increasingly popular aspect of Chinese medicine involving the coordination of different breathing patterns with various physical postures and motions of the body. Qigong is mostly taught for health maintenance purposes, but there are also some who teach it, especially in China, for therapeutic interventions. Various forms of traditional qigong are also widely taught in conjunction with Chinese martial arts, and are especially prevalent in the advanced training of what are known as the neijia (internal martial arts).

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R 

Reality: In everyday usage means "everything that exists." The term "Reality," in its most liberal sense, includes everything that is, whether or not it is observable, accessible or understandable by science, philosophy, theology or any other system of analysis.

Reality in this sense may include both being and nothingness, whereas "existence" is often restricted to being.

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Reincarnation: As a doctrine or mystical belief, holds the notion that one's 'Spirit' ('Soul' depending on interpretation), 'Higher or True Self', 'Divine Spark', 'I' or 'Ego' (not to be confused with the ego as defined by psychology) or critical parts of these returns to the material world after physical death to be reborn in a new body. The natural process is considered integrative of all experiences from each lifetime. A new personality feature, with the associated character, is developed during each life in the physical world, based upon past integrated experience and new acquired experiences. Some Reincarnation theories express that usually rebirth is made each time in alternated female and male type of bodies. Also that there is interaction between pre-determinism of certain experiences or lessons intended to happen during the physical life, and the free-will action of the individual as they live that life.

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Religion: Sometimes used interchangeably with faith or belief system—is commonly defined as belief concerning the supernatural, sacred, or divine; and the moral codes, practices, values, institutions and rituals associated with such belief. In its broadest sense some have defined it as the sum total of answers given to explain humankind's relationship with the universe. In the course of the development of religion, it has taken many forms in various cultures and individuals. Occasionally, the word "religion" is used to designate what should be more properly described as "organized religion" – that is, an organization of people supporting the exercise of some religion, often taking the form of a legal entity (see religion-supporting organization). There are many different religions in the world today.

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Religious ecstasy: A trance-like state characterized by expanded mental and spiritual awareness and is frequently accompanied by visions, hallucinations, and physical euphoria. Such an experience usually lasts about a half-hour. However, there are many records of such experiences lasting several days, and some people claim to have experienced ecstasy over a period of over three decades, or to have recurring experiences of ecstasy during their lifetime.

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Repentance: The feeling and act in which one recognizes and tries to right a wrong, or gain forgiveness from someone that they wronged. In religious contexts it usually refers to repenting for a sin against God. It always includes an admission of guilt, and also includes at least one of: a solemn promise or resolve not to repeat the offense; an attempt to make restitution for the wrong, or in some way to reverse the harmful effects of the wrong where possible.

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Responsibility assumption: A doctrine in the spirituality and personal growth fields holding that each individual has substantial or total responsibility for the events and circumstances that befall them in their life. While there is little notable about the notion that each person has at least some role in shaping their experience, the doctrine of responsibility assumption posits that the individual's mental contribution to his or her own experience is substantially greater than is normally thought. "I must have wanted this" is the type of catchphrase used by adherents of this doctrine when encountering situations, pleasant or unpleasant, to remind them that their own desires and choices led to the present outcome.

The term responsibility assumption thus has a specialized meaning beyond the general concept of taking responsibility for something, and is not to be confused with the general notion of making an assumption that a concept such as "responsibility" exists.

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Revelation: Refers to an uncovering or disclosure of that which had been previously wholly or partly hidden via communication from the divine. In monotheistic religions, revelation is the process in which God makes himself, his will, and/or other information known to mankind. The recipient of revelation is commonly referred to as a prophet, and sometimes is termed a messenger.

There are a number of ways that religious thinkers have traditionally approached this topic; many widely differing views have been proposed. Generally speaking, one can find all of the following viewpoints in varying segments of Judaism and in varying groups within Christianity.

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Revivalism: A revival is the apparent restoration of a living creature from a dead state to a living state. In a New Testament story, Lazarus was revived by divine intervention. In religious terms, Revival is the substitution of religious fervor in life and worship, for an intellectualized, pragmatic approach to everyday conduct (often stigmatized by revivalists as 'pride').

