Pain and suffering as part of religious life: The Mauritian Thaipusam kavadi
In a pop-science article published in Dingir, E. Kundtová Klocová discusses the various socio-cultural aspects of the Thaipusam Kavadi ritual as practiced in Mauritius.
What do nonbelievers believe in?
As the number of nonreligious individuals has been increasing around the world, the team explored what exactly nonreligious beliefs and worldviews entail. Rather than assuming an absence of belief or imposing a predetermined set of beliefs, the research team used an open-ended approach to investigate which secular beliefs and worldviews nonreligious nontheistic individuals in ten countries around the world might endorse. In the study, approximately one thousand answers were analyzed (100 participants per country).
To analyze the answers, the team created a data-driven coding scheme, showing that the ten most frequently mentioned categories were science, humanism, critical skepticism, natural laws, equality, kindness and caring, care for the earth, left-wing political causes, atheism, and individualism and freedom. The research demonstrates that there is a range of secular beliefs, clustering together in scientific worldviews, humanist worldviews, and caring nature-focused worldviews, which provide answers the big questions about life.
You can find the paper here:
