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NOTES FROM THE LAST SEMINAR, THE HUMAN SPIRIT

Our last seminar, The Human Spirit , was chaired by Professor Dennis Haskell. Before he introduced the speakers, the Centre director A/Professor Neville Bruce introduced Cleeve Calder, an honours student who is researching the influence of family meals on health and wellbeing. Cleeve said a few words about her project and appealed to the audience to participate by doing her questionnaire. It is available at https://www.ihs.uwa.edu.au/research/current_projects/family_meals_and_health .

Michael Wood , the Anglican chaplain at UWA, acknowledged some starting points for his talk: first that he was not going to speak from a neutral position, but that he was a forty-six-year-old white male Anglican priest; second that there is a mystery we call God; and third, that he could be wrong. Michael said he wanted to examine why some religion is beneficial to humanity and why some appears to be toxic. He used the story of Jacob being named Israel to suggest that humans’ relationship with God is one of struggle. Our sense of self and identity informs and is informed by our conception of God. Stories are central to our understanding. Psalm 135 implies that we become what we look at and construct – thus the Old Testament prohibition against idolatry. The Bible presents God in many stories – sometimes as wrathful, sometimes merciful. So it is open to humans to justify cruel and vengeful actions in God’s name. There are nonreligious parallels too, such as political and economic motivations for power and dominance. But the conception of the merciful God, particularly in the New Testament, presented the possibility of a new Kingdom in which the powerful are no better than the weak. The Jesus story offers a new definition of lordship that might inform social change for the better. Michael said that many people are bailing out of religion and calling themselves spiritual, but he felt there were good reasons for sticking with religion: he finds ritual and community nourishing, and religion provides a framework for interpreting spiritual experience. Finally, Michael cheekily presented a slide with the name IHSOUS (Jesus in Greek, translated into Latin) with IHS highlighted, and suggested that Jesus was the first “integrated” human. Michael’s PowerPoint notes are on our website here .

Professor Mike Anderson also presented a story, this time about a celebrated atheist, Hume, who professed to have become a believer in order to be rescued from a bog by a canny old crone. He called this pragmatic attitude to belief “my kind of enlightenment”. Mike outlined some of the issues in the question of the psychology of religious belief, and suggested how psychology might have a role in evaluating the meaning and value of spirituality and religion for human beings. He showed the results of a large twin study into religious observance that suggested that there was a genetic predisposition to religious right affiliation. Spirituality was a sense of connectedness with others and with the universe. A large percentage of people – 30 – 40% – had spiritual experiences. Believing in something, and going to church, gives a wellbeing
benefit, but does not necessarily protect against depression. On the question of whether we have to be religious to be good, it seems that while in individuals a religious experience can be transformative and beneficial, there is little difference between religious and irreligious populations. Finally, Mike suggested some possible reasons why humans believe in God, including evolutionary, sociological and cultural explanations. You can see Mike Anderson’s notes here .

Peter Docker started with an acknowledgement that we were on Nyungar Boodja; he offered his respect to the land and its elders in Nyungar language. Like Michael Wood, he described his starting point: as a non-Indigenous person who may never attain a thorough understanding of Indigenous spirituality. The relationships between Indigenous Australians and those with a largely Judaeo-Christian background had been characterised by ignorance and misunderstandings because our societies and belief systems are so different. Essentially, the Indigenous viewpoint is that they are part of nature, whereas the settlers saw themselves as separate from nature. Settlers did not recognise that the landscape had been shaped and managed for millennia – they saw Australia as virgin bush. Indigenous Australians did not believe in God but had an ongoing relationship with ancestral spirits. For a period, Indigenous matters in Western Australia were overseen by the Aborigines and Fisheries Department, which in the settler worldview placed Aborigines at a lower level, but ironically fitted with the Indigenous worldview of humans as being on a par with flora and fauna.

Yet for all the differences in worldview, there are also some similarities. Christians have a conception of heaven; Indigenous people observe rituals to help departed souls get to the right place. Totems in Irish/Celtic societies had been supplanted by Christianity but persevered in folk culture. Peter spoke about some aspects of traditional Indigenous culture that attracted him. High on the list was the prohibition against speaking with or even looking at one’s mother-in-law! There were no material possessions in traditional culture, and no jobs beyond ceremonial responsibilities. Status was gained through hunting ability and knowledge. After time was spent on gathering food, the rest was available for playing with family (and, where women outnumbered men, that family could include more than one wife), ceremony, singing and dancing. Peter gave a reading from his book, Someone Else’s Country (Fremantle Arts Centre Press), in which his totem, wurrung, the crow, is recognised by a Wongi stockman, and went on to explain how having a totem can be problematic for Indigenous people. He suggested that it was possible for wadjulas (white fellas) to have a totem if we opened our hearts to the possibility. He also said that we could learn from the importance of story: country owns us, and country is defined by story, so we could ask the question, what story defines us? For him, the story is one of coming together: he sees himself as being between clasped black and white hands, holding them together. A list of references Peter suggested is on our website here .

Questions and comments included:
· The “truths” of various religions can conflict with each other.
· Types of religious belief can be determined by the nature of the community and its
environment.
· Religion strengthens group identity and groups can compete.
· Has religion arisen from economic and social imperatives to replace, for example, the
good administration of the Roman Empire, rather than from biological or spiritual
imperatives?
· Although believing in something does not make it true, it makes it true for the believer, and this is important.
· Does religion satisfy our need for penance and punishment? The forgiveness at the core of Christianity is attractive to people.

NEXT SEMINAR IN THE HUMAN WELLBEING SERIES

Our next free public seminar takes an interdisciplinary look at a major threat to human wellbeing, war and conflict. It will be held at 5.30 pm in Seminar room 1.81 in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia (two buildings south of Shenton House on the Matilda Bay side of the campus).

Seminar 4, 17 September 08 War and conflict

Humans are manifestly a social species and yet of all species, uniquely genocidal. How can this paradox be explained? The traits of competitiveness and aggression can be expressed in many ways, from individual murder, to ethnic cleansing, and potential annihilation of our species. Do our social practices and systems – adversarial politics and legal practice, a competitive economic system, gladiatorial entertainment – contribute to our tendency to war and lack of respect for others’ rights and cultures? Can new legal approaches to conflict resolution inform international diplomacy? How have these topics been addressed in the arts?
Chair: Dr Carmen Lawrence will speak about the preconditions for war and conflict; senior lecturer in law Robyn Carroll will describe the role of mediation in our legal system; and Prof Dennis Haskell will give a cultural perspective.

Audience participation is invited after the presentations, and light refreshments are available.

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If you have missed previous newsletters containing summaries of the seminar presentations, you can see them on our web site on the News and Events page .

ABOUT THE CENTRE FOR INTEGRATED HUMAN STUDIES
You can find out more about the Centre and about IHS at our web site . If you are interested in enrolling in postgraduate courses in IHS, please contact the Director, A/Prof Neville Bruce on +61 08 6488 3292 or email [email protected].

TELL US WHAT YOU THINK
Please feel free to give us your comments, thoughts or suggestions for future seminar topics by emailing Karen on [email protected] .

Media references

Karen Connolly
Integrated Human Studies
School of Anatomy and Human Biology
The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway Crawley WA 6009
+61 08 6488 3647 email: [email protected]
In the office on Mondays and Thursdays - for urgent enquiries please phone Neville Bruce on +61 08 6488 3292