The survey, conducted by the Gallup polling agency over six years and three continents, seeks to dispel the belief held by some in the West that Islam itself is the driving force of radicalism.

It shows that the overwhelming majority of Muslims condemned the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001 and other subsequent terrorist attacks, the authors of the study said in Washington.

"Samuel Harris said in the Washington Times (in 2004): 'It is time we admitted that we are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam'," Dalia Mogadeh, co-author of the book "Who Speaks for Islam" which grew out of the study, told a news conference here.

"The argument Mr Harris makes is that religion in the primary driver" of radicalism and violence, she said.

"Religion is an important part of life for the overwhelming majority of Muslims, and if it were indeed the driver for radicalisation, this would be a serious issue."

But the study, which Gallup says surveyed a sample equivalent to 90 percent of the world's Muslims, showed that widespread religiosity "does not translate into widespread support for terrorism," said Mogadeh, director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies.

About 93 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are moderates and only seven percent are politically radical, according to the poll, based on more than 50,000 interviews.

In majority Muslim countries, overwhelming majorities said religion was a very important part of their lives — 99 percent in Indonesia, 98 percent in Egypt, 95 percent in Pakistan.

But only seven percent of the billion Muslims surveyed — the radicals — condoned the attacks on the United States in 2001, the poll showed.

Moderate Muslims interviewed for the poll condemned the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington because innocent lives were lost and civilians killed.

"Some actually cited religious justifications for why they were against 9/11, going as far as to quote from the Koran — for example, the verse that says taking one innocent life is like killing all humanity," she said.

Meanwhile, radical Muslims gave political, not religious, reasons for condoning the attacks, the poll showed.

The survey shows radicals to be neither more religious than their moderate counterparts, nor products of abject poverty or refugee camps.

"The radicals are better educated, have better jobs, and are more hopeful with regard to the future than mainstream Muslims," John Esposito, who co-authored "Who Speaks for Islam", said.

"Ironically, they believe in democracy even more than many of the mainstream moderates do, but they're more cynical about whether they'll ever get it," said Esposito, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University in Washington.

Gallup launched the study following 9/11, after which US President George W. Bush asked in a speech, which is quoted in the book: "Why do they hate us?"

"They hate… a democratically elected government," Bush offered as a reason.

"They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

But the poll, which gives ordinary Muslims a voice in the global debate that they have been drawn into by 9/11, showed that most Muslims — including radicals — admire the West for its democracy, freedoms and technological prowess.

What they do not want is to have Western ways forced on them, it said.

"Muslims want self-determination, but not an American-imposed and -defined democracy. They don't want secularism or theocracy. What the majority wants is democracy with religious values," said Esposito.

The poll has given voice to Islam's silent majority, said Mogahed.

"A billion Muslims should be the ones that we look to, to understand what they believe, rather than a vocal minority," she told AFP.

Muslims in 40 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East were interviewed for the survey, which is part of Gallup's World Poll that aims to interview 95 percent of the world's population.

Photo:

A Muslim walks past giant windows before prayer at the grand Mosque, Istiqlal, in Jakarta, in 2007. (AFP/File)

Original Article

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By Adelle M. Banks

If you're Buddhist in the United States, you're most likely a white convert who lives in the American West.

If you're a Jehovah's Witness, you're likely to be a white Southerner, but almost half of your fellow believers are either African-American or Hispanic.

And if you're a Midwesterner, you're living in the region that best reflects the religious diversity of America.

A new study of more than 35,000 adult Americans by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life captures the depth and breadth of religious America — 78.4 percent Christian, 4.7 percent members of other faiths and 16.1 percent unaffiliated.

The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, released Monday (Feb. 25), estimates the religious makeup of the country's 225 million adults in groups as large as evangelical Protestants (26.3 percent) and as small as Unitarians (0.3 percent).