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Ritual: A formalised, predetermined set of symbolic actions generally performed in a particular environment at a regular, recurring interval. The set of actions that comprise a ritual often include, but are not limited to, such things as recitation, singing, group processions, repetitive dance, manipulation of sacred objects, etc. The general purpose of rituals is to express some fundamental truth or meaning, evoke spiritual, numinous emotional responses from participants, and/or engage a group of people in unified action to strengthen their communal bonds. The word ritual, when used as an adjective, relates to the noun 'rite', as in rite of passage.

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Sacrifice: (from a Middle English verb meaning 'to make sacred', from Old French, from Latin sacrificium : sacer, sacred; sacred + facere, to make) Commonly known as the practice of offering food, or the lives of animals or people to the gods, as an act of

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propitiation or worship. The term is also used metaphorically to describe selfless good deeds for others. 

Sadhana: Spiritual exercise by a Sadhu or a Sadhaka to attain a desired goal. The goal of sadhana is to attain some stage, which can be either moksha, liberation from the cycle of birth and death (Samsara), or a particular goal such as the blessing by a deity through his or her appearance before the Sadhaka at the end of the limited Sadhana. Sadhana can involve meditation, puja to a deity, namasmarana (sometimes with the help of a japa mala), mortification of the flesh or unorthodox practices such as in a smashana sadhana on a cremation ground. Each type of Yoga entails its own type of sadhana. To embark on a sadhana, a guru is required to give one the necessary know-how and the seed for the future result, in the form of some diksha, initiation, which he or she has received from his or her guru.

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Saint: Generally refers to someone who is exceptionally virtuous and holy. It can be applied to both the living and the dead and is an acceptable term in most of the world's popular religions. The Saint is held up by the community as an example of how we all should act, and his or her life story is usually recorded for the edification of future generations.

The process of officially recognizing a person as a Saint, practiced by some churches, is called canonization, though many Protestant groups use the less formal, broader usage seen in Scripture to include all who are faithful as saints.

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Salvation: Refers to deliverance from undesirable state or condition. In theology, the study of salvation is called soteriology and is a vitally important concept in several religions. Christianity regards salvation as deliverance from the bondage of sin and from condemnation, resulting in eternal life with God.

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Satguru: (or Sadguru) Means true guru (Sanskrit sat=true), literally: true teacher. The title means that his students have faith that the guru can be trusted and will lead them to moksha, enlightenment or inner peace. It is based on a long line of Hindu philosophical understandings of the importance of knowledge and that the teacher, guru, is the sacred conduit to self-realization.

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SBNR: Acronym used by individuals who define themselves as Spiritual But Not Religious.

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Self-realization: In yoga, self-realization is knowledge of one's true self. This true self is also referred to as the atma to avoid ambiguity. The term "self-realization" is a translation of the Sanskrit expression atma jnana (knowledge of the self or atma). The reason the term "realization" is used instead of "knowledge" is that jnana refers to knowledge based on experience, not mere intellectual knowledge.

As discussed in the article on yoga, while the goal of self-realization is the same in all yoga paths, the means used to achieve that goal differ. For example, in hatha yoga, self-

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realization is said to be achieved when the serpent force or kundalini rises through the shushumna nadi to the sahasrara chakra. The following terms are related to selfrealization or atma jnana: moksha (liberation from the cycle of birth and death); samādhi (Supreme or Divine Bliss). 

Seven Virtues: Derived from the Psychomachia, an epic poem written by Prudentius (c.

410). Practicing these virtues is alleged to protect one against temptation toward the Seven Deadly Sins. The Seven Virtues considered by the Roman Catholic church are those of humility, meekness, charity, chastity, moderation, zeal and generosity. These are considered to be the polar opposite of the seven deadly sins, namely pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth and greed.

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Shabd: (or Shabda) Literally means ―sound‖ or ―word‖ in Sanskrit. Esoterically, Shabd is the ―Sound Current vibrating in all creation. It can be heard by the inner ears.‖ Variously referred to as the Audible Life Stream, Inner Sound, Sound Current or Word in English, the Shabd is the esoteric essence of God which is available to all human beings, according to the Shabd path teachings of Eckankar, the Quan Yin Method, Sant Mat and Surat Shabd Yoga.

