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Christian values | Christian values historically refers to values derived from the teachings of Jesus Christ. The term has various applications and meanings, and specific definitions can vary widely between denominations, geographical locations, historical contexts, and different schools of thought. Christian values also relate to the Christian identity in identity politics.
Modern use in worldwide conservative or right-wing politics
In the 21st-century United States, Australia, United Kingdom and other countries, the phrases Christian values and family values are used by Christian right and conservative parties to describe some or all of the following political stances:
Modern interpretations of Christian values may include:
Censorship of sexual content, especially in films and on television.
Sexual abstinence outside marriage and abstinence-only sex education.
The promotion of intelligent design to be taught in public schools and colleges as an alternative to evolution.
The desirability of laws against same-sex marriage.
Support for laws against the acceptance of homosexuality into mainstream society.
The desirability of organized school prayer in public schools.
See also
Biblical law in Christianity
Brotherly love (philosophy)
Christian ethics
Family values
Jesusism
Judeo-Christian values
Red-Letter Christians
Morality and religion
References
Values
Christian terminology
Political terminology
Value (ethics)
Religious philosophical concepts | 0.813169 | 0.988421 | 0.803754 |
Religion | Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings.
The origin of religious belief is an open question, with possible explanations including awareness of individual death, a sense of community, and dreams. Religions have sacred histories, narratives, and mythologies, preserved in oral traditions, sacred texts, symbols, and holy places, that may attempt to explain the origin of life, the universe, and other phenomena.
Religious practices may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, matrimonial and funerary services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, or public service.
There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide, though nearly all of them have regionally based, relatively small followings. Four religions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism—account for over 77% of the world's population, and 92% of the world either follows one of those four religions or identifies as nonreligious, meaning that the remaining 9,000+ faiths account for only 8% of the population combined. The religiously unaffiliated demographic includes those who do not identify with any particular religion, atheists, and agnostics, although many in the demographic still have various religious beliefs.
Many world religions are also organized religions, most definitively including the Abrahamic religions Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, while others are arguably less so, in particular folk religions, indigenous religions, and some Eastern religions. A portion of the world's population are members of new religious movements. Scholars have indicated that global religiosity may be increasing due to religious countries having generally higher birth rates.
The study of religion comprises a wide variety of academic disciplines, including theology, philosophy of religion, comparative religion, and social scientific studies. Theories of religion offer various explanations for its origins and workings, including the ontological foundations of religious being and belief.
Etymology and history of concept
Etymology
The term religion comes from both Old French and Anglo-Norman (1200s CE) and means respect for sense of right, moral obligation, sanctity, what is sacred, reverence for the gods. It is ultimately derived from the Latin word . According to Roman philosopher Cicero, comes from : (meaning "again") + (meaning "read"), where is in the sense of "go over", "choose", or "consider carefully". Contrarily, some modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell have argued that is derived from : (meaning "again") + ("bind" or "connect"), which was made prominent by St. Augustine following the interpretation given by Lactantius in , IV, 28. The medieval usage alternates with order in designating bonded communities like those of monastic orders: "we hear of the 'religion' of the Golden Fleece, of a knight 'of the religion of Avys'".
In classic antiquity, broadly meant conscientiousness, sense of right, moral obligation, or duty to anything. In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root was understood as an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts; never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. In general, referred to broad social obligations towards anything including family, neighbors, rulers, and even towards God. was most often used by the ancient Romans not in the context of a relation towards gods, but as a range of general emotions which arose from heightened attention in any mundane context such as hesitation, caution, anxiety, or fear, as well as feelings of being bound, restricted, or inhibited. The term was also closely related to other terms like (which meant "very precisely"), and some Roman authors related the term (which meant too much fear or anxiety or shame) to at times. When came into English around the 1200s as religion, it took the meaning of "life bound by monastic vows" or monastic orders. The compartmentalized concept of religion, where religious and worldly things were separated, was not used before the 1500s. The concept of religion was first used in the 1500s to distinguish the domain of the church and the domain of civil authorities; the Peace of Augsburg marks such instance, which has been described by Christian Reus-Smit as "the first step on the road toward a European system of sovereign states."
Roman general Julius Caesar used to mean "obligation of an oath" when discussing captured soldiers making an oath to their captors. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder used the term to describe the apparent respect given by elephants to the night sky. Cicero used as being related to (worship of the gods).
In Ancient Greece, the Greek term was loosely translated into Latin as in late antiquity. was sparsely used in classical Greece but became more frequently used in the writings of Josephus in the 1st century CE. It was used in mundane contexts and could mean multiple things from respectful fear to excessive or harmfully distracting practices of others, to cultic practices. It was often contrasted with the Greek word , which meant too much fear.
History of the concept of the "religion"
Religion is a modern concept. The concept was invented recently in the English language and is found in texts from the 17th century due to events such as the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation and globalization in the Age of Exploration, which involved contact with numerous foreign cultures with non-European languages. Some argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply the term religion to non-Western cultures, while some followers of various faiths rebuke using the word to describe their own belief system.
The concept of "ancient religion" stems from modern interpretations of a range of practices that conform to a modern concept of religion, influenced by early modern and 19th century Christian discourse. The concept of religion was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries, despite the fact that ancient sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written. For example, there is no precise equivalent of religion in Hebrew, and Judaism does not distinguish clearly between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities. One of its central concepts is , meaning the walk or path sometimes translated as law, which guides religious practice and belief and many aspects of daily life. Even though the beliefs and traditions of Judaism are found in the ancient world, ancient Jews saw Jewish identity as being about an ethnic or national identity and did not entail a compulsory belief system or regulated rituals. In the 1st century CE, Josephus had used the Greek term (Judaism) as an ethnic term and was not linked to modern abstract concepts of religion or a set of beliefs. The very concept of "Judaism" was invented by the Christian Church, and it was in the 19th century that Jews began to see their ancestral culture as a religion analogous to Christianity. The Greek word , which was used by Greek writers such as Herodotus and Josephus, is found in the New Testament. is sometimes translated as "religion" in today's translations, but the term was understood as generic "worship" well into the medieval period. In the Quran, the Arabic word is often translated as religion in modern translations, but up to the mid-1600s translators expressed as "law".
The Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes translated as religion, also means law. Throughout classical South Asia, the study of law consisted of concepts such as penance through piety and ceremonial as well as practical traditions. Medieval Japan at first had a similar union between imperial law and universal or Buddha law, but these later became independent sources of power.
Though traditions, sacred texts, and practices have existed throughout time, most cultures did not align with Western conceptions of religion since they did not separate everyday life from the sacred. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the terms Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, and world religions first entered the English language. Native Americans were also thought of as not having religions and also had no word for religion in their languages either. No one self-identified as a Hindu or Buddhist or other similar terms before the 1800s. "Hindu" has historically been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for people indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of religion since there was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning, but when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this idea.
According to the philologist Max Müller in the 19th century, the root of the English word religion, the Latin , was originally used to mean only reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety (which Cicero further derived to mean diligence). Müller characterized many other cultures around the world, including Egypt, Persia, and India, as having a similar power structure at this point in history. What is called ancient religion today, they would have only called law.
Definition
Scholars have failed to agree on a definition of religion. There are, however, two general definition systems: the sociological/functional and the phenomenological/philosophical.
Modern Western
The concept of religion originated in the modern era in the West. Parallel concepts are not found in many current and past cultures; there is no equivalent term for religion in many languages. Scholars have found it difficult to develop a consistent definition, with some giving up on the possibility of a definition. Others argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply it to non-Western cultures.
An increasing number of scholars have expressed reservations about ever defining the essence of religion. They observe that the way the concept today is used is a particularly modern construct that would not have been understood through much of history and in many cultures outside the West (or even in the West until after the Peace of Westphalia). The MacMillan Encyclopedia of Religions states:
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined religion as a:
Alluding perhaps to Tylor's "deeper motive", Geertz remarked that:
The theologian Antoine Vergote took the term supernatural simply to mean whatever transcends the powers of nature or human agency. He also emphasized the cultural reality of religion, which he defined as:
Peter Mandaville and Paul James intended to get away from the modernist dualisms or dichotomous understandings of immanence/transcendence, spirituality/materialism, and sacredness/secularity. They define religion as:
According to the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Religions, there is an experiential aspect to religion which can be found in almost every culture:
Anthropologists Lyle Steadman and Craig T. Palmer emphasized the communication of supernatural beliefs, defining religion as:
Classical
Friedrich Schleiermacher in the late 18th century defined religion as das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl, commonly translated as "the feeling of absolute dependence".
His contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel disagreed thoroughly, defining religion as "the Divine Spirit becoming conscious of Himself through the finite spirit."
Edward Burnett Tylor defined religion in 1871 as "the belief in spiritual beings". He argued that narrowing the definition to mean the belief in a supreme deity or judgment after death or idolatry and so on, would exclude many peoples from the category of religious, and thus "has the fault of identifying religion rather with particular developments than with the deeper motive which underlies them". He also argued that the belief in spiritual beings exists in all known societies.
In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, the psychologist William James defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine". By the term divine James meant "any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not" to which the individual feels impelled to respond with solemnity and gravity.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim, in his seminal book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, defined religion as a "unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things". By sacred things he meant things "set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them". Sacred things are not, however, limited to gods or spirits. On the contrary, a sacred thing can be "a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred". Religious beliefs, myths, dogmas and legends are the representations that express the nature of these sacred things, and the virtues and powers which are attributed to them.
Echoes of James' and Durkheim's definitions are to be found in the writings of, for example, Frederick Ferré who defined religion as "one's way of valuing most comprehensively and intensively". Similarly, for the theologian Paul Tillich, faith is "the state of being ultimately concerned", which "is itself religion. Religion is the substance, the ground, and the depth of man's spiritual life."
When religion is seen in terms of sacred, divine, intensive valuing, or ultimate concern, then it is possible to understand why scientific findings and philosophical criticisms (e.g., those made by Richard Dawkins) do not necessarily disturb its adherents.
Aspects
Beliefs
The origin of religious belief is an open question, with possible explanations including awareness of individual death, a sense of community, and dreams. Traditionally, faith, in addition to reason, has been considered a source of religious beliefs. The interplay between faith and reason, and their use as perceived support for religious beliefs, have been a subject of interest to philosophers and theologians.
Mythology
The word myth has several meanings:
A traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon;
A person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence; or
A metaphor for the spiritual potentiality in the human being.
Ancient polytheistic religions, such as those of Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, are usually categorized under the heading of mythology. Religions of pre-industrial peoples, or cultures in development, are similarly called myths in the anthropology of religion. The term myth can be used pejoratively by both religious and non-religious people. By defining another person's religious stories and beliefs as mythology, one implies that they are less real or true than one's own religious stories and beliefs. Joseph Campbell remarked, "Mythology is often thought of as other people's religions, and religion can be defined as misinterpreted mythology."
In sociology, however, the term myth has a non-pejorative meaning. There, myth is defined as a story that is important for the group, whether or not it is objectively or provably true. Examples include the resurrection of their real-life founder Jesus, which, to Christians, explains the means by which they are freed from sin, is symbolic of the power of life over death, and is also said to be a historical event. But from a mythological outlook, whether or not the event actually occurred is unimportant. Instead, the symbolism of the death of an old life and the start of a new life is most significant. Religious believers may or may not accept such symbolic interpretations.
Practices
The practices of a religion may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration of a deity (god or goddess), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, religious music, religious art, sacred dance, public service, or other aspects of human culture.
Social organisation
Religions have a societal basis, either as a living tradition which is carried by lay participants, or with an organized clergy, and a definition of what constitutes adherence or membership.
Academic study
A number of disciplines study the phenomenon of religion: theology, comparative religion, history of religion, evolutionary origin of religions, anthropology of religion, psychology of religion (including neuroscience of religion and evolutionary psychology of religion), law and religion, and sociology of religion.
Daniel L. Pals mentions eight classical theories of religion, focusing on various aspects of religion: animism and magic, by E.B. Tylor and J.G. Frazer; the psycho-analytic approach of Sigmund Freud; and further Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Mircea Eliade, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Clifford Geertz.
Michael Stausberg gives an overview of contemporary theories of religion, including cognitive and biological approaches.
Theories
Sociological and anthropological theories of religion generally attempt to explain the origin and function of religion. These theories define what they present as universal characteristics of religious belief and practice.
Origins and development
The origin of religion is uncertain. There are a number of theories regarding the subsequent origins of religious practices.
According to anthropologists John Monaghan and Peter Just, "Many of the great world religions appear to have begun as revitalization movements of some sort, as the vision of a charismatic prophet fires the imaginations of people seeking a more comprehensive answer to their problems than they feel is provided by everyday beliefs. Charismatic individuals have emerged at many times and places in the world. It seems that the key to long-term success—and many movements come and go with little long-term effect—has relatively little to do with the prophets, who appear with surprising regularity, but more to do with the development of a group of supporters who are able to institutionalize the movement."
The development of religion has taken different forms in different cultures. Some religions place an emphasis on belief, while others emphasize practice. Some religions focus on the subjective experience of the religious individual, while others consider the activities of the religious community to be most important. Some religions claim to be universal, believing their laws and cosmology to be binding for everyone, while others are intended to be practiced only by a closely defined or localized group. In many places, religion has been associated with public institutions such as education, hospitals, the family, government, and political hierarchies.
Anthropologists John Monoghan and Peter Just state that, "it seems apparent that one thing religion or belief helps us do is deal with problems of human life that are significant, persistent, and intolerable. One important way in which religious beliefs accomplish this is by providing a set of ideas about how and why the world is put together that allows people to accommodate anxieties and deal with misfortune."
Cultural system
While religion is difficult to define, one standard model of religion, used in religious studies courses, was proposed by Clifford Geertz, who simply called it a "cultural system". A critique of Geertz's model by Talal Asad categorized religion as "an anthropological category". Richard Niebuhr's (1894–1962) five-fold classification of the relationship between Christ and culture, however, indicates that religion and culture can be seen as two separate systems, though with some interplay.
Social constructionism
One modern academic theory of religion, social constructionism, says that religion is a modern concept that suggests all spiritual practice and worship follows a model similar to the Abrahamic religions as an orientation system that helps to interpret reality and define human beings. Among the main proponents of this theory of religion are Daniel Dubuisson, Timothy Fitzgerald, Talal Asad, and Jason Ānanda Josephson. The social constructionists argue that religion is a modern concept that developed from Christianity and was then applied inappropriately to non-Western cultures.
Cognitive science
Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. The field employs methods and theories from a very broad range of disciplines, including: cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive anthropology, artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, neurobiology, zoology, and ethology. Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.
Hallucinations and delusions related to religious content occurs in about 60% of people with schizophrenia. While this number varies across cultures, this had led to theories about a number of influential religious phenomena and possible relation to psychotic disorders. A number of prophetic experiences are consistent with psychotic symptoms, although retrospective diagnoses are practically impossible. Schizophrenic episodes are also experienced by people who do not have belief in gods.
Religious content is also common in temporal lobe epilepsy, and obsessive–compulsive disorder. Atheistic content is also found to be common with temporal lobe epilepsy.
Comparativism
Comparative religion is the branch of the study of religions concerned with the systematic comparison of the doctrines and practices of the world's religions. In general, the comparative study of religion yields a deeper understanding of the fundamental philosophical concerns of religion such as ethics, metaphysics, and the nature and form of salvation. Studying such material is meant to give one a richer and more sophisticated understanding of human beliefs and practices regarding the sacred, numinous, spiritual and divine.
In the field of comparative religion, a common geographical classification of the main world religions includes Middle Eastern religions (including Zoroastrianism and Iranian religions), Indian religions, East Asian religions, African religions, American religions, Oceanic religions, and classical Hellenistic religions.
Classification
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the academic practice of comparative religion divided religious belief into philosophically defined categories called world religions. Some academics studying the subject have divided religions into three broad categories:
World religions, a term which refers to transcultural, international religions;
Indigenous religions, which refers to smaller, culture-specific or nation-specific religious groups; and
New religious movements, which refers to recently developed religions.
Some recent scholarship has argued that not all types of religion are necessarily separated by mutually exclusive philosophies, and furthermore that the utility of ascribing a practice to a certain philosophy, or even calling a given practice religious, rather than cultural, political, or social in nature, is limited. The current state of psychological study about the nature of religiousness suggests that it is better to refer to religion as a largely invariant phenomenon that should be distinguished from cultural norms (i.e. religions).
Morphological classification
Some religion scholars classify religions as either universal religions that seek worldwide acceptance and actively look for new converts, such as the Baháʼí Faith, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Jainism, while ethnic religions are identified with a particular ethnic group and do not seek converts. Others reject the distinction, pointing out that all religious practices, whatever their philosophical origin, are ethnic because they come from a particular culture.
Demographic classification
The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism), and traditional folk religions.
A global poll in 2012 surveyed 57 countries and reported that 59% of the world's population identified as religious, 23% as not religious, 13% as convinced atheists, and also a 9% decrease in identification as religious when compared to the 2005 average from 39 countries. A follow-up poll in 2015 found that 63% of the globe identified as religious, 22% as not religious, and 11% as convinced atheists. On average, women are more religious than men. Some people follow multiple religions or multiple religious principles at the same time, regardless of whether or not the religious principles they follow traditionally allow for syncretism. Unaffiliated populations are projected to drop, even when taking disaffiliation rates into account, due to differences in birth rates.
Scholars have indicated that global religiosity may be increasing due to religious countries having higher birth rates in general.
Specific religions
Abrahamic
Abrahamic religions are monotheistic religions which believe they descend from Abraham.
Judaism
Judaism is the oldest Abrahamic religion, originating in the people of ancient Israel and Judah. The Torah is its foundational text, and is part of the larger text known as the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. It is supplemented by oral tradition, set down in written form in later texts such as the Midrash and the Talmud. Judaism includes a wide corpus of texts, practices, theological positions, and forms of organization. Within Judaism there are a variety of movements, most of which emerged from Rabbinic Judaism, which holds that God revealed his laws and commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai in the form of both the Written and Oral Torah; historically, this assertion was challenged by various groups. The Jewish people were scattered after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Today there are about 13 million Jews, about 40 per cent living in Israel and 40 per cent in the United States. The largest Jewish religious movements are Orthodox Judaism (Haredi Judaism and Modern Orthodox Judaism), Conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism.
Christianity
Christianity is based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (1st century) as presented in the New Testament. The Christian faith is essentially faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, and as Savior and Lord. Almost all Christians believe in the Trinity, which teaches the unity of Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead. Most Christians can describe their faith with the Nicene Creed. As the religion of Byzantine Empire in the first millennium and of Western Europe during the time of colonization, Christianity has been propagated throughout the world via missionary work. It is the world's largest religion, with about 2.3 billion followers as of 2015. The main divisions of Christianity are, according to the number of adherents:
The Catholic Church, led by the Bishop of Rome and the bishops worldwide in communion with him, is a communion of 24 Churches sui iuris, including the Latin Church and 23 Eastern Catholic churches, such as the Maronite Catholic Church.
Eastern Christianity, which include Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Church of the East.
Protestantism, separated from the Catholic Church in the 16th-century Protestant Reformation and is split into thousands of denominations. Major branches of Protestantism include Anglicanism, Baptists, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Methodism, though each of these contain many different denominations or groups.
There are also smaller groups, including:
Restorationism, the belief that Christianity should be restored (as opposed to reformed) along the lines of what is known about the apostolic early church.
Latter-day Saint movement, founded by Joseph Smith in the late 1820s.
Jehovah's Witnesses, founded in the late 1870s by Charles Taze Russell.
Christian Existentialist
Islam
Islam is a monotheistic religion based on the Quran, one of the holy books considered by Muslims to be revealed by God, and on the teachings (hadith) of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, a major political and religious figure of the 7th century CE. Islam is based on the unity of all religious philosophies and accepts all of the Abrahamic prophets of Judaism, Christianity and other Abrahamic religions before Muhammad. It is the most widely practiced religion of Southeast Asia, North Africa, Western Asia, and Central Asia, while Muslim-majority countries also exist in parts of South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Europe. There are also several Islamic republics, including Iran, Pakistan, Mauritania, and Afghanistan. With about 1.8 billion followers (2015), almost a quarter of earth's population are Muslims.
Sunni Islam is the largest denomination within Islam and follows the Qur'an, the ahadith (plural of Hadith) which record the sunnah, whilst placing emphasis on the sahabah.
Shia Islam is the second largest denomination of Islam and its adherents believe that Ali succeeded Muhammad and further places emphasis on Muhammad's family.
There are also Muslim revivalist movements such as Muwahhidism and Salafism.
Other denominations of Islam include Nation of Islam, Ibadi, Sufism, Quranism, Mahdavia, Ahmadiyya and non-denominational Muslims. Wahhabism is the dominant Muslim schools of thought in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Other
Whilst Judaism, Christianity and Islam are commonly seen as the only three Abrahamic faiths, there are smaller and newer traditions which lay claim to the designation as well.
For example, the Baháʼí Faith is a new religious movement that has links to the major Abrahamic religions as well as other religions (e.g., of Eastern philosophy). Founded in 19th-century Iran, it teaches the unity of all religious philosophies and accepts all of the prophets of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as well as additional prophets (Buddha, Mahavira), including its founder Bahá'u'lláh. It is an offshoot of Bábism. One of its divisions is the Orthodox Baháʼí Faith.
Even smaller regional Abrahamic groups also exist, including Samaritanism (primarily in Israel and the State of Palestine), the Rastafari movement (primarily in Jamaica), and Druze (primarily in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel).
The Druze faith originally developed out of Isma'ilism, and it has sometimes been considered an Islamic school by some Islamic authorities, but Druze themselves do not identify as Muslims. Scholars classify the Druze faith as an independent Abrahamic religion because it developed its own unique doctrines and eventually separated from both Isma'ilism and Islam altogether. One of these doctrines includes the belief that Al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh was an incarnation of God.
Mandaeism, sometimes also known as Sabianism (after the mysterious Sabians mentioned in the Quran, a name historically claimed by several religious groups), is a Gnostic, monotheistic and ethnic religion. Its adherents, the Mandaeans, consider John the Baptist to be their chief prophet. Mandaeans are the last surviving Gnostics from antiquity.
East Asian
East Asian religions (also known as Far Eastern religions or Taoic religions) consist of several religions of East Asia which make use of the concept of Tao (in Chinese), Dō (in Japanese or Korean) or Đạo (in Vietnamese). They include:
Taoism and Confucianism
Taoism and Confucianism, as well as Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese religion influenced by Chinese thought.
Folk religions
Chinese folk religion: the indigenous religions of the Han Chinese, or, by metonymy, of all the populations of the Chinese cultural sphere. It includes the syncretism of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, Wuism, as well as many new religious movements such as Chen Tao, Falun Gong and Yiguandao.
Other folk and new religions of East Asia and Southeast Asia such as Korean shamanism, Chondogyo, and Jeung San Do in Korea; indigenous Philippine folk religions in the Philippines; Shinto, Shugendo, Ryukyuan religion, and Japanese new religions in Japan; Satsana Phi in Laos; Vietnamese folk religion, and Cao Đài, Hòa Hảo in Vietnam.
Indian religions
Indian religions are practiced or were founded in the Indian subcontinent. They are sometimes classified as the dharmic religions, as they all feature dharma, the specific law of reality and duties expected according to the religion.
Hinduism
Hinduism is also called Vaidika Dharma, the dharma of the Vedas, although many practitioners refer to their religion as Sanātana Dharma ("the Eternal Dharma") which refers to the idea that its origins lie beyond human history. Vaidika Dharma is a synecdoche describing the similar philosophies of Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and related groups practiced or founded in the Indian subcontinent. Concepts most of them share in common include karma, caste, reincarnation, mantras, yantras, and darśana. Deities in Hinduism are referred to as Deva (masculine) and Devi (feminine). Major deities include Vishnu, Lakshmi, Shiva, Parvati, Brahma and Saraswati. These deities have distinct and complex personalities yet are often viewed as aspects of the same Ultimate Reality called Brahman. Hinduism is one of the most ancient of still-active religious belief systems, with origins perhaps as far back as prehistoric times. Therefore, Hinduism has been called the oldest religion in the world.
Jainism
Jainism, taught primarily by Rishabhanatha (the founder of ahimsa) is an ancient Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence, truth and anekantavada for all forms of living beings in this universe; which helps them to eliminate all the Karmas, and hence to attain freedom from the cycle of birth and death (saṃsāra), that is, achieving nirvana. Jains are found mostly in India. According to Dundas, outside of the Jain tradition, historians date the Mahavira as about contemporaneous with the Buddha in the 5th-century BCE, and accordingly the historical Parshvanatha, based on the c. 250-year gap, is placed in 8th or 7th century BCE.
Digambara Jainism (or sky-clad) is mainly practiced in South India. Their holy books are Pravachanasara and Samayasara written by their Prophets Kundakunda and Amritchandra as their original canon is lost.
Shwetambara Jainism (or white-clad) is mainly practiced in Western India. Their holy books are Jain Agamas, written by their Prophet Sthulibhadra.
Buddhism
Buddhism was founded by Siddhartha Gautama in the 5th century BCE. Buddhists generally agree that Gotama aimed to help sentient beings end their suffering (dukkha) by understanding the true nature of phenomena, thereby escaping the cycle of suffering and rebirth (saṃsāra), that is, achieving nirvana.
Theravada Buddhism, which is practiced mainly in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia alongside folk religion, shares some characteristics of Indian religions. It is based in a large collection of texts called the Pali Canon.
Mahayana Buddhism (or the Great Vehicle) under which are a multitude of doctrines that became prominent in China and are still relevant in Vietnam, Korea, Japan and to a lesser extent in Europe and the United States. Mahayana Buddhism includes such disparate teachings as Zen, Pure Land, and Soka Gakkai.
Vajrayana Buddhism first appeared in India in the 3rd century CE. It is currently most prominent in the Himalaya regions and extends across all of Asia (cf. Mikkyō).
Two notable new Buddhist sects are Hòa Hảo and the Navayana (Dalit Buddhist movement), which were developed separately in the 20th century.
Sikhism
Sikhism is a panentheistic religion founded on the teachings of Guru Nanak and ten successive Sikh gurus in 15th-century Punjab. It is the fifth-largest organized religion in the world, with approximately 30 million Sikhs. Sikhs are expected to embody the qualities of a Sant-Sipāhī—a saint-soldier, have control over one's internal vices and be able to be constantly immersed in virtues clarified in the Guru Granth Sahib. The principal beliefs of Sikhi are faith in Waheguru—represented by the phrase ik ōaṅkār, one cosmic divine actioner (God), who prevails in everything, along with a praxis in which the Sikh is enjoined to engage in social reform through the pursuit of justice for all human beings.
Indigenous and folk
Indigenous religions or folk religions refers to a broad category of traditional religions that can be characterised by shamanism, animism and ancestor worship, where traditional means "indigenous, that which is aboriginal or foundational, handed down from generation to generation…". These are religions that are closely associated with a particular group of people, ethnicity or tribe; they often have no formal creeds or sacred texts. Some faiths are syncretic, fusing diverse religious beliefs and practices.
Australian Aboriginal religions.
Folk religions of the Americas: Native American religions
Folk religions are often omitted as a category in surveys even in countries where they are widely practiced, e.g., in China.
Traditional African
African traditional religion encompasses the traditional religious beliefs of people in Africa. In West Africa, these religions include the Akan religion, Dahomey (Fon) mythology, Efik mythology, Odinani, Serer religion (A ƭat Roog), and Yoruba religion, while Bushongo mythology, Mbuti (Pygmy) mythology, Lugbara mythology, Dinka religion, and Lotuko mythology come from central Africa. Southern African traditions include Akamba mythology, Masai mythology, Malagasy mythology, San religion, Lozi mythology, Tumbuka mythology, and Zulu mythology. Bantu mythology is found throughout central, southeast, and southern Africa. In north Africa, these traditions include Berber and ancient Egyptian.
There are also notable African diasporic religions practiced in the Americas, such as Santeria, Candomble, Vodun, Lucumi, Umbanda, and Macumba.
Iranian
Iranian religions are ancient religions whose roots predate the Islamization of Greater Iran. Nowadays these religions are practiced only by minorities.
Zoroastrianism is based on the teachings of prophet Zoroaster in the 6th century BCE. Zoroastrians worship the creator Ahura Mazda. In Zoroastrianism, good and evil have distinct sources, with evil trying to destroy the creation of Mazda, and good trying to sustain it.
Kurdish religions include the traditional beliefs of the Yazidi, Alevi, and Ahl-e Haqq. Sometimes these are labeled Yazdânism.
New religious movements
The Baháʼí Faith teaches the unity of all religious philosophies.
Cao Đài is a syncretistic, monotheistic religion, established in Vietnam in 1926.
Eckankar is a pantheistic religion with the purpose of making God an everyday reality in one's life.
Epicureanism is a Hellenistic philosophy that is considered by many of its practitioners as a type of (sometimes non-theistic) religious identity. It has its own scriptures, a monthly "feast of reason" on the Twentieth and considers friendship to be holy.
Hindu reform movements, such as Ayyavazhi, Swaminarayan Faith and Ananda Marga, are examples of new religious movements within Indian religions.
Japanese new religions (shinshukyo) is a general category for a wide variety of religious movements founded in Japan since the 19th century. These movements share almost nothing in common except the place of their founding. The largest religious movements centered in Japan include Soka Gakkai, Tenrikyo, and Seicho-No-Ie among hundreds of smaller groups.
Jehovah's Witnesses, a non-trinitarian Christian Reformist movement sometimes described as millenarian.
Neo-Druidism is a religion promoting harmony with nature, named after but not necessarily connected to the Iron Age druids.
Modern pagan movements attempting to reconstruct or revive ancient pagan practices, such as Heathenry, Hellenism, and Kemeticism.
Noahidism is a monotheistic ideology based on the Seven Laws of Noah, and on their traditional interpretations within Rabbinic Judaism.
Some forms of parody religion or fiction-based religion like Jediism, Pastafarianism, Dudeism, "Tolkien religion", and others often develop their own writings, traditions, and cultural expressions, and end up behaving like traditional religions.
Satanism is a broad category of religions that, for example, worship Satan as a deity (Theistic Satanism) or use Satan as a symbol of carnality and earthly values (LaVeyan Satanism and The Satanic Temple).
Scientology is defined as a cult, a scam, a commercial business, or a new religious movement. Its mythological framework is similar to a UFO cult and includes references to aliens, but it is kept secret from most followers. It charges a fee for its central activity, on the basis of which it has been characterised as a commercial enterprise.
UFO Religions in which extraterrestrial entities are an element of belief, such as Raëlism, Aetherius Society, and Marshall Vian Summers's New Message from God.
Unitarian Universalism is a religion characterized by support for a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and has no accepted creed or theology.
Wicca is a neo-pagan religion first popularised in 1954 by British civil servant Gerald Gardner, involving the worship of a God and Goddess.
Related aspects
Law
The study of law and religion is a relatively new field, with several thousand scholars involved in law schools, and academic departments including political science, religion, and history since 1980. Scholars in the field are not only focused on strictly legal issues about religious freedom or non-establishment, but also study religions as they are qualified through judicial discourses or legal understanding of religious phenomena. Exponents look at canon law, natural law, and state law, often in a comparative perspective. Specialists have explored themes in Western history regarding Christianity and justice and mercy, rule and equity, and discipline and love. Common topics of interest include marriage and the family and human rights. Outside of Christianity, scholars have looked at law and religion links in the Muslim Middle East and pagan Rome.
Studies have focused on secularization. In particular, the issue of wearing religious symbols in public, such as headscarves that are banned in French schools, have received scholarly attention in the context of human rights and feminism.
Science
Science acknowledges reason and empirical evidence; and religions include revelation, faith and sacredness whilst also acknowledging philosophical and metaphysical explanations with regard to the study of the universe. Both science and religion are not monolithic, timeless, or static because both are complex social and cultural endeavors that have changed through time across languages and cultures.
The concepts of science and religion are a recent invention: the term religion emerged in the 17th century in the midst of colonization and globalization and the Protestant Reformation. The term science emerged in the 19th century out of natural philosophy in the midst of attempts to narrowly define those who studied nature (natural science), and the phrase religion and science emerged in the 19th century due to the reification of both concepts. It was in the 19th century that the terms Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Confucianism first emerged. In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin roots of both science (scientia) and religion (religio) were understood as inner qualities of the individual or virtues, never as doctrines, practices, or actual sources of knowledge.
In general, the scientific method gains knowledge by testing hypotheses to develop theories through elucidation of facts or evaluation by experiments and thus only answers cosmological questions about the universe that can be observed and measured. It develops theories of the world which best fit physically observed evidence. All scientific knowledge is subject to later refinement, or even rejection, in the face of additional evidence. Scientific theories that have an overwhelming preponderance of favorable evidence are often treated as de facto verities in general parlance, such as the theories of general relativity and natural selection to explain respectively the mechanisms of gravity and evolution.
Religion does not have a method per se partly because religions emerge through time from diverse cultures and it is an attempt to find meaning in the world, and to explain humanity's place in it and relationship to it and to any posited entities. In terms of Christian theology and ultimate truths, people rely on reason, experience, scripture, and tradition to test and gauge what they experience and what they should believe. Furthermore, religious models, understanding, and metaphors are also revisable, as are scientific models.
Regarding religion and science, Albert Einstein states (1940): "For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action; it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts…Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determine the goals, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up."
Morality
Many religions have value frameworks regarding personal behavior meant to guide adherents in determining between right and wrong. These include the Five Vows of Jainism, Judaism's halakha, Islam's sharia, Catholicism's canon law, Buddhism's Noble Eightfold Path, and Zoroastrianism's good thoughts, good words, and good deeds concept, among others.
Religion and morality are not synonymous. While it is often assumed in Christian thought that morality is ultimately based in religion, it can also have a secular basis.
The study of religion and morality can be contentious due to ethnocentric views on morality, failure to distinguish between in group and out group altruism, and inconsistent definitions of religiosity.
Politics
Impact
Religion has had a significant impact on the political system in many countries. Notably, most Muslim-majority countries adopt various aspects of sharia, the Islamic law. Some countries even define themselves in religious terms, such as The Islamic Republic of Iran. The sharia thus affects up to 23% of the global population, or 1.57 billion people who are Muslims. However, religion also affects political decisions in many western countries. For instance, in the United States, 51% of voters would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who did not believe in God, and only 6% more likely. Christians make up 92% of members of the US Congress, compared with 71% of the general public (as of 2014). At the same time, while 23% of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated, only one member of Congress (Kyrsten Sinema, D-Arizona), or 0.2% of that body, claims no religious affiliation. In most European countries, however, religion has a much smaller influence on politics although it used to be much more important. For instance, same-sex marriage and abortion were illegal in many European countries until recently, following Christian (usually Catholic) doctrine. Several European leaders are atheists (e.g., France's former president Francois Hollande or Greece's prime minister Alexis Tsipras). In Asia, the role of religion differs widely between countries. For instance, India is still one of the most religious countries and religion still has a strong impact on politics, given that Hindu nationalists have been targeting minorities like the Muslims and the Christians, who historically belonged to the lower castes. By contrast, countries such as China or Japan are largely secular and thus religion has a much smaller impact on politics.
Secularism
Secularization is the transformation of the politics of a society from close identification with a particular religion's values and institutions toward nonreligious values and secular institutions. The purpose of this is frequently modernization or protection of the population's religious diversity.
Economics
One study has found there is a negative correlation between self-defined religiosity and the wealth of nations. In other words, the richer a nation is, the less likely its inhabitants to call themselves religious, whatever this word means to them (Many people identify themselves as part of a religion (not irreligion) but do not self-identify as religious).
Sociologist and political economist Max Weber has argued that Protestant Christian countries are wealthier because of their Protestant work ethic. According to a study from 2015, Christians hold the largest amount of wealth (55% of the total world wealth), followed by Muslims (5.8%), Hindus (3.3%) and Jews (1.1%). According to the same study it was found that adherents under the classification Irreligion or other religions hold about 34.8% of the total global wealth (while making up only about 20% of the world population, see section on classification).
Health
Mayo Clinic researchers examined the association between religious involvement and spirituality, and physical health, mental health, health-related quality of life, and other health outcomes. The authors reported that: "Most studies have shown that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes, including greater longevity, coping skills, and health-related quality of life (even during terminal illness) and less anxiety, depression, and suicide."
The authors of a subsequent study concluded that the influence of religion on health is largely beneficial, based on a review of related literature. According to academic James W. Jones, several studies have discovered "positive correlations between religious belief and practice and mental and physical health and longevity."
An analysis of data from the 1998 US General Social Survey, whilst broadly confirming that religious activity was associated with better health and well-being, also suggested that the role of different dimensions of spirituality/religiosity in health is rather more complicated. The results suggested "that it may not be appropriate to generalize findings about the relationship between spirituality/religiosity and health from one form of spirituality/religiosity to another, across denominations, or to assume effects are uniform for men and women.
Violence
Critics such as Hector Avalos, Regina Schwartz, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins have argued that religions are inherently violent and harmful to society by using violence to promote their goals, in ways that are endorsed and exploited by their leaders.
Anthropologist Jack David Eller asserts that religion is not inherently violent, arguing "religion and violence are clearly compatible, but they are not identical." He asserts that "violence is neither essential to nor exclusive to religion" and that "virtually every form of religious violence has its nonreligious corollary."
Animal sacrifice
Some (but not all) religions practise animal sacrifice, the ritual killing and offering of an animal to appease or maintain favour with a deity. It has been banned in India.
Superstition
Greek and Roman pagans, who saw their relations with the gods in political and social terms, scorned the man who constantly trembled with fear at the thought of the gods (deisidaimonia), as a slave might fear a cruel and capricious master. The Romans called such fear of the gods superstitio. Ancient Greek historian Polybius described superstition in ancient Rome as an instrumentum regni, an instrument of maintaining the cohesion of the Empire.
Superstition has been described as the non-rational establishment of cause and effect. Religion is more complex and is often composed of social institutions and has a moral aspect. Some religions may include superstitions or make use of magical thinking. Adherents of one religion sometimes think of other religions as superstition. Some atheists, deists, and skeptics regard religious belief as superstition.
The Roman Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful in the sense that it denotes a lack of trust in the divine providence of God and, as such, is a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that superstition "in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion" (para. #2110). "Superstition," it says, "is a deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand is to fall into superstition. Cf. Matthew 23:16–22" (para. #2111)
Agnosticism and atheism
The terms atheist (lack of belief in gods) and agnostic (belief in the unknowability of the existence of gods), though specifically contrary to theistic (e.g., Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) religious teachings, do not by definition mean the opposite of religious. The true opposite of religious is the word irreligious. Irreligion describes an absence of any religion; antireligion describes an active opposition or aversion toward religions in general. There are religions (including Buddhism and Taoism) that classify some of their followers as agnostic, atheistic, or nontheistic. For example, in ancient India, there were large atheistic movements and traditions (Nirīśvaravāda) that rejected the Vedas, such as the atheistic Ājīvika and the Ajñana which taught agnosticism.
Interfaith cooperation
Because religion continues to be recognized in Western thought as a universal impulse, many religious practitioners have aimed to band together in interfaith dialogue, cooperation, and religious peacebuilding. The first major dialogue was the Parliament of the World's Religions at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which affirmed universal values and recognition of the diversity of practices among different cultures. The 20th century has been especially fruitful in use of interfaith dialogue as a means of solving ethnic, political, or even religious conflict, with Christian–Jewish reconciliation representing a complete reverse in the attitudes of many Christian communities towards Jews.
Recent interfaith initiatives include A Common Word, launched in 2007 and focused on bringing Muslim and Christian leaders together, the "C1 World Dialogue", the Common Ground initiative between Islam and Buddhism, and a United Nations sponsored "World Interfaith Harmony Week".
Culture
Culture and religion have usually been seen as closely related. Paul Tillich looked at religion as the soul of culture and culture as the form or framework of religion. In his own words:
Religion as ultimate concern is the meaning-giving substance of culture, and culture is the totality of forms in which the basic concern of religion expresses itself. In abbreviation: religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion. Such a consideration definitely prevents the establishment of a dualism of religion and culture. Every religious act, not only in organized religion, but also in the most intimate movement of the soul, is culturally formed.
Ernst Troeltsch, similarly, looked at culture as the soil of religion and thought that, therefore, transplanting a religion from its original culture to a foreign culture would actually kill it in the same manner that transplanting a plant from its natural soil to an alien soil would kill it. However, there have been many attempts in the modern pluralistic situation to distinguish culture from religion. Domenic Marbaniang has argued that elements grounded on beliefs of a metaphysical nature (religious) are distinct from elements grounded on nature and the natural (cultural). For instance, language (with its grammar) is a cultural element while sacralization of language in which a particular religious scripture is written is more often a religious practice. The same applies to music and the arts.
Criticism
Criticism of religion is criticism of the ideas, the truth, or the practice of religion, including its political and social implications.
See also
Cosmogony
Cult
Index of religion-related articles
Life stance
List of foods with religious symbolism
List of religion-related awards
List of religious texts
Matriarchal religion
Museum of the History of Religion
Nontheistic religions
Outline of religion
Priest
Religion and happiness
Religious conversion
Religious discrimination
Social conditioning
Socialization
Theocracy
Theology of religions
Why there is anything at all
Notes
References
Sources
Primary
Lao Tzu; Tao Te Ching (Victor H. Mair translator); Bantam (1998).
The Holy Bible, King James Version; New American Library (1974).
The Koran; Penguin (2000), .
The Origin of Live & Death, African Creation Myths; Heinemann (1966).
Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia; Penguin (1971).
Selected Work Marcus Tullius Cicero
Secondary
Yves Coppens, Origines de l'homme – De la matière à la conscience, De Vive Voix, Paris, 2010
Yves Coppens, La preistoria dell'uomo, Jaca Book, Milano, 2011
Descartes, René; Meditations on First Philosophy; Bobbs-Merrill (1960), .
Dow, James W. (2007), A Scientific Definition of Religion
Durant, Will (& Ariel (uncredited)); Our Oriental Heritage; MJF Books (1997), .
Durant, Will (& Ariel (uncredited)); Caesar and Christ; MJF Books (1994),
Durant, Will (& Ariel (uncredited)); The Age of Faith; Simon & Schuster (1980), .
Marija Gimbutas 1989. The Language of the Goddess. Thames and Hudson New York
Gonick, Larry; The Cartoon History of the Universe; Doubleday, vol. 1 (1978) , vol. II (1994) , W.W. Norton, vol. III (2002) .
Haisch, Bernard The God Theory: Universes, Zero-point Fields, and What's Behind It All—discussion of science vs. religion (Preface), Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006,
Khanbaghi, A., The Fire, the Star and the Cross: Minority Religions in Medieval and Early Modern Iran (IB Tauris; 2006) 268 pages. Social, political and cultural history of religious minorities in Iran, c. 226–1722 AD.
King, Winston, Religion [First Edition]. In: Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Lindsay Jones. Vol. 11. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference US, 2005. pp. 7692–7701.
Korotayev, Andrey, World Religions and Social Evolution of the Old World Oikumene Civilizations: A Cross-cultural Perspective, Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004, .
McKinnon, Andrew M. (2002), "Sociological Definitions, Language Games and the 'Essence' of Religion" . Method & theory in the study of religion, vol 14, no. 1, pp. 61–83.
Palmer, Spencer J., et al. Religions of the World: a Latter-day Saint [Mormon] View. 2nd general ed., tev. and enl. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1997. xv, 294 p., ill.
Ramsay, Michael, Abp. Beyond Religion? Cincinnati, Ohio: Forward Movement Publications, (cop. 1964).
Saler, Benson; Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories (1990),
Schuon, Frithjof. The Transcendent Unity of Religions, in series, Quest Books. 2nd Quest ... rev. ed. Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1993, cop. 1984. xxxiv, 173 p.
Wallace, Anthony F.C. 1966. Religion: An Anthropological View. New York: Random House. (pp. 62–66)
The World Almanac (annual), World Almanac Books, .
The World Almanac (for numbers of adherents of various religions), 2005
Further reading
Encyclopedias
Monographs
Barzilai, Gad (2007). Law and Religion; The International Library of Essays in Law and Society; Ashgate.
Inglehart, Ronald F., "Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religion", Foreign Affairs, vol. 99, no. 5 (September / October 2020), pp. 110–118.
Lang, Andrew (1909). The Making of Religion. 3rd ed. Longmans, Green, and Co.
Marx, Karl (1844). "Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right", Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.
Noss, John B. (1980). Man's Religions, 6th ed.; New York: Macmillan. N.B.: The first ed. appeared in 1949, . .
External links
Religion Statistics from UCB Libraries GovPubs
by Adherents.com August 2005
IACSR – International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion
Studying Religion – Introduction to the methods and scholars of the academic study of religion
A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right – Marx's original reference to religion as the opium of the people.
The Complexity of Religion and the Definition of "Religion" in International Law – Harvard Human Rights Journal article from the President and Fellows of Harvard College (2003)
Sociology of Religion Resources
Video: 5 Religions spreading across the world
Main topic articles | 0.802502 | 0.999747 | 0.802299 |
Theology | Theology is the study of religious belief from a religious perspective, with a focus on the nature of divinity. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing the supernatural, but also deals with religious epistemology, asks and seeks to answer the question of revelation. Revelation pertains to the acceptance of God, gods, or deities, as not only transcendent or above the natural world, but also willing and able to interact with the natural world and to reveal themselves to humankind.
Theologians use various forms of analysis and argument (experiential, philosophical, ethnographic, historical, and others) to help understand, explain, test, critique, defend or promote any myriad of religious topics. As in philosophy of ethics and case law, arguments often assume the existence of previously resolved questions, and develop by making analogies from them to draw new inferences in new situations.
The study of theology may help a theologian more deeply understand their own religious tradition, another religious tradition, or it may enable them to explore the nature of divinity without reference to any specific tradition. Theology may be used to propagate, reform, or justify a religious tradition; or it may be used to compare, challenge (e.g. biblical criticism), or oppose (e.g. irreligion) a religious tradition or worldview. Theology might also help a theologian address some present situation or need through a religious tradition, or to explore possible ways of interpreting the world.
Etymology
The term "theology" derives from the Greek theologia (θεολογία), a combination of theos (Θεός, 'god') and logia (λογία, 'utterances, sayings, oracles')—the latter word relating to Greek logos (λόγος, 'word, discourse, account, reasoning'). The term would pass on to Latin as , then French as , eventually becoming the English theology.
Through several variants (e.g., theologie, teologye), the English theology had evolved into its current form by 1362. The sense that the word has in English depends in large part on the sense that the Latin and Greek equivalents had acquired in patristic and medieval Christian usage although the English term has now spread beyond Christian contexts.
Classical philosophy
Greek theologia (θεολογία) was used with the meaning 'discourse on God' around 380 BC by Plato in The Republic. Aristotle divided theoretical philosophy into mathematike, physike, and theologike, with the latter corresponding roughly to metaphysics, which, for Aristotle, included discourse on the nature of the divine.
Drawing on Greek Stoic sources, the Latin writer Varro distinguished three forms of such discourse:
mythical, concerning the myths of the Greek gods;
rational, philosophical analysis of the gods and of cosmology; and
civil, concerning the rites and duties of public religious observance.
Later usage
Some Latin Christian authors, such as Tertullian and Augustine, followed Varro's threefold usage. However, Augustine also defined theologia as "reasoning or discussion concerning the Deity".
The Latin author Boethius, writing in the early 6th century, used theologia to denote a subdivision of philosophy as a subject of academic study, dealing with the motionless, incorporeal reality; as opposed to physica, which deals with corporeal, moving realities. Boethius' definition influenced medieval Latin usage.
In patristic Greek Christian sources, theologia could refer narrowly to devout and/or inspired knowledge of and teaching about the essential nature of God.
In scholastic Latin sources, the term came to denote the rational study of the doctrines of the Christian religion, or (more precisely) the academic discipline that investigated the coherence and implications of the language and claims of the Bible and of the theological tradition (the latter often as represented in Peter Lombard's Sentences, a book of extracts from the Church Fathers).
In the Renaissance, especially with Florentine Platonist apologists of Dante's poetics, the distinction between 'poetic theology' (theologia poetica) and 'revealed' or Biblical theology serves as stepping stone for a revival of philosophy as independent of theological authority.
It is in the last sense, theology as an academic discipline involving rational study of Christian teaching, that the term passed into English in the 14th century, although it could also be used in the narrower sense found in Boethius and the Greek patristic authors, to mean rational study of the essential nature of God, a discourse now sometimes called theology proper.
From the 17th century onwards, the term theology began to be used to refer to the study of religious ideas and teachings that are not specifically Christian or correlated with Christianity (e.g., in the term natural theology, which denoted theology based on reasoning from natural facts independent of specifically Christian revelation) or that are specific to another religion (such as below).
Theology can also be used in a derived sense to mean "a system of theoretical principles; an (impractical or rigid) ideology".
In religion
The term theology has been deemed by some as only appropriate to the study of religions that worship a supposed deity (a theos), i.e. more widely than monotheism; and presuppose a belief in the ability to speak and reason about this deity (in logia). They suggest the term is less appropriate in religious contexts that are organized differently (i.e., religions without a single deity, or that deny that such subjects can be studied logically). Hierology has been proposed, by such people as Eugène Goblet d'Alviella (1908), as an alternative, more generic term.
Abrahamic religions
Christianity
As defined by Thomas Aquinas, theology is constituted by a triple aspect: what is taught by God, teaches of God, and leads to God. This indicates the three distinct areas of God as theophanic revelation, the systematic study of the nature of divine and, more generally, of religious belief, and the spiritual path. Christian theology as the study of Christian belief and practice concentrates primarily upon the texts of the Old Testament and the New Testament as well as on Christian tradition. Christian theologians use biblical exegesis, rational analysis and argument. Theology might be undertaken to help the theologian better understand Christian tenets, to make comparisons between Christianity and other traditions, to defend Christianity against objections and criticism, to facilitate reforms in the Christian church, to assist in the propagation of Christianity, to draw on the resources of the Christian tradition to address some present situation or need, or for a variety of other reasons.
Islam
Islamic theological discussion that parallels Christian theological discussion is called Kalam; the Islamic analogue of Christian theological discussion would more properly be the investigation and elaboration of Sharia or Fiqh.
Some Universities in Germany established departments of islamic theology. (i.e.)
Judaism
In Jewish theology, the historical absence of political authority has meant that most theological reflection has happened within the context of the Jewish community and synagogue, including through rabbinical discussion of Jewish law and Midrash (rabbinic biblical commentaries). Jewish theology is also linked to ethics, as it is the case with theology in other religions, and therefore has implications for how one behaves.
Indian religions
Buddhism
Some academic inquiries within Buddhism, dedicated to the investigation of a Buddhist understanding of the world, prefer the designation Buddhist philosophy to the term Buddhist theology, since Buddhism lacks the same conception of a theos or a Creator God. Jose Ignacio Cabezon, who argues that the use of theology is in fact appropriate, can only do so, he says, because "I take theology not to be restricted to discourse on God.... I take 'theology' not to be restricted to its etymological meaning. In that latter sense, Buddhism is of course atheological, rejecting as it does the notion of God."
Whatever the case, there are various Buddhist theories and discussions on the nature of Buddhahood and the ultimate reality / highest form of divinity, which has been termed "buddhology" by some scholars like Louis de La Vallée-Poussin. This is a different usage of the term than when it is taken to mean the academic study of Buddhism, and here would refer to the study of the nature of what a Buddha is. In Mahayana Buddhism, a central concept in its buddhology is the doctrine of the three Buddha bodies (Sanskrit: Trikāya). This doctrine is shared by all Mahayana Buddhist traditions.
Hinduism
Within Hindu philosophy, there are numerous traditions of philosophical speculation on the nature of the universe, of God (termed Brahman, Paramatma, Ishvara, and/or Bhagavan in some schools of Hindu thought) and of the ātman (soul). The Sanskrit word for the various schools of Hindu philosophy is darśana ('view, viewpoint'), the most influential one in terms of modern Hindu religion is Vedanta and its various sub-schools, each of which presents a different theory of Ishvara (the Supreme lord, God).
Vaishnava theology has been a subject of study for many devotees, philosophers and scholars in India for centuries. A large part of its study lies in classifying and organizing the manifestations of thousands of gods and their aspects. In recent decades the study of Hinduism has also been taken up by a number of academic institutions in Europe, such as the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and Bhaktivedanta College.
There are also other traditions of Hindu theology, including the various theologies of Shaivism (which include dualistic and non-dualistic strands) as well as the theologies of the Goddess centered Shakta traditions which posit a feminine deity as the ultimate.
Other religions
Shinto
In Japan, the term theology has been ascribed to Shinto since the Edo period with the publication of Mano Tokitsuna's . In modern times, other terms are used to denote studies in Shinto—as well as Buddhist—belief, such as and .
Modern Paganism
English academic Graham Harvey has commented that Pagans "rarely indulge in theology". Nevertheless, theology has been applied in some sectors across contemporary Pagan communities, including Wicca, Heathenry, Druidry and Kemetism. As these religions have given precedence to orthopraxy, theological views often vary among adherents. The term is used by Christine Kraemer in her book Seeking The Mystery: An Introduction to Pagan Theologies and by Michael York in Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion.
Topics
Richard Hooker defines theology as "the science of things divine". The term can, however, be used for a variety of disciplines or fields of study. Theology considers whether the divine exists in some form, such as in physical, supernatural, mental, or social realities, and what evidence for and about it may be found via personal spiritual experiences or historical records of such experiences as documented by others. The study of these assumptions is not part of theology proper, but is found in the philosophy of religion, and increasingly through the psychology of religion and neurotheology. Theology's aim, then, is to record, structure and understand these experiences and concepts; and to use them to derive normative prescriptions for how to live our lives.
History of academic discipline
The history of the study of theology in institutions of higher education is as old as the history of such institutions themselves. For instance:
Taxila was an early centre of Vedic learning, possible from the 6th-century BC or earlier;Scharfe, Hartmut. 2002. Education in Ancient India. Leiden: Brill.
the Platonic Academy founded in Athens in the 4th-century BC seems to have included theological themes in its subject matter;
the Chinese Taixue delivered Confucian teaching from the 2nd century BC;
the School of Nisibis was a centre of Christian learning from the 4th century AD;
Nalanda in India was a site of Buddhist higher learning from at least the 5th or 6th century AD; and
the Moroccan University of Al-Karaouine was a centre of Islamic learning from the 10th century, as was Al-Azhar University in Cairo.
The earliest universities were developed under the aegis of the Latin Church by papal bull as studia generalia and perhaps from cathedral schools. It is possible, however, that the development of cathedral schools into universities was quite rare, with the University of Paris being an exception. Later they were also founded by kings (University of Naples Federico II, Charles University in Prague, Jagiellonian University in Kraków) or by municipal administrations (University of Cologne, University of Erfurt).
In the early medieval period, most new universities were founded from pre-existing schools, usually when these schools were deemed to have become primarily sites of higher education. Many historians state that universities and cathedral schools were a continuation of the interest in learning promoted by monasteries. Christian theological learning was, therefore, a component in these institutions, as was the study of church or canon law: universities played an important role in training people for ecclesiastical offices, in helping the church pursue the clarification and defence of its teaching, and in supporting the legal rights of the church over against secular rulers. At such universities, theological study was initially closely tied to the life of faith and of the church: it fed, and was fed by, practices of preaching, prayer and celebration of the Mass.
During the High Middle Ages, theology was the ultimate subject at universities, being named "The Queen of the Sciences". It served as the capstone to the Trivium and Quadrivium that young men were expected to study. This meant that the other subjects (including philosophy) existed primarily to help with theological thought.
In this context, medieval theology in the Christian West could subsume fields of study which would later become more self-sufficient, such as metaphysics (Aristotle's "first philosophy",Ontology - "In the 13th century, appropriating Aristotle's threefold division of the speculative sciences (physics, mathematics, and what Aquinas variously calls 'first philosophy' or 'metaphysics' or 'theology'), Aquinas argues that primary being and being in general are the subject of the same science (eadem enim est scientia primi entis et entis communis ) inasmuch as primary being (s) are principles of the others (nam prima entia sunt principia aliorum; cf. Aquinas' In Boeth. de Trin. 5.1, In 10 meta. 6 and 11, and the Proemium to the latter)."
or ontology (the science of being).Ontology – "In the sixth book [of the Metaphysics] (1026a16–32), Aristotle refers to a first philosophy that is concerned with being as being, but in contrast to physics and mathematics, precisely as the speculative science of what is separate from matter and motion. First philosophy in this context is labeled 'theology' inasmuch as the divine would only be present in something of this nature, i.e., some immutable being (ousia akinetos)."
Christian theology's preeminent place in the university started to come under challenge during the European Enlightenment, especially in Germany. Other subjects gained in independence and prestige, and questions were raised about the place of a discipline that seemed to involve a commitment to the authority of particular religious traditions in institutions that were increasingly understood to be devoted to independent reason.
Since the early 19th century, various different approaches have emerged in the West to theology as an academic discipline. Much of the debate concerning theology's place in the university or within a general higher education curriculum centres on whether theology's methods are appropriately theoretical and (broadly speaking) scientific or, on the other hand, whether theology requires a pre-commitment of faith by its practitioners, and whether such a commitment conflicts with academic freedom.Frei, Hans W. 1992. Types of Christian Theology, edited by W. C. Placher and G. Hunsinger. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.McClendon, James W. 2000. "Theology and the University." Ch. 10 in Systematic Theology 3: Witness. Nashville, TN: Abingdon.
Ministerial training
In some contexts, theology has been held to belong in institutions of higher education primarily as a form of professional training for Christian ministry. This was the basis on which Friedrich Schleiermacher, a liberal theologian, argued for the inclusion of theology in the new University of Berlin in 1810.
For instance, in Germany, theological faculties at state universities are typically tied to particular denominations, Protestant or Roman Catholic, and those faculties will offer denominationally-bound (konfessionsgebunden) degrees, and have denominationally bound public posts amongst their faculty; as well as contributing "to the development and growth of Christian knowledge" they "provide the academic training for the future clergy and teachers of religious instruction at German schools."
In the United States, several prominent colleges and universities were started in order to train Christian ministers. Harvard, Georgetown, Boston University, Yale, Duke University, and Princeton all had the theological training of clergy as a primary purpose at their foundation.
Seminaries and bible colleges have continued this alliance between the academic study of theology and training for Christian ministry. There are, for instance, numerous prominent examples in the United States, including Phoenix Seminary, Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, The Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Criswell College in Dallas, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, Dallas Theological Seminary, North Texas Collegiate Institute in Farmers Branch, Texas, and the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri. The only Judeo-Christian seminary for theology is the 'Idaho Messianic Bible Seminary' which is part of the Jewish University of Colorado in Denver.
As an academic discipline in its own right
In some contexts, scholars pursue theology as an academic discipline without formal affiliation to any particular church (though members of staff may well have affiliations to churches), and without focussing on ministerial training. This applies, for instance, to the Department of Theological Studies at Concordia University in Canada, and to many university departments in the United Kingdom, including the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter, and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds. Traditional academic prizes, such as the University of Aberdeen's Lumsden and Sachs Fellowship, tend to acknowledge performance in theology (or divinity as it is known at Aberdeen) and in religious studies.
Religious studies
In some contemporary contexts, a distinction is made between theology, which is seen as involving some level of commitment to the claims of the religious tradition being studied, and religious studies, which by contrast is normally seen as requiring that the question of the truth or falsehood of the religious traditions studied be kept outside its field. Religious studies involves the study of historical or contemporary practices or of those traditions' ideas using intellectual tools and frameworks that are not themselves specifically tied to any religious tradition and that are normally understood to be neutral or secular. In contexts where 'religious studies' in this sense is the focus, the primary forms of study are likely to include:
Anthropology of religion
Comparative religion
History of religions
Philosophy of religion
Psychology of religion
Sociology of religion
Sometimes, theology and religious studies are seen as being in tension, and at other times, they are held to coexist without serious tension.
Occasionally it is denied that there is as clear a boundary between them.
Criticism
Pre-20th century
Whether or not reasoned discussion about the divine is possible has long been a point of contention. Protagoras, as early as the fifth century BC, who is reputed to have been exiled from Athens because of his agnosticism about the existence of the gods, said that "Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have, for there is much to prevent one's knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man's life."Poster, Carol. "Protagoras (fl. 5th C. BCE) ." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 6 October 2008.
Since at least the eighteenth century, various authors have criticized the suitability of theology as an academic discipline. In 1772, Baron d'Holbach labeled theology "a continual insult to human reason" in Le Bon sens. Lord Bolingbroke, an English politician and political philosopher, wrote in Section IV of his Essays on Human Knowledge, "Theology is in fault not religion. Theology is a science that may justly be compared to the Box of Pandora. Many good things lie uppermost in it; but many evil lie under them, and scatter plagues and desolation throughout the world."
Thomas Paine, a Deistic American political theorist and pamphleteer, wrote in his three-part work The Age of Reason (1794, 1795, 1807):The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. Not anything can be studied as a science, without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.The German atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach sought to dissolve theology in his work Principles of the Philosophy of the Future: "The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God – the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology." This mirrored his earlier work The Essence of Christianity (1841), for which he was banned from teaching in Germany, in which he had said that theology was a "web of contradictions and delusions".
The American satirist Mark Twain remarked in his essay "The Lowest Animal", originally written in around 1896, but not published until after Twain's death in 1910, that:[Man] is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.... The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.
20th and 21st centuries
A. J. Ayer, a British former logical-positivist, sought to show in his essay "Critique of Ethics and Theology" that all statements about the divine are nonsensical and any divine-attribute is unprovable. He wrote: "It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved.... [A]ll utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical."
Jewish atheist philosopher Walter Kaufmann, in his essay "Against Theology", sought to differentiate theology from religion in general:Theology, of course, is not religion; and a great deal of religion is emphatically anti-theological.... An attack on theology, therefore, should not be taken as necessarily involving an attack on religion. Religion can be, and often has been, untheological or even anti-theological. However, Kaufmann found that "Christianity is inescapably a theological religion."
English atheist Charles Bradlaugh believed theology prevented human beings from achieving liberty, although he also noted that many theologians of his time held that, because modern scientific research sometimes contradicts sacred scriptures, the scriptures must therefore be wrong. Robert G. Ingersoll, an American agnostic lawyer, stated that, when theologians had power, the majority of people lived in hovels, while a privileged few had palaces and cathedrals. In Ingersoll's opinion, it was science that improved people's lives, not theology. Ingersoll further maintained that trained theologians reason no better than a person who assumes the devil must exist because pictures resemble the devil so exactly.
The British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has been an outspoken critic of theology. In an article published in The Independent in 1993, he severely criticizes theology as entirely useless, declaring that it has completely and repeatedly failed to answer any questions about the nature of reality or the human condition. He states, "I have never heard any of them [i.e. theologians] ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false." He then states that, if all theology were completely eradicated from the earth, no one would notice or even care. He concludes:The achievements of theologians don't do anything, don't affect anything, don't achieve anything, don't even mean anything. What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?
See also
Thealogy
References
External links
"Theology" on Encyclopædia Britannica''
Chattopadhyay, Subhasis. "Reflections on Hindu Theology" in Prabuddha Bharata or Awakened India 120(12): 664–672 (2014). . Edited by Swami Narasimhananda. | 0.793 | 0.998506 | 0.791815 |
Religion and sexuality | The views of the various different religions and religious believers regarding human sexuality range widely among and within them, from giving sex and sexuality a rather negative connotation to believing that sex is the highest expression of the divine. Some religions distinguish between human sexual activities that are practised for biological reproduction (sometimes allowed only when in formal marital status and at a certain age) and those practised only for sexual pleasure in evaluating relative morality.
Overview
Sexual morality has varied greatly over time and between cultures. A society's sexual norms—standards of sexual conduct—can be linked to religious beliefs, or social and environmental conditions, or all of these. Sexuality and reproduction are fundamental elements in human interaction and societies worldwide. Furthermore, "sexual restriction" is one of the universals of culture peculiar to all human societies.
Accordingly, most religions have seen a need to address the question of a "proper" role for sexuality. Religions have differing codes of sexual morality, which regulate sexual activity or assign normative values to certain sexually charged actions or ideas. Each major religion has developed a moral code covering issues of human sexuality, morality, ethics, etc. These moral codes seek to regulate the situations that can give rise to sexual interest and to influence people's sexual activities and practices.
Abrahamic religions
Abrahamic religions (namely Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, the Baháʼí Faith, and Islam) have traditionally affirmed and endorsed a patriarchal and heteronormative approach towards human sexuality.
Catholicism in particular favours exclusively penetrative vaginal intercourse between men and women within the boundaries of marriage over all other forms of human sexual activity, including autoeroticism, masturbation, anal sex, oral sex, non-penetrative and non-heterosexual sexual intercourse (all of which have been labeled as "sodomy" at various times), believing and teaching that such behaviors are forbidden because they're considered sinful, and further compared to or derived from the alleged behavior of the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah. However, the status of LGBT people in early Christianity and early Islam is debated.
Baháʼí Faith
In the Baháʼí Faith, sexual relationships are permitted only between a husband and wife. Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Baháʼí Faith, forbids extramarital sexual intercourse in his book of laws; the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. He developed the belief that all humans are spiritual individuals that help develop and further the advancement of society physically and spiritually. The Baháʼí consideration of sex is that chastity should be practiced by both sexes before marriage because it is commendable ethically and leads to a happy and successful marital life. The Baháʼí Faith recognizes the value of the sex impulse, but judges that its proper expression is within the institution of marriage: Baháʼís do not believe in suppression of the sex impulse but in its regulation and control.
