American Institute of Holistic Theology (AIHT)

Oh, right. Missed it. Bachelor's - Six months. Master's 4-6 mos. So it's quite possible (if you get a little advance work on your diss.) to go from neophyte to Doctor in about a year. Wonderful! Also - doesn't say anything specific I could find about exams. Open-book questions at the end of the chapters, maybe?

Yes- both his Doctorates are first-class. He's given us full details of accreditation and evaluation thereof in the forum. I'll let him say anything necessary.

Perhaps some course involving knocking on doors... Seriously, RAM said it best (that's twice). "You don't need a degree to make a difference." I think the point was made that bogus degrees should be avoided. If you need a degree, get a good one. And there are times when you don't need one at all. There should never be an occasion to need a bogus degree. If you "need" one to pay the bills, get a different line of work - FAST.

I'll shut up now. I'm an old man, and that puts me at a disadvantage in pissing contests. :sad:

J.

 

RF, it isn't an issue of "prestigious accreditations," it is an issue of legitimate recognized accreditation. The reason this is such a critical issue is because without such accreditation the value/utility/validity of the degree is . Yes, I hold a professional doctorate (RA) from here in the states, and a SA PhD (RA equivalent accreditation per AACRAO and IERF). Please understand my comments on this issue have nothing to do with arrogance, pride or looking with condescension on someone who doesn't have RA credentials. Obtaining and using a degree in a professional manner (e.g., business cards, websites, shingle, etc.), especially a doctorate, when the degree is from some entity like the Universal Life Church or ACMT, is blatantly misleading, unethical and dishonest.

One doesn't need a degree of any kind to be a minister in the Jehovah Witness movement. I had a great uncle (dead now) who was very active with the JW's. He had never graduated from High School. Although some denominations require the MDiv for ordination, I can think of no Christian denomination that requires a PhD for ordination.

 

True indeed! Your age puts you at no disadvantage, Johann, when it comes to promoting integrity. Continue to disseminate the truth.

 

Fair enough. Although he did not do a degree, we cannot blast your uncle because he did not attend an accredited school. If his denomination were to grant bachelors of divinity degrees to graduates, would it be OK to blast him because the seminary granted him a bachelors degree?

I agree that there is an ethical issue here. Bottom line is that a person should not use a non secular degree for a secular situation. I hold a doctor of metaphysics but never list it in a resume nor I brag about it in a business card. I don't even tell people that I know that I have it so it is really just hidden in the closet. However, I don't see nothing wrong to use it if I were to present a talk in a metaphysical church.

Yes, most of these doctors of metaphysics are substandard and are not equivalent to a PhD in philosophy with specialization in metaphysics from a RA school. They are really certificates but metaphysical school labels them as PhDs or Doctorates just to make them attractive.

 

I am not shy to say that I completed mine in 4 months part time from scratch but I also must admit that I enjoyed the material very much so I studied it every day. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to join a real seminary later (interfaith seminary) that required 3 years of work for just a certificate that could lead to ordination after 4 years of experience.

Most PhDs from metaphysical churches are substandard without question. They are really certificates labelled as doctorates mainly to please egos of people.
Can I call them mills? It depends on your definition, they are not being bought and you need to work for them, they are not granted by work experience but study. I would label them as substandard but not mills.

 

It would be helpful to me if some of the terms in this thread were better defined.

What is an "interfaith church"? What does 'interfaith' mean in this context? 'Interfaith' how?

What do "metaphysical" and 'metaphysics" mean in the context of this thread? I'm already reasonably familiar with metaphysics in the academic sense, but this obviously isn't that.

Metaphysics - By Branch / Doctrine - The Basics of Philosophy

I agree that training of religious teachers and practitioners needn't be Western-style university training. In most non-Christian traditions, it isn't. But if that's the case, then alternative kinds of religious training probably shouldn't be posing as universities and pretending to be award doctoral degrees.

What's more, religious training needs to have its own integrity. Buddhism is traditionally taught by monastics who rarely if ever have M.Div's and in many cases have never attended a Western-style university. But that doesn't mean that they don't practice a serious self-discipline.

The Buddhist World: Lay Buddhist's Guide to the Monk's Rules

And in many traditions, alongside the daily practice undertaken by all monks, there's a massive scholastic tradition that monks with suitable intellectual talents study. Other monks with different talents devote themselves to higher forms of meditation practice.

I guess that my point is that just because a university degree isn't always necessary or appropriate in religious professions, doesn't mean that the standards of practice and intellectual training required to be an authoritative religious teacher can therefore be shrugged off as trivial, just because they are religious.

To think so runs the risk of trivializing one's own tradition, it seems to me. Hence my interest in what 'interfaith' and 'metaphysics' mean and in what their relationship is to the established religious traditions.

