• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Is Positive Psychology the Science of Religion?

loverofhumanity

We are all the leaves of one tree
Premium Member
Martin Seligman is a professor in Psychology, was elected president of the American Psychological Association and is the founder of Positive Psychology as well as author of books such as “Character Strengths and Virtues’ and ‘Authentic Happiness ‘.

What is Positive Psychology. (What is Positive Psychology & Why is It Important? [2020 Update])

Positive psychology focuses on the positive events and influences in life, including:

  1. Positive experiences (like happiness, joy, inspiration, and love).
  2. Positive states and traits (like gratitude, resilience, and compassion).
  3. Positive institutions (applying positive principles within entire organizations and institutions).
And this.....

While psychology may have neglected virtue, religion and philosophy most assuredly have not, and there is astonishing convergence across the millennia and across cultures about virtue and strength. Confucius, Aristotle, Aquinas, the Bushido samurai code, the Bhagavad-Gita, and other venerable traditions disagree on the details, but all of these codes include six core virtues: Wisdom and knowledge Courage Love and humanity Justice Temperance Spirituality and transcendence. (Authentic Happiness - Seligman Martin) union of the science of psychology

The word ‘convergence’ is what interests me most. It appears this scientific research of virtues and character appears to vindicate what the Prophets and Messengers of God have taught for centuries,

Is this the dawn of the emergence of unity between science and religion? In this field of psychology one can read things like ....

‘The time has finally arrived for a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called the “good life.” (Authentic Happiness -Seligman)

In the past psychology had only dealt with illness and diseases of the mind but now it is, I believe entering a more realistic phase where things like character and virtues and traits play an important role in healing and promoting happiness and well-being of people.

Seligman’s books affirm many spiritual concepts from a scientific perspective which to me is a sign of the beginning of unity between science and religion. Many of his books are used in University courses and they are a fresh and new perspective of happiness and positive emotions found in religion from a scientific viewpoint,

Is this the beginning of the unity between science and religion?
 
Last edited:

rational experiences

Veteran Member
I would believe that science has very little positive in their assessment of causes and self history.

I studied religious science themes to realise that the information was medically biological stated in science. Yet the occult science reactive sciences caused it.

Medical science is the biological positive in the sciences which already existed, with a personal motivation of service, compassion and human need.

Consciousness is natural and innate in everyone and to discuss a changed consciousness became the review psychology, which does not reason the motivation to want to react destruction of life.

Realisation is just naturally innate in all of us, and as humans become sicker, then conscious realisation is made active, in a self assessment. Which religious idealism always owned itself...to assess the self and tell the themed stories about how human males in science groups and history had attacked and harmed our life.

How does anyone over the reason/motivation of life attack/harm, by just thinking positives? The reasoning to be harmed and forced to suffer owns the motivated cause to claim back a positive life by cause and effect teaching of self conditions in life.

As a self realisation.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
No, just because science agrees with religion on some things does not make them united in full.

There are still ares where religion would have to abolish its superstition to become united to science

And no in the other direction.
There are still areas where science would have to abolish its superstition to become united to religion.
 

stvdv

Veteran Member: I Share (not Debate) my POV
Seligman’s books affirm many spiritual concepts from a scientific perspective which to me is a sign of the beginning of unity between science and religion.

Is this the beginning of the unity between science and religion?
Many enlightened Mastered have said "IF you don't experience God, you just declare you don't experience Love"
Religion is all about LOVE
Science better be full of LOVE
Otherwise many troubles will start

So,
IF Science accept Religion for what it really is = LOVE
THEN I see unity between science and religion
 

joe1776

Well-Known Member

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
What do you suppose is an example of a scientific superstition?

That the world is physical and objective. Or in other words that the only knowledge is scientific.
In the end it is a superstition, because it doesn't account for how causation works in humans.
I.e. Merriam-Webster - superstition: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation
 

Sirona

Hindu Wannabe
The age of Enlightenment propagated reason over belief/superstition, which led to the doctine that non-material things "don't exist". With the evolution of science(s), that paradigma is about to be changed or at least modified, so, interdisciplinary sciences are developed. One I've heard about is psychoneuroimmunology.

Psychoneuroimmunology - Wikipedia

That said, obviously religions can be the object of scientific studies as well.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
The age of Enlightenment propagated reason over belief/superstition, which led to the doctine that non-material things "don't exist". With the evolution of science(s), that paradigma is about to be changed or at least modified, so, interdisciplinary sciences are developed. One I've heard about is psychoneuroimmunology.

Psychoneuroimmunology - Wikipedia

That said, obviously religions can be the object of scientific studies as well.

And so can science. Science is today the object of scientific studies as well.
Just google: The study of science using science.
 

Sirona

Hindu Wannabe
And so can science. Science is today the object of scientific studies as well.
Just google: The study of science using science.

Thanks for your comment, however, I was more referring to fields were science and religion may overlap. I think the complete "unity of science and religion" is bogus (Shall we burn Giordano Bruno again?), but there seem to be fields where science and religion can inspire each other.

Moreover, "religious technologies" like Dianetics/Scientology may expressly use technobabble rather than traditional religious speak to make their products appear authoritative or valid.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
Thanks for your comment, however, I was more referring to fields were science and religion may overlap. I think the complete "unity of science and religion" is bogus (Shall we burn Giordano Bruno again?), but there seem to be fields where science and religion can inspire each other.

Moreover, "religious technologies" like Dianetics/Scientology may expressly use technobabble rather than traditional religious speak to make their products appear authoritative or valid.

Well, science and religion can overlap when it comes to how we view this:
Science has limits: A few things that science does not do

In other words, both science and religion are cultural and we could get them more "in line" by changing the cultural understanding of what knowledge is. Or rather that knowledge is not just one methodology.
 

Sirona

Hindu Wannabe
Well, science and religion can overlap when it comes to how we view this:
Science has limits: A few things that science does not do

In other words, both science and religion are cultural and we could get them more "in line" by changing the cultural understanding of what knowledge is. Or rather that knowledge is not just one methodology.

I think the application of natural science is cultural, but natural science in itself isn't. There are scientific laws, formulas and constants which are always valid, regardless of whether some culture "knows" or uses them. Humanities of course are dependent on culture.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
I think the application of natural science is cultural, but natural science in itself isn't. There are scientific laws, formulas and constants which are always valid, regardless of whether some culture "knows" or uses them. Humanities of course are dependent on culture.

Yeah, I agree as it stands.
 

loverofhumanity

We are all the leaves of one tree
Premium Member
No, just because science agrees with religion on some things does not make them united in full.

There are still areas where religion would have to abolish its superstition to become united to science

They can help each other I think.
 

loverofhumanity

We are all the leaves of one tree
Premium Member
Many enlightened Mastered have said "IF you don't experience God, you just declare you don't experience Love"
Religion is all about LOVE
Science better be full of LOVE
Otherwise many troubles will start

So,
IF Science accept Religion for what it really is = LOVE
THEN I see unity between science and religion

yes but science understands love as the law of attraction but what we need science to do is stop inventing new weapons of destruction and focus more on what will bring about peace.
 

Quintessence

Consults with Trees
Staff member
Premium Member
The issue is that the sciences are descriptive, not prescriptive. That is to say, the sciences in of themselves can make observations about things like virtues and values in human cultures, but they cannot dictate their application. The moment it does, it stops being science. Science is a methodology, a body of information. It doesn't decree how that information ought to be used or establish norms.

At any rate, the relationship between sciences and religions is a lot more complicated than many give credit for. Considering religion at core is about grappling with existential questions to live a good life, the sciences are an extension of that anyway.
 

rational experiences

Veteran Member
Science by psyche displaced self ownership by minus one.

To contemplate beginnings when everything owned presence and its end.

So its own psychological reasoning is flawed, for it tries to placate that the reasoning of everything is because a human being male in a group reasoned everything as a human.

Which then motivated him to placate by that shifting of natural to being one status of self importance that he entitles as a God state...hierarchy and an order above and beyond everyone and everything else. As if he invented every state just by his thinking upon its presence.

If science healed its mentality then it quotes today, seeing all living humans today use all previous memories and themes of the past, whilst they live naturally right at this moment. That science has healed itself he claims, by removing the pretext of claiming self is a God. So he gave self entitlement to his self again....in the status sciences.

Just did it again in a manipulative scientific reasoning.

Natural humans were and always have been spiritual, loving, kind and caring as their highest known self in awareness, a human. Living naturally and involving natural to its best ability of least harm is the highest loving form of life. If invention is involved in that thesis, then it is about harmonising in the life support and doing as little change to natural also.

Science has never owned that titled self reference, and it always removed the males and their lives who tried to introduce it into human acceptance in reality.

For psychological dictatorship is today studied as human conscious concepts and precepts of a long human brain/mind and spiritual study with science claiming that they will finally understand concepts and precepts about their self expression of what they claim is the highest human wisdom. Science. Yet science never created, most of its inventions was the knowledge of destruction of natural form.

So today they have reached the highest pinnacle of their own self deception, rationally as an idealisation of their own scientific selves.
 
Top