The author comments on Leonardo Ambasciano's book An Unnatural History of Religions: Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge (2019) and develops the line of its argument that a fideistic, sui generis, confessional History of Religions tradition continues due to the tacit support from scholars, institutions and organisations. Gnosticism is presented as a case study, showing how it exemplifies core critiques of HoR, and is supported by the same scholars and institutions, particularly the IAHR. The author then considers the recent British Academy report into Theology and Religious Studies in the UK to argue that the HoR tradition in contemporary Religious Studies is not a "problem to be solved", but rather something at the very basis of the discipline. The argument is therefore made that there cannot be a truly scientific academic study of religion while RS exists.
Within science fiction the topic of 'first contact' is a popular theme. How will an encounter with aliens unfold? Will we succeed in communicating with them? Although such questions are present in the background of many science fiction novels, they are not always explicitly dealt with and even if so, often in a poor way. In this article, I will introduce a typology of five dominant types of solutions to the problem of first contact in science fiction works. The first four solutions are the more dominant, but also the least interesting ones. There is a fifth category that addresses the question of first contact in a more interesting way, exemplified by the work of Stanisław Lem. This fifth option defines itself as a critique of the four previous categories, or of their shared assumption of what Lem (1967) has called 'the myth of cognitive universality'. Lem is sceptical of the common optimism that first contact will always be successful. In books such as Solaris (1961), His Master's Voice (1967) and Fiasco (1986), humanity makes first contact with an alien phenomenon, but fails to comprehend the phenomenon. Fundamentally, it will be argued that Lem's work shows that in such an encounter we will typically not only lack the right answers to our questions, but that we also often lack the correct questions: we simply do not have the right categories or instruments to even recognize, let alone meaningfully interrogate, the alien phenomenon. The article ends with an exploration of the implications of Lem's pessimism and whether it is the most plausible option for first contact. Moreover, the article will draw some lessons for philosophy of science, by exploring the parallel with the confrontation of novel or deviant phenomena in science. Lem's work is helpful here because it succeeds in articulating what has not always been appreciated in the philosophy of science, namely that the right questions by which to interrogate scientific phenomena are not given, but that their articulation always requires work.
In the article we present the results of our research on the spirituality of Slavic Neopagans in Poland. Spirituality is understood here according to the concept of mysticism described by R. W. Hood Jr. (1975). As the second main theoretical tool, we use the concept of religious maturity put forward by R. L. Dudley and R. J. Cruise (1990). A questionnaire survey, conducted online on a sample of Slavic Neopagans and Catholics, showed statistically significant differences between the groups in three out of the eight subscales of mysticism (Unifying Quality, Inner Subjective Quality and Religious Quality), while at the same time showing a lack of significant differences with respect to religious maturity. Further analysis by means of binary logistic regression made it possible to determine predictors of belonging to the group of Slavic Neopagans (75.8% of the cases). In the regression model, the separate treatment of mysticism and religious maturity turned out to be insignificant, whereas gender, age, and the interaction between religious maturity and mysticism significantly differentiated the investigated groups.