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Podcast
LOIS LEE (founder of Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network)
20 April 12
Duration:11.39.
Lois Lee acted as rapporteur for the workshop, and presented her own reflection on the day, beginning by thanking Rebecca Catto for organising the event
She talked about the aims of the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network, bridging gaps between academic disciplines. An initial issue lay on the diversity of terminology used. Acknowledging this was a generalisation, she said atheism has been used by psychologists; nonreligion and irreligion have been favoured by sociologists; secularism has been a term favoured in anthropology. This is all changing as a conversation such as today’s brings those strands together.
She praised the excellent question posed by Rebecca Catto, asking where non-religious people stood in terms of legal protection of their freedom.
The social sciences take seriously that behaviours are often not rational, but are cultural and structural. While some religious people wish to defend the rational nature of belief, it might be more helpful to talk about the cultural and emotional attachments which people have with a religion. And while only some non-religious people are attached to an explicit form of non-religion, their behaviours do show the characteristics of belonging to a culture, for instance in their choice of romantic relationships, where they would deliberately avoid relationships with someone religious.
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