Adherents believe that a Satguru, or ECK Master, who is a human being, has merged with the Shabd in such a manner that he or she is a living manifestation of it at its highest level (the ―Word made flesh‖). However, not only can the Satguru can attain this, but all human beings are inherently privileged in this way. Indeed, in Sant Mat the raison d‘être for the human form is to meditate on the Sound Current, and in so doing merge with it until one‘s own divinity is ultimately realized.

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Shamanism: Refers to the traditional healing and religious practices of Northern Asia (Siberia) and Mongolia. By extension, the concept of shamanism has been extended in common language to a range of traditional beliefs and practices that involve the ability to diagnose, cure, and sometimes cause human suffering by traversing the axis mundi and forming a special relationship with, or gaining control over, spirits. Shamans have been credited with the ability to control the weather, divination, the interpretation of dreams, astral projection, and traveling to upper and lower worlds. Shamanistic traditions have existed throughout the world since prehistoric times.

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Shinto: (神道 Shintō) (sometimes called Shintoism) A native religion of Japan and was once its state religion. It involves the worship of kami, which can be translated to mean gods, spirits of nature, or just spiritual presences. Some kami are local and can be regarded as the spirit or genius of a particular place, but others represent major natural objects and processes, for example, Amaterasu, the Sun goddess. The word Shinto was created by combining two kanji: "神" shin meaning god (the character can also be read as "kami" in Japanese) and "道" tō meaning Tao ("way" or "path" in a philosophical sense).

Thus, Shinto means "the way of the gods."

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practiced today, and some remain largely as everyday activities without religious connotations like omikuji (a form of sortition). 

Shunyata: (Śūnyatā, (Sanskrit, Pali: suññatā), or "Emptiness") A term for an aspect of the Buddhist metaphysical critique as well as Buddhist epistemology and phenomenology. Shunyata signifies that everything one encounters in life is empty of soul, permanence, and self-nature. Everything is inter-related, never self-sufficient or independent; nothing has independent reality. Yet shunyata never connotes nihilism, which Buddhist doctrine considers to be a delusion, just as it considers materialism to be a delusion.

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Simran: 'Simran', derived from the word 'Smarana,' (from Sanskrit), means: remembering or contemplating on the highest – that which should be valued in memory, in general. It teaches that: everything changes while inner and outer purity naturally happen. Smarana does not project about restriction through God or religion. It shows that remembering the highest aspect of life that one has seen will eventually open up what's important to an individual.

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Soul: The soul, according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is the ethereal substance – spirit (Hebrew:rooah or nefesh) – particular to a unique living being. Such traditions often consider the soul both immortal and innately aware of its immortal nature, as well as the true basis for sentience in each living being.

The concept of the soul has strong links with notions of an afterlife, but opinions may vary wildly, even within a given religion, as to what happens to the soul after death.

Many within these religions and philosophies see the soul as immaterial, while others consider it possibly material.

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Spirit: The English word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, meaning breath. In religion and spirituality, the respiration of the human being has for obvious reasons been strongly linked with the very occurrence of life. A similar significance has been attributed to human blood. Spirit has thus evolved to denote that which separates a living body from a corpse, but can be used metaphorically (she performed the piece with spirit or she put up a spirited defence) where it is a synonym for such words as 'vivacity'.

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Spiritism: A religious and philosophic doctrine established in France in the mid-19th century by Allan Kardec. The term was coined by him as the specific name of the doctrine he was about to publish but, given the fact that the word was created from roots taken from the common language, it was soon incorporated into the normal use and has been used to name other doctrines as well, though the authentic Spiritists protest against this usage.

During the late 19th century, many well educated people from Europe and the United States embraced Spiritism as a logical explanation of themes related to the Christian Revelation. However, most of the initial enthusiasm receded. But in some places the work of a few dedicated preachers managed to achieve a solid foundation – more notably,

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in Brazil, and to a certain extent in the Philippines. In Brazil, more than 2 million people declare themselves Kardecist spiritists, according to the last IBGE census data, which makes Brazil the largest Spiritist country in the world. Spiritism has influenced syncretisms like Brazilian Umbanda and Vietnamese Caodaism.

Spiritism is not to be confused with spiritualism. Its use with that meaning is regarded as pejorative by both Spiritualists and Spiritists. Uncapitalised, the word, in English, is an obsolete term for animism and other religious practices involving the invocation of spiritual beings, including shamanism. 

Spiritual evolution: The philosophical/theological/esoteric idea that nature and human beings and/or human culture evolve along a predetermined cosmological pattern or ascent, or in accordance with certain pre-determined potentials. Predeterminism of evolution concept is also complemented with the idea of a creative impulse of human beings, known as epigenesis.

Within this broad definition, theories of spiritual evolution are very diverse. They may be cosmological (describing existence at large), personal (describing the development of the individual), or both. They can be holistic (holding that higher realities emerge from and are not reducible to the lower), idealist (holding that reality is primarily mental or spiritual) or nondual (holding that there is no ultimate distinction between mental and physical reality). All of them can be considered to be teleological to a greater or lesser degree.

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Spiritualism: May refer to a variety of modern religious ideologies, primarily active in the United States and Europe. Central tenets of Spiritualist liturgy and dogma are the beliefs and practices of mediumship which purports to be evidence of the continued existence of an individual's spirit or soul after death. The origin of Spiritualism is commonly considered to be the Modern Spiritualist movement of the 19th century United States.

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Spirituality: In a narrow sense, is a concern with matters of the spirit, however that may be defined; but it is also a wide term with many available readings. It may include belief in supernatural powers, as in religion, but the emphasis is on personal experience. It may be an expression for life perceived as higher, more complex or more integrated with one's worldview, as contrasted with the merely sensual.

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Sufi whirling: The practice of Sufi whirling (or Sufi spinning), is a twirling meditation that originated among the ancient Indian mystics and Turkish Sufis, which is still practiced by the Dervishes of the Mevlevi order. Following a recommended fast of several hours, Sufi whirlers begin with hands crossed onto shoulders and may return their hands to this position if they feel dizzy. They rotate on their left feet in short twists, using the right foot to drive their bodies around the left foot. The left foot is like an anchor to the ground, so that if the whirler loses his or her balance, he or she can think of their left foot, direct attention towards it and regain balance back.

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Sufism: (Arabic ‫ ت ص ف‬tasawwuf) A mystic tradition of Islam, which is based on the pursuit of spiritual truth as a definite goal to attain. In modern language it might also be referred to as Islamic spirituality or Islamic mysticism. While fiqh focuses on the legal aspects of Islam, Sufism focuses on the internal aspects of Islam, such as perfecting the aspect of sincerity of faith and fighting one's ego. Sufi practitioners are organized into a diverse range of brotherhoods and sisterhoods, with a wide diversity of thought. Sufi orders ("tariqas") can be Shi'a, Sunni, both or neither.

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Supplication: (also known as petitioning) The most common form of prayer, wherein a person asks a supernatural deity to provide something, either for that person who is praying or for someone else on whose behalf a prayer of supplication is being made. One example of supplication is the Catholic ritual of novena (from novem, the Latin word for "nine") wherein one repeatedly asks for the same favor over a period of nine days. This ritual began in France and Spain during the Middle Ages when a nine-day period of hymns and prayers led up to a Christmas feast, a period which ended with gift giving. In Islam, the Arabic word du'a is often used for supplication. Du'a may be made in any language, although there are many traditional Islamic supplications in Arabic, Persian and Turkish.

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Tao Te Ching: (Chinese: 道德經, Dào dé jīng) Roughly translated as The Book of the Way and its Virtue (see article on translating the title) is an ancient Chinese scripture.

Tradition has it that the book was written around 600 BCE by a sage called Laozi (WG: Lao Tzu, "Old Master"), a record-keeper in the Emperor's Court of the Zhou Dynasty. A careful reading of the text, however, suggests that it is a compilation of maxims sharing similar themes. The authenticity of the date of composition/compilation and the authorship are still debated.

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Tenrikyo: (天理教; Tenrikyō, lit. Teaching of Divine Reason, also known as Tenriism) A religion of Japanese Shinto origin with some Buddhist influence. It was founded by a female peasant, Nakayama Miki, who underwent a revelatory experience from 1838 onwards. After this date she is referred to as Oyasama (lit. Honoured Parent) by followers. Tenrikyo is estimated to have about 2 million followers worldwide with 1.5 million of those in Japan.

