Daniel M. Ingram
Dear All,
A researcher friend at the Univeristy of Wales Trinity St. David is studying spiritual experiences in those who have fought COVID. Please feel encouraged to participate in this study if you had a spiritual experience related to COVID and want to share that to help science. Here's the blurb she sent me:
Dear all,
In a collaboration between the Religious Experience Research Centre and the Center for Mind and Culture in Boston, Massachusetts in the US, a new research project studies the types of spiritual and religious experience people experienced while fighting COVID-19. If you are interested in it and want to contribute, follow the link to the survey COVID-19 and Spiritual Experiences Survey (surveymonkey.com)
https://bit.ly/3jVam43 Thank you.
Best wishes
Bettina
Yr Athro / Professor Bettina Schmidt, DPhil (habil.), PhD, MA
I would like to suggest that before participating people investigate those organizations and researchers and get an understanding of how they will use your personal data. Are they pursuing an ideological agenda that you want to assist with? In particular this type of self-selecting / self-reporting on surveys is extremely easy to manipulate through how the questions are worded (and the people answering the questions will likely never know they are being manipulated - the researchers may not realize it themselves) and it does not provide the same type of hard objective results
(which are not as hard and objective as many people think) that controlled randomized double blind studies can.
Many scientists today accept naturalism as an integral part of science and will not recognize the possibility of the supernatural in their scientific results. Even if they personally had religious beliefs they know they would
ruin their career if they pulblished anything that questioned naturalism. Why would someone who had a spiritual or religious experience want to participate in that kind of biased research?
Here is something I found on the web site for the Center for Mind and Culture
https://mindandculture.org/media/religion-brain-and-behavior/The aim of Religion, Brain & Behavior is to provide a vehicle for the advancement of current biological approaches to understanding religion at every level from brain to behavior. RBB unites multiple disciplinary perspectives that share these interests.
It looks to me like they are looking for natural explanations for religious experiences. There are other levels beyond brain and behavior, if they are not interested in those higher levels, then that suggests they have a built in filter that will prevent them from acknowledging certain results. That's actually not science it's ideological naturalism.
