Ietsism
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Ietsism (Dutch: Ietsisme; Dutch pronunciation: [itsˈɪsmə]) is an unspecified belief in an undetermined transcendent reality. It is a Dutch term for a range of beliefs held by people who, on the one hand, inwardly suspect – or indeed believe – that "there must be something undefined beyond the mundane and that which can be known or can be proven", but on the other hand do not accept or subscribe to an established view of the nature of a deity offered by any particular religion. Some related terms in English are agnostic theism (though many ietsists do not believe in anything that could be called "god", and therefore are agnostic atheists), eclecticism, deism and spiritual but not religious.
Ietsists might call themselves Christians or followers of another religion based on
Etymology
The name derives from the Dutch equivalent of the question: "Do you believe in (the conventional 'Christian') God?", a typical ietsist answer being "No, but there must be something", "something" being iets in Dutch.
The atheist political columnist and molecular biologist
Around the year 2012, the word began to circulate among English speakers as a loanword.[citation needed] More recently, the word ietsers ("somethingers") has emerged in the Netherlands to describe people of this viewpoint, but this has not yet been widely borrowed into English.
The term ietsism is becoming more widely used in Europe, as opposed to the phrase 'spiritual but not religious' which prevails in North America.[2][3]
Beliefs
Ietsism may roughly be described as a belief in an
In contrast to traditional
Within ietsism beliefs are very diverse but all have in common that they are not classifiable under a
An opinion poll conducted by the Dutch daily newspaper
As ietsists cannot be neatly classified as religious or nonreligious, ietsism is somewhat notorious for blighting statistics on religious demographics. Hence labeling ietsists as either religious or nonreligious will tilt the demographic balance for those countries to either predominantly religious or predominantly nonreligious.
See also
- Deism
- Higher Power
- Ignosticism
- Irreligion
- List of English words of Dutch origin
- Moralistic therapeutic deism
- Religion in the Netherlands
- Spiritual but not religious
- Unknown God
References
- ^ (in Dutch) wayback.archive.org (permalink) - Ronald Plasterk: ietsisme, the site “weblog.nl” is archived and transferred to wordpress.com
- ^ "In iets geloven!?". Godsdienstonderwijs.be (in Dutch). Retrieved 2017-01-02.
- ^ "Ткаченко А.В., ИТСИЗМ КАК ОСНОВНАЯ ФОРМА РЕЛИГИОЗНЫХ ПРЕДСТАВЛЕНИЙ СОВРЕМЕННОЙ МОЛОДЁЖИ".
- ^ van Beek, Marije (2015-01-16). "Ongelovigen halen de gelovigen in". www.trouw.nl (in Dutch). Trouw. Retrieved 2017-01-02.