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Theism: The belief in one or more gods or goddesses. More specifically, it may also mean the belief in God, a god, or gods, who is/are actively involved in maintaining the Universe. This secondary meaning is shown in context to other beliefs concerning the divine. The term is attested in English from 1678, and was probably coined to contrast with atheism attested from ca. 1587.

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Theosis: In Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic theology, theosis, meaning divinization (or woodenly, deification or, to become god), is the call to man to become holy and seek union with God, beginning in this life and later consummated in the resurrection. Theosis comprehends salvation from sin, is premised upon apostolic and

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early Christian understanding of the life of faith, and is conceptually foundational in both the East and the West. 

Tithe: (from Old English teogotha "tenth") A one-tenth part of something, paid as a voluntary contribution or as a tax or levy, usually to support a Jewish or Christian religious organization. Today, tithes (or tithing) are normally voluntary and paid in cash, checks, or stocks, whereas historically tithes could be paid in kind, such as agricultural products. There are still European countries today that allow some churches to assess a mandatory tithe which is enforced by law.

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Torah: (‫ )תורה‬A Hebrew word meaning "teaching," "instruction," or "law." It is the central and most important document of Judaism revered by Jews through the ages. It primarily refers to the first section of the Tanakh—the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, but the term is sometimes also used in the general sense to also include both of Judaism's written law and oral law, encompassing the entire spectrum of authoritative Jewish religious teachings throughout history, including the Mishnah, the Talmud, the midrash, and more.

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Transcendentalism: The name of a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that advocates that there is an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through a knowledgeable intuitive awareness that is conditional upon the individual. The concept emerged in New England in the early-to mid-nineteenth century. It is sometimes called "American Transcendentalism" to distinguish it from other uses of the word transcendental. It began as a protest against the general state of culture and society at the time, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard and the doctrine of the Unitarian church which was taught at Harvard Divinity School.

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Unitarian Universalism: (UU or UUism) A theologically liberal, inclusive religion formed by the merger of Unitarian and Universalist organizations in the mid-20th century. UUs generally: cherish creativity, freedom, and compassion; embrace diversity and interconnectedness; and promote personal spiritual growth and justice-making through worship, fellowship, personal experience, social action, deeds, and education.

While one UU may differ from another in personal creed, the term UU is a distinct theological signifier and Unitarianism or Universalism should not be confused or interchanged with Unitarian Universalism.

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Veneration: In traditional Christian churches (for example, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy), veneration (Latin veneratio, Greek δουλια dulia), or veneration of saints, is a special act of honoring a dead person who has been identified as singular in the traditions of the religion, and through them honoring God who made them and in whose image they are made. Veneration is often shown outwardly by respectfully bowing or making the

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sign of the cross before a saint's icon, relics, or cult image. These items are often also kissed. 

Vipassana: (Sanskrit: vipasyanā) The practice of Insight Meditation. While it is often referred to as Buddhist meditation, the practice taught by the Buddha was non-sectarian, and has a universal application. It does not require conversion to Buddhism. While the meditation practices themselves vary from school to school, the underlying principle is the investigation of phenomena (Sanskrit: dharmas) as they manifest in the five aggregates (Skandha) namely, matter or form (Rupa), sensation or feelings (Vedana), perception (Samjna), mental formations (Sankara) & consciousness (Vijnana). This process leads to direct experiential perception, Vipassanā.

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Wabi-sabi: (in Kanji: 侘寂) Represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic. It is difficult to explain wabi-sabi in Western terms, but the aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, or incomplete. A concept derived from the Buddhist assertion of the first noble truth—Dukkha.

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Worship: Usually refers to specific acts of religious praise, honour, or devotion, typically directed to a supernatural being such as a god or goddess. It is the informal term in English for what sociologists of religion call cultus, the body of practices and traditions that correspond to theology. Religious worship may be performed individually, in informally organized groups, or as part of an organized service with a designated leader (as in a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque). In its older sense in the English language of worthiness or respect, worship may sometimes refer to actions directed at members of higher social classes (such as lords or monarchs) or to particularly esteemed persons (such as a lover). Typical acts of worship include: prayer; sacrifice (korban in Hebrew); rituals; meditation; holidays, festivals; pilgrimages; hymns or psalms; the construction of temples or shrines; the creation of idols of the deity.

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Yana (Buddhism): A Sanskrit word with a range of meanings including nouns such as vehicle, journey, and path; and verbs such as going, moving, riding, and marching. In the Indian religions Buddhism and Hinduism, both yana and marga (road or path) express the metaphor of spiritual practice as a path or journey. Ancient texts in both religions discuss doctrines and practices associated with various yanas. In Buddhism, yana often augments the metaphor of the spiritual path with the idea of various vehicles that convey a person along that path. The yana/marga metaphor is similar to the Chinese image of the Tao (path or way) but Indian and Chinese cultures appear to have evolved such similar metaphors independently.

Yin and yang: The concept of yin and yang (Korean: 음양; Revised: eumyang; McCune–Reischauer: ŭmyang; simplified Chinese: 阴阳; traditional Chinese: 陰陽; pinyin: yīnyáng; Vietnamese: Âm-Dương) originates in ancient Chinese philosophy and

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metaphysics, which describes two primal opposing but complementary forces found in all things in the universe. Yin, the darker element, is passive, dark, feminine, downwardseeking, and corresponds to the night; yang, the brighter element, is active, light, masculine, upward-seeking and corresponds to the day.

Yoga: (Sanskrit ग, "union") A family of spiritual practices that originated in India, where it is seen primarily as a means to enlightenment (or bodhi). Traditionally, Karma yoga, Bhakti yoga, Jnana yoga, and Rāja yoga are considered the four main yogas. In the West, yoga has become associated with the asanas (postures) of Hatha yoga, which are popular as fitness exercises. Yoga as a means to enlightenment is central to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

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Zazen: In Zen Buddhism, sitting meditation or zazen (Japanese: 座禅; literally "seated concentration") is a meditative discipline practitioners perform to calm the body and the mind and experience insight into the nature of existence. While the term originally referred to a sitting practice, it is now commonly used to refer to practices in any posture, such as walking.

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Advocacy Foundation Publishers The e-Advocate Quarterly Issue

Title

Quarterly

Vol. I

2015 The ComeUnity ReEngineering Project Initiative The Adolescent Law Group Landmark Cases in US Juvenile Justice (PA) The First Amendment Project

The Fundamentals

2016 The Fourth Amendment Project Landmark Cases in US Juvenile Justice (NJ) Youth Court The Economic Consequences of Legal Decision-Making

Strategic Development Q-1 2016

2017 The Sixth Amendment Project The Theological Foundations of US Law & Government The Eighth Amendment Project The EB-5 Investor Immigration Project*

Sustainability Q-1 2017

2018 Strategic Planning The Juvenile Justice Legislative Reform Initiative The Advocacy Foundation Coalition for Drug-Free Communities Landmark Cases in US Juvenile Justice (GA)

Collaboration Q-1 2018

I II III IV Vol. II V VI VII VIII Vol. III IX X XI XII Vol. IV XIII XIV XV XVI

Q-1 2015 Q-2 2015 Q-3 2015 Q-4 2015

Q-2 2016 Q-3 2016 Q-4 2016

Q-2 2017 Q-3 2017 Q-4 2017

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Issue

Title

Quarterly

Vol. V

2019

Organizational Development

XVII XVIII XIX XX

The Board of Directors The Inner Circle Staff & Management Succession Planning

Q-1 2019 Q-2 2019 Q-3 2019 Q-4 2019

XXI XXII

The Budget* Data-Driven Resource Allocation*

Bonus #1 Bonus #2

Vol. VI

2020

Missions

XXIII

Q-1 2020

XXV XXVI

Critical Thinking The Advocacy Foundation Endowments Initiative Project International Labor Relations Immigration

Vol. VII

2021

Community Engagement

XXIV

XXVII XXVIII XXIX XXX XXXI Vol. VIII

The 21st Century Charter Schools Initiative The All-Sports Ministry @ ...

Lobbying for Nonprofits Advocacy Foundation Missions Domestic Advocacy Foundation Missions International 2022

Q-2 2020 Q-3 2020 Q-4 2020

Q-1 2021 Q-2 2021 Q-3 2021 Q-4 2021 Bonus ComeUnity ReEngineering

XXXV

The Creative & Fine Arts Ministry @ The Foundation The Advisory Council & Committees The Theological Origins of Contemporary Judicial Process The Second Chance Ministry @ ...

Vol. IX

2023

Legal Reformation

XXXVI

The Fifth Amendment Project The Judicial Re-Engineering Initiative The Inner-Cities Strategic Revitalization Initiative Habeas Corpus

Q-1 2023

XXXII XXXIII XXXIV

XXXVII XXXVIII XXXVIX

Q-1 2022 Q-2 2022 Q-3 2022 Q-4 2022

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Vol. X

2024

ComeUnity Development

XXXVXI XXXVXII XXXVXIII

The Inner-City Strategic Revitalization Plan The Mentoring Initiative The Violence Prevention Framework The Fatherhood Initiative

Vol. XI

2025

Public Interest

XLIX L

Public Interest Law Spiritual Resource Development Nonprofit Confidentiality In The Age of Big Data Interpreting The Facts

Q-1 2025 Q-2 2025

XXXVX

LI LII

Q-1 2024 Q-2 2024 Q-3 2024 Q-4 2024

Q-3 2025 Q-4 2025

The e-Advocate Journal of Theological Jurisprudence Vol. I – 2017 The Theological Origins of Contemporary Judicial Process Scriptural Application to The Model Criminal Code Scriptural Application for Tort Reform Scriptural Application to Juvenile Justice Reformation Vol. II – 2018 Scriptural Application for The Canons of Ethics Scriptural Application to Contracts Reform & The Uniform Commercial Code Scriptural Application to The Law of Property Scriptural Application to The Law of Evidence

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Legal Missions International Issue Vol. I I II III IV

Title

Quarterly

2015 God‘s Will and The 21st Century Democratic Process The Community Engagement Strategy Foreign Policy Public Interest Law in The New Millennium

Vol. II

2016

V VI VII VIII

Ethiopia Zimbabwe Jamaica Brazil

Vol. III

2017

IX X XI XII

India Suriname The Caribbean United States/ Estados Unidos

Vol. IV

2018

XIII XIV XV XVI

Cuba Guinea Indonesia Sri Lanka

Vol. V

2019

XVII XVIII XIV XV

Russia Australia South Korea Puerto Rico

Q-1 2015 Q-2 2015 Q-3 2015 Q-4 2015

Q-1 2016 Q-2 2016 Q-3 2016 Q-4 2016

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Issue

Title

Vol. VI

2020

XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX

Trinidad & Tobago Egypt Sierra Leone South Africa Israel

Vol. VII

2021

XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV

Haiti Peru Costa Rica China Japan

Vol VIII

2022

XXVI

Chile

Quarterly Q-1 2020 Q-2 2020 Q-3 2020 Q-4 2020 Bonus

Q-1 2021 Q-2 2021 Q-3 2021 Q-4 2021 Bonus

Q-1 2022

The e-Advocate Juvenile Justice Report Vol. I – Juvenile Delinquency in The US Vol. II. – the Prison Industrial Complex Vol. III – Restorative/ Transformative Justice Vol. IV – The Sixth Amendment Right to The Effective Assistance of Counsel Vol. V – The Theological Foundations of Juvenile Justice Vol. VI – Collaborating to Eradicate Juvenile Delinquency

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The e-Advocate Newsletter 2012 - Juvenile Delinquency in the US Genesis of the Problem Family Structure Societal Influences Evidence-Based Programming Strengthening Assets v. Eliminating Deficits 2013 - Restorative Justice in the US Introduction/Ideology/Key Values Philosophy/Application & Practice Expungement & Pardons Pardons & Clemency Examples/Best Practices 2014 - The Prison Industrial Complex 25% of the World's Inmates Are In the US The Economics of Prison Enterprise The Federal Bureau of Prisons The After-Effects of Incarceration/Individual/Societal 2015 - US Constitutional Issues In The New Millennium The Fourth Amendment Project The Sixth Amendment Project The Eighth Amendment Project The Adolescent Law Group 2016 - The Theological Law Firm Academy The Theological Foundations of US Law & Government The Economic Consequences of Legal Decision-Making The Juvenile Justice Legislative Reform Initiative The EB-5 International Investors Initiative 2017 - Organizational Development The Board of Directors The Inner Circle Staff & Management Succession Planning Bonus #1 The Budget Page 133 of 138

