There is a consensus among psychological theorists indicating that beliefs and behaviors are related. Since most of the homogeneous and institutionalized tenets among social groups and people, religious beliefs relation with behaviors is a theme deserved to be studied. Examining the relation between religious beliefs and risky behaviors will help to predict and prevent such behaviors. Most psyc...

Largely because of an attempt at conciseness, but also be cause of the compactness of KeyKOS and the mutual re liance of the abstractions from which it is developed, certain words and phrases appear, of necessity, earlier in this publi cation than the principle discussions explaining them. The information in this publication is ordered with the intent that a reader will need to assume as lit...

In ‘secular’ Western societies, religious topics permeate media texts of books, films, series and games and such texts even inform several religious-spiritual movements. Critically expanding on theories about ‘fiction-based religion’, ‘invented religion’ or ‘hyper-real religion’, this article studies if, how and why players of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of...

In the Terry Lectures given at Yale University in 1937, a demonstration is proposed of the persective from which medical psychology views religion. Religion must be taken into account by psychologists, since it represents one of the most ancient and universal expressions of the human mind; but it is felt that the approach of psychology must be scientific, empirical and phenomenological rather t...

Religion is a social phenomenon. Society and, therefore, religion will continue to exist as long as human beings exist. This article explores this syllogism, by analysing two 19th-century social theories on the future of religion. Weber was not positive as to the future of religion and foresaw that religion would die out at the hands of rationality and modernisation. Durkheim predicted that rel...

This study measured the prevalence of religious self-disclosure in public MySpace profiles that belonged to a subsample of National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) wave 3 respondents (N=560). Personal attributes associated with religious identification as well as the overall quantity of religious self-disclosures are examined. A majority (62 percent) of profile owners identified their religi...

Contrary to some predictions, it appears religion is coming back. We are constantly being reminded that religion is becoming more important again in late modernity. Despite this, religion is still “banished to the sidelines in the contemporary field of theoretical struggle” (Beckford 2003: 12). Moreover, when religion is studied, it is often a concept of ‘religion’ so reified and generalised as...

OBJECTIVE This study compared the ways in which psychiatrists and nonpsychiatrists interpret the relationship between religion/spirituality and health and address religion/spirituality issues in the clinical encounter. METHOD The authors mailed a survey to a stratified random sample of 2,000 practicing U.S. physicians, with an oversampling of psychiatrists. The authors asked the physicians ab...

Recent functional neuroimaging data, acquired in studies of religious experience, have been used to explain and justify religion and its origins. In this paper, we critique the move from describing brain activity associated with self-reported religious states, to explaining why there is religion at all. Toward that end, first we review recent neuroimaging findings on religious experience, and s...

theoretical expectations. The assumption is that along with modernization and economic development, adherence to religious world views (seen to be a relic of the past) gradually dissipate, as they have in other advanced societies. But they haven’t in the United States. In fact, the importance of religious commitments and religious organizations to American society increased over the last severa...