1. Self-Spirituality. When I was quite young I asked my mother something about religion and she said, “Take the best of what you find in all religions.” I suspect this is a common recommendation among liberal-humanist parents like my mother. What occurred to me later in life is that this simple recommendation was full of interesting issues, if taken somewhat literally. This is the idea behind my notion of ‘personal religious constructivism’ – what you called self-spirituality when we met in Auckland. So, I am particularly interested in trends, branches and paths in one or more religious traditions in which forms of ‘self-spirituality’ are prescribed; I want to understand the methodologies employed.
2. Religion without god. I am also particularly interested in traditional world-views that do not include a god or gods as foundational. When I talk to people about religion, it is extremely common for them to not understand how there can be a religion without god – or to insist that without god, there is nothing religious going on. I would like to explore this issue – religious thought and practice outside of belief in gods. I wonder whether theistic traditions somehow accommodated atheists in their ranks – were there prescribed paths within the traditions but outside of the mainstream? How does/did that work?
3. Non-realism. Related to the above is something of a reaction to Dawkins et al who try to convince everyone that gods (and anything supernatural) do not exist. While I may tend to agree, it seems they are missing the point – which, for me, is not about ontological status, but about the use of symbolic models to coalesce world-views and to move from IS to OUGHT. One can have a religious world-view independent of the ontological reality of … anything. So I am very interested in non-realism and related philosophical issues related to religion thought and belief. (One of the issues I find fascinating here is how one’s temperament relates to belief. This is more of a ‘psychology of religion’ topic. I am also interested in the neurophysiology of religious/mystical/ecstatic experience.)