Bonus #2 Data-Driven Resource Allocation 2018 - Sustainability The Data-Driven Resource Allocation Process The Quality Assurance Initiative The Advocacy Foundation Endowments Initiative The Community Engagement Strategy 2019 - Collaboration Critical Thinking for Transformative Justice International Labor Relations Immigration God's Will & The 21st Century Democratic Process 2020 - Community Engagement The Community Engagement Strategy The 21st Century Charter Schools Initiative Extras The NonProfit Advisors Group Newsletters The 501(c)(3) Acquisition Process The Board of Directors The Gladiator Mentality Strategic Planning Fundraising 501(c)(3) Reinstatements The Collaborative US/ International Newsletters How You Think Is Everything The Reciprocal Nature of Business Relationships Accelerate Your Professional Development The Competitive Nature of Grant Writing Assessing The Risks

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About The Author John C (Jack) Johnson III Founder & CEO Having become disillusioned with the inner-workings of the ―Cradle-to-Prison‖ pipeline, former practicing attorney Johnson set out, in 2001, to try to help usher-in fundamental changes in the area of Juvenile and Transformative Justice.

Educated at Temple University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Rutgers Law School, in Camden, New Jersey, Jack moved to Atlanta, Georgia to pursue greater opportunities to provide Advocacy and Preventive Programmatic services for at-risk/ atpromise young persons, their families, and Justice Professionals embedded in the Juvenile Justice process.

There, along with a small group of community and faith-based professionals, ―The Advocacy Foundation, Inc." was conceived and implemented over roughly a thirteen year period, originally chartered as a Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Educational Support Services organization consisting of Mentoring, Tutoring, Counseling, Character Development, Community Change Management, Practitioner Re-Education & Training, and a host of related components.

The Foundation‘s Overarching Mission is “To help Individuals, Organizations, & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential”, by implementing a wide array of evidence-based proactive multi-disciplinary "Restorative & Transformative Justice" programs & projects throughout the northeast, southeast, and western international-waters regions, providing prevention and support services to at-risk/ at-promise youth, to young adults, to their families, and to Social Service, Justice and Mental Health professionals‖ everywhere. The Foundation has since relocated its headquarters to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and been expanded to include a three-tier mission.

In addition to his work with the Foundation, Jack also served as an Adjunct Professor of Law & Business at National-Louis University of Atlanta (where he taught Political Science, Business & Legal Ethics, Labor & Employment Relations, and Critical Thinking courses to undergraduate and graduate level students). Jack has also served as Board President for a host of wellestablished and up & coming nonprofit organizations throughout the region, including ―Visions Unlimited Community Development Systems, Inc.‖, a multi-million dollar, award-winning, Violence Prevention and Gang Intervention Social Service organization in Atlanta, as well as Vice-Chair of the Georgia/ Metropolitan Atlanta Violence Prevention Partnership, a state-wide 300 member violence prevention organization led by the Morehouse School of Medicine, Emory University and The AtlantaBased Martin Luther King Center.

Attorney Johnson‘s prior accomplishments include a wide-array of Professional Legal practice areas, including Private, Corporate and Government postings, just about all of which yielded significant professional awards & accolades, the history and chronology of which are available for review online. ______

Selected Affiliations & Accomplishments Clayton County Youth Services Partnership, Inc. – Chair; Georgia Violence Prevention Partnership, Inc – Vice Chair; Fayette County NAACP - Legal Redress Committee Chairman; Clayton County Fatherhood Initiative Partnership – Principal Investigator; Morehouse School of Medicine School of Community Health Feasibility Study - Steering Committee; Atlanta Violence Prevention Capacity Building Project – Project Partner; Clayton County Minister‘s Conference, President 2006-2007; Liberty In Life Ministries, Inc. – Board of Directors; Young Adults Talk, Inc. – Board of Directors; ROYAL, Inc - Board of Directors; Temple University Alumni Association; Rutgers Law School Alumni Association; Sertoma International; Our Common Welfare Board of Directors, President)2003-2005; River‘s Edge Elementary School PTA (Co-President); Summerhill Community Ministries; Outstanding Young Men of America; Employee of the Year; Academic All-American - Basketball; Church Trustee.

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www.TheAdvocacyFoundation.org

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