Today in my Literature of the Sacred class we had a great lecture about stage theory and faith. Stage theories are everywhere and you can find one to map any facet of life, stages of cognitive development, moral development, physical etc. Today we were introduced to the stages of faith. This is not necessarily faith in God, but usually faith in something with permanence, baseball does not count. They are as follows:
Primal Stage, where as a child without language you decide whether or not you are loved in this world or not, depending on the care you receive by parents.
Intuitive/Projective, ages 2-6, you are able to identify permanent fixtures in your life, your house, toys, family members etc. God is seen as a parent figure, basic ideas of right and wrong are established.
Mythic/Literal, ages 7-12, concrete thoughts, everything is taken literally. little empathy, single perspective. what I found interesting about this stage is researchers find that many men are stuck in this mind set due to stressful jobs or authoritarian situations and they often seek religions that follow that authoritarian pattern.
Synthetic/conventional, ages 13-adult, This is the ability to view other perspectives, however most of your decisions are made by the collective of people you surround yourself with, this may include family, church or school organizations or friends. It is around this point that most people get stuck in life, the ensuing stages found fewer and fewer people.
Individuative/Reflective, ages 20-adult, development of independent thought, deconstruction of past thoughts. This is where we develop a healthy sense of skepticism about everything that has been taught to us in the past that we willingly accepted. Most people develop this in college, many never make it to the next stage.
Conjunctive, ages 30 to adult, this brings a reevaluation of life, once you get through deconstructing your belief system, and you realize just how bleak everything is when you don't believe in anything, you begin to put back together the past ideas that you scorned earlier. At this point you are ok with paradox. This might include a mid-life crisis, where you try to relive or retry things that you once failed.
Universalizing, I compare this to Maslows Self-Actualization, you put aside yourself and devote yourself to God (or whatever your belief brings you to) God's concerns are your concerns. A lot of people who reach this stage (only 1 was found in the study of over 350 people) are resented and probably killed because of this, Socrates, Jesus...
I'm sorry if this is long, but I have a few more thoughts: most religions will promote your advancement to the synthetic/conventional stage because it bolsters their strength, however the goal of most religions - honestly- is to reach the Universalizing stage. However, once you get to the individuation stage, religions almost condemn you, so that is the challenge, to make it through the individuation to get where you want to go.
Also, considering I'm taking 19th Century Europe and struggling for a paper topic, I immediately thought of a stage theory for developing into a realized country
Settlement/organization stage
Colonial/tribal stage
Suppression stage (whether you realize it or not)
Revolution (corresponding to individuative)
constitutional/democratic stage
citizens-first stage (possibly socialism or communism - except it would work)
4 comments:
I like this. I also like how Toni applied the stages to organized religion. I'm sure they apply in non-organized (disorganized?) religion, too, but obviously we're all most interested in how the stages can be applied to us.
I'm interested in your nation analogy, but here is my concern: for each of the stages, you need to have a critical mass of people to make the transition (i.e. a revolution requires mobs or armies with relatively large public support). But as we work up the chain, more and more people get stuck in lower levels.
You mentioned that only 1 in 350 people will make it to Universalizing.
So, can you really get a critical mass of enlightened people to make the transition to communism? Isn't this something the proletariat (in their large numbers) will generally thwart?
This is why communism really hasn't worked yet, nations, governments and citizens just aren't prepared to make the sacrifices to make a successful communist state
it's the ideal that no one has reached
I read something along these lines earlier this summer, written by some guy in the 1950's. He kind of followed the concept that Man creates God in his own image and that depending on where the person was on the stage would determine his attitude toward's God.
The other thought I had while reading this was of a fireside talk (they never have fires at those things) where the guy described a social testimony, a knowledge based testimony, and finally a spiritual testimony.
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