The Perception of God in Both the Buddhist and Christian - Book Report/Review Example

The Birth of Living God Introduction The absence of any significant Condition and Religion interactions strongly suggests that religious priming increases prejudice toward certain out groups in Buddhists and Christians alike. Religious primes were found to increase prejudice toward the perception of God in both the Buddhist and Christian samples, as indicated by the presence of a significant main effect of condition. This finding is important for two reasons. First, these results suggest that members of religions with dissimilar value systems respond in the same way to priming of their own religious group. Although some researchers have speculated that Buddhisms less proscribed teachings might engender greater tolerance, these results indicate that in group religious priming affects Christians and Buddhists in the same way, suggesting that defense of wider cultural values, rather than religious values per se, underpins religious prejudice. The perception of in these results suggest that Buddhists become more prejudiced towards some cultures when exposed to in group religious primes (Preston, Ritter and Hernandez, 2010). Second, this finding provides a much-needed cross-cultural replication of demonstrating that non-Western Christians also exhibit enhanced prejudice when exposed to religious primes. Christianity, it seems, still has the power to exert forces of intergroup differentiation when separated from the predominantly Caucasian, Anglo-American cultural environment in which it has most frequently been studied (Preston, Ritter and Hernandez, 2010). This does, however, beg the question of why how individuals perception to God were targeted for prejudice whereas members of religious, ethnic, and national outgroups were not. Although such results might be unexpected in a Western setting, they can be understood in the context of Singapores unique cultural milieu. Upon gaining independence in 1965, Singapore became the worlds first constitutionally multiracial nation, and since then the governing Peoples Action Party has implemented numerous domestic policies intended to foster a sense of cultural unity, including the Ethnic Integration Policy, which uses a quota system to ensure ethnic balance within public housing estates and to prevent the formation of racial enclaves. Furthermore, religious festivals associated with Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism is given equal precedence in Singapores calendar of public holidays, ensuring that no one religious group receives undue focus or preferential treatment. Such policies have been highly successful, and national surveys reveal that attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities are overwhelmingly positive. As a consequence, researchers have often found little evidence of overt racial prejudice in Singaporean samples(Preston, Ritter and Hernandez, 2010). The typical Singaporeans tolerance does however have its limits, and other outgroups remain the target of prejudice. Singapores conservatism means that most Singaporeans hold traditional values regarding marriage and family life that has been natured in God’s teachings. The expression of prejudicial views regarding God is deemed to be both morally and legally defensible. Given the aforementioned, it seems highly likely that prejudice driven by traditionalism/conservatism would target God, who are seen to violate key Singaporean conservative principles, rather than members of religious, racial, and national outgroups, who do not (Preston, Ritter and Hernandez, 2010). Limitations, Alternative Explanations, and Future Directions Although these results do suggest that cultural conservatism mediates the effect of in group religious priming on out-group attitudes, we did not test this hypothesis directly. If the activation of religious concepts really is spilling over to activate cognitive representations of traditionalism and conservatism, then future studies should look for evidence of this spillover effect. In addition, if religious primes really do exert their prejudice-inducing effects by activating traditionalism/conservatism, then directly priming these constructs should produce an identical pattern of prejudice. Furthermore, it is possible that religious out-group primes might also produce this pattern of prejudice, as priming these concepts should also activate the cultural value systems with which they are intertwined. Such investigations may yield further evidence that cultural rather than religious value defense underlies religious prejudice (Preston, Ritter and Hernandez, 2010). Another limitation of the present research relates to the nature of the primes employed. Recent work by Preston and colleagues suggests that priming the communal and divine elements of religion may have different consequences for intergroup attitudes and behaviors. Found that participants primed with religions communal aspects donated more money to an in-group charity; whereas those primed with the divine aspect donated more money to an out-group have suggested that these divine primes activate the concept of a supernatural watcher an “omnipresent and omniscient moralizing agent which promotes moral behavior by making salient the certainty divine punishment and reward. Because the present study employed an approximately equal number of communal and supernatural Buddhist and Christian primes, it is possible that the differential effects of priming these distinct cognitive representations has been obscured (Preston, Ritter and Hernandez, 2010). Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that a consistent, culturally sensible pattern of out-group derogation was observed in both Buddhists and Christians, despite their exposure to a significant number of supernatural priming terms. Because supernatural primes should “activate a goal of virtue to live up to the moral standards set by supernatural , one would expect such primes to have opposing effects on Christians and Buddhists with respect to ant homosexual prejudice, given the idiosyncrasies of their divinely specified value systems. Even if activation of supernatural monitoring concepts encouraged recursion to a more basic, golden-rule morality promoting universal altruism irrespective of group membership, this would be difficult to reconcile with the selective, yet culturally consistent, pattern of prejudice observed here. This is not to say that priming supernatural watchers has no effect on attitudes toward outgroups, just that supernatural monitoring concerns are unlikely to underpin the prime-induced prejudice observed here. Future research should further explore this issue by examining the effects of communal and supernatural primes in isolation (Preston, Ritter and Hernandez, 2010). Finally, it is also important to acknowledge the modest size of the effect reported here. Whereas ingroup religious priming was found to significantly increase prejudice toward homosexuals, this effect was relatively small and should not be taken as evidence that religion causes homophobia. Prejudice and discrimination are complex multifactorial phenomena, and the present research suggests only that in-group religious priming can play a small but significant role in promoting intergroup differentiation (Preston, Ritter and Hernandez, 2010). Conclusion Despite their adherence to religions with very different value systems, Christians and Buddhists sharing a common cultural environment were found to respond identically to ingroup religious primes. Despite their faiths greater emphasis on tolerance and relative lack of proscription, Buddhists displayed the same pattern of prime-induced prejudice toward homosexuals as their Christian counterparts. There can be little doubt that, in certain circumstances, religion causes prejudice. However, an increasing body of research suggests that religious ingroup priming drives intergroup differentiation not through activation of religious value systems but through powerful associations with psychological constructs that reinforce existing social hierarchies, such as traditionalism/conservatism. The crime of religious prejudice may be one of guilt by association. Reference Preston, J. L., Ritter, R. S. and Hernandez, J. I. 2010. Principles of religious prosociality: A review and reformulation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4: pp. 574–590. Read More