Well New Introductory Section Finally Drafted

It is interesting sitting down and watching my drafting approach to writing. I will start out with a pretty broad remit and go off on lots of tangents. The topics I normally find interesting. I will then spend quite a bit of time deciding what to write. Then I will start writing.

Now that sounds as if it is all drafted but it isn't. Normally I will only gain clarity of what I want to argue when I am drafting. Therefore there is a process of going through and through my text to get it not only to cover the area it has to cover but also to get the argument clear.

I had two things I wanted to argue in this section. The first was pretty clear and that was that there was no right dimensionality to religiosity and the use of apparently simple terms such as "belief" and "belonging" hide as much as they reveal. The simplistic reason for this is that often in the literature they are used in a technical way by the writers but interpreted in a non-technical way. There is also no agreed technical meaning. For instance belonging could mean:

• has formal membership of a congregation
• regularly participates in public worship
• identifies themselves as belonging to

The three are not the same. A paper that takes one of them might differ completely from a paper that takes another. The habit of not clearly spelling this out means that there are difficulties in dealing with the literature but we do not want three dimensions for belonging. The problem really is we think of belonging as a binary, either you do belong or you do not.  Therefore, we feel there ought to be a simple test, but in reality people negotiate belonging in a complex way.

"Belief" is even more complex but perhaps is closer to adequately theorized.  I am not sure whether I should take a "belief" as uniform or "situational". In fact as in a sense the situation is singular this study cannot determine that. However I do think there is elision in Belief between accepting proposition and a performance of belief which has more to do with confidence/trust/allegiance that with propositional truth. In the second sense I can actually see it playing within the congregation. It fits with the occasional comments on an individuals faith that came up in interviews and in conversations. These were not people who usually went out of their way to make statements about what they believed but were people who acted in certain ways.

The later half of this month has to be spent expanding the bibliographic sections of the thesis which basically means writing more about what the people I have cited actually say.