The study also paints a picture of people who often move from one faith to another, as well as the religious landscape of various parts of the country. Pew researcher John Green called the Midwest a "microcosm of American religion" and closely matches the overall religious profile of the U.S. population's largest religious groups:

– Evangelical Protestant: 26 percent

– Mainline Protestant: 22 percent

– Catholic: 24 percent

"In religious terms, the Midwest really … does reflect, of all the regions, the great diversity, at least in terms of affiliation," said Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum and an expert on religion and politics at the University of Akron.

Stephen Prothero, who chairs the religion department at Boston University, said that description fits, given the predominantly Catholic Northeast, mostly Baptist South and a Western region known for Buddhists, Hindus and people with no religious affiliation. The Midwest may be known for Lutherans, he said, "but the Lutherans don't dominate in the Midwest the way that the Catholics do in New England or the Southern Baptists do in the Southeast."

Other key findings of the study include:

– Of the 16.1 percent of Americans who are not affiliated with any faith, just 4 percent describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. The remaining 12 percent are almost equally divided between the "secular unaffiliated," who say religion is not important in their lives and the "religious unaffiliated," who say religion is at least somewhat important.

"Some of those people are between religions," said Green. "Some of them are just hostile to organized religion. They're fine with God."

– Catholics are the religious group with the greatest loss of adherents, with former Catholics making up about 10 percent of the U.S. population. Hindus, on the other hand, are best at retaining their faith; eight in 10 Hindus who were born into the faith remain connected to it.

– More than a quarter of Americans — 28 percent — have left the faith of their childhoods for another — or no faith at all. Including changes from one form of Protestantism to another, 44 percent of Americans have changed their affiliation or dropped their connection to a faith. Jehovah's Witnesses and Buddhists are among the faiths with the lowest retention rates of childhood members.

– The nation's Protestants make up just 51 percent of the U.S. population, meaning that segment of Christianity is close to becoming a religious minority. Young people are helping fuel that trend: While 62 percent of Americans 70 and older are Protestant, only 43 percent of Americans ages 18-29 are.

Barry Kosmin, a sociologist of religion at Trinity College in Connecticut, said he first detected a drop in Protestant identification in the 1990s. "Christian' has kind of replaced `Protestant' as a term for most Americans," he said. "If you ask most students `What is a Protestant?', they don't even know the term."

– Muslims are the most racially diverse faith group, including 37 percent who are white, 24 percent who are black, and 20 percent Asian.

– More than a third of married Americans — 37 percent — are married to someone with a different religious affiliation, including a different Protestant faith. Hindus and Mormons are most likely to be married to someone of the same religion, while majorities of Buddhists and the "unaffiliated" have married someone of a different religion.

– Researchers found that Jews outnumber Muslims, with Jews comprising 1.7 percent of the adult population and Muslims comprising 0.6 percent.

The massive size of the survey enables a closer look at some of the smaller faiths in America, but some other studies, such as the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, have had larger samples.

The Pew survey results are based on more than 35,000 telephone interviews, some of which were done in Spanish, between May and August

The margin of error for distinct religious groups varies widely depending on sample size. For the 9,472 evangelical Protestants surveyed, it was plus or minus 1.5 percentage points, but for the 411 Buddhist respondents, it was plus or minus 6.5 percentage points.

Copyright 2008 Religion News Service. All rights reserved.

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Bill Urell was a recovering addict and a trained addiction counselor, but he rejected the idea that faith was part of the healing journey… until he realized "Spirituality did not get me sober. It keeps me sober. What it does for me is add texture, color, and depth to my sober living experience. "

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"

"Years ago, a student of
mine tried to explain that he had been too depressed to study and asked
to be excused from a scheduled exam. I blew him off, telling him to get
over it. Only hours afterward, he jumped to his death from a high-rise apartment
building. The young man left behind a suicide note telling his parents
that he just couldn’t endure the sadness that had been torturing his
soul.

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Joy Wilson went looking for something to spice up her marriage without compromising her Christian beliefs.

Finding nothing, she founded her own "sin-free" sex toy business. Book22.com caters to the Christian community with books, toys and occasional advice. The name refers to the Song of Solomon, the extended love poem that forms the 22nd book of the Bible.

Wilson says that after the birth of her first child, she had trouble rekindling her desire for intimacy. She and her husband went looking for marital aids, and found that Internet searches for products as tame as massage oil led to sites with pornographic images. "I was really surprised that it was that bad," she says.

She and her husband talked it over and decided that there must be a way for conservative people to add a spark to their romantic lives. She says their site steers clear of certain types of sexual activity that they believe are unholy. And they carefully consider which new products to add.

"We pray about things before we add them to our site," she says. "We live our lives very openly in front of Jesus, so we just kind of pray for direction about which way he would have us go, and I have to be honest with you — he's really surprised us. … Almost our whole entire 'special order' page has come about from that."

Wilson says she and her husband are blessed with good health, but that God has shown them that other couples might need help from a particular toy.

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By now, we’ve probably all heard that bringing mindfulness into daily practice (ie: “Be here now”) as a sort of meditation can be a way to quiet the mind, slow the hectic pace of life, and enjoy life more.  This practice of mindfulness has been promoted by Buddhist sages from Thich Nhat Hanh to the Dalai Lama, and can being previously unimagined peace to even the newest practitioner.

One of the most important pieces of mindful living is mindful eating.  Even if it’s not possible to remain mindful 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week, simply taking the time to enjoy a meal, mindfully, joyfully, experiencing the food with all of its flavors and textures can be a balm to the spirit.  Thich Nhat Hanh, in his article Mindful Eating, describes the power of mindful healing as a joyful part of a transformative process toward healing and growth, and Dr Weil has prescribed mindful eating as tool toward overall improved mental and physical health and even claims it can slow the aging process.

In an article for Catalyst Magazine, writer Katherine Pioli found a path to mindful eating through chopsticks.  Yes, chopsticks.  Something that’s so simple, but which will force each of us to slow down and truly savor a meal, all for the cost of one (usually free) pair of chopsticks.

This might just be worth a try.

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) won a lawsuit against a Pennsylvania school district in 2005 that had added the controversial theory of "intelligent design" to its curricullum. Unlike the theory of evolution which is taught at most schools as a fact-based science, "intelligent design" — as argued by the ACLU — was nothing more than a philosophy predicated on the Judeo-Christian belief that the logical sequences found in nature are not random happenings or surprising mutations, but deftly managed events created by a greater omniscient and omnipresent intelligence with a specific plan. In short, the work of God. A federal judge thought otherwise.

But therein lies the rub: Which god? When the founding fathers established the Constitution of the United States, they chose to include the separation of church and state. This was to ensure that the state-sanctioned religious persecutions that plagued much of Europe during the 16th century would not despoil the young, yet grand experiment in democracy that was to become this Republic.

Scientific research has come a long way since Charles Darwin first posited the concept of "natural selection", an idea as controversial now as it was back in 1859 when it was first published. In the intervening years, humanity has learned much about how we became the dominant species on the planet, how the Earth and the solar system were formed and the ever-changing development of the Universe. Over that time, how we understand the theory of evolution has also changed.

Scientists now believe that there is an intrinsic logic to our reality, that there are absolutes, laws of nature. Much remains a mystery, and as one question is answered, many others arise. The question that faced Pennsylvania's Dover School District was whether or not the imposition of one creation belief on a multi-ethnic, secular student body is in keeping with the law that prohibits the creation of a state religion. If they allow one belief system to be taught, surely they must also teach others?

To help out with this dilemma, Tom X. Chao and Anthony Duignan-Cabrera of LiveScience present a list of those Creation Myths that helped define civilizations both past and present… —

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Blessed Imbolc

Related articles:

A Midwinter Festival, By Kaatryn MacMorgan
Spring is stirring just beneath the surface at Imbolc, when we anticipate the earth's rebirth.

The Flame in the Snow, By Andras Corban Arthen
A desultory musing on an Imbolg night

The True Spirit of Imbolc – for me, at least By Zander Bruce
A contributor to Witchvox shares his personal feelings on the holiday.

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