Christianity
The Old Testament and Christianity have historically affirmed and endorsed a patriarchal and heteronormative approach towards human sexuality, favouring exclusively penetrative vaginal intercourse between men and women within the boundaries of marriage over all other forms of human sexual activity, including autoeroticism, masturbation, anal sex, oral sex, non-penetrative and non-heterosexual sexual intercourse (all of which have been labeled as "sodomy" at various times), believing and teaching that such behaviors are forbidden because they're considered sinful, and further compared to or derived from the behavior of the alleged residents of Sodom and Gomorrah.
In the New Testament, Jesus discussed little about sex, and most of the information about sex comes from the Old Testament and Paul's writings, and some are controversial today.
Sexuality carried out between different sexes, between 2 people (Monogamy, although polygamy is not forbidden) and in particular procreation, is generally understood as the ideal state.
There is conjugal love through Song of Songs in which it is about eroticism and romance.
New Testament
Paul the Apostle stated in 1 Corinthians "To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practising self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion." Importantly, Paul's view of sex is also that it is actually unnecessary for those with certain gifts (presumably "celibacy"). Jennifer Wright Knust says Paul framed desire a force Christians gained control over whereas non-Christians were "enslaved" by it. Further, Paul says the bodies of Christians were members of Christ's body and thus sexual desire must be eschewed.
New Testament scholar N. T. Wright asserts that Paul absolutely forbade fornication, irrespective of a new Christian's former cultural practices. Wright notes "If a Corinthian were to say, 'Because I'm a Corinthian, I have always had a string of girl-friends I sleep with, that's part of our culture,' Paul would respond, 'Not now you're a Christian you don't.'... When someone disagreed with Paul's clear rules on immorality or angry disputes, the matters he deals with in Colossians 3.5–10, he is... firm, as we see dramatically in 1 Corinthians 5 and 6. There is no place in the Christian fellowship for such practices and for such a person."
Some have suggested that Paul's treatment of sex was influenced by his conviction that the end of the world was imminent. Under this view, Paul, believing that the world would soon end, took it as a corollary that all earthly concerns, including sex, should hold little interest for Christians. Paul's letters show far greater concern with sexual issues than the gospel writers attributed to Jesus, since Paul was building Christian communities over decades and responding to various issues that arose.
The theologian Lee Gatiss states that "the word 'fornication' has gone out of fashion and is not in common use to describe non-marital sex. However, it is an excellent translation for [the Biblical term] , which basically referred to any kind of sex outside of marriage... This has been contested... but the overwhelming weight of scholarship and all the available evidence from the ancient world points firmly in this direction. 'Flee sexual immorality and pursue self-control' (cf. 1 Thess 4:1–8) was the straightforward message to Christians in a sex-crazed world."
Early Christianity
In early Christianity, reflection on scriptural texts introduced an eschatological hermeneutic to the reading of the Book of Genesis. The Garden of Eden was seen as a normative ideal state to which Christians were to strive; writers linked the future enjoyment of Heaven to the original blessedness of Adam and Eve in their reflections.
The valuation of virginity in the ancient church brought into relief a tension between the Genesis injunction to "be fruitful and multiply" with its understood contextual implication of marriage as a social institution, and the interpretation of the superiority of virginity over marriage, sexual activity and family formation from the Gospel texts Matt 19:11-12, Matt 19:29. One way patristic thinkers tried to harmonize the texts was through the position that there had actually been no sexual intercourse in Eden: on this reading, sex happened after the fall of man and the expulsion from Eden, thus preserving virginity as the perfect state both in the historical Paradise and the anticipated Heaven. John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Justin Martyr, Epiphanius of Salamis, and Irenaeus of Lyons all espoused this view:
Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, 12 "He did not yet judge of what was lovely by taste or sight; he found in the Lord alone all that was sweet; and he used the helpmeet given him only for this delight, as Scripture signifies when it said that 'he knew her not' till he was driven forth from the garden, and till she, for the sin which she was decoyed into committing, was sentenced to the pangs of childbirth. We, then, who in our first ancestor were thus ejected, are allowed to return to our earliest state of blessedness by the very same stages by which we lost Paradise. What are they? Pleasure, craftily offered, began the Fall, and there followed after pleasure shame, and fear, even to remain longer in the sight of their Creator, so that they hid themselves in leaves and shade; and after that they covered themselves with the skins of dead animals; and then were sent forth into this pestilential and exacting land where, as the compensation for having to die, marriage was instituted".
John Chrysostom, On Virginity, 14.3 "When the whole world had been completed and all had been readied for our repose and use, God fashioned man for whom he made the world... Man did need a helper, and she came into being; not even then did marriage seem necessary... Desire for sexual intercourse, conception, labor, childbirth, and every form of corruption had been banished from their souls. As a clear river shooting forth from a pure source, so they were in that place adorned by virginity." 15.2 "Why did marriage not appear before the treachery? Why was there no intercourse in paradise? Why not the pains of childbirth before the curse? Because at that time these things were superfluous."
Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 3, ch 22:4 "But Eve was disobedient; for she did not obey when as yet she was a virgin. And even as she, having indeed a husband, Adam, but being nevertheless as yet a virgin (for in Paradise they were both naked, and were not ashamed, inasmuch as they, having been created a short time previously, had no understanding of the procreation of children: for it was necessary that they should first come to adult age, and then multiply from that time onward), having become disobedient, was made the cause of death, both to herself and to the entire human race..."
Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, 78.17–19 "And as in paradise Eve, still a virgin, fell into the sin of disobedience, once more through the Virgin [Mary] came the obedience of grace."
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, ch 100 "For Eve, who was a virgin and undefiled, having conceived the word of the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death. But the Virgin Mary received faith and joy, when the angel Gabriel announced the good tidings to her..."
Prof. John Noonan suggests that "if one asks... where the Christian Fathers derived their notions on marital intercourse – notions which have no express biblical basis – the answer must be, chiefly from the Stoics". He uses texts from Musonius Rufus, Seneca the Younger, and Ocellus Lucanus, tracing works of Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Jerome to the works of these earlier thinkers, particularly as pertaining to the permissible use of the sexual act, which in the Stoic model must be subdued, dispassionate, and justified by its procreative intent.
Augustine of Hippo had a different challenge: to respond to the errors of Manichaeism. The Manichees, according to Augustine, were "opposed to marriage, because they are opposed to procreation which is the purpose of marriage". "The method of contraception practised by these Manichees whom Augustine knew is the use of the sterile period as determined by Greek medicine", which Augustine condemns (this stands in contrast to the contemporarily permitted Catholic use of Natural family planning). Elaine Pagels says, "By the beginning of the fifth century, Augustine had actually declared that spontaneous sexual desire is the proof of—and penalty for—universal original sin", though that this view goes against "most of his Christian predecessors".
As monastic communities developed, the sexual lives of monks came under scrutiny from two theologians, John Cassian and Caesarius of Arles, who commented on the "vices" of the solitary life. "Their concerns were not with the act of masturbation, but with the monks who vowed chastity. The monks' vow made masturbation an illicit act; the act itself was not considered sinful... In fact... prior to Cassian, masturbation was not considered a sexual offence for anyone."
Catholicism
From the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church formally recognized marriage between a freely consenting, baptized man and woman as a sacrament – an outward sign communicating a special gift of God's love. The Council of Florence in 1438 gave this definition, following earlier church statements in 1208, and declared that sexual union was a special participation in the union of Christ in the church. However the Puritans, while highly valuing the institution, viewed marriage as a "civil", rather than a "religious" matter, being "under the jurisdiction of the civil courts". This is because they found no biblical precedent for clergy performing marriage ceremonies. Further, marriage was said to be for the "relief of concupiscence" as well as any spiritual purpose.
The Catholic moral theologian Charles E. Curran stated "the fathers of the Church are practically silent on the simple question of masturbation".
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the flesh is the hinge of salvation". The Catechism indicates that sexual relationships in marriage is "a way of imitating in the flesh the Creator's generosity and fecundity" and lists fornication as one of the "offenses against chastity", calling it "an intrinsically and gravely disordered action" because "use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose". The "conjugal act" aims "at a deeply personal unity, a unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul" since the marriage bond is to be a sign of the love between God and humanity.
Pope John Paul II's first major teaching was on the theology of the body, presented in a series of lectures by the same name. Over the course of five years he elucidated a vision of sex that was not only positive and affirming but was about redemption, not condemnation. He taught that by understanding God's plan for physical love we could understand "the meaning of the whole of existence, the meaning of life." He taught that human beings were created by a loving God for a purpose: to be loving persons who freely choose to love, to give themselves as persons who express their self-giving through their bodies. Thus, sexual intercourse between husband and wife is a symbol of their total mutual self-donation.
For John Paul II, "The body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine." He says there is no other more perfect image of the unity and communion of God in mutual love than the sexual act of a married couple, whereby they give themselves in a total way – exclusively to one another, and up to the end of their lives, and in a fruitfully generous way by participating in the creation of new human beings. Through this perspective, he understands the immorality of extra-marital sex. It falsifies the language of the human body, a language of total love worthy of persons by using the body for selfish ends, thus treating persons as things and objects, rather than dealing with embodied persons with the reverence and love that incarnate spirits deserve. John Paul II stresses that there is great beauty in sexual love when done in harmony with the human values of freely chosen total commitment and self-giving. For him, this sexual love is a form of worship, an experience of the sacred.
Roman Catholics believe that masturbation is a sin.
In September 2015, the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, responsible for enforcing Catholic doctrine, did not permit a transgender man in Spain to serve as a godfather effectively barring transgender Catholics from serving as a baptismal sponsors. The statement concluded: "[...] the result is evident that this person does not possess the requisite of leading a life conformed to the faith and to the position of godfather (CIC, can 874 §1,3), therefore is not able to be admitted to the position of godmother nor godfather. One should not see this as discrimination, but only the recognition of an objective absence of the requisites that by their nature are necessary to assume the ecclesial responsibility of being a godparent."
Protestantism
Views over sexuality in Protestant churches differ.
Conservative evangelical Protestant churches
Some Protestants assert that any and all sex outside of marriage, including that conducted between committed, engaged or cohabiting couples, is the sin of fornication.
Unlike Roman Catholics, Protestants do not disapprove of masturbation due to the lack of a Biblical injunction against the act. Mainstream and conservative Protestants agree masturbation is not a sin, although there are various restrictions, such as making sure it does not lead to use of pornography or looking lustfully at people or mutual masturbation or addiction to the act. It must also not be undertaken in a spirit of defiance against God.
Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches
All 20 Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches of the Evangelical Church in Germany welcome LGBT members, as well as the Protestant Church in the Netherlands. In these Lutheran, United, and Reformed churches gay ministers are permitted in ministry and gay married couples are allowed in their churches.
More recently, the United Methodist Church has seen somewhat of a divide over the subject of human sexuality. The 2019 General Conference Special Session met, hoping to resolve the ongoing division regarding the homosexual community. This topic was first debated at a General Conference in 1972, resulting in a statement that the church "does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers this practice incompatible with Christian teaching." While the church still believes that church-goers should not "reject or condemn" those in the LGBTQ community, their statement still remains and additionally restricts their pastors from being "self-avowed, practicing homosexuals." With uncertainty about what the Church will look like in the future, calls for individual churches to separate from the United Methodist denomination have increased. The COVID-19 pandemic moved the original 2020 General Conference to 2024, when those present plan to address the possibility of altering the existing policies.
Inside the Lutheran Church of Sweden, the Bishop of Stockholm, Eva Brunne is a lesbian in a registered partnership with Gunilla Lindén, who is also an ordained priest of the Church of Sweden.
Anglicanism
The Anglican Church upholds human sexuality as a gift from a loving God, designed to be between a man and a woman in a monogamous, lifetime union of marriage. It also recognises singleness and dedicated celibacy as Christ-like. It reassures people with same-sex attraction they are loved by God, and are welcomed as full members of the Body of Christ. The church leadership has a variety of views in regard to homosexual expression and ordination. Some expressions of sexuality are considered sinful, including "promiscuity, prostitution, incest, pornography, paedophilia, predatory sexual behaviour, and sadomasochism (all of which may be heterosexual and homosexual), adultery, violence against wives, and female circumcision." The church is concerned with pressures on young people to engage sexually and encourages abstinence.
In the Anglican Church, there is a large discussion over the blessing of gay couples, and over tolerance of homosexuality. The discussion is more about the aspect of love between two people of the same-sex in a relationship than it is about the sexual aspect of a relationship.
Metropolitan Community Church
The Metropolitan Community Church, also known as the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, has a specific outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families and communities.
Latter Day Saints movement
Within the many branches of the Latter Day Saints movement, the principal denomination, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), teaches conservative views around sexual ethics in their Law of Chastity, which holds that masturbation, pre- and extra-marital sex, and same-sex sexual activity are sins. In the mid-1800s, however, it was allowed for men to be married to and have children with several women, and this was also discontinued in the late 1800s.
On various occasions, LDS Church leaders have taught that members should not masturbate as part of obedience to the LDS law of chastity. The LDS Church believes that sex outside of opposite-sex marriage is sinful, and that any same-sex sexual activity is a serious sin. God is believed to be in a heterosexual marriage with the Heavenly Mother, and Mormons believe that opposite-sex marriage is what God wants for all his children. Top LDS Church leaders formerly taught that attractions to those of the same sex were a sin or disease that could be changed or fixed, but now have no stance on the etiology of homosexuality, and teach that therapy focused on changing sexual orientation is unethical. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual members are, thus, left with the option of attempting to change their sexual orientation, entering a mixed-orientation opposite-sex marriage, or living a celibate lifestyle without any sexual expression (including masturbation).
The LDS Church teaches that women's principal role is to raise children. Women who rejected this role as being a domestic woman in the home, were seen as unstable and corrupted. Before 1890, the Mormon leaders taught that polygamy was a way to salvation, and many had multiple wives into the early 1900s, and some women practiced polyandry.
The Mormon religion teaches that marriage should be with a man and a woman. The LDS Church teaches its members to obey the law of chastity, which says that "sexual relations are proper only between a man and a woman who are legally and lawfully wedded as husband and wife." Violations of this code include: "adultery, being without natural affection, lustfulness, infidelity, incontinence, filthy communications, impurity, inordinate affection, fornication." The traditional Mormon religion forbids all homosexual behavior, whether it be intra-marriage or extramarital. In Romans 1:24-32, Paul preached to the Romans that homosexual behavior was sinful. In Leviticus 20:13, Moses included in his law that homosexual actions and behaviors were against God's will. In the 1830s, LDS founder, Joseph Smith, instituted the private practice on polygamy. The practice was defended by the church as a matter of religious freedom. In 1890, the church practice was terminated. Since the termination of polygamy, Mormons have solely believed in marriage between two people, and those two people being a man and a woman. The LDS community states that they still love homosexuals as sons and daughters of the Lord, but if they act upon their inclinations, then they are subject to discipline of the church.
Unitarian Universalism
Several Unitarian Universalist congregations have undertaken a series of organizational, procedural, and practical steps to become acknowledged as a "Welcoming Congregation": a congregation which has taken specific steps to welcome and integrate gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) members. UU ministers perform same-sex unions and now same-sex marriages where legal (and sometimes when not, as a form of civil protest). On June 29, 1984, the Unitarian Universalists became the first major church "to approve religious blessings on homosexual unions."
Unitarian Universalists have been in the forefront of the work to make same-sex marriages legal in their local states and provinces, as well as on the national level. Gay men, bisexuals, and lesbians are also regularly ordained as ministers, and a number of gay, bisexual, and lesbian ministers have, themselves, now become legally married to their partners. In May 2004, Arlington Street Church was the site of the first state-sanctioned same-sex marriage in the United States. The official stance of the UUA is for the legalization of same-sex marriage—"Standing on the Side of Love." In 2004 UU Minister Rev. Debra Haffner of The Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing published An Open Letter on Religious Leaders on Marriage Equality to affirm same-sex marriage from a multi-faith perspective. In December 2009, Washington, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty signed the bill to legalize same-sex marriage for the District of Columbia in All Souls Church, Unitarian (Washington, D.C.).
Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness is a group within Unitarian Universalism whose vision is "for Unitarian Universalism to become the first poly-welcoming mainstream religious denomination."
Islam
Interfaith marriages are recognized between Muslims and Non-Muslim "People of the Book" (usually enumerated as Jews, Christians, and Sabians). According to the traditional interpretation of Islamic law (sharīʿa), a Muslim man is allowed to marry a Christian or Jewish woman but this ruling does not apply to women who belong to other Non-Muslim religious groups, whereas a Muslim woman is not allowed to marry a Non-Muslim man of any Non-Muslim religious group. In general, the Quran tells Muslim men not to marry Non-Muslim women, and it tells Muslim women not marry non-Muslim men, but it makes an allowance for Muslim men to marry women of the People of the Book (usually Jews, Christians, and Sabians). No such allowances are made for women. Some Muslim scholars discourage all interfaith marriages, citing cultural differences between Muslims and Non-Muslims.
In some societies outside the traditional dar al-islam, interfaith marriages between Muslims and Non-Muslims are not uncommon, including marriages that contradict the historic Sunni understanding of ijmāʿ (the consensus of fuqāha) as to the bounds of legitimacy. The tradition of reformist and progressive Islam, however, permits marriage between Muslim women and Non-Muslim men; Islamic scholars opining this view include Khaleel Mohammed, Hassan Al-Turabi, among others. Despite Sunni Islam prohibiting Muslim women from marrying Non-Muslim men in interfaith marriages, interfaith marriages between Muslim women and Non-Muslim men take place at substantial rates, contravening the traditional Sunni understanding of ijmāʿ. The modern tradition of reformist and progressive Islam has also come to permit marriage between Muslim women and Non-Muslim men, with Islamic scholars opining this view including Khaleel Mohammed and Hassan Al-Turabi, among others. In the United States, about 10% of Muslim women are today married to Non-Muslim men.
Attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people and their experiences in the Muslim world have been influenced by its religious, legal, social, political, and cultural history. The religious stigma and sexual taboo associated with homosexuality in Islamic societies can have profound effects for those Muslims who self-identify as LGBTQ+. Today, most LGBTQ-affirming Islamic organizations and individual congregations are primarily based in the Western world and South Asian countries; they usually identify themselves with the liberal and progressive movements within Islam.
Homosexual acts are forbidden in traditional Islamic jurisprudence and are liable to different punishments, including flogging, stoning, and the death penalty, depending on the situation and legal school. However, homosexual relationships were generally tolerated in pre-modern Islamic societies, and historical records suggest that these laws were invoked infrequently, mainly in cases of rape or other "exceptionally blatant infringement on public morals". Public attitudes toward homosexuality in the Muslim world underwent a marked negative change starting from the 19th century through the global spread of Islamic fundamentalist movements such as Salafism and Wahhabism, and the influence of the sexual notions and restrictive norms prevalent in Europe at the time: a number of Muslim-majority countries have retained criminal penalties for homosexual acts enacted under European colonial rule. In recent times, extreme prejudice, discrimination, and violence against LGBT people persists, both socially and legally, in much of the Muslim world, exacerbated by increasingly socially conservative attitudes and the rise of Islamist movements in Muslim-majority countries.
Judaism
In the perspective of traditional Judaism, sex and reproduction are the holiest of acts one can do, the act through which one can imitate God, and in order to preserve its sanctity there are many boundaries and guidelines. Within the boundaries, there are virtually no outright strictures, and it is in fact obligatory. It prohibits sexual relations outside of heterosexual marriage, maintains biblical strictures on relations within marriage including observance of niddah, a prohibition on relations for a period including the menstrual period, and tzniut, requirements of modest dress and behavior. Traditional Judaism views the physical acts of adultery, incest, intentional waste of semen, the physical act of men having sex with men, and male masturbation as grave sins. Judaism permits relatively free divorce, with Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism requiring a religious divorce ceremony for a divorce to be religiously recognized. Worldwide movements in Judaism considered more liberal have rejected Jewish law as binding but rather inspirational and allegorical, so adapted perspectives more consistent with general contemporary Western culture.
Most of mainstream Judaism does not accept polyamory, although some people consider themselves Jewish and polyamorous. One prominent rabbi who does accept polyamory is Sharon Kleinbaum who was ordained in Reconstructionist Judaism which considers biblical Jewish law as not considered binding, but is treated as a valuable cultural remnant that should be upheld unless there is reason for the contrary. She is the senior rabbi at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York which works independently of any major American Jewish denomination; R Kleinbaum says that polyamory is a choice that does not preclude a Jewishly observant, socially conscious life. Some polyamorous Jews also point to biblical patriarchs having multiple wives and concubines as evidence that polyamorous relationships can be sacred in Judaism. There is an email list dedicated to polyamorous Jews, called AhavaRaba, which roughly translates to "big love" in Hebrew. (Its name echoes the Ahava rabbah prayer expressing thanks for God's "abundant love".)
Orthodox
There are several levels to the observance of physical and personal modesty (tzniut), according to Orthodox Judaism, as derived from various sources in halakha. Observance of these rules varies from aspirational to mandatory to routine across the spectrum of Orthodox stricture and observance.
Orthodox Judaism also maintains a strong prohibition on interfaith sexual relations and marriage. Orthodox Judaism, alone of all the Jewish denominations, retains relatively mild traditional disabilities on divorce, including a Biblical prohibition on a Kohen (priestly descendant of Aaron) marrying a divorcee or a woman who has engaged in certain types of sexual misconduct. An Orthodox bill of divorce is required for a divorce to be recognized.
Conservative
Conservative Judaism, consistent with its general view that halakha (Jewish law) is a binding guide to Jewish life but subject to periodic revision by the Rabbinate, has lifted a number of strictures observed by Orthodox Judaism. In particular, in December 2006, Conservative Judaism's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards adopted responsa presenting diametrically opposed views on the issue of homosexuality. It adopted an opinion restricting a prior prohibition on homosexual conduct to male-male anal sex only, which it declared to be the only Biblical prohibition, declaring all other prohibitions (e.g. male-male oral sex or lesbian sex) rabbinic, and lifting all rabbinic restrictions based on its interpretation of the Talmudic principle of Kevod HaBriyot ("human dignity"). While declining to develop a form of religious gay marriage, it permitted blessing lesbian and gay unions and ordaining openly lesbian and gay rabbis who agree not to engage in male-male anal sex. It is also a traditionalist opinion, upholding all traditional prohibitions on homosexual activity, also adopted as a majority opinion, The approach permits individual rabbis, congregations, and rabbinical schools to set their own policy on homosexual conduct. It reflects a profound change from a prior blanket prohibition on male homosexual practices. It acknowledges a sharp divergence of views on sexual matters within Conservative Judaism, such that there is no single Conservative Jewish approach to matters of sexuality. Conservative Judaism currently straddles the divide between liberal and traditional opinion on sexual matters within contemporary American society, permitting both views.
Conservative Judaism has maintained on its books a variety of requirements and prohibitions, including a requirement that married women observe the family purity laws and a general prohibition on non-marital heterosexual conduct. The family purity laws require women to be recognized as tumah or niddah during their menstrual period. As a tumah, a woman is to wait 7 days for her menstrual cycle to end and then 7 "clean days" in order to enter the mikveh and begin sexual relations. During this time, it is forbidden to have any type of contact with the niddah, thus anything she touches is not to be touched and no physical contact is permitted. On the same day as the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards released its homosexuality responsa, it released multiple opinions on the subject of niddah including a responsum lifting certain traditional restrictions on husband-wife contact during the niddah period while maintaining a prohibition on sexual relations. The permissive responsum on homosexuality used the Conservative movement's approach to niddah as an analogy for construing the Biblical prohibition against male homosexual conduct narrowly and lifting restrictions it deemed Rabbinic in nature. The responsum indicated it would be making a practical analogy between an approach in which male homosexual couples would be on their honor to refrain from certain acts and its approach to niddah:
The responsum enjoined young people not to be "promiscuous" and to prepare themselves for "traditional marriage" if possible, while not explicitly lifting or re-enforcing any express strictures on non-marital heterosexual conduct.
Even before this responsum, strictures on pre-marital sex had been substantially ignored, even in official circles. For example, when the Jewish Theological Seminary of America proposed enforcing a policy against non-marital cohabitation by rabbinical students in the 1990s, protests by cohabiting rabbinical students resulted in a complete rescission of the policy.
Conservative Judaism formally prohibits interfaith marriage and its standards currently indicate it will expel a rabbi who performs an interfaith marriage. It maintains a variety of formal strictures including a prohibition on making birth announcements in synagogue bulletins for children on non-Jewish mothers and accepting non-Jews as synagogue members. However, interfaith marriage is relatively widespread among the Conservative laity, and the Conservative movement has recently adapted a policy of being more welcoming of interfaith couples in the hopes of interesting their children in Judaism.
Conservative Judaism, which was for much of the 20th century the largest Jewish denomination in the United States declined sharply in synagogue membership in the United States the 1990s, from 51% of synagogue memberships in 1990 to 33.1% in 2001, with most of the loss going to Orthodox Judaism and most of the rest to Reform. The fracturing in American society of opinion between increasingly liberal and increasingly traditionalist viewpoints on sexual and other issues, as well as the gap between official opinion and general lay practice vis-a-vis the more traditionalist and liberal denominations, may have contributed to the decline.
Reform, Liberal, Reconstructionist, and Humanistic
Reform Judaism, Humanistic Judaism, and Reconstructionist Judaism do not observe or require traditional sexuality rules and have welcomed non-married and homosexual couples and endorsed homosexual commitment ceremonies and marriages.
Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism are more tolerant of interfaith partnerships and often explicitly welcome interfaith families at their synagogues and services. Reform and Liberal branches of Judaism do not currently perform religious (and therefore legally binding) marriage ceremonies for interfaith couples; however as of October 2020, Liberal Rabbis may bless an interfaith marriage under a chuppah at their discretion, provided the couple intend to keep a Jewish household. Humanistic Judaism permits interfaith marriage. Reform, Reconstructionist, and Humanistic Judaism also do not require a religious divorce ceremony separate from a civil divorce.
It has been speculated that the more tolerant attitudes of Reform, Reconstructionist, and Humanistic Judaism towards both sexual diversity and interfaith marriage may have contributed to the rise in their popularity during the 1990s, from about 33% of affiliated households to 38%, passing Conservative Judaism as the largest Jewish denomination in the United States.
Dharmic religions
Buddhism
The most common formulation of Buddhist ethics are the five precepts and the Noble Eightfold Path, which say that one should neither be attached to nor crave sensual pleasure. These precepts take the form of voluntary, personal undertakings, not divine mandate or instruction.
Of the five precepts, the third vow is to refrain from sex with another's spouse, someone under age (namely, those protected by their parents or guardians), and those who have taken vows of religious celibacy. In Chinese Buddhism, the third vow is interpreted as refraining from sex outside marriage.
Buddhist monks and nuns of most traditions are expected to refrain from all sexual activity and the Buddha is said to have admonished his followers to avoid unchastity "as if it were a pit of burning cinders." While laypersons may have sex within marriage, monastics are not to have any sexual conduct at all.
Hinduism
Religiously, Hindus begin life at the Brahmacharya or "student" stage, in which they are directed to chastely advance themselves educationally and spiritually to prepare themselves for a life of furthering their dharma (societal, occupational, parental, etc. duties) and karma (right earthly actions); only once they reach the Grihastya or "householder" stage can they seek kama (physical pleasure) and artha (worldly achievement, material prosperity) through marriage and their vocations, respectively.
According to the Dharmasastras or the religious legal texts of Hinduism, marriage in Hinduism is an institution for reproduction and thus is naturally limited to heterosexual couples. Furthermore, sex outside of marriage is prohibited. The Manusmriti list eight types of marriage of which four are consensual and encouraged and four are non-consensual and discouraged. However, popular practices did not necessarily reflect religious teachings.
The Kama Sutra (Discourse on Kāma) by Vatsayana, widely believed to be just a manual for sexual practices, offers an insight into the sexual mores, ethics and societal rules that were prevalent in ancient India. The erotic sculptures of Khajuraho also offer insight. Abhigyana Shakuntalam, a drama in Sanskrit by Kālidāsa, cited as one of the best examples of shringara rasa (romance, one of the nine rasas or emotions), talks of the love story of Dushyanta and Shakuntala.
Sikhism
A disciplined Sikh is expected to be in control of sexual desire at all times. Kaam, or excessive lust, is one of the five thieves, or vices, that interfere with one's spiritual journey. Normal and healthy amounts of sexuality and lust are not condemned nor considered kaam.
East Asian religions
Taoism
In Chinese mythology, Jiutian Xuannü is the goddess of war, sex, and longevity. She is closely related to Sunü (素女), who is her divine sister. Both their names combined, as xuansu zhidao (玄素之道), signify the Daoist arts of the bedchamber. Most books bearing Jiutian Xuannü's name were about warfare, but there were a few books that were specifically about sex. The Xuannü Jing (玄女經, "Mysterious Woman Classic") and the Sunü Jing (素女經, "Natural Woman Classic"), both dating to the Han dynasty, were handbooks in dialogue form about sex. Texts from the Xuannü Jing have been partly incorporated into the Sui dynasty edition of the Sunü Jing. From the Han dynasty onwards, these handbooks would be familiar to the upper class. On the other side, during the Han dynasty, Wang Chong had criticized the sexual arts as "not only harming the body but infringing upon the nature of man and woman." During the Tang dynasty and earlier periods, Jiutian Xuannü was often associated with the sexual arts. The Xuannü Jing remained a familiar work among the literati during the Tang and Sui dynasties.
The Dongxuanzi Fangzhong Shu (洞玄子房中術, "Bedchamber Arts of the Master of the Grotto Mysteries"), which was likely written by the 7th-century poet Liu Zongyuan, contains explicit descriptions of the sexual arts that was supposedly transmitted from Jiutian Xuannü. The sexual practices, that Jiutian Xuannü supposedly taught, were often compared to alchemy and physiological procedures for prolonging life. In Ge Hong's Baopu Zi, there's a passage in which Jiutian Xuannü tells Huangdi that sexual techniques are "like the intermingling of water and fire—it can kill or bring new life depending upon whether or not one uses the correct methods."
Tu'er Shen, The Leveret Spirit is a Chinese Shenist or Taoist deity who manages love and sex between men. His name is often colloquially translated as "Rabbit God". Wei-Ming Temple in the Yonghe District of New Taipei City in Taiwan is dedicated to Tu'er Shen. About 9000 pilgrims visit the temple each year to pray to find a suitable partner. The Wei-ming temple also performs love ceremony for gay couples.
Indigenous religions
African Diasporic religions
Within Candomblé, a syncretic religion primarily found in Brazil, there is widespread (though not universal) support for gay rights, many members are LGBT, and have performed gay marriages. Practitioners of Santería, primarily found in Cuba, generally (though not universally) welcome LGBT members and include them in religious or ritual activities. Also a Brazilian syncretic religion, Umbanda houses generally support LGBT rights and have performed gay marriages. Homosexuality is religiously acceptable in Haitian Vodou. The lwa or loa (spirits) Erzulie Dantor and Erzulie Freda are often associated with and viewed as protectors of queer people. The lao Ghede Nibo is sometimes depicted as an effeminate drag queen and inspires those he inhabits to lascivious sexuality of all kinds.
Ancient Mesopotamian religion
Individuals who went against the traditional gender binary were heavily involved in the cult of Inanna, an ancient Mesopotamian goddess. During Sumerian times, a set of priests known as gala worked in Inanna's temples, where they performed elegies and lamentations. Men who became gala sometimes adopted female names and their songs were composed in the Sumerian eme-sal dialect, which, in literary texts, is normally reserved for the speech of female characters. Some Sumerian proverbs seem to suggest that gala had a reputation for engaging in anal sex with men. During the Akkadian Period, kurgarrū and assinnu were servants of Ishtar who dressed in female clothing and performed war dances in Ishtar's temples. Several Akkadian proverbs seem to suggest that they may have also had homosexual proclivities. Gwendolyn Leick, an anthropologist known for her writings on Mesopotamia, has compared these individuals to the contemporary Indian hijra. In one Akkadian hymn, Ishtar is described as transforming men into women. Some modern pagans include Inanna in their worship.
Pre-colonial religions of the Americas
Among the Indigenous peoples of the Americas prior to the European colonization, many Nations had respected ceremonial, religious, and social roles for homosexual, bisexual, and gender-nonconforming individuals in their communities and in many contemporary Native American and First Nations communities, these roles still exist. Homosexual and gender-variant individuals were also common among other pre-conquest civilizations in Latin America, such as the Aztecs, Mayans, Quechuas, Moches, Zapotecs, and the Tupinambá of Brazil and were accepted in their various religions.
New religious movements
Since the beginning of the sexual liberation movement in the Western world, which coincided with second-wave feminism and the women's liberation movement initiated in the early 1960s, new religious movements and alternative spiritualities such as Modern Paganism and the New Age began to grow and spread across the globe alongside their intersection with the sexual liberation movement and the counterculture of the 1960s, and exhibited characteristic features, such as the embrace of alternative lifestyles, unconventional dress, rejection of Abrahamic religions and their conservative social mores, use of cannabis and other recreational drugs, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humble or self-imposed poverty, and laissez-faire sexual behavior. The sexual liberation movement was aided by feminist ideologues in their mutual struggle to challenge traditional ideas regarding female sexuality, male sexuality, and queer sexuality. Elimination of undue favorable bias towards men and objectification of women, as well as support for women's right to choose their sexual partners free of outside interference or societal judgment, were three of the main goals associated with sexual liberation from the feminist perspective.
Modern Paganism
Most Neopagan religions have the theme of fertility (both physical and creative/spiritual) as central to their practices, and as such encourage what they view as a healthy sex life, consensual sex between adults, regardless of gender.
Heathenry, a modern Germanic Pagan movement, includes several pro-LGBT groups. Some groups legitimize openness toward LGBT practitioners by reference to the gender-bending actions of Thor and Odin in Norse mythology. There are, for instance, homosexual and transgender members of The Troth, a prominent U.S. Heathen organisation. Many Heathen groups in Northern Europe perform same-sex marriages, and a group of self-described "Homo-Heathens" marched in the 2008 Stockholm Pride carrying a statue of the Norse god Freyr. Research found a greater proportion of LGBT practitioners within Heathenry (21%) than wider society, although noted that the percentage was lower than in other forms of modern Paganism.
Wicca, like other religions, has adherents with a broad spectrum of views, ranging from conservative to liberal. It is a largely nondogmatic religion and has no prohibitions against sexual intercourse outside of marriage or relationships between members of the same sex. The religion's ethics are largely summed up by the Wiccan Rede: "An it harm none, do as thou wilt", which is interpreted by many as allowing and endorsing responsible sexual relationships of all varieties. Specifically in the Wiccan tradition of modern witchcraft, one of the widely accepted pieces of Craft liturgy, the Charge of the Goddess instructs that "...all acts of love and pleasure are [the Goddess'] rituals", giving validity to all forms of sexual activity for Wiccan practitioners.
In the Gardnerian and Alexandrian forms of Wicca, the "Great Rite" is a sex ritual much like the hieros gamos, performed by a priest and priestess who are believed to embody the Wiccan God and Goddess. The Great Rite is almost always performed figuratively using the athame and chalice as symbols of the penis and vagina. The literal form of the ritual is always performed by consenting adults, by a couple who are already lovers and in private. The Great Rite is not seen as an opportunity for casual sex.
Raëlism
Raëlism, an international new religious movement and UFO religion which was founded in France in 1974, promotes a positive outlook towards human sexuality, including homosexuality. Its founder Raël recognised same-sex marriage, and a Raëlian press release stated that sexual orientation is genetic and it also likened discrimination against gay people to racism. Some Raëlian leaders have performed licensed same-sex marriages.
Santa Muerte
The cult of Santa Muerte is a new religious movement centered on the worship of Santa Muerte, a cult image, female deity, and folk saint which is popularly revered in Mexican Neopaganism and folk Catholicism. A personification of death, she is associated with healing, protection, and safe delivery to the afterlife by her devotees. Santa Muerte is also revered and seen as a saint and protector of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) communities in Mexico, since LGBTQ+ people are considered and treated as outcasts by the Catholic Church, evangelical churches, and Mexican society at large. Many LGBTQ+ people ask her for protection from violence, hatred, disease, and to help them in their search for love. Her intercession is commonly invoked in same-sex marriage ceremonies performed in Mexico. The Iglesia Católica Tradicional México-Estados Unidos, also known as the Church of Santa Muerte, recognizes gay marriage and performs religious wedding ceremonies for homosexual couples. According to R. Andrew Chesnut, PhD in Latin American history and professor of Religious studies, the cult of Santa Muerte is the single fastest-growing new religious movement in the Americas.
Satanism
LaVeyan Satanism is critical of Abrahamic sexual mores, considering them narrow, restrictive and hypocritical. Sex is viewed as an indulgence, but one that should only be freely entered into with consent. The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth only give two instructions regarding sex, namely "Do not make sexual advances unless you are given the mating signal" and "Do not harm little children", although the latter is much broader and encompasses physical and other abuse. This has always been consistent part of Church of Satan policy since its inception in 1966 as Peter H. Gilmore wrote in an essay supporting same sex marriage:
Satanists are pluralists, accepting gays, lesbians, bisexuals, BDSM, polyamorists, transgender people, and asexuals. In that essay, he also stated:
Allegations have been made by antifascist organisations, several British politicians and the media that the Order of Nine Angles condones and encourages sexual abuse, and this has been given as one of the reasons why the O9A should be proscribed by the British government. Many O9A members openly view rape as an effective way to undermine society by transgressing against its norms. White Star Acception commits rapes by their own admission and O9A texts such as "The Dreccian Way", "Iron Gates", "Bluebird" and "The Rape Anthology" recommend and praise rape and pedophilia, even suggesting rape is necessary for "ascension of the Ubermensch". To advance in rank, ONA member must perform assaults, lynching and sexual assault being the most recommended. Material promoting pedophilia has also appeared in ONA's in house magazine Fenrir. According to BBC News, "the authorities are concerned by the number of paedophiles associated with the ONA".
Western esotericism and occultism
Sex magic is a term for various types of sexual activity used in magical, ritualistic, or otherwise religious and spiritual pursuits found within Western esotericism which is a broad spectrum of spiritual traditions found in Western society, or refers to the collection of the mystical, esoteric knowledge of the Western world. One practice of sex magic is using the energy of sexual arousal or orgasm with visualization of a desired result. A premise of sex magic is the concept that sexual energy is a potent force that can be harnessed to transcend one's normally perceived reality. The earliest known practical teachings of sex magic in the Western world come from 19th-century American occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph, under the heading of The Mysteries of Eulis. In the latter part of the 19th century, sexual reformer Ida Craddock published several works dealing with sacred sexuality, most notably Heavenly Bridegrooms and Psychic Wedlock. Aleister Crowley reviewed Heavenly Bridegrooms in the pages of his journal The Equinox, stating:
It was one of the most remarkable human documents ever produced, and it should certainly find a regular publisher in book form. The authoress of the MS. claims that she was the wife of an angel. She expounds at the greatest length the philosophy connected with this thesis. Her learning is enormous. [...]
This book is of incalculable value to every student of occult matters. No Magick library is complete without it.
Aleister Crowley became involved with Theodor Reuss and Ordo Templi Orientis following the publication of The Book of Lies between 1912 and 1913. According to Crowley's account, Reuss approached him and accused him of having revealed the innermost (sexual) secret of O.T.O. in one of the cryptic chapters of this book. When it became clear to Reuss that Crowley had done so unintentionally, he initiated Crowley into the IX° (ninth degree) of O.T.O. and appointed him "Sovereign Grand Master General of Ireland, Iona and all the Britains."
While the O.T.O. included, from its inception, the teaching of sex magick in the highest degrees of the Order, when Crowley became head of the Order, he expanded on these teachings and associated them with different degrees as follows:
VIII°: masturbatory or auto-sexual magical techniques were taught, referred as the Lesser Work of Sol
IX°: heterosexual magical techniques were taught
XI°: anal intercourse magical techniques were taught.
Hugh Urban, professor of comparative religion at Ohio State University, noted Crowley's emphasis on sex as "the supreme magical power".<ref name="urban">Urban, Hugh. Unleashing the Beast: Aleister Crowley, tantra and sex magic in late Victorian England . Ohio State University</ref> According to Crowley:
Zoroastrianism
See also
Christianity and homosexuality
Christianity and sexual orientation
Christian views on birth control
Erotic plasticity
Forbidden relationships in Judaism
Homosexuality and Judaism
Incest#Religious views
Jewish views on marriage
LGBT-affirming denominations in Judaism
Martinus
Nazar ila'l-murd
Pederasty in ancient Greece
Polyamory#Acceptance by religions
Religious censorship
Religious trauma syndrome
Sexual abstinence
Side A, Side B, Side X, Side Y (theological views)
Sodomy law
Song of Songs
Unification Church and sex
Virgin goddess
References
Citations
Sources
Further reading
General on sex and religion.
Eisler, Riane, Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body: New Paths to Power and Love, HarperOne 1996.
Endsjø, Dag Øistein, Sex and Religion: Teachings and Taboos in the History of World Faiths, Reaktion Books 2011. Also published in Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Italian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Swedish, and Ukrainian.
Helminiak, Daniel A., Sex and the Sacred - Gay Identity and Spiritual Growth, Routledge 2006.
Kolodny, Debra (editor), Blessed Bi Spirit: Bisexual People of Faith, Continuum, 2000. ,
Buddhism
Faure, Bernard, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality. .
Sudo, Philip T., Zen Sex: The Way of Making Love. .
Christianity
Boswell, John, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, University Of Chicago Press, 1st ed. 1980 , paperback 2005
De La Torre, Miguel A., A Lily Among the Thorns: Imagining a New Christian Sexualitym .
Kern, Jan, Seduced By Sex: Saved By Love. .
Köstenberger, Andreas J., God, Marriage, and Family: Rebuilding the Biblical Foundation. .
Kuefler, Mathew (editor), The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, University Of Chicago Press, Nov. 2005
Pagels, Elaine, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity, Vintage 1988.
Hinduism
Smith, David, The Hindu Erotic: Exploring Hinduism and Sexuality, I.B. Tauris 2015.
Vanita, Ruth and Saleem Kidwai, Same-Sex Love In India: Readings from Literature and History, Palgrave, 2001.
Islam
El Feki, Shereen, Sex and the Citadel - Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World, Vintage 2014.
Kugle, Scott Siraj al-Haqq, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims, SD Books 2010.
Judaism
Alpert, Rebecca, Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition, Columbia University Press, 1998. ,
Boteach, Shmuley, Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy. .
Gold, Michael Does God Belong in the Bedroom? .
Critical perspectives
Savramis, Demosthenes, The Satanizing of Woman: Religion Versus Sexuality. .
Other
Kebacqz, Karen, and Ronald G. Barton, Sex in the Parish, First ed., Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991.
Tolle, Eckhart, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment'', New World Library, 1st ed. 1999, paperback 2004
Kosman, Admiel, Homosexuality - Between Early Judaism and Early Christianity (Lecture at Winchester University, UK) Prof. Admiel Kosman 20 March 2014
LGBTQ and religion | 0.794974 | 0.993891 | 0.790118 |
Relativism | Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. There are many different forms of relativism, with a great deal of variation in scope and differing degrees of controversy among them. Moral relativism encompasses the differences in moral judgments among people and cultures. Epistemic relativism holds that there are no absolute principles regarding normative belief, justification, or rationality, and that there are only relative ones. Alethic relativism (also factual relativism) is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture (cultural relativism). Some forms of relativism also bear a resemblance to philosophical skepticism. Descriptive relativism seeks to describe the differences among cultures and people without evaluation, while normative relativism evaluates the word truthfulness of views within a given framework.
Forms of relativism
Anthropological versus philosophical relativism
Anthropological relativism refers to a methodological stance, in which the researcher suspends (or brackets) their own cultural prejudice while trying to understand beliefs or behaviors in their contexts. This has become known as methodological relativism, and concerns itself specifically with avoiding ethnocentrism or the application of one's own cultural standards to the assessment of other cultures. This is also the basis of the so-called "emic" and "etic" distinction, in which:
An emic or insider account of behavior is a description of a society in terms that are meaningful to the participant or actor's own culture; an emic account is therefore culture-specific, and typically refers to what is considered "common sense" within the culture under observation.
An etic or outsider account is a description of a society by an observer, in terms that can be applied to other cultures; that is, an etic account is culturally neutral, and typically refers to the conceptual framework of the social scientist. (This is complicated when it is scientific research itself that is under study, or when there is theoretical or terminological disagreement within the social sciences.)
Philosophical relativism, in contrast, asserts that the truth of a proposition depends on the metaphysical, or theoretical frame, or the instrumental method, or the context in which the proposition is expressed, or on the person, groups, or culture who interpret the proposition.
Methodological relativism and philosophical relativism can exist independently from one another, but most anthropologists base their methodological relativism on that of the philosophical variety.
Descriptive versus normative relativism
The concept of relativism also has importance both for philosophers and for anthropologists in another way. In general, anthropologists engage in descriptive relativism ("how things are" or "how things seem"), whereas philosophers engage in normative relativism ("how things ought to be"), although there is some overlap (for example, descriptive relativism can pertain to concepts, normative relativism to truth).
Descriptive relativism assumes that certain cultural groups have different modes of thought, standards of reasoning, and so forth, and it is the anthropologist's task to describe, but not to evaluate the validity of these principles and practices of a cultural group. It is possible for an anthropologist in his or her fieldwork to be a descriptive relativist about some things that typically concern the philosopher (e.g., ethical principles) but not about others (e.g., logical principles). However, the descriptive relativist's empirical claims about epistemic principles, moral ideals and the like are often countered by anthropological arguments that such things are universal, and much of the recent literature on these matters is explicitly concerned with the extent of, and evidence for, cultural or moral or linguistic or human universals.
The fact that the various species of descriptive relativism are empirical claims may tempt the philosopher to conclude that they are of little philosophical interest, but there are several reasons why this is not so. First, some philosophers, notably Kant, argue that certain sorts of cognitive differences between human beings (or even all rational beings) are impossible, so such differences could never be found to obtain in fact, an argument that places a priori limits on what empirical inquiry could discover and on what versions of descriptive relativism could be true. Second, claims about actual differences between groups play a central role in some arguments for normative relativism (for example, arguments for normative ethical relativism often begin with claims that different groups in fact have different moral codes or ideals). Finally, the anthropologist's descriptive account of relativism helps to separate the fixed aspects of human nature from those that can vary, and so a descriptive claim that some important aspect of experience or thought does (or does not) vary across groups of human beings tells us something important about human nature and the human condition.
Normative relativism concerns normative or evaluative claims that modes of thought, standards of reasoning, or the like are only right or wrong relative to a framework. 'Normative' is meant in a general sense, applying to a wide range of views; in the case of beliefs, for example, normative correctness equals truth. This does not mean, of course, that framework-relative correctness or truth is always clear, the first challenge being to explain what it amounts to in any given case (e.g., with respect to concepts, truth, epistemic norms). Normative relativism (say, in regard to normative ethical relativism) therefore implies that things (say, ethical claims) are not simply true in themselves, but only have truth values relative to broader frameworks (say, moral codes). (Many normative ethical relativist arguments run from premises about ethics to conclusions that assert the relativity of truth values, bypassing general claims about the nature of truth, but it is often more illuminating to consider the type of relativism under question directly.)
Legal relativism
In English common law, two (perhaps three) separate standards of proof are recognized:
proof based on the balance of probabilities is the lesser standard used in civil litigation, which cases mostly concern money or some other penalty, that, if further and better evidence should emerge, is reasonably reversible.
proof beyond reasonable doubt is used in criminal law cases where an accused's right to personal freedom or survival is in question, because such punishment is not reasonably reversible.
Absolute truth is so complex as to be only capable of being fully understood by the omniscient established during the Tudor period as the one true God
Related and contrasting positions
Relationism is the theory that there are only relations between individual entities, and no intrinsic
properties. Despite the similarity in name, it is held by some to be a position distinct from relativism—for instance, because "statements about relational properties [...] assert an absolute truth about things in the world".
On the other hand, others wish to equate relativism, relationism and even relativity, which is a precise theory of relationships between physical objects: Nevertheless, "This confluence of relativity theory with relativism became a strong contributing factor in the increasing prominence of relativism".
Whereas previous investigations of science only sought sociological or psychological explanations of failed scientific theories or pathological science, the 'strong programme' is more relativistic, assessing scientific truth and falsehood equally in a historic and cultural context.
Criticisms
A common argument against relativism suggests that it inherently refutes itself: the statement "all is relative" classes either as a relative statement or as an absolute one. If it is relative, then this statement does not rule out absolutes. If the statement is absolute, on the other hand, then it provides an example of an absolute statement, proving that not all truths are relative. However, this argument against relativism only applies to relativism that positions truth as relative–i.e. epistemological/truth-value relativism. More specifically, it is only extreme forms of epistemological relativism that can come in for this criticism as there are many epistemological relativists who posit that some aspects of what is regarded as factually "true" are not universal, yet still accept that other universal truths exist (e.g. gas laws or moral laws).
Another argument against relativism posits a Natural Law. Simply put, the physical universe works under basic principles: the "Laws of Nature". Some contend that a natural Moral Law may also exist, for example as argued by, Immanuel Kant in Critique of Practical Reason, Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006) and addressed by C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity (1952). Dawkins said "I think we face an equal but much more sinister challenge from the left, in the shape of cultural relativism - the view that scientific truth is only one kind of truth and it is not to be especially privileged".
Philosopher Hilary Putnam, among others, states that some forms of relativism make it impossible to believe one is in error. If there is no truth beyond an individual's belief that something is true, then an individual cannot hold their own beliefs to be false or mistaken. A related criticism is that relativizing truth to individuals destroys the distinction between truth and belief.
Views
Philosophical
Ancient
Sophism
Sophists are considered the founding fathers of relativism in Western philosophy. Elements of relativism emerged among the Sophists in the 5th century BC. Notably, it was Protagoras who coined the phrase, "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not." The thinking of the Sophists is mainly known through their opponent, Plato. In a paraphrase from Plato's dialogue Theaetetus, Protagoras said: "What is true for you is true for you, and what is true for me is true for me."
Modern
Bernard Crick
Bernard Crick, a British political scientist and advocate of relativism, suggested in In Defence of Politics (1962) that moral conflict between people is inevitable. He thought that only ethics can resolve such conflict, and when that occurs in public it results in politics. Accordingly, Crick saw the process of dispute resolution, harms reduction, mediation or peacemaking as central to all of moral philosophy. He became an important influence on feminists and later on the Greens.
Paul Feyerabend
Philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend is often considered to be a relativist, although he denied being one.
Feyerabend argued that modern science suffers from being methodologically monistic (the belief that only a single methodology can produce scientific progress). Feyerabend summarises his case in Against Method with the phrase "anything goes".
In an aphorism [Feyerabend] often repeated, "potentially every culture is all cultures". This is intended to convey that world views are not hermetically closed, since their leading concepts have an "ambiguity" - better, an open-endedness - which enables people from other cultures to engage with them. [...] It follows that relativism, understood as the doctrine that truth is relative to closed systems, can get no purchase. [...] For Feyerabend, both hermetic relativism and its absolutist rival [realism] serve, in their different ways, to "devalue human existence". The former encourages that unsavoury brand of political correctness which takes the refusal to criticise "other cultures" to the extreme of condoning murderous dictatorship and barbaric practices. The latter, especially in its favoured contemporary form of "scientific realism", with the excessive prestige it affords to the abstractions of "the monster 'science'", is in bed with a politics which likewise disdains variety, richness and everyday individuality - a politics which likewise "hides" its norms behind allegedly neutral facts, "blunts choices and imposes laws".
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science, as expressed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is often interpreted as relativistic. He claimed that, as well as progressing steadily and incrementally ("normal science"), science undergoes periodic revolutions or "paradigm shifts", leaving scientists working in different paradigms with difficulty in even communicating. Thus the truth of a claim, or the existence of a posited entity, is relative to the paradigm employed. However, it is not necessary for him to embrace relativism because every paradigm presupposes the prior, building upon itself through history and so on. This leads to there being a fundamental, incremental, and referential structure of development which is not relative but again, fundamental.
From these remarks, one thing is however certain: Kuhn is not saying that incommensurable theories cannot be compared - what they can't be is compared in terms of a system of common measure. He very plainly says that they can be compared, and he reiterates this repeatedly in later work, in a (mostly in vain) effort to avert the crude and sometimes catastrophic misinterpretations he suffered from mainstream philosophers and post-modern relativists alike.
But Kuhn rejected the accusation of being a relativist later in his postscript:
scientific development is ... a unidirectional and irreversible process. Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles ... That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.
Some have argued that one can also read Kuhn's work as essentially positivist in its ontology: the revolutions he posits are epistemological, lurching toward a presumably 'better' understanding of an objective reality through the lens presented by the new paradigm. However, a number of passages in Structure do indeed appear to be distinctly relativist, and to directly challenge the notion of an objective reality and the ability of science to progress towards an ever-greater grasp of it, particularly through the process of paradigm change.
In the sciences there need not be progress of another sort. We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.
We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there be any such goal? Can we not account for both science's existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community's state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson define relativism in Metaphors We Live By as the rejection of both subjectivism and metaphysical objectivism in order to focus on the relationship between them, i.e. the metaphor by which we relate our current experience to our previous experience. In particular, Lakoff and Johnson characterize "objectivism" as a "straw man", and, to a lesser degree, criticize the views of Karl Popper, Kant and Aristotle.
Robert Nozick
In his book Invariances, Robert Nozick expresses a complex set of theories about the absolute and the relative. He thinks the absolute/relative distinction should be recast in terms of an invariant/variant distinction, where there are many things a proposition can be invariant with regard to or vary with. He thinks it is coherent for truth to be relative, and speculates that it might vary with time. He thinks necessity is an unobtainable notion, but can be approximated by robust invariance across a variety of conditions—although we can never identify a proposition that is invariant with regard to everything. Finally, he is not particularly warm to one of the most famous forms of relativism, moral relativism, preferring an evolutionary account.
Joseph Margolis
Joseph Margolis advocates a view he calls "robust relativism" and defends it in his books Historied Thought, Constructed World, Chapter 4 (California, 1995) and The Truth about Relativism (Blackwell, 1991). He opens his account by stating that our logics should depend on what we take to be the nature of the sphere to which we wish to apply our logics. Holding that there can be no distinctions which are not "privileged" between the alethic, the ontic, and the epistemic, he maintains that a many-valued logic just might be the most apt for aesthetics or history since, because in these practices, we are loath to hold to simple binary logic; and he also holds that many-valued logic is relativistic. (This is perhaps an unusual definition of "relativistic". Compare with his comments on "relationism".) To say that "True" and "False" are mutually exclusive and exhaustive judgements on Hamlet, for instance, really does seem absurd. A many-valued logicwith its values "apt", "reasonable", "likely", and so onseems intuitively more applicable to interpreting Hamlet. Where apparent contradictions arise between such interpretations, we might call the interpretations "incongruent", rather than dubbing either of them "false", because using many-valued logic implies that a measured value is a mixture of two extreme possibilities. Using the subset of many-valued logic, fuzzy logic, it can be said that various interpretations can be represented by membership in more than one possible truth set simultaneously. Fuzzy logic is therefore probably the best mathematical structure for understanding "robust relativism" and has been interpreted by Bart Kosko as philosophically being related to Zen Buddhism.
It was Aristotle who held that relativism implies that we should, sticking with appearances only, end up contradicting ourselves somewhere if we could apply all attributes to all ousiai (beings). Aristotle, however, made non-contradiction dependent upon his essentialism. If his essentialism is false, then so too is his ground for disallowing relativism. (Subsequent philosophers have found other reasons for supporting the principle of non-contradiction.)
Beginning with Protagoras and invoking Charles Sanders Peirce, Margolis shows that the historic struggle to discredit relativism is an attempt to impose an unexamined belief in the world's essentially rigid rule-like nature. Plato and Aristotle merely attacked "relationalism"the doctrine of true for l or true for k, and the like, where l and k are different speakers or different worldsor something similar (most philosophers would call this position "relativism"). For Margolis, "true" means true; that is, the alethic use of "true" remains untouched. However, in real world contexts, and context is ubiquitous in the real world, we must apply truth values. Here, in epistemic terms, we might tout court retire "true" as an evaluation and keep "false". The rest of our value-judgements could be graded from "extremely plausible" down to "false". Judgements which on a bivalent logic would be incompatible or contradictory are further seen as "incongruent", although one may well have more weight than the other. In short, relativistic logic is not, or need not be, the bugbear it is often presented to be. It may simply be the best type of logic to apply to certain very uncertain spheres of real experiences in the world (although some sort of logic needs to be applied in order to make that judgement). Those who swear by bivalent logic might simply be the ultimate keepers of the great fear of the flux.
Richard Rorty
Philosopher Richard Rorty has a somewhat paradoxical role in the debate over relativism: he is criticized for his relativistic views by many commentators, but has always denied that relativism applies to much anybody, being nothing more than a Platonic scarecrow. Rorty claims, rather, that he is a pragmatist, and that to construe pragmatism as relativism is to beg the question.
'"Relativism" is the traditional epithet applied to pragmatism by realists'
'"Relativism" is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called 'relativists' are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought.'
'In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try.'
Rorty takes a deflationary attitude to truth, believing there is nothing of interest to be said about truth in general, including the contention that it is generally subjective. He also argues that the notion of warrant or justification can do most of the work traditionally assigned to the concept of truth, and that justification is relative; justification is justification to an audience, for Rorty.
In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he argues that the debate between so-called relativists and so-called objectivists is beside the point because they do not have enough premises in common for either side to prove anything to the other.
Nalin de Silva
In his book Mage Lokaya (My World), 1986, Nalin de Silva criticized the basis of the established western system of knowledge, and its propagation, which he refers as "domination throughout the world".He explained in this book that mind independent reality is impossible and knowledge is not found but constructed. Further he has introduced and developed the concept of "Constructive Relativism" as the basis on which knowledge is constructed relative to the sense organs, culture and the mind completely based on Avidya.
Colin Murray Turbayne
In his final book Metaphors for the Mind: The Creative Mind and Its Origins (1991), Colin Murray Turbayne joins the debate about relativism and realism by providing an analysis of the manner in which Platonic metaphors which were first presented in the procreation model of the Timaeus dialogue have evolved over time to influence the philosophical works of both George Berkeley and Emmanuel Kant. In addition, he illustrates the manner in which these ancient Greek metaphors have subsequently evolved to impact the development of the theories of "substance" and "attribute", which in turn have dominated the development of human thought and language in the 20th century.
In his The Myth of Metaphor (1962) Turbayne argues that it is perfectly possible to transcend the limitations which are inherent in such metaphors, including those incorporated within the framework of classical "objective" mechanistic Newtonian cosmology and scientific materialism in general. In Turbayne's view, one can strive to embrace a more satisfactory epistemology by first acknowledging the limitations imposed by such metaphorical systems. This can readily be accomplished by restoring Plato's metaphorical model to its original state in which both "male" and "female" aspects of the mind work in concert within the context of a harmonious balance during the process of creation.
Postmodernism
The term "relativism" often comes up in debates over postmodernism, poststructuralism and phenomenology. Critics of these perspectives often identify advocates with the label "relativism". For example, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is often considered a relativist view because it posits that linguistic categories and structures shape the way people view the world. Stanley Fish has defended postmodernism and relativism.
These perspectives do not strictly count as relativist in the philosophical sense, because they express agnosticism on the nature of reality and make epistemological rather than ontological claims. Nevertheless, the term is useful to differentiate them from realists who believe that the purpose of philosophy, science, or literary critique is to locate externally true meanings. Important philosophers and theorists such as Michel Foucault, Max Stirner, political movements such as post-anarchism or post-Marxism can also be considered as relativist in this sense - though a better term might be social constructivist.
The spread and popularity of this kind of "soft" relativism varies between academic disciplines. It has wide support in anthropology and has a majority following in cultural studies. It also has advocates in political theory and political science, sociology, and continental philosophy (as distinct from Anglo-American analytical philosophy). It has inspired empirical studies of the social construction of meaning such as those associated with labelling theory, which defenders can point to as evidence of the validity of their theories (albeit risking accusations of performative contradiction in the process). Advocates of this kind of relativism often also claim that recent developments in the natural sciences, such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, chaos theory and complexity theory show that science is now becoming relativistic. However, many scientists who use these methods continue to identify as realist or post-positivist, and some sharply criticize the association.
Religious
Buddhism
Madhyamaka Buddhism, which forms the basis for many Mahayana Buddhist schools and which was founded by Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna taught the idea of relativity. In the Ratnāvalī, he gives the example that shortness exists only in relation to the idea of length. The determination of a thing or object is only possible in relation to other things or objects, especially by way of contrast. He held that the relationship between the ideas of "short" and "long" is not due to intrinsic nature (svabhāva). This idea is also found in the Pali Nikāyas and Chinese Āgamas, in which the idea of relativity is expressed similarly: "That which is the element of light ... is seen to exist on account of [in relation to] darkness; that which is the element of good is seen to exist on account of bad; that which is the element of space is seen to exist on account of form."
Madhyamaka Buddhism discerns two levels of truth: relative and ultimate. The two truths doctrine states that there are Relative or conventional, common-sense truth, which describes our daily experience of a concrete world, and Ultimate truth, which describes the ultimate reality as sunyata, empty of concrete and inherent characteristics. Conventional truth may be understood, in contrast, as "obscurative truth" or "that which obscures the true nature". It is constituted by the appearances of mistaken awareness. Conventional truth would be the appearance that includes a duality of apprehender and apprehended, and objects perceived within that. Ultimate truth is the phenomenal world free from the duality of apprehender and apprehended.
Catholicism
The Catholic Church, especially under John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, has identified relativism as one of the most significant problems for faith and morals today.
According to the Church and to some theologians, relativism, as a denial of absolute truth, leads to moral license and a denial of the possibility of sin and of God. Whether moral or epistemological, relativism constitutes a denial of the capacity of the human mind and reason to arrive at truth. Truth, according to Catholic theologians and philosophers (following Aristotle) consists of adequatio rei et intellectus, the correspondence of the mind and reality. Another way of putting it states that the mind has the same form as reality. This means when the form of the computer in front of someone (the type, color, shape, capacity, etc.) is also the form that is in their mind, then what they know is true because their mind corresponds to objective reality.
The denial of an absolute reference, of an axis mundi, denies God, who equates to Absolute Truth, according to these Christian theologians. They link relativism to secularism, an obstruction of religion in human life.
Leo XIII
Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) was the first known Pope to use the word "relativism", in his encyclical Humanum genus (1884). Leo condemned Freemasonry and claimed that its philosophical and political system was largely based on relativism.
John Paul II
John Paul II wrote in Veritatis Splendor
As is immediately evident, the crisis of truth is not unconnected with this development. Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its primordial reality as an act of a person's intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus to express a judgment about the right conduct to be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a tendency to grant to the individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly. Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others. Taken to its extreme consequences, this individualism leads to a denial of the very idea of human nature.
In Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), he says:
Freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth. When freedom, out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth, which is the foundation of personal and social life, then the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim.
Benedict XVI
In April 2005, in his homily during Mass prior to the conclave which would elect him as Pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger talked about the world "moving towards a dictatorship of relativism":
How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Ephesians 4, 14). Having a clear Faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and "swept along by every wind of teaching", looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires. However, we have a different goal: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. Being an "Adult" means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today's fashions or the latest novelties. A faith which is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ is adult and mature. It is this friendship which opens us up to all that is good and gives us the knowledge to judge true from false, and deceit from truth.
On June 6, 2005, Pope Benedict XVI told educators:
Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own 'ego'.
Then during the World Youth Day in August 2005, he also traced to relativism the problems produced by the communist and sexual revolutions, and provided a counter-counter argument.
In the last century we experienced revolutions with a common programme–expecting nothing more from God, they assumed total responsibility for the cause of the world in order to change it. And this, as we saw, meant that a human and partial point of view was always taken as an absolute guiding principle. Absolutizing what is not absolute but relative is called totalitarianism. It does not liberate man, but takes away his dignity and enslaves him. It is not ideologies that save the world, but only a return to the living God, our Creator, the Guarantor of our freedom, the Guarantor of what is really good and true.
Pope Francis
Pope Francis refers in Evangelii gaudium to two forms of relativism, "doctrinal relativism" and a "practical relativism" typical of "our age". The latter is allied to "widespread indifference" to systems of belief.
Jainism
Mahavira (599-527 BC), the 24th Tirthankara of Jainism, developed a philosophy known as Anekantavada. John Koller describes anekāntavāda as "epistemological respect for view of others" about the nature of existence, whether it is "inherently enduring or constantly changing", but "not relativism; it does not mean conceding that all arguments and all views are equal".
Sikhism
In Sikhism the Gurus (spiritual teachers) have propagated the message of "many paths" leading to the one God and ultimate salvation for all souls who tread on the path of righteousness. They have supported the view that proponents of all faiths can, by doing good and virtuous deeds and by remembering the Lord, certainly achieve salvation. The students of the Sikh faith are told to accept all leading faiths as possible vehicles for attaining spiritual enlightenment provided the faithful study, ponder and practice the teachings of their prophets and leaders. The holy book of the Sikhs called the Sri Guru Granth Sahib says: "Do not say that the Vedas, the Bible and the Koran are false. Those who do not contemplate them are false." Guru Granth Sahib page 1350; later stating: "The seconds, minutes, and hours, days, weeks and months, and the various seasons originate from the one Sun; O nanak, in just the same way, the many forms originate from the Creator." Guru Granth Sahib page 12,13.
See also
References
Bibliography
Maria Baghramian, Relativism, London: Routledge, 2004,
Gad Barzilai, Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003,
Andrew Lionel Blais, On the Plurality of Actual Worlds, University of Massachusetts Press, 1997,
Benjamin Brown, Thoughts and Ways of Thinking: Source Theory and Its Applications. London: Ubiquity Press, 2017. .
Ernest Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985,
Rom Harré and Michael Krausz, Varieties of Relativism, Oxford, UK; New York, NY: Blackwell, 1996,
Knight, Robert H. The Age of Consent: the Rise of Relativism and the Corruption of Popular Culture. Dallas, Tex.: Spence Publishing Co., 1998. xxiv, 253, [1] p.
Michael Krausz, ed., Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010,
Martin Hollis, Steven Lukes, Rationality and Relativism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982,
Joseph Margolis, Michael Krausz, R. M. Burian, Eds., Rationality, Relativism, and the Human Sciences, Dordrecht: Boston, M. Nijhoff, 1986,
Jack W. Meiland, Michael Krausz, Eds. Relativism, Cognitive and Moral, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982,
Markus Seidel, Epistemic Relativism: A Constructive Critique, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014,
External links
Westacott, E. Relativism, 2005, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Westacott, E. Cognitive Relativism, 2006, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Professor Ronald Jones on relativism
What 'Being Relative' Means, a passage from Pierre Lecomte du Nouy's "Human Destiny" (1947)
BBC Radio 4 series "In Our Time", on Relativism - the battle against transcendent knowledge, 19 January 2006
Against Relativism, by Christopher Noriss
The Catholic Encyclopedia
Harvey Siegel reviews Paul Boghossian's Fear of Knowledge
Epistemological schools and traditions | 0.793387 | 0.995858 | 0.7901 |
Secular ethics | Secular ethics is a branch of moral philosophy in which ethics is based solely on human faculties such as logic, empathy, reason or moral intuition, and not derived from belief in supernatural revelation or guidance—a source of ethics in many religions. Secular ethics refers to any ethical system that does not draw on the supernatural, and includes humanism, secularism and freethinking. A classical example of literature on secular ethics is the Kural text, authored by the ancient Indian philosopher Valluvar.
Secular ethical systems comprise a wide variety of ideas to include the normativity of social contracts, some form of attribution of intrinsic moral value, intuition-based deontology, cultural moral relativism, and the idea that scientific reasoning can reveal objective moral truth (known as science of morality).
Secular ethics frameworks are not always mutually exclusive from theological values. For example, the Golden Rule or a commitment to non-violence, could be supported by both religious and secular frameworks. Secular ethics systems can vary within the societal and cultural norms of a specific time period, and may also be used by a person of any religious persuasion, including atheists.
Tenets of secular ethics
Despite the width and diversity of their philosophical views, secular ethicists generally share one or more principles:
Human beings, through their ability to empathize, are capable of determining ethical grounds.
The well-being of others is central to ethical decision-making.
Human beings, through logic and reason, are capable of deriving normative principles of behavior.
This may lead to a behavior preferable to that propagated or condoned based on religious texts. Alternatively, this may lead to the advocacy of a system of moral principles that a broad group of people, both religious and non-religious, can agree upon.
Human beings have the moral responsibility to ensure that societies and individuals act based on these ethical principles.
Societies should, if at all possible, advance from a less ethical and just form to a more ethical and just form.
Many of these tenets are applied in the science of morality, the use of the scientific method to answer moral questions. Various thinkers have framed morality as questions of empirical truth to be explored in a scientific context. The science is related to ethical naturalism, a type of ethical realism.
In How Good People Make Tough Choices: Resolving the Dilemmas of Ethical Living, Rushworth Kidder identifies four general characteristics of an ethical code:
1. It is brief
2. It is usually not explanatory
3. Can be expressed in a number of forms (e.g. positive or negative, single words or a list of sentences)
4. Centers on moral values
Humanist ethics
Humanists endorse universal morality based on the commonality of human nature, and that knowledge of right and wrong is based on our best understanding of our individual and joint interests, rather than stemming from a transcendental or arbitrarily local source, therefore rejecting faith completely as a basis for action. The humanist ethics goal is a search for viable individual, social and political principles of conduct, judging them on their ability to enhance human well-being and individual responsibility, thus ultimately eliminating human suffering.
The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) is the world-wide umbrella organization for those adhering to the Humanist life stance.
Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.
Humanism is known to adopt principles of the Golden Rule.
Secular ethics and religion
There are those who state that religion is not necessary for moral behavior at all. The Dalai Lama has said that compassion and affection are human values independent of religion: "We need these human values. I call these secular ethics, secular beliefs. There’s no relationship with any particular religion. Even without religion, even as nonbelievers, we have the capacity to promote these things."
Those who are unhappy with the negative orientation of traditional religious ethics believe that prohibitions can only set the absolute limits of what a society is willing to tolerate from people at their worst, not guide them towards achieving their best. In other words, someone who follows all these prohibitions has just barely avoided being a criminal, not acted as a positive influence on the world. They conclude that rational ethics can lead to a fully expressed ethical life, while religious prohibitions are insufficient.
That does not mean secular ethics and religion are mutually exclusive. In fact, many principles, such as the Golden Rule, are present in both systems, and some religious people, as well as some Deists, prefer to adopt a rational approach to ethics.
Examples of secular ethical codes
Humanist Manifestos
The Humanist Manifestos are three manifestos, the first published in 1933, that outline the philosophical views and stances of humanists. Integral to the manifestos is a lack of supernatural guidance.
Alternatives to the Ten Commandments
There are numerous versions of Alternatives to the Ten Commandments
Girl Scout law
The Girl Scout law is as follows:
I will do my best to be
honest and fair,
friendly and helpful,
considerate and caring,
courageous and strong, and
responsible for what I say and do,
and to
respect myself and others,
respect authority,
use resources wisely,
make the world a better place, and
be a sister to every Girl Scout.
United States Naval Academy honor concept
"Midshipmen are persons of integrity: They stand for that which is right.
They tell the truth and ensure that the full truth is known. They do not lie.
They embrace fairness in all actions. They ensure that work submitted as their own is their own, and that assistance received from any source is authorized and properly documented. They do not cheat.
They respect the property of others and ensure that others are able to benefit from the use of their own property. They do not steal."
Minnesota Principles
The Minnesota Principles were proposed "by the Minnesota Center for Corporate Responsibility in 1992 as a guide to international business activities":
Business activities must be characterized by fairness. We understand fairness to include equitable treatment and equality of opportunity for all participants in the marketplace.
Business activities must be characterized by honesty. We understand honesty to include candor, truthfulness and promise-keeping.
Business activities must be characterized by respect for human dignity. We understand this to mean that business activities should show a special concern for the less powerful and the disadvantaged.
Business activities must be characterized by respect for the environment. We understand this to mean that business activities should promote sustainable development and prevent environmental degradation and waste of resources.
Rotary Four-Way Test
The Four-Way Test is the "linchpin of Rotary International's ethical practice." It acts as a test of thoughts as well as actions. It asks, "Of the things we think, say, or do":
Is it the truth?
Is it fair to all concerned?
Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
Military codes
As the United States Constitution prohibits the establishment of a government religion, US military codes of conduct typically contain no religious overtones.
West Point Honor Code
The West Point honor code states that "A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do." The non-toleration clause is key in differentiating it from numerous other codes.
Nature and ethics
Whether or not the relationships between animals found in nature and between people in early human evolution can provide a basis for human morality is a persistently unresolved question. Thomas Henry Huxley wrote in Evolution and Ethics in 1893 that people make a grave error in trying to create moral ideas from the behavior of animals in nature. He remarked:
Famous biologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould has stated that "answers will not be read passively from nature" and "[t]he factual state of the world does not teach us how we, with our powers for good and evil, should alter or preserve it in the most ethical manner". Thus, he concluded that ideas of morality should come from a form of higher mental reason, with nature viewed as an independent phenomenon.
Evolutionary ethics is not the only way to involve nature with ethics. For example, there are ethically realist theories like ethical naturalism. Related to ethical naturalism is also the idea that ethics are best explored, not just using the lens of philosophy, but science as well (a science of morality).
Key philosophers and philosophical texts
Epicurus
Epicurus (341–270 BCE), in his philosophy of Epicureanism, posits an ethics of pleasure based on the study of nature, and teaches that we should carry out our choices and rejections based on hedonic calculus. Epicureanism also teaches a curriculum of control of desires based on the hierarchy of desires: natural and necessary desires are top priority, natural yet unnecessary desires are secondary, and those that are neither natural nor necessary are dismissed. The main texts of its ethics are the 40 Principal Doctrines (Kyriai Doxai) and Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus. As per Principal Doctrine 5, the ethical code of the School promotes living pleasantly, justly, prudently, and correctly.
Valluvar
Thiruvalluvar (before c. 5th century CE), a South Indian poet-philosopher and the author of the Kural, a non-denominational Classical Tamil work on secular ethics and morality, is believed to have lived between the 1st century BCE and the 5th century CE. While others of his time chiefly focused on the praise of God, culture and the ruler of the land, Valluvar focused on the moral behaviors of the common individual. Valluvar limits his theistic teachings to the introductory chapter of the Kural text, the "Praise of God." Throughout the text thereafter, he focuses on the everyday moral behaviors of an individual, thus making the text a secular one. Even in the introductory chapter, he refrains from mentioning the name of any particular god but only addresses God in generic terms as "the Creator," "the truly Wise One," "the One of eight-fold excellence," and so forth. Translated into about 40 world languages, the Kural text remains one of the most widely translated non-religious works in the world. Praised as "the Universal Veda," it emphasizes on the ethical edifices of non-violence, moral vegetarianism, casteless human brotherhood, absence of desires, path of righteousness and truth, and so forth, besides covering a wide range of subjects such as moral codes of rulers, friendship, agriculture, knowledge and wisdom, sobriety, love, and domestic life.
Holyoake
George Jacob Holyoake's 1896 publication English Secularism defines secularism thus:
"Secularism is a code of duty pertaining to this life, founded on considerations purely human, and intended mainly for those who find theology indefinite or inadequate, unreliable or unbelievable. Its essential principles are three: (1) The improvement of this life by material means. (2) That science is the available Providence of man. (3) That it is good to do good. Whether there be other good or not, the good of the present life is good, and it is good to seek that good."
Holyoake held that secularism should take no interest at all in religious questions (as they were irrelevant), and was thus to be distinguished from strong freethought and atheism. In this he disagreed with Charles Bradlaugh, and the disagreement split the secularist movement between those who argued that anti-religious movements and activism was not necessary or desirable and those who argued that it was.
Nietzsche
Nietzsche's many works spoke of a Master-Slave Morality, The Will to Power, or something stronger that overcomes the weaker and Darwinistic adaptation and will to live. Nietzsche expressed his moral philosophy throughout his collection of works; the most important of these to secular ethics being The Gay Science (in which the famous God is dead phrase was first used), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and On The Genealogy of Morals.
According to Nietzsche, our understanding of cause and effect may be limited to a single will, an inclination that is identical to that of other living things. In this respect, Nietzsche's theory is more straightforward than Kant's since Nietzsche did manage clarify our sense of causality by considering simply the will to power, whereas Kant postulated two sorts of wills (free and unfree wills). We shouldn't "accept numerous forms of causality until the experiment of making do with a single one has been pushed to its farthest extent," according to Nietzsche, since the "conscience of method requires" it. The want to power appears to be practically beyond dispute, according to Nietzsche's formulation, and since causation is our ultimate certainty.
Kant
On ethics, Kant wrote works that both described the nature of universal principles and also sought to demonstrate the procedure of their application. Kant maintained that only a "good will" is morally praiseworthy, so that doing what appears to be ethical for the wrong reasons is not a morally good act. Kant's emphasis on one's intent or reasons for acting is usually contrasted with the utilitarian tenet that the goodness of an action is to be judged solely by its results. Utilitarianism is a hypothetical imperative, if one wants _, they must do __. Contrast this with the Kantian ethic of the categorical imperative, where the moral act is done for its own sake, and is framed: One must do __ or alternatively, one must not do __.
For instance, under Kantian ethics, if a person were to give money to charity because failure to do so would result in some sort of punishment from a god or Supreme Being, then the charitable donation would not be a morally good act. A dutiful action must be performed solely out of a sense of duty; any other motivation profanes the act and strips it of its moral quality.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism (from the Latin utilis, useful) is a theory of ethics that prescribes the quantitative maximization of good consequences for a population. It is a form of consequentialism. This good to be maximized is usually happiness, pleasure, or preference satisfaction. Though some utilitarian theories might seek to maximize other consequences, these consequences generally have something to do with the welfare of people (or of people and nonhuman animals). For this reason, utilitarianism is often associated with the term welfarist consequentialism.
In utilitarianism, it is the "end result" which is fundamental (as opposed to Kantian ethics discussed above). Thus using the same scenario as above, it would be irrelevant whether the person giving money to charity was doing so out of personal or religious conviction, the mere fact that the charitable donation is being made is sufficient for it to be classified as morally good.
See also
Outline of ethics
Secular humanism
Secular morality
References
Bibliography
Kosower, M. (2018) Some Reflections on Torah, Science, Rationality, and Morality https://mkosower.academia.edu/research
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/some-reflections-on-torah-science-rationality-and-morality/
https://www.secularethic.org/home-1
https://archive.pagecentertraining.psu.edu/public-relations-ethics/ethical-decision-making/yet-another-test-page/the-difference-between-ethics-and-religion/ | 0.796645 | 0.989827 | 0.788541 |
World religions | World religions is a category used in the study of religion to demarcate at least five—and in some cases more—religions that are deemed to have been especially large, internationally widespread, or influential in the development of Western society. Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism are always included in the list. These are often juxtaposed against other categories, such as folk religions, Indigenous religions, and new religious movements (NRMs), which are also used by scholars in this field of research.
The world religions paradigm was developed in the United Kingdom during the 1960s, where it was pioneered by phenomenological scholars of religion such as Ninian Smart. It was designed to broaden the study of religion away from its heavy focus on Christianity by taking into account other large religious traditions around the world. The paradigm is often used by lecturers instructing undergraduate students in the study of religion and is also the framework used by school teachers in the United Kingdom and other countries. The paradigm's emphasis on viewing these religious movements as distinct and mutually exclusive entities has also had a wider impact on the categorisation of religion—for instance in censuses—in both Western countries and elsewhere.
Since the late 20th century, the paradigm has faced critique by scholars of religion such as Jonathan Z. Smith, some of whom have argued for its abandonment. Critics have argued that the world religions paradigm is inappropriate because it takes the Protestant branch of Nicene Christianity as the model for what constitutes "religion"; that it is tied up with discourses of modernity, including the power relations present in modern society; that it encourages an uncritical understanding of religion; and that it makes a value judgment as to what religions should be considered "major". Others have argued that it remains useful in the classroom, so long as students are made aware that it is a socially-constructed category.
Definition
The scholars of religion Christopher R. Cotter and David G. Robertson described the "World Religions Paradigm" as "a particular way of thinking about religions which organizes them into a set of discrete traditions with a supposedly 'global' import." It typically consists of the "Big Five" religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism.
As noted by Cotter and Robertson, the "Big Five" religions are often listed in an "Abrahamocentric order" which places the largest three Abrahamic religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—before the non-Abrahamic religions Hinduism and Buddhism. The category is sometimes also extended to include other major religious groups, namely the Baháʼí Faith, Sikhism, and/or Zoroastrianism.
The inclusion of Judaism in the "Big Five" raises some issues; it is included in the list because of its influence on Christianity and Islam and because of its relevance to traditional Western understandings of Western history. On demographic grounds, it does not fit into the list, for there are far fewer Jews in the world than there are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. Similarly, it does not fit into the list if the groups are defined by a desire to spread internationally, because Judaism historically has been a non-proselytizing religion.
Many scholars have utilised the "world religions" category alongside other "catch-all" categories such as "new religious movements" and "Indigenous religions". The scholar of religion Steven J. Sutcliffe compared the relationship between the three categories to the English football league system, with the "world" religions forming a Premier League, the "new" religions forming a Championship, and "Indigenous" religions a First Division. That groups that get placed in categories like "Indigenous religions" get treated less seriously than the "world religions" by many scholars was noted by the scholar of religion Graham Harvey, who maintained that "indigenous religions should receive similarly respectful treatment to that considered appropriate to the larger 'World Religions'."
History
Cotter and Robertson noted that the history of the world religions paradigm is "intimately tied up" with the history of the study of religion as an academic discipline. It emerged from within the phenomenology of religion approach which placed an emphasis on description rather than critical analysis.
The paradigm was integrated throughout the education system through work of scholars like Ninian Smart, who formed the Shap Working Party on World Religions in Education in 1969. It was introduced with the intent of moving Western education away from its focus on Christianity. However, it took liberal Western Protestantism as its baseline and interpreted these different religious traditions through the framework of liberal Protestant norms and values. This included an emphasis on theology as being central to a given religion. It also reflects the post-Enlightenment Christian approach of treating different religious groups as distinct, mutually exclusive categories. It thus reflects the socio-political concerns of 1960s Britain, the environment in which it was devised.
The paradigm has since gone beyond this academic discipline, and "informs the perception" of many members of different religious groups. The paradigm for instance frames the teaching about religion in the British education system; at all three Key Stages, British teachers are instructed to teach about Christianity, while by the end of key Stage 3 they are also supposed to teach about the other "five principal religions": Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism. Similarly, the censuses of many countries for instance reflect the influence of the world religion paradigm by only permitting respondents to describe themselves as adhering to one particular religious tradition, whereas in reality many individuals identify themselves with various different traditions at the same time. This idea of mutually exclusive religious identities is not only a Western phenomenon, but can also be found in other socio-cultural contexts; Hindu nationalists for instance often endorse the idea that Hinduism and Buddhism are mutually exclusive categories despite the fact that many people in South Asia mix Hindu and Buddhist practices.
The scholars of religion Tara Baldrick-Morrone, Michael Graziano, and Brad Stoddard stated that "the WRP is neither neutral nor natural, but its social authority derives from appearing as both."
Criticism
The utility of the World Religions Paradigm has experienced a sustained and rigorous critique from many scholars of religion. The scholar of religion Graham Harvey for instance noted that many scholars "object strongly" to the paradigm. In 1978, the scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith called it a "dubious category".
One of the major criticisms of the framework is that it is based on a model of "religion" that relies on the Protestant branch of Nicene Christianity as its base example. A second criticism is that it is rooted in the discourses of modernity, including the power relations present in modern society. Smith observed that it was constructed by Western scholars from a Western perspective. He noted that the only religions that get included in it are those which have "achieved sufficient power and numbers to enter our [i.e. Western] history, either to form it, interact with it, or to thwart it" and represent "important geo-political entities with which we must deal." The framework also includes privileging the literate elites active in particular religious movements by presenting their interpretations of particular traditions as being authoritative, eclipsing alternative interpretations presented by non-literate, marginalised, and localized practitioners. For instance, as noted by the scholar of religion Suzanne Owen, "Hinduism as a World Religion does not include Hinduism as a village religion".
A third criticism of the world religions paradigm is that it encourages an uncritical and sui generis model of "religion". It presents each of the "world religions" in an abstracted and essentialised form, failing to take account of hybridization. For instance, in teaching about Christianity it does not refer to reincarnation, because this is not typically regarded as a Christian doctrine, and yet there are Christians who profess a belief in reincarnation.
A fourth criticism is that in choosing to focus attention on the "major religions", it makes a value judgement as to what constitutes "major" and what does not.
Paradigm in pedagogy
Many scholars of religion have resisted efforts to challenge the paradigm, and as of 2016 was reported as still being widespread in university introductory courses to the study of religion. Many instructors feel that explaining the critique of the world religions paradigm to undergraduate students would be difficult, as the critique would be too complex for many of them to understand. Its continued use has also been defended by the claim that it is what undergraduate students expect and that it mirrors what they will have been taught at school.
Some scholars have argued for the rejection of the world religions paradigm altogether; Cotter and Robertson presented the argument that "the continued uncritical use of the WRP fosters a breeding ground for relativistic navel-gazing which has no place in the contemporary research university". Owen was of the view that "as long as it continues to employ the World Religions paradigm as a default approach (even after deconstructing it), religious studies will fail in its humanistic task" because it will simply be engaging in "knowledge transfer" and not "critically engaging" with "culture and knowledge". One alternative framework that some scholars use to teach about religion is the "lived religion" paradigm, which places emphasis not on distinct religious traditions but on individual experiences and practices. Another alternative is the "material religion" framework which focuses on examining religion through material culture and physical objects. Owen noted that, in her experience, many students display an "initial resistance to alternatives" as they are expecting the world religions paradigm. She cited the example of her introductory course at Leeds Trinity University College, which was constructed on thematic lines rather than according to the world religions paradigm, and which induced feelings of panic among many undergraduates.
Many scholars who are critical of the world religions paradigm find themselves having to teach it as part of introductory courses for undergraduate students. Some spent much of a course teaching the concept and then several sessions after this deconstructing it. Some scholars have suggested that even when students are taught using the world religions paradigm, it could be a good means of encouraging them to think critically about category formation. The scholar Steven W. Ramey for instance advocated teaching the paradigm in a manner that makes it clear that it is a "constructed discourse". Similarly, Baldrick-Morrone, Graziano, and Stoddard suggested that teaching undergraduates about the world religious paradigm helps to explain to students how "classification is a social act". They noted that students could leave such a course not only knowing more about the specific religious traditions included in the world religions category, but that they would also leave "knowing how to better interrogate the world around them". To avoid promoting the paradigm's portrayal of different religious traditions as rigid, homogenous categories, the scholar Teemu Taira suggested introducing ethnographic case studies into the class to better explain the realities of people's lives and uses of religious traditions.
See also
Comparative religion
Baháʼí Faith and the unity of religion
Buddhism and other religions
Christianity and other religions
Hinduism and other religions
Islam and other religions
Judaism and other religions
Indian religions
List of religious populations
Major religious groups
Religious pluralism
Religious war
Sociology of religion
Three Persian religions
References
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
encyclopedias
other works
External links
James Cox on "The World Religions Paradigm" at The Religious Studies Project
"After the World Religions Paradigm...?" at The Religious Studies Project
Comparative religion
Religious faiths, traditions, and movements
Religious studies
Social constructionism
Sociology of religion | 0.789548 | 0.99793 | 0.787914 |
Dogma | Dogma, in its broadest sense, is any belief held definitively and without the possibility of reform. It may be in the form of an official system of principles or doctrines of a religion, such as Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, or Islam, the positions of a philosopher or philosophical school, such as Stoicism, and political belief systems such as fascism, socialism, progressivism, liberalism, and conservatism.
In the pejorative sense, dogma refers to enforced decisions, such as those of aggressive political interests or authorities. More generally, it is applied to some strong belief that its adherents are not willing to discuss rationally. This attitude is named as a dogmatic one, or dogmatism, and is often used to refer to matters related to religion, though this pejorative sense strays far from the formal sense in which it is applied to religious belief. The pejorative sense is not limited to theistic attitudes alone and is often used with respect to political or philosophical dogmas.
Etymology
The word dogma was adopted in the 17th century from , derived from the from the . The plural is based on the , though dogmas may be more commonly used in English.
In philosophy
Pyrrhonism
In Pyrrhonism, "dogma" refers to assent to a proposition about a non-evident matter. The main principle of Pyrrhonism is expressed by the word acatalepsia, which connotes the ability to withhold assent from doctrines regarding the truth of things in their own nature; against every statement its contradiction may be advanced with equal justification. Consequently, Pyrrhonists withhold assent with regard to non-evident propositions, i.e., dogmas. Pyrrhonists argue that dogmatists, such as the Stoics, Epicureans, and Peripatetics, have failed to demonstrate that their doctrines regarding non-evident matters are true.
In religion
Christianity
In Christianity, a dogma is a belief communicated by divine revelation and defined by the Church, The organization's formal religious positions may be taught to new members or simply communicated to those who choose to become members. It is rare for agreement with an organization's formal positions to be a requirement for attendance, though membership may be required for some church activities.
In the narrower sense of the church's official interpretation of divine revelation, theologians distinguish between defined and non-defined dogmas, the former being those set out by authoritative bodies such as the Roman Curia for the Catholic Church, the latter being those which are universally held but have not been officially defined, the nature of Christ as universal redeemer being an example. The term originated in late Greek philosophy legal usage, in which it meant a decree or command, and came to be used in the same sense in early Christian theology. Protestants to differing degrees are less formal about doctrine, and often rely on denomination-specific beliefs, but seldom refer to these beliefs as dogmata. The first unofficial institution of dogma in the Christian church was by Saint Irenaeus in his Demonstration of Apostolic Teaching, which provides a 'manual of essentials' constituting the 'body of truth'.
Catholicism and Eastern Christianity
For Catholicism and Eastern Christianity, the dogmata are contained in the Nicene Creed and the canon laws of two, three, seven, or twenty ecumenical councils (depending on whether one is Church of the East, Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, or Roman Catholic). These tenets are summarized by John of Damascus in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, which is the third book of his main work, titled The Fount of Knowledge. In this book he takes a dual approach in explaining each article of the faith: one, directed at Christians, where he uses quotes from the Bible and, occasionally, from works of other Church Fathers, and the second, directed both at members of non-Christian religions and at atheists, for whom he employs Aristotelian logic and dialectics.
The decisions of fourteen later councils that Catholics hold as dogmatic and a small number of decrees promulgated by popes exercising papal infallibility (for examples, see Immaculate Conception and Assumption of Mary) are considered as being a part of the Catholic Church's sacred body of doctrine.
Judaism
In the Jewish commentary tradition, dogma is a principle by which the Rabbanim can try the proofs of faith about the existence of God and truth; dogma is what is necessarily true for rational thinking. In Jewish Kabbalah, a dogma is an archetype of the Pardes or Torah Nistar, the secrets of Bible. In the relation between "logical thinking" and "rational Kabbalah" the "Partzuf" is the means to identify "dogma".
Buddhism
View or position (; ) is a central idea in Buddhism that corresponds with the Western notion of dogma. In Buddhist thought, a view is not a simple, abstract collection of propositions, but a charged interpretation of experience which intensely shapes and affects thought, sensation, and action. Having the proper mental attitude toward views is therefore considered an integral part of the Buddhist path, as sometimes correct views need to be put into practice and incorrect views abandoned, while at other times all views are seen as obstacles to enlightenment.
Islam
Taqlid is a term in Islam that refers to conforming to the teachings of a particular person. Classical usage of the term differs between Sunni Islam and Shia Islam. In Sunni Islam, taqlid refers to the unjustified conformity to the teachings of a person without inquiring or thinking about said teachings, rather than the justified conformity of a layperson to the teaching of mujtahid (a person who is qualified for independent reasoning). In Shia Islam, taqlid refers to the general conformity of non-mujtahid to the teaching of mujtahid, without a negative connotation. The discrepancy corresponds to differing views on Shia views on the Imamate and Sunni imams. Taqlid can be seen as a form of dogma, as no particular scholar can always be correct, so their rulings should not be taken uncritically.
See also
Faith – Confidence or trust, often characterized as without evidence
References
Bibliography
External links
Dogma – Strong's N.T. Greek Lexicon
Il Domani – terribile o radioso? – del Dogma , a book by Enrico Maria Radaelli with a Preface by Roger Scruton and comments by Brunero Gherardini, Alessandro Gnocchi-Mario Palmaro, and Mario Oliveri (Roma 2012)
Irenaeus. Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching. pp. 70–75. [online] available at: Christian Classics ethereal library St. Irenaeus: Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching – Christian Classics Ethereal Library [Accessed 20 June 2017]
Christian terminology
Epicureanism
Epistemology of religion
Greek words and phrases
Justification (epistemology)
Principles
Pyrrhonism
Religious belief and doctrine
Stoicism
Concepts in ancient Greek epistemology | 0.789502 | 0.997828 | 0.787787 |
Religious naturalism | Religious naturalism is a framework for religious orientation in which a naturalist worldview is used to respond to types of questions and aspirations that are parts of many religions. It has been described as "a perspective that finds religious meaning in the natural world."
Religious naturalism can be considered intellectually, as a philosophy, and it can be embraced as a part of, or as the focus of, a personal religious orientation. Advocates have stated that it can be a significant option for people who are unable to embrace religious traditions in which supernatural presences or events play prominent roles, and that it provides "a deeply spiritual and inspiring religious vision" that is particularly relevant in a time of ecological crisis.
Overview
Naturalism
Naturalism is the view that the natural world is all that exists, and that its constituents, principles, and relationships are the sole reality. All that occurs is seen as being due to natural processes, with nothing supernatural involved. As Sean Carroll put it:
Naturalism comes down to three things:
There is only one world, the natural world.
The world evolves according to unbroken patterns, the laws of nature.
The only reliable way of learning about the world is by observing it.
Essentially, naturalism is the idea that the world revealed to us by scientific investigation is the one true world.
In religious naturalism, a naturalist view (as described above) defines the bounds of what can be believed as being possible or real. As this does not include a view of a personal god who may cause specific actions or miracles, or of a soul that may live on after death, religious naturalists draw from what can be learned about the workings of the natural world as they try to understand why things happen as they do, and for perspectives that can help to determine what is right or good (and why) and what we might aspire to and do.
Religious
When the term, religious, is used with respect to religious naturalism, it is understood in a general way—separate from the beliefs or practices of specific established religions, but including types of questions, aspirations, values, attitudes, feelings, and practices that are parts of many religious traditions. It can include...
interpretive, spiritual, and moral responses to questions about how things are and which things matter,
beliefs, practices, and ethics that orient people to "the big picture" (including our place in relation to a vast and ancient cosmos and other people and forms of life), and
pursuit of "high-minded goals" (such as truth, wisdom, fulfillment, serenity, self-understanding, justice, and a meaningful life).
As Jerome Stone put it, "One way of getting at what we mean by religion is that it is our attempt to make sense of our lives and behave appropriately within the total scheme of things."
When discussing distinctions between religious naturalists and non-religious (nonspiritual) naturalists, Loyal Rue said: "I regard a religious or spiritual person to be one who takes ultimate concerns to heart." He noted that, while "plain old" naturalists share similar views about what may occur in the world, those who describe themselves as religious naturalists take nature more "to heart", in seeing it as vitally important, and as something that they may respond to on a deeply personal level.
Shared principles
The main principle of religious naturalism is that a naturalist worldview can serve as a foundation for religious orientation.
Shared principles related to naturalism include views that:
the best way to understand natural processes is through methods of science; where scientists observe, test, and draw conclusions from what is seen and non-scientists learn from what scientists have described;
for some topics, such as questions of purpose, meaning, morality, and emotional or spiritual responses, science may be of limited value and perspectives from psychology, philosophy, literature, and related disciplines, plus art, myth, and use of symbols, can contribute to understanding; and
due to limits in human knowledge, some things are currently not well-understood, and some things may never be known.
Shared principles related to having nature as a focus of religious orientation include the view that nature is of ultimate importance—as the forces and ordered processes that enable our lives, and all of life, and that cause all things to be are as they are. As such, nature can prompt religious responses, which can vary for each person and can include:
a sense of amazement or awe – at the wonder of our lives and our world, and the beauty, order, and power that can be seen in nature,
appreciation or gratitude – for the gift of life, and opportunities for fulfillment that can come with this,
a sense of humility, in seeing ourselves as small and fleeting parts of a vast and ancient cosmos,
an attitude of acceptance (or appreciation) of mystery, where learning to become comfortable with the fact that some things are unable to be known can contribute to peace of mind, and
reverence – in viewing the natural world as sacred (worthy of religious veneration).
Nature is not "worshipped", in the sense of reverent devotion to a deity. Instead, the natural world is respected as a primary source of truth—as it expresses and illustrates the varied principles of nature that enable life and may contribute to well-being.
With this, learning about nature, including human nature, (via both academic and artistic resources and direct personal experiences) is seen as valuable—as it can provide an informed base of understanding of how things are and why things happen as they do, expand awareness and appreciation of the interdependence among all things, prompt an emotional or spiritual sense of connection with other people and forms of life in all of nature, and serve as a point of reference for considering and responding to moral and religious questions and life challenges.
Tenets
As in many religious orientations, religious naturalism includes a central story, with a description of how it is believed that our world and human beings came to be.
In this (based on what can be understood through methods of science), the cosmos began approximately 13.8 billion years ago as a massive expansion of energy, which has been described as "the Big Bang". Due to natural forces and processes, this expansion led over time to the emergence of light, nuclear particles, galaxies, stars, and planets. Life on Earth is thought to have emerged more than 3.5 billion years ago—beginning with molecules that combined in ways that enabled them to maintain themselves as stable entities and self-replicate, which evolved to single-cell organisms and then to varied multi-cell organisms that, over time, included millions of varied species, including mammals, primates, and humans, living in complex interdependent ecosystems.
This story has been described as "The Epic of Evolution" and, for religious naturalists, it provides a foundation for considering how things are, which things matter, and how we should live. It is also seen as having a potential to unite all humans with a shared understanding of our world, including conditions that are essential to all lives, as it is based on the best available scientific knowledge and is widely accepted among scientists and in many cultures worldwide.
From the perspective of religious naturalism humans are seen as biological beings—composed of natural substances and products of evolution who act in ways that are enabled and limited by natural processes. With this, all of what we think, feel, desire, decide, and do is due to natural processes and, after death, each person ceases to be, with no potential for an eternal afterlife or reincarnation. Due to evolving from common ancient roots, many of the processes that enable our human lives (including aspects of body and mind) are shared by other types of living things. And, as we recognize what we share, we can feel a type of kinship or connection with all forms of life. Similarly, recognizing that all forms of life are:
dependent on conditions on Earth (to provide atmosphere, soil, temperature, water, and other requirements for life) and also
interdependent with other forms of life (as sources of food, and in contributing to healthy ecosystems),
and in recognizing and appreciating Earth as a rare site, in a vast cosmos, where life exists, and as the environment that is essential for our lives and well-being, this planet and its life-enabling qualities is seen as being of ultimate concern, which can prompt or warrant a felt need to respect, preserve, and protect the varied ecosystems that sustain us.
Values are seen as having accompanied the emergence of life—where, unlike rocks and other inanimate objects that perform no purposeful actions, living things have a type of will that prompts them to act in ways that enable them (or their group) to survive and reproduce. With this, life can be seen as a core/primary value, and things that can contribute to life and well-being are also valued. And, from a religious naturalist perspective, ongoing reproduction and continuation of life (a "credo of continuation"), has been described as a long-term goal or aspiration.
Morality, likewise, is seen as having emerged in social groups, as standards for behavior and promotion of virtues that contribute to the well-being of groups. Evolutionary roots of this can be seen in groups of primates and some other types of mammals and other creatures, where empathy, helping others, a sense of fairness, and other elements of morality have often been seen. It includes promotion of "virtues" (behaviors seen pro-social or "good").
With perspectives of religious naturalism, moral concern is seen as extending beyond the well-being of human groups to an "ecomorality" that also includes concern for the well-being of non-human species (in part, as this recognizes how non-human life can contribute to the well-being of humans, and also as it respects the value of all life).
With recognition that moral choices can be complex (where as some choices benefit one group, they may cause harm to others), an aspiration is that, beyond aspiring to virtues and adhering to social rules, religious naturalists can work to develop mature judgement that prepares them to consider varied aspects of challenges, judge options, and make choices that consider impact from several perspectives.
Advocates of religious naturalism believe that, as they offer perspectives that can help to show how things really are in the physical world, and which things ultimately matter, and as they can contribute to development of religious attitudes, including humility, gratitude, compassion, and caring, and enhance exposure to and appreciation of the many wonders of the natural world, perspectives from religious naturalism can contribute to personal wholeness, social cohesion, and awareness and activities that can contribute to preservation of global ecosystems.
Beyond supporting a credo of continuation that values varied forms of life and ecosystems, aspirations based on religious naturalism include:
living in harmony with nature,
exploring and celebrating the mysteries of nature, and
pursuing goals that enable the long-term viability of the biosphere.
As suggested by Donald Crosby, since nature is regarded as a focus of religious commitment and concern, religious naturalists may "grant to nature the kind of reverence awe, love and devotion we in the West have formerly reserved for God."
History
Core themes in religious naturalism have been present, in varied cultures, for centuries. But active discussion, with the use of this name, is relatively recent.
Zeno (c. 334 – c. 262 BCE, a founder of Stoicism) said:
Views consistent with religious naturalism can be seen in ancient Daoist texts (e.g., Dao De Jing) and some Hindu views (such as God as Nirguna Brahman, God without attributes). They may also be seen in Western images that do not focus on active, personal aspects of God, such as Thomas Aquinas' view of God as Pure Act, Augustine's God as Being Itself, and Paul Tillich's view of God as Ground of Being . As Wesley Wildman has described, views consistent with religious naturalism have long existed as part of the underside of major religious traditions, often quietly and sometimes in mystical strands or intellectual sub-traditions, by practitioners who are not drawn to supernatural claims.
The earliest uses of the term, religious naturalism, seem to have occurred in the 1800s. In 1846, the American Whig Review described "a seeming 'religious naturalism, In 1869, American Unitarian Association literature adjudged:"Religious naturalism differs from this mainly in the fact that it extends the domain of nature farther outward into space and time. ...It never transcends nature". Ludwig Feuerbach wrote that religious naturalism was "the acknowledgment of the Divine in Nature" and also "an element of the Christian religion", but by no means that religion's definitive "characteristic" or "tendency".
In 1864, Pope Pius IX condemned religious naturalism in the first seven articles of the Syllabus of Errors.
Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement, was an early advocate of religious naturalism. He believed that a naturalistic approach to religion and ethics was possible in a desacralizing world. He saw God as the sum of all-natural processes.
Other verified usages of the term came in 1940 from George Perrigo Conger and from Edgar S. Brightman. Shortly thereafter, H. H. Dubs wrote an article entitled "Religious Naturalism: An Evaluation", which begins "Religious naturalism is today one of the outstanding American philosophies of religion..." and discusses ideas developed by Henry Nelson Wieman in books that predate Dubs's article by 20 years.
In 1991 Jerome A. Stone wrote The Minimalist Vision of Transcendence explicitly "to sketch a philosophy of religious naturalism". Use of the term was expanded in the 1990s by Loyal Rue, who was familiar with it from Brightman's book. Rue used the term in conversations with several people before 1994, and subsequent conversations between Rue and Ursula Goodenough [both of whom were active in the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) led to Goodenough's use in her book The Sacred Depths of Nature and by Rue in Religion is Not About God and other writings. Since 1994 numerous authors have used the phrase or expressed similar thinking. Examples include Chet Raymo, Stuart Kauffman and Karl E. Peters.
Mike Ignatowski states that "there were many religious naturalists in the first half of the 20th century and some even before that" but that "religious naturalism as a movement didn't come into its own until about 1990 [and] took a major leap forward in 1998 when Ursula Goodenough published The Sacred Depths of Nature, which is considered one of the founding texts of this movement."
Biologist Ursula Goodenough states:
Donald Crosby's Living with Ambiguity published in 2008, has, as its first chapter, "Religion of Nature as a Form of Religious Naturalism".
Loyal Rue's Nature Is Enough published in 2011, discusses "Religion Naturalized, Nature Sanctified" and "The Promise of Religious Naturalism".
Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative is a history by Dr. Jerome A. Stone (Dec. 2008 release) that presents this paradigm as a once-forgotten option in religious thinking that is making a rapid revival. It seeks to explore and encourage religious ways of responding to the world on a completely naturalistic basis without a supreme being or ground of being. This book traces this history and analyzes some of the issues dividing religious naturalists. It covers the birth of religious naturalism, from George Santayana to Henry Nelson Wieman and briefly explores religious naturalism in literature and art. Contested issues are discussed including whether nature's power or goodness is the focus of attention and also on the appropriateness of using the term "God". The contributions of more than twenty living religious naturalists are presented. The last chapter ends the study by exploring what it is like on the inside to live as a religious naturalist.
Chet Raymo writes that he had come to the same conclusion as Teilhard de Chardin: "Grace is everywhere", and that naturalistic emergence is in everything and far more magical than religion-based miracles. A future humankind religion should be ecumenical, ecological, and embrace the story provided by science as the "most reliable cosmology".
Carol Wayne White is among a younger generation of scholars whose model of religious naturalism helps advance socially- and ethically- oriented models of practice. Using the best available insights from scientific studies, White conceives of the human as an emergent, interconnected life form amid spectacular biotic diversity, which has far-reaching ethical implications within the context of ecology, religion, and American life. Her religious naturalism contributes to an intellectual legacy that has attempted to overcome the deficient conceptions of our myriad nature couched in problematic binary constructions. In doing so, her religious naturalism not only presents human beings as biotic forms emerging from evolutionary processes sharing a deep homology with other sentient beings, it also emphasizes humans valuing such connection. In Black Lives and Sacred Humanity, Toward an African American Religious Naturalism (Fordham Press, 2016), White confronts both human–human forms of injustice and ecological forms of injustice that occur when we fail to recognize these basic truths.
As P. Roger Gillette summarizes:
Varieties
The literature related to religious naturalism includes many variations in conceptual framing. This reflects individual takes on various issues, to some extent various schools of thought, such as basic naturalism, religious humanism, pantheism, panentheism, and spiritual naturalism that have had time on the conceptual stage, and to some extent differing ways of characterizing Nature.
The current discussion often relates to the issue of whether belief in a God or God-language and associated concepts have any place in a framework that treats the physical universe as its essential frame of reference and the methods of science as providing the preeminent means for determining what Nature is. There are at least three varieties of religious naturalism, and three similar but somewhat different ways to categorize them. They are:
An approach to naturalism using theological language but fundamentally treats God metaphorically.
An approach to naturalism using theological language, but as either (1) a faith statement or supported by philosophical arguments, or (2) both, usually leaving open the question whether that usage as metaphor or refers to the ultimate answer that Nature can be.
Neo-theistic (process theology, progressive religions) – Gordon Kaufman, Karl E. Peters, Ralph Wendell Burhoe, Edmund Robinson
Non-theistic (agnostic, naturalistic concepts of god) – Robertson himself, Stanley Klein, Stuart Kauffman, Naturalistic Paganism.
Atheistic (no God concept, some modern naturalism, Process Naturalism, C. Robert Mesle, non-militant atheism, antitheism) – Jerome A. Stone, Michael Cavanaugh, Donald A. Crosby, Ursula Goodenough, Daniel Dennett, and Carol Wayne White
A miscellany of individual perspectives – Philip Hefner
The first category has as many sub-groups as there are distinct definitions for god. Believers in a supernatural entity (transcendent) are by definition not religious naturalists, however the matter of a naturalistic concept of God (Immanence) is currently debated. Strong atheists are not considered religious naturalists in this differentiation. Some individuals call themselves religious naturalists but refuse to be categorized. The unique theories of religious naturalists Loyal Rue, Donald A. Crosby, Jerome A. Stone, and Ursula Goodenough are discussed by Michael Hogue in his 2010 book The Promise of Religious Naturalism.
God concepts
Those who conceive of God as the creative process within the universe—example, Henry Nelson Wieman
Those who think of God as the totality of the universe considered religiously—Bernard Loomer.
A third type of religious naturalism sees no need to use the concept or terminology of God—Stone himself and Ursula Goodenough
Stone emphasizes that some religious naturalists do not reject the concept of God, but if they use the concept, it involves a radical alteration of the idea such as Gordon Kaufman who defines God as creativity.
Ignatowski divides religious naturalism into only two types—theistic and non-theistic.
Notable proponents and critics
Proponents
Proponents of religious naturalism are seen from two perspectives. The first includes contemporary individuals who have discussed and supported religious naturalism, per se. The other includes historic individuals who may not have used or been familiar with the term, "religious naturalism", but who had views that are relevant to and whose thoughts have contributed to the development of religious naturalism.
Individuals who have openly discussed and supported religious naturalism, include:
Chet Raymo
Loyal Rue
Donald A. Crosby
Jerome A. Stone
Michael Dowd
Ursula Goodenough
Terrence Deacon
Loren Eiseley
Philip Hefner
Ralph Wendell Burhoe
Mordecai Kaplan
Henry Nelson Wieman
George Santayana
Gordon D. Kaufman
Stuart Kauffman
Stanley A. Klein
C. Robert Mesle
Karl E. Peters
Varadaraja V. Raman
Ian Barbour
Robert S. Corrington
Wesley Wildman
Carol Wayne White
Individuals who were precursors to religious naturalism, or who otherwise influenced its development, include:
Lao-Tzu
Albert Einstein
W.E.B. Du Bois
Aldo Leopold
Critics
Religious naturalism has been criticized from two perspectives. One is that of traditional Western religion, which disagrees with naturalist disbelief in a personal God. Another is that of naturalists who do not agree that a religious sense can or should be associated with naturalist views. Critics in the first group include supporters of traditional Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions. Critics in the second group include:
Richard Dawkins
John Haught
Prominent communities and leaders
Religious naturalists sometimes use the social practices of traditional religions, including communal gatherings and rituals, to foster a sense of community, and to serve as reinforcement of its participants' efforts to expand the scope of their understandings. Some other groups mainly communicate online. Some known examples of religious naturalists groupings and congregation leaders are:
Religious Naturalist Association
Spiritual Naturalist Society
Unitarian Universalist Religious Naturalists
Religious Naturalism Facebook Group
Universal Pantheist Society founded 1975 – Pantheism is an intercepting concept with religious naturalism
Congregation Beth Or, a Jewish congregation near Chicago led by Rabbi David Oler
Congregation of Beth Adam in Loveland Ohio led by Rabbi Robert Barr
Pastor Ian Lawton, minister at the Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, West Michigan and Center for Progressive Christianity
Religious Naturalism is the focus of classes and conferences at some colleges and theology schools. Articles about religious naturalism have appeared frequently in journals, including Zygon, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, and the International Journal for Philosophy and Religion.
See also
List of new religious movements
References
Further reading
2015 – Donald A. Crosby – More Than Discourse: Symbolic Expressions of Naturalistic Faith, State University of New York Press,
2015 – Nathan Martinez – Rise Like Lions: Language and The False Gods of Civilization,
2008 – Donald A. Crosby – The Thou of Nature: Religious Naturalism and Reverence for Sentient Life, State University of New York Press,
2011 – Loyal Rue – Nature Is Enough, State University of New York Press,
2010 – Michael Hogue – The Promise of Religious Naturalism, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Sept.16, 2010,
2009 – Michael Ruse & Joseph Travis – Evolution: The First Four Billion Years, Belknap Press, 2009,
2008 – Donald A. Crosby – Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil, State University of New York Press,
2008 – Michael Dowd – Thank God for Evolution:, Viking (June 2008),
2008 – Chet Raymo – When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist, Sorin Books,
2008 – Kenneth R. Miller – Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, Viking Adult, 2008,
2008 – Eugenie C. Scott – Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction, Greenwood Press,
2007 – Eric Chaisson – Epic of Evolution, Columbia University Press (March 2, 2007),
2006 – John Haught – Is Nature Enough?, Cambridge University Press (May 31, 2006),
2006 – Loyal Rue – Religion Is Not About God, Rutgers University Press, July 24, 2006,
2004 – Gordon Kaufman – In the Beginning... Creativity, Augsburg Fortress Pub., 2004,
2003 – James B. Miller – The Epic of Evolution: Science and Religion in Dialogue, Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2003,
2002 – Donald A. Crosby – A Religion of Nature – State University of New York Press,
2000 – Ursula Goodenough – Sacred Depths of Nature, Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (June 15, 2000),
2000 – John Stewart – Evolution's Arrow: The Direction of Evolution and the Future of Humanity, Chapman Press, 2000,
1997 – Connie Barlow – Green Space Green Time: The Way of Science, Springer (September 1997),
1992 – Brian Swimme – The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era, HarperCollins, 1992,
Reading lists – Evolution Reading Resources, Books of the Epic of Evolution,
Cosmic Evolution
External links
Religious Naturalist Association
Religious Naturalism Resources Boston University
The Great Story leading religious naturalist educational website
Naturalism.org
The New Cosmology
The Spiritual Naturalist Society
Religion
Religious studies
Religion and politics
Religion and government | 0.800133 | 0.984567 | 0.787784 |
Ethics | Ethics is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches include normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.
Normative ethics aims to find general principles that govern how people should act. Applied ethics examines concrete ethical problems in real-life situations, such as abortion, treatment of animals, and business practices. Metaethics explores the underlying assumptions and concepts of ethics. It asks whether there are objective moral facts, how moral knowledge is possible, and how moral judgments motivate people. Influential normative theories are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. According to consequentialists, an act is right if it leads to the best consequences. Deontologists focus on acts themselves, saying that they must adhere to duties, like telling the truth and keeping promises. Virtue ethics sees the manifestation of virtues, like courage and compassion, as the fundamental principle of morality.
Ethics is closely connected to value theory, which studies the nature and types of value, like the contrast between intrinsic and instrumental value. Moral psychology is a related empirical field and investigates psychological processes involved in morality, such as reasoning and the formation of character. Descriptive ethics describes the dominant moral codes and beliefs in different societies and considers their historical dimension.
The history of ethics started in the ancient period with the development of ethical principles and theories in ancient Egypt, India, China, and Greece. This period saw the emergence of ethical teachings associated with Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and contributions of philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle. During the medieval period, ethical thought was strongly influenced by religious teachings. In the modern period, this focus shifted to a more secular approach concerned with moral experience, reasons for acting, and the consequences of actions. An influential development in the 20th century was the emergence of metaethics.
Definition
Ethics, also called moral philosophy, is the study of moral phenomena. It is one of the main branches of philosophy and investigates the nature of morality and the principles that govern the moral evaluation of conduct, character traits, and institutions. It examines what obligations people have, what behavior is right and wrong, and how to lead a good life. Some of its key questions are "How should one live?" and "What gives meaning to life?". In contemporary philosophy, ethics is usually divided into normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.
Morality is about what people ought to do rather than what they actually do, what they want to do, or what social conventions require. As a rational and systematic field of inquiry, ethics studies practical reasons why people should act one way rather than another. Most ethical theories seek universal principles that express a general standpoint of what is objectively right and wrong. In a slightly different sense, the term ethics can also refer to individual ethical theories in the form of a rational system of moral principles, such as Aristotelian ethics, and to a moral code that certain societies, social groups, or professions follow, as in Protestant work ethic and medical ethics.
The English word ethics has its roots in the Ancient Greek word , meaning and . This word gave rise to the Ancient Greek word , which was translated into Latin as and entered the English language in the 15th century through the Old French term . The term morality originates in the Latin word , meaning and . It was introduced into the English language during the Middle English period through the Old French term .
The terms ethics and morality are usually used interchangeably but some philosophers distinguish between the two. According to one view, morality focuses on what moral obligations people have while ethics is broader and includes ideas about what is good and how to lead a meaningful life. Another difference is that codes of conduct in specific areas, such as business and environment, are usually termed ethics rather than morality, as in business ethics and environmental ethics.
Normative ethics
Normative ethics is the philosophical study of ethical conduct and investigates the fundamental principles of morality. It aims to discover and justify general answers to questions like "How should one live?" and "How should people act?", usually in the form of universal or domain-independent principles that determine whether an act is right or wrong. For example, given the particular impression that it is wrong to set a child on fire for fun, normative ethics aims to find more general principles that explain why this is the case, like the principle that one should not cause extreme suffering to the innocent, which may itself be explained in terms of a more general principle. Many theories of normative ethics also aim to guide behavior by helping people make moral decisions.
Theories in normative ethics state how people should act or what kind of behavior is correct. They do not aim to describe how people normally act, what moral beliefs ordinary people have, how these beliefs change over time, or what ethical codes are upheld in certain social groups. These topics belong to descriptive ethics and are studied in fields like anthropology, sociology, and history rather than normative ethics.
Some systems of normative ethics arrive at a single principle covering all possible cases. Others encompass a small set of basic rules that address all or at least the most important moral considerations. One difficulty for systems with several basic principles is that these principles may conflict with each other in some cases and lead to ethical dilemmas.
Distinct theories in normative ethics suggest different principles as the foundation of morality. The three most influential schools of thought are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. These schools are usually presented as exclusive alternatives, but depending on how they are defined, they can overlap and do not necessarily exclude one another. In some cases, they differ in which acts they see as right or wrong. In other cases, they recommend the same course of action but provide different justifications for why it is right.
Consequentialism
Consequentialism, also called teleological ethics, says that morality depends on consequences. According to the most common view, an act is right if it brings the best future. This means that there is no alternative course of action that has better consequences. A key aspect of consequentialist theories is that they provide a characterization of what is good and then define what is right in terms of what is good. For example, classical utilitarianism says that pleasure is good and that the action leading to the most overall pleasure is right. Consequentialism has been discussed indirectly since the formulation of classical utilitarianism in the late 18th century. A more explicit analysis of this view happened in the 20th century, when the term was coined by G. E. M. Anscombe.
Consequentialists usually understand the consequences of an action in a very wide sense that includes the totality of its effects. This is based on the idea that actions make a difference in the world by bringing about a causal chain of events that would not have existed otherwise. A core intuition behind consequentialism is that the future should be shaped to achieve the best possible outcome.
The act itself is usually not seen as part of the consequences. This means that if an act has intrinsic value or disvalue, it is not included as a factor. Some consequentialists see this as a flaw, saying that all value-relevant factors need to be considered. They try to avoid this complication by including the act itself as part of the consequences. A related approach is to characterize consequentialism not in terms of consequences but in terms of outcome, with the outcome being defined as the act together with its consequences.
Most forms of consequentialism are agent-neutral. This means that the value of consequences is assessed from a neutral perspective, that is, acts should have consequences that are good in general and not just good for the agent. It is controversial whether agent-relative moral theories, like ethical egoism, should be considered as types of consequentialism.
Types
There are many different types of consequentialism. They differ based on what type of entity they evaluate, what consequences they take into consideration, and how they determine the value of consequences. Most theories assess the moral value of acts. However, consequentialism can also be used to evaluate motives, character traits, rules, and policies.
Many types assess the value of consequences based on whether they promote happiness or suffering. But there are also alternative evaluative principles, such as desire satisfaction, autonomy, freedom, knowledge, friendship, beauty, and self-perfection. Some forms of consequentialism hold that there is only a single source of value. The most prominent among them is utilitarianism, which states that the moral value of acts only depends on the pleasure and suffering they cause. An alternative approach says that there are many different sources of value, which all contribute to one overall value. Before the 20th century, consequentialists were only concerned with the total of value or the aggregate good. In the 20th century, alternative views were developed that additionally consider the distribution of value. One of them states that an equal distribution of goods is better than an unequal distribution even if the aggregate good is the same.
There are disagreements about which consequences should be assessed. An important distinction is between act consequentialism and rule consequentialism. According to act consequentialism, the consequences of an act determine its moral value. This means that there is a direct relation between the consequences of an act and its moral value. Rule consequentialism, by contrast, holds that an act is right if it follows a certain set of rules. Rule consequentialism determines the best rules by considering their outcomes at a community level. People should follow the rules that lead to the best consequences when everyone in the community follows them. This implies that the relation between an act and its consequences is indirect. For example, if telling the truth is one of the best rules, then according to rule consequentialism, a person should tell the truth even in specific cases where lying would lead to better consequences.
Another disagreement is between actual and expected consequentialism. According to the traditional view, only the actual consequences of an act affect its moral value. One difficulty of this view is that many consequences cannot be known in advance. This means that in some cases, even well-planned and intentioned acts are morally wrong if they inadvertently lead to negative outcomes. An alternative perspective states that what matters are not the actual consequences but the expected consequences. This view takes into account that when deciding what to do, people have to rely on their limited knowledge of the total consequences of their actions. According to this view, a course of action has positive moral value despite leading to an overall negative outcome if it had the highest expected value, for example, because the negative outcome could not be anticipated or was unlikely.
A further difference is between maximizing and satisficing consequentialism. According to maximizing consequentialism, only the best possible act is morally permitted. This means that acts with positive consequences are wrong if there are alternatives with even better consequences. One criticism of maximizing consequentialism is that it demands too much by requiring that people do significantly more than they are socially expected to. For example, if the best action for someone with a good salary would be to donate 70% of their income to charity, it would be morally wrong for them to only donate 65%. Satisficing consequentialism, by contrast, only requires that an act is "good enough" even if it is not the best possible alternative. According to this view, it is possible to do more than one is morally required to do.
Mohism in ancient Chinese philosophy is one of the earliest forms of consequentialism. It arose in the 5th century BCE and argued that political action should promote justice as a means to increase the welfare of the people.
Utilitarianism
The most well-known form of consequentialism is utilitarianism. In its classical form, it is an act consequentialism that sees happiness as the only source of intrinsic value. This means that an act is morally right if it produces "the greatest good for the greatest number" by increasing happiness and reducing suffering. Utilitarians do not deny that other things also have value, like health, friendship, and knowledge. However, they deny that these things have intrinsic value. Instead, they say that they have extrinsic value because they affect happiness and suffering. In this regard, they are desirable as a means but, unlike happiness, not as an end. The view that pleasure is the only thing with intrinsic value is called ethical or evaluative hedonism.
Classical utilitarianism was initially formulated by Jeremy Bentham at the end of the 18th century and further developed by John Stuart Mill. Bentham introduced the hedonic calculus to assess the value of consequences. Two key aspects of the hedonic calculus are the intensity and the duration of pleasure. According to this view, a pleasurable experience has a high value if it has a high intensity and lasts for a long time. A common criticism of Bentham's utilitarianism argued that its focus on the intensity of pleasure promotes an immoral lifestyle centered around indulgence in sensory gratification. Mill responded to this criticism by distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures. He stated that higher pleasures, like the intellectual satisfaction of reading a book, are more valuable than lower pleasures, like the sensory enjoyment of food and drink, even if their intensity and duration are the same. Since its original formulation, many variations of utilitarianism have developed, including the difference between act and rule utilitarianism and between maximizing and satisficing utilitarianism.
Deontology
Deontology assesses the moral rightness of actions based on a set of norms or principles. These norms describe the requirements that all actions need to follow. They may include principles like telling the truth, keeping promises, and not intentionally harming others. Unlike consequentialists, deontologists hold that the validity of general moral principles does not directly depend on their consequences. They state that these principles should be followed in every case since they express how actions are inherently right or wrong. According to moral philosopher David Ross, it is wrong to break a promise even if no harm comes from it. Deontologists are interested in which actions are right and often allow that there is a gap between what is right and what is good. Many focus on prohibitions and describe which acts are forbidden under any circumstances.
Agent-centered and patient-centered
Agent-centered deontological theories focus on the person who acts and the duties they have. Agent-centered theories often focus on the motives and intentions behind people's actions, highlighting the importance of acting for the right reasons. They tend to be agent-relative, meaning that the reasons for which people should act depend on personal circumstances. For example, a parent has a special obligation to their child, while a stranger does not have this kind of obligation toward a child they do not know. Patient-centered theories, by contrast, focus on the people affected by actions and the rights they have. An example is the requirement to treat other people as ends and not merely as a means to an end. This requirement can be used to argue, for example, that it is wrong to kill a person against their will even if this act would save the lives of several others. Patient-centered deontological theories are usually agent-neutral, meaning that they apply equally to everyone in a situation, regardless of their specific role or position.
Kantianism
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is one of the most well-known deontologists. He states that reaching outcomes that people desire, such as being happy, is not the main purpose of moral actions. Instead, he argues that there are universal principles that apply to everyone independent of their desires. He uses the term categorical imperative for these principles, saying that they have their source in the structure of practical reason and are true for all rational agents. According to Kant, to act morally is to act in agreement with reason as expressed by these principles while violating them is both immoral and irrational.
Kant provided several formulations of the categorical imperative. One formulation says that a person should only follow maxims that can be universalized. This means that the person would want everyone to follow the same maxim as a universal law applicable to everyone. Another formulation states that one should treat other people always as ends in themselves and never as mere means to an end. This formulation focuses on respecting and valuing other people for their own sake rather than using them in the pursuit of personal goals.
In either case, Kant says that what matters is to have a good will. A person has a good will if they respect the moral law and form their intentions and motives in agreement with it. Kant states that actions motivated in such a way are unconditionally good, meaning that they are good even in cases where they result in undesirable consequences.
Others
Divine command theory says that God is the source of morality. It states that moral laws are divine commands and that to act morally is to obey and follow God's will. While all divine command theorists agree that morality depends on God, there are disagreements about the precise content of the divine commands, and theorists belonging to different religions tend to propose different moral laws. For example, Christian and Jewish divine command theorists may argue that the Ten Commandments express God's will while Muslims may reserve this role for the teachings of the Quran.
Contractualists reject the reference to God as the source of morality and argue instead that morality is based on an explicit or implicit social contract between humans. They state that actual or hypothetical consent to this contract is the source of moral norms and duties. To determine which duties people have, contractualists often rely on a thought experiment about what rational people under ideal circumstances would agree on. For example, if they would agree that people should not lie then there is a moral obligation to refrain from lying. Because it relies on consent, contractualism is often understood as a patient-centered form of deontology. Famous social contract theorists include Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Rawls.
Discourse ethics also focuses on social agreement on moral norms but says that this agreement is based on communicative rationality. It aims to arrive at moral norms for pluralistic modern societies that encompass a diversity of viewpoints. A universal moral norm is seen as valid if all rational discourse participants do or would approve. This way, morality is not imposed by a single moral authority but arises from the moral discourse within society. This discourse should aim to establish an ideal speech situation to ensure fairness and inclusivity. In particular, this means that discourse participants are free to voice their different opinions without coercion but are at the same time required to justify them using rational argumentation.
Virtue ethics
The main concern of virtue ethics is how virtues are expressed in actions. As such, it is neither directly interested in the consequences of actions nor in universal moral duties. Virtues are positive character traits like honesty, courage, kindness, and compassion. They are usually understood as dispositions to feel, decide, and act in a certain manner by being wholeheartedly committed to this manner. Virtues contrast with vices, which are their harmful counterparts.
Virtue theorists usually say that the mere possession of virtues by itself is not sufficient. Instead, people should manifest virtues in their actions. An important factor is the practical wisdom, also called phronesis, of knowing when, how, and which virtue to express. For example, a lack of practical wisdom may lead courageous people to perform morally wrong actions by taking unnecessary risks that should better be avoided.
Different types of virtue ethics differ on how they understand virtues and their role in practical life. Eudaimonism is the original form of virtue theory developed in Ancient Greek philosophy and draws a close relation between virtuous behavior and happiness. It states that people flourish by living a virtuous life. Eudaimonist theories often hold that virtues are positive potentials residing in human nature and that actualizing these potentials results in leading a good and happy life. Agent-based theories, by contrast, see happiness only as a side effect and focus instead on the admirable traits and motivational characteristics expressed while acting. This is often combined with the idea that one can learn from exceptional individuals what those characteristics are. Feminist ethics of care are another form of virtue ethics. They emphasize the importance of interpersonal relationships and say that benevolence by caring for the well-being of others is one of the key virtues.
Influential schools of virtue ethics in ancient philosophy were Aristotelianism and Stoicism. According to Aristotle (384–322 BCE), each virtue is a golden mean between two types of vices: excess and deficiency. For example, courage is a virtue that lies between the deficient state of cowardice and the excessive state of recklessness. Aristotle held that virtuous action leads to happiness and makes people flourish in life. Stoicism emerged about 300 BCE and taught that, through virtue alone, people can achieve happiness characterized by a peaceful state of mind free from emotional disturbances. The Stoics advocated rationality and self-mastery to achieve this state. In the 20th century, virtue ethics experienced a resurgence thanks to philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum.
Other traditions
There are many other schools of normative ethics in addition to the three main traditions. Pragmatist ethics focuses on the role of practice and holds that one of the key tasks of ethics is to solve practical problems in concrete situations. It has certain similarities to utilitarianism and its focus on consequences but concentrates more on how morality is embedded in and relative to social and cultural contexts. Pragmatists tend to give more importance to habits than to conscious deliberation and understand morality as a habit that should be shaped in the right way.
Postmodern ethics agrees with pragmatist ethics about the cultural relativity of morality. It rejects the idea that there are objective moral principles that apply universally to all cultures and traditions. It asserts that there is no one coherent ethical code since morality itself is irrational and humans are morally ambivalent beings. Postmodern ethics instead focuses on how moral demands arise in specific situations as one encounters other people.
Ethical egoism is the view that people should act in their self-interest or that an action is morally right if the person acts for their own benefit. It differs from psychological egoism, which states that people actually follow their self-interest without claiming that they should do so. Ethical egoists may act in agreement with commonly accepted moral expectations and benefit other people, for example, by keeping promises, helping friends, and cooperating with others. However, they do so only as a means to promote their self-interest. Ethical egoism is often criticized as an immoral and contradictory position.
Normative ethics has a central place in most religions. Key aspects of Jewish ethics are to follow the 613 commandments of God according to the Mitzvah duty found in the Torah and to take responsibility for societal welfare. Christian ethics puts less emphasis on following precise laws and teaches instead the practice of selfless love, such as the Great Commandment to "Love your neighbor as yourself". The Five Pillars of Islam constitute a basic framework of Muslim ethics and focus on the practice of faith, prayer, charity, fasting during Ramadan, and pilgrimage to Mecca. Buddhists emphasize the importance of compassion and loving-kindness towards all sentient entities. A similar outlook is found in Jainism, which has non-violence as its principal virtue. Duty is a central aspect of Hindu ethics and is about fulfilling social obligations, which may vary depending on a person's social class and stage of life. Confucianism places great emphasis on harmony in society and sees benevolence as a key virtue. Taoism extends the importance of living in harmony to the whole world and teaches that people should practice effortless action by following the natural flow of the universe. Indigenous belief systems, like Native American philosophy and the African Ubuntu philosophy, often emphasize the interconnectedness of all living beings and the environment while stressing the importance of living in harmony with nature.
Metaethics
Metaethics is the branch of ethics that examines the nature, foundations, and scope of moral judgments, concepts, and values. It is not interested in which actions are right but in what it means for an action to be right and whether moral judgments are objective and can be true at all. It further examines the meaning of morality and other moral terms. Metaethics is a metatheory that operates on a higher level of abstraction than normative ethics by investigating its underlying assumptions. Metaethical theories typically do not directly judge which normative ethical theories are correct. However, metaethical theories can still influence normative theories by examining their foundational principles.
Metaethics overlaps with various branches of philosophy. On the level of ontology, it examines whether there are objective moral facts. Concerning semantics, it asks what the meaning of moral terms are and whether moral statements have a truth value. The epistemological side of metaethics discusses whether and how people can acquire moral knowledge. Metaethics overlaps with psychology because of its interest in how moral judgments motivate people to act. It also overlaps with anthropology since it aims to explain how cross-cultural differences affect moral assessments.
Basic concepts
Metaethics examines basic ethical concepts and their relations. Ethics is primarily concerned with normative statements about what ought to be the case, in contrast to descriptive statements, which are about what is the case. Duties and obligations express requirements of what people ought to do. Duties are sometimes defined as counterparts of the rights that always accompany them. According to this view, someone has a duty to benefit another person if this other person has the right to receive that benefit. Obligation and permission are contrasting terms that can be defined through each other: to be obligated to do something means that one is not permitted not to do it and to be permitted to do something means that one is not obligated not to do it. Some theorists define obligations in terms of values or what is good. When used in a general sense, good contrasts with bad. When describing people and their intentions, the term evil rather than bad is often employed.
Obligations are used to assess the moral status of actions, motives, and character traits. An action is morally right if it is in tune with a person's obligations and morally wrong if it violates them. Supererogation is a special moral status that applies to cases in which the agent does more than is morally required of them. To be morally responsible for an action usually means that the person possesses and exercises certain capacities or some form of control. If a person is morally responsible then it is appropriate to respond to them in certain ways, for example, by praising or blaming them.
Realism, relativism, and nihilism
A major debate in metaethics is about the ontological status of morality, questioning whether ethical values and principles are real. It examines whether moral properties exist as objective features independent of the human mind and culture rather than as subjective constructs or expressions of personal preferences and cultural norms.
Moral realists accept the claim that there are objective moral facts. This view implies that moral values are mind-independent aspects of reality and that there is an absolute fact about whether a given action is right or wrong. A consequence of this view is that moral requirements have the same ontological status as non-moral facts: it is an objective fact whether there is an obligation to keep a promise just as it is an objective fact whether a thing is rectangular. Moral realism is often associated with the claim that there are universal ethical principles that apply equally to everyone. It implies that if two people disagree about a moral evaluation then at least one of them is wrong. This observation is sometimes taken as an argument against moral realism since moral disagreement is widespread in most fields.
Moral relativists reject the idea that morality is an objective feature of reality. They argue instead that moral principles are human inventions. This means that a behavior is not objectively right or wrong but only subjectively right or wrong relative to a certain standpoint. Moral standpoints may differ between persons, cultures, and historical periods. For example, moral statements like "Slavery is wrong" or "Suicide is permissible" may be true in one culture and false in another. Some moral relativists say that moral systems are constructed to serve certain goals such as social coordination. According to this view, different societies and different social groups within a society construct different moral systems based on their diverging purposes. Emotivism provides a different explanation, stating that morality arises from moral emotions, which are not the same for everyone.
Moral nihilists deny the existence of moral facts. They reject the existence of both objective moral facts defended by moral realism and subjective moral facts defended by moral relativism. They believe that the basic assumptions underlying moral claims are misguided. Some moral nihilists conclude from this that anything is allowed. A slightly different view emphasizes that moral nihilism is not itself a moral position about what is allowed and prohibited but the rejection of any moral position. Moral nihilism, like moral relativism, recognizes that people judge actions as right or wrong from different perspectives. However, it disagrees that this practice involves morality and sees it as just one type of human behavior.
Naturalism and non-naturalism
A central disagreement among moral realists is between naturalism and non-naturalism. Naturalism states that moral properties are natural properties accessible to empirical observation. They are similar to the natural properties investigated by the natural sciences, like color and shape. Some moral naturalists hold that moral properties are a unique and basic type of natural property. Another view states that moral properties are real but not a fundamental part of reality and can be reduced to other natural properties, such as properties describing the causes of pleasure and pain.
Non-naturalism argues that moral properties form part of reality and argues that moral features are not identical or reducible to natural properties. This view is usually motivated by the idea that moral properties are unique because they express what should be the case. Proponents of this position often emphasize this uniqueness by claiming that it is a fallacy to define ethics in terms of natural entities or to infer prescriptive from descriptive statements.
Cognitivism and non-cognitivism
The metaethical debate between cognitivism and non-cognitivism is about the meaning of moral statements and is a part of the study of semantics. According to cognitivism, moral statements like "Abortion is morally wrong" and "Going to war is never morally justified" are truth-apt, meaning that they all have a truth value: they are either true or false. Cognitivism claims that moral statements have a truth value but is not interested in which truth value they have. It is often seen as the default position since moral statements resemble other statements, like "Abortion is a medical procedure" or "Going to war is a political decision", which have a truth value.
There is a close relation between the semantic theory of cognitivism and the ontological theory of moral realism. Moral realists assert that moral facts exist. This can be used to explain why moral statements are true or false: a statement is true if it is consistent with the facts and false otherwise. As a result, philosophers who accept one theory often accept the other as well. An exception is error theory, which combines cognitivism with moral nihilism by claiming that all moral statements are false because there are no moral facts.
Non-cognitivism is the view that moral statements lack a truth value. According to this view, the statement "Murder is wrong" is neither true nor false. Some non-cognitivists claim that moral statements have no meaning at all. A different interpretation is that they have another type of meaning. Emotivism says that they articulate emotional attitudes. According to this view, the statement "Murder is wrong" expresses that the speaker has a negative moral attitude towards murder or disapproves of it. Prescriptivism, by contrast, understands moral statements as commands. According to this view, stating that "Murder is wrong" expresses a command like "Do not commit murder".
Moral knowledge
The epistemology of ethics studies whether or how one can know moral truths. Foundationalist views state that some moral beliefs are basic and do not require further justification. Ethical intuitionism is one such view that says that humans have a special cognitive faculty through which they can know right from wrong. Intuitionists often argue that general moral truths, like "Lying is wrong", are self-evident and that it is possible to know them without relying on empirical experience. A different foundationalist position focuses on particular observations rather than general intuitions. It says that if people are confronted with a concrete moral situation, they can perceive whether right or wrong conduct was involved.
In contrast to foundationalists, coherentists say that there are no basic moral beliefs. They argue that beliefs form a complex network and mutually support and justify one another. According to this view, a moral belief can only amount to knowledge if it coheres with the rest of the beliefs in the network. Moral skeptics say that people are unable to distinguish between right and wrong behavior, thereby rejecting the idea that moral knowledge is possible. A common objection by critics of moral skepticism asserts that it leads to immoral behavior.
Thought experiments are used as a method in ethics to decide between competing theories. They usually present an imagined situation involving an ethical dilemma and explore how people's intuitions of right and wrong change based on specific details in that situation. For example, in Philippa Foot's trolley problem, a person can flip a switch to redirect a trolley from one track to another, thereby sacrificing the life of one person to save five. This scenario explores how the difference between doing and allowing harm affects moral obligations. Another thought experiment, proposed by Judith Jarvis Thomson, examines the moral implications of abortion by imagining a situation in which a person gets connected without their consent to an ill violinist. In this scenario, the violinist dies if the connection is severed, similar to how a fetus dies in the case of abortion. The thought experiment explores whether it would be morally permissible to sever the connection within the next nine months.
Moral motivation
On the level of psychology, metaethics is interested in how moral beliefs and experiences affect behavior. According to motivational internalists, there is a direct link between moral judgments and action. This means that every judgment about what is right motivates the person to act accordingly. For example, Socrates defends a strong form of motivational internalism by holding that a person can only perform an evil deed if they are unaware that it is evil. Weaker forms of motivational internalism say that people can act against their own moral judgments, for example, because of the weakness of the will. Motivational externalists accept that people can judge an act to be morally required without feeling a reason to engage in it. This means that moral judgments do not always provide motivational force. A closely related question is whether moral judgments can provide motivation on their own or need to be accompanied by other mental states, such as a desire to act morally.
Applied ethics
Applied ethics, also known as practical ethics, is the branch of ethics and applied philosophy that examines concrete moral problems encountered in real-life situations. Unlike normative ethics, it is not concerned with discovering or justifying universal ethical principles. Instead, it studies how those principles can be applied to specific domains of practical life, what consequences they have in these fields, and whether additional domain-specific factors need to be considered.
One of the main challenges of applied ethics is to breach the gap between abstract universal theories and their application to concrete situations. For example, an in-depth understanding of Kantianism or utilitarianism is usually not sufficient to decide how to analyze the moral implications of a medical procedure like abortion. One reason is that it may not be clear how the Kantian requirement of respecting everyone's personhood applies to a fetus or, from a utilitarian perspective, what the long-term consequences are in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number. This difficulty is particularly relevant to applied ethicists who employ a top-down methodology by starting from universal ethical principles and applying them to particular cases within a specific domain. A different approach is to use a bottom-up methodology, known as casuistry. This method does not start from universal principles but from moral intuitions about particular cases. It seeks to arrive at moral principles relevant to a specific domain, which may not be applicable to other domains. In either case, inquiry into applied ethics is often triggered by ethical dilemmas in which a person is subject to conflicting moral requirements.
Applied ethics covers issues belonging to both the private sphere, like right conduct in the family and close relationships, and the public sphere, like moral problems posed by new technologies and duties toward future generations. Major branches include bioethics, business ethics, and professional ethics. There are many other branches, and their domains of inquiry often overlap.
Bioethics
Bioethics covers moral problems associated with living organisms and biological disciplines. A key problem in bioethics is how features such as consciousness, being able to feel pleasure and pain, rationality, and personhood affect the moral status of entities. These differences concern, for example, how to treat non-living entities like rocks and non-sentient entities like plants in contrast to animals, and whether humans have a different moral status than other animals. According to anthropocentrism, only humans have a basic moral status. This suggests that all other entities possess a derivative moral status only insofar as they impact human life. Sentientism, by contrast, extends an inherent moral status to all sentient beings. Further positions include biocentrism, which also covers non-sentient lifeforms, and ecocentrism, which states that all of nature has a basic moral status.
Bioethics is relevant to various aspects of life and many professions. It covers a wide range of moral problems associated with topics like abortion, cloning, stem cell research, euthanasia, suicide, animal testing, intensive animal farming, nuclear waste, and air pollution.
Bioethics can be divided into medical ethics, animal ethics, and environmental ethics based on whether the ethical problems relate to humans, other animals, or nature in general. Medical ethics is the oldest branch of bioethics. The Hippocratic Oath is one of the earliest texts to engage in medical ethics by establishes ethical guidelines for medical practitioners like a prohibition to harm the patient. Medical ethics often addresses issues related to the start and end of life. It examines the moral status of fetuses, for example, whether they are full-fledged persons and whether abortion is a form of murder. Ethical issues also arise about whether a person has the right to end their life in cases of terminal illness or chronic suffering and if doctors may help them do so. Other topics in medical ethics include medical confidentiality, informed consent, research on human beings, organ transplantation, and access to healthcare.
Animal ethics examines how humans should treat other animals. This field often emphasizes the importance of animal welfare while arguing that humans should avoid or minimize the harm done to animals. There is wide agreement that it is wrong to torture animals for fun. The situation is more complicated in cases where harm is inflicted on animals as a side effect of the pursuit of human interests. This happens, for example, during factory farming, when using animals as food, and for research experiments on animals. A key topic in animal ethics is the formulation of animal rights. Animal rights theorists assert that animals have a certain moral status and that humans should respect this status when interacting with them. Examples of suggested animal rights include the right to life, the right to be free from unnecessary suffering, and the right to natural behavior in a suitable environment.
Environmental ethics deals with moral problems relating to the natural environment including animals, plants, natural resources, and ecosystems. In its widest sense, it covers the whole cosmos. In the domain of agriculture, this concerns the circumstances under which the vegetation of an area may be cleared to use it for farming and the implications of planting genetically modified crops. On a wider scale, environmental ethics addresses the problem of global warming and people's responsibility on the individual and collective levels, including topics like climate justice and duties towards future generations. Environmental ethicists often promote sustainable practices and policies directed at protecting and conserving ecosystems and biodiversity.
Business and professional ethics
Business ethics examines the moral implications of business conduct and how ethical principles apply to corporations and organizations. A key topic is corporate social responsibility, which is the responsibility of corporations to act in a manner that benefits society at large. Corporate social responsibility is a complex issue since many stakeholders are directly and indirectly involved in corporate decisions, such as the CEO, the board of directors, and the shareholders. A closely related topic is the question of whether corporations themselves, and not just their stakeholders, have moral agency. Business ethics further examines the role of honesty and fairness in business practices as well as the moral implications of bribery, conflict of interest, protection of investors and consumers, worker's rights, ethical leadership, and corporate philanthropy.
Professional ethics is a closely related field that studies ethical principles applying to members of a specific profession, like engineers, medical doctors, lawyers, and teachers. It is a diverse field since different professions often have different responsibilities. Principles applying to many professions include that the professional has the required expertise for the intended work and that they have personal integrity and are trustworthy. Further principles are to serve the interest of their target group, follow client confidentiality, and respect and uphold the client's rights, such as informed consent. More precise requirements often vary between professions. A cornerstone of engineering ethics is to protect public safety, health, and well-being. Legal ethics emphasizes the importance of respect for justice, personal integrity, and confidentiality. Key factors in journalism ethics include accuracy, truthfulness, independence, and impartiality as well as proper attribution to avoid plagiarism.
Other subfields
Many other fields of applied ethics are discussed in the academic literature. Communication ethics covers moral principles of communicative conduct. Two key issues in it are freedom of speech and speech responsibility. Freedom of speech concerns the ability to articulate one's opinions and ideas without the threats of punishment and censorship. Speech responsibility is about being accountable for the consequences of communicative action and inaction. A closely related field is information ethics, which focuses on the moral implications of creating, controlling, disseminating, and using information.
The ethics of technology examines the moral issues associated with the creation and use of any artifact, from simple spears to high-tech computers and nanotechnology. Central topics in the ethics of technology include the risks associated with creating new technologies, their responsible use, and questions about human enhancement through technological means, such as performance-enhancing drugs and genetic enhancement. Important subfields include computer ethics, ethics of artificial intelligence, machine ethics, ethics of nanotechnology, and nuclear ethics.
The ethics of war investigates moral problems of war and violent conflicts. According to just war theory, waging war is morally justified if it fulfills certain conditions. These conditions are commonly divided into requirements concerning the cause to initiate violent activities, such as self-defense, and the way those violent activities are conducted, such as avoiding excessive harm to civilians in the pursuit of legitimate military targets. Military ethics is a closely related field that is interested in the conduct of military personnel. It governs questions of the circumstances under which they are permitted to kill enemies, destroy infrastructure, and put the lives of their own troops at risk. Additional topics are the recruitment, training, and discharge of military personnel.
Further fields of applied ethics include political ethics, which examines the moral dimensions of political decisions, educational ethics, which covers ethical issues related to proper teaching practices, and sexual ethics, which addresses the moral implications of sexual behavior.
Related fields
Value theory
Value theory, also called axiology, is the philosophical study of value. It examines the nature and types of value. A central distinction is between intrinsic and instrumental value. An entity has intrinsic value if it is good in itself or good for its own sake. An entity has instrumental value if it is valuable as a means to something else, for example, by causing something that has intrinsic value. Further topics include what kinds of things have value and how valuable they are. For instance, axiological hedonists say that pleasure is the only source of intrinsic value and that the magnitude of value corresponds to the degree of pleasure. Axiological pluralists, by contrast, hold that there are different sources of intrinsic value, such as happiness, knowledge, and beauty.
There are disagreements about the exact relation between value theory and ethics. Some philosophers characterize value theory as a subdiscipline of ethics while others see value theory as the broader term that encompasses other fields besides ethics, such as aesthetics and political philosophy. A different characterization sees the two disciplines as overlapping but distinct fields. The term axiological ethics is sometimes used for the discipline studying this overlap, that is, the part of ethics that studies values. The two disciplines are sometimes distinguished based on their focus: ethics is about moral behavior or what is right while value theory is about value or what is good. Some ethical theories, like consequentialism, stand very close to value theory by defining what is right in terms of what is good. But this is not true for ethics in general and deontological theories tend to reject the idea that what is good can be used to define what is right.
Moral psychology
Moral psychology explores the psychological foundations and processes involved in moral behavior. It is an empirical science that studies how humans think and act in moral contexts. It is interested in how moral reasoning and judgments take place, how moral character forms, what sensitivity people have to moral evaluations, and how people attribute and react to moral responsibility.
One of its key topics is moral development or the question of how morality develops on a psychological level from infancy to adulthood. According to Lawrence Kohlberg, children go through different stages of moral development as they understand moral principles first as fixed rules governing reward and punishment, then as conventional social norms, and later as abstract principles of what is objectively right across societies. A closely related question is whether and how people can be taught to act morally.
Evolutionary ethics, a closely related field, explores how evolutionary processes have shaped ethics. One of its key ideas is that natural selection is responsible for moral behavior and moral sensitivity. It interprets morality as an adaptation to evolutionary pressure that augments fitness by offering a selective advantage. Altruism, for example, can provide benefits to group survival by improving cooperation. Some theorists, like Mark Rowlands, argue that morality is not limited to humans, meaning that some non-human animals act based on moral emotions. Others explore evolutionary precursors to morality in non-human animals.
Descriptive ethics
Descriptive ethics, also called comparative ethics, studies existing moral codes, practices, and beliefs. It investigates and compares moral phenomena in different societies and different groups within a society. It aims to provide a value-neutral and empirical description without judging or justifying which practices are objectively right. For instance, the question of how nurses think about the ethical implications of abortion belongs to descriptive ethics. Another example is descriptive business ethics, which describes ethical standards in the context of business, including common practices, official policies, and employee opinions. Descriptive ethics also has a historical dimension by exploring how moral practices and beliefs have changed over time.
Descriptive ethics is a multidisciplinary field that is covered by disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, and history. Its empirical outlook contrasts with the philosophical inquiry into normative questions, such as which ethical principles are correct and how to justify them.
History
The history of ethics studies how moral philosophy has developed and evolved in the course of history. It has its origin in ancient civilizations. In ancient Egypt, the concept of Maat was used as an ethical principle to guide behavior and maintain order by emphasizing the importance of truth, balance, and harmony. In ancient India starting in the 2nd millennium BCE, the Vedas and later Upanishads were composed as the foundational texts of Hindu philosophy and discussed the role of duty and the consequences of one's actions. Buddhist ethics originated in ancient India between the sixth and the fifth centuries BCE and advocated compassion, non-violence, and the pursuit of enlightenment. Ancient China in the 6th century BCE saw the emergence of Confucianism, which focuses on moral conduct and self-cultivation by acting in agreement with virtues, and Daoism, which teaches that human behavior should be in harmony with the natural order of the universe.
In ancient Greece, Socrates emphasized the importance of inquiry into what a good life is by critically questioning established ideas and exploring concepts like virtue, justice, courage, and wisdom. According to Plato, to lead a good life means that the different parts of the soul are in harmony with each other. For Aristotle (384–322 BCE), a good life is associated with being happy by cultivating virtues and flourishing. Starting in the 4th century BCE, the close relation between right action and happiness was also explored by the Hellenistic schools of Epicureanism, which recommended a simple lifestyle without indulging in sensory pleasures, and Stoicism, which advocated living in tune with reason and virtue while practicing self-mastery and becoming immune to disturbing emotions.
Ethical thought in the medieval period was strongly influenced by religious teachings. Christian philosophers interpreted moral principles as divine commands originating from God. Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274 CE) developed natural law ethics by claiming that ethical behavior consists in following the laws and order of nature, which he believed were created by God. In the Islamic world, philosophers like Al-Farabi and Avicenna (980–1037 CE) synthesized ancient Greek philosophy with the ethical teachings of Islam while emphasizing the harmony between reason and faith. In medieval India, Hindu philosophers like Adi Shankara and Ramanuja (1017–1137 CE) saw the practice of spirituality to attain liberation as the highest goal of human behavior.
Moral philosophy in the modern period was characterized by a shift toward a secular approach to ethics. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) identified self-interest as the primary drive of humans. He concluded that it would lead to "a war of every man against every man" unless a social contract is established to avoid this outcome. David Hume (1711–1776) thought that only moral sentiments, like empathy, can motivate ethical actions while he saw reason not as a motivating factor but only as what anticipates the consequences of possible actions. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), by contrast, saw reason as the source of morality. He formulated a deontological theory, according to which the ethical value of actions depends on their conformity with moral laws independent of their outcome. These laws take the form of categorical imperatives, which are universal requirements that apply to every situation. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) saw Kant's categorical imperative on its own as an empty formalism and emphasized the role of social institutions in providing concrete content to moral duties. According to the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the demands of ethical duties are sometimes suspended when doing God's will. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) formulated criticisms of both Christian and Kantian morality. Another influential development in this period was the formulation of utilitarianism by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). According to the utilitarian doctrine, actions should promote happiness while reducing suffering and the right action is the one that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
An important development in 20th-century ethics in analytic philosophy was the emergence of metaethics. Significant early contributions to this field were made by G. E. Moore (1873–1958), who argued that moral values are essentially different from other properties found in the natural world. R. M. Hare (1919–2002) followed this idea in formulating his prescriptivism, which states that moral statements are commands that, unlike regular judgments, are neither true nor false. J. L. Mackie (1917–1981) suggested that every moral statement is false since there are no moral facts. An influential argument for moral realism was made by Derek Parfit (1942–2017), who argued that morality concerns objective features of reality that give people reasons to act in one way or another. Bernard Williams (1929–2003) agreed with the close relation between reasons and ethics but defended a subjective view instead that sees reasons as internal mental states that may or may not reflect external reality. Another development in this period was the revival of ancient virtue ethics by philosophers like Philippa Foot (1920–2010). In the field of political philosophy, John Rawls (1921–2002) relied on Kantian ethics to analyze social justice as a form of fairness. In continental philosophy, phenomenologists such as Max Scheler (1874–1928) and Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950) built ethical systems based on the claim that values have objective reality that can be investigated using the phenomenological method. Existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), by contrast, held that values are created by humans and explored the consequences of this view in relation to individual freedom, responsibility, and authenticity. This period also saw the emergence of feminist ethics, which questions traditional ethical assumptions associated with a male perspective and puts alternative concepts, like care, at the center.
See also
Index of ethics articles
Outline of ethics
Practical philosophy
Science of morality
References
Notes
Citations
Sources
External links
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Christian culture | Christian culture generally includes all the cultural practices which have developed around the religion of Christianity. There are variations in the application of Christian beliefs in different cultures and traditions.
Christian culture has influenced and assimilated much from the Middle Eastern, Zoroastrianism, Greco-Roman, Byzantine, Western culture, Slavic and Caucasian culture. During the early Roman Empire, Christendom has been divided in the pre-existing Greek East and Latin West. Consequently, different versions of the Christian cultures arose with their own rites and practices, Christianity remains culturally diverse in its Western and Eastern branches.
Christianity played a prominent role in the development of Western civilization, in particular, the Catholic Church and Protestantism. Western culture, throughout most of its history, has been nearly equivalent to Christian culture. Outside the Western world, Christianity has had an influence on various cultures, such as in Africa and Asia.
Christians have made a noted contributions to human progress in a broad and diverse range of fields, both historically and in modern times, including science and technology, medicine, fine arts and architecture, politics, literatures, music, philanthropy, philosophy, ethics, humanism, theatre and business. According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes a review of Nobel prizes award between 1901 and 2000 reveals that (65.4%) of Nobel Prizes Laureates, have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference.
Cultural influence
The Bible has had a profound influence on Western civilization and on cultures around the globe; it has contributed to the formation of Western law, art, texts, and education. With a literary tradition spanning two millennia, the Bible is one of the most influential works ever written. From practices of personal hygiene to philosophy and ethics, the Bible has directly and indirectly influenced politics and law, war and peace, sexual morals, marriage and family life, toilet etiquette, letters and learning, the arts, economics, social justice, medical care and more. The Gutenberg Bible was the first book printed in Europe using movable type.
Since the spread of Christianity from the Levant to Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Europe, North Africa and Horn of Africa during the early Roman Empire, Christendom has been divided in the pre-existing Greek East and Latin West. Consequently, different versions of the Christian cultures arose with their own rites and practices, centered around the cities such as Rome (Western Christianity) and Carthage, whose communities was called Western or Latin Christendom, and Constantinople (Eastern Christianity), Antioch (Syriac Christianity), Kerala (Indian Christianity) and Alexandria, among others, whose communities were called Eastern or Oriental Christendom. The Byzantine Empire was one of the peaks in Christian history and Christian civilization. From the 11th to 13th centuries, Latin Christendom rose to the central role of the Western world and Western culture.
Outside the Western world, Christianity has had an influence on various cultures, such as in Africa, the Near East, Middle East, Central Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Scholars and intellectuals agree Christians in the Middle East have made significant contributions to Arab and Islamic civilization since the introduction of Islam, and they have had a significant impact contributing the culture of the Mashriq, Turkey, and Iran. Eastern Christian scientists and scholars of the medieval Islamic world (particularly Jacobite and Nestorian Christians) contributed to the Arab Islamic civilization during the reign of the Umayyad and the Abbasid, by translating works of Greek philosophers to Syriac and afterwards, to Arabic. They also excelled in philosophy, science, theology, and medicine.
Historian Paul Legutko of Stanford University said the Catholic Church is "at the center of the development of the values, ideas, science, laws, and institutions which constitute what we call Western civilization." The Eastern Orthodox Church has played a prominent role in the history and culture of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Near East. The Oriental Orthodox Churches have played a prominent role in the history and culture of Armenia, Egypt, Turkey, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and parts of the Middle East and India. Protestants have extensively developed a unique culture that has made major contributions in education, the humanities and sciences, the political and social order, the economy and the arts, and many other fields.
Influence on Western culture
Christianity played a prominent role in the development of Western civilization, in particular, the Catholic Church and Protestantism. Western culture, throughout most of its history, has been nearly equivalent to Christian culture, and much of the population of the Western hemisphere could broadly be described as cultural Christians. The notion of Europe and the Western world has been intimately connected with the concept of Christianity and Christendom, many even consider Christianity to be the link that created a unified European identity, although some progress originated elsewhere: Renaissance and Romanticism began with the curiosity and passion of the pagan world of old.
Although Western culture contained several polytheistic religions during its early years under the Greek and Roman Empires, as the centralized Roman power waned, the dominance of the Catholic Church was the only consistent force in Western Europe. Until the Age of Enlightenment, Christian culture guided the course of philosophy, literature, art, music, and science. Christian disciplines of the respective arts have subsequently developed into Christian philosophy, Christian art, Christian music, Christian literature, etc. Art and literature, law, education, and politics were preserved in the teachings of the Church, in an environment that, otherwise, would have probably seen their loss. The Church founded many cathedrals, universities, monasteries and seminaries, some of which continue to exist today. Medieval Christianity created the first modern universities. The Catholic Church established a hospital system in Medieval Europe that vastly improved upon the Roman valetudinaria. These hospitals were established to cater to "particular social groups marginalized by poverty, sickness, and age", according to historian of hospitals, Guenter Risse. Christianity also had a strong impact on all other aspects of life: marriage and family, education, the humanities and sciences, the political and social order, the economy, and the arts.
Christianity had a significant impact on education and science and medicine as the church created the basis of the Western system of education, and was the sponsor of founding universities in the Western world as the university is generally regarded as an institution that has its origin in the Medieval Christian setting. Many clerics throughout history have made significant contributions to science and Jesuits in particular have made numerous significant contributions to the development of science. Some scholars state that Christianity contributed to the rise of the Scientific Revolution. Protestantism also has had an important influence on science. According to the Merton Thesis, there was a positive correlation between the rise of English Puritanism and German Pietism on the one hand, and early experimental science on the other.
The cultural influence of Christianity includes social welfare, founding hospitals, economics (as the Protestant work ethic), natural law (which would later influence the creation of international law), politics, architecture, literature, personal hygiene (ablution), and family life. Historically, extended families were the basic family unit in the Christian culture and countries.
Christianity played a role in ending practices common among pagan societies, such as human sacrifice, slavery, infanticide and polygamy. Scientists such as Newton and Galileo believed that God would be better understood if God's creation was better understood.
Architecture
The architecture of cathedrals, basilicas and abbey churches is characterised by the buildings' large scale and follows one of several branching traditions of form, function and style that all ultimately derive from the Early Christian architectural traditions established in the Constantinian period.
Cathedrals in particular, as well as many abbey churches and basilicas, have certain complex structural forms that are found less often in parish churches. They also tend to display a higher level of contemporary architectural style and the work of accomplished craftsmen, and occupy a status both ecclesiastical and social that an ordinary parish church does not have. Such a cathedral or great church is generally one of the finest buildings within its region and is a focus of local pride. Many cathedrals and basilicas, and a number of abbey churches are among the world's most renowned works of architecture. These include St. Peter's Basilica, Notre Dame de Paris, Cologne Cathedral, Salisbury Cathedral, Prague Cathedral, Lincoln Cathedral, the Basilica of St Denis, the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, the Basilica of San Vitale, St Mark's Basilica, Westminster Abbey, Saint Basil's Cathedral, Washington National Cathedral, Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, Gaudí's incomplete Sagrada Familia and the ancient church of Hagia Sophia, now a museum. Hagia Sophia has been described as architectural and cultural icon of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox civilization.
The earliest large churches date from Late Antiquity. As Christianity and the construction of churches and cathedrals spread throughout the world, their manner of building was dependent upon local materials and local techniques. Different styles of architecture developed and their fashion spread, carried by the establishment of monastic orders, by the posting of bishops from one region to another and by the travelling of master stonemasons who served as architects. The styles of the great church buildings are successively known as Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, various Revival styles of the late 18th to early 20th centuries and Modern. Overlaid on each of the academic styles are the regional characteristics. Some of these characteristics are so typical of a particular country or region that they appear, regardless of style, in the architecture of churches designed many centuries apart.
Art
Christian art is sacred art which uses themes and imagery from Christianity. Most Christian groups use or have used art to some extent, although some have had strong objections to some forms of religious image, and there have been major periods of iconoclasm within Christianity.
Images of Jesus and narrative scenes from the Life of Christ are the most common subjects, and scenes from the Old Testament play a part in the art of most denominations. Images of the Virgin Mary and saints are much rarer in Protestant art than that of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
Christianity makes far wider use of images than related religions, in which figurative representations are forbidden, such as Islam and Judaism. However, there is also a considerable history of aniconism in Christianity from various periods.
Illumination
An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration. The earliest surviving substantive illuminated manuscripts are from the period AD 400 to 600, primarily produced in Ireland, Constantinople and Italy. The majority of surviving manuscripts are from the Middle Ages, although many illuminated manuscripts survive from the 15th-century Renaissance, along with a very limited number from Late Antiquity.
Most illuminated manuscripts were created as codices, which had superseded scrolls; some isolated single sheets survive. A very few illuminated manuscript fragments survive on papyrus. Most medieval manuscripts, illuminated or not, were written on parchment (most commonly of calf, sheep, or goat skin), but most manuscripts important enough to illuminate were written on the best quality of parchment, called vellum, traditionally made of unsplit calfskin, although high quality parchment from other skins was also called parchment.
Iconography
Christian art began, about two centuries after Christ, by borrowing motifs from Roman Imperial imagery, classical Greek and Roman religion and popular art. Religious images are used to some extent by the Abrahamic Christian faith, and often contain highly complex iconography, which reflects centuries of accumulated tradition. In the Late Antique period iconography began to be standardised, and to relate more closely to biblical texts, although many gaps in the canonical Gospel narratives were plugged with matter from the apocryphal gospels. Eventually the Church would succeed in weeding most of these out, but some remain, like the ox and ass in the Nativity of Christ.
An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Orthodox Christianity. Christianity has used symbolism from its very beginnings. In both East and West, numerous iconic types of Christ, Mary and saints and other subjects were developed; the number of named types of icons of Mary, with or without the infant Christ, was especially large in the East, whereas Christ Pantocrator was much the commonest image of Christ.
Christian symbolism invests objects or actions with an inner meaning expressing Christian ideas. Christianity has borrowed from the common stock of significant symbols known to most periods and to all regions of the world. Religious symbolism is effective when it appeals to both the intellect and the emotions. Especially important depictions of Mary include the Hodegetria and Panagia types. Traditional models evolved for narrative paintings, including large cycles covering the events of the Life of Christ, the Life of the Virgin, parts of the Old Testament, and, increasingly, the lives of popular saints. Especially in the West, a system of attributes developed for identifying individual figures of saints by a standard appearance and symbolic objects held by them; in the East they were more likely to identified by text labels.
Each saint has a story and a reason why he or she led an exemplary life. Symbols have been used to tell these stories throughout the history of the Church. A number of Christian saints are traditionally represented by a symbol or iconic motif associated with their life, termed an attribute or emblem, in order to identify them. The study of these forms part of iconography in Art history.
Eastern Christian art
The dedication of Constantinople as capital in 330 AD created a great new Christian artistic centre for the Eastern Roman Empire, which soon became a separate political unit. Major Constantinopolitan churches built under Constantine and his son, Constantius II, included the original foundations of Hagia Sophia and the Church of the Holy Apostles. As the Western Roman Empire disintegrated and was taken over by "barbarian" peoples, the art of the Byzantine Empire reached levels of sophistication, power and artistry not previously seen in Christian art, and set the standards for those parts of the West still in touch with Constantinople.
This achievement was checked by the controversy over the use of graven images, and the proper interpretation of the Second Commandment, which led to the crisis of Iconoclasm or destruction of religious images, which racked the Empire between 726 and 843. The restoration of Orthodoxy resulted in a strict standardization of religious imagery within the Eastern Church. Byzantine art became increasingly conservative, as the form of images themselves, many accorded divine origin or thought to have been be painted by Saint Luke or other figures, was held to have a status not far off that of a scriptural text. They could be copied, but not improved upon. As a concession to Iconoclast sentiment, monumental religious sculpture was effectively banned. Neither of these attitudes were held in Western Europe, but Byzantine art nonetheless had great influence there until the High Middle Ages, and remained very popular long after that, with vast numbers of icons of the Cretan School exported to Europe as late as the Renaissance. Where possible, Byzantine artists were borrowed for projects such as mosaics in Venice and Palermo. The enigmatic frescoes at Castelseprio may be an example of work by a Greek artist working in Italy.
The art of Eastern Catholicism has always been rather closer to the Orthodox art of Greece and Russia, and in countries near the Orthodox world, notably Poland, Catholic art has many Orthodox influences. The Black Madonna of Częstochowa may well have been of Byzantine origin – it has been repainted and this is hard to tell. Other images that are certainly of Greek origin, like the Salus Populi Romani and Our Lady of Perpetual Help, both icons in Rome, have been subjects of specific veneration for centuries.
Although the influence has often been resisted, especially in Russia, Catholic art has also affected Orthodox depictions in many respects, especially in countries like Romania, and in the post-Byzantine Cretan School, which led Greek Orthodox art under Venetian rule in the 15th and 16th centuries. El Greco left Crete when relatively young, but Michael Damaskinos returned after a brief period in Venice, and was able to switch between Italian and Greek styles. Even the traditionalist Theophanes the Cretan, working mainly on Mount Athos, nevertheless shows unmistakable Western influence.
Many Eastern Orthodox states in Eastern Europe, as well as to some degree the Muslim states of the eastern Mediterranean, preserved many aspects of the empire's culture and art for centuries afterward. A number of states contemporary with the Byzantine Empire were culturally influenced by it, without actually being part of it (the "Byzantine commonwealth"). These included Bulgaria, Serbia, and Kievan Rus', as well as some non-Orthodox states like the Republic of Venice and the Kingdom of Sicily, which had close ties to the Byzantine Empire despite being in other respects part of western European culture. Art produced by Eastern Orthodox Christians living in the Ottoman Empire is often called "post-Byzantine". Certain artistic traditions that originated in the Byzantine Empire, particularly in regard to icon painting and church architecture, are maintained in Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Russia and other Eastern Orthodox countries to the present day.
Catholic art
Roman Catholic art consists of all visual works produced in an attempt to illustrate, supplement and portray in tangible form the teachings of the Catholic Church. This includes sculpture, painting, mosaics, metalwork, embroidery and even architecture. Catholic art has played a leading role in the history and development of Western art since at least the 4th century. The principal subject matter of Catholic art has been the life and times of Jesus Christ, along with those of his disciples, the saints, and the events of the Jewish Old Testament.
The earliest surviving art works are the painted frescoes on the walls of the catacombs and meeting houses of the persecuted Christians of the Roman Empire. The Christian Church in Rome was influenced by the Roman style of art and the religious Christian artists of the time. The stone sarcophagi of Roman Christians exhibit the earliest surviving carved statuary of Jesus, Mary and other biblical figures. The legalisation of Christianity transformed Catholic art, which adopted richer forms such as mosaics and illuminated manuscripts. The iconoclasm controversy briefly divided the eastern and western churches, after which artistic development progressed in separate directions. Romanesque and Gothic art flowered in the Western Church as the style of painting and statuary moved in an increasingly naturalistic direction. The Protestant Reformation produced new waves of image-destruction, to which the Church responded with the dramatic and emotive Baroque and Rococo styles. In the 19th century the leadership in western art moved away from the Catholic Church which, after embracing historical revivalism was increasingly affected by the modernist movement, a movement that in its "rebellion" against nature, counters the Church's emphasis on nature as a good creation of God.
Renaissance artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, and Titian, were among a multitude of innovative virtuosos sponsored by the Church.
British art historian Kenneth Clark wrote that Western Europe's first "great age of civilisation" was ready to begin around the year 1000. From 1100, he wrote, monumental abbeys and cathedrals were constructed and decorated with sculptures, hangings, mosaics and works belonging one of the greatest epochs of art and providing stark contrast to the monotonous and cramped conditions of ordinary living during the period. Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St. Denis is considered an influential early patron of Gothic architecture and believed that love of beauty brought people closer to God: "The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material". Clarke calls this "the intellectual background of all the sublime works of art of the next century and in fact has remained the basis of our belief of the value of art until today".
Later, during The Renaissance and Counter-Reformation, Catholic artists produced many of the unsurpassed masterpieces of Western art – often inspired by biblical themes: from Michelangelo's Moses and David and Pietà sculptures, to Da Vinci's Last Supper and Raphael's various Madonna paintings. Referring to a "great outburst of creative energy such as took place in Rome between 1620 and 1660", Kenneth Clarke wrote:
[W]ith a single exception, the great artists of the time were all sincere, conforming Christians. Guercino spent much of his mornings in prayer; Bernini frequently went into retreats and practised the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius; Rubens attended Mass every morning before beginning work. The exception was Caravaggio, who was like the hero of a modern play, except that he happened to paint very well.
This conformism was not based on fear of the Inquisition, but on the perfectly simple belief that the faith which had inspired the great saints of the preceding generation was something by which a man should regulate his life.
Protestant art
The Protestant Reformation during the 16th century in Europe almost entirely rejected the existing tradition of Catholic art, and very often destroyed as much of it as it could reach. A new artistic tradition developed, producing far smaller quantities of art that followed Protestant agendas and diverged drastically from the southern European tradition and the humanist art produced during the High Renaissance. In turn, the Catholic Counter-Reformation both reacted against and responded to Protestant criticisms of art in Roman Catholicism to produce a more stringent style of Catholic art. Protestant religious art both embraced Protestant values and assisted in the proliferation of Protestantism, but the amount of religious art produced in Protestant countries was hugely reduced. Artists in Protestant countries diversified into secular forms of art like history painting, landscape painting, portrait painting and still life.
Prominent painters with Protestant background were, for example, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Lucas Cranach, Rembrandt, and Vincent van Gogh. World literature was enriched by the works of Edmund Spenser, John Milton, John Bunyan, John Donne, John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, William Wordsworth, Jonathan Swift, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Matthew Arnold, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Theodor Fontane, Washington Irving, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Stearns Eliot, John Galsworthy, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, John Updike, and many others.
Education
The university is generally regarded as an institution that has its origin in the Medieval Christian setting. Prior to the establishment of universities, European higher education took place for hundreds of years in Christian cathedral schools or monastic schools (Scholae monasticae), in which monks and nuns taught classes; evidence of these immediate forerunners of the later university at many places dates back to the 6th century AD.
Missionary activity for the Catholic Church has always incorporated education of evangelized peoples as part of its social ministry. History shows that in evangelized lands, the first people to operate schools were Roman Catholics. In some countries, the Church is the main provider of education or significantly supplements government forms of education. Presently, the Church operates the world's largest non-governmental school system. Many of Western Civilization's most influential universities were founded by the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church founded the West's first universities, which were preceded by the schools attached to monasteries and cathedrals, and generally staffed by monks and friars. Universities began springing up in Italian towns like Salerno, which became a leading medical school, translating the work of Greek and Arabic physicians into Latin. Bologna University became the most influential of the early universities, which first specialised in canon law and civil law. Paris University, specialising in such topics as theology, came to rival Bologna under the supervision of Notre Dame Cathedral. Oxford University in England later came rival Paris in Theology and Salamanca University was founded in Spain in 1243. According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, the universities benefitted from the use of Latin, the common language of the Church, and its internationalist reach, and their role was to "teach, argue and reason within a Christian framework". The medieval universities of Western Christendom were well-integrated across all of Western Europe, encouraged freedom of enquiry and produced a great variety of fine scholars and natural philosophers, including Robert Grosseteste of the University of Oxford, an early expositor of a systematic method of scientific experimentation; and Saint Albert the Great, a pioneer of biological field research The Catholic church has always been involved in education, since the founding of the first universities of Europe. It runs and sponsors thousands of primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities throughout the world.
As the Reformers wanted all members of the church to be able to read the Bible, education on all levels got a strong boost. Compulsory education for both boys and girls was introduced. For example, the Puritans who established Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1628 founded Harvard College only eight years later. About a dozen other colleges followed in the 18th century, including Yale University (1701). Pennsylvania also became a centre of learning. While Princeton University was a Presbyterian foundation. Protestantism also initiated translations of the Bible into national languages and hereby supported the development of national literatures.
A large number of mainline Protestants have played leadership roles in many aspects of American life, including politics, business, science, the arts, and education. They founded most of the country's leading institutes of higher education. The Ivy League universities have strong White Anglo-Saxon Protestant historical ties, and their influence continues today. Until about World War II, Ivy League universities were composed largely of WASP students.
Some of the first colleges and universities in America, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Amherst, all were founded by the Mainline Protestantism, as were later Carleton, Duke, Oberlin, Beloit, Pomona, Rollins and Colorado College.
According to Pew Center study there is correlation between education and income, about (59%) of American Anglican have a graduate and post-graduate degree, and about (56%) of Episcopalians and (47%) of Presbyterians and (46%) United Church of Christ, have a graduate and post-graduate degree.
A Pew Center study about religion and education around the world in 2016, found that Christians ranked as the second most educated religious group around in the world after Jews with an average of 9.3 years of schooling, and the highest of years of schooling among Christians found in Germany (13.6), New Zealand (13.5) and Estonia (13.1). Christians were also found to have the second highest number of graduate and post-graduate degrees per capita while in absolute numbers ranked in the first place (220 million). Between the various Christian communities, Singapore outranks other nations in terms of Christians who obtain a university degree in institutions of higher education (67%), followed by the Christians of Israel (63%), and the Christians of Georgia (57%).
According to the study, Christians in North America, Europe, Middle East, North Africa and Asia-Pacific regions are highly educated since many of the world universities were built by the historic Christian Churches, in addition to the historical evidence that "Christian monks built libraries and, in the days before printing presses, preserved important earlier writings produced in Latin, Greek and Arabic". According to the same study, Christians have a significant amount of gender equality in educational attainment, and the study suggests that one of the reasons is the encouragement of the Protestant Reformers in promoting the education of women, which led to the eradication of illiteracy among females in Protestant communities.
According to the same study "there is a large and pervasive gap in educational attainment between Muslims and Christians in sub-Saharan Africa" as Muslim adults in this region are far less educated than their Christian counterparts, with scholars suggesting that this gap is due to the educational facilities that were created by Christian missionaries during the colonial era for fellow believers.
Literature and poetry
Christian literature is writing that deals with Christian themes and incorporates the Christian world view. This constitutes a huge body of extremely varied writing. Christian poetry is any poetry that contains Christian teachings, themes, or references. The influence of Christianity on poetry has been great in any area that Christianity has taken hold. Christian poems often directly reference the Bible, while others provide allegory.
While falling within the strict definition of literature, the Bible is not generally considered literature. However, the Bible has been treated and appreciated as literature; the Bible is a corner stone of Western civilization. The King James Version in particular has long been considered a masterpiece of English prose, whatever may be thought of its religious significance. The Authorized Version has been called "the most influential version of the most influential book in the world, in what is now its most influential language", "the most important book in English religion and culture", and "the most celebrated book in the English-speaking world". David Crystal has estimated that it is responsible for 257 idioms in English, examples include feet of clay and reap the whirlwind. Furthermore, prominent atheist figures such as the late Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have praised the King James Version as being "a giant step in the maturing of English literature" and "a great work of literature", respectively, with Dawkins then adding, "A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian". Several retellings of the Bible, or parts of the Bible, have also been made with the aim of emphasising its literary qualities. With estimated sales of over 5 billion copies, the Bible is widely considered to be the best-selling book of all time. It sells approximately 100 million copies annually, and has been a major influence on literature and history, especially in the West, where the Gutenberg Bible was the first book printed using movable type.
In Byzantine literature, four different cultural elements are recognised: the Greek, the Christian, the Roman, and the Oriental. Byzantine literature is often classified in five groups: historians and annalists, encyclopaedists (Patriarch Photios, Michael Psellus, and Michael Choniates are regarded as the greatest encyclopaedists of Byzantium) and essayists, and writers of secular poetry. The only genuine heroic epic of the Byzantines is the Digenis Acritas. The remaining two groups include the new literary species: ecclesiastical and theological literature, and popular poetry. And it was in Alexandria that Graeco-Oriental Christianity had its birth. There the Septuagint translation had been made; there that that fusion of Greek philosophy and Jewish religion took place which culminated in Philo; there flourished the mystic speculative Neoplatonism associated with Plotinus and Porphyry. At Alexandria the great Greek ecclesiastical writers worked alongside pagan rhetoricians and philosophers; several were born here, e.g. Origen, Athanasius, and his opponent Arius, also Cyril and Synesius. On Egyptian soil monasticism began and thrived. After Alexandria, Antioch held great prestige, where a school of Christian commentators flourished under St. John Chrysostom and where later arose the Christian universal chronicles. In surrounding Syria, we find the germs of Greek ecclesiastical poetry, while from neighboring Palestine came St. John of Damascus, one of the Greek Fathers.
The list of Catholic authors and literary works is vast. With a literary tradition spanning two millennia, the Bible and Papal Encyclicals have been constants of the Catholic canon but countless other historical works may be listed as noteworthy in terms of their influence on Western society. From late Antiquity, St Augustine's book Confessions, which outlines his sinful youth and conversion to Christianity, is widely considered to be the first autobiography of ever written in the canon of Western Literature. Augustine profoundly influenced the coming medieval worldview. The Summa Theologica, written 1265–1274, is the best-known work of Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–1274), and although unfinished, "one of the classics of the history of philosophy and one of the most influential works of Western literature." It is intended as a manual for beginners in theology and a compendium of all of the main theological teachings of the Church. It presents the reasoning for almost all points of Christian theology in the West. The epic poetry of the Italian Dante and his Divine Comedy of the late Middle Ages is also considered immensely influential. The English statesman and philosopher, Thomas More, wrote the seminal work Utopia in 1516. St Ignatius Loyola, a key figure in the Catholic counter-reformation, is the author of an influential book of meditations known as the Spiritual Exercises.
Catholics have also given greater value to the world through literary works by Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Dryden, Walker Percy, Jack Kerouac, Evelyn Waugh, Alexander Pope, Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Merton, Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, J.R.R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, Claude McKay, Paul Verlaine, Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, Tennessee Williams, Francois Mauriac, Flannery O'Connor, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Paul Claudel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Michel de Montaigne, Siegfried Sassoon, John Henry Newman, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Rimbaud, Joseph Conrad, Miguel de Cervantes, Czeslaw Milosz, Hilaire Belloc, John of the Cross, Luis Vaz De Camoes, Edith Sitwell, Thomas More, among others.
Medicine and health care
The administration of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires split and the demise of the Western Empire by the 6th century was accompanied by a series of violent invasions and precipitated the collapse of cities and civic institutions of learning, along with their links to the learning of classical Greece and Rome. For the next thousand years, medical knowledge would change very little. A scholarly medical tradition maintained itself in the more stable East, but in the West, scholarship virtually disappeared outside of the Church, where monks were aware of a dwindling range of medical texts. Hospitality was considered an obligation of Christian charity and bishops' houses and the valetudinaria of wealthier Christians were used to tend the sick. And the legacy of this early period was, in the words of Porter, that "Christianity planted the hospital: the well-endowed establishments of the Levant and the scattered houses of the West shared a common religious ethos of charity."
The Byzantine Empire was one of the first empires to have flourishing medical establishments. Prior to the Byzantine Empire the Roman Empire had hospitals specifically for soldiers and slaves. However, none of these establishments were for the public. The hospitals in Byzantium were originally started by the church to act as a place for the poor to have access to basic amenities. Hospitals were usually separated between men and women. Although the remains of these hospitals have not been discovered by archaeologists, recordings of hospitals from the Byzantine Empire describe large buildings that had the core feature of an open hearth. The establishments of the Byzantine Empire resembled the beginning of what we now know as modern hospitals. The first hospital was erected by Leontius of Antioch between the years 344 to 358 and was a place for strangers and migrants to find refuge. Around the same time, a deacon named Marathonius was in charge of hospitals and monasteries in Constantinople. His main objective was to improve urban aesthetics, illustrating hospitals as a main part of Byzantine cities. These early hospitals were designed for the poor. In fact, most hospitals throughout the Byzantine Empire were almost exclusively utilized by the poor. This may be due to descriptions of hospitals similar to "Gregory Nazianzen who called the hospital a stairway to heaven, implying that it aimed only to ease death for the chronically or terminally ill rather than promote recovery". There is debate between scholars as to why these institutions were started by the church. Many scholars believe that the church founded hospitals in order to receive additional donations. Whatever the case for these hospitals, they began to diffuse across the empire. Soon after, St. Basil of Caesarea developed a place for the sick in which provided refuge for the sick and homeless.
Geoffrey Blainey likened the Catholic Church in its activities during the Middle Ages to an early version of a welfare state: "It conducted hospitals for the old and orphanages for the young; hospices for the sick of all ages; places for the lepers; and hostels or inns where pilgrims could buy a cheap bed and meal". It supplied food to the population during famine and distributed food to the poor. This welfare system the church funded through collecting taxes on a large scale and possessing large farmlands and estates. It was common for monks and clerics to practice medicine and medical students in northern European universities often took minor Holy orders. Mediaeval hospitals had a strongly Christian ethos, and were, in the words of historian of medicine Roy Porter, "religious foundations through and through", and Ecclesiastical regulations were passed to govern medicine, partly to prevent clergymen profiting from medicine. During Europe's Age of Discovery, Catholic missionaries, notably the Jesuits, introduced the modern sciences to India, China and Japan. While persecutions continue to limit the spread of Catholic institutions to some Middle Eastern Muslim nations, and such places as the People's Republic of China and North Korea, elsewhere in Asia the church is a major provider of health care services - especially in Catholic Nations like the Philippines.
Today the Roman Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of health care services in the world. It has around 18,000 clinics, 16,000 homes for the elderly and those with special needs, and 5,500 hospitals, with 65 percent of them located in developing countries. In 2010, the Church's Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Health Care Workers said that the Church manages 26% of the world's health care facilities. The Church's involvement in health care has ancient origins.
Music
Christian music is music that has been written to express either personal or a communal belief regarding Christian life and faith. Common themes of Christian music include praise, worship, penitence, and lament, and its forms vary widely across the world.
Like other forms of music the creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of Christian music varies according to culture and social context. Christian music is composed and performed for many purposes, ranging from aesthetic pleasure, religious or ceremonial purposes, or as an entertainment product for the marketplace.
In music, Catholic monks developed the first forms of modern Western musical notation in order to standardize liturgy throughout the worldwide Church, and an enormous body of religious music has been composed for it through the ages. This led directly to the emergence and development of European classical music, and its many derivatives. The Baroque style, which encompassed music, art, and architecture, was particularly encouraged by the post-Reformation Catholic Church as such forms offered a means of religious expression that was stirring and emotional, intended to stimulate religious fervor.
The list of Catholic composers and Catholic sacred music which have a prominent place in Western culture is extensive, but includes Ludwig van Beethoven's Ode to Joy; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Ave verum corpus; Franz Schubert's Ave Maria, César Franck's Panis angelicus, and Antonio Vivaldi's Gloria.
Martin Luther, Paul Gerhardt, George Wither, Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, William Cowper, and many other authors and composers created well-known church hymns. Musicians like Heinrich Schütz, Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel, Henry Purcell, Johannes Brahms, and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy composed great works of music.
Philosophy
Christian philosophy is a term to describe the fusion of various fields of philosophy with the theological doctrines of Christianity. Scholasticism, which means "that [which] belongs to the school", and was a method of learning taught by the academics (or school people) of medieval universities c. 1100–1500. Scholasticism originally started to reconcile the philosophy of the ancient classical philosophers with medieval Christian theology. Scholasticism is not a philosophy or theology in itself but a tool and method for learning which places emphasis on dialectical reasoning.
Medieval philosophy is the philosophy of Western Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages, roughly extending from the Christianization of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance. Medieval philosophy is defined partly by the rediscovery and further development of classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, and partly by the need to address theological problems and to integrate the then widespread sacred doctrines of Abrahamic religion (Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) with secular learning.
The history of western European medieval philosophy is traditionally divided into two main periods: the period in the Latin West following the Early Middle Ages until the 12th century, when the works of Aristotle and Plato were preserved and cultivated; and the "golden age" of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries in the Latin West, which witnessed the culmination of the recovery of ancient philosophy, and significant developments in the field of philosophy of religion, logic and metaphysics.
The medieval era was disparagingly treated by the Renaissance humanists, who saw it as a barbaric "middle" period between the classical age of Greek and Roman culture, and the "rebirth" or renaissance of classical culture. Yet this period of nearly a thousand years was the longest period of philosophical development in Europe, and possibly the richest. Jorge Gracia has argued that "in intensity, sophistication, and achievement, the philosophical flowering in the thirteenth century could be rightly said to rival the golden age of Greek philosophy in the fourth century B.C."
Some problems discussed throughout this period are the relation of faith to reason, the existence and unity of God, the object of theology and metaphysics, the problems of knowledge, of universals, and of individuation.
Philosophers from the Middle Ages include the Christian philosophers Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, Anselm, Gilbert of Poitiers, Peter Abelard, Roger Bacon, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham and Jean Buridan; the Jewish philosophers Maimonides and Gersonides; and the Muslim philosophers Alkindus, Alfarabi, Alhazen, Avicenna, Algazel, Avempace, Abubacer, Ibn Khaldūn, and Averroes. The medieval tradition of Scholasticism continued to flourish as late as the 17th century, in figures such as Francisco Suarez and John of St. Thomas.
Aquinas, father of Thomism, was immensely influential in Catholic Europe, placed a great emphasis on reason and argumentation, and was one of the first to use the new translation of Aristotle's metaphysical and epistemological writing. His work was a significant departure from the Neoplatonic and Augustinian thinking that had dominated much of early Scholasticism.
The Renaissance ("rebirth") was a period of transition between the Middle Ages and modern thought, in which the recovery of classical texts helped shift philosophical interests away from technical studies in logic, metaphysics, and theology towards eclectic inquiries into morality, philology, and mysticism. The study of the classics and the humane arts generally, such as history and literature, enjoyed a scholarly interest hitherto unknown in Christendom, a tendency referred to as humanism. Displacing the medieval interest in metaphysics and logic, the humanists followed Petrarch in making man and his virtues the focus of philosophy.
These new movements in philosophy developed contemporaneously with larger religious and political transformations in Europe: the Reformation and the decline of feudalism. Though the theologians of the Protestant Reformation showed little direct interest in philosophy, their destruction of the traditional foundations of theological and intellectual authority harmonized with a revival of fideism and skepticism in thinkers such as Erasmus, Montaigne, and Francisco Sanches. Meanwhile, the gradual centralization of political power in nation-states was echoed by the emergence of secular political philosophies, as in the works of Niccolò Machiavelli (often described as the first modern political thinker, or a key turning point towards modern political thinking), Thomas More, Erasmus, Justus Lipsius, Jean Bodin, and Hugo Grotius.
Science and technology
Earlier attempts at reconciliation of Christianity with Newtonian mechanics appear quite different from later attempts at reconciliation with the newer scientific ideas of evolution or relativity. Many early interpretations of evolution polarized themselves around a struggle for existence. These ideas were significantly countered by later findings of universal patterns of biological cooperation. According to John Habgood, all man really knows here is that the universe seems to be a mix of good and evil, beauty and pain, and that suffering may somehow be part of the process of creation. Habgood holds that Christians should not be surprised that suffering may be used creatively by God, given their faith in the symbol of the Cross.
Robert John Russell has examined consonance and dissonance between modern physics, evolutionary biology, and Christian theology.
Christian philosophers Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Thomas Aquinas held that scriptures can have multiple interpretations on certain areas where the matters were far beyond their reach, therefore one should leave room for future findings to shed light on the meanings. The "Handmaiden" tradition, which saw secular studies of the universe as a very important and helpful part of arriving at a better understanding of scripture, was adopted throughout Christian history from early on. Also the sense that God created the world as a self operating system is what motivated many Christians throughout the Middle Ages to investigate nature.
Modern historians of science such as J.L. Heilbron, Alistair Cameron Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, Thomas Goldstein, and Ted Davis have reviewed the popular notion that medieval Christianity was a negative influence in the development of civilization and science. In their views, not only did the monks save and cultivate the remnants of ancient civilization during the barbarian invasions, but the medieval church promoted learning and science through its sponsorship of many universities which, under its leadership, grew rapidly in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Church's "model theologian", not only argued that reason is in harmony with faith, he even recognized that reason can contribute to understanding revelation, and so encouraged intellectual development. He was not unlike other medieval theologians who sought out reason in the effort to defend his faith. Some of today's scholars, such as Stanley Jaki, have claimed that Christianity with its particular worldview, was a crucial factor for the emergence of modern science. Some scholars and historians attributes Christianity to having contributed to the rise of the Scientific Revolution.
Professor Noah J Efron says that "Generations of historians and sociologists have discovered many ways in which Christians, Christian beliefs, and Christian institutions played crucial roles in fashioning the tenets, methods, and institutions of what in time became modern science. They found that some forms of Christianity provided the motivation to study nature systematically..." Virtually all modern scholars and historians agree that Christianity moved many early-modern intellectuals to study nature systematically.
Individual scientists' beliefs
Christian Scholars and Scientists have made noted contributions to science and technology fields, as well as Medicine, Many well-known historical figures who influenced Western science considered themselves Christian such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton Robert Boyle, Francis Bacon, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Emanuel Swedenborg, Alessandro Volta, Antoine Lavoisier, André-Marie Ampère, John Dalton, James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Louis Pasteur, Michael Faraday, and J. J. Thomson.
Isaac Newton, for example, believed that gravity caused the planets to revolve about the Sun, and credited God with the design. In the concluding General Scholium to the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he wrote: "This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being." Other famous founders of science who adhered to Christian beliefs include Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and Blaise Pascal.
Prominent modern scientists advocating Christian belief include Nobel Prize–winning physicists Charles Townes (United Church of Christ member) and William Daniel Phillips (United Methodist Church member), evangelical Christian and past head of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins, and climatologist John T. Houghton.
According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes a review of Nobel prizes award between 1901 and 2000 reveals that (65.4%) of Nobel Prizes Laureates, have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference. Overall, Christians have won a total of 72.5% in Chemistry between 1901 and 2000, 65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics.
Eastern Christianity
Byzantine science was essentially classical science, and played an important and crucial role in the transmission of classical knowledge to the Islamic world and to Renaissance Italy. Many of the most distinguished classical scholars held high office in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Therefore, Byzantine science was in every period closely connected with ancient-pagan philosophy, and metaphysics. Despite some opposition to pagan learning, many of the most distinguished classical scholars held high office in the Church. The writings of antiquity never ceased to be cultivated in the Byzantine empire due to the impetus given to classical studies by the Academy of Athens in the 4th and 5th centuries, the vigor of the philosophical academy of Alexandria, and to the services of the University of Constantinople, which concerned itself entirely with secular subjects, to the exclusion of theology, which was taught in the Patriarchical Academy. Even the latter offered instruction in the ancient classics, and included literary, philosophical, and scientific texts in its curriculum. The monastic schools concentrated upon the Bible, theology, and liturgy. Therefore, the monastic scriptoria expended most of their efforts upon the transcription of ecclesiastical manuscripts, while ancient-pagan literature was transcribed, summarized, excerpted, and annotated by laymen or clergy like Photios, Arethas of Caesarea, Eustathius of Thessalonica, and Basilius Bessarion. Byzantine scientists preserved and continued the legacy of the great Ancient Greek mathematicians and put mathematics in practice. In early Byzantium (5th to 7th century) the architects and mathematicians Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles used complex mathematical formulas to construct the great Hagia Sophia church, a technological breakthrough for its time and for centuries afterwards due to its striking geometry, bold design and height. In late Byzantium (9th to 12th century) mathematicians like Michael Psellos considered mathematics as a way to interpret the world.
Middle Eastern Christians especially the adherents of the Church of the East (Nestorians), contributed to the Arab Islamic Civilization during the Umayyad and the Abbasid periods by translating works of Greek philosophers to Syriac and afterwards to Arabic. During the 4th through the 7th centuries, scholarly work in the Syriac and Greek languages was either newly initiated, or carried on from the Hellenistic period. Centers of learning and of transmission of classical wisdom included colleges such as the School of Nisibis, and later the School of Edessa, and the renowned hospital and medical academy of Jundishapur; libraries included the Library of Alexandria and the Imperial Library of Constantinople; other centers of translation and learning functioned at Merv, Salonika, Nishapur and Ctesiphon, situated just south of what later became Baghdad.
Many scholars of the House of Wisdom were of Christian background;
the House of Wisdom was a library, translation institute, and academy established in Abbasid-era Baghdad, Iraq. Nestorians played a prominent role in the formation of Arab culture, with the Jundishapur school being prominent in the late Sassanid, Umayyad and early Abbasid periods. Notably, eight generations of the Nestorian Bukhtishu family served as private doctors to caliphs and sultans between the 8th and 11th centuries.
The migration waves of Byzantine scholars and émigrés in the period following the Crusader sacking of Constantinople in 1204 and the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, is considered by many scholars key to the revival of Greek and Roman studies that led to the development of the Renaissance humanism, and science. These émigrés brought to Western Europe the relatively well-preserved remnants and accumulated knowledge of their own (Greek) civilization, which had mostly not survived the Early Middle Ages in the West. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica: "Many modern scholars also agree that the exodus of Greeks to Italy as a result of this event marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance".
Catholic Church
While refined and clarified over the centuries, the Roman Catholic position on the relationship between science and religion is one of harmony, and has maintained the teaching of natural law as set forth by Thomas Aquinas. For example, regarding scientific study such as that of evolution, the church's unofficial position is an example of theistic evolution, stating that faith and scientific findings regarding human evolution are not in conflict, though humans are regarded as a special creation, and that the existence of God is required to explain both monogenism and the spiritual component of human origins. Catholic schools have included all manners of scientific study in their curriculum for many centuries.
Galileo once stated "The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." In 1981 John Paul II, then pope of the Roman Catholic Church, spoke of the relationship this way: "The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its make-up, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise, but in order to state the correct relationships of man with God and with the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God, and in order to teach this truth it expresses itself in the terms of the cosmology in use at the time of the writer".
The influence of the Church on Western letters and learning has been formidable. The ancient texts of the Bible have deeply influenced Western art, literature and culture. For centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, small monastic communities were practically the only outposts of literacy in Western Europe. In time, the Cathedral schools developed into Europe's earliest universities and the church has established thousands of primary, secondary and tertiary institutions throughout the world in the centuries since. The Church and clergymen have also sought at different times to censor texts and scholars. Thus different schools of opinion exist as to the role and influence of the Church in relation to western letters and learning.
The Catholic Cistercian order used its own numbering system, which could express numbers from 0 to 9999 in a single sign. According to one modern Cistercian, "enterprise and entrepreneurial spirit" have always been a part of the order's identity, and the Cistercians "were catalysts for development of a market economy" in 12th-century Europe. Until the Industrial Revolution, most of the technological advances in Europe were made in the monasteries. According to the medievalist Jean Gimpel, their high level of industrial technology facilitated the diffusion of new techniques: "Every monastery had a model factory, often as large as the church and only several feet away, and waterpower drove the machinery of the various industries located on its floor." Waterpower was used for crushing wheat, sieving flour, fulling cloth and tanning – a "level of technological achievement [that] could have been observed in practically all" of the Cistercian monasteries. The English science historian James Burke examines the impact of Cistercian waterpower, derived from Roman watermill technology such as that of Barbegal aqueduct and mill near Arles in the fourth of his ten-part Connections TV series, called "Faith in Numbers". The Cistercians made major contributions to culture and technology in medieval Europe: Cistercian architecture is considered one of the most beautiful styles of medieval architecture; and the Cistercians were the main force of technological diffusion in fields such as agriculture and hydraulic engineering.
One view, first propounded by Enlightenment philosophers, asserts that the Church's doctrines are entirely superstitious and have hindered the progress of civilization. Communist states have made similar arguments in their education in order to inculcate a negative view of Catholicism (and religion in general) in their citizens. The most famous incidents cited by such critics are the Church's condemnations of the teachings of Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler.
The Church's priest-scientists, many of whom were Jesuits, have been among the leading lights in astronomy, genetics, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar physics, becoming some of the "fathers" of these sciences. Examples include important churchmen such as the Augustinian abbot Gregor Mendel (pioneer in the study of genetics), Roger Bacon (a Franciscan friar who was one of the early advocates of the scientific method), and Belgian priest Georges Lemaître (the first to propose the Big Bang theory). Other notable priest scientists have included Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Nicholas Steno, Francesco Grimaldi, Giambattista Riccioli, Roger Boscovich, and Athanasius Kircher. Even more numerous are Catholic laity involved in science:Henri Becquerel who discovered radioactivity; Galvani, Volta, Ampere, Marconi, pioneers in electricity and telecommunications; Lavoisier, "father of modern chemistry"; Vesalius, founder of modern human anatomy; and Cauchy, one of the mathematicians who laid the rigorous foundations of calculus.
Throughout history many of the Roman Catholic clerics have made contributions to science, mostly during periods of Church domination of public life. These cleric-scientists include Nicolaus Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Roger Joseph Boscovich, Marin Mersenne, Bernard Bolzano, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan, Robert Grosseteste, Christopher Clavius, Nicolas Steno, Athanasius Kircher, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, William of Ockham, and others. The Catholic Church has also produced many lay scientists and mathematicians, including 20th-century Nobel laureates like chemist Mario J. Molina, chemist John Polanyi, physicist Riccardo Giacconi, among many others.
Jesuit in science
The Jesuits have made numerous significant contributions to the development of science. For example, the Jesuits have dedicated significant study to earthquakes, and seismology has been described as "the Jesuit science". The Jesuits have been described as "the single most important contributor to experimental physics in the seventeenth century". According to Jonathan Wright in his book God's Soldiers, by the 18th century the Jesuits had "contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn's rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light."
Protestant
Protestantism had an important influence on science. According to the Merton Thesis there was a positive correlation between the rise of Puritanism and Protestant Pietism on the one hand and early experimental science on the other. The Merton Thesis has two separate parts: Firstly, it presents a theory that science changes due to an accumulation of observations and improvement in experimental techniques and methodology; secondly, it puts forward the argument that the popularity of science in 17th-century England and the religious demography of the Royal Society (English scientists of that time were predominantly Puritans or other Protestants) can be explained by a correlation between Protestantism and the scientific values. In his theory, Robert K. Merton focused on English Puritanism and German Pietism as having been responsible for the development of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. Merton explained that the connection between religious affiliation and interest in science was the result of a significant synergy between the ascetic Protestant values and those of modern science. Protestant values encouraged scientific research by allowing science to study God's influence on the world and thus providing a religious justification for scientific research.
According of Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States by Harriet Zuckerman, a review of American Nobel prizes winners awarded between 1901 and 1972, 72% of American Nobel Prize laureates, have identified from Protestant background. Overall, Protestant have won a total of 84.2% of all the American Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, 60% in Medicine, 58.6% in Physics, between 1901 and 1972.
Thought and work ethic
The notion of "Christian finance" refers to banking and financial activities which came into existence several centuries ago. Whether the activities of the Knights Templar (12th century), Mounts of Piety (appeared in 1462) or the Apostolic Chamber attached directly to the Vatican, a number of operations of a banking nature (money loan, guarantee, etc.) or a financial nature (issuance of securities, investments) is proved, despite the prohibition of usury and the Church distrust against exchange activities (opposed to production activities).
Francisco de Vitoria, a disciple of Thomas Aquinas and a Catholic thinker who studied the issue regarding the human rights of colonized natives, is recognized by the United Nations as a father of international law, and now also by historians of economics and democracy as a leading light for the West's democracy and rapid economic development. Joseph Schumpeter, an economist of the 20th century, referring to the Scholastics, wrote, "it is they who come nearer than does any other group to having been the 'founders' of scientific economics." Other economists and historians, such as Raymond de Roover, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, and Alejandro Chafuen, have also made similar statements.
The Protestant concept of God and man allows believers to use all their God-given faculties, including the power of reason. That means that they are allowed to explore God's creation and, according to Genesis 2:15, make use of it in a responsible and sustainable way. Thus a cultural climate was created that greatly enhanced the development of the humanities and the sciences. Another consequence of the Protestant understanding of man is that the believers, in gratitude for their election and redemption in Christ, are to follow God's commandments. Industry, frugality, calling, discipline, and a strong sense of responsibility are at the heart of their moral code. In particular, John Calvin rejected luxury. Therefore, craftsmen, industrialists, and other businessmen were able to reinvest the greater part of their profits in the most efficient machinery and the most modern production methods that were based on progress in the sciences and technology. As a result, productivity grew, which led to increased profits and enabled employers to pay higher wages. In this way, the economy, the sciences, and technology reinforced each other. The chance to participate in the economic success of technological inventions was a strong incentive to both inventors and investors. The Protestant work ethic was an important force behind the unplanned and uncoordinated mass action that influenced the development of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. This idea is also known as the "Protestant ethic thesis". In the book The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save It from Itself Lawrence E. Harrison argues that Protestantism along with Confucianism, and Judaism have been more successful in promoting progress, culture and society. Due to the Protestant virtues of education, achievement, work ethic, merit, frugality, and honesty.
Some mainline Protestant denominations such as Episcopalians and Presbyterians and congregationalist tend to be considerably wealthier and better educated (having high proportion of graduate and post-graduate degrees per capita) than most other religious groups in America, and are disproportionately represented in the upper reaches of American business, law and politics, especially the Republican Party. Large numbers of the most wealthy and affluent American families as the Vanderbilts, the Astors, Rockefeller, Du Pont, Roosevelt, Forbes, Whitneys, Mellons, the Morgans and Harrimans are Mainline Protestant families. The Boston Brahmins, who were regarded as the nation's social and cultural elites, were often associated with the American upper class, Harvard University; and the Episcopal Church. The Old Philadelphianss were often associated with the American upper class and the Episcopal Church and Quakerism. These families were influential in the development and leadership of arts, culture, science, medicine, law, politics, industry and trade in the United States.
The rise of Protestantism in the 16th contributed to the development of banking in Northern Europe. In the late 18th century, Protestant merchant families began to move into banking to an increasing degree, especially in trading countries such as the United Kingdom (Barings), Germany (Schroders, Berenbergs) and the Netherlands (Hope & Co., Gülcher & Mulder) At the same time, new types of financial activities broadened the scope of banking far beyond its origins. One school of thought attributes Calvinism with setting the stage for the later development of capitalism in northern Europe. The Morgan family is an American Episcopal Church family and banking dynasty, which became prominent in the U.S. and throughout the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Catholic banking families includes House of Medici, Welser family, Fugger family, and Simonetti family.
Some academics have theorized that Lutheranism, the dominant traditional religion of the Nordic countries, had an effect on the development of social democracy there and the Nordic model. Schröder posits that Lutheranism promoted the idea of a nationwide community of believers and led to increased state involvement in economic and social life, allowing for nationwide welfare solidarity and economic co-ordination. Esa Mangeloja says that the revival movements helped to pave the way for the modern Finnish welfare state. During that process, the church lost some of its most important social responsibilities (health care, education, and social work) as these tasks were assumed by the secular Finnish state. Pauli Kettunen presents the Nordic model as the outcome of a sort of mythical "Lutheran peasant enlightenment", portraying the Nordic model as the result of a sort of "secularized Lutheranism"; however, mainstream academic discourse on the subject focuses on "historical specificity", with the centralized structure of the Lutheran church being but one aspect of the cultural values and state structures that led to the development of the welfare state in Scandinavia.
Festivals
Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern Christians, and traditional Protestant communities frame worship around the liturgical year. The liturgical cycle divides the year into a series of seasons, each with their theological emphases, and modes of prayer, which can be signified by different ways of decorating churches, colours of paraments and vestments for clergy, scriptural readings, themes for preaching and even different traditions and practices often observed personally or in the home.
Western Christian liturgical calendars are based on the cycle of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, and Eastern Christians use analogous calendars based on the cycle of their respective rites. Calendars set aside holy days, such as solemnities which commemorate an event in the life of Jesus or Mary, the saints, periods of fasting such as Lent, and other pious events such as memoria or lesser festivals commemorating saints. Christian groups that do not follow a liturgical tradition often retain certain celebrations, such as Christmas, Easter and Pentecost: these are the celebrations of Christ's birth, resurrection and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Church, respectively. A few denominations make no use of a liturgical calendar.
Christmas (or Feast of the Nativity) is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world. Christmas Day is a public holiday in many of the world's nations, is celebrated religiously by a majority of Christians, as well as culturally by many non-Christians, and forms an integral part of the holiday season centered around it. Popular modern customs of the holiday include gift giving; completing an Advent calendar or Advent wreath; Christmas music and caroling; viewing a Nativity play; an exchange of Christmas cards; church services; a special meal; and the display of various Christmas decorations, including Christmas trees, Christmas lights, nativity scenes, garlands, wreaths, mistletoe, and holly. In addition, several closely related and often interchangeable figures, known as Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, and Christkind, are associated with bringing gifts to children during the Christmas season and have their own body of traditions and lore.
Easter or Resurrection Sunday, is a festival and holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, described in the New Testament as having occurred on the third day after his burial following his crucifixion by the Romans at Calvary 30 AD. Easter customs vary across the Christian world, and include sunrise services, exclaiming the Paschal greeting, clipping the church, and decorating Easter eggs (symbols of the empty tomb). The Easter lily, a symbol of the resurrection, traditionally decorates the chancel area of churches on this day and for the rest of Eastertide. Additional customs that have become associated with Easter and are observed by both Christians and some non-Christians include egg hunting, the Easter Bunny, and Easter parades. There are also various traditional Easter foods that vary regionally.
Religious life
Roman Catholic theology enumerates seven sacraments: Baptism (Christening), Confirmation (Chrismation), Eucharist (Communion), Penance (Reconciliation), Anointing of the Sick (before the Second Vatican Council generally called Extreme Unction), Matrimony
In Christian belief and practice, a sacrament is a rite, instituted by Christ, that mediates grace, constituting a sacred mystery. The term is derived from the Latin word sacramentum, which was used to translate the Greek word for mystery. Views concerning both what rites are sacramental, and what it means for an act to be a sacrament vary among Christian denominations and traditions.
The most conventional functional definition of a sacrament is that it is an outward sign, instituted by Christ, that conveys an inward, spiritual grace through Christ. The two most widely accepted sacraments are Baptism and the Eucharist (or Holy Communion), however, the majority of Christians also recognize five additional sacraments: Confirmation (Chrismation in the Orthodox tradition), Holy orders (ordination), Penance (or Confession), Anointing of the Sick, and Matrimony (see Christian views on marriage).
Taken together, these are the Seven Sacraments as recognized by churches in the High Church tradition—notably Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Independent Catholic, Old Catholic, many Anglicans, and some Lutherans. Most other denominations and traditions typically affirm only Baptism and Eucharist as sacraments, while some Protestant groups, such as the Quakers, reject sacramental theology. Christian denominations, such as Baptists, which believe these rites do not communicate grace, prefer to call Baptism and Holy Communion ordinances rather than sacraments.
Today, most Christian denominations are neutral about religious male circumcision, neither requiring it nor forbidding it. The practice is customary among the Coptic, Ethiopian, and Eritrean Orthodox Churches, and also some other African churches, as they require that their male members undergo circumcision. Even though most Christian denominations does not require male circumcision, male circumcision is widely in many predominantly Christian countries and many Christian communities. Christian communities in Africa, the Anglosphere countries, the Philippines, the Middle East, South Korea and Oceania have high circumcision rates, While Christian communities in Europe and South America have low circumcision rates. The United States and the Philippines are the largest majority Christian countries in the world to extensively practice circumcision. Scholar Heather L. Armstrong writes that, as of 2021, about half of Christian males worldwide are circumcised, with most of them being located in Africa, Anglosphere countries, and the Philippines.
Worship can be varied for special events like baptisms or weddings in the service or significant feast days. In the early church, Christians and those yet to complete initiation would separate for the Eucharistic part of the worship. In many churches today, adults and children will separate for all or some of the service to receive age-appropriate teaching. Such children's worship is often called Sunday school or Sabbath school (Sunday schools are often held before rather than during services).
Family life
Christian culture puts notable emphasis on the family, and according to the work of scholars Max Weber, Alan Macfarlane, Steven Ozment, Jack Goody and Peter Laslett, the huge transformation that led to modern marriage in Western democracies was "fueled by the religio-cultural value system provided by elements of Judaism, early Christianity, Roman Catholic canon law and the Protestant Reformation". Historically, extended families were the basic family unit in the Catholic culture and countries.
Most Christian denominations practice infant baptism to enter children into the faith. Some form of confirmation ritual occurs when the child has reached the age of reason and voluntarily accepts the religion. Ritual circumcision is used to mark Coptic Christian and Ethiopian Orthodox Christian infant males as belonging to the faith. During the early period of capitalism, the rise of a large, commercial middle class, mainly in the Protestant countries of the Netherlands and England, brought about a new family ideology centred around the upbringing of children. Puritanism stressed the importance of individual salvation and concern for the spiritual welfare of children. It became widely recognized that children possess rights on their own behalf. This included the rights of poor children to sustenance, membership in a community, education, and job training. The Poor Relief Acts in Elizabethan England put responsibility on each Parish to care for all the poor children in the area. And prior to the 20th century, three major branches of Christianity—Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Protestantism—as well as leading Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin generally held a critical perspective of birth control.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints puts notable emphasis on the family, and the distinctive concept of a united family which lives and progresses forever is at the core of Latter-day Saint doctrine. Church members are encouraged to marry and have children, and as a result, Latter-day Saint families tend to be larger than average. All sexual activity outside of marriage is considered a serious sin. All homosexual activity is considered sinful and same-sex marriages are not performed or supported by the LDS Church. Latter-day Saint fathers who hold the priesthood typically name and bless their children shortly after birth to formally give the child a name and generate a church record for them. Mormons tend to be very family-oriented and have strong connections across generations and with extended family, reflective of their belief that families can be sealed together beyond death. Mormons also have a strict law of chastity, requiring abstention from sexual relations outside heterosexual marriage and fidelity within marriage.
A Pew Center study about Religion and Living arrangements around the world in 2019, found that Christians around the world live in somewhat smaller households, on average, than non-Christians (4.5 vs. 5.1 members). 34% of world's Christian population live in two parent families with minor children, while 29% live in household with extended families, 11% live as couples without other family members, 9% live in household with least one child over the age of 18 with one or two parents, 7% live alone, and 6% live in single parent households. Christians in Asia and Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, and in Sub-Saharan Africa, overwhelmingly live in extended or two parent families with minor children. While more Christians in Europe and North America live alone or as couples without other family members.
Cuisine
In mainstream Nicene Christianity, there is no restriction on kinds of animals that can be eaten. This practice stems from Peter's vision of a sheet with animals, in which Saint Peter "sees a sheet containing animals of every description lowered from the sky." Nonetheless, the New Testament does give a few guidelines about the consumption of meat, practiced by the Christian Church today; one of these is not consuming food knowingly offered to pagan idols, a conviction that the early Church Fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen preached. In addition, Christians traditionally bless any food before eating it with a mealtime prayer (grace), as a sign of thanking God for the meal they have.
Slaughtering animals for food is often done without the trinitarian formula, although the Armenian Apostolic Church, among other Orthodox Christians, have rituals that "display obvious links with shechitah, Jewish kosher slaughter." The Bible states Norman Geisler, stipulates one to "abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from meat of strangled animals". In the New Testament, Paul of Tarsus notes that some devout Christians may wish to abstain from consuming meat if it causes "my brother to stumble" in his faith with God. As such, some Christian monks, such as the Trappists, have adopted a policy of Christian vegetarianism. In addition, Christians of the Seventh-day Adventist tradition generally "avoid eating meat and highly spiced food". Christians in the Anglican, Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, and Orthodox denominations traditionally observe a meat-free day, and meat free seasons especially during the liturgical season of Lent.
Some Christian denominations condone the moderate drinking of alcohol (moderationism), such as Anglicans, Catholics, Lutherans, and the Orthodox, although others, such as Adventists, Baptists, Methodists, and Pentecostals either abstain from or prohibit the consumption of alcohol (abstentionism and prohibitionism). However, all Christian Churches, in view of the biblical position on the issue, universally condemn drunkenness as sinful.
Christian cooking combines the food of many cultures in which Christian have lived. A special Christmas family meal is traditionally an important part of the holiday's celebration, and the food that is served varies greatly from country to country. Some regions, such as Sicily, have special meals for Christmas Eve, when 12 kinds of fish are served. In the United Kingdom and countries influenced by its traditions, a standard Christmas meal includes turkey, goose or other large bird, gravy, potatoes, vegetables, sometimes bread and cider. Special desserts are also prepared, such as Christmas pudding, mince pies, fruit cake and Yule log.
Cleanliness
The Bible has many rituals of purification relating to menstruation, childbirth, sexual relations, nocturnal emission, unusual bodily fluids, skin disease, death, and animal sacrifices. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church prescribes several kinds of hand washing for example after leaving the latrine, lavatory or bathhouse, or before prayer, or after eating a meal. The women in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church are prohibited from entering the church temple during menses; and the men do not enter a church the day after they have had intercourse with their wives.
Christianity has always placed a strong emphasis on hygiene, Despite the denunciation of the mixed bathing style of Roman pools by early Christian clergy, as well as the pagan custom of women naked bathing in front of men, this did not stop the Church from urging its followers to go to public baths for bathing, which contributed to hygiene and good health according to the Church Fathers, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian. The Church also built public bathing facilities that were separate for both sexes near monasteries and pilgrimage sites; also, the popes situated baths within church basilicas and monasteries since the early Middle Ages. Pope Gregory the Great urged his followers on value of bathing as a bodily need.
Great bath houses were built in Byzantine centers such as Constantinople and Antioch, and the popes allocated to the Romans bathing through diaconia, or private Lateran baths, or even a myriad of monastic bath houses functioning in the 8th and 9th centuries. The popes maintained their baths in their residences, and bath houses including hot baths incorporated into Christian Church buildings or those of monasteries, which known as "charity baths" because they served both the clerics and needy poor people. Public bathing were common in medivail Christendom larger towns and cities such as Paris, Regensburg and Naples. Catholic religious orders of the Augustinians' and Benedictines' rules contained ritual purification, and inspired by Benedict of Nursia encouragement for the practice of therapeutic bathing; Benedictine monks played a role in the development and promotion of spas. Protestant Christianity also played a prominent role in the development of the British spas.
Contrary to popular belief bathing and sanitation were not lost in Europe with the collapse of the Roman Empire. Soapmaking first became an established trade during the so-called "Dark Ages". The Romans used scented oils (mostly from Egypt), among other alternatives. By the 15th century, the manufacture of soap in the Christendom had become virtually industrialized, with sources in Antwerp, Castile, Marseille, Naples and Venice. By the mid-19th century, the English urbanised middle classes had formed an ideology of cleanliness that ranked alongside typical Victorian concepts, such as Christianity, respectability and social progress. The Salvation Army has adopted movement of the deployment of the personal hygiene, and by providing personal hygiene products.
The use of water in many Christian countries is due in part to the biblical toilet etiquette which encourages washing after all instances of defecation. The bidet is common in predominantly Catholic countries where water is considered essential for anal cleansing, and in some traditionally Orthodox and Protestant countries such as Greece and Finland respectively, where bidet showers are common.
Christian pop culture
Christian pop culture (or Christian popular culture), is the vernacular Christian culture that prevails in any given society. The content of popular culture is determined by the daily interactions, needs and desires, and cultural 'movements' that make up everyday lives of Christians. It can include any number of practices, including those pertaining to cooking, clothing, mass media and the many facets of entertainment such as sports and literature.
In modern urban mass societies, Christian pop culture has been crucially shaped by the development of industrial mass production, the introduction of new technologies of sound and image broadcasting and recording, and the growth of mass media industries—the film, broadcast radio and television, radio, video game, and the book publishing industries, as well as the print and electronic news media.
Items of Christian pop culture most typically appeal to a broad spectrum of Christians. Some argue that broad-appeal items dominate Christian pop culture because profit-making Christian companies that produce and sell items of Christian pop culture attempt to maximize their profits by emphasizing broadly appealing items. And yet the situation is more complex. To take the example of Christian pop music, it is not the case that the music industry can impose any product they wish. In fact, highly popular types of music have often first been elaborated in small, counter-cultural circles such as Christian punk rock or Christian rap.
Because the Christian pop industry is significantly smaller than the secular pop industry, a few organizations and companies dominate the market and have a strong influence over what is dominant within the industry.
Another source of Christian pop culture which makes it differ from pop culture is the influence from mega churches. Christian pop culture reflects the current popularity of megachurches, but also the uniting of smaller community churches. The culture has been led by Hillsong Church in particular, which resides in many countries including Australia, France, and the United Kingdom.
Film industry
The Christian film industry is an umbrella term for films containing a Christian themed message or moral, produced by Christian filmmakers to a Christian audience, and films produced by non-Christians with Christian audiences in mind. They are often interdenominational films, but can also be films targeting a specific denomination of Christianity. Popular mainstream studio productions of films with strong Christian messages or biblical stories, like Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Passion of the Christ, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Book of Eli, Machine Gun Preacher, The Star, The Flying House, Superbook and Silence, are not specifically part of the Christian film industry, being more agnostic about their audiences' religious beliefs. These films generally also have a much higher budget, production values and better known film stars, and are received more favourably with film critics.
The 2014 film God's Not Dead is one of the all-time most successful independent Christian films and the 2015 film War Room became a Box Office number-one film.
Televangelism
Televangelism (tele- "distance" and "evangelism", meaning "ministry", sometimes called teleministry) is the use of media, specifically radio and television, to communicate Christianity. Televangelists are ministers, whether official or self-proclaimed, who devote a large portion of their ministry to television broadcasting. Some televangelists are also regular pastors or ministers in their own places of worship (often a megachurch), but the majority of their followers come from TV and radio audiences. Others do not have a conventional congregation, and work primarily through television. The term is also used derisively by critics as an insinuation of aggrandizement by such ministers.
Televangelism began as a uniquely American phenomenon, resulting from a largely deregulated media where access to television networks and cable TV is open to virtually anyone who can afford it, combined with a large Christian population that is able to provide the necessary funding. It became especially popular among Evangelical Protestant audiences, whether independent or organized around Christian denominations. However, the increasing globalisation of broadcasting has enabled some American televangelists to reach a wider audience through international broadcast networks, including some that are specifically Christian in nature, such as Trinity Broadcasting Network (the world's largest religious television network), The God Channel, Christian Broadcasting Network, Australian Christian Channel, SAT-7 and Emmanuel TV. Domestically produced televangelism is increasingly present in some other nations such as Brazil. Christian television may include broadcast television or cable television channels whose entire broadcast programming schedule is television programs directly related to Christianity or shows including comedy, action, drama, reality, dramatizations and variety shows, movies, and mini-series; which are part of the overall programming of a general-interest television station.
Some countries have more regulated media with either general restrictions on access or specific rules regarding religious broadcasting. In such countries, religious programming is typically produced by TV companies (sometimes as a regulatory or public service requirement) rather than private interest groups.
Christianophile
A Christianophile is a person who expresses a strong interest in or appreciation for Christianity, Christian culture, Christian history, Christendom or the Christian people. That affinity may include Christianity itself or its history, philosophy, theology, music, literature, art, architecture, festivals etc. The term "Christianophile" can be contrasted with Christianophobe, someone who shows hatred or other forms of negative feelings towards all that is Christian.
Christianity and Christian culture has a generally positive image in a number of non-Christian societies such as Hong Kong, Macau, India, Japan, Lebanon, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. In number of traditional Christian societies in Europe, there has been a revival of what has been called by some scholars "Christianophile", and a sympathy for Christianity and its culture, with politicians increasingly speaking of the "Christian roots and heritage" of their countries; this includes Austria, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom.
G. K. Chesterton has been called a Christianophile; he wrote in the early 20th century about the benefits of Christianity. Famous for his use of paradox, Chesterton explained that while Christianity had the most mysteries, it was the most practical religion. He pointed to the advance of Christian civilizations as proof of its practicality. T. S. Eliot has shown a strong affinity to the Christian culture; according to him, the common tradition of Christianity and its culture which has made Europe what it is, and the culture of Europe been rooted in Christianity. Winston Churchill has shown a strong affinity to Protestant culture because he felt it "a step nearer Reason". Historian Geoffrey Blainey on his book A Short History of Christianity, discussed the role of Christianity in civilization, and the extent of Christian influence on the world. Some scholars criticize the concept Eurocentrism as a "Christianophile myth" because it has favored the components (mainly Christianity) of European civilization and allowed eurocentrists to brand diverging societies and cultures as "uncivilized".
See also
Aristotelianism
Astrotheology
Assyrian culture
Celtic Christianity
Christianese
Christian influences in Islam
Christian values
Culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Cynicism (philosophy)
Gnosticism
International law
Judeo-Christian values
Multiculturalism and Christianity
Natural law
Neoplatonism and Christianity
Platonism
Protestant culture
Role of Christianity in civilization
Stoicism
Syriac Christianity
The night of churches
References
Works cited
.
Further reading
Eva Baer. Ayyubid metalwork with Christian images. BRILL, 1989
Culture | 0.792198 | 0.992097 | 0.785937 |
Christian theology | Christian theology is the theology – the systematic study of the divine and religion – of Christian belief and practice. It concentrates primarily upon the texts of the Old Testament and of the New Testament, as well as on Christian tradition. Christian theologians use biblical exegesis, rational analysis and argument. Theologians may undertake the study of Christian theology for a variety of reasons, such as in order to:
help them better understand Christian tenets
make comparisons between Christianity and other traditions
defend Christianity against objections and criticism
facilitate reforms in the Christian church
assist in the propagation of Christianity
draw on the resources of the Christian tradition to address some present situation or perceived need
education in Christian philosophy, especially in Neoplatonic philosophy
Christian theology has permeated much of non-ecclesiastical Western culture, especially in pre-modern Europe, although Christianity is a worldwide religion.
Theological spectrum
Conservative Christianity
Liberal Christianity
Progressive Christianity
Moderate Christianity
Christian traditions
Christian theology varies significantly across the main branches of Christian tradition: Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. Each of those traditions has its own unique approaches to seminaries and ministerial formation.
Systematic theology
Systematic theology as a discipline of Christian theology formulates an orderly, rational and coherent account of Christian faith and beliefs. Systematic theology draws on the foundational sacred texts of Christianity, while simultaneously investigating the development of Christian doctrine throughout history, particularly through the ecumenical councils of the early church (such as the First Council of Nicea) and philosophical evolution. Inherent to a system of theological thought is the development of a method, one which can apply both broadly and particularly. Christian systematic theology will typically explore:
God (theology proper)
The attributes of God
The Trinity as espoused by Trinitarian Christians
Revelation
Biblical hermeneutics – the interpretation of Biblical texts
The creation
Divine providence
Theodicy – accounting for an omnibenevolent God's creation and tolerance of evil
Philosophy
Hamartiology – the study of Sin
Paterology - the study of The Father
Christology – the study of the nature and person of Jesus Christ/The Son
Pneumatology – the study of The Holy Spirit
Soteriology – the study of salvation
Ecclesiology – the study of the Christian church
Missiology – the study of the Christian message and of missions
Spirituality and mysticism
Sacramental theology
Eschatology – the ultimate destiny of humankind
Moral theology
Christian anthropology
The afterlife
Prolegomena: Scripture as a primary basis of Christian theology
Biblical revelation
Revelation is the revealing or disclosing, or making something obvious through active or passive communication with God, and can originate directly from God or through an agent, such as an angel. A person recognised as having experienced such contact is often called a prophet. Christianity generally considers the Bible as divinely or supernaturally revealed or inspired. Such revelation does not always require the presence of God or an angel. For instance, in the concept which Catholics call interior locution, supernatural revelation can include just an inner voice heard by the recipient.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) first described two types of revelation in Christianity: general revelation and special revelation.
General revelation occurs through observation of the created order. Such observations can logically lead to important conclusions, such as the existence of God and some of God's attributes. General revelation is also an element of Christian apologetics.
Certain specifics, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, as revealed in the teachings of the Scriptures, can not otherwise be deduced except by special revelation.
Biblical inspiration
The Bible contains many passages in which the authors claim divine inspiration for their message or report the effects of such inspiration on others. Besides the direct accounts of written revelation (such as Moses receiving the Ten Commandments inscribed on tablets of stone), the Prophets of the Old Testament frequently claimed that their message was of divine origin by prefacing the revelation using the following phrase: "Thus says the LORD" (for example, 1 Kgs 12:22–24;1 Chr 17:3–4; Jer 35:13; Ezek 2:4; Zech 7:9; etc.). The Second Epistle of Peter claims that "no prophecy of Scripture ... was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" The Second Epistle of Peter also implies that Paul's writings are inspired (2 Pet 3:16).
Many Christians cite a verse in Paul's letter to Timothy, 2 Timothy 3:16–17, as evidence that "all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable ..." Here St. Paul is referring to the Old Testament, since the scriptures have been known by Timothy from "infancy" (verse 15). Others offer an alternative reading for the passage; for example, theologian C. H. Dodd suggests that it "is probably to be rendered" as: "Every inspired scripture is also useful..." A similar translation appears in the New English Bible, in the Revised English Bible, and (as a footnoted alternative) in the New Revised Standard Version. The Latin Vulgate can be so read. Yet others defend the "traditional" interpretation; Daniel B. Wallace calls the alternative "probably not the best translation."
Some modern English versions of the Bible renders theopneustos with "God-breathed" (NIV) or "breathed out by God" (ESV), avoiding the word inspiration, which has the Latin root inspīrāre - "to blow or breathe into".
Biblical authority
Christianity generally regards the agreed collections of books known as the Bible as authoritative and as written by human authors under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Some Christians believe that the Bible is inerrant (totally without error and free from contradiction, including the historical and scientific parts) or infallible (inerrant on issues of faith and practice but not necessarily on matters of history or science).
Some Christians infer that the Bible cannot both refer to itself as being divinely inspired and also be errant or fallible. For if the Bible were divinely inspired, then the source of inspiration being divine, would not be subject to fallibility or error in that which is produced. For them, the doctrines of the divine inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy, are inseparably tied together. The idea of biblical integrity is a further concept of infallibility, by suggesting that current biblical text is complete and without error, and that the integrity of biblical text has never been corrupted or degraded. Historians note, or claim, that the doctrine of the Bible's infallibility was adopted hundreds of years after the books of the Bible were written.
Biblical canon
The content of the Protestant Old Testament is the same as the Hebrew Bible canon, with changes in the division and order of books, but the Catholic Old Testament contains additional texts, known as the deuterocanonical books. Protestants recognize 39 books in their Old Testament canon, while Roman Catholic and Eastern Christians recognize 46 books as canonical. Both Catholics and Protestants use the same 27-book New Testament canon.
Early Christians used the Septuagint, a Koine Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. Christianity subsequently endorsed various additional writings that would become the New Testament. In the 4th century a series of synods, most notably the Synod of Hippo in AD 393, produced a list of texts equal to the 46-book canon of the Old Testament that Catholics use today (and the 27-book canon of the New Testament that all use). A definitive list did not come from any early ecumenical council. Around 400, Jerome produced the Vulgate, a definitive Latin edition of the Bible, the contents of which, at the insistence of the Bishop of Rome, accorded with the decisions of the earlier synods. This process effectively set the New Testament canon, although examples exist of other canonical lists in use after this time.
During the 16th-century Protestant Reformation certain reformers proposed different canonical lists of the Old Testament. The texts which appear in the Septuagint but not in the Jewish canon fell out of favor, and eventually disappeared from Protestant canons. Catholic Bibles classify these texts as deuterocanonical books, whereas Protestant contexts label them as the Apocrypha.
Theology proper: God
In Christianity, God is the creator and preserver of the universe. God is the sole ultimate power in the universe but is distinct from it. The Bible never speaks of God as impersonal. Instead, it refers to him in personal terms– who speaks, sees, hears, acts, and loves. God is understood to have a will and personality and is an all powerful, divine and benevolent being. He is represented in Scripture as being primarily concerned with people and their salvation.
Attributes of God
Classification
Many Reformed theologians distinguish between the communicable attributes (those that human beings can also have) and the incommunicable attributes (those which belong to God alone).
Enumeration
Some attributes ascribed to God in Christian theology are:
Aseity—That "God is so independent that he does not need us." It is based on Acts 17:25, where it says that God "is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything" (NIV). This is often related to God's self-existence and his self-sufficiency.
Eternity—That God exists beyond the temporal realm.
Graciousness—That God extends His favor and gifts to human beings unconditionally as well as conditionally.
Holiness—That God is separate from sin and incorruptible. Noting the refrain of "Holy, holy, holy" in Isaiah 6:3 and Revelation 4:8,
Immanence—That although God is transcendent and holy, He is also accessible and can be dynamically experienced.
Immutability—That God's essential nature is unchangeable.
Impassibility—That God does not experience emotion or suffering (a more controversial doctrine, disputed especially by open theism).
Impeccability—That God is incapable of error (sin).
Incorporeality—That God is without physical composition. A related concept is the spirituality of God, which is derived from Jesus' statement in John 4:24, "God is spirit."
Love—That God is care and compassion. 1 John 4:16 says "God is love."
Mission—That God is the supreme liberator. While the Mission of God is not traditionally included in this list, David Bosch has argued that "mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God."
Omnibenevolence—That God is omnibenevolent. Omnibenevolence of God refers to him being "all good".
Omnipotence—That God is supremely or all-powerful.
Omnipresence—That God is the supreme being, existing everywhere and at all times; the all-perceiving or all-conceiving foundation of reality.
Omniscience—That God is supremely or all-knowing.
Oneness—That God is without peer, also that every divine attribute is instantiated in its entirety (the qualitative infinity of God). See also Monotheism and Divine simplicity.
Providence—That God watches over His creation with interest and dedication. While the Providence of God usually refers to his activity in the world, it also implies his care for the universe, and is thus an attribute. A distinction is usually made between "general providence" which refers to God's continuous upholding the existence and natural order of the universe, and "special providence" which refers to God's extraordinary intervention in the life of people. See also Sovereignty.
Righteousness—That God is the greatest or only measure of human conduct. The righteousness of God may refer to his holiness, to his justice, or to his saving activity through Christ.
Transcendence—That God exists beyond the natural realm of physical laws and thus is not bound by them; He is also wholly Other and incomprehensible apart from general or special self-revelation.
Triune—The Christian God is understood (by trinitarian Christians) to be a "threeness" of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that is fully consistent with His "oneness"; a single infinite being who is both within and beyond nature. Because the persons of the Trinity represent a personal relation even on the level of God to Himself, He is personal both in His relation toward us and in His relation toward Himself.
Veracity—That God is the Truth all human beings strive for; He is also impeccably honest. Titus 1:2 refers to "God, who does not lie."
Wisdom—That God fully comprehends human nature and the world, and will see His will accomplished in heaven and on earth. Romans 16:27 speaks about the "only wise God".
Monotheism
Some Christians believe that the God worshiped by the Hebrew people of the pre-Christian era had always revealed himself as he did through Jesus; but that this was never obvious until Jesus was born (see John 1). Also, though the Angel of the Lord spoke to the Patriarchs, revealing God to them, some believe it has always been only through the Spirit of God granting them understanding, that men have been able to perceive later that God himself had visited them.
This belief gradually developed into the modern formulation of the Trinity, which is the doctrine that God is a single entity (Yahweh), but that there is a trinity in God's single being, the meaning of which has always been debated. This mysterious "Trinity" has been described as hypostases in the Greek language (subsistences in Latin), and "persons" in English. Nonetheless, Christians stress that they only believe in one God.
Most Christian churches teach the Trinity, as opposed to Unitarian monotheistic beliefs. Historically, most Christian churches have taught that the nature of God is a mystery, something that must be revealed by special revelation rather than deduced through general revelation.
Christian orthodox traditions (Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant) follow this idea, which was codified in 381 and reached its full development through the work of the Cappadocian Fathers. They consider God to be a triune entity, called the Trinity, comprising the three "Persons"; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, described as being "of the same substance". The true nature of an infinite God, however, is commonly described as beyond definition, and the word 'person' is an imperfect expression of the idea.
Some critics contend that because of the adoption of a tripartite conception of deity, Christianity is a form of tritheism or polytheism. This concept dates from Arian teachings which claimed that Jesus, having appeared later in the Bible than his Father, had to be a secondary, lesser, and therefore distinct god. For Jews and Muslims, the idea of God as a trinity is heretical– it is considered akin to polytheism. Christians overwhelmingly assert that monotheism is central to the Christian faith, as the very Nicene Creed (among others) which gives the orthodox Christian definition of the Trinity does begin with: "I believe in one God".
In the 3rd century, Tertullian claimed that God exists as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—the three personae of one and the same substance. To trinitarian Christians God the Father is not at all a separate god from God the Son (of whom Jesus is the incarnation) and the Holy Spirit, the other hypostases (Persons) of the Christian Godhead. According to the Nicene Creed, the Son (Jesus Christ) is "eternally begotten of the Father", indicating that their divine Father-Son relationship is not tied to an event within time or human history.
In Christianity, the doctrine of the Trinity states that God is one being who exists, simultaneously and eternally, as a mutual indwelling of three Persons: the Father, the Son (incarnate as Jesus), and the Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost). Since earliest Christianity, one's salvation has been very closely related to the concept of a triune God, although the Trinitarian doctrine was not formalized until the 4th century. At that time, the Emperor Constantine convoked the First Council of Nicaea, to which all bishops of the empire were invited to attend. Pope Sylvester I did not attend but sent his legate. The council, among other things, decreed the original Nicene Creed.
Trinity
For most Christians, beliefs about God are enshrined in the doctrine of Trinitarianism, which holds that the three persons of God together form a single God. The Trinitarian view emphasizes that God has a will and that God the Son has two wills, divine and human, though these are never in conflict (see Hypostatic union). However, this point is disputed by Oriental Orthodox Christians, who hold that God the Son has only one will of unified divinity and humanity (see Miaphysitism).
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity teaches the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead. The doctrine states that God is the Triune God, existing as three persons, or in the Greek hypostases, but one being. Personhood in the Trinity does not match the common Western understanding of "person" as used in the English language—it does not imply an "individual, self-actualized center of free will and conscious activity." To the ancients, personhood "was in some sense individual, but always in community as well." Each person is understood as having the one identical essence or nature, not merely similar natures. Since the beginning of the 3rd century the doctrine of the Trinity has been stated as "the one God exists in three Persons and one substance, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."
Trinitarianism, belief in the Trinity, is a mark of Catholicism, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy as well as other prominent Christian sects arising from the Protestant Reformation, such as Anglicanism, Methodism, Lutheranism, Baptist, and Presbyterianism. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church describes the Trinity as "the central dogma of Christian theology". This doctrine contrasts with Nontrinitarian positions which include Unitarianism, Oneness and Modalism. A small minority of Christians hold non-trinitarian views, largely coming under the heading of Unitarianism.
Most, if not all, Christians believe that God is spirit, an uncreated, omnipotent, and eternal being, the creator and sustainer of all things, who works the redemption of the world through his Son, Jesus Christ. With this background, belief in the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit is expressed as the doctrine of the Trinity, which describes the single divine ousia (substance) existing as three distinct and inseparable hypostases (persons): the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ the Logos), and the Holy Spirit.
The Trinitarian doctrine is considered by most Christians to be a core tenet of their faith. Nontrinitarians typically hold that God, the Father, is supreme; that Jesus, although still divine Lord and Savior, is the Son of God; and that the Holy Spirit is a phenomenon akin to God's will on Earth. The holy three are separate, yet the Son and the Holy Spirit are still seen as originating from God the Father.
The New Testament does not have the term "Trinity" and nowhere discusses the Trinity as such. Some emphasize, however, that the New Testament does repeatedly speak of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to "compel a trinitarian understanding of God." The doctrine developed from the biblical language used in New Testament passages such as the baptismal formula in and by the end of the 4th century it was widely held in its present form.
God the Father
In many monotheist religions, God is addressed as the father, in part because of his active interest in human affairs, in the way that a father would take an interest in his children who are dependent on him and as a father, he will respond to humanity, his children, acting in their best interests. In Christianity, God is called "Father" in a more literal sense, besides being the creator and nurturer of creation, and the provider for his children. The Father is said to be in unique relationship with his only begotten (monogenes) son, Jesus Christ, which implies an exclusive and intimate familiarity: "No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."
In Christianity, God the Father's relationship with humanity is as a father to children—in a previously unheard-of sense—and not just as the creator and nurturer of creation, and the provider for his children, his people. Thus, humans, in general, are sometimes called children of God. To Christians, God the Father's relationship with humanity is that of Creator and created beings, and in that respect he is the father of all. The New Testament says, in this sense, that the very idea of family, wherever it appears, derives its name from God the Father, and thus God himself is the model of the family.
However, there is a deeper "legal" sense in which Christians believe that they are made participants in the special relationship of Father and Son, through Jesus Christ as his spiritual bride. Christians call themselves adopted children of God.
In the New Testament, God the Father has a special role in his relationship with the person of the Son, where Jesus is believed to be his Son and his heir. According to the Nicene Creed, the Son (Jesus Christ) is "eternally begotten of the Father", indicating that their divine Father-Son relationship is not tied to an event within time or human history. See Christology. The Bible refers to Christ, called "The Word" as present at the beginning of God's creation., not a creation himself, but equal in the personhood of the Trinity.
In Eastern Orthodox theology, God the Father is the "principium" (beginning), the "source" or "origin" of both the Son and the Holy Spirit, which gives intuitive emphasis to the threeness of persons; by comparison, Western theology explains the "origin" of all three hypostases or persons as being in the divine nature, which gives intuitive emphasis to the oneness of God's being.
Christology and Christ
Christology is the field of study within Christian theology which is primarily concerned with the nature, person, and works of Jesus Christ, held by Christians to be the Son of God. Christology is concerned with the meeting of the human (Son of Man) and divine (God the Son or Word of God) in the person of Jesus.
Primary considerations include the Incarnation, the relationship of Jesus's nature and person with the nature and person of God, and the salvific work of Jesus. As such, Christology is generally less concerned with the details of Jesus's life (what he did) or teaching than with who or what he is. There have been and are various perspectives by those who claim to be his followers since the church began after his ascension. The controversies ultimately focused on whether and how a human nature and a divine nature can co-exist in one person. The study of the inter-relationship of these two natures is one of the preoccupations of the majority tradition.
Teachings about Jesus and testimonies about what he accomplished during his three-year public ministry are found throughout the New Testament. Core biblical teachings about the person of Jesus Christ may be summarized that Jesus Christ was and forever is fully God (divine) and fully human in one sinless person at the same time, and that through the death and resurrection of Jesus, sinful humans can be reconciled to God and thereby are offered salvation and the promise of eternal life via his New Covenant. While there have been theological disputes over the nature of Jesus, Christians believe that Jesus is God incarnate and "true God and true man" (or both fully divine and fully human). Jesus, having become fully human in all respects, suffered the pains and temptations of a mortal man, yet he did not sin. As fully God, he defeated death and rose to life again. Scripture asserts that Jesus was conceived, by the Holy Spirit, and born of his virgin mother Mary without a human father. The biblical accounts of Jesus's ministry include miracles, preaching, teaching, healing, Death, and resurrection. The apostle Peter, in what has become a famous proclamation of faith among Christians since the 1st century, said, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Most Christians now wait for the Second Coming of Christ when they believe he will fulfill the remaining Messianic prophecies.
Christ
Christ is the English term for the Greek (Khristós) meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew (Māšîaḥ), usually transliterated into English as Messiah. The word is often misunderstood to be the surname of Jesus due to the numerous mentions of Jesus Christ in the Christian Bible. The word is in fact used as a title, hence its common reciprocal use Christ Jesus, meaning Jesus the Anointed One or Jesus the Messiah. Followers of Jesus became known as Christians because they believed that Jesus was the Christ, or Messiah, prophesied about in the Old Testament, or Tanakh.
Trinitarian ecumenical councils
The Christological controversies came to a head over the persons of the Godhead and their relationship with one another.
Christology was a fundamental concern from the First Council of Nicaea (325) until the Third Council of Constantinople (680). In this time period, the Christological views of various groups within the broader Christian community led to accusations of heresy, and, infrequently, subsequent religious persecution. In some cases, a sect's unique Christology is its chief distinctive feature, in these cases it is common for the sect to be known by the name given to its Christology.
The decisions made at First Council of Nicaea and re-ratified at the First Council of Constantinople, after several decades of ongoing controversy during which the work of Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers were influential. The language used was that the one God exists in three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit); in particular it was affirmed that the Son was homoousios (of one substance) with the Father. The Creed of the Nicene Council made statements about the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus, thus preparing the way for discussion about how exactly the divine and human come together in the person of Christ (Christology).
Nicaea insisted that Jesus was fully divine and also human. What it did not do was make clear how one person could be both divine and human, and how the divine and human were related within that one person. This led to the Christological controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries of the Christian era.
The Chalcedonian Creed did not put an end to all Christological debate, but it did clarify the terms used and became a point of reference for all other Christologies. Most of the major branches of Christianity—Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and Reformed—subscribe to the Chalcedonian Christological formulation, while many branches of Eastern Christianity—Syrian Orthodoxy, Assyrian Church, Coptic Orthodoxy, Ethiopian Orthodoxy, and Armenian Apostolicism—reject it.
Attributes of Christ
God as Son
According to the Bible, the second Person of the Trinity, because of his eternal relation to the first Person (God as Father), is the Son of God. He is considered (by Trinitarians) to be coequal with the Father and Holy Spirit. He is all God and all human: the Son of God as to his divine nature, while as to his human nature he is from the lineage of David. The core of Jesus's self-interpretation was his "filial consciousness", his relationship to God as child to parent in some unique sense (see Filioque controversy). His mission on earth proved to be that of enabling people to know God as their Father, which Christians believe is the essence of eternal life.
God the Son is the second person of the Trinity in Christian theology. The doctrine of the Trinity identifies Jesus of Nazareth as God the Son, united in essence but distinct in person with regard to God the Father and God the Holy Spirit (the first and third persons of the Trinity). God the Son is co-eternal with God the Father (and the Holy Spirit), both before Creation and after the End (see Eschatology). So Jesus was always "God the Son", though not revealed as such until he also became the "Son of God" through incarnation. "Son of God" draws attention to his humanity, whereas "God the Son" refers more generally to his divinity, including his pre-incarnate existence. So, in Christian theology, Jesus was always God the Son, though not revealed as such until he also became the Son of God through incarnation.
The exact phrase "God the Son" is not in the New Testament. Later theological use of this expression reflects what came to be standard interpretation of New Testament references, understood to imply Jesus's divinity, but the distinction of his person from that of the one God he called his Father. As such, the title is associated more with the development of the doctrine of the Trinity than with the Christological debates. There are over 40 places in the New Testament where Jesus is given the title "the Son of God", but scholars don't consider this to be an equivalent expression. "God the Son" is rejected by anti-trinitarians, who view this reversal of the most common term for Christ as a doctrinal perversion and as tending towards tritheism.
Matthew cites Jesus as saying, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God (5:9)." The gospels go on to document a great deal of controversy over Jesus being the Son of God, in a unique way. The book of the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of the New Testament, however, record the early teaching of the first Christians– those who believed Jesus to be both the Son of God, the Messiah, a man appointed by God, as well as God himself. This is evident in many places, however, the early part of the book of Hebrews addresses the issue in a deliberate, sustained argument, citing the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible as authorities. For example, the author quotes Psalm 45:6 as addressed by the God of Israel to Jesus.
Hebrews 1:8. About the Son he says, "Your throne, O God, will last for ever and ever."
The author of Hebrews' description of Jesus as the exact representation of the divine Father has parallels in a passage in Colossians.
Colossians 2:9–10. "in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form"
John's gospel quotes Jesus at length regarding his relationship with his heavenly Father. It also contains two famous attributions of divinity to Jesus.
John 1:1. "the Word was God" [in context, the Word is Jesus, see Christ the Logos]
John 20:28. "Thomas said to him, 'My Lord and my God!'"
The most direct references to Jesus as God are found in various letters.
Romans 9:5. "Christ, who is God over all"
Titus 2:13. "our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ"
2 Peter 1:1. "our God and Savior Jesus Christ"
The biblical basis for later trinitarian statements in creeds is the early baptism formula found in Matthew 28.
Matthew 28:19. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name [note the singular] of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. See also Great Commission.
Person of Christ
Only divine?
Docetism (from the Greek verb to seem) taught that Jesus was fully divine, and his human body was only illusory. At a very early stage, various Docetic groups arose; in particular, the gnostic sects which flourished in the 2nd century AD tended to have Docetic theologies. Docetic teachings were attacked by St. Ignatius of Antioch (early 2nd century), and appear to be targeted in the canonical Epistles of John (dates are disputed, but range from the late 1st century among traditionalist scholars to the late 2nd century among critical scholars).
The Council of Nicaea rejected theologies that entirely ruled out any humanity in Christ, affirming in the Nicene Creed the doctrine of the Incarnation as a part of the doctrine of the Trinity. That is, that the second person of the Trinity became incarnate in the person Jesus and was fully human.
Only human?
The early centuries of Christian history also had groups at the other end of the spectrum, arguing that Jesus was an ordinary mortal. The Adoptionists taught that Jesus was born fully human, and was adopted as God's Son when John the Baptist baptised him because of the life he lived. Another group, known as the Ebionites, taught that Jesus was not God, but the human Moshiach (messiah, anointed) prophet promised in the Hebrew Bible.
Some of these views could be described as Unitarianism (although that is a modern term) in their insistence on the oneness of God. These views, which directly affected how one understood the Godhead, were declared heresies by the Council of Nicaea. Throughout much of the rest of the ancient history of Christianity, Christologies that denied Christ's divinity ceased to have a major impact on the life of the church.
How can he be both?
What sort of divinity?
Arianism affirmed that Jesus was divine, but taught that he was nevertheless a created being (there was [a time] when he was not [in existence]), and was therefore less divine than God the Father. The matter boiled down to one iota; Arianism taught Homoiousia—the belief that Jesus's divinity is similar to that of God the Father—as opposed to Homoousia—the belief that Jesus's divinity is the same as that of God the Father. Arius' opponents additionally included in the term Arianism the belief that Jesus's divinity is different from that of God the Father (Heteroousia).
Arianism was condemned by the Council of Nicea, but remained popular in the northern and western provinces of the empire, and continued to be the majority view of western Europe well into the 6th century. Indeed, even the Christian legend of Constantine's death-bed baptism involves a bishop who, in recorded history, was an Arian.
In the modern era, a number of denominations have rejected the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, including the Christadelphians and the Jehovah's Witnesses.
What sort of amalgamation?
The Christological debates following the Council of Nicaea sought to make sense of the interplay of the human and divine in the person of Christ while upholding the doctrine of the Trinity. Apollinaris of Laodicea (310–390) taught that in Jesus, the divine component took the place of the human nous (thinking– not to be confused with thelis, meaning intent). This however was seen as a denial of Jesus's true humanity, and the view was condemned at the First Council of Constantinople.
Subsequently, Nestorius of Constantinople (386–451) initiated a view that effectively separated Jesus into two persons—one divine and one human; the mechanism of this combination is known as hypostases, and contrasts with hypostasis—the view that there is no separation. Nestorius' theology was deemed heretical at the First Council of Ephesus (431). Though, as seen by the writings of Babai the Great, the Christology of the Church of the East is highly similar to that of Chalcedon, many orthodox Christians (particularly in the West) consider this group to be the perpetuation of Nestorianism; the modern Assyrian Church of the East has at times shunned this term, as it implies acceptance of the entire theology of Nestorius.
Various forms of Monophysitism taught that Christ only had one nature: that the divine had either dissolved (Eutychianism), or that the divine joined with the human as one nature in the person of Christ (Miaphysitism). A notable monophysite theologian was Eutyches (–456). Monophysitism was rejected as heresy at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which affirmed that Jesus Christ had two natures (divine and human) joined in one person, in hypostatic union (see Chalcedonian creed). While Eutychianism was suppressed into oblivion by the Chalcedonians and Miaphysites, the Miaphysite groups who dissented from the Chalcedonian formula have persisted as the Oriental Orthodox Church.
As theologians continued to search for a compromise between the Chalcedonian definition and the Monophysites, other Christologies developed that partially rejected the full humanity of Christ. Monothelitism taught that in the one person of Jesus there were two natures, but only a divine will. Closely related to this is Monoenergism, which held to the same doctrine as the Monothelites, but with different terminology. These positions were declared heresy by the Third Council of Constantinople (the Sixth Ecumenical Council, 680–681).
Incarnation
The Incarnation is the belief in Christianity that the second person in the Christian Godhead, also known as God the Son or the Logos (Word), "became flesh" when he was miraculously conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary. The word Incarnate derives from Latin (in=in or into, caro, carnis=flesh) meaning "to make into flesh" or "to become flesh". The incarnation is a fundamental theological teaching of orthodox (Nicene) Christianity, based on its understanding of the New Testament. The incarnation represents the belief that Jesus, who is the non-created second hypostasis of the triune God, took on a human body and nature and became both man and God. In the Bible its clearest teaching is in : "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us."
In the Incarnation, as traditionally defined, the divine nature of the Son was joined but not mixed with human nature in one divine Person, Jesus Christ, who was both "truly God and truly man". The Incarnation is commemorated and celebrated each year at Christmas, and also reference can be made to the Feast of the Annunciation; "different aspects of the mystery of the Incarnation" are celebrated at Christmas and the Annunciation.
This is central to the traditional faith held by most Christians. Alternative views on the subject (See Ebionites and the Gospel according to the Hebrews) have been proposed throughout the centuries (see below), but all were rejected by mainstream Christian bodies.
In recent decades, an alternative doctrine known as "Oneness" has been espoused among various Pentecostal groups (see below), but has been rejected by the remainder of Christendom.
Description and development of the traditional doctrine
In the early Christian era, there was considerable disagreement amongst Christians regarding the nature of Christ's Incarnation. While all Christians believed that Jesus was indeed the Son of God, the exact nature of his Sonship was contested, together with the precise relationship of the "Father," "Son" and "Holy Ghost" referred to in the New Testament. Though Jesus was clearly the "Son," what exactly did this mean? Debate on this subject raged most especially during the first four centuries of Christianity, involving Jewish Christians, Gnostics, followers of the Presbyter Arius of Alexandra, and adherents of St. Athanasius the Great, among others.
Eventually, the Christian Church accepted the teaching of St. Athanasius and his allies, that Christ was the incarnation of the eternal second person of the Trinity, who was fully God and fully a man simultaneously. All divergent beliefs were defined as heresies. This included Docetism, which said that Jesus was a divine being that took on human appearance but not flesh; Arianism, which held that Christ was a created being; and Nestorianism, which maintained that the Son of God and the man, Jesus, shared the same body but retained two separate natures. The Oneness belief held by certain modern Pentecostal churches is also seen as heretical by most mainstream Christian bodies.
The most widely accepted the early Christian Church made definitions of the Incarnation and the nature of Jesus at the First Council of Nicaea in 325, the Council of Ephesus in 431, and the Council of Chalcedon in 451. These councils declared that Jesus was both fully God: begotten from, but not created by the Father; and fully man: taking his flesh and human nature from the Virgin Mary. These two natures, human and divine, were hypostatically united into the one personhood of Jesus Christ.
Fortuitous and Necessary Incarnation
The link between the Incarnation and the Atonement within systematic theological thought is complex. Within traditional models of the Atonement, such as Substitution, Satisfaction or Christus Victor, Christ must be Divine in order for the Sacrifice of the Cross to be efficacious, for human sins to be "removed" or "conquered". In his work The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, Jurgen Moltmann differentiated between what he called a "fortuitous" and a "necessary" Incarnation. The latter gives a soteriological emphasis to the Incarnation: the Son of God became a man so that he could save us from our sins. The former, on the other hand, speaks of the Incarnation as a fulfilment of the Love of God, of his desire to be present and living amidst humanity, to "walk in the garden" with us.
Moltmann favours "fortuitous" incarnation primarily because he feels that to speak of an incarnation of "necessity" is to do an injustice to the life of Christ. Moltmann's work, alongside other systematic theologians, opens up avenues of liberation Christology.
Hypostatic union
In short, this doctrine states that two natures, one human and one divine, are united in the one person of Christ. The Council further taught that each of these natures, the human and the divine, was distinct and complete. This view is sometimes called Dyophysite (meaning two natures) by those who rejected it.
Hypostatic union (from the Greek for substance) is a technical term in Christian theology employed in mainstream Christology to describe the union of two natures, humanity and divinity, in Jesus Christ. A brief definition of the doctrine of two natures can be given as: "Jesus Christ, who is identical with the Son, is one person and one hypostasis in two natures: a human and a divine."
The First Council of Ephesus recognised this doctrine and affirmed its importance, stating that the humanity and divinity of Christ are made one according to nature and hypostasis in the Logos.
The First Council of Nicaea declared that the Father and the Son are of the same substance and are co-eternal. This belief was expressed in the Nicene Creed.
Apollinaris of Laodicea was the first to use the term hypostasis in trying to understand the Incarnation. Apollinaris described the union of the divine and human in Christ as being of a single nature and having a single essence– a single hypostasis.
The Nestorian Theodore of Mopsuestia went in the other direction, arguing that in Christ there were two natures (dyophysite) (human and divine) and two hypostases (in the sense of "essence" or "person") that co-existed.
The Chalcedonian Creed agreed with Theodore that there were two natures in the Incarnation. However, the Council of Chalcedon also insisted that hypostasis be used as it was in the Trinitarian definition: to indicate the person and not the nature as with Apollinarius.
Thus, the Council declared that in Christ there are two natures; each retaining its own properties, and together united in one subsistence and in one single person.
As the precise nature of this union is held to defy finite human comprehension, the hypostatic union is also referred to by the alternative term "mystical union."
The Oriental Orthodox Churches, having rejected the Chalcedonian Creed, were known as Monophysites because they would only accept a definition that characterized the incarnate Son as having one nature. The Chalcedonian "in two natures" formula was seen as derived from and akin to a Nestorian Christology. Contrariwise, the Chalcedonians saw the Oriental Orthodox as tending towards Eutychian Monophysitism. However, the Oriental Orthodox have in modern ecumenical dialogue specified that they have never believed in the doctrines of Eutyches, that they have always affirmed that Christ's humanity is consubstantial with our own, and they thus prefer the term "Miaphysite" to refer to themselves (a reference to Cyrillian Christology, which used the phrase "mia physis tou theou logou sesarkomene").
In recent times, leaders from the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches have signed joint statements in an attempt to work towards reunification.
Other Christological concerns
The sinlessness of Christ
Although Christian orthodoxy holds that Jesus was fully human, the Epistle to the Hebrews, for example, states that Christ was 'holy and without evil' (7:26). The question concerning the sinlessness of Jesus Christ focuses on this seeming paradox. Does being fully human require that one participate in the "fall" of Adam, or could Jesus exist in an "unfallen" status as Adam and Eve did before the "fall", according to Genesis 2–3?
Kinds of sinlessness
Evangelical writer Donald Macleod suggests that the sinless nature of Jesus Christ involves two elements. "First, Christ was free of actual sin." Studying the gospels there is no reference to Jesus praying for the forgiveness of sin, nor confessing sin. The assertion is that Jesus did not commit sin, nor could he be proven guilty of sin; he had no vices. In fact, he is quoted as asking, "Can any of you prove me guilty of sin?" in John 8:46. "Secondly, he was free from inherent sin ("original sin" or "ancestral sin")."
Temptation of Christ
The temptation of Christ shown in the gospels affirms that he was tempted. Indeed, the temptations were genuine and of a greater intensity than normally experienced by human beings. He experienced all the frail weaknesses of humanity. Jesus was tempted through hunger and thirst, pain and the love of his friends. Thus, the human weaknesses could engender temptation. Nevertheless, MacLeod notes that "one crucial respect in which Christ was not like us is that he was not tempted by anything within himself."
The temptations Christ faced focused upon his person and identity as the incarnate Son of God. MacLeod writes, "Christ could be tempted through his sonship." The temptation in the wilderness and again in Gethsemane exemplifies this arena of temptation. Regarding the temptation of performing a sign that would affirm his sonship by throwing himself from the pinnacle of the temple, MacLeod observes, "The sign was for himself: a temptation to seek reassurance, as if to say, 'the real question is my own sonship. I must forget all else and all others and all further service until that is clear. MacLeod places this struggle in the context of the incarnation, "...he has become a man and must accept not only the appearance but the reality."
Communication of attributes
The communion of attributes (Communicatio idiomatum) of Christ's divine and human natures is understood according to Chalcedonian theology to mean that they exist together with neither overriding the other. That is, both are preserved and coexist in one person. Christ had all the properties of God and humanity. God did not stop being God and become man. Christ was not half-God and half-human. The two natures did not mix into a new third kind of nature. Although independent, they acted in complete accord; when one nature acted, so did the other. The natures did not commingle, merge, infuse each other, or replace each other. One was not converted into the other. They remained distinct (yet acted with one accord).
Virgin Birth
The Gospel according to Matthew and Gospel according to Luke suggest a virgin birth of Jesus Christ. Some now disregard or even argue against this "doctrine" to which most denominations of Christianity ascribe. This section looks at the Christological issues surrounding belief or disbelief in the virgin birth.
A non-virgin birth would seem to require some form of adoptionism. This is because a human conception and birth would seem to yield a fully human Jesus, with some other mechanism required to make Jesus divine as well.
A non-virgin birth would seem to support the full humanity of Jesus. William Barclay: states, "The supreme problem of the virgin birth is that it does quite undeniably differentiate Jesus from all men; it does leave us with an incomplete incarnation."
Barth speaks of the virgin birth as the divine sign "which accompanies and indicates the mystery of the incarnation of the Son."
Donald MacLeod gives several Christological implications of a virgin birth:
Highlights salvation as a supernatural act of God rather than an act of human initiative.
Avoids adoptionism (which is virtually required if a normal birth).
Reinforces the sinlessness of Christ, especially as it relates to Christ being outside the sin of Adam (original sin).
Relationship of Persons
The discussion of whether the three distinct persons in the Godhead of the Trinity were of greater, equal, or lesser by comparison was also, like many other areas of early Christology, a subject of debate. In Athenagoras of Athens (–190) writings we find a very developed trinitarian doctrine. On the one end of the spectrum was modalism, a doctrine stating that the three persons of the Trinity were equal to the point of erasing their differences and distinctions. On the other end of the spectrum were tritheism as well as some radically subordinationist views, the latter of which emphasized the primacy of the Father of Creation to the deity of Christ and Jesus's authority over the Holy Spirit. During the Council of Nicea, the modalist bishops of Rome and Alexandria aligned politically with Athanasius; whereas the bishops of Constantinople (Nicomedia), Antioch, and Jerusalem sided with the subordinationists as middle ground between Arius and Athanasius.
Approaches to Christology
Theologians like Jurgen Moltmann and Walter Kasper have characterized Christologies as anthropological or cosmological. These are also termed 'Christology from below' and 'Christology from above' respectively. An anthropological Christology starts with the human person of Jesus and works from his life and ministry toward what it means for him to be divine; whereas, a cosmological Christology works in the opposite direction. Starting from the eternal Logos, a cosmological Christology works toward his humanity. Theologians typically begin on one side or the other and their choice inevitably colors their resultant Christology. As a starting point, these options represent "diverse yet complementary" approaches; each poses its own difficulties. Both Christologies 'from above' and 'from below' must come to terms with the two natures of Christ: human and divine. Just as light can be perceived as a wave or as a particle, so Jesus must be thought in terms of both his divinity and humanity. You cannot talk about "either or" but must talk about "both and".
Cosmological approaches
Christologies from above start with the Logos, the second Person of the Trinity, establish his eternality, his agency in creation, and his economic Sonship. Jesus's unity with God is established by the Incarnation as the divine Logos assumes a human nature. This approach was common in the early church—e.g., St. Paul and St. John in the Gospels. The attribution of full humanity to Jesus is resolved by stating that the two natures mutually share their properties (a concept termed communicatio idiomatum).
Anthropological approaches
Christologies from below start with the human being Jesus as the representative of the new humanity, not with the pre-existent Logos. Jesus lives an exemplary life, one to which we aspire in religious experience. This form of Christology lends itself to mysticism, and some of its roots go back to emergence of Christ mysticism in the 6th century East, but in the West it flourished between the 11th and 14th centuries. A recent theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg contends that the resurrected Jesus is the "eschatological fulfillment of human destiny to live in nearness to God."
Political approaches
The Christian faith is inherently political because allegiance to Jesus as risen Lord relativises all earthly rule and authority. Jesus is called "Lord" over 230 times in Paul's epistles alone, and is thus the principal confession of faith in the Pauline epistles. Further, N.T. Wright argues that this Pauline confession is the core of the gospel of salvation. The Achilles' heel of this approach is the loss of eschatological tension between this present age and the future divine rule that is yet to come. This can happen when the state co-opts Christ's authority as was often the case in imperial Christology. Modern political Christologies seek to overcome imperialist ideologies.
Works of Christ
Resurrection of Jesus
The resurrection is perhaps the most controversial aspect of the life of Jesus Christ. Christianity hinges on this point of Christology, both as a response to a particular history and as a confessional response. Some Christians claim that because he was resurrected, the future of the world was forever altered. Most Christians believe that Jesus's resurrection brings reconciliation with God (II Corinthians 5:18), the destruction of death (I Corinthians 15:26), and forgiveness of sins for followers of Jesus Christ.
After Jesus had died, and was buried, the New Testament states that he appeared to others in bodily form. Some skeptics say his appearances were only perceived by his followers in mind or spirit. The gospels state that the disciples believed they witnessed Jesus's resurrected body and that led to the beginning of the faith. They had previously hid in fear of persecution after Jesus's death. After seeing Jesus they boldly proclaimed the message of Jesus Christ despite tremendous risk. They obeyed Jesus's mandate to be reconciled to God through repentance (Luke 24:47), baptism, and obedience (Matthew 28:19–20).
Offices as Prophet, Priest, and King
Jesus Christ, the Mediator of humankind, fulfills the three offices of Prophet, Priest, and King. Eusebius of the early church worked out this threefold classification, which during the Reformation played a substantial role in scholastic Lutheran Christology and in John Calvin's and John Wesley's Christology.
Pneumatology: Holy Spirit
Pneumatology is the study of the Holy Spirit. Pneuma (πνεῦμα) is Greek for "breath", which metaphorically describes a non-material being or influence. In Christian theology pneumatology refers to the study of the Holy Spirit. In Christianity, the Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost) is the Spirit of God. Within mainstream (Trinitarian) Christian beliefs he is the third person of the Trinity. As part of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit is equal with God the Father and with God the Son. The Christian theology of the Holy Spirit was the last piece of Trinitarian theology to be fully developed.
Within mainstream (Trinitarian) Christianity the Holy Spirit is one of the three persons of the Trinity who make up the single substance of God. As such the Holy Spirit is personal, and as part of the Godhead, he is fully God, co-equal and co-eternal with God the Father and Son of God. He is different from the Father and the Son in that he proceeds from the Father (or from the Father and the Son) as described in the Nicene Creed. His sacredness is reflected in the New Testament gospels which proclaim blasphemy against the Holy Spirit as unforgivable.
The English word comes from two Greek words: πνευμα (pneuma, spirit) and λογος (logos, teaching about). Pneumatology would normally include study of the person of the Holy Spirit, and the works of the Holy Spirit. This latter category would normally include Christian teachings on new birth, spiritual gifts (charismata), Spirit-baptism, sanctification, the inspiration of prophets, and the indwelling of the Holy Trinity (which in itself covers many different aspects). Different Christian denominations have different theological approaches.
Christians believe that the Holy Spirit leads people to faith in Jesus and gives them the ability to live a Christian lifestyle. The Holy Spirit dwells inside every Christian, each one's body being his temple. Jesus described the Holy Spirit as paracletus in Latin, derived from Greek. The word is variously translated as Comforter, Counselor, Teacher, Advocate, guiding people in the way of the truth. The Holy Spirit's action in one's life is believed to produce positive results, known as the Fruit of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit enables Christians, who still experience the effects of sin, to do things they never could do on their own. These spiritual gifts are not innate abilities "unlocked" by the Holy Spirit, but entirely new abilities, such as the ability to cast out demons or simply bold speech. Through the influence of the Holy Spirit, a person sees more clearly the world around him or her and can use his or her mind and body in ways that exceed his or her previous capacity. A list of gifts that may be bestowed include the charismatic gifts of prophecy, tongues, healing, and knowledge. Christians holding a view known as cessationism believe these gifts were given only in New Testament times. Christians almost universally agree that certain "spiritual gifts" are still in effect today, including the gifts of ministry, teaching, giving, leadership, and mercy. The experience of the Holy Spirit is sometimes referred to as being anointed.
After his resurrection, Christ told his disciples that they would be "baptized with the Holy Spirit" and would receive power from this event, a promise that was fulfilled in the events recounted in the second chapter of Acts. On the first Pentecost, Jesus's disciples were gathered in Jerusalem when a mighty wind was heard and tongues of fire appeared over their heads. A multilingual crowd heard the disciples speaking, and each of them heard them speaking in his or her native language.
The Holy Spirit is believed to perform specific divine functions in the life of the Christian or the church. These include:
Conviction of sin. The Holy Spirit acts to convince the unredeemed person both of the sinfulness of their actions, and of their moral standing as sinners before God.
Bringing to conversion. The action of the Holy Spirit is seen as an essential part of the bringing of the person to the Christian faith. The new believer is "born again of the Spirit".
Enabling the Christian life. The Holy Spirit is believed to dwell in the individual believers and enable them to live a righteous and faithful life.
As a comforter or Paraclete, one who intercedes, or supports or acts as an advocate, particularly in times of trial.
Inspiration and interpretation of scripture. The Holy Spirit both inspires the writing of the scriptures and interprets them to the Christian and church.
The Holy Spirit is also believed to be active especially in the life of Jesus Christ, enabling him to fulfill his work on earth. Particular actions of the Holy Spirit include:
Cause of his birth. According to the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus, the "beginning of His incarnate existence", was due to the Holy Spirit.
Anointing him at his baptism.
Empowerment of his ministry. The ministry of Jesus following his baptism (in which the Holy Spirit is described in the gospels as "descending on Him like a dove") is conducted in the power and at the direction of the Holy Spirit.
Fruit of the Spirit
Christians believe the "Fruit of the Spirit" consists of virtuous characteristics engendered in the Christian by the action of the Holy Spirit. They are those listed in : "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." The Roman Catholic Church adds to this list generosity, modesty, and chastity.
Gifts of the Spirit
Christians believe that the Holy Spirit gives 'gifts' to Christians. These gifts consist of specific abilities granted to the individual Christian. They are frequently known by the Greek word for gift, Charisma, from which the term charismatic derives. The New Testament provides three different lists of such gifts which range from the supernatural (healing, prophecy, tongues) through those associated with specific callings (teaching) to those expected of all Christians in some degree (faith). Most consider these lists not to be exhaustive, and other have compiled their own lists. Saint Ambrose wrote of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit poured out on a believer at baptism: 1. Spirit of Wisdom; 2. Spirit of Understanding; 3. Spirit of Counsel; 4. Spirit of Strength; 5. Spirit of Knowledge; 6. Spirit of Godliness; 7. Spirit of Holy Fear.
It is over the nature and occurrence of these gifts, particularly the supernatural gifts (sometimes called charismatic gifts), that the greatest disagreement between Christians with regard to the Holy Spirit exists.
One view is that the supernatural gifts were a special dispensation for the apostolic ages, bestowed because of the unique conditions of the church at that time, and are extremely rarely bestowed in the present time. This is the view of some in the Catholic Church and many other mainstream Christian groups. The alternate view, espoused mainly by Pentecostal denominations and the charismatic movement, is that the absence of the supernatural gifts was due to the neglect of the Holy Spirit and his work by the church. Although some small groups, such as the Montanists, practiced the supernatural gifts they were rare until the growth of the Pentecostal movement in the late 19th century.
Believers in the relevance of the supernatural gifts sometimes speak of a Baptism of the Holy Spirit or Filling of the Holy Spirit which the Christian needs to experience in order to receive those gifts. Many churches hold that the Baptism of the Holy Spirit is identical with conversion, and that all Christians are by definition baptized in the Holy Spirit.
Cosmology: Things created
The various authors of the Old and New Testament provide glimpses of their insight regarding cosmology. The cosmos was created by God by divine command, in the best-known and most complete account in the Bible, that of Genesis 1.
World
Within this broad understanding, however, there are a number of views regarding exactly how this doctrine ought to be interpreted.
Some Christians, particularly Young and Old Earth creationists, interpret Genesis as an accurate and literal account of creation.
Others may understand these to be, instead, spiritual insights more vaguely defined.
It is a tenet of Christian faith (Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant) that God is the creator of all things from nothing, and has made human beings in the Image of God, who by direct inference is also the source of the human soul. In Chalcedonian Christology, Jesus is the Word of God, which was in the beginning and, thus, is uncreated, and hence is God, and consequently identical with the Creator of the world ex nihilo.
Roman Catholicism uses the phrase special creation to refer to the doctrine of immediate or special creation of each human soul. In 2004, the International Theological Commission, then under the presidency of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, published a paper in which it accepts the current scientific accounts of the history of the universe commencing in the Big Bang about 15 billion years ago and of the evolution of all life on earth including humans from the micro organisms commencing about 4 billion years ago. The Roman Catholic Church allows for both a literal and allegorical interpretation of Genesis, so as to allow for the possibility of Creation by means of an evolutionary process over great spans of time, otherwise known as theistic evolution. It believes that the creation of the world is a work of God through the Logos, the Word (idea, intelligence, reason and logic):
"In the beginning was the Word...and the Word was God...all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made."
The New Testament claims that God created everything by the eternal Word, Jesus Christ his beloved Son. In him
"all things were created, in heaven and on earth.. . all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
Anthropology: Humanity
Christian anthropology is the study of humanity, especially as it relates to the divine. This theological anthropology refers to the study of the human ("anthropology") as it relates to God. It differs from the social science of anthropology, which primarily deals with the comparative study of the physical and social characteristics of humanity across times and places.
One aspect studies the innate nature or constitution of the human, known as the nature of mankind. It is concerned with the relationship between notions such as body, soul and spirit which together form a person, based on their descriptions in the Bible. There are three traditional views of the human constitution– trichotomism, dichotomism and monism (in the sense of anthropology).
Components
Soul
The semantic domain of Biblical soul is based on the Hebrew word nepes, which presumably means "breath" or "breathing being". This word never means an immortal soul or an incorporeal part of the human being that can survive death of the body as the spirit of dead. This word usually designates the person as a whole or its physical life. In the Septuagint nepes is mostly translated as psyche and, exceptionally, in the Book of Joshua as empneon (ἔμπνεον), that is "breathing being".
The New Testament follows the terminology of the Septuagint, and thus uses the word psyche with the Hebrew semantic domain and not the Greek, that is an invisible power (or ever more, for Platonists, immortal and immaterial) that gives life and motion to the body and is responsible for its attributes.
In Patristic thought, towards the end of the 2nd century psyche was understood in more a Greek than a Hebrew way, and it was contrasted with the body. In the 3rd century, with the influence of Origen, there was the establishing of the doctrine of the inherent immortality of the soul and its divine nature. Origen also taught the transmigration of the souls and their preexistence, but these views were officially rejected in 553 in the Fifth Ecumenical Council. Inherent immortality of the soul was accepted among western and eastern theologians throughout the middle ages, and after the Reformation, as evidenced by the Westminster Confession.
Spirit
The spirit (Hebrew ruach, Greek , pneuma, which can also mean "breath") is likewise an immaterial component. It is often used interchangeably with "soul", psyche, although trichotomists believe that the spirit is distinct from the soul.
"When Paul speaks of the pneuma of man he does not mean some higher principle within him or some special intellectual or spiritual faculty of his, but simply his self, and the only questions is whether the self is regarded in some particular aspect when it is called pneuma. In the first place, it apparently is regarded in the same way as when it is called psyche– viz. as the self that lives in man's attitude, in the orientation of his will."
Body, Flesh
The body (Greek soma) is the corporeal or physical aspect of a human being. Christians have traditionally believed that the body will be resurrected at the end of the age.
Flesh (Greek , sarx) is usually considered synonymous with "body", referring to the corporeal aspect of a human being. The apostle Paul contrasts flesh and spirit in Romans 7–8.
Origin of humanity
The Bible teaches in the book of Genesis the humans were created by God. Some Christians believe that this must have involved a miraculous creative act, while others are comfortable with the idea that God worked through the evolutionary process.
The book of Genesis also teaches that human beings, male and female, were created in the image of God. The exact meaning of this has been debated throughout church history.
Death and afterlife
Christian anthropology has implications for beliefs about death and the afterlife. The Christian church has traditionally taught that the soul of each individual separates from the body at death, to be reunited at the resurrection. This is closely related to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. For example, the Westminster Confession (chapter XXXII) states:
"The bodies of men, after death, return to dust, and see corruption: but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them"
Intermediate state
The question then arises: where exactly does the disembodied soul "go" at death? Theologians refer to this subject as the intermediate state. The Old Testament speaks of a place called sheol where the spirits of the dead reside. In the New Testament, hades, the classical Greek realm of the dead, takes the place of sheol. In particular, Jesus teaches in Luke 16:19–31 (Lazarus and Dives) that hades consists of two separate "sections", one for the righteous and one for the unrighteous. His teaching is consistent with intertestamental Jewish thought on the subject.
Fully developed Christian theology goes a step further; on the basis of such texts as Luke 23:43 and Philippians 1:23, it has traditionally been taught that the souls of the dead are received immediately either into heaven or hell, where they will experience a foretaste of their eternal destiny prior to the resurrection. (Roman Catholicism teaches a third possible location, Purgatory, though this is denied by Protestants and Eastern Orthodox.)
"the souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God, in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies. And the souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day." (Westminster Confession)
Some Christian groups which stress a monistic anthropology deny that the soul can exist consciously apart from the body. For example, the Seventh-day Adventist Church teaches that the intermediate state is an unconscious sleep; this teaching is informally known as "soul sleep".
Final state
In Christian belief, both the righteous and the unrighteous will be resurrected at the last judgment. The righteous will receive incorruptible, immortal bodies (1 Corinthians 15), while the unrighteous will be sent to hell. Traditionally, Christians have believed that hell will be a place of eternal physical and psychological punishment. In the last two centuries, annihilationism has become popular.
Mariology
The study of the Blessed Virgin Mary, doctrines about her, and how she relates to the Church, Christ, and the individual Christian is called Mariology. Catholic Mariology is the Marian study specifically in the context of the Catholic Church. Examples of Mariology include the study of and doctrines regarding her Perpetual Virginity, her Motherhood of God (and by extension her Motherhood/Intercession for all Christians), her Immaculate Conception, and her Assumption into heaven.
Angelology
Most descriptions of angels in the Bible describe them in military terms. For example, in terms such as encampment (Gen.32:1–2), command structure (Ps.91:11–12; Matt.13:41; Rev.7:2), and combat (Jdg.5:20; Job 19:12; Rev.12:7).
Its specific hierarchy differs slightly from the Hierarchy of Angels as it surrounds more military services, whereas the Hierarchy of angels is a division of angels into non-military services to God.
Members of the heavenly host
Cherubim are depicted as accompanying God's chariot-throne (Ps.80:1). refers to two Cherub statues placed on top of the Ark of the Covenant, the two cherubim are usually interpreted as guarding the throne of God. Other guard-like duties include being posted in locations such as the gates of Eden (Gen.3:24). Cherubim were mythological winged bulls or other beasts that were part of ancient Near Eastern traditions.
This angelic designation might be given to angels of various ranks. An example would be Raphael who is ranked variously as a Seraph, Cherub, and Archangel . This is usually a result of conflicting schemes of hierarchies of angels.
It is not known how many angels there are but one figure given in Revelation 5:11 for the number of "many angels in a circle around the throne, as well as the living creatures and the elders" was "ten thousand times ten thousand", which would be 100 million.
Demonology: Fallen angels
In most of Christianity, a fallen angel is an angel who has been exiled or banished from Heaven. Often such banishment is a punishment for disobeying or rebelling against God (see War in Heaven). The best-known fallen angel is Lucifer. Lucifer is a name frequently given to Satan in Christian belief. This usage stems from a particular interpretation, as a reference to a fallen angel, of a passage in the Bible that speaks of someone who is given the name of "Day Star" or "Morning Star" (in Latin, Lucifer) as fallen from heaven. The Greek etymological synonym of Lucifer, Φωσφόρος (Phosphoros, "light-bearer"). is used of the morning star in and elsewhere with no reference to Satan. But Satan is called Lucifer in many writings later than the Bible, notably in Milton's Paradise Lost (7.131–134, among others), because, according to Milton, Satan was "brighter once amidst the host of Angels, than that star the stars among."
Allegedly, fallen angels are those which have committed one of the seven deadly sins. Therefore, are banished from heaven and suffer in hell for all eternity. Demons from hell would punish the fallen angel by ripping out their wings as a sign of insignificance and low rank.
Heaven
Christianity has taught Heaven as a place of eternal life, in that it is a shared plane to be attained by all the elect (rather than an abstract experience related to individual concepts of the ideal). The Christian Church has been divided over how people gain this eternal life. From the 16th to the late 19th century, Christendom was divided between the Catholic view, the Eastern Orthodox view, the Coptic view, the Jacobite view, the Abyssinian view and Protestant views. See also Christian denominations.
Heaven is the English name for a transcendental realm wherein human beings who have transcended human living live in an afterlife. in the Bible and in English, the term "heaven" may refer to the physical heavens, the sky or the seemingly endless expanse of the universe beyond, the traditional literal meaning of the term in English.
Christianity maintains that entry into Heaven awaits such time as, "When the form of this world has passed away." (*JPII) One view expressed in the Bible is that on the day Christ returns the righteous dead are resurrected first, and then those who are alive and judged righteous will be brought up to join them, to be taken to heaven. (I Thess 4:13–18)
Two related and often confused concepts of heaven in Christianity are better described as the "resurrection of the body", which is exclusively of biblical origin, as contrasted with the "immortality of the soul", which is also evident in the Greek tradition. In the first concept, the soul does not enter heaven until the last judgement or the "end of time" when it (along with the body) is resurrected and judged. In the second concept, the soul goes to a heaven on another plane such as the intermediate state immediately after death. These two concepts are generally combined in the doctrine of the double judgement where the soul is judged once at death and goes to a temporary heaven, while awaiting a second and final physical judgement at the end of the world.(*" JPII, also see eschatology, afterlife)
One popular medieval view of Heaven was that it existed as a physical place above the clouds and that God and the Angels were physically above, watching over man. Heaven as a physical place survived in the concept that it was located far out into space, and that the stars were "lights shining through from heaven".
Many of today's biblical scholars, such as N. T. Wright, in tracing the concept of Heaven back to its Jewish roots, see Earth and Heaven as overlapping or interlocking. Heaven is known as God's space, his dimension, and is not a place that can be reached by human technology. This belief states that Heaven is where God lives and reigns whilst being active and working alongside people on Earth. One day when God restores all things, Heaven and Earth will be forever combined into the New Heavens and New Earth of the World to Come.
Religions that teach about heaven differ on how (and if) one gets into it, typically in the afterlife. In most, entrance to Heaven is conditional on having lived a "good life" (within the terms of the spiritual system). A notable exception to this is the 'sola fide' belief of many mainstream Protestants, which teaches that one does not have to live a perfectly "good life," but that one must accept Jesus Christ as one's Lord and Saviour, and then Jesus Christ will assume the guilt of one's sins; believers are believed to be forgiven regardless of any good or bad "works" one has participated in.
Many religions state that those who do not go to heaven will go to a place "without the presence of God", Hell, which is eternal (see annihilationism). Some religions believe that other afterlives exist in addition to Heaven and Hell, such as Purgatory. One belief, universalism, believes that everyone will go to Heaven eventually, no matter what they have done or believed on earth. Some forms of Christianity believe Hell to be the termination of the soul.
Various saints have had visions of heaven. The Eastern Orthodox concept of life in heaven is described in one of the prayers for the dead: "...a place of light, a place of green pasture, a place of repose, whence all sickness, sorrow and sighing are fled away."
The Church bases its belief in Heaven on some main biblical passages in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures (Old and New Testaments) and collected church wisdom. Heaven is the Realm of the Blessed Trinity, the angels and the saints.
The essential joy of heaven is called the beatific vision, which is derived from the vision of God's essence. The soul rests perfectly in God, and does not, or cannot desire anything else than God. After the Last Judgment, when the soul is reunited with its body, the body participates in the happiness of the soul. It becomes incorruptible, glorious and perfect. Any physical defects the body may have laboured under are erased. Heaven is also known as paradise in some cases. The Great Gulf separates heaven from hell.
Upon dying, each soul goes to what is called "the particular judgement" where its own afterlife is decided (i.e. Heaven after Purgatory, straight to Heaven, or Hell.) This is different from "the general judgement" also known as "the Last judgement" which will occur when Christ returns to judge all the living and the dead.
The term Heaven (which differs from "The Kingdom of Heaven" see note below) is applied by the biblical authors to the realm in which God currently resides. Eternal life, by contrast, occurs in a renewed, unspoilt and perfect creation, which can be termed Heaven since God will choose to dwell there permanently with his people, as seen in . There will no longer be any separation between God and man. The believers themselves will exist in incorruptible, resurrected and new bodies; there will be no sickness, no death and no tears. Some teach that death itself is not a natural part of life, but was allowed to happen after Adam and Eve disobeyed God (see original sin) so that mankind would not live forever in a state of sin and thus a state of separation from God.
Many evangelicals understand this future life to be divided into two distinct periods: first, the Millennial Reign of Christ (the one thousand years) on this earth, referred to in ; secondly, the New Heavens and New Earth, referred to in Revelation 21 and 22. This millennialism (or chiliasm) is a revival of a strong tradition in the Early Church that was dismissed by Saint Augustine of Hippo and the Roman Catholic Church after him.
Not only will the believers spend eternity with God, they will also spend it with each other. John's vision recorded in Revelation describes a New Jerusalem which comes from Heaven to the New Earth, which is seen to be a symbolic reference to the people of God living in community with one another. 'Heaven' will be the place where life will be lived to the full, in the way that the designer planned, each believer 'loving the Lord their God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their mind' and 'loving their neighbour as themselves' (adapted from Matthew 22:37–38, the Great Commandment)—a place of great joy, without the negative aspects of earthly life. See also World to Come.
Purgatory
Purgatory is the condition or temporary punishment in which, it is believed, the souls of those who die in a state of grace are made ready for Heaven. This is a theological idea that has ancient roots and is well-attested in early Christian literature, while the poetic conception of purgatory as a geographically situated place is largely the creation of medieval Christian piety and imagination.
The notion of purgatory is associated particularly with the Latin Church of the Catholic Church (in the Eastern Catholic Churches it is a doctrine, though often without using the name "Purgatory"); Anglicans of the Anglo-Catholic tradition generally also hold to the belief. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, believed in an intermediate state between death and the final judgment and in the possibility of "continuing to grow in holiness there." The Eastern Orthodox Churches believe in the possibility of a change of situation for the souls of the dead through the prayers of the living and the offering of the Divine Liturgy, and many Eastern Orthodox, especially among ascetics, hope and pray for a general apocatastasis. A similar belief in at least the possibility of a final salvation for all is held by Mormonism. Judaism also believes in the possibility of after-death purification and may even use the word "purgatory" to present its understanding of the meaning of Gehenna. However, the concept of soul "purification" may be explicitly denied in these other faith traditions.
Hell
Hell in Christian beliefs, is a place or a state in which the souls of the unsaved will suffer the consequences of sin. The Christian doctrine of Hell derives from the teaching of the New Testament, where Hell is typically described using the Greek words Gehenna or Tartarus. Unlike Hades, Sheol, or Purgatory it is eternal, and those damned to Hell are without hope. In the New Testament, it is described as the place or state of punishment after death or last judgment for those who have rejected Jesus. In many classical and popular depictions it is also the abode of Satan and of Demons. Such is not the case in the Book of Revelation, where Satan is thrown into Hell only at the end of Christ's millennium long reign on this Earth.
Hell is generally defined as the eternal fate of unrepentant sinners after this life. Hell's character is inferred from biblical teaching, which has often been understood literally. Souls are said to pass into Hell by God's irrevocable judgment, either immediately after death (particular judgment) or in the general judgment. Modern theologians generally describe Hell as the logical consequence of the soul using its free will to reject the will of God. It is considered compatible with God's justice and mercy because God will not interfere with the soul's free choice.
Only in the King James Version of the bible is the word "Hell" used to translate certain words, such as sheol (Hebrew) and both hades and Gehenna(Greek). All other translations reserve Hell only for use when Gehenna is mentioned. It is generally agreed that both sheol and hades do not typically refer to the place of eternal punishment, but to the underworld or temporary abode of the dead.
Traditionally, the majority of Protestants have held that Hell will be a place of unending conscious torment, both physical and spiritual, although some recent writers (such as C. S. Lewis and J.P. Moreland) have cast Hell in terms of "eternal separation" from God. Certain biblical texts have led some theologians to the conclusion that punishment in Hell, though eternal and irrevocable, will be proportional to the deeds of each soul (e.g. , ).
Another area of debate is the fate of the unevangelized (i.e. those who have never had an opportunity to hear the Christian gospel), those who die in infancy, and intellectually disabled people. Some Protestants agree with Augustine that people in these categories will be damned to Hell for original sin, while others believe that God will make an exception in these cases.
A "significant minority" believe in the doctrine of conditional immortality, which teaches that those sent to Hell will not experience eternal conscious punishment, but instead will be extinguished or annihilated after a period of "limited conscious punishment". Prominent evangelical theologians who have adopted conditionalist beliefs include John Wenham, Edward Fudge, Clark Pinnock and John Stott (although the latter has described himself as an "agnostic" on the issue of annihilationism). Conditionalists typically reject the traditional concept of the immortality of the soul.
Some Protestants (such as George MacDonald, Karl Randall, Keith DeRose and Thomas Talbott), also, however, in a minority, believe that after serving their sentence in Gehenna, all souls are reconciled to God and admitted to heaven, or ways are found at the time of death of drawing all souls to repentance so that no "hellish" suffering is experienced. This view is often called Christian universalism—its conservative branch is more specifically called 'Biblical or Trinitarian Universalism'—and is not to be confused with Unitarian Universalism. See universal reconciliation, apocatastasis and the problem of Hell.
Theodicy: Allowance of evil
Theodicy can be said to be defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil. Specifically, Theodicy is a specific branch of theology and philosophy which attempts to reconcile belief in God with the perceived existence of evil. As such, theodicy can be said to attempt to justify the behaviour of God (at least insofar as God allows evil).
Responses to the problem of evil have sometimes been classified as defenses or theodicies. However, authors disagree on the exact definitions. Generally, a defense attempts to show that there is no logical incompatibility between the existence of evil and the existence of God. A defense need not argue that this is a probable or plausible explanation, only that the defense is logically possible. A defense attempts to answer the logical problem of evil.
A theodicy, on the other hand, is a more ambitious attempt to provide a plausible justification for the existence of evil. A theodicy attempts to answer the evidential problem of evil. Richard Swinburne maintains that it does not make sense to assume there are greater goods, unless we know what they are, i.e., we have a successful theodicy.
As an example, some authors see arguments including demons or the fall of man as not logically impossible but not very plausible considering our knowledge about the world. Thus they are seen as defenses but not good theodicies. C. S. Lewis writes in his book The Problem of Pain:
Another possible answer is that the world is corrupted due to the sin of mankind. Some answer that because of sin, the world has fallen from the grace of God, and is not perfect. Therefore, evils and imperfections persist because the world is fallen. William A. Dembski argues that the effects of Adam's sin recorded in the Book of Genesis were 'back-dated' by God, and hence applied to the earlier history of the universe.
Evil is sometimes seen as a test or trial for humans. Irenaeus of Lyons and more recently John Hick have argued that evil and suffering are necessary for spiritual growth. This is often combined with the free will argument by arguing that such spiritual growth requires free will decisions. A problem with this is that many evils do not seem to cause any kind of spiritual growth, or even permit it, as when a child is abused from birth and becomes, seemingly inevitably, a brutal adult.
The problem of evil is often phrased in the form: Why do bad things happen to good people?. Christianity teach that all people are inherently sinful due to the fall of man and original sin; for example, Calvinist theology follows a doctrine called federal headship, which argues that the first man, Adam, was the legal representative of the entire human race. A counterargument to the basic version of this principle is that an omniscient God would have predicted this, when he created the world, and an omnipotent God could have prevented it.
The Book of Isaiah clearly claims that God is the source of at least some natural disasters, but Isaiah doesn't attempt to explain the motivation behind the creation of evil. In contrast, the Book of Job is one of the most widely known formulations of the problem of evil in Western thought. In it, Satan challenges God regarding his servant Job, claiming that Job only serves God for the blessings and protection that he receives from him. God allows Satan to plague Job and his family in a number of ways, with the limitation that Satan may not take Job's life (but his children are killed). Job discusses this with three friends and questions God regarding his suffering which he finds to be unjust. God responds in a speech and then more than restores Job's prior health, wealth, and gives him new children.
Bart D. Ehrman argues that different parts of the Bible give different answers. One example is evil as punishment for sin or as a consequence of sin. Ehrman writes that this seems to be based on some notion of free will although this argument is never explicitly mentioned in the Bible. Another argument is that suffering ultimately achieves a greater good, possibly for persons other than the sufferer, that would not have been possible otherwise. The Book of Job offers two different answers: suffering is a test, and you will be rewarded later for passing it; another that God in his might chooses not to reveal his reasons. Ecclesiastes sees suffering as beyond human abilities to comprehend. Apocalyptic parts, including the New Testament, see suffering as due to cosmic evil forces, that God for mysterious reasons has given power over the world, but which will soon be defeated and things will be set right.
Hamartiology: Sin
The Greek word in the New Testament that is translated in English as "sin" is hamartia, which literally means missing the target. 1 John 3:4 states: "Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness". Jesus clarified the law by defining its foundation: "Jesus replied: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Hamartiology (, hamartia, "missing the mark," "sin," + -λογια, -logia, "sayings" or "discourse") is the branch of Christian theology, more specifically, systematic theology, which is the study of sin with a view to articulating a doctrine of it.
Substantial branches of hamartiological understanding subscribe to the doctrine of original sin, which was taught by the Apostle Paul in Romans 5:12–19 and popularized by Saint Augustine. Augustine taught that all the descendants of Adam and Eve are guilty of Adam's sin without their own personal choice.
In contrast, Pelagius argued that humans enter life as essentially tabulae rasae. The fall that occurred when Adam and Eve disobeyed God was held by his group to have affected humankind only minimally. But few theologians continue to hold this hamartiological viewpoint.
A third branch of thinking takes an intermediate position, arguing that after the fall of Adam and Eve, humans are born impacted by sin such that they have very decided tendencies toward sinning (which by personal choice all accountable humans but Jesus soon choose to indulge).
The degree to which a Christian believes humanity is impacted by either a literal or metaphorical "fall" determines their understanding of related theological concepts like salvation, justification, and sanctification.
Christian views on sin are mostly understood as legal infraction or contract violation, and so salvation tends to be viewed in legal terms, similar to Jewish thinking.
Sin
In religion, sin is the concept of acts that violate a rule of God. The term sin may also refer to the state of having committed such a violation. Commonly, the moral code of conduct is decreed by a divine entity, i.e. Divine law.
Sin is often used to mean an action that is prohibited or considered wrong; in some religions (notably some sects of Christianity), sin can refer not only to physical actions taken, but also to thoughts and internalized motivations and feelings. Colloquially, any thought, word, or act considered immoral, shameful, harmful, or alienating might be termed "sinful".
An elementary concept of "sin" regards such acts and elements of Earthly living that one cannot take with them into transcendental living. Food, for example is not of transcendental living and therefore its excessive savoring is considered a sin. A more developed concept of "sin" deals with a distinction between sins of death (mortal sin) and the sins of human living (venial sin). In that context, mortal sins are said to have the dire consequence of mortal penalty, while sins of living (food, casual or informal sexuality, play, inebriation) may be regarded as essential spice for transcendental living, even though these may be destructive in the context of human living (obesity, infidelity).
Common ideas surrounding sin in various religions include:
Punishment for sins, from other people, from God either in life or in afterlife, or from the Universe in general.
The question of whether an act must be intentional to be sinful.
The idea that one's conscience should produce guilt for a conscious act of sin.
A scheme for determining the seriousness of the sin.
Repentance from (expressing regret for and determining not to commit) sin, and atonement (repayment) for past deeds.
The possibility of forgiveness of sins, often through communication with a deity or intermediary; in Christianity often referred to as salvation. Crime and justice are related secular concepts.
In Western Christianity, "sin is lawlessness" (1 John 3:4) and so salvation tends to be understood in legal terms, similar to Jewish law. Sin alienates the sinner from God. It has damaged, and completely severed, the relationship of humanity to God. That relationship can only be restored through acceptance of Jesus Christ and his death on the cross as a sacrifice for mankind's sin (see Salvation and Substitutionary atonement).
In Eastern Christianity, sin is viewed in terms of its effects on relationships, both among people and between people and God. Sin is seen as the refusal to follow God's plan, and the desire to be like God and thus in direct opposition to him (see the account of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis). To sin is to want control of one's destiny in opposition to the will of God,
to do some rigid beliefs.
In the Russian variant of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, sin sometimes is regarded as any mistake made by people in their life. From this point of view every person is sinful because every person makes mistakes during his life. When person accuses others in sins he always must remember that he is also sinner and so he must have mercy for others remembering that God is also merciful to him and to all humanity.
Fall of man
The fall of man or simply the fall refers in Christian doctrine to the transition of the first humans from a state of innocent obedience to God, to a state of guilty disobedience to God. In the Book of Genesis chapter 2, Adam and Eve live at first with God in a paradise, but are then deceived or tempted by the serpent to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which had been forbidden to them by God. After doing so they become ashamed of their nakedness, and God consequently expelled them from paradise. The fall is not mentioned by name in the Bible, but the story of disobedience and expulsion is recounted in both Testaments in different ways. The Fall can refer to the wider theological inferences for all humankind as a consequence of Eve and Adam's original sin. Examples include the teachings of Paul in and .
Some Christian denominations believe the fall corrupted the entire natural world, including human nature, causing people to be born into original sin, a state from which they cannot attain eternal life without the gracious intervention of God. Protestants hold that Jesus' death was a "ransom" by which humanity was offered freedom from the sin acquired at the fall. In other religions, such as Judaism, Islam, and Gnosticism, the term "the fall" is not recognized and varying interpretations of the Eden narrative are presented.
Christianity interprets the fall in a number of ways. Traditional Christian theology accepts the teaching of St Paul in his letter to the Romans "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" and of St John's Gospel that "God so loved the world that he sent his only son (Jesus Christ) that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life".
The doctrine of original sin, as articulated by Augustine of Hippo's interpretation of Paul of Tarsus, provides that the fall caused a fundamental change in human nature, so that all descendants of Adam are born in sin, and can only be redeemed by divine grace. Sacrifice was the only means by which humanity could be redeemed after the fall. Jesus, who was without sin, died on the cross as the ultimate redemption for the sin of humankind.
Original sin
Thus, the moment Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree—which God had commanded them not to do—sinful death was born; it was an act of disobedience, thinking they could become like gods, that was the sin. Since Adam was the head of the human race, he is held responsible for the evil that took place, for which reason the fall of man is referred to as the "sin of Adam". This sin caused Adam and his descendants to lose unrestricted access to God Himself. The years of life were limited. "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned". In Christian theology, the death of Jesus on the cross is the atonement to the sin of Adam. "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.". As a result of that act of Christ, all who put their trust in Christ alone now have unrestricted access to God through prayer and in presence.
Original sin, which Eastern Christians usually refer to as ancestral sin, is, according to a doctrine proposed in Christian theology, humanity's state of sin resulting from the fall of man. This condition has been characterized in many ways, ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred to as a "sin nature," to something as drastic as total depravity or automatic guilt by all humans through collective guilt.
Those who uphold the doctrine look to the teaching of Paul the Apostle in and for its scriptural base, and see it as perhaps implied in Old Testament passages such as and .
The Apostolic Fathers and the Apologists mostly dealt with topics other than original sin. The doctrine of original sin was first developed in 2nd-century Bishop of Lyon Irenaeus's struggle against Gnosticism. The Greek Fathers emphasized the cosmic dimension of the fall, namely that since Adam human beings are born into a fallen world, but held fast to belief that man, though fallen, is free. It was in the West that precise definition of the doctrine arose.
Augustine of Hippo taught that original sin was both an act of foolishness (insipientia) and of pride and disobedience to the God of Adam and Eve. He thought it was a most subtle job to discern what came first: self-centeredness or failure in seeing truth. The sin would not have taken place, if satan hadn't sown into their senses "the root of evil" (radix Mali). The sin of Adam and Eve wounded their nature, affecting human intelligence and will, as well as affections and desires, including sexual desire. The consequences of the fall were transmitted to their descendants in the form of concupiscence, which is a metaphysical term, and not a psychological one. Thomas Aquinas explained Augustine's doctrine pointing out that the libido (concupiscence), which makes the original sin pass from parents to children, is not a libido actualis, i.e. sexual lust, but libido habitualis, i.e. a wound of the whole of human nature. Augustine insisted that concupiscence was not a being but bad quality, the privation of good or a wound. The bishop of Hippo admitted that sexual concupiscence (libido) might have been present in the perfect human nature in the paradise, and that only later it had become disobedient to human will as a result of the first couple's disobedience to God's will in the original sin. The original sin have made humanity a massa damnata (mass of perdition, condemned crowd). In Augustine's view (termed "Realism"), all of humanity was really present in Adam when he sinned, and therefore all have sinned. Original sin, according to Augustine, consists of the guilt of Adam which all humans inherit. As sinners, humans are utterly depraved in nature, lack the freedom to do good, and cannot respond to the will of God without divine grace. Grace is irresistible, results in conversion, and leads to perseverance.
Augustine's formulation of original sin was popular among Protestant reformers, such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, and also, within Roman Catholicism, in the Jansenist movement, but this movement was declared heretical by the Catholic Church. There are wide-ranging disagreements among Christian groups as to the exact understanding of the doctrine about a state of sinfulness or absence of holiness affecting all humans, even children, with some Christian groups denying it altogether.
The notion of original sin as interpreted by Augustine of Hippo was affirmed by the Protestant Reformer John Calvin. Calvin believed that humans inherit Adamic guilt and are in a state of sin from the moment of conception. This inherently sinful nature (the basis for the Calvinistic doctrine of "total depravity") results in a complete alienation from God and the total inability of humans to achieve reconciliation with God based on their own abilities. Not only do individuals inherit a sinful nature due to Adam's fall, but since he was the federal head and representative of the human race, all whom he represented inherit the guilt of his sin by imputation.
New Testament
The scriptural basis for the doctrine is found in two New Testament books by Paul the Apostle, Romans 5:12–21 and 1 Corinthians 15:22, in which he identifies Adam as the one man through whom death came into the world.
Total depravity
Total depravity (also called absolute inability and total corruption) is a theological doctrine that derives from the Augustinian concept of original sin. It is the teaching that, as a consequence of the fall of man, every person born into the world is enslaved to the service of sin and, apart from the efficacious or prevenient grace of God, is utterly unable to choose to follow God or choose to accept salvation as it is freely offered.
It is also advocated to various degrees by many Protestant confessions of faith and catechisms, including those of Lutheranism, Arminianism, and Calvinism.
Total depravity is the fallen state of man as a result of original sin. The doctrine of total depravity asserts that people are by nature not inclined or even able to love God wholly with heart, mind, and strength, but rather all are inclined by nature to serve their own will and desires and to reject the rule of God. Even religion and philanthropy are wicked to God to the extent that these originate from a human imagination, passion, and will and are not done to the glory of God. Therefore, in Reformed theology, if God is to save anyone He must predestine, call, elect individuals to salvation since fallen man does not want to, indeed is incapable of choosing God.
Total depravity does not mean, however, that people are as evil as possible. Rather, it means that even the good which a person may intend is faulty in its premise, false in its motive, and weak in its implementation; and there is no mere refinement of natural capacities that can correct this condition. Thus, even acts of generosity and altruism are in fact egoist acts in disguise. All good, consequently, is derived from God alone, and in no way through man.
Comparison among Protestants
This table summarizes three Protestant beliefs on depravity.
Soteriology: Salvation
Christian soteriology is the branch of Christian theology that deals with one's salvation. It is derived from the Greek sōtērion (salvation) (from sōtēr savior, preserver) + English -logy.
Atonement is a doctrine that describes how human beings can be reconciled to God. In Christian theology the atonement refers to the forgiving or pardoning of one's sin through the death of Jesus Christ by crucifixion, which made possible the reconciliation between God and creation. Within Christianity there are three main theories for how such atonement might work: the ransom theory, the satisfaction theory and the moral influence theory. Christian soteriology is unlike and not to be confused with collective salvation.
Traditional focus
Christian soteriology traditionally focuses on how God ends the separation people have from him due to sin by reconciling them with himself. (Rom. 5:10–11). Many Christians believe they receive the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38), life (Rom. 8:11), and salvation (1 Thess. 5:9) bought by Jesus through his innocent suffering, death, and resurrection from the dead three days later (Matt. 28).
Christ's death, resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Holy Spirit, is called The Paschal Mystery. Christ's human birth is called the Incarnation. Either or both are considered in different versions of soteriology.
While not neglecting the Paschal Mystery, many Christians believe salvation is brought through the Incarnation itself, in which God took on human nature so that humans could partake in the divine nature (2 Peter 1.4). As St. Athanasius put it, God became human so that we might become divine (St. Athanasius, De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B.). This grace in Christ (1 Cor. 1:4) is received as a gift of God that cannot be merited by works done prior to one's conversion to Christianity (Eph. 2:8–9), which is brought about by hearing God's Word (Rom. 10:17) and harkening to it. This involves accepting Jesus Christ as the personal saviour and Lord over one's life.
Distinct schools
Protestant teaching, originating with Martin Luther, teaches that salvation is received by grace alone and that one's sole necessary response to this grace is faith alone. Older Christian teaching, as found in Catholic and Orthodox theology, is that salvation is received by grace alone, but that one's necessary response to this grace comprises both faith and works (James 2:24, 26; Rom 2:6–7; Gal 5:6).
Catholic soteriology
Human beings exists because God wanted to share His life with them. In this sense, every human being is God's child. In a fuller sense, to come to salvation is to be reconciled to God through Christ and to be united with His divine Essence via Theosis in the beatific vision of the Godhead. The graces of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection are found in the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church.
Comparison among Protestants
Ecclesiology: Church
Ecclesiology (from Greek , ekklēsiā, "congregation, church"; and , -logia) is the study of the theological understanding of the Christian church, including the institutional structure, sacraments and practices (especially the worship of God) thereof. Specific areas of concern include the church's role in salvation, its origin, its relationship to the historical Christ, its discipline, its destiny, and its leadership. Ecclesiology is, therefore, the study of the church as a thing in, and of, itself.
Different ecclesiologies give shape to very different institutions. Thus, in addition to describing a broad discipline of theology, ecclesiology may be used in the specific sense of a particular church or denomination's character, self-described or otherwise. This is the sense of the word in such phrases as Roman Catholic ecclesiology, Lutheran ecclesiology, and ecumenical ecclesiology.
Issues addressed by ecclesiology
Ecclesiology asks the questions:
Who is the Church? Is it a visible or earthly corporation or a unified, visible society—a "church" in the sense of a specific denomination or institution, for instance? Or is it the body of all believing Christians (see invisible church) regardless of their denominational differences and disunity? What is the relationship between living Christians and departed Christians (the "cloud of witnesses")– do they (those on Earth and those in Heaven) constitute together the Church?
Must one join a church? That is, what is the role of corporate worship in the spiritual lives of believers? Is it in fact necessary? Can salvation be found outside of formal membership in a given faith community, and what constitutes "membership?" (Baptism? Formal acceptance of a creed? Regular participation?)
What is the authority of the Church? Who gets to interpret the doctrines of the Church? Is the organizational structure itself, either in a single corporate body, or generally within the range of formal church structures, an independent vehicle of revelation or of God's grace? Or is the Church's authority instead dependent on and derivative of a separate and prior divine revelation external to the organization, with individual institutions being "the Church" only to the extent that they teach this message? For example, is the Bible a written part of a wider revelation entrusted to the Church as faith community, and therefore to be interpreted within that context? Or is the Bible the revelation itself, and the Church is to be defined as a group of people who claim adherence to it?
What does the Church do? What are the sacraments, divine ordinances, and liturgies, in the context of the Church, and are they part of the Church's mission to preach the Gospel? What is the comparative emphasis and relationship between worship service, spiritual formation, and mission, and is the Church's role to create disciples of Christ or some other function? Is the Eucharist the defining element of the rest of the sacramental system and the Church itself, or is it secondary to the act of preaching? Is the Church to be understood as the vehicle for salvation, or the salvific presence in the world, or as a community of those already "saved?"
How should the Church be governed? What was the mission and authority of the Apostles, and is this handed down through the sacraments today? What are the proper methods of choosing clergy such as bishops and priests, and what is their role within the context of the Church? Is an ordained clergy necessary? * Who are the leaders of a church? Must there be a policy-making board of "leaders" within a church and what are the qualifications for this position, and by what process do these members become official, ordained "leaders"? Must leaders and clergy be "ordained," and is this possible only by those who have been ordained by others?
Ecclesiastical polity
Ecclesiastical polity is the operational and governance structure of a church or Christian denomination. It also denotes the ministerial structure of the church and the authority relationships between churches. Polity is closely related to Ecclesiology, the study of doctrine and theology relating to church organization.
Issues of church governance appear in the first chapters of the Acts of the Apostles; the first act recorded after the ascension is the election of Matthias to replace Judas Iscariot. Over the years a system of episcopal polity developed.
During the Protestant Reformation, arguments were made that the New Testament prescribed structures quite different from that of the Catholic Church of the day, and different Protestant bodies used different types of polity. It was during this period that Richard Hooker wrote Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity to defend the polity of the Church of England against the Puritans.
Episcopal polity is used in several closely related senses. Most commonly it refers to the field of church governance in the abstract, but it also can refer to the governance of a particular Christian body. In this sense it is used as a term in civil law. "Polity" is sometimes used as a shorthand for the church governance structure itself.
Though each church or denomination has its own characteristic structure, there are three general types of polity.
Episcopal polity
Churches having episcopal polity are governed by bishops. The title bishop comes from the Greek word episkopos, which literally translates into overseer. In regard to Catholicism, bishops have authority over the diocese, which is both sacramental and political; as well as performing ordinations, confirmations, and consecrations, the bishop supervises the clergy of the diocese and represents the diocese both secularly and in the hierarchy of church governance.
Bishops in this system may be subject to higher ranking bishops (variously called archbishops, metropolitans or patriarchs, depending upon the tradition; see also Bishop for further explanation of the varieties of bishops.) They also meet in councils or synods. These synods, subject to presidency by higher ranking bishops, may govern the dioceses which are represented in the council, though the synod may also be purely advisory.
Note that the presence of the office of "bishop" within a church is not proof of episcopal polity. For example, in Mormonism, the "bishop" occupies the office that in an Anglican church would be occupied by a priest.
Also, episcopal polity is not usually a simple chain of command.
Instead, some authority may be held, not only by synods and colleges of bishops, but by lay and clerical councils. Further, patterns of authority are subject to a wide variety of historical rights and honors which may cut across simple lines of authority.
Episcopal polity is the predominant pattern in Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Anglican churches. It is also common in Methodist and Lutheran churches. Among churches with episcopal polity, different theories of autonomy are expressed. So in Roman Catholicism the church is viewed as a single polity headed by the pope, but in Eastern Orthodoxy the various churches retain formal autonomy but are held to be unified by shared doctrine and conciliarity—that is, the authority of councils, such as ecumenical councils, Holy Synods and the former standing council, the Endemusa Synod.
Presbyterian polity
Many Reformed churches, notably those in the Presbyterian and Continental Reformed traditions, are governed by a hierarchy of councils. The lowest level council governs a single local church and is called the session or consistory; its members are called elders. The minister of the church (sometimes referred to as a teaching elder) is a member of and presides over the session; lay representatives (ruling elders or, informally, just elders) are elected by the congregation. The session sends representatives to the next level higher council, called the presbytery or classis. In some Presbyterian churches there are higher level councils (synods or general assemblies). Each council has authority over its constituents, and the representatives at each level are expected to use their own judgment. Hence higher level councils act as courts of appeal for church trials and disputes, and it is not uncommon to see rulings and decisions overturned.
Presbyterian polity is, of course, the characteristic governance of Presbyterian churches, and also of churches in the Continental Reformed tradition. Elements of presbyterian polity are also found in other churches. For example, in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America governance by bishops is paralleled by a system of deputies, who are lay and clerical representatives elected by parishes and, at the national level, by the dioceses. Legislation in the general convention requires the separate consent of the bishops and of the deputies.
Note that, in episcopal polity, a presbyter refers to a priest.
Congregational polity
Congregationalist polity dispenses with titled positions such as bishop as a requirement of church structure. The local congregation rules itself, though local leaders and councils may be appointed.
Members may be sent from the congregation to associations that are sometimes identified with the church bodies formed by Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, and other non-congregational Protestants. The similarity is deceptive, however, because the congregationalist associations do not exercise control over their members (other than ending their membership in the association). Many congregationalist churches are completely independent in principle. One major exception is Ordination, where even congregationalist churches often invite members of the vicinage or association to ordain their called pastor.
It is a principle of congregationalism that ministers do not govern congregations by themselves. They may preside over the congregation, but it is the congregation which exerts its authority in the end.
Congregational polity is sometimes called "Baptist polity", as it is the characteristic polity of Baptist churches.
Priesthood
Laity, Priesthood of all believers
Clergy, Bishop, Priest, Pastor, Elder
Church discipline
Missiology
Missiology is the interdisciplinary study of Christian mission history and methodology, emerging as an academic discipline in the 19th century. It examines the missionary work of various Christian denominations, focusing on themes like inculturation, contextualization, and interfaith relations, while engaging with social sciences. Notable figures include Alexander Duff and Gustav Warneck, who were pivotal in establishing missiology as a formal field of study.
Sacrament
A sacrament, as defined in Hexam's Concise Dictionary of Religion, is what Roman Catholics believe to be "a rite in which God is uniquely active". Augustine of Hippo defined a Christian sacrament as "a visible sign of an invisible reality". The Anglican Book of Common Prayer speaks of them as "an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible Grace." Examples of sacraments would be Baptism and the Eucharist." Therefore a sacrament is a religious symbol or often a rite which conveys divine grace, blessing, or sanctity upon the believer who participates in it, or a tangible symbol which represents an intangible reality. As defined above, an example would be baptism in water, representing (and conveying) the grace of the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Forgiveness of Sins, and membership into the Church. Anointing with holy anointing oil is another example which is often synonymous with receiving the Holy Spirit and salvation. Another way of looking at Sacraments is that they are an external and physical sign of the conferral of Sanctifying Grace.
Throughout the Christian faith, views concerning which rites are sacramental, that is conferring sanctifying grace, and what it means for an external act to be sacramental vary widely. Other religious traditions also have what might be called "sacraments" in a sense, though not necessarily according to the Christian meaning of the term.
General definitions and terms
In the majority of Western Christianity, the generally accepted definition of a sacrament is that it is an outward sign that conveys spiritual grace through Christ. Christian churches, denominations, and sects are divided regarding the number and operation of the sacraments. Sacraments are generally held to have been instituted by Jesus Christ, although in some cases this point is debated. They are usually administered by the clergy to a recipient or recipients, and are generally understood to involve visible and invisible components. The invisible component (manifested inwardly) is understood to be brought about by the action of the Holy Spirit, God's grace working in the sacrament's participants, while the visible (or outward) component entails the use of such things as water, oil, and bread and wine that is blessed or consecrated; the laying-on-of-hands; or a particularly significant covenant that is marked by a public benediction (such as with marriage or absolution of sin in the reconciliation of a penitent).
As defined by the Roman Catholic Church, recognised by the Eastern Orthodox churches, Oriental Orthodox, (though these two do not categorically define the number), and Independent Catholic and Old Catholic Church.
The Orthodox Churches (Eastern and Oriental) typically do not limit the number of sacraments, viewing all encounters with reality in life as sacramental in some sense, and their acknowledgement of the number of sacraments at seven as an innovation of convenience not found in the Church Fathers. It came into use, although infrequently, later on from later encounters with the West and its Sacramental Theology. Other denominations and traditions, both in eastern and western Christianity may affirm only Baptism and Eucharist as sacraments, these include many of the Protestant denominations and some of the Old Believers in the Orthodox communion, some of whom reject all sacraments except Baptism.
Since some post-Reformation denominations do not regard clergy as having a classically sacerdotal or priestly function, they avoid the term "sacrament," preferring the terms "sacerdotal function," "ordinance," or "tradition." This belief invests the efficacy of the ordinance in the obedience and participation of the believer and the witness of the presiding minister and the congregation. This view stems from a highly developed concept of the priesthood of all believers. In this sense, the believer himself or herself performs the sacerdotal role .
Eucharist
Transsubstantiation (Roman Catholicism)
Anglican Eucharistic theology
Sacramental Union (Lutheran)
Eucharist, also called Communion, or the Lord's Supper, and other names, is a Christian sacrament or ordinance, generally considered to be a re-enactment of the Last Supper, the final meal that Jesus Christ shared with his disciples before his arrest and eventual crucifixion. The consecration of bread and a cup within the rite recalls the moment at the Last Supper when Jesus gave his disciples bread, saying, "This is my body", and wine, saying, "This is my blood".
There are different interpretations of the significance of the Eucharist, but "there is more of a consensus among Christians about the meaning of the Eucharist than would appear from the confessional debates over the sacramental presence, the effects of the Eucharist, and the proper auspices under which it may be celebrated."
The phrase "the Eucharist" may refer not only to the rite but also to the consecrated bread (leavened or unleavened) and wine (or, in some Protestant denominations, unfermented grape juice) used in the rite, and, in this sense, communicants may speak of "receiving the Eucharist", as well as "celebrating the Eucharist".
Eucharist is from Greek εὐχαριστία (eucharistia), meaning thanksgiving. The verb εὐχαριστῶ, the usual word for "to thank" in the Septuagint and the New Testament, is found in the major texts concerning the Lord's Supper, including the earliest:
The Lord's Supper (Κυριακὸν δεῖπνον) derives from 1 Corinthians 11:20–21.
Communion is a translation; other translations are "participation", "sharing", "fellowship" of the Greek κοινωνία (koinōnía) in . The King James Version has
The Last Supper appears in all three Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke; and in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, while the last-named of these also indicates something of how early Christians celebrated what Paul the Apostle called the Lord's Supper. As well as the Eucharistic dialogue in John chapter 6.
In his First Epistle to the Corinthians (–55), Paul the Apostle gives the earliest recorded description of Jesus's Last Supper: "The Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, 'This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me'."
The synoptic gospels, first Mark, and then Matthew and Luke, depict Jesus as presiding over the Last Supper. References to Jesus's body and blood foreshadow his crucifixion, and he identifies them as a new covenant. In the gospel of John, the account of the Last Supper has no mention of Jesus taking bread and wine and speaking of them as his body and blood; instead it recounts his humble act of washing the disciples' feet, the prophecy of the betrayal, which set in motion the events that would lead to the cross, and his long discourse in response to some questions posed by his followers, in which he went on to speak of the importance of the unity of the disciples with him and each other.
The expression The Lord's Supper, derived from St. Paul's usage in , may have originally referred to the Agape feast, the shared communal meal with which the Eucharist was originally associated. The Agape feast is mentioned in . But The Lord's Supper is now commonly used in reference to a celebration involving no food other than the sacramental bread and wine.
The Didache (Greek: teaching) is an early Church order, including, among other features, instructions for baptism and the Eucharist. Most scholars date it to the early 2nd century, and distinguish in it two separate Eucharistic traditions, the earlier tradition in chapter 10 and the later one preceding it in chapter 9. The Eucharist is mentioned again in chapter 14.
Ignatius of Antioch, one of the Apostolic Fathers and a direct disciple of the Apostle John, mentions the Eucharist as "the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ", and Justin Martyr speaks of it as more than a meal: "the food over which the prayer of thanksgiving, the word received from Christ, has been said ... is the flesh and blood of this Jesus who became flesh ... and the deacons carry some to those who are absent."
Eucharistic theology
Many Christian denominations classify the Eucharist as a sacrament. Some Protestants prefer to call it an ordinance, viewing it not as a specific channel of divine grace but as an expression of faith and of obedience to Christ.
Most Christians, even those who deny that there is any real change in the elements used, recognize a special presence of Christ in this rite, though they differ about exactly how, where, and when Christ is present. Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy teach that the consecrated elements truly become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Transubstantiation is the metaphysical explanation given by Roman Catholics as to how this transformation occurs. Lutherans believe that the body and blood of Jesus are present "in, with and under" the forms of bread and wine, a concept known as the sacramental union. The Reformed churches, following the teachings of John Calvin, believe in a spiritual (or "pneumatic") real presence of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit and received by faith. Anglicans adhere to a range of views although the Anglican church officially teaches the real presence. Some Christians reject the concept of the real presence, believing that the Eucharist is only a memorial of the death of Christ.
The Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry document of the World Council of Churches, attempting to present the common understanding of the Eucharist on the part of the generality of Christians, describes it as "essentially the sacrament of the gift which God makes to us in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit", "Thanksgiving to the Father", "Anamnesis or Memorial of Christ", "the sacrament of the unique sacrifice of Christ, who ever lives to make intercession for us", "the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, the sacrament of his real presence", "Invocation of the Spirit", "Communion of the Faithful", and "Meal of the Kingdom".
Baptism
Infant baptism
Believer's baptism
Eschatology
Eschatology (derived from the Greek roots ἔσχατος "last" and λογία "discourse," "study") is the study of the end of things, whether the end of an individual life, the end of the age, or the end of the world. Broadly speaking, it is the study of the destiny of man as revealed in the Bible.
Eschatology is concerned with the afterlife, beginning with death and the personal judgment which follows the death of the individual, and which is followed by the destination of heaven or hell. (In Catholic theology, heaven is sometimes preceded by purgatory.) Eschatology also concerns itself with events which are said to happen at the end of this age: the return of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead, the Rapture, the Tribulation, and following these things, the Millennium, or thousand years of peace, which has been interpreted both literally and symbolically. Finally, eschatology concerns itself with the end of the world and its associated events: the Last Judgment; the banishment of Death, Hades, and Satan and his followers to the Lake of Fire; and the creation of a new heaven and earth. Millenarianists, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other recently founded sects have been influential in the modern development of these doctrines, though their roots are biblical.
Eschatology is an ancient branch of study in Christian theology, with study of the "last things" and the Second Coming of Christ first touched on by Ignatius of Antioch (–107 AD), then given more consideration by the Christian apologist in Rome, Justin Martyr (–165). Treatment of eschatology continued in the West in the teachings of the influential theologian of Roman North Africa, Tertullian (–225), and was given fuller reflection and speculation soon after in the East by the master theologian, Origen (–254).
Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other 16th-century reformers wrote long tracts about the End Times, but interest in eschatology dwindled after the Reformation until the late 19th century, when it became popular in the Reformed, Pentecostal, and Evangelical sects. It was increasingly recognized as a formal division of theological study during the 20th century.
The second coming of Christ is the central event in Christian eschatology. Most Christians believe that death and suffering will continue to exist until Christ's return. Others believe that suffering will gradually be eliminated prior to his coming, and that the elimination of injustice is our part in preparing for that event. Needless to say, there are a variety of viewpoints concerning the order and significance of eschatological events.
Approaches to interpretation
The Preterist approach (from the Latin praeteritus "gone by") seeks parallels between Revelation and the events of the 1st century, such as Herod's attempt to kill the infant Christ, the struggle of Christianity to survive the persecutions of Judaism and the Roman Empire, the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the desecration of the temple in the same year, and the growth of Christianity from a sect within Judaism to an independent religion.
The Historicist method takes a broader historical approach and seeks parallels between Revelation and the major people and events of history, especially those which have had a direct effect on Israel and the Church.
The Futurist method approaches Revelation as chiefly referring to events that have not yet come to pass but will take place at the end of this age and at the end of the world. The main focus is the return of Christ.
The Idealist model, also known as Spiritualist or Symbolic model, approaches the images of Revelation as symbols representing larger themes and concepts, rather than actual people and events. It sees in Revelation an allegorical representation of the ongoing struggle of the forces of light and darkness, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil.
See also
Biblical law in Christianity
Eastern Orthodox – Roman Catholic theological differences
Lists of Christian theologians
New Testament theology
Old Testament theology
Outline of theology
References
Bibliography
Volume 1: The Living God (1992).
Volume 2: The Word of Life (1992).
Volume 3: Life in the Spirit (1994).
See the Christian Theology Reading Room (Tyndale Seminary) for an extensive collection of online resources for Christian Theology.
Christian Classics Ethereal Library
Jonathan Hayward, contemporary Orthodox theologian
Orthodox Church Fathers: Christian Theology Classics Search Engine
External links
Table of Christian theological terms in Argumentrix (archived 31 January 2013) | 0.788578 | 0.996643 | 0.785931 |
New Age | New Age is a range of spiritual or religious practices and beliefs which rapidly grew in Western society during the early 1970s. Its highly eclectic and unsystematic structure makes a precise definition difficult. Although many scholars consider it a religious movement, its adherents typically see it as spiritual or as unifying Mind-Body-Spirit, and rarely use the term New Age themselves. Scholars often call it the New Age movement, although others contest this term and suggest it is better seen as a milieu or zeitgeist.
As a form of Western esotericism, the New Age drew heavily upon esoteric traditions such as the occultism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the work of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, as well as Spiritualism, New Thought, and Theosophy. More immediately, it arose from mid-twentieth century influences such as the UFO religions of the 1950s, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the Human Potential Movement. Its exact origins remain contested, but it became a major movement in the 1970s, at which time it was centered largely in the United Kingdom. It expanded widely in the 1980s and 1990s, in particular in the United States. By the start of the 21st century, the term New Age was increasingly rejected within this milieu, with some scholars arguing that the New Age phenomenon had ended.
Despite its eclectic nature, the New Age has several main currents. Theologically, the New Age typically accepts a holistic form of divinity that pervades the universe, including human beings themselves, leading to a strong emphasis on the spiritual authority of the self. This is accompanied by a common belief in a variety of semi-divine non-human entities such as angels, with whom humans can communicate, particularly by channeling through a human intermediary. Typically viewing history as divided into spiritual ages, a common New Age belief is in a forgotten age of great technological advancement and spiritual wisdom, declining into periods of increasing violence and spiritual degeneracy, which will now be remedied by the emergence of an Age of Aquarius, from which the milieu gets its name. There is also a strong focus on healing, particularly using forms of alternative medicine, and an emphasis on unifying science with spirituality.
The dedication of New Agers varied considerably, from those who adopted a number of New Age ideas and practices to those who fully embraced and dedicated their lives to it. The New Age has generated criticism from Christians as well as modern Pagan and Indigenous communities. From the 1990s onward, the New Age became the subject of research by academic scholars of religious studies.
Definitions
The New Age phenomenon has proved difficult to define, with much scholarly disagreement as to its scope. The scholars Steven J. Sutcliffe and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus have even suggested that it remains "among the most disputed of categories in the study of religion".
The scholar of religion Paul Heelas characterised the New Age as "an eclectic hotch-potch of beliefs, practices, and ways of life" that can be identified as a singular phenomenon through their use of "the same (or very similar) lingua franca to do with the human (and planetary) condition and how it can be transformed." Similarly, the historian of religion Olav Hammer termed it "a common denominator for a variety of quite divergent contemporary popular practices and beliefs" that have emerged since the late 1970s and are "largely united by historical links, a shared discourse and an air de famille". According to Hammer, this New Age was a "fluid and fuzzy cultic milieu". The sociologist of religion Michael York described the New Age as "an umbrella term that includes a great variety of groups and identities" that are united by their "expectation of a major and universal change being primarily founded on the individual and collective development of human potential."
The scholar of religion Wouter Hanegraaff adopted a different approach by asserting that "New Age" was "a label attached indiscriminately to whatever seems to fit it" and that as a result it "means very different things to different people". He thus argued against the idea that the New Age could be considered "a unified ideology or Weltanschauung", although he believed that it could be considered a "more or less unified 'movement'." Other scholars have suggested that the New Age is too diverse to be a singular movement. The scholar of religion George D. Chryssides called it "a counter-cultural Zeitgeist", while the sociologist of religion Steven Bruce suggested that New Age was a milieu; Heelas and scholar of religion Linda Woodhead called it the "holistic milieu".
There is no central authority within the New Age phenomenon that can determine what counts as New Age and what does not. Many of those groups and individuals who could analytically be categorised as part of the New Age reject the term New Age in reference to themselves. Some even express active hostility to the term. Rather than terming themselves New Agers, those involved in this milieu commonly describe themselves as spiritual "seekers", and some self-identify as a member of a different religious group, such as Christianity, Judaism, or Buddhism. In 2003 Sutcliffe observed that the use of the term New Age was "optional, episodic and declining overall", adding that among the very few individuals who did use it, they usually did so with qualification, for instance by placing it in quotation marks. Other academics, such as Sara MacKian, have argued that the sheer diversity of the New Age renders the term too problematic for scholars to use. MacKian proposed "everyday spirituality" as an alternate term.
While acknowledging that New Age was a problematic term, the scholar of religion James R. Lewis stated that it remained a useful etic category for scholars to use because "There exists no comparable term which covers all aspects of the movement." Similarly, Chryssides argued that the fact that "New Age" is a "theoretical concept" does not "undermine its usefulness or employability"; he drew comparisons with "Hinduism", a similar "Western etic piece of vocabulary" that scholars of religion used despite its problems.
Religion, spirituality, and esotericism
In discussing the New Age, academics have varyingly referred to "New Age spirituality" and "New Age religion". Those involved in the New Age rarely consider it to be "religion"—negatively associating that term solely with organized religion—and instead describe their practices as "spirituality". Religious studies scholars, however, have repeatedly referred to the New Age milieu as a "religion". York described the New Age as a new religious movement (NRM). Conversely, both Heelas and Sutcliffe rejected this categorisation; Heelas believed that while elements of the New Age represented NRMs, this did not apply to every New Age group. Similarly, Chryssides stated that the New Age could not be seen as "a religion" in itself.
The New Age is also a form of Western esotericism. Hanegraaff regarded the New Age as a form of "popular culture criticism", in that it represented a reaction against the dominant Western values of Judeo-Christian religion and rationalism, adding that "New Age religion formulates such criticism not at random, but falls back on" the ideas of earlier Western esoteric groups.
The New Age has also been identified by various scholars of religion as part of the cultic milieu. This concept, developed by the sociologist Colin Campbell, refers to a social network of marginalized ideas. Through their shared marginalization within a given society, these disparate ideas interact and create new syntheses.
Hammer identified much of the New Age as corresponding to the concept of "folk religions" in that it seeks to deal with existential questions regarding subjects like death and disease in "an unsystematic fashion, often through a process of bricolage from already available narratives and rituals". York also heuristically divides the New Age into three broad trends. The first, the social camp, represents groups that primarily seek to bring about social change, while the second, the occult camp, instead focus on contact with spirit entities and channeling. York's third group, the spiritual camp, represents a middle ground between these two camps that focuses largely on individual development.
Terminology
The term new age, along with related terms like new era and new world, long predate the emergence of the New Age movement, and have widely been used to assert that a better way of life for humanity is dawning. It occurs commonly, for instance, in political contexts; the Great Seal of the United States, designed in 1782, proclaims a "new order of ages", while in the 1980s the Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed that "all mankind is entering a new age". The term has also appeared within Western esoteric schools of thought, having a scattered use from the mid-nineteenth century onward. In 1864 the American Swedenborgian Warren Felt Evans published The New Age and its Message, while in 1907 Alfred Orage and Holbrook Jackson began editing a weekly journal of Christian liberalism and socialism titled The New Age. The concept of a coming "new age" that would be inaugurated by the return to Earth of Jesus Christ was a theme in the poetry of Wellesley Tudor Pole (1884–1968) and of Johanna Brandt (1876–1964), and then also appeared in the work of the British-born American Theosophist Alice Bailey (1880–1949), featuring in titles such as Discipleship in the New Age (1944) and Education in the New Age (1954).
Between the 1930s and 1960s a small number of groups and individuals became preoccupied with the concept of a coming "New Age" and used the term accordingly. The term had thus become a recurring motif in the esoteric spirituality milieu. Sutcliffe, therefore, expressed the view that while the term New Age had originally been an "apocalyptic emblem", it would only be later that it became "a tag or codeword for a 'spiritual' idiom".
History
Antecedents in occult and theosophy
According to scholar Nevill Drury, the New Age has a "tangible history", although Hanegraaff expressed the view that most New Agers were "surprisingly ignorant about the actual historical roots of their beliefs". Similarly, Hammer thought that "source amnesia" was a "building block of a New Age worldview", with New Agers typically adopting ideas with no awareness of where those ideas originated.
As a form of Western esotericism, the New Age has antecedents that stretch back to southern Europe in Late Antiquity. Following the Age of Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe, new esoteric ideas developed in response to the development of scientific rationality. Scholars call this new esoteric trend occultism, and this occultism was a key factor in the development of the worldview from which the New Age emerged.
One of the earliest influences on the New Age was the Swedish 18th-century Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who professed the ability to communicate with angels, demons, and spirits. Swedenborg's attempt to unite science and religion and his prediction of a coming era in particular have been cited as ways that he prefigured the New Age. Another early influence was the late 18th and early 19th century German physician and hypnotist Franz Mesmer, who wrote about the existence of a force known as "animal magnetism" running through the human body. The establishment of Spiritualism, an occult religion influenced by both Swedenborgianism and Mesmerism, in the U.S. during the 1840s has also been identified as a precursor to the New Age, in particular through its rejection of established Christianity, representing itself as a scientific approach to religion, and its emphasis on channeling spirit entities.
A further major influence on the New Age was the Theosophical Society, an occult group co-founded by the Russian Helena Blavatsky in the late 19th century. In her books Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky wrote that her Society was conveying the essence of all world religions, and it thus emphasized a focus on comparative religion. Serving as a partial bridge between Theosophical ideas and those of the New Age was the American esotericist Edgar Cayce, who founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment. Another partial bridge was the Danish mystic Martinus who is popular in Scandinavia.
Another influence was New Thought, which developed in late nineteenth-century New England as a Christian-oriented healing movement before spreading throughout the United States. Another influence was the psychologist Carl Jung.
Drury also identified as an important influence upon the New Age the Indian Swami Vivekananda, an adherent of the philosophy of Vedanta who first brought Hinduism to the West in the late 19th century.
Hanegraaff believed that the New Age's direct antecedents could be found in the UFO religions of the 1950s, which he termed a "proto-New Age movement". Many of these new religious movements had strong apocalyptic beliefs regarding a coming new age, which they typically asserted would be brought about by contact with extraterrestrials. Examples of such groups included the Aetherius Society, founded in the UK in 1955, and the Heralds of the New Age, established in New Zealand in 1956.
1960s
From a historical perspective, the New Age phenomenon is most associated with the counterculture of the 1960s. According to author Andrew Grant Jackson, George Harrison's adoption of Hindu philosophy and Indian instrumentation in his songs with the Beatles in the mid-1960s, together with the band's highly publicised study of Transcendental Meditation, "truly kick-started" the Human Potential Movement that subsequently became New Age. Although not common throughout the counterculture, usage of the terms New Age and Age of Aquarius—used in reference to a coming era—were found within it, for instance appearing on adverts for the Woodstock festival of 1969, and in the lyrics of "Aquarius", the opening song of the 1967 musical Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical.
This decade also witnessed the emergence of a variety of new religious movements and newly established religions in the United States, creating a spiritual milieu from which the New Age drew upon; these included the San Francisco Zen Center, Transcendental Meditation, Soka Gakkai, the Inner Peace Movement, the Church of All Worlds, and the Church of Satan. Although there had been an established interest in Asian religious ideas in the U.S. from at least the eighteenth-century, many of these new developments were variants of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism, which had been imported to the West from Asia following the U.S. government's decision to rescind the Asian Exclusion Act in 1965. In 1962 the Esalen Institute was established in Big Sur, California. Esalen and similar personal growth centers had developed links to humanistic psychology, and from this, the human potential movement emerged and strongly influenced the New Age.
In Britain, a number of small religious groups that came to be identified as the "light" movement had begun declaring the existence of a coming new age, influenced strongly by the Theosophical ideas of Blavatsky and Bailey. The most prominent of these groups was the Findhorn Foundation, which founded the Findhorn Ecovillage in the Scottish area of Findhorn, Moray in 1962. Although its founders were from an older generation, Findhorn attracted increasing numbers of countercultural baby boomers during the 1960s, to the extent that its population had grown sixfold to c. 120 residents by 1972. In October 1965, the co-founder of Findhorn Foundation, Peter Caddy, a former member of the occult Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship, attended a meeting of various figures within Britain's esoteric milieu; advertised as "The Significance of the Group in the New Age", it was held at Attingham Park over the course of a weekend.
All of these groups created the backdrop from which the New Age movement emerged. As James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton point out, the New Age phenomenon represents "a synthesis of many different preexisting movements and strands of thought". Nevertheless, York asserted that while the New Age bore many similarities with both earlier forms of Western esotericism and Asian religion, it remained "distinct from its predecessors in its own self-consciousness as a new way of thinking".
Emergence and development: c. 1970–2000
By the early 1970s, use of the term New Age was increasingly common within the cultic milieu. This was because—according to Sutcliffe—the "emblem" of the "New Age" had been passed from the "subcultural pioneers" in groups like Findhorn to the wider array of "countercultural baby boomers" between and 1974. He noted that as this happened, the meaning of the term New Age changed; whereas it had once referred specifically to a coming era, at this point it came to be used in a wider sense to refer to a variety of spiritual activities and practices. In the latter part of the 1970s, the New Age expanded to cover a wide variety of alternative spiritual and religious beliefs and practices, not all of which explicitly held to the belief in the Age of Aquarius, but were nevertheless widely recognized as broadly similar in their search for "alternatives" to mainstream society. In doing so, the "New Age" became a banner under which to bring together the wider "cultic milieu" of American society.
The counterculture of the 1960s had rapidly declined by the start of the 1970s, in large part due to the collapse of the commune movement, but it would be many former members of the counter-culture and hippie subculture who subsequently became early adherents of the New Age movement.
The exact origins of the New Age movement remain an issue of debate; Melton asserted that it emerged in the early 1970s, whereas Hanegraaff instead traced its emergence to the latter 1970s, adding that it then entered its full development in the 1980s. This early form of the movement was based largely in Britain and exhibited a strong influence from theosophy and Anthroposophy. Hanegraaff termed this early core of the movement the New Age sensu stricto, or "New Age in the strict sense".
Hanegraaff terms the broader development the New Age sensu lato, or "New Age in the wider sense". Stores that came to be known as "New Age shops" opened up, selling related books, magazines, jewelry, and crystals, and they were typified by the playing of New Age music and the smell of incense.This probably influenced several thousand small metaphysical book- and gift-stores that increasingly defined themselves as "New Age bookstores", while New Age titles came to be increasingly available from mainstream bookstores and then websites like Amazon.com.
Not everyone who came to be associated with the New Age phenomenon openly embraced the term New Age, although it was popularised in books like David Spangler's 1977 work Revelation: The Birth of a New Age and Mark Satin's 1979 book New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society. Marilyn Ferguson's 1982 book The Aquarian Conspiracy has also been regarded as a landmark work in the development of the New Age, promoting the idea that a new era was emerging. Other terms that were employed synonymously with New Age in this milieu included "Green", "Holistic", "Alternative", and "Spiritual".
1971 witnessed the foundation of est by Werner H. Erhard, a transformational training course that became a part of the early movement. Melton suggested that the 1970s witnessed the growth of a relationship between the New Age movement and the older New Thought movement, as evidenced by the widespread use of Helen Schucman's A Course in Miracles (1975), New Age music, and crystal healing in New Thought churches. Some figures in the New Thought movement were skeptical, challenging the compatibility of New Age and New Thought perspectives. During these decades, Findhorn had become a site of pilgrimage for many New Agers, and greatly expanded in size as people joined the community, with workshops and conferences being held there that brought together New Age thinkers from across the world.
Several key events occurred, which raised public awareness of the New Age subculture: publication of Linda Goodman's best-selling astrology books Sun Signs (1968) and Love Signs (1978); the release of Shirley MacLaine's book Out on a Limb (1983), later adapted into a television mini-series with the same name (1987); and the "Harmonic Convergence" planetary alignment on August 16 and 17, 1987, organized by José Argüelles in Sedona, Arizona. The Convergence attracted more people to the movement than any other single event. Heelas suggested that the movement was influenced by the "enterprise culture" encouraged by the U.S. and U.K. governments during the 1980s onward, with its emphasis on initiative and self-reliance resonating with any New Age ideas.
Channelers Jane Roberts (Seth Material), Helen Schucman (A Course in Miracles), J. Z. Knight (Ramtha), Neale Donald Walsch (Conversations with God) contributed to the movement's growth. The first significant exponent of the New Age movement in the U.S. has been cited as Ram Dass. Core works in the propagating of New Age ideas included Jane Roberts's Seth series, published from 1972 onward, Helen Schucman's 1975 publication A Course in Miracles, and James Redfield's 1993 work The Celestine Prophecy. A number of these books became best sellers, such as the Seth book series which quickly sold over a million copies. Supplementing these books were videos, audiotapes, compact discs and websites. The development of the internet in particular further popularized New Age ideas and made them more widely accessible.
New Age ideas influenced the development of rave culture in the late 1980s and 1990s. In Britain during the 1980s, the term New Age Travellers came into use, although York characterised this term as "a misnomer created by the media". These New Age Travellers had little to do with the New Age as the term was used more widely, with scholar of religion Daren Kemp observing that "New Age spirituality is not an essential part of New Age Traveller culture, although there are similarities between the two worldviews". The term New Age came to be used increasingly widely by the popular media in the 1990s.
Decline or transformation: 1990–present
By the late 1980s, some publishers dropped the term New Age as a marketing device. In 1994, the scholar of religion Gordon J. Melton presented a conference paper in which he argued that, given that he knew of nobody describing their practices as "New Age" anymore, the New Age had died. In 2001, Hammer observed that the term New Age had increasingly been rejected as either pejorative or meaningless by individuals within the Western cultic milieu. He also noted that within this milieu it was not being replaced by any alternative and that as such a sense of collective identity was being lost.
Other scholars disagreed with Melton's idea; in 2004 Daren Kemp stated that "New Age is still very much alive". Hammer himself stated that "the New Age movement may be on the wane, but the wider New Age religiosity... shows no sign of disappearing". MacKian suggested that the New Age "movement" had been replaced by a wider "New Age sentiment" which had come to pervade "the socio-cultural landscape" of Western countries. Its diffusion into the mainstream may have been influenced by the adoption of New Age concepts by high-profile figures: U.S. First Lady Nancy Reagan consulted an astrologer, British Princess Diana visited spirit mediums, and Norwegian Princess Märtha Louise established a school devoted to communicating with angels.
New Age shops continued to operate, although many have been remarketed as "Mind, Body, Spirit".
In 2015, the scholar of religion Hugh Urban argued that New Age spirituality is growing in the United States and can be expected to become more visible: "According to many recent surveys of religious affiliation, the 'spiritual but not religious' category is one of the fastest-growing trends in American culture, so the New Age attitude of spiritual individualism and eclecticism may well be an increasingly visible one in the decades to come".
Australian scholar Paul J. Farrelly, in his 2017 doctoral dissertation at Australian National University, argued that, while the term New Age may become less popular in the West, it is actually booming in Taiwan, where it is regarded as something comparatively new and is being exported from Taiwan to the Mainland China, where it is more or less tolerated by the authorities.
Beliefs and practices
Eclecticism and self-spirituality
The New Age places strong emphasis on the idea that the individual and their own experiences are the primary source of authority on spiritual matters. It exhibits what Heelas termed "unmediated individualism", and reflects a world-view that is "radically democratic". It places an emphasis on the freedom and autonomy of the individual. This emphasis has led to ethical disagreements; some New Agers believe helping others is beneficial, although another view is that doing so encourages dependency and conflicts with a reliance on the self. Nevertheless, within the New Age, there are differences in the role accorded to voices of authority outside of the self. Hammer stated that "a belief in the existence of a core or true Self" is a "recurring theme" in New Age texts. The concept of "personal growth" is also greatly emphasised among New Agers, while Heelas noted that "for participants spirituality is life-itself".
New Age religiosity is typified by its eclecticism. Generally believing that there is no one true way to pursue spirituality, New Agers develop their own worldview "by combining bits and pieces to form their own individual mix", seeking what Drury called "a spirituality without borders or confining dogmas". The anthropologist David J. Hess noted that in his experience, a common attitude among New Agers was that "any alternative spiritual path is good because it is spiritual and alternative". This approach that has generated a common jibe that New Age represents "supermarket spirituality". York suggested that this eclecticism stemmed from the New Age's origins within late modern capitalism, with New Agers subscribing to a belief in a free market of spiritual ideas as a parallel to a free market in economics.
As part of its eclecticism, the New Age draws ideas from many different cultural and spiritual traditions from across the world, often legitimising this approach by reference to "a very vague claim" about underlying global unity. Certain societies are more usually chosen over others; examples include the ancient Celts, ancient Egyptians, the Essenes, Atlanteans, and ancient extraterrestrials. As noted by Hammer: "to put it bluntly, no significant spokespersons within the New Age community claim to represent ancient Albanian wisdom, simply because beliefs regarding ancient Albanians are not part of our cultural stereotypes". According to Hess, these ancient or foreign societies represent an exotic "Other" for New Agers, who are predominantly white Westerners.
Theology, cosmogony, and cosmology
A belief in divinity is integral to New Age ideas, although understandings of this divinity vary. New Age theology exhibits an inclusive and universalistic approach that accepts all personal perspectives on the divine as equally valid. This intentional vagueness as to the nature of divinity also reflects the New Age idea that divinity cannot be comprehended by the human mind or language. New Age literature nevertheless displays recurring traits in its depiction of the divine: the first is the idea that it is holistic, thus frequently being described with such terms as an "Ocean of Oneness", "Infinite Spirit", "Primal Stream", "One Essence", and "Universal Principle". A second trait is the characterisation of divinity as "Mind", "Consciousness", and "Intelligence", while a third is the description of divinity as a form of "energy". A fourth trait is the characterisation of divinity as a "life force", the essence of which is creativity, while a fifth is the concept that divinity consists of love.
Most New Age groups believe in an Ultimate Source from which all things originate, which is usually conflated with the divine. Various creation myths have been articulated in New Age publications outlining how this Ultimate Source created the universe and everything in it. In contrast, some New Agers emphasize the idea of a universal inter-relatedness that is not always emanating from a single source. The New Age worldview emphasises holism and the idea that everything in existence is intricately connected as part of a single whole, in doing so rejecting both the dualism of the Christian division of matter and spirit and the reductionism of Cartesian science. A number of New Agers have linked this holistic interpretation of the universe to the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock. The idea of holistic divinity results in a common New Age belief that humans themselves are divine in essence, a concept described using such terms as "droplet of divinity", "inner Godhead", and "divine self". Influenced by Theosophical and Anthroposophical ideas regarding 'subtle bodies', a common New Age idea holds to the existence of a Higher Self that is a part of the human but connects with the divine essence of the universe, and which can advise the human mind through intuition.
Cosmogonical creation stories are common in New Age sources, with these accounts reflecting the movement's holistic framework by describing an original, primal oneness from which all things in the universe emanated. An additional common theme is that human souls—once living in a spiritual world—then descended into a world of matter.
The New Age movement typically views the material universe as a meaningful illusion, which humans should try to use constructively rather than focus on escaping into other spiritual realms. This physical world is hence seen as "a domain for learning and growth" after which the human soul might pass on to higher levels of existence. There is thus a widespread belief that reality is engaged in an ongoing process of evolution; rather than Darwinian evolution, this is typically seen as either a teleological evolution which assumes a process headed to a specific goal or an open-ended, creative evolution.
Spirit and channeling
A conduit, in esoterism, and spiritual discourse, is a specific object, person, location, or process (such as engaging in a séance or entering a trance, or using psychedelic medicines) which allows a person to connect or communicate with a spiritual realm, metaphysical energy, or spiritual entity, or vice versa. The use of such a conduit may be entirely metaphoric or symbolic, or it may be earnestly believed to be functional.
MacKian argued that a central, but often overlooked, element of the phenomenon was an emphasis on "spirit", and in particular participants' desire for a relationship with spirit. Many practitioners in her UK-focused study described themselves as "workers for spirit", expressing the desire to help people learn about spirit. They understood various material signs as marking the presence of spirit, for instance, the unexpected appearance of a feather. New Agers often call upon this spirit to assist them in everyday situations, for instance, to ease the traffic flow on their way to work.
New Age literature often refers to benevolent non-human spirit-beings who are interested in humanity's spiritual development; these are variously referred to as angels, guardian angels, personal guides, masters, teachers, and contacts. New Age angelology is nevertheless unsystematic, reflecting the idiosyncrasies of individual authors. The figure of Jesus Christ is often mentioned within New Age literature as a mediating principle between divinity and humanity, as well as an exemplar of a spiritually advanced human being.
Although not present in every New Age group, a core belief within the milieu is in channeling. This is the idea that humans beings, sometimes (although not always) in a state of trance, can act "as a channel of information from sources other than their normal selves". These sources are varyingly described as being God, gods and goddesses, ascended masters, spirit guides, extraterrestrials, angels, devas, historical figures, the collective unconscious, elementals, or nature spirits. Hanegraaff described channeling as a form of "articulated revelation", and identified four forms: trance channeling, automatisms, clairaudient channeling, and open channeling.
A notable channeler in the early 1900s was Rose Edith Kelly, wife of the English occultist and ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). She allegedly channeled the voice of a non-physical entity named Aiwass during their honeymoon in Cairo, Egypt (1904). Others purport to channel spirits from "future dimensions", ascended masters, or, in the case of the trance mediums of the Brahma Kumaris, God. Another channeler in the early 1900s was Edgar Cayce, who said that he was able to channel his higher self while in a trance-like state.
In the later half of the 20th century, Western mediumship developed in two different ways. One type involves clairaudience, in which the medium is said to hear spirits and relay what they hear to their clients. The other is a form of channeling in which the channeler seemingly goes into a trance, and purports to leave their body allowing a spirit entity to borrow it and then speak through them. When in a trance the medium appears to enter into a cataleptic state, although modern channelers may not. Some channelers open the eyes when channeling, and remain able to walk and behave normally. The rhythm and the intonation of the voice may also change completely.
Examples of New Age channeling include Jane Roberts' belief that she was contacted by an entity called Seth, and Helen Schucman's belief that she had channeled Jesus Christ. The academic Suzanne Riordan examined a variety of these New Age channeled messages, noting that they typically "echoed each other in tone and content", offering an analysis of the human condition and giving instructions or advice for how humanity can discover its true destiny.
For many New Agers, these channeled messages rival the scriptures of the main world religions as sources of spiritual authority, although often New Agers describe historical religious revelations as forms of "channeling" as well, thus attempting to legitimate and authenticate their own contemporary practices. Although the concept of channeling from discarnate spirit entities has links to Spiritualism and psychical research, the New Age does not feature Spiritualism's emphasis on proving the existence of life after death, nor psychical research's focus of testing mediums for consistency.
Other New Age channels include:
J. Z. Knight (b. 1946), who channels the spirit "Ramtha", a 30-thousand-year-old man from Lemuria
Esther Hicks (b. 1948), who channels a purported collective consciousness she calls "Abraham"
Gary Douglas, who purportedly channels Grigori Rasputin, aliens called Novian, a 14th century monk names Brother George, and an ancient Chinese man called Tchia Tsinin his organization, Access Consciousness.
Astrological cycles and the Age of Aquarius
New Age thought typically envisions the world as developing through cosmological cycles that can be identified astrologically. It adopts this concept from Theosophy, although often presents it in a looser and more eclectic way than is found in Theosophical teaching. New Age literature often proposes that humanity once lived in an age of spiritual wisdom. In the writings of New Agers like Edgar Cayce, the ancient period of spiritual wisdom is associated with concepts of supremely-advanced societies living on lost continents such as Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu, as well as the idea that ancient societies like those of Ancient Egypt were far more technologically advanced than modern scholarship accepts. New Age literature often posits that the ancient period of spiritual wisdom gave way to an age of spiritual decline, sometimes termed the Age of Pisces. Although characterised as being a negative period for humanity, New Age literature views the Age of Pisces as an important learning experience for the species. Hanegraaff stated that New Age perceptions of history were "extremely sketchy" in their use of description, reflecting little interest in historiography and conflating history with myth. He also noted that they were highly ethnocentric in placing Western civilization at the centre of historical development.
A common belief among the New Age is that humanity has entered, or is coming to enter, a new period known as the Age of Aquarius, which Melton has characterised as a "New Age of love, joy, peace, abundance, and harmony[...] the Golden Age heretofore only dreamed about." In accepting this belief in a coming new age, the milieu has been described as "highly positive, celebratory, [and] utopian", and has also been cited as an apocalyptic movement. Opinions about the nature of the coming Age of Aquarius differ among New Agers. There are for instance differences in belief about its commencement; New Age author David Spangler wrote that it began in 1967, others placed its beginning with the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, author José Argüelles predicted its start in 2012, and some believe that it will not begin until several centuries into the third millennium.
There are also differences in how this new age is envisioned. Those adhering to what Hanegraaff termed the "moderate" perspective believed that it would be marked by an improvement to current society, which affected both New Age concerns—through the convergence of science and mysticism and the global embrace of alternative medicine—to more general concerns, including an end to violence, crime and war, a healthier environment, and international co-operation. Other New Agers adopt a fully utopian vision, believing that the world will be wholly transformed into an "Age of Light", with humans evolving into totally spiritual beings and experiencing unlimited love, bliss, and happiness. Rather than conceiving of the Age of Aquarius as an indefinite period, many believe that it would last for around two thousand years before being replaced by a further age.
There are various beliefs within the milieu as to how this new age will come about, but most emphasise the idea that it will be established through human agency; others assert that it will be established with the aid of non-human forces such as spirits or extraterrestrials. Ferguson, for instance, said that there was a vanguard of humans known as the "Aquarian conspiracy" who were helping to bring the Age of Aquarius forth through their actions. Participants in the New Age typically express the view that their own spiritual actions are helping to bring about the Age of Aquarius, with writers like Ferguson and Argüelles presenting themselves as prophets ushering forth this future era.
Healing and alternative medicine
Another recurring element of New Age is an emphasis on healing and alternative medicine. The general New Age ethos is that health is the natural state for the human being and that illness is a disruption of that natural balance. Hence, New Age therapies seek to heal "illness" as a general concept that includes physical, mental, and spiritual aspects; in doing so it critiques mainstream Western medicine for simply attempting to cure disease, and thus has an affinity with most forms of traditional medicine. Its focus of self-spirituality has led to the emphasis of self-healing, although also present are ideas on healing both others and the Earth itself.
The healing elements of the movement are difficult to classify given that a variety of terms are used, with some New Age authors using different terms to refer to the same trends, while others use the same term to refer to different things. However, Hanegraaff developed a set of categories into which the forms of New Age healing could be roughly categorised. The first of these was the Human Potential Movement, which argues that contemporary Western society suppresses much human potential, and accordingly professes to offer a path through which individuals can access those parts of themselves that they have alienated and suppressed, thus enabling them to reach their full potential and live a meaningful life. Hanegraaff described transpersonal psychology as the "theoretical wing" of this Human Potential Movement; in contrast to other schools of psychological thought, transpersonal psychology takes religious and mystical experiences seriously by exploring the uses of altered states of consciousness. Closely connected to this is the shamanic consciousness current, which argues that the shaman was a specialist in altered states of consciousness and seeks to adopt and imitate traditional shamanic techniques as a form of personal healing and growth.
Hanegraaff identified the second main healing current in the New Age movement as being holistic health. This emerged in the 1970s out of the free clinic movement of the 1960s, and has various connections with the Human Potential Movement. It emphasises the idea that the human individual is a holistic, interdependent relationship between mind, body, and spirit, and that healing is a process in which an individual becomes whole by integrating with the powers of the universe. A very wide array of methods are utilised within the holistic health movement, with some of the most common including acupuncture, reiki, biofeedback, chiropractic, yoga, applied kinesiology, homeopathy, aromatherapy, iridology, massage and other forms of bodywork, meditation and visualisation, nutritional therapy, psychic healing, herbal medicine, healing using crystals, metals, music, chromotherapy, and reincarnation therapy. Although the use of crystal healing has become a visual trope within the New Age, this practice was not common in esotericism prior to their adoption in the New Age milieu.
The mainstreaming of the Holistic Health movement in the UK is discussed by Maria Tighe. The inter-relation of holistic health with the New Age movement is illustrated in Jenny Butler's ethnographic description of "Angel therapy" in Ireland.
New Age science
According to Drury, the New Age attempts to create "a worldview that includes both science and spirituality", while Hess noted how New Agers have "a penchant for bringing together the technical and the spiritual, the scientific and the religious".
Although New Agers typically reject rationalism, the scientific method, and the academic establishment, they employ terminology and concepts borrowed from science and particularly from new physics. Moreover, a number of influences on New Age, such as David Bohm and Ilya Prigogine, had backgrounds as professional scientists. Hanegraaff identified "New Age science" as a form of Naturphilosophie.
In this, the milieu is interested in developing unified world views to discover the nature of the divine and establish a scientific basis for religious belief. Figures in the New Age movement—most notably Fritjof Capra in his The Tao of Physics (1975) and Gary Zukav in The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979)—have drawn parallels between theories in the New Physics and traditional forms of mysticism, thus arguing that ancient religious ideas are now being proven by contemporary science. Many New Agers have adopted James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis that the Earth acts akin to a single living organism, going further to propound that the Earth has a consciousness and intelligence.
Despite New Agers' appeals to science, most of the academic and scientific establishments dismiss "New Age science" as pseudo-science, or at best existing in part on the fringes of genuine scientific research. This is an attitude also shared by many active in the field of parapsychology. In turn, New Agers often accuse the scientific establishment of pursuing a dogmatic and outmoded approach to scientific enquiry, believing that their own understandings of the universe will replace those of the academic establishment in a paradigm shift.
Ethics and afterlife
There is no ethical cohesion within the New Age phenomenon, although Hanegraaff argued that the central ethical tenet of the New Age is to cultivate one's own divine potential. Given that the movement's holistic interpretation of the universe prohibits a belief in a dualistic good and evil, negative events that happen are interpreted not as the result of evil but as lessons designed to teach an individual and enable them to advance spiritually.
It rejects the Christian emphasis on sin and guilt, believing that these generate fear and thus negativity, which then hinder spiritual evolution. It also typically criticises the blaming and judging of others for their actions, believing that if an individual adopts these negative attitudes it harms their own spiritual evolution. Instead, the movement emphasizes positive thinking, although beliefs regarding the power behind such thoughts vary within New Age literature. Common New Age examples of how to generate such positive thinking include the repeated recitation of mantras and statements carrying positive messages, and the visualisation of a white light.
According to Hanegraaff, the question of death and afterlife is not a "pressing problem requiring an answer" in the New Age. A belief in reincarnation is very common, where it is often viewed as being part of an individual's progressive spiritual evolution toward realisation of their own divinity. In New Age literature, the reality of reincarnation is usually treated as self-evident, with no explanation as to why practitioners embrace this afterlife belief over others, although New Agers endorse it in the belief that it ensures cosmic justice. Many New Agers believe in karma, treating it as a law of cause and effect that assures cosmic balance, although in some cases they stress that it is not a system that enforces punishment for past actions.
Much New Age literature on reincarnation says that part of the human soul, that which carries the personality, perishes with the death of the body, while the Higher Self—that which connects with divinity—survives in order to be reborn into another body. It is believed that the Higher Self chooses the body and circumstances into which it will be born, in order to use it as a vessel through which to learn new lessons and thus advance its own spiritual evolution. New Age writers like Shakti Gawain and Louise Hay therefore express the view that humans are responsible for the events that happen to them during their life, an idea that many New Agers regard as empowering. At times, past life regression are employed within the New Age in order to reveal a Higher Soul's previous incarnations, usually with an explicit healing purpose. Some practitioners espouse the idea of a "soul group" or "soul family", a group of connected souls who reincarnate together as family of friendship units. Rather than reincarnation, another afterlife belief found among New Agers holds that an individual's soul returns to a "universal energy" on bodily death.
Demographics
In the mid-1990s, the New Age was found primarily in the United States and Canada, Western Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. The fact that most individuals engaging in New Age activity do not describe themselves as "New Agers" renders it difficult to determine the total number of practitioners. Heelas highlighted the range of attempts to establish the number of New Age participants in the U.S. during this period, noting that estimates ranged from 20,000 to 6 million; he believed that the higher ranges of these estimates were greatly inflated by, for instance, an erroneous assumption that all Americans who believed in reincarnation were part of the New Age. He nevertheless suggested that over 10 million people in the U.S. had had some contact with New Age practices or ideas. Between 2000 and 2002, Heelas and Woodhead conducted research into the New Age in the English town of Kendal, Cumbria; they found 600 people actively attended New Age activities on a weekly basis, representing 1.6% of the town's population. From this, they extrapolated that around 900,000 Britons regularly took part in New Age activities. In 2006, Heelas stated that New Age practices had grown to such an extent that they were "increasingly rivaling the sway of Christianity in Western settings".
Sociological investigation indicates that certain sectors of society are more likely to engage in New Age practices than others. In the United States, the first people to embrace the New Age belonged to the baby boomer generation, those born between 1946 and 1964.
Sutcliffe noted that although most influential New Age figureheads were male, approximately two-thirds of its participants were female. Heelas and Woodhead's Kendal Project found that of those regularly attending New Age activities in the town, 80% were female, while 78% of those running such activities were female. They attributed this female dominance to "deeply entrenched cultural values and divisions of labour" in Western society, according to which women were accorded greater responsibility for the well-being of others, thus making New Age practices more attractive to them. They suggested that men were less attracted to New Age activities because they were hampered by a "masculinist ideal of autonomy and self-sufficiency" which discouraged them from seeking the assistance of others for their inner development.
The majority of New Agers are from the middle and upper-middle classes of Western society. Heelas and Woodhead found that of the active Kendal New Agers, 57% had a university or college degree. Their Kendal Project also determined that 73% of active New Agers were aged over 45, and 55% were aged between 40 and 59; it also determined that many got involved while middle-aged. Comparatively few were either young or elderly. Heelas and Woodhead suggested that the dominance of middle-aged people, particularly women, was because at this stage of life they had greater time to devote to their own inner development, with their time previously having been dominated by raising children. They also suggested that middle-aged people were experiencing more age-related ailments than the young, and thus more keen to pursue New Age activities to improve their health.
Heelas added that within the baby boomers, the movement had nevertheless attracted a diverse clientele. He typified the typical New Ager as someone who was well-educated yet disenchanted with mainstream society, thus arguing that the movement catered to those who believe that modernity is in crisis. He suggested that the movement appealed to many former practitioners of the 1960s counter-culture because while they came to feel that they were unable to change society, they were nonetheless interested in changing the self. He believed that many individuals had been "culturally primed for what the New Age has to offer", with the New Age attracting "expressive" people who were already comfortable with the ideals and outlooks of the movement's self-spirituality focus. It could be particularly appealing because the New Age suited the needs of the individual, whereas traditional religious options that are available primarily catered for the needs of a community. He believed that although the adoption of New Age beliefs and practices by some fitted the model of religious conversion, others who adopted some of its practices could not easily be considered to have converted to the religion. Sutcliffe described the "typical" participant in the New Age milieu as being "a religious individualist, mixing and matching cultural resources in an animated spiritual quest".
The degree to which individuals are involved in the New Age varies. Heelas argued that those involved could be divided into three broad groups; the first comprised those who were completely dedicated to it and its ideals, often working in professions that furthered those goals. The second consisted of "serious part-timers" who worked in unrelated fields but who nevertheless spent much of their free time involved in movement activities. The third was that of "casual part-timers" who occasionally involved themselves in New Age activities but for whom the movement was not a central aspect of their life. MacKian instead suggested that involvement could be seen as being layered like an onion; at the core are "consultative" practitioners who devote their life to New Age practices, around that are "serious" practitioners who still invest considerable effort into New Age activities, and on the periphery are "non-practitioner consumers", individuals affected by the general dissemination of New Age ideas but who do not devote themselves more fully to them. Many New Age practices have filtered into wider Western society, with a 2000 poll, for instance, revealing that 39% of the UK population had tried alternative therapies.
In 1995, Kyle stated that on the whole, New Agers in the United States preferred the values of the Democratic Party over those of the Republican Party. He added that most New Agers "soundly rejected" the agenda of former Republican President Ronald Reagan.
Social communities
MacKian suggested that this phenomenon was "an inherently social mode of spirituality", one which cultivated a sense of belonging among its participants and encouraged relations both with other humans and with non-human, otherworldly spirit entities.
MacKian suggested that these communities "may look very different" from those of traditional religious groups.
Online connections were one of the ways that interested individuals met new contacts and established networks.
Commercial aspects
Some New Agers advocate living in a simple and sustainable manner to reduce humanity's impact on the natural resources of Earth; and they shun consumerism. The New Age movement has been centered around rebuilding a sense of community to counter social disintegration; this has been attempted through the formation of intentional communities, where individuals come together to live and work in a communal lifestyle. New Age centres have been set up in various parts of the world, representing an institutionalised form of the movement. Notable examples include the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, Holly Hock Farm near to Vancouver, the Wrekin Trust in West Malvern, Worcestershire, and the Skyros Centre in Skyros. Criticising mainstream Western education as counterproductive to the ethos of the movement, many New Age groups have established their own schools for the education of children, although in other cases such groups have sought to introduce New Age spiritual techniques into pre-existing establishments.
Bruce argued that in seeking to "denying the validity of externally imposed controls and privileging the divine within", the New Age sought to dismantle pre-existing social order, but that it failed to present anything adequate in its place. Heelas, however, cautioned that Bruce had arrived at this conclusion based on "flimsy evidence", and Aldred argued that only a minority of New Agers participate in community-focused activities; instead, she argued, the majority of New Agers participate mainly through the purchase of books and products targeted at the New Age market, positioning New Age as a primarily consumerist and commercial movement.
Fairs and festivals
New Age spirituality has led to a wide array of literature on the subject and an active niche market, with books, music, crafts, and services in alternative medicine available at New Age stores, fairs, and festivals.
New Age fairs—sometimes known as "Mind, Body, Spirit fairs", "psychic fairs", or "alternative health fairs"—are spaces in which a variety of goods and services are displayed by different vendors, including forms of alternative medicine and esoteric practices such as palmistry or tarot card reading. An example is the Mind Body Spirit Festival, held annually in the United Kingdom, at which—the religious studies scholar Christopher Partridge noted—one could encounter "a wide range of beliefs and practices from crystal healing to ... Kirlian photography to psychic art, from angels to past-life therapy, from Theosophy to UFO religion, and from New Age music to the vegetarianism of Suma Chign Hai." Similar festivals are held across Europe and in Australia and the United States.
Approaches to financial prosperity and business
A number of New Age proponents have emphasised the use of spiritual techniques as a tool for attaining financial prosperity, thus moving the movement away from its counter-cultural origins. Commenting on this "New Age capitalism", Hess observed that it was largely small-scale and entrepreneurial, focused around small companies run by members of the petty bourgeoisie, rather than being dominated by large scale multinational corporations. The links between New Age and commercial products have resulted in the accusation that New Age itself is little more than a manifestation of consumerism. This idea is generally rejected by New Age participants, who often reject any link between their practices and consumerist activities.
Embracing this attitude, various books have been published espousing such an ethos, established New Age centres have held spiritual retreats and classes aimed specifically at business people, and New Age groups have developed specialised training for businesses. During the 1980s, many U.S. corporations—among them IBM, AT&T, and General Motors—embraced New Age seminars, hoping that they could increase productivity and efficiency among their workforce, although in several cases this resulted in employees bringing legal action against their employers, saying that such seminars had infringed on their religious beliefs or damaged their psychological health. However, the use of spiritual techniques as a method for attaining profit has been an issue of major dispute within the wider New Age movement, with New Agers such as Spangler and Matthew Fox criticising what they see as trends within the community that are narcissistic and lack a social conscience. In particular, the movement's commercial elements have caused problems given that they often conflict with its general economically egalitarian ethos; as York highlighted, "a tension exists in New Age between socialistic egalitarianism and capitalistic private enterprise".
Given that it encourages individuals to choose spiritual practices on the grounds of personal preference and thus encourages them to behave as a consumer, the New Age has been considered to be well suited to modern society.
Music
The term "new-age music" is applied, sometimes negatively, to forms of ambient music, a genre that developed in the 1960s and was popularised in the 1970s, particularly with the work of Brian Eno. The genre's relaxing nature resulted in it becoming popular within New Age circles, with some forms of the genre having a specifically New Age orientation. Studies have determined that new-age music can be an effective component of stress management.
The style began in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the works of free-form jazz groups recording on the ECM label; such as Oregon, the Paul Winter Consort, and other pre-ambient bands; as well as ambient music performer Brian Eno, classical avant-garde musician Daniel Kobialka, and the psychoacoustic environments recordings of Irv Teibel. In the early 1970s, it was mostly instrumental with both acoustic and electronic styles. New-age music evolved to include a wide range of styles from electronic space music using synthesizers and acoustic instrumentals using Native American flutes and drums, singing bowls, Australian didgeridoos and world music sounds to spiritual chanting from other cultures.
Politics
While many commentators have focused on the spiritual and cultural aspects of the New Age movement, it also has a political component. The New Age political movement became visible in the 1970s, peaked in the 1980s, and continued into the 1990s. The sociologist of religion Steven Bruce noted that the New Age provides ideas on how to deal with "our socio-psychological problems". Scholar of religion James R. Lewis observed that, despite the common caricature of New Agers as narcissistic, "significant numbers" of them were "trying to make the planet a better place on which to live," and scholar J. Gordon Melton's New Age Encyclopedia (1990) included an entry called "New Age politics". Some New Agers have entered the political system in an attempt to advocate for the societal transformation that the New Age promotes.
Ideas
Although New Age activists have been motivated by New Age concepts like holism, interconnectedness, monism, and environmentalism, their political ideas are diverse, ranging from far-right and conservative through to liberal, socialist, and libertarian. Accordingly, Kyle stated that "New Age politics is difficult to describe and categorize. The standard political labels—left or right, liberal or conservative—miss the mark." MacKian suggested that the New Age operated as a form of "world-realigning infrapolitics" that undermines the disenchantment of modern Western society.
The extent to which New Age spokespeople mix religion and politics varies. New Agers are often critical of the established political order, regarding it as "fragmented, unjust, hierarchical, patriarchal, and obsolete". The New Ager Mark Satin for instance spoke of "New Age politics" as a politically radical "third force" that was "neither left nor right". He believed that in contrast to the conventional political focus on the "institutional and economic symptoms" of society's problems, his "New Age politics" would focus on "psychocultural roots" of these issues. Ferguson regarded New Age politics as "a kind of Radical Centre", one that was "not neutral, not middle-of-the-road, but a view of the whole road." Fritjof Capra argued that Western societies have become sclerotic because of their adherence to an outdated and mechanistic view of reality, which he calls the Newtonian/Cartesian paradigm. In Capra's view, the West needs to develop an organic and ecological "systems view" of reality in order to successfully address its social and political issues. Corinne McLaughlin argued that politics need not connote endless power struggles, that a new "spiritual politics" could attempt to synthesize opposing views on issues into higher levels of understanding.
Many New Agers advocate globalisation and localisation, but reject nationalism and the role of the nation-state. Some New Age spokespeople have called for greater decentralisation and global unity, but are vague about how this might be achieved; others call for a global, centralised government. Satin for example argued for a move away from the nation-state and towards self-governing regions that, through improved global communication networks, would help engender world unity. Benjamin Creme conversely argued that "the Christ", a great Avatar, Maitreya, the World Teacher, expected by all the major religions as their "Awaited One", would return to the world and establish a strong, centralised global government in the form of the United Nations; this would be politically re-organised along a spiritual hierarchy. Kyle observed that New Agers often speak favourably of democracy and citizens' involvement in policy making but are critical of representative democracy and majority rule, thus displaying elitist ideas to their thinking.
Groups
Scholars have noted several New Age political groups. Self-Determination: A Personal/Political Network, lauded by Ferguson and Satin, was described at length by sociology of religion scholar Steven Tipton. Founded in 1975 by California state legislator John Vasconcellos and others, it encouraged Californians to engage in personal growth work and political activities at the same time, especially at the grassroots level. Hanegraaff noted another California-based group, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, headed by the author Willis Harman. It advocated a change in consciousness—in "basic underlying assumptions"—in order to come to grips with global crises. Kyle said that the New York City-based Planetary Citizens organization, headed by United Nations consultant and Earth at Omega author Donald Keys, sought to implement New Age political ideas.
Scholar J. Gordon Melton and colleagues focused on the New World Alliance, a Washington, DC-based organization founded in 1979 by Mark Satin and others. According to Melton et al., the Alliance tried to combine left- and right-wing ideas as well as personal growth work and political activities. Group decision-making was facilitated by short periods of silence. Sponsors of the Alliance's national political newsletter included Willis Harman and John Vasconcellos. Scholar James R. Lewis counted "Green politics" as one of the New Age's more visible activities. One academic book says that the U.S. Green Party movement began as an initiative of a handful of activists including Charlene Spretnak, co-author of a "'new age' interpretation" of the German Green movement (Capra and Spretnak's Green Politics), and Mark Satin, author of New Age Politics. Another academic publication says Spretnak and Satin largely co-drafted the U.S. Greens' founding document, the "Ten Key Values" statement.
In the 21st century
While the term New Age may have fallen out of favor, scholar George Chryssides notes that the New Age by whatever name is "still alive and active" in the 21st century. In the realm of politics, New Ager Mark Satin's book Radical Middle (2004) reached out to mainstream liberals. York (2005) identified "key New Age spokespeople" including William Bloom, Satish Kumar, and Starhawk who were emphasizing a link between spirituality and environmental consciousness. Former Esalen Institute staffer Stephen Dinan's Sacred America, Sacred World (2016) prompted a long interview of Dinan in Psychology Today, which called the book a "manifesto for our country's evolution that is both political and deeply spiritual".
In 2013 longtime New Age author Marianne Williamson launched a campaign for a seat in the United States House of Representatives, telling The New York Times that her type of spirituality was what American politics needed. "America has swerved from its ethical center", she said. Running as an independent in west Los Angeles, she finished fourth in her district's open primary election with 13% of the vote. In early 2019, Williamson announced her candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States in the 2020 United States presidential election. A 5,300-word article about her presidential campaign in The Washington Post said she had "plans to fix America with love. Tough love". In January 2020 she withdrew her bid for the nomination.
Reception
Popular media
Mainstream periodicals tended to be less than sympathetic; sociologist Paul Ray and psychologist Sherry Anderson discussed in their 2000 book The Cultural Creatives, what they called the media's "zest for attacking" New Age ideas, and offered the example of a 1996 Lance Morrow essay in Time magazine. Nearly a decade earlier, Time had run a long cover story critical of New Age culture; the cover featured a headshot of a famous actress beside the headline, "Om.... THE NEW AGE starring Shirley MacLaine, faith healers, channelers, space travelers, and crystals galore". The story itself, by former Saturday Evening Post editor Otto Friedrich, was sub-titled, "A Strange Mix of Spirituality and Superstition Is Sweeping Across the Country". In 1988, the magazine The New Republic ran a four-page critique of New Age culture and politics by a journalist Richard Blow entitled simply, "Moronic Convergence".
Some New Agers and New Age sympathizers responded to such criticisms. For example, sympathizers Ray and Anderson said that much of it was an attempt to "stereotype" the movement for idealistic and spiritual change, and to cut back on its popularity. New Age theoretician David Spangler tried to distance himself from what he called the "New Age glamour" of crystals, talk-show channelers, and other easily commercialized phenomena, and sought to underscore his commitment to the New Age as a vision of genuine social transformation.
Academia
Initially, academic interest in the New Age was minimal. The earliest academic studies of the New Age phenomenon were performed by specialists in the study of new religious movements such as Robert Ellwood. This research was often scanty because many scholars regarded the New Age as an insignificant cultural fad. Having been influenced by the U.S. anti-cult movement, much of it was also largely negative and critical of New Age groups. The "first truly scholarly study" of the phenomenon was an edited volume put together by James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton in 1992. From that point on, the number of published academic studies steadily increased.
In 1994, Christoph Bochinger published his study of the New Age in Germany, "New Age" und moderne Religion. This was followed by Michael York's sociological study in 1995 and Richard Kyle's U.S.-focused work in 1995. In 1996, Paul Heelas published a sociological study of the movement in Britain, being the first to discuss its relationship with business. That same year, Wouter Hanegraaff published New Age Religion and Western Culture, a historical analysis of New Age texts; Hammer later described it as having "a well-deserved reputation as the standard reference work on the New Age". Most of these early studies were based on a textual analysis of New Age publications, rather than on an ethnographic analysis of its practitioners.
Sutcliffe and Gilhus argued that 'New Age studies' could be seen as having experienced two waves; in the first, scholars focused on "macro-level analyses of the content and boundaries" of the "movement", while the second wave featured "more variegated and contextualized studies of particular beliefs and practices". Sutcliffe and Gilhus have also expressed concern that, as of 2013, 'New Age studies' has yet to formulate a set of research questions scholars can pursue.
The New Age has proved a challenge for scholars of religion operating under more formative models of what "religion" is. By 2006, Heelas noted that the New Age was so vast and diverse that no scholar of the subject could hope to keep up with all of it.
Christian perspectives
Mainstream Christianity has typically rejected the ideas of the New Age; Christian critiques often emphasise that the New Age places the human individual before God. Most published criticism of the New Age has been produced by Christians, particularly those on the religion's fundamentalist wing. In the United States, the New Age became a major concern of evangelical Christian groups in the 1980s, an attitude that influenced British evangelical groups. During that decade, evangelical writers such as Constance Cumbey, Dave Hunt, Gary North, and Douglas Groothuis published books criticising the New Age; a number propagated conspiracy theories regarding its origin and purpose. The most successful such publication was Frank E. Peretti's 1986 novel This Present Darkness, which sold over a million copies; it depicted the New Age as being in league with feminism and secular education as part of a conspiracy to overthrow Christianity. Modern Christian critics of the New Age include Doreen Virtue, a former New Age writer from California who converted to fundamentalist Christianity in 2017.
Official responses to the New Age have been produced by major Christian organisations like the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, and the Methodist Church. The Roman Catholic Church published A Christian reflection on the New Age in 2003, following a six-year study; the 90-page document criticizes New Age practices such as yoga, meditation, feng shui, and crystal healing. According to the Vatican, euphoric states attained through New Age practices should not be confused with prayer or viewed as signs of God's presence. Cardinal Paul Poupard, then-president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the New Age is "a misleading answer to the oldest hopes of man". Monsignor Michael Fitzgerald, then-president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, stated at the Vatican conference on the document: the "Church avoids any concept that is close to those of the New Age". On the contrary, some fringe Christian groups have adopted a more positive view of the New Age, among them the Christaquarians, and Christians Awakening to a New Awareness, all of which believe that New Age ideas can enhance a person's Christian faith.
Contemporary Pagan perspectives
There is academic debate about the connection between the New Age and Modern Paganism, sometimes termed "Neo-paganism". The two phenomena have often been confused and conflated, particularly in Christian critiques. Religious studies scholar Sarah Pike asserted that there was a "significant overlap" between the two religious movements, while Aidan A. Kelly stated that Paganism "parallels the New Age movement in some ways, differs sharply from it in others, and overlaps it in some minor ways". Other scholars have identified them as distinct phenomena that share overlap and commonalities. Hanegraaff suggested that whereas various forms of contemporary Paganism were not part of the New Age movement—particularly those that pre-dated the movement—other Pagan religions and practices could be identified as New Age. Partridge portrayed both Paganism and the New Age as different streams of occulture (occult culture) that merge at points.
Various differences between the two movements have been highlighted; the New Age movement focuses on an improved future, whereas the focus of Paganism is on the pre-Christian past. Similarly, the New Age movement typically propounds a universalist message that sees all religions as fundamentally the same, whereas Paganism stresses the difference between monotheistic religions and those embracing a polytheistic or animistic theology. While the New Age emphasises a light-centred image, Paganism acknowledges both light and dark, life and death, and recognises the savage side of the natural world. Many Pagans have sought to distance themselves from the New Age movement, even using "New Age" as an insult within their community, while conversely many involved in the New Age have expressed criticism of Paganism for emphasizing the material world over the spiritual. Many Pagans have expressed criticism of the high fees charged by New Age teachers, something not typically present in the Pagan movement.
Non-Western and Indigenous criticism
New Age often adopts spiritual ideas and practices from other, particularly non-Western cultures. According to York, these may include "Hawaiian Kahuna magic, Australian Aboriginal dream-working, South American Amerindian ayahuasca and San Pedro ceremonies, Hindu Ayurveda and yoga, Chinese Feng Shui, Qi Gong, and Tai Chi."
The New Age has been accused of cultural imperialism, misappropriating sacred ceremonies, and exploitation of the intellectual and cultural property of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous American spiritual leaders, such as Elders councils of the Lakota, Cheyenne, Navajo, Creek, Hopi, Chippewa, and Haudenosaunee have denounced New Age misappropriation of their sacred ceremonies and other intellectual property, stating that "[t]he value of these instructions and ceremonies [when led by unauthorized people] are questionable, maybe meaningless, and hurtful to the individual carrying false messages". Traditional leaders of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples have reached consensus to reject "the expropriation of [their] ceremonial ways by non-Indians". They see the New Age movement as either not fully understanding, deliberately trivializing, or distorting their way of life, and strongly disapprove of all such "plastic medicine people" who are appropriating their spiritual ways.
Indigenous leaders have spoken out against individuals from within their own communities who may go out into the world to become a "white man's shaman", and any "who are prostituting our spiritual ways for their own selfish gain, with no regard for the spiritual well-being of the people as a whole". The terms "plastic shaman" and "plastic medicine person" have been used to describe an outsider who identifies or promotes themselves as a shaman, holy person, or other traditional spiritual leader, yet has no genuine connection to the traditions or cultures represented.
Political writers and activists
Toward the end of the 20th century, some social and political analysts and activists were arguing that the New Age political perspective had something to offer mainstream society. In 1987, some political scientists launched the "Section on Ecological and Transformational Politics" of the American Political Science Association, and an academic book prepared by three of them stated that the "transformational politics" concept was meant to subsume such terms as new age and new paradigm. In 1991, scholar of cultural studies Andrew Ross suggested that New Age political ideas—however muddled and naïve—could help progressives construct an appealing alternative to both atomistic individualism and self-denying collectivism. In 2005, British researcher Stuart Rose urged scholars of alternative religions to pay more attention to the New Age's interest in such topics as "new socio-political thinking" and "New Economics", topics Rose discussed in his book Transforming the World: Bringing the New Age Into Focus, issued by a European academic publisher.
Other political thinkers and activists saw New Age politics less positively. On the political right, author George Weigel argued that New Age politics was just a retooled and pastel-colored version of leftism. Conservative evangelical writer Douglas Groothuis, discussed by scholars Hexham and Kemp, warned that New Age politics could lead to an oppressive world government. On the left, scholars argued that New Age politics was an oxymoron: that personal growth has little or nothing to do with political change. One political scientist said New Age politics fails to recognize the reality of economic and political power. Another academic, Dana L. Cloud, wrote a lengthy critique of New Age politics as a political ideology; she faulted it for not being opposed to the capitalist system, or to liberal individualism.
A criticism of New Age often made by leftists is that its focus on individualism deflects participants from engaging in socio-political activism. This perspective regards New Age as a manifestation of consumerism that promotes elitism and indulgence by allowing wealthier people to affirm their socio-economic status through consuming New Age products and therapies. New Agers who do engage in socio-political activism have also been criticized. Journalist Harvey Wasserman suggested that New Age activists were too averse to social conflict to be effective politically. Melton et al. found that New Age activists' commitment to the often frustrating process of consensus decision-making led to "extended meetings and minimal results", and a pair of futurists concluded that one once-promising New Age activist group had been both "too visionary and too vague" to last.
See also
Higher consciousness
Hypnosis
Mindfulness
New Age communities
New religious movement
Nonviolent resistance
Peace movement
Philosophy of happiness
Post-scarcity
Postchristianity
Roerichism
Social theory
References
Citations
Works cited
Further reading
External links
"Rainbow Gathering" – New Age Annual Event since 1972
"The New Age 40 Years Later ". Huffington Post interview of Mark Satin, author of New Age Politics, cited above.
1970s establishments
Counterculture of the 1970s
Mysticism
Nonduality
Panentheism
Spirituality
Subcultures
Western esotericism | 0.785793 | 0.999193 | 0.785159 |
Religious values | Religious values reflect the beliefs and practices which a religious adherent partakes in. Most values originate from sacred texts of each respective religion. They can also originate from members of the religion.
Members of particular religions are considered to be a prime embodiment of the particular religion's values, such as leaders or adherents of a religion who strictly abide by its rules. Each religion has similar and differing values. Being religious does not indicate that certain religions are opposed to particular attitudes or encourage them. These values are also evident in secular society as it shares similarities.
Various aspects of the significance of religious values have been considered with respect to novels, their relevance to a particular religious group (the Jains for instance or Latin Americans), and in relation to human society.
Religions influence areas of living in society such a how they treat money. Money is used more ethically by religious adherents than those who are not. Care of the environment is also a religious moral based on values of creation. There are issues in society such as abortion which religious values impact as well. An adherent's attitudes on homosexuality are also affected by religious values. If divorce is taken as a path in marriage or not is affected by how religious the individuals are. Even an adherents consumer behaviour can be shaped by their religion.
Origin of Religious Values
Religious values are usually based on values reflected within religious texts or by the influence of the lives of religious persons.
Known as the ‘Indigenous Religious Values Hypothesis’, the origin of religious values can be seen as the product of the values held by the society in which the religion originated from. The beliefs of an individual are often centred around a religion, so the religion can be the origin of that individual's values. When religion is defined heuristically, it can be used by individuals, communities or societies to answer their existential questions with the beliefs that the religion teaches. Values develop from the answers religions give to those existential questions.
Significance of Religious Values
Every individual does not consider religion to affect the actions and thoughts of a person. Though in some communities secularisation is considered dominant, it does not mean that religion is insignificant in those communities.
Money shapes religion in one way or another
Monetary Intelligence is greater among individuals who have a lower interest in making money but are more religious, along with those who wish to make ethical decisions. In a study by Thomas Tang on monetary intelligence found that making ethical decisions in the study was related to recalling the Ten Commandments, which are a Christian set of ethical teachings from which Christian values are developed. These developed values are uniform across many religions, though not all of them from the Ten Commandments.
Environment
The Roman Catholic leader, Pope Francis wrote an encyclical called ‘Laudato Sí’. It focused on the environment and it was thought that it would change the attitudes of Roman Catholics. A study by Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research and Yale University researchers, found that 40% of American Catholics were only aware of the encyclical and the encyclical did not produce much of a difference in their reaction to climate change.
Abortion
A study done by Harris and Mills found that those who associate more with values of self-determination are more likely to agree to abortion than those who associate with values which reflect responsibility for others. Persons who associate with values of self-determination are not as religious as those who identify with values of responsibility for others.
Joseph Tamney and his colleagues conducted a study to create a model representing the reasons why or why not individuals support legalised abortion in the American population. They mention that Judaism and Christianity possess values which limits an individual's freedom. Christianity values the preservation of natural processes and human life. This is why adherents of Christianity oppose abortion.
Homosexuality
A study investigated the role of religion in how attitudes about homosexuality is shaped in 33 countries. Some countries have liberal policies while others punish homosexuality. They found that nations who value self-expression are more accepting of homosexuality than nations who are focused on survival. Nations which survival values are not tolerant of ideas that are not traditional. Being self-expressive allow more opportunity for personal religious beliefs to be displayed. Muslim nations have harsher punishments for those found guilty of homosexuality. Their attitudes are no different to countries that are Buddhist, Protestant or Orthodox whose penalties are not as harsh. Just living in Muslim countries encourages inhabitants, including those who do not adhere to the religion, to have these attitudes about homosexuality than living in a Catholic country.
Divorce
Religious values are against divorce unless during a situation of abuse or adultery. Studies show that this is due to the fact that religions benefit from marriage. The value of family is evident in many religions, especially Christianity. Christian teachings, which mainly originate in
the Bible, consider divorce to be a sin. This is why marriage is considered to be sacred and in need of preservation.
Religion is considered to promote sustaining marriage and traditional sexual norms. Being religious indicates that marriages are more likely to be stable and be happy. Religious couples are not likely to cheat on their spouses than non-religious, married individuals. Married couples who are religious are less likely to separate or divorce. A study held by Joshua Tuttle and Shannon Davis found that religion decreases the occurrence of infidelity in married couples. They claimed that this was because religions promote traditional sexual and marital norms and discourage extramarital sexual activity. They also found that being religious did not stop marital infidelity from occurring, but it also did not change the chance of divorce. Marital infidelity also does not appear to have an effect of the chance of divorce in long-married couples.
Consumer Behaviour
Religion influences consumer's purchase. Some religions do not allow the consumption of certain foods such as Islam, which does not allow pork and Hinduism which does not allow beef. Those who are adherents of Islam may shop without much thought and research of the product they purchase. Muslims are also more likely to try new brands and new stores as their religious philosophy is that the outcome of their actions are God's will. Hindus are more likely to be rational with their purchases, which follows their religious philosophy. Adherents of Catholicism are more likely to purchase popular products and from well-known brands. Catholics are also likely to research their products and actively search for their desired product. Nittin Essoo and Sally Dibb found in their study that religious consumers were more practical in their shopping than devout shoppers, focusing more on the deals on the price and the credit which is available. They also found that adherents of Catholicism had a more demanding shopping behaviour compared to the shopping behaviour of Hindus and Muslims shoppers. When analysing Hindu behaviours when shopping, Essoo and Dibb described it as fatalism which sided with the religion's beliefs of self-control, calmness, detachment and compassion, which the researchers claimed explained their passive shopping behaviour. The studies result suggested that Hindu consumers were less demanding, less thoughtful of their purchases, they were less traditional, less practical with their purchase and their shopping behaviour was also less innovative compared to Muslim and Catholic shoppers. This meant they were less likely to put effort into purchasing and were more accepting of poor service and high prices.
Gender Discrimination
In Australia, the Sex Discrimination Act does not allow gender discrimination in any organisation except in religious grounds. Due to this, religions are allowed to not allow women to perform certain duties or actions, such as the Catholic Church's refusal to allow women to be ordained as clergy. Woman are not allowed to sit at the front of religious places of worship in some religions. Some religions do not allow the entry of women into places of religious worship.
The Study of Religious Values
William Schweiker points out that religion, unlike philosophy, is influenced by the lives of persons significant to a religion, places which are considered important and principles which are unique to a religion, differing one religion from the other. Religious values can be studied with different approaches. Schweiker mentions five of these listed below:
Formalist approach
When a group of values, practices and principles are considered to be part of a ‘Religion’, focusing on the moral implications on an individual's life through this manifestation of qualities is called a formalist approach.
Sociolinguistic approach
Studying the ways in which communities live.
Ethical naturalism
Where propositions of ethics by the world is examined to define general ethical concepts.
Hermeneutical
Looks at the perspective of traditions on any given situation.
Multidimensional
Is similar to a formalist approach, only differing in that it is more perceiving of how knowledge and disciplines were made among the specific labels given by the formalist aspect of this approach.
The Practice of Religious Values in Society
Law in Countries
Saudi Arabia and other countries enforces Islamic law. The public practice of religions other than Islam is illegal, however private practice and religious texts only for personal use are permitted.
Pledging at Court
In Australia, witnesses and jurors who appear at court are asked to make either an oath or affirmation upon any religious text if they wish and by any god recognised by their religion, if they do identify with one. Court Services Victoria detailed the pledge on their website:“I swear (or the person taking the oath may promise) by Almighty God (or the person may name a god recognised by his or her religion) that the evidence I shall give will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” (para. 3).
Clothing
Female adherents of Islam are advised to wear the hijab in public (in-front of anyone they could marry), which is a veil covering their hair. It is compulsory in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Some Christians wear a cross as an indicator to their beliefs.
Environment
The Mosques and Schools in Jordan are nearing 100% powered by renewable energy, using the energy for activities such as lights and heating water.
Charity
Caritas Australia is example of a religious affiliated charity, based on Christian values such as justice and equality.
Shamayim is a Jewish animal welfare organisation, encouraging religious communities to go without meat for at least a year.
Jewish Initiative for Animals (JIFA) is another animal welfare organisation which focuses on Jewish values to promote ethical eating.
See also
Religion and environmentalism
Nature conservation
Charity (practice)
Ethics in religion
Buddhist ethics
Christian ethics
Hindu ethics
Islamic ethics
Jewish ethics
Morality
References
Bibliography
Adamczyk, A., & Pitt, C. (2009). Shaping attitudes about homosexuality: The role of religion and cultural context. Social Science Research, 38(2), 338–351.
Alba, B. (2019, March 5). If we reject gender discrimination in every other arena, why do we accept it in religion. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/06/if-we-reject-gender-discrimination-in-every-other-arena-why-do-we-accept-it-in-religion
Cadge, W., & Konieczny, E. M., (2014). “Hidden in Plain Sight”: The Significance of Religion and Spirituality in Secular Organizations. Sociology of Religion, 75(4), 551–563.https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/sru043
Commonwealth Office. (2020, April 21). Local laws and customs - Saudi Arabia travel advice. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/saudi-arabia/local-laws-and-customs
Court Services Australia. (2014, July 24). Oaths and affirmations. Retrieved from https://www.courts.vic.gov.au/court-system/appearing-court/oaths-and-affirmations
Davis, L. (2017). On the Origin of Religious Values. SSRN Electronic Journal.
Essoo, N., & Dibb, S. (2004). Religious Influences on Shopping Behaviour: An Exploratory Study. Journal of Marketing Management, 20(7-8), 683–712.
Fowler, S. (2017, December 7). Where Values Come From. Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/where-value-come-from_b_10934032
Harris, J. R. Mills, W. E (1985). Religion, Values and Attitudes toward Abortion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 24(2), 137- 154.
Ives, C.D., Kidwell, J. (2019). Religion and social values for sustainability. Sustain Sci, 14, 1355–1362. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00657-0
Jäckle, S., & Wenzelburger, G. (2014). Religion, Religiosity, and the Attitudes Toward Homosexuality—A Multilevel Analysis of 79 Countries. Journal of Homosexuality, 62(2), 207–241.
Korbelik, J. (2006, July 29). Karma merges into pop culture. Retrieved from https://journalstar.com/lifestyles/faith-and-values/karma-merges-into-pop-culture/article_ee8999cc-5f5e-5682-84d1-68682707bf37.html
Napier, M. (2016, March 14). Origins of Caritas Australia. Retrieved from http://www.walktoabetterworld.com/origin-of-caritas-australia/
Pacific Roots Magazine. (2019, December). Feature Interview: Jewish Initiative for Animals. Retrieved from http://pacificrootsmagazine.com/feature-interview-jewish-initiative-for-animals/
Plant Based News. (2017, July 28). Jewish Animal Welfare Organization Challenges Synagogues To Go Vegan. Retrieved from https://www.plantbasednews.org/culture/jewish-animal-welfare-organization-challenges-synagogues-to-go-vegan
BBC, (2009, September 3). Religions - Islam: Hijab. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/beliefs/hijab_1.shtml
Roberts, M. S. (2011, September 12). Religions - Christianity: The cross. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/symbols/cross_1.shtml
Schweiker, William. The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005. Print.
Sharma, S. (2014, July 1). MAP: Where Islamic veils are banned - and where they are mandatory. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/01/map-where-islamic-veils-are-banned-and-where-they-are-mandatory/
Stokes, C. E., & Ellison, C. G. (2010). Religion and Attitudes Toward Divorce Laws Among U.S. Adults. Journal of Family Issues, 31(10), 1279–1304.
Suliman, A. (2018, October 13). Jordan's capital is creating green mosques and schools to tackle emissions. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/with-green-mosques-and-schools-amman-pushes-for-zero-emissions
Tamney, J., Johnson, S., & Burton, R. (1992). The Abortion Controversy: Conflicting Beliefs and Values in American Society. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 31(1), 32–46.
Tang, T. L.-P. (2016). Theory of monetary intelligence: Money attitudes -Religious values, making money, making ethical decisions, and making the grade. Journal of Business Ethics, 133(3), 583–603. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2411-5
Tuttle, J. D., & Davis, S. N. (2015). Religion, Infidelity, and Divorce: Reexamining the Effect of Religious Behavior on Divorce Among Long-Married Couples. Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, 56(6), 475–489.
}
Religious ethics | 0.806419 | 0.97347 | 0.785025 |
Human sexuality | Human sexuality is the way people experience and express themselves sexually. This involves biological, psychological, physical, erotic, emotional, social, or spiritual feelings and behaviors. Because it is a broad term, which has varied with historical contexts over time, it lacks a precise definition. The biological and physical aspects of sexuality largely concern the human reproductive functions, including the human sexual response cycle.
Someone's sexual orientation is their pattern of sexual interest in the opposite and/or same sex. Physical and emotional aspects of sexuality include bonds between individuals that are expressed through profound feelings or physical manifestations of love, trust, and care. Social aspects deal with the effects of human society on one's sexuality, while spirituality concerns an individual's spiritual connection with others. Sexuality also affects and is affected by cultural, political, legal, philosophical, moral, ethical, and religious aspects of life.
Interest in sexual activity normally increases when an individual reaches puberty. Although no single theory on the cause of sexual orientation has yet gained widespread support, there is considerably more evidence supporting nonsocial causes of sexual orientation than social ones, especially for males. Hypothesized social causes are supported by only weak evidence, distorted by numerous confounding factors. This is further supported by cross-cultural evidence, because cultures that are tolerant of homosexuality do not have significantly higher rates of it.
Evolutionary perspectives on human coupling, reproduction and reproduction strategies, and social learning theory provide further views of sexuality. Sociocultural aspects of sexuality include historical developments and religious beliefs. Some cultures have been described as sexually repressive. The study of sexuality also includes human identity within social groups, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and birth control methods.
Development
Sexual orientation
There is considerably more evidence supporting innate causes of sexual orientation than learned ones, especially for males. This evidence includes the cross-cultural correlation of homosexuality and childhood gender nonconformity, moderate genetic influences found in twin studies, evidence for prenatal hormonal effects on brain organization, the fraternal birth order effect, and the finding that in rare cases where infant males were raised as girls due to physical differences or deformity, they nevertheless turned out attracted to females. Hypothesized social causes are supported by only weak evidence, distorted by numerous confounding factors.
Cross-cultural evidence also leans more toward non-social causes. Cultures that are very tolerant of homosexuality do not have significantly higher rates of it. Homosexual behavior is relatively common among boys in British single-sex boarding schools, but adult Britons who attended such schools are no more likely to engage in homosexual behavior than those who did not. In an extreme case, the Sambia people ritually require their boys to engage in homosexual behavior during adolescence before they have any access to females, yet most of these boys become heterosexual.
It is not fully understood why genes causing homosexuality persist in the gene pool. One hypothesis involves kin selection, suggesting that homosexuals invest heavily enough in their relatives to offset the cost of not reproducing as much directly. This has not been supported by studies in Western cultures, but several studies in Samoa have found some support for this hypothesis. Another hypothesis involves sexually antagonistic genes, which cause homosexuality when expressed in males but increase reproduction when expressed in females. Studies in both Western and non-Western cultures have found support for this hypothesis.
Gender differences
Psychological theories exist regarding the development and expression of gender differences in human sexuality. A number of them (including neo-analytic theories, sociobiological theories, social learning theory, social role theory, and script theory) agree in predicting that men should be more approving of casual sex (sex happening outside a stable, committed relationship such as marriage) and should also be more promiscuous (have a higher number of sexual partners) than women. These theories are mostly consistent with observed differences in males' and females' attitudes toward casual sex before marriage in the United States. Other aspects of human sexuality, such as sexual satisfaction, incidence of oral sex, and attitudes toward homosexuality and masturbation, show little to no observed difference between males and females. Observed gender differences regarding the number of sexual partners are modest, with males tending to have slightly more than females.
Biological and physiological aspects
Like other mammals, humans are primarily grouped into either the male or female sex.
The biological aspects of humans' sexuality deal with the reproductive system, the sexual response cycle, and the factors that affect these aspects. They also deal with the influence of biological factors on other aspects of sexuality, such as organic and neurological responses, heredity, hormonal issues, gender issues, and sexual dysfunction.
Physical anatomy and reproduction
Males and females are anatomically similar; this extends to some degree to the development of the reproductive system. As adults, they have different reproductive mechanisms that enable them to perform sexual acts and to reproduce. Men and women react to sexual stimuli in a similar fashion with minor differences. Women have a monthly reproductive cycle, whereas the male sperm production cycle is more continuous.
Brain
The hypothalamus is the most important part of the brain for sexual functioning. This is a small area at the base of the brain consisting of several groups of nerve cell bodies that receives input from the limbic system. Studies have shown that within lab animals, the destruction of certain areas of the hypothalamus causes the elimination of sexual behavior. The hypothalamus is important because of its relationship to the pituitary gland, which lies beneath it. The pituitary gland secretes hormones that are produced in the hypothalamus and itself. The four important sexual hormones are oxytocin, prolactin, follicle-stimulating hormone, and luteinizing hormone.
Oxytocin, sometimes referred to as the "love hormone", is released in both sexes during sexual intercourse when an orgasm is achieved. Oxytocin has been suggested as critical to the thoughts and behaviors required to maintain close relationships. The hormone is also released in women when they give birth or are breastfeeding. Prolactin and oxytocin are responsible for inducing milk production in women. Follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) is responsible for ovulation in women, and acts by triggering egg maturity; in men it stimulates sperm production. Luteinizing hormone (LH) triggers ovulation, which is the release of a mature egg.
Male anatomy and reproductive system
Males have both internal and external genitalia that are responsible for procreation and sexual intercourse. Production of spermatozoa (sperm) is also cyclic, but unlike the female ovulation cycle, the sperm production cycle is constantly producing millions of sperm daily.
External male anatomy
The external male genitalia are the penis and the scrotum.
The penis provides a passageway for sperm and urine. The penis consists of nerves, blood vessels, fibrous tissue, and three parallel cylinders of spongy tissue. Other components of the penis include the shaft, glans, root, cavernous bodies, and spongy body. The three cylindrical bodies of spongy tissue, which are filled with blood vessels, run along the length of the shaft. The two bodies that lie side by side in the upper portion of the penis are the corpora cavernosa (cavernous bodies). The third, called the corpus spongiosum (spongy body), is a tube that lies centrally beneath the others and expands at the end to form the tip of the penis (glans). During arousal, these bodies erect the penis by filling with blood.
The raised rim at the border of the shaft and glans is called the corona. The urethra connects the urinary bladder to the penis where urine exits the penis through the urethral meatus. The urethra eliminates urine and acts as a channel for semen and sperm to exit the body during sexual intercourse. The root consists of the expanded ends of the cavernous bodies, which fan out to form the crura and attach to the pubic bone and the expanded end of the spongy body. The bulb of the penis is surrounded by the bulbospongiosus muscle, while the corpora cavernosa are surrounded by the ischiocavernosus muscles. These aid urination and ejaculation. The penis has a foreskin that typically covers the glans; this is sometimes removed by circumcision for medical, religious or cultural reasons. In the scrotum, the testicles are held away from the body, one possible reason for this is so sperm can be produced in an environment slightly lower than normal body temperature.
The penis has very little muscular tissue, and this exists in its root. The shaft and glans have no muscle fibers. Unlike most other primates, male humans lack a penile bone.
Internal male anatomy
Male internal reproductive structures are the testicles, the duct system, the prostate and seminal vesicles, and the Cowper's gland.
The testicles (male gonads), are where sperm and male hormones are produced. Millions of sperm are produced daily in several hundred seminiferous tubules. Cells called the Leydig cells lie between the tubules; these produce hormones called androgens; these consist of testosterone and inhibin. The testicles are held by the spermatic cord, which is a tubelike structure containing blood vessels, nerves, the vas deferens, and a muscle that helps to raise and lower the testicles in response to temperature changes and sexual arousal, in which the testicles are drawn closer to the body.
Sperm gets transported through a four-part duct system. The first part of this system is the epididymis. The testicles converge to form the seminiferous tubules, coiled tubes at the top and back of each testicle. The second part of the duct system is the vas deferens, a muscular tube that begins at the lower end of the epididymis. The vas deferens passes upward along the side of the testicles to become part of the spermatic cord. The expanded end is the ampulla, which stores sperm before ejaculation. The third part of the duct system is the ejaculatory ducts, which are -long paired tubes that pass through the prostate gland, where semen is produced. The prostate gland is a solid, chestnut-shaped organ that surrounds the first part of the urethra, which carries urine and semen. Similar to the female G-spot, the prostate provides sexual stimulation and can lead to orgasm through anal sex.
The prostate gland and the seminal vesicles produce seminal fluid that is mixed with sperm to create semen. The prostate gland lies under the bladder and in front of the rectum. It consists of two main zones: the inner zone that produces secretions to keep the lining of the male urethra moist and the outer zone that produces seminal fluids to facilitate the passage of semen. The seminal vesicles secrete fructose for sperm activation and mobilization, prostaglandins to cause uterine contractions that aid movement through the uterus, and bases that help neutralize the acidity of the vagina. The Cowper's glands, or bulbourethral glands, are two pea-sized structures beneath the prostate.
Female anatomy and reproductive system
External female anatomy
The external female genitalia are the vulva.
The mons pubis is a soft layer of fatty tissue overlaying the pubic bone. Following puberty, this area grows in size. It has many nerve endings and is sensitive to stimulation.
The labia minora and labia majora are collectively known as the labia or "lips". The labia majora are two elongated folds of skin extending from the mons to the perineum. Its outer surface becomes covered with hair after puberty. In between the labia majora are the labia minora, two hairless folds of skin that meet above the clitoris to form the clitoral hood, which is highly sensitive to touch. The labia minora become engorged with blood during sexual stimulation, causing them to swell and turn red.
The labia minora are composed of connective tissues that are richly supplied with blood vessels which cause a pinkish appearance. Near the anus, the labia minora merge with the labia majora. In a sexually unstimulated state, the labia minora protects the vaginal and urethral opening by covering them. At the base of the labia minora are the Bartholin's glands, which add a few drops of an alkaline fluid to the vagina via ducts; this fluid helps to counteract the acidity of the outer vagina since sperm cannot live in an acidic environment. The Skene's glands are possibly responsible for secreting fluid during female ejaculation.
The clitoris is developed from the same embryonic tissue as the penis; it or its glans alone consists of as many (or more in some cases) nerve endings as the human penis or glans penis, making it extremely sensitive to touch. The clitoral glans, which is a small, elongated erectile structure, has only one known function—sexual sensations. It is the female's most sensitive erogenous zone and the main source of orgasm in women. Thick secretions called smegma collect around the clitoris.
The vaginal opening and the urethral opening are only visible when the labia minora are parted. These openings have many nerve endings that make them sensitive to touch. They are surrounded by a ring of sphincter muscles called the bulbocavernosus muscle. Underneath this muscle and on opposite sides of the vaginal opening are the vestibular bulbs, which help the vagina grip the penis by swelling with blood during arousal. Within the vaginal opening is the hymen, a thin membrane that partially covers the opening in many virgins. Rupture of the hymen has been historically considered the loss of one's virginity, though, by modern standards, loss of virginity is considered to be the first sexual intercourse. The hymen can be ruptured by activities other than sexual intercourse. The urethral opening connects to the bladder with the urethra; it expels urine from the bladder. This is located below the clitoris and above the vaginal opening.
The breasts are the subcutaneous tissues on the front thorax of the female body. Though they are not technically part of a woman's sexual anatomy, they do have roles in both sexual pleasure and reproduction. Breasts are modified sweat glands made up of fibrous tissues and fat that provide support and contain nerves, blood vessels, and lymphatic vessels. Their main purpose is to provide milk to a developing infant. Breasts develop during puberty in response to an increase in estrogen. Each adult breast consists of 15 to 20 milk-producing mammary glands, irregularly shaped lobes that include alveolar glands and a lactiferous duct leading to the nipple. The lobes are separated by dense connective tissues that support the glands and attach them to the tissues on the underlying pectoral muscles. Other connective tissue, which forms dense strands called suspensory ligaments, extends inward from the skin of the breast to the pectoral tissue to support the weight of the breast. Heredity and the quantity of fatty tissue determine the size of the breasts.
Men typically find female breasts attractive and this holds true for a variety of cultures. In women, stimulation of the nipple seems to result in activation of the brain's genital sensory cortex (the same region of the brain activated by stimulation of the clitoris, vagina, and cervix). This may be why many women find nipple stimulation arousing and why some women are able to orgasm by nipple stimulation alone.
Internal female anatomy
The female internal reproductive organs are the vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries. The vagina is a sheath-like canal that extends from the vulva to the cervix. It receives the penis during intercourse and serves as a depository for sperm. The vagina is also the birth canal; it can expand to during labor and delivery. The vagina is located between the bladder and the rectum. The vagina is normally collapsed, but during sexual arousal it opens, lengthens, and produces lubrication to allow the insertion of the penis. The vagina has three layered walls; it is a self-cleaning organ with natural bacteria that suppress the production of yeast. The G-spot, named after the Ernst Gräfenberg who first reported it in 1950, may be located in the front wall of the vagina and may cause orgasms. This area may vary in size and location between women; in some it may be absent. Various researchers dispute its structure or existence or regard it as an extension of the clitoris.
The uterus or womb is a hollow, muscular organ where a fertilized egg (ovum) will implant itself and grow into a fetus. The uterus lies in the pelvic cavity between the bladder and the bowel, and above the vagina. It is usually positioned in a 90-degree angle tilting forward, although in about 20% of women it tilts backwards. The uterus has three layers; the innermost layer is the endometrium, where the egg is implanted. During ovulation, this thickens for implantation. If implantation does not occur, it is sloughed off during menstruation. The cervix is the narrow end of the uterus. The broad part of the uterus is the fundus.
During ovulation, the ovum travels down the fallopian tubes to the uterus. These extend about from both sides of the uterus. Finger-like projections at the ends of the tubes brush the ovaries and receive the ovum once it is released. The ovum then travels for three to four days to the uterus. After sexual intercourse, sperm swim up this funnel from the uterus. The lining of the tube and its secretions sustain the egg and the sperm, encouraging fertilization and nourishing the ovum until it reaches the uterus. If the ovum divides after fertilization, identical twins are produced. If separate eggs are fertilized by different sperm, the mother gives birth to non-identical or fraternal twins.
The ovaries (female gonads), develop from the same embryonic tissue as the testicles. The ovaries are suspended by ligaments and are the source where ova are stored and developed before ovulation. The ovaries also produce female hormones progesterone and estrogen. Within the ovaries, each ovum is surrounded by other cells and contained within a capsule called a primary follicle. At puberty, one or more of these follicles are stimulated to mature on a monthly basis. Once matured, these are called Graafian follicles. The female reproductive system does not produce the ova; about 60,000 ova are present at birth, only 400 of which will mature during the woman's lifetime.
Ovulation is based on a monthly cycle; the 14th day is the most fertile. On days one to four, menstruation and production of estrogen and progesterone decreases, and the endometrium starts thinning. The endometrium is sloughed off for the next three to six days. Once menstruation ends, the cycle begins again with an FSH surge from the pituitary gland. Days five to thirteen are known as the pre-ovulatory stage. During this stage, the pituitary gland secretes follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH). A negative feedback loop is enacted when estrogen is secreted to inhibit the release of FSH. Estrogen thickens the endometrium of the uterus. A surge of luteinizing hormone (LH) triggers ovulation.
On day 14, the LH surge causes a Graafian follicle to surface the ovary. The follicle ruptures and the ripe ovum is expelled into the abdominal cavity. The fallopian tubes pick up the ovum with the fimbria. The cervical mucus changes to aid the movement of sperm. On days 15 to 28—the post-ovulatory stage, the Graafian follicle—now called the corpus luteum—secretes estrogen. Production of progesterone increases, inhibiting LH release. The endometrium thickens to prepare for implantation, and the ovum travels down the fallopian tubes to the uterus. If the ovum is not fertilized and does not implant, menstruation begins.
Sexual response cycle
The sexual response cycle is a model that describes the physiological responses that occur during sexual activity. This model was created by William Masters and Virginia Johnson. According to Masters and Johnson, the human sexual response cycle consists of four phases; excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution, also called the EPOR model. During the excitement phase of the EPOR model, one attains the intrinsic motivation to have sex. The plateau phase is the precursor to orgasm, which may be mostly biological for men and mostly psychological for women. Orgasm is the release of tension, and the resolution period is the unaroused state before the cycle begins again.
The male sexual response cycle starts in the excitement phase; two centers in the spine are responsible for erections. Vasoconstriction in the penis begins, the heart rate increases, the scrotum thickens, the spermatic cord shortens, and the testicles become engorged with blood. In the plateau phase, the penis increases in diameter, the testicles become more engorged, and the Cowper's glands secrete pre-seminal fluid. The orgasm phase, during which rhythmic contractions occur every 0.8 seconds, consists of two phases; the emission phase, in which contractions of the vas deferens, prostate, and seminal vesicles encourage ejaculation, which is the second phase of orgasm. Ejaculation is called the expulsion phase; it cannot be reached without an orgasm. In the resolution phase, the male is now in an unaroused state consisting of a refractory (rest) period before the cycle can begin. This rest period may increase with age.
The female sexual response begins with the excitement phase, which can last from several minutes to several hours. Characteristics of this phase include increased heart and respiratory rate, and an elevation of blood pressure. Flushed skin or blotches of redness may occur on the chest and back; breasts increase slightly in size and nipples may become hardened and erect. The onset of vasocongestion results in swelling of the clitoris, labia minora, and vagina. The muscle that surrounds the vaginal opening tightens and the uterus elevates and grows in size. The vaginal walls begin to produce a lubricating liquid. The second phase, called the plateau phase, is characterized primarily by the intensification of the changes begun during the excitement phase. The plateau phase extends to the brink of orgasm, which initiates the resolution stage; the reversal of the changes begun during the excitement phase. During the orgasm stage the heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, and breathing rates peak. The pelvic muscle near the vagina, the anal sphincter, and the uterus contract. Muscle contractions in the vaginal area create a high level of pleasure, though all orgasms are centered in the clitoris.
Sexual dysfunction and sexual problems
Sexual disorders, according to the DSM-IV-TR, are disturbances in sexual desire and psycho-physiological changes that characterize the sexual response cycle and cause marked distress and interpersonal difficulty. Sexual dysfunctions are a result of physical or psychological disorders. Physical causes include hormonal imbalance, diabetes, heart disease and more; psychological causes include but are not limited to stress, anxiety, and depression. Sexual dysfunction affects both men and women. There are four major categories of sexual problems in women: desire disorders, arousal disorders, orgasmic disorders, and sexual pain disorders. Sexual desire disorder occurs when an individual lacks sexual desire because of hormonal changes, depression, and pregnancy. Arousal disorder is a female sexual dysfunction leading to a lack of vaginal lubrication. In addition, blood flow problems may affect arousal disorder. Lack of orgasm, also known as anorgasmia, is another sexual dysfunction in women. The last sexual disorder is painful intercourse, which can be caused by factors including pelvic mass, scar tissue, and sexually transmitted infections.
Three common sexual disorders for men are sexual desire disorder, ejaculation disorder, and erectile dysfunction. Lack of sexual desire in men may be caused by physical issues like low testosterone or psychological factors such as anxiety and depression. Ejaculation disorders include retrograde ejaculation, retarded ejaculation, and premature ejaculation. Erectile dysfunction is an inability to initiate and maintain an erection during intercourse.
Psychological aspects
As one form of behavior, the psychological aspects of sexual expression have been studied in the context of emotional involvement, gender identity, intersubjective intimacy, and Darwinian reproductive efficacy. Sexuality in humans generates profound emotional and psychological responses. Some theorists identify sexuality as the central source of human personality. Psychological studies of sexuality focus on psychological influences that affect sexual behavior and experiences. Early psychological analyses were carried out by Sigmund Freud, who believed in a psychoanalytic approach. He also proposed the concepts of psychosexual development and the Oedipus complex, among other theories.
Gender identity is a person's sense of their own gender, whether male, female, or non-binary. Gender identity can correlate with assigned sex at birth or can differ from it. All societies have a set of gender categories that can serve as the basis of the formation of a person's social identity in relation to other members of society.
Sexual behavior and intimate relationships are strongly influenced by a person's sexual orientation.
Sexual orientation is an enduring pattern of romantic or sexual attraction (or a combination of these) to persons of the opposite sex, same sex, or both sexes. Heterosexual people are romantically/sexually attracted to the members of the opposite sex, gay and lesbian people are romantically/sexually attracted to people of the same sex, and those who are bisexual are romantically/sexually attracted to both sexes.
The idea that homosexuality results from reversed gender roles is reinforced by the media's portrayal of gay men as feminine and lesbians as masculine. However, a person's conformity or non-conformity to gender stereotypes does not always predict sexual orientation. Society believes that if a man is masculine, he is heterosexual, and if a man is feminine, he is homosexual. There is no strong evidence that a homosexual or bisexual orientation must be associated with atypical gender roles. By the early 21st century, homosexuality was no longer considered to be a pathology. Theories have linked many factors, including genetic, anatomical, birth order, and hormones in the prenatal environment, to homosexuality.
Other than the need to procreate, there are many other reasons people have sex. According to one study conducted on college students (Meston & Buss, 2007), the four main reasons for sexual activities are physical attraction, as a means to an end, to increase emotional connection, and to alleviate insecurity.
Sexuality and age
Child sexuality
Until Sigmund Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905, children were often regarded as asexual, having no sexuality until later development. Sigmund Freud was one of the first researchers to take child sexuality seriously. His ideas, such as psychosexual development and the Oedipus conflict, have been much debated but acknowledging the existence of child sexuality was an important development.
Freud gave sexual drives an importance and centrality in human life, actions, and behavior; he said sexual drives exist and can be discerned in children from birth. He explains this in his theory of infantile sexuality, and says sexual energy (libido) is the most important motivating force in adult life. Freud wrote about the importance of interpersonal relationships to one's sexual and emotional development. From birth, the mother's connection to the infant affects the infant's later capacity for pleasure and attachment. Freud described two currents of emotional life; an affectionate current, including our bonds with the important people in our lives; and a sensual current, including our wish to gratify sexual impulses. During adolescence, a young person tries to integrate these two emotional currents.
Alfred Kinsey also examined child sexuality in his Kinsey Reports. Children are naturally curious about their bodies and sexual functions. For example, they wonder where babies come from, they notice the differences between males and females, and many engage in genital play, which is often mistaken for masturbation. Child sex play, also known as playing doctor, includes exhibiting or inspecting the genitals. Many children take part in some sex play, typically with siblings or friends. Sex play with others usually decreases as children grow, but they may later possess romantic interest in their peers. Curiosity levels remain high during these years, but the main surge in sexual interest occurs in adolescence.
Sexuality in late adulthood
Adult sexuality originates in childhood. However, like many other human capacities, sexuality is not fixed, but matures and develops. A common stereotype associated with old people is that they tend to lose interest and the ability to engage in sexual acts once they reach late adulthood. This misconception is reinforced by Western popular culture, which often ridicules older adults who try to engage in sexual activities. Age does not necessarily change the need or desire to be sexually expressive or active. A couple in a long-term relationship may find that the frequency of their sexual activity decreases over time and the type of sexual expression may change, but feelings of intimacy may continue to grow and develop over time.
Sociocultural aspects
Human sexuality can be understood as part of the social life of humans, which is governed by implied rules of behavior and the status quo. This narrows the view to groups within a society. The socio-cultural context of society, including the effects of politics and the mass media, influences and forms social norms. Throughout history, social norms have been changing and continue to change as a result of movements such as the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism.
Sex education
The age and manner in which children are informed of issues of sexuality is a matter of sex education. The school systems in almost all developed countries have some form of sex education, but the nature of the issues covered varies widely. In some countries, such as Australia and much of Europe, age-appropriate sex education often begins in pre-school, whereas other countries leave sex education to the pre-teenage and teenage years. Sex education covers a range of topics, including the physical, mental, and social aspects of sexual behavior. Communities have differing opinions on the appropriate age for children to learn about sexuality. According to Time magazine and CNN, 74% of teenagers in the United States reported that their major sources of sexual information were their peers and the media, compared to 10% who named their parents or a sex education course.
In the United States, some sex education programs encourage abstinence-only, the choice to restrain oneself from sexual activity. In contrast, comprehensive sex education aims to encourage students to take charge of their own sexuality and know how to have safe, healthy, and pleasurable sex if and when they choose to do so.
Proponents for an abstinence-only education believe that teaching a comprehensive curriculum would encourage teenagers to have sex, while proponents for comprehensive sex education argue that many teenagers will have sex regardless and should be equipped with knowledge of how to have sex responsibly. According to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, many teens who intend to be abstinent fail to do so, and when these teenagers do have sex, many do not use safe sex practices such as contraceptives.
Sexuality in history
Sexuality has been an important, vital part of human existence throughout history. All civilizations have managed sexuality through sexual standards, representations, and behavior.
Before the rise of agriculture, groups of hunter-gatherers and nomadic groups inhabited the world. These groups had less restrictive sexual standards that emphasized sexual pleasure and enjoyment, but with definite rules and constraints. Some underlying continuities or key regulatory standards contended with the tension between recognition of pleasure, interest, and the need to procreate for the sake of social order and economic survival. Hunter-gatherers also placed high value on certain types of sexual symbolism.
A common tension in hunter-gatherer societies is expressed in their art, which emphasized male sexuality and prowess, but also blurred gender lines in sexual matters. One example of these male-dominated portrayals is the Egyptian creation myth, in which the sun god Atum masturbates in the water, creating the Nile River. In Sumerian myth, the gods' semen filled the Tigris.
Once agricultural societies emerged, the sexual framework shifted in ways that persisted for many millennia in much of Asia, Africa, Europe, and parts of the Americas. One common characteristic new to these societies was the collective supervision of sexual behavior due to urbanization and the growth of population and population density. Children would commonly witness parents having sex because many families shared the same sleeping quarters. Due to land ownership, determination of children's paternity became important, and society and family life became patriarchal. These changes in sexual ideology were used to control female sexuality and to differentiate standards by gender. With these ideologies, sexual possessiveness and increases in jealousy emerged.
While retaining the precedents of earlier civilizations, each classical civilization established a somewhat distinctive approach to gender, artistic expression of sexual beauty, and to behaviors such as homosexuality. Some of these distinctions are portrayed in sex manuals, which were also common among civilizations in China, Greece, Rome, Persia, and India; each has its own sexual history.
Before the High Middle Ages, homosexual acts appear to have been ignored or tolerated by the Christian church. During the 12th century, hostility toward homosexuality began to spread throughout religious and secular institutions. By the end of the 19th century, it was viewed as a pathology.
During the beginning of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, many changes in sexual standards occurred. New artificial birth control devices such as the condom and diaphragm were introduced. Doctors started claiming a new role in sexual matters, urging that their advice was crucial to sexual morality and health. New pornographic industries grew, and Japan adopted its first laws against homosexuality. In Western societies, the definition of homosexuality was constantly changing; Western influence on other cultures became more prevalent. New contacts created serious issues around sexuality and sexual traditions. There were also major shifts in sexual behavior. During this period, puberty began occurring at younger ages, so a new focus on adolescence as a time of sexual confusion and danger emerged. There was a new focus on the purpose of marriage; it was increasing regarded as being for love rather than only for economics and reproduction.
Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud adopted more accepting stances toward homosexuality; Ellis said homosexuality was inborn and therefore not immoral, not a disease, and that many homosexuals made significant contributions to society. Freud wrote that all human beings as capable of becoming either heterosexual or homosexual; neither orientation was assumed to be innate. According to Freud, a person's orientation depended on the resolution of the Oedipus complex. He said male homosexuality resulted when a young boy had an authoritarian, rejecting mother and turned to his father for love and affection, and later to men in general. He said female homosexuality developed when a girl loved her mother and identified with her father and became fixated at that stage.
Alfred Kinsey initiated the modern era of sex research. He collected data from questionnaires given to his students at Indiana University, but then switched to personal interviews about sexual behaviors. Kinsey and his colleagues sampled 5,300 men and 5,940 women. He found that most people masturbated, that many engaged in oral sex, that women are capable of having multiple orgasms, and that many men had had some type of homosexual experience in their lifetimes.
Before William Masters, a physician, and Virginia Johnson, a behavioral scientist, the study of anatomy and physiological studies of sex was still limited to experiments with laboratory animals. Masters and Johnson started to directly observe and record the physical responses in humans that are engaged in sexual activity under laboratory settings. They observed 10,000 episodes of sexual acts between 312 men and 382 women. This led to methods of treating clinical problems and abnormalities. Masters and Johnson opened the first sex therapy clinic in 1965. In 1970, they described their therapeutic techniques in their book, Human Sexual Inadequacy.
The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, classified homosexuality as a mental illness, and more specifically, a "sociopathic personality disturbance". This definition remained the professional understanding of homosexuality until 1973 when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from their list of diagnoses for mental disorders. Through her research of heterosexual and homosexual men, Evelyn Hooker revealed that there was no correlation between homosexuality and psychological maladjustment, and her findings played a pivotal role in shifting the scientific community away from the perspective that homosexuality was something that needed to be treated or cured.
Sexuality, colonialism, and race
European conquerors/colonists discovered that many non-European cultures had expressions of sexuality and gender which differed from European notion of heterosexual cisnormativity. These would include transgender practices. In 1516, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish explorer, discovered indigenous people in Central America, among whom several indigenous men who dressed like women and had sex with each other, resulting in him feeding forty of these men to his dogs for having non-gender conforming behaviors and sexuality. In North America and the United States, Europeans have used claims of sexual immorality to justify discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities.
Scholars also study the ways in which colonialism has affected sexuality today and argue that due to racism and slavery it has been dramatically changed from the way it had previously been understood.
In her book, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia, Laura Stoler investigates how the Dutch colonists used sexual control and gender-specific sexual sanctions to distinguish between the rulers from the ruled and enforce colonial domination onto the people of Indonesia.
In America, there are 155 native tribes that are recorded to have embraced two-spirit people within their tribes, but the total number of tribes could be greater than what is documented. Two-spirit people were and still are members of communities who do not fall under Western gender categories of male and female, but rather under a "third gender" category. This system of gender contradicts both the gender binary and the assertion that sex and gender are the same. Instead of conforming to traditional roles of men and women, two-spirit fill a special niche in their communities.
For example, two-spirited people are commonly revered for possessing special wisdom and spiritual powers. Two-spirited people also can take part in marriages, either monogamous and polygamous ones. Historically, European colonizers perceived relationships involving two-spirited people as homosexuality, and therefore believed in the moral inferiority of native people. In reaction, colonizers began to impose their own religious and social norms on indigenous communities, diminishing the role of two-spirit people in native cultures. Within reservations, the Religious Crime Code of the 1880s explicitly aimed to "aggressively attack Native sexual and marriage practices". The goal of colonizers was for native peoples to assimilate into Euro-American ideals of family, sexuality, gender expression, and more.
The link between constructed sexual meanings and racial ideologies has been studied. According to Joane Nagel, sexual meanings are constructed to maintain racial-ethnic-national boundaries by the denigration of "others" and regulation of sexual behavior within the group. She writes, "both adherence to and deviation from such approved behaviors, define and reinforce racial, ethnic, and nationalist regimes". In the United States people of color face the effects of colonialism in different ways with stereotypes such as the Mammy and Jezebel for Black women; lotus blossom and dragon lady for Asian women; and the spicy Latina. These stereotypes contrast with standards of sexual conservatism, creating a dichotomy that dehumanizes and demonizes the stereotyped groups. An example of a stereotype that lies at the intersection of racism, classism, and misogyny is the archetype of the welfare queen. Cathy Cohen describes how the welfare queen stereotype demonizes poor black single mothers for deviating from conventions surrounding family structure.
Reproductive and sexual rights
Reproductive and sexual rights encompass the concept of applying human rights to issues related to reproduction and sexuality. This concept is a modern one, and remains controversial since it deals, directly and indirectly, with issues such as contraception, LGBT rights, abortion, sex education, freedom to choose a partner, freedom to decide whether to be sexually active or not, right to bodily integrity, freedom to decide whether or not, and when, to have children. These are all global issues that exist in all cultures to some extent, but manifest differently depending on the specific contexts.
According to the Swedish government, "sexual rights include the right of all people to decide over their own bodies and sexuality" and "reproductive rights comprise the right of individuals to decide on the number of children they have and the intervals at which they are born." Such rights are not accepted in all cultures, with practices such criminalization of consensual sexual activities (such as those related to homosexual acts and sexual acts outside marriage), acceptance of forced marriage and child marriage, failure to criminalize all non-consensual sexual encounters (such as marital rape), female genital mutilation, or restricted availability of contraception, being common around the world.
Stigma of contraceptives in the U.S.
In 1915, Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, leaders of the birth control movement, began to spread information regarding contraception in opposition to the laws, such as the Comstock Law, that demonized it. One of their main purposes was to assert that the birth control movement was about empowering women with personal reproductive and economic freedom for those who could not afford to parent a child or simply did not want one. Goldman and Sanger saw it necessary to educate people as contraceptives were quickly being stigmatized as a population control tactic due to being a policy limiting births, disregarding that this limitation did not target ecological, political, or large economic conditions. This stigma targeted lower-class women who had the most need of access to contraception.
Birth control finally began to lose stigma in 1936 when the ruling of U.S. v. One Package declared that prescribing contraception to save a person's life or well-being was no longer illegal under the Comstock Law. Although opinions varied on when birth control should be available to women, by 1938, there were 347 birth control clinics in the United States but advertising their services remained illegal.
The stigma continued to lose credibility as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt publicly showed her support for birth control through the four terms her husband served (1933–1945). However, it was not until 1966 that the Federal Government began to fund family planning and subsidized birth control services for lower-class women and families at the order of President Lyndon B. Johnson. This funding continued after 1970 under the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act. Today, all Health Insurance Marketplace plans are required to cover all forms of contraception, including sterilization procedures, as a result of The Affordable Care Act signed by President Barack Obama in 2010.
Stigma and activism during the AIDS epidemic
In 1981, doctors diagnosed the first reported cases of AIDS in America. The disease disproportionately affected and continues to affect gay and bisexual men, especially black and Latino men. The Reagan administration is criticized for its apathy towards the AIDS epidemic, and audio recordings reveal that Ronald Reagan's press secretary Larry Speakes viewed the epidemic as a joke, mocking AIDS by calling it the "gay plague". The epidemic also carried stigma coming from religious influences. For example, Cardinal Krol voiced that AIDS was "an act of vengeance against the sin of homosexuality", which clarifies the specific meaning behind the pope's mention of "the moral source of AIDS."
Activism during the AIDS crisis focused on promoting safe sex practices to raise awareness that the disease could be prevented. The "Safe Sex is Hot Sex" campaign, for example, aimed to promote the use of condoms. Campaigns by the U.S. government, however, diverged from advocacy of safe sex. In 1987, Congress even denied federal funding from awareness campaigns that "[promoted] or [encouraged], directly or indirectly, homosexual activities". Instead, campaigns by the government primarily relied on scare tactics in order to instill fear in men who had sex with other men.
In addition to prevention campaigns, activists also sought to counteract narratives that led to the "social death" for people living with AIDS. Gay men from San Francisco and New York City created the Denver Principles, a foundational document that demanded the rights, agency, and dignity of people living with AIDS.
In his article "Emergence of Gay Identity and Gay Social Movements in Developing Countries", Matthew Roberts discusses how international AIDS prevention campaigns created opportunities for gay men to interact with other openly gay men from other countries. These interactions allowed western gay "culture" to be introduced to gay men in countries where homosexuality was not an important identifier. Thus, group organizers self-identified as gay more and more, creating the basis for further development of gay consciousness in different countries.
Sexual behavior
General activities and health
In humans, sexual intercourse has been shown to have health benefits, such as an improved sense of smell, reduction in stress and blood pressure, increased immunity, and decreased risk of prostate cancer. Sexual intimacy and orgasms increase levels of oxytocin, which helps people bond and build trust. Some of these benefits, such as stress reduction, also apply to masturbation, as distinct from sexual intercourse with another person. Masturbation is also a healthy element of sexual development in itself.
A long-term study of 3,500 people between ages 30 and 101 by clinical neuropsychologist David Weeks, MD, head of old-age psychology at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Scotland, said he found that "sex helps you look between four and seven years younger", according to impartial ratings of the subjects' photographs. Exclusive causation, however, is unclear, and the benefits may be indirectly related to sex and directly related to significant reductions in stress, greater contentment, and better sleep that sex promotes.
Sexual intercourse can also be a disease vector. There are 19 million new cases of sexually transmitted infections (STI) every year in the U.S., and worldwide there are over 340 million sexually transmitted infections each year. More than half of these occur in adolescents and young adults aged 15–24 years. At least one in four US teenage girls has a sexually transmitted infection. In the U.S., about 30% of 15- to 17-year-olds have had sexual intercourse, but only about 80% of 15- to 19-year-olds report using condoms for their first sexual intercourse. In one study, more than 75% of young women age 18–25 years felt they were at low risk of acquiring an STI.
Creating a relationship
People both consciously and subconsciously seek to attract others with whom they can form deep relationships. This may be for companionship, procreation, or an intimate relationship. This involves interactive processes whereby people find and attract potential partners and maintain a relationship. These processes, which involve attracting one or more partners and maintaining sexual interest, can include:
Flirting, the use of indirect behavior to convey romantic or sexual interest. It can involve verbal or non-verbal cues, such as sexual comments, body language, gazing, or close to another, but non-verbal flirting is more common. Flirting is a socially accepted way of attracting someone. There are different types of flirting, and most people usually have one way of flirting that makes them most comfortable. When flirting, people can be polite, playful, physical, etc. Sometimes it is difficult to know whether or not the person is interested. Non-verbal flirting allows people to test another's interest without fear of direct rejection. Flirting styles vary according to culture. Different cultures have different social etiquette. For example, length of eye contact, or how closely one stands by someone.
Seduction, the process whereby one person deliberately entices another to engage in sexual behavior. This behavior is one that the person you are seducing would not usually do, unless sexually aroused. Seduction can be seen as both a positive and a negative. Since the word seduction has a Latin meaning, which is "to lead astray" it can be viewed negatively.
Sexual attraction
Sexual attraction is attraction on the basis of sexual desire or the quality of arousing such interest. Sexual attractiveness or sex appeal is an individual's ability to attract the sexual or erotic interest of another person and is a factor in sexual selection or mate choice. The attraction can be to the physical or other qualities or traits of a person, or to such qualities in the context in which they appear. The attraction may be to a person's aesthetics or movements or to their voice or smell, besides other factors. The attraction may be enhanced by a person's adornments, clothing, perfume, hair length and style, and anything else which can attract the sexual interest of another person. It can also be influenced by individual genetic, psychological, or cultural factors, or to other, more amorphous qualities of the person. Sexual attraction is also a response to another person that depends on a combination of the person possessing the traits and also on the criteria of the person who is attracted.
Though attempts have been made to devise objective criteria of sexual attractiveness and measure it as one of several bodily forms of capital asset (see erotic capital), a person's sexual attractiveness is to a large extent a subjective measure dependent on another person's interest, perception, and sexual orientation. For example, a gay or lesbian person would typically find a person of the same sex to be more attractive than one of the other sex. A bisexual person would find either sex to be attractive.
In addition, there are asexual people, who usually do not experience sexual attraction for either sex, though they may have romantic attraction (homoromantic, biromantic or heteroromantic). Interpersonal attraction includes factors such as physical or psychological similarity, familiarity or possessing a preponderance of common or familiar features, similarity, complementarity, reciprocal liking, and reinforcement.
The ability of a person's physical and other qualities to create a sexual interest in others is the basis of their use in advertising, music video, pornography, film, and other visual media, as well as in modeling, sex work and other occupations.
Legal issues
Globally, laws regulate human sexuality in several ways, including criminalizing particular sexual behaviors, granting individuals the privacy or autonomy to make their own sexual decisions, protecting individuals with regard to equality and non-discrimination, recognizing and protecting other individual rights, as well as legislating matters regarding marriage and the family, and creating laws protecting individuals from violence, harassment, and persecution.
In the United States, there are two fundamentally different approaches, applied in different states, regarding the way the law is used to attempt to govern a person's sexuality. The "black letter" approach to law focuses on the study of pre-existing legal precedent and attempts to offer a clear framework of rules within which lawyers and others can work. In contrast, the socio-legal approach focuses more broadly on the relationship between the law and society, and offers a more contextualized view of the relationship between legal and social change.
Issues regarding human sexuality and human sexual orientation came to the forefront in Western law in the latter half of the twentieth century, as part of the gay liberation movement's encouragement of LGBT individuals to "come out of the closet" and engage with the legal system, primarily through courts. Therefore, many issues regarding human sexuality and the law are found in the opinions of the courts.
Sexual privacy
While the issue of privacy has been useful to sexual rights claims, some scholars have criticized its usefulness, saying that this perspective is too narrow and restrictive. The law is often slow to intervene in certain forms of coercive behavior that can limit individuals' control over their own sexuality (such as female genital mutilation, forced marriages or lack of access to reproductive health care). Many of these injustices are often perpetuated wholly or in part by private individuals rather than state agents, and as a result, there is an ongoing debate about the extent of state responsibility to prevent harmful practices and to investigate such practices when they do occur.
State intervention with regards to sexuality also occurs, and is considered acceptable by some, in certain instances (e.g. same-sex sexual activity or prostitution).
The legal systems surrounding prostitution are a topic of debate. Proponents for criminalization argue that sex work is an immoral practice that should not be tolerated, while proponents for decriminalization point out how criminalization does more harm than good. Within the feminist movement, there is also a debate over whether sex work is inherently objectifying and exploitative or whether sex workers have the agency to sell sex as a service.
When sex work is criminalized, sex workers do not have support from law enforcement when they fall victim to violence. In a 2003 survey of street-based sex workers in NYC, 80% said they had been threatened with or experienced violence, and many said the police were no help. 27% said they had experienced violence from police officers themselves. Different identities such as being black, transgender, or poor can result in a person being more likely to be criminally profiled by the police. For example, in New York, there is a law against "loitering for the purpose of engaging in prostitution", which has been nicknamed the "walking while trans" law because of how often transgender women are assumed to be sex workers and arrested for simply walking out in public.
Religious sexual morality
In some religions, sexual behavior is regarded as primarily spiritual. In others it is treated as primarily physical. Some hold that sexual behavior is only spiritual within certain kinds of relationships, when used for specific purposes, or when incorporated into religious ritual. In some religions there are no distinctions between the physical and the spiritual, whereas some religions view human sexuality as a way of completing the gap that exists between the spiritual and the physical.
Many religious conservatives, especially those of Abrahamic religions and Christianity in particular, tend to view sexuality in terms of behavior (i.e. homosexuality or heterosexuality is what someone does). These conservatives tend to promote celibacy for gay people, and may also tend to believe that sexuality can be changed through conversion therapy or prayer to become an ex-gay. They may also see homosexuality as a form of mental illness, something that ought to be criminalized, an immoral abomination, caused by ineffective parenting, and view same-sex marriage as a threat to society.
On the other hand, most religious liberals define sexuality-related labels in terms of sexual attraction and self-identification. They may also view same-sex activity as morally neutral and as legally acceptable as opposite-sex activity, unrelated to mental illness, genetically or environmentally caused (but not as the result of bad parenting), and fixed. They also tend to be more in favor of same-sex marriage.
Judaism
According to Judaism, sex between a man and woman within marriage is sacred and should be regularly enjoyed; celibacy is considered sinful.
Christianity
Early Christianity
Desire, including sexual desire and lust, were considered immoral and sinful, according to some authors. Elaine Pagels says, "By the beginning of the fifth century, Augustine had actually declared that spontaneous sexual desire is the proof of—and penalty for—universal original sin", though that this view goes against "most of his Christian predecessors". According to Jennifer Wright Knust, Paul framed desire a force Christians gained control over whereas non-Christians were "enslaved" by it; and he also said the bodies of Christians were members of Christ's body and thus sexual desire must be eschewed.
Roman Catholic Church
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that sexuality is "noble and worthy" and has a unitive and procreative end. For this reason, sexual activity's ideal should occur in the context of a marriage between a man and a woman, and open to the possibility of life. Pope Francis teaches in Amoris laetitia against "an attitude that would solve everything by applying general rules or deriving undue conclusions from particular theological considerations. and that he also warns that "not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium." and that "We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them." The church has authoritative teachings on sexuality found in the catechism. The church places primacy of conscience especially on the regulation of births.
Anglicanism
The Anglican Church teaches that human sexuality is a gift from a loving God designed to be between a man and a woman in a monogamous lifetime union of marriage. It also views singleness and dedicated celibacy as Christ-like. It states that people with same sex attraction are loved by God and are welcomed as full members of the Body of Christ, while the Church leadership has a variety of views in regard to homosexual expression and ordination. Some expressions of sexuality are considered sinful including "promiscuity, prostitution, incest, pornography, pedophilia, predatory sexual behavior, and sadomasochism (all of which may be heterosexual and homosexual), adultery, violence against wives, and female circumcision". The Church is concerned with pressures on young people to engage sexually and encourages abstinence.
Evangelicalism
In matters of sexuality, several Evangelical churches promote the virginity pledge among young Evangelical Christians, who are invited to commit themselves during a public ceremony to sexual abstinence until Christian marriage. This pledge is often symbolized by a purity ring.
In evangelical churches, young adults and unmarried couples are encouraged to marry early in order to live a sexuality according to the will of God.
Although some churches are discreet on the subject, other evangelical churches in United States and Switzerland speak of a satisfying sexuality as a gift from God and a component of a harmonious Christian marriage, in messages during worship services or conferences. Many evangelical books and websites are specialized on the subject.
The perceptions of homosexuality in the Evangelical Churches are varied. They range from liberal through moderate to conservative.
The christian marriage is presented by some churches as a protection against sexual misconduct and a compulsory step to obtain a position of responsibility in the church. This concept, however, has been challenged by numerous sex scandals involving married evangelical leaders. Finally, evangelical theologians recalled that celibacy should be more valued in the Church today, since the gift of celibacy was taught and lived by Jesus Christ and Paul of Tarsus.
Islam
In Islam, desire for sex is considered to be a natural urge that should not be suppressed, although the concept of free sex is not accepted; these urges should be fulfilled responsibly. Marriage is considered to be a good deed; it does not hinder spiritual wayfaring. The term used for marriage within the Quran is . Although Islamic sexuality is restrained via Islamic sexual jurisprudence, it emphasizes sexual pleasure within marriage. It is acceptable for a man to have more than one wife, but he must take care of those wives physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, and spiritually. Muslims believe that sexual intercourse is an act of worship that fulfils emotional and physical needs, and that producing children is one way in which humans can contribute to God's creation, and Islam discourages celibacy once an individual is married.
However, homosexuality is strictly forbidden in Islam, and some Muslim lawyers have suggested that gay people should be put to death.
Some have argued that Islam has an open and playful approach to sex so long as it is within marriage, free of lewdness, fornication and adultery.
Hinduism
Hinduism emphasizes that sex is only appropriate between husband and wife, in which satisfying sexual urges through sexual pleasure is an important duty of marriage. Any sex before marriage is considered to interfere with intellectual development, especially between birth and the age of 25, which is said to be brahmacharya and this should be avoided. Kama (sensual pleasures) is one of the four purusharthas or aims of life (dharma, artha, kama, and moksha). The Hindu Kama Sutra deals partially with sexual intercourse; it is not exclusively a sexual or religious work.
Sikhism
Sikhism views chastity as important, as Sikhs believe that the divine spark of Waheguru is present inside every individual's body, therefore it is important for one to keep clean and pure. Sexual activity is limited to married couples, and extramarital sex is forbidden. Marriage is seen as a commitment to Waheguru and should be viewed as part of spiritual companionship, rather than just sexual intercourse, and monogamy is deeply emphasized in Sikhism. Any other way of living is discouraged, including celibacy and homosexuality. However, in comparison to other religions, the issue of sexuality in Sikhism is not considered one of paramount importance.
See also
Notes
References
Further reading
Gregersen, E. (1982). Sexual Practices: The Story of Human Sexuality. New York: F. Watts.
Lyons, Andrew P. & Harriet D., eds. Sexualities in Anthropology: a reader. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011
Richardson, Niall; Smith, Clarissa & Werndly, Angela (2013) Studying Sexualities: Theories, Representations, Cultures. London: Palgrave Macmillan
Soble, Alan (ed.). Sex from Plato to Paglia: A Philosophical Encyclopedia, 2 volumes. Greenwood Press, 2006.
Lay summary of primary source appearing from the University of Calgary, in Science, on prolactin release during sexual activity in mice, and its possible relationship to stroke therapy.
External links
"Examining the Relationship Between Media Use and Aggression, Sexuality, and Body Image", Journal of Applied Research on Children: Informing Policy for Children at Risk: Vol. 4: Iss. 1, Article 3.
Glossary of clinical sexology – Glossario di sessuologia clinica
International Encyclopedia of Sexuality full text
Janssen, D.F., Growing Up Sexually. Volume I. World Reference Atlas [full text]
Masters, William H., Virginia E. Johnson, and Robert C. Kolodny. Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS. New York: Grove Press, 1988. ix, 243 p.
National Sexuality Resource Center
Durex Global Sex Survey 2005 at data360.org
POPLINE is a searchable database of the world's reproductive health literature.
The Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality at the Kinsey Institute
MRI Video of Human Copulation
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Psychology of religion | Psychology of religion consists of the application of psychological methods and interpretive frameworks to the diverse contents of religious traditions as well as to both religious and irreligious individuals. The various methods and frameworks can be summarized according to the classic distinction between the natural-scientific and human-scientific approaches. The first cluster amounts to objective, quantitative, and preferably experimental procedures for testing hypotheses about causal connections among the objects of one's study. In contrast, the human-scientific approach accesses the human world of experience using qualitative, phenomenological, and interpretive methods. This approach aims to discern meaningful, rather than causal, connections among the phenomena one seeks to understand.
Psychologists of religion pursue three major projects:
systematic description, especially of religious contents, attitudes, experiences, and expressions
explanation of the origins of religion, both in the history of the human race and in individual lives, taking into account a diversity of influences
mapping out the consequences of religious attitudes and conduct, both for the individual and for society at large.
The psychology of religion first arose as a self-conscious discipline in the late 19th century, but all three of these tasks have a history going back many centuries before that.
Overview
The challenge for the psychology of religion is essentially threefold:
to provide a thoroughgoing description of the objects of investigation, whether they be shared religious content (e.g., a tradition's ritual observances) or individual experiences, attitudes, or conduct;
to account in psychological terms for the rise of such phenomena, whether they be in individual lives or not;
to clarify the outcomesthe fruits, as William James put itof these phenomena, for individuals, and the larger society. These fruits may be both positive and negative.
The first, descriptive task naturally requires a clarification of one's termsabove all, the word religion. Historians of religion have long underscored the problematic character of this term. They note that its usage over the centuries has changed in significant ways, generally in the direction of reification. The early psychologists of religion were fully aware of these difficulties, typically acknowledging that the definitions they chose were to some degree arbitrary. With the rise of positivistic trends in psychology over the 20th century, especially the demand that all phenomena be operationalized by quantitative procedures, psychologists of religion developed a multitude of scales, most of them developed for use by Protestant Christians.<ref>Hill, P. C., and Hood, R. W., Jr. (Eds.). (1999). Measures of Religiosity." Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press.</ref> Factor analysis was also brought into play by both psychologists and sociologists of religion, to establish a fixed core of dimensions and a corresponding set of scales. The justification and adequacy of these efforts, especially in the light of constructivist and other postmodern viewpoints, remains a matter of debate.
In the last several decades, especially among clinical psychologists, a preference for the terms "spirituality" and "spiritual" has emerged, along with efforts to distinguish them from "religion" and "religious." Especially in the United States, "religion" has for many become associated with sectarian institutions and their obligatory creeds and rituals, thus giving the word a negative cast; "spirituality," in contrast, is positively constructed as deeply individual and subjective, as a universal capacity to apprehend and accord one's life with higher realities. In fact, "spirituality" has likewise undergone an evolution in the West, from a time when it was essentially a synonym for religion in its original, subjective meaning.
Today, efforts are ongoing to "operationalize" these terms, with little regard for their history in their Western context, and with the apparent realist assumption that underlying them are fixed qualities identifiable using empirical procedures.
Schnitker and Emmons theorized that the understanding of religion as a search for meaning makes implications in the three psychological areas of motivation, cognition and social relationships. The cognitive aspects relate to God and a sense of purpose, the motivational ones to the need to control, and the religious search for meaning is also woven into social communities.
History
Edwin Diller Starbuck
Edwin Diller Starbuck is considered a pioneer of the psychology of religion and his book Psychology of Religion (1899) has been described as the first book in the genre. This book had the endorsement of William James who wrote a preface to it. Starbuck's work would influence James' own book The Varieties of Religious Experience, with James thanking him in the preface for having "made over to me his large collection of manuscript material". In the book itself James mentions Starbuck's name 46 times and cites him on dozens of occasions.
William James
American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) is regarded by most psychologists of religion as the founder of the field. He served as president of the American Psychological Association, and wrote one of the first psychology textbooks. In the psychology of religion, James' influence endures. His Varieties of Religious Experience is considered to be the classic work in the field, and references to James' ideas are common at professional conferences.
James distinguished between institutional religion and personal religion. Institutional religion refers to the religious group or organization and plays an important part in a society's culture. Personal religion, in which the individual has mystical experience, can be experienced regardless of the culture. James was most interested in understanding personal religious experience.
In studying personal religious experiences, James made a distinction between healthy-minded and sick-souled religiousness. Individuals predisposed to healthy-mindedness tend to ignore the evil in the world and focus on the positive and the good. James used examples of Walt Whitman and the "mind-cure" religious movement to illustrate healthy-mindedness in The Varieties of Religious Experience. In contrast, individuals predisposed to having a sick-souled religion are unable to ignore evil and suffering and need a unifying experience, religious or otherwise, to reconcile good and evil. James included quotations from Leo Tolstoy and John Bunyan to illustrate the sick soul.
William James' hypothesis of pragmatism stems from the efficacy of religion. If an individual believes in and performs religious activities, and those actions happen to work, then that practice appears the proper choice for the individual. However, if the processes of religion have little efficacy, then there is no rationality for continuing the practice.
Other early theorists
G.W.F. Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) described all systems of religion, philosophy, and social science as expressions of the basic urge of consciousness to learn about itself and its surroundings, and record its findings and hypotheses. Thus, religion is only a form of that search for knowledge, within which humans record various experiences and reflections. Others, compiling and categorizing these writings in various ways, form the consolidated worldview as articulated by that religion, philosophy, social science, etc. His work The Phenomenology of Spirit was a study of how various types of writing and thinking draw from and re-combine with the individual and group experiences of various places and times, influencing the current forms of knowledge and worldviews that are operative in a population. This activity is the functioning of an incomplete group mind, where each is accessing the recorded wisdom of others. His works often include detailed descriptions of the psychological motivations involved in thought and behavior, e.g., the struggle of a community or nation to know itself and thus correctly govern itself. In Hegel's system, Religion is one of the major repositories of wisdom to be used in these struggles, representing a huge body of recollections from humanity's past in various stages of its development.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) gave explanations of the genesis of religion in his various writings. In Totem and Taboo, he applied the idea of the Oedipus complex (involving unresolved sexual feelings of, for example, a son toward his mother and hostility toward his father) and postulated its emergence in the primordial stage of human development.
In Moses and Monotheism, Freud reconstructed biblical history by his general theory. His ideas were also developed in The Future of an Illusion. When Freud spoke of religion as an illusion, he maintained that it "is a fantasy structure from which a man must be set free if he is to grow to maturity."
Freud views the idea of God as being a version of the father image, and religious belief as at bottom infantile and neurotic. Authoritarian religion, Freud believed, is dysfunctional and alienates man from himself.
Carl Jung
The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875–1961) adopted a very different posture, one that was more sympathetic to religion and more concerned with a positive appreciation of religious symbolism. Jung considered the question of the metaphysical existence of God to be unanswerable by the psychologist and adopted a kind of agnosticism.
Jung postulated, in addition to the personal unconscious (roughly adopting Freud's concept), the collective unconscious, which is the repository of human experience and which contains "archetypes" (i.e. basic images that are universal in that they recur regardless of culture). The irruption of these images from the unconscious into the realm of consciousness he viewed as the basis of religious experience and often of artistic creativity. Some of Jung's writings have been devoted to elucidating some of the archetypal symbols, and include his work in comparative mythology.
Alfred Adler
Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler (1870–1937), who parted ways with Freud, emphasized the role of goals and motivation in his Individual Psychology. One of Adler's most famous ideas is that we try to compensate for inferiorities that we perceive in ourselves. A lack of power often lies at the root of feelings of inferiority. One way that religion enters into this picture is through our beliefs in God, which are characteristic of our tendency to strive for perfection and superiority. For example, in many religions, God is considered to be perfect and omnipotent, and commands people likewise to be perfect. If we, too, achieve perfection, we become one with God. By identifying with God in this way, we compensate for our imperfections and feelings of inferiority.
Our ideas about God are important indicators of how we view the world. According to Adler, these ideas have changed over time, as our vision of the world – and our place in it – has changed. Consider this example that Adler offers: the traditional belief that people were placed deliberately on earth as God's ultimate creation is being replaced with the idea that people have evolved by natural selection. This coincides with a view of God not as a real being, but as an abstract representation of nature's forces. In this way, our view of God has changed from one that was concrete and specific to one that is more general. From Adler's vantage point, this is a relatively ineffective perception of God because it is so general that it fails to convey a strong sense of direction and purpose.
An important thing for Adler is that God (or the idea of God) motivates people to act and that those actions do have real consequences for ourselves and others. Our view of God is important because it embodies our goals and directs our social interactions.
Compared to science, another social movement, religion is more efficient because it motivates people more effectively. According to Adler, only when science begins to capture the same religious fervor, and promotes the welfare of all segments of society, will the two be more equal in peoples' eyes.
Gordon Allport
In his 1950 book The Individual and His Religion, Gordon Allport (1897–1967) illustrates how people may use religion in different ways. He makes a distinction between Mature religion andImmature religion. Mature religious sentiment is how Allport characterized the person whose approach to religion is dynamic, open-minded, and able to maintain links between inconsistencies. In contrast, immature religion is self-serving and generally represents the negative stereotypes that people have about religion.
More recently, this distinction has been encapsulated in the terms "intrinsic religion", referring to a genuine, heartfelt devout faith, and "extrinsic religion", referring to a more utilitarian use of religion as a means to an end, such as church attendance to gain social status. These dimensions of religion were measured on the Religious Orientation Scale of Allport and Ross. The third form of religious orientation has been described by Daniel Batson. This refers to treatment of religion as an open-ended search.
More specifically, it has been seen by Batson as comprising a willingness to view religious doubts positively, acceptance that religious orientation can change and existential complexity, the belief that one's religious beliefs should be shaped from personal crises that one has experienced in one's life. Batson refers to extrinsic, intrinsic and quests respectively as religion-as-means, religion-as-end, and religion-as-quest, and measures these constructs on the Religious Life Inventory.
Erik H. Erikson
Erik Erikson (1902–1994) is best known for his theory of psychological development, which has its roots in the psychoanalytic importance of identity in personality. His biographies of Gandhi and Martin Luther reveal Erikson's positive view of religion. He considered religions to be important influences in successful personality development because they are the primary way that cultures promote the virtues associated with each stage of life. Religious rituals facilitate this development. Erikson's theory has not benefited from systematic empirical study, but it remains an influential and well-regarded theory in the psychological study of religion.
Erich Fromm
The American scholar Erich Fromm (1900–1980) modified the Freudian theory and produced a more complex account of the functions of religion. In his book Psychoanalysis and Religion he responded to Freud's theories by explaining that part of the modification is viewing the Oedipus complex as based not so much on sexuality as on a "much more profound desire", namely, the childish desire to remain attached to protecting figures. The right religion, in Fromm's estimation, can, in principle, foster an individual's highest potentialities, but religion in practice tends to relapse into being neurotic.
According to Fromm, humans need a stable frame of reference. Religion fills this need. In effect, humans crave answers to questions that no other source of knowledge has an answer to, which only religion may seem to answer. However, a sense of free will must be given for religion to appear healthy. An authoritarian notion of religion appears detrimental.
Rudolf Otto
Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) was a German Protestant theologian and scholar of comparative religion. Otto's most famous work, The Idea of the Holy (published first in 1917 as ), defines the concept of the holy as that which is numinous. Otto explained the numinous as a "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self." It is a mystery that is both fascinating (fascinans) and terrifying at the same time; A mystery that causes trembling and fascination, attempting to explain that inexpressible and perhaps supernatural emotional reaction of wonder drawing us to seemingly ordinary and/or religious experiences of grace. This sense of emotional wonder appears evident at the root of all religious experiences. Through this emotional wonder, we suspend our rational mind for non-rational possibilities.The Idea of the Holy also set out a paradigm for the study of religion that focuses on the need to realize the religious as a non-reducible, original category in its own right. This paradigm was under much attack between approximately 1950 and 1990 but has made a strong comeback since then.
Modern thinkers
Autobiographal accounts of 20th-century psychology of religion as a field have been supplied by numerous modern psychologists of religion, primarily based in Europe, but also by several US-based psychologists such as Ralph W. Hood and Donald Capps.
Allen Bergin
Allen Bergin is noted for his 1980 paper "Psychotherapy and Religious Values," which is known as a landmark in scholarly acceptance that religious values do, in practice, influence psychotherapy.Slife, B.D. & Whoolery, M. (2003). "Understanding disciplinary significance: The story of Allen Bergin's 1980 article on values". In R. Sternberg (Ed.) The anatomy of impact: What has made the great works of psychology great? Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. He received the Distinguished Professional Contributions to Knowledge award from the American Psychological Association in 1989 and was cited as challenging "psychological orthodoxy to emphasize the importance of values and religion in therapy."
Robert A. Emmons
Robert A. Emmons offered a theory of "spiritual strivings" in his 1999 book, The Psychology of Ultimate Concerns. With support from empirical studies, Emmons argued that spiritual strivings foster personality integration because they exist at a higher level of the personality.
Ralph W. Hood Jr.
Ralph W. Hood Jr. is a professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He is a former editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and a former co-editor of the Archive for the Psychology of Religion and The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion. He is Past President of Division 36 of the American Psychological Association and a recipient of its William James Award. He has published several hundred articles and book chapters on the psychology of religion and has authored, co-authored, or edited thirteen volumes, all dealing with the psychology of religion.
Kenneth Pargament
Kenneth Pargament is noted for his book Psychology of Religion and Coping (1997), as well as for a 2007 book on religion and psychotherapy, and a sustained research program on religious coping. He is professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University (Ohio, US), and
has published more than 100 papers on the subject of religion and spirituality in psychology. Pargament led the design of a questionnaire called the "RCOPE" to measure Religious Coping strategies. Pargament has distinguished between three types of styles for coping with stress:
Collaborative, in which people co-operate with God to deal with stressful events;
Deferring, in which people leave everything to God; and
Self-directed, in which people do not rely on God and try exclusively to solve problems by their own efforts. He also describes four major stances toward religion that have been adopted by psychotherapists in their work with clients, which he calls the religiously rejectionist, exclusivist, constructivist, and pluralist stances.Brian J. Zinnbauer & Kenneth I. Pargament (2000). Working with the sacred: Four approaches to religious and spiritual issues in counseling. Journal of Counseling & Development, v78 n2, pp. 162–171.
James Hillman
James Hillman, at the end of his book Re-Visioning Psychology, reverses James' position of viewing religion through psychology, urging instead that we view psychology as a variety of religious