Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

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 Skeptical Inquirer, The Magazine for Science and Reason
 www.csicop.org

 NEW STUDY REVEALS THAT RELIGIOUS BELIEVERS ALSO BELIEVE IN PARANORMAL

 Findings Break with Past Research and Conventional Wisdom

 AMHERST, N.Y-- Are people who are devoutly religious also believers in UFOs,
ESP, and psychic ability?  Conventional wisdom has tended to answer "no," but
a new study published in the January/February 2000 issue of Skeptical Inquirer
, The Magazine for Science and Reason, indicates that the two belief systems
often go hand-in-hand.

 Erich Goode, Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at
Stony Brook, surveyed 484 students, asking them whether they agreed or
disagreed with dozens of questions centering mainly around religious and
paranormal beliefs.  He selected four questions that tapped Christian
conservatism, traditionalism, or fundamentalism, and five that measured a
range of paranormal assertions.

 Goode discovered a positive and significant relationship between
fundamentalism and paranormalism, with those agreeing to the religious
questions more likely to also agree to the paranormal questions, and those
disagreeing with the religious questions, also more likely to disagree with
the paranormal questions. Goode writes: "As a general rule, persons who
accept articles of traditional, fundamentalist Christian faith...tend also to
accept a range of paranormal beliefs as well."

 In the past, experts have asserted a "disjuncture" between belief in
traditional, fundamentalist religious dogma, and belief in the
parapsychological, the occult, and the supernatural. Researchers have
observed that in areas of the U.S. where Christianity tended to be weak, New
Age beliefs tended to be strong.  Survey research also showed that the
non-religious are more likely than the born-again to believe in classic
paranormal beliefs like UFOs and ESP.

 Goode cites possible differences in certain ecological relationships as
contributing to the contradiction between his recent research and past
findings. He allows for the possibility that in strongly religious areas-like
much of the South-the specific form that strong fundamentalism takes denies
most tenets of paranormalism, while in areas where religious fundamentalism
is weak-like the Northeast-the two may be more compatible.

 He theorizes that in social and cultural contexts that may be more open to
the mixing of religious and paranormal belief, each belief system may shade
off into the other, "making for a middle ground that adherents of both polar
extremes find compatible and feel comfortable with."

 Goode argues that there may be many paranormal beliefs that are intuitively
appealing to the Christian, and many Christian traditions that may lay the
foundation for paranormalism.  Says Goode: "There may only be a hair's
breadth separating belief in angels from belief in ghosts, belief in the
curative power of Lourdes from belief in psychic surgery, and belief in
heaven from belief that UFOs are not only real but piloted by superhuman
beings."

 Skeptical Inquirer, The Magazine for Science and Reason, is a bi-monthly
publication dedicated to the scientific examination of claims of the
paranormal and the pseudoscientific.  The January/February 2000 issue also
includes articles on the "Ten Outstanding Skeptics of the Twentieth Century,"
"Anna Eva Fay: The Mentalist Who Baffled Sir William Crookes," "The
Pseudoscience of Oxygen Therapy," and "Confessions of a (Former)
Graphologist."

 Visit http://www.csicop.org, rated one of the top ten science sites on the
Web.

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 Contact 716-636-1425 X219
 sinisbet@aol.com