How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [45]
Three of the Religious Science groups we surveyed were 90 percent Caucasian, living in middle-to upper-class neighborhoods. The fourth congregation was 90 percent black, and the church was situated in a poorer inner-city neighborhood. However, the percentages of the different styles of drawing were the same, which meant that racial and socio-economic differences did not change the way these people envision God.
UNITARIAN PICTURES OF GOD
Unitarianism, first established in sixteenth century Europe with the explicit purpose of demonstrating tolerance toward different religions, attracts individuals from many faiths and backgrounds, including a large percentage of agnostics and atheists. Unitarian belief systems emphasize humanitarian principles of justice, equal rights, co-existence with others, and a willingness to integrate scientific evidence in the search for truth, meaning, and democratic freedom.20
When we gave one Unitarian congregation a range of categories by which they could identify themselves, 75 percent circled “freethinker,” 75 percent circled “humanist,” 40 percent circled “agnostic,” and 11 percent circled “atheist” (most respondents circled multiple categories—again, a reminder that many Americans prefer not to label their religious orientations). Like the members of the Church of Religious Science, Unitarian “pictures of God” reflected a wide variety of positive, abstract, symbolic, and nature-oriented imagery Indeed, they had the lowest percentage of faces and people—less than 1 percent—compared to any other group, a visual demonstration that they have distanced themselves from a biblical interpretation of God. Fifty percent of their “God” drawings were highly abstract, 26 percent reflected scenes from nature, 20 percent drew suns, planets, stars, or radiating spirals, but less than 1 percent left their pages blank—far fewer than the other adult groups we've surveyed. Their commentaries about God also reflected their tolerance and open-mindedness toward people who hold different religious and philosophical beliefs.
COLLEGE STUDENTS
The community college students in our study presented a very different profile, which was reflected in the ways they envisioned God. When asked what their current religious or spiritual orientation was, half wrote down that they were either religious or spiritual, but few were affiliated with an organization. The other half said they were either nonreligious, agnostic, or atheist.
But then we asked a variety of questions designed to more accurately ascertain their degree of belief and disbelief concerning God. We discovered that many of the religious and spiritual students also considered themselves agnostic, nonreligious, interfaith, or freethinker. Even those who considered themselves nonreligious would often select additional terms that could easily be interpreted as spiritual or religious. As we have pointed out before, it is very difficult to ascertain what a person's religious beliefs are, and we believe that if you ask enough questions, you'll find that most people simultaneously hold a multiplicity of seemingly discrepant beliefs. This was certainly true of our college student sample.
In fact, of all the categories chosen, the majority of students—both religious and nonreligious—identified themselves (as the Unitarians did) as freethinkers. Usually, the term is used by atheists and agnostics who reject all forms of institutionalized religious belief, but an informal query showed that these individuals did not like to identify themselves