RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES: VARIETIES OF COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

As an interdisciplinary endeavor, the study of consciousness is informed by a variety of scholarly perspectives that, when integrated, deepen our understanding of consciousness as a functional system of semiotic communication. This thesis explores linguistic behavior as a manifestation of collective consciousness via the incorporation of theory from psychology, sociology, and philosophy into an analytical framework for studying consciousness. Using this analytical framework, I present an analysis of patterns of linguistic behavior from online religious communitas on reddit.com. I analyze the patterns of linguistic behaviors in this data using tokenization and semantic analysis techniques, revealing the divergent manifestations of identity in each collective consciousness. Ultimately, I find a striking similarity between the language used across all the subreddits, but the differences between them validate the consideration of these as divergent interpretants of collective consciousness.