Reply #93: Categories in the survey.

[theredpen]

For example many atheists are members of the Unitarian Universalists, Reform Judaism, Buddhists just to name a few, and they would consider themselves spiritual, in fact they might even be pegged as religious, since they attend services at these organizations.

Absolutely, except that none of these people would have been in the "religion: none" category. They would have been in "religion: other" or "religion: Jewish".

It's certainly possibly for an atheist to self-describe as spiritual despite no tie with any religious tradition, but "spiritual" is a dualist concept and Heaven & Earth specifically rejects dualist models of human experience. So, while I agree with your points here, I was talking about the brand of atheism that H&E promotes — well, usually promotes because now all of a sudden, "spiritual" is what all the cool atheists are doing.

You are right that the article is mis-titled, a better title would have been "Judeo-Christian religious affiliation not linked to helping the poor in Mediicine".

I agree, and so do the authors of the study.

Notwithstanding these limitations, this study does point to possible implications for medical educators, policy makers, and researchers. Rabinowitz and colleagues have suggested that medical school admissions officials could increase the supply of physicians who care for the underserved by giving preference to candidates who possess characteristics known to predict a disposition toward such work. Admissions policies that favor certain religious or spiritual characteristics are not likely to be adopted for many reasons, but if they were, our findings would suggest that admissions officials should ignore both the general religiousness of candidates and their sense of calling to medicine, and should give preference to applicants who consider themselves very spiritual, who either have no religion or strongly agree that the religion they have influences their practice of medicine, or who agree that their families of origin emphasized service to the poor.

Basically, they are saying that if we want to graduate more doctors who would be inclined to serve the poor, they should look for some attributes that atheists might have ("spiritual", "no religion", "family of original emphasized service to the poor") and also one that atheists wouldn't have ("religion they have influences their practice of medicine").

The recommend against using the general religiousness of candidates because that doesn't correlate to higher rates of service to the poor — which is what you said.

But doesn't it seem intuitive that people who claim to be religious, but don't claim to be "highly spiritual" wouldn't be particularly deep individuals? This is sort of the flip side to noting that people who don't claim to be religious, but are "highly spiritual" would be oriented toward "higher" goals such as social justice, whether or not they were atheists.