Indigenous Religious Believers’ Experience to Manage Stigma in Indonesia

Indigenous Religious Traditions

Orthodoxy, and other so-called world religions that were complicit with colonialist expansion and its repression of the “other peoples” (indigenous), their rites and beliefs. For centuries, colonial societies have denied that indigenous peoples had “religions” at all; as the great photographer of Native North American cultures Edward S. Curtis stated, “There seems to be a broadly prevalent idea...

Belief bias during reasoning among religious believers and skeptics.

We provide evidence that religious skeptics, as compared to believers, are both more reflective and effective in logical reasoning tasks. While recent studies have reported a negative association between an analytic cognitive style and religiosity, they focused exclusively on accuracy, making it difficult to specify potential underlying cognitive mechanisms. The present study extends the previo...

Metaphor, Religious Language and Religious Experience

Is it possible to talk about God without either misrepresentation or failing to assert anything of significance? The article begins by reviewing how, in attempting to answer this question, traditional theories of religious language have failed to sidestep both potential pitfalls adequately. After arguing that recently developed theories of metaphor seem better able to shed light on the nature o...

Psychedelics and Religious Experience

Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia

The Indonesian province of Aceh is known as rebellious. The most recent eruption was the civil war between the Indonesian army and the ethno-nationalist separatist movement GAM, which started in 1976 and could only be ended after the destructive Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Aceh is also known as strictly Islamic. When Aceh is featured in the media, the focus is often on the implementation, sin...