Yes, I'm aware that there are 'saintly' individuals with suitable native spiritual talents such that they can function as religious authorities with no additional training at all. It just flows from their hearts, so to speak. (I've met people like that.) But most of us aren't saints. If we were, then what would be added by attending something like Sedona?

 

Buddhism might seem to be a curious case to any Western people because, as you said, there are no real educational requirements for becoming a teacher. In regards to "defining our terms" we might need to define more closely the term "teacher." There are, for example, teachers who are senior monks living in monasteries and thy instruct other monks They do not necessarily have any formal education beyond basic reading and writing. They exist in their positions as a link in a long chain of teacher/monks and this is most often described as a lineage that began with some early, respected monk. Then you have someone like Robert Thurman who was once a monk but gave that up and ultimately earned a PhD in Sanskrit from Harvard. There are formal education programs for monks too so, there's lots of grey area.
if you want to say that the equivalent to being a pastor of a Christian church is being the abbot in a monastery (not a perfect comparison) then you could say that you would never see an abbot appointed based solely upon having a degree and it might not even mean much if they had one.

 

Interesting contrast there. Although no degree is required to teach the principles, Buddhists have established many colleges and universities around the world. Here's a list of the American ones. Some are RA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_universities_and_colleges_in_the_United_States

I'm not a Buddhist, although there are some things I like about Buddhism. I sort of like the idea of Naropa, the school which houses the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I first read Kerouac and Ginsberg (a Buddhist) in the 1950s, as a teenager, when their work was quite newly published. Both of them (and other Beat writers) made a great and lasting impression on me.

J.

 

Another and a different sort of example is that of Thich Nhat Hahn who is a pretty famous Buddhist teacher from Vietnam. He attended a kind of Buddhist Academy Bao Quoc) which is a school attached to a Temple. My own favorite teacher is Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun. She has two American degrees that have nothing to do with Buddhism or religion but she has a lot of respect, and responsibility within her lineage, the Karmapa (sot of like the Dali Lma)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karmapa

 

In Thailand, monastics play a role analogous to that of Christian clergy in the country's wats (analogous to churches), teaching, giving dhamma talks and performing various liturgical functions for the laity. How are these religious practitioners trained to perform that function? Not in M.Div programs. They are taught in a monastic setting through practicing the monastic discipline itself, serving as junior monks in their temple's ecclesiastical work and in what are called Pariyatidhamma schools that typically teach the Pali language and Buddhist doctrine. In an effort to improve the learning and skills of the monks, the Thai government has established ecclesiastical examinations that the monks should pass in order to function as clergy.

For those monks (and more recently laity as well) of a more scholarly disposition, the government has established two public Buddhist universities, one of them with the extraordinary name: Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University. It means 'Chulalongkorn the Great (a 19th century king who founded it) Royal Monastic University'. For a long time these two only awarded the equivalent of bachelors degrees, but more recently they have rolled out Western-style masters and Ph.D. degrees as well. (Even in the West, Ph.D. degrees were a 19th century innovation.) The analogy here is between seminary M.Div training of clergy (the parayatidhamma schools) and more academic training of theologians (Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya_University

To give some idea of the numbers involved, there are some 31,071 wats/monasteries in Thailand. These house 267,000 monks. In addition there are 97,800 novices (white-robed anagarikas). So most of the monasteries are small, housing only a few monks. They are less like our image of massive medieval Christian monasteries than they are like large churches, with a half dozen or so resident clergy. About 30% are associated with parayatidhamma schools. Of these quarter million monks, only 9,775 are enrolled in the two monastic universities. And only 351 are graduate students.

So pretty clearly, it isn't Western-style degrees and graduate education that's driving clerical education in Thailand.

 

Yes - long name for sure, but very easy to understand, for anyone who has even a few words of Hindi - or Sanskrit (not Thai):
Maha (great) Chulalongkorn (King's name) raja (king) vidyalaya (school).

J.

 

The interfaith movement does not practice specific dogmas, instead it believes that all faiths lead to God. An interfaith minister needs to be trained in western and eastern spirituality and in comparative religions.

Metaphysics in the context discussed here is in the religious context. Metaphysics as a religion also does not practice dogmas and believes that the human being is capable of finding his own spirituality by using reasoning and self exploration. In few words, it is a more philosophical approach to answer the religious questions. Plato and Aristotle for example used the Metaphysical approach to answer questions such as what is the soul, survival of the human consciousness, what is consciousness, etc. It is also linked to the psychic phenomena as Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and other philosophers used chanelling and other psychic phenomena to understand the nature of the human soul, consciousness, etc.

The problem with modern schools such as Sedona is that they commercialize the original Metaphysics teachings into non senses such as metaphysical psychology, metaphysical management, etc just to make these degrees more marketable.

The main problem with metaphysics as a religion is that there is no need to attend temples or practice dogmas but to learn how to use your human mind. The problem comes from the potential to make money out of this and some schools corrupt the original teachings and use this to train you in esoteric subjects such as clarivoyance, spiritual healing, etc mainly to give you the potential to make money out metaphysics teachings.

In few words, metaphysics is mainly meant for personal development purposes and for those that are not interested in following an organized religion faith but prefer a more philosophical approach to this.
Interfaith in a way is very similar to metaphysics except that you need to be trained in all religions and faiths and not just Philosophy.

 

This is much like Buddhism which has many paths and no need for temples. I believe that most practitioners, like myself, rarely go to a temple to practice, Instead I occasionally go on a retreat, read, listen to lectures, etc. I do not see that as being a problem though, I see it as a strength.

 

Metaphysics is similar except that it uses philosophy rather than meditation in order to discover your spirituality.
Interfaith uses both, it is really a good bridge between Christianity and Eastern religions as Buddhism.
Bottom line is that degrees in Buddhism, Metaphysics, Interfaith, etc make no sense. Degrees in Theology were installed by the Catholic Church mainly to give a structure to a Theology. They were really created to address the needs of the Catholic church but their use is so spread that we want to use them for other religious approaches.

Reverend titles are also another problem, they are also so commercialized that it is not so easy to identify who really went to a structured program or who got it from an online church by taking a short program of few months.

In Canada, there are quite a few programs that run as summer or short term programs that lead to ordinations from some spiritual churches with no physical presence. Some people use them mainly to become wedding officiants and make their money with the wedding preparation, wedding planning, etc.

We discussed this before but Religion is a business like any other business with people profiting from degree programs, wedding preparation, spiritual healing, pastoral counseling, etc.

 

I think anyone using the Bible should attend some sort of formal training as you cannot simple pick up the Bible and have a clear understanding of everything. I takes years of training to do so. A great deal is plain text, but as I just said not everything.



No, religion is not always a business, our church gave out way more than we took in. Half the time paid staff uses their personal money to cover gaps. Food drives, free daycare and much much more. We have never made a penny.

 

Sorry, I meant some make it a Business. There is nothing wrong about opening a religious school for a specific denomination but it becomes a problem when people joining the school doing it with the only purpose of earning a vanity degree rather than learning the religious faith.

I agree, it takes time and commitment to learn a faith so it cannot be learned over night.

 

But herein lies the problem: all this happens in four months? It really does take time to understand all these things, even though there are surface similarities. I think the three years people typically study to qualify for Christian ministry is about right. Platonic philosophy and its offshoots down to say, Proclus, really does take about the same commitment. I don't know about the timeframe, but I can't imagine that Buddhism, one of the others mentioned in this thread, deserves less effort. My experience with people who've studied comparative religion at the PhD level is that they've managed to learn something about all religions, but usually fail to really grasp any of them in depth because they reductively force all religions into a modern framework in order to compare them. (That framework also presupposes that religions are at root the same, and any claims to exclusivity can be ignored as irrelevant). The interfaith statement 'all faiths lead to God' is easy to plumb in a short peiod of time, but once you're done, don't be surprised if the adherents of those particular faiths claim you've misrepresented them.

 

Regardless of the discipline one pursues, a legitimate PhD contains components not easily mastered. Many PhD students take a full year or longer completing a successful research proposal (A friend of mine just invested 17 months completing his RP). The literature review is a massive effort in and of itself, 6 months--2 years, depending on how much preliminary research has been done prior to being admitted to the PhD program. Research data is collect/collated per the subject of one's topic. Then comes the writing of the dissertation/thesis, which could take another 1-2+ years. These are general numbers, however, my point is that a legitimate PhD will not be earned in 4 months.

 

A serious program is at least 3 years with a residential component. After training, a serious church needs at least 3 to 4 years of experience lecturing, conducting services, etc plus exams. You cannot have an unqualified person guiding others, this is not just unethical but it can have legal consequences as people suing the church, etc.

The online four month programs are mainly introductory courses. No real church is going to accept them. Most people that get them, cannot practice in real churches but become freelances in non regulated professions such as spiritual coaching, psychic readings, etc and many other professions that never needed a PhD.

 

The real meaning of a PhD is "Being able to teach". Regardless of where you went to school or the type of accreditation, you will not only respected as a PhD if you have published in your field, presented at recognized conferences, contributed with services as a teacher, research supervisor among other things.
Even those ones with an RA, NA or any other discussed accreditation PhD will not be considered "Teachers of philosophy" if they are just paper PhDs with no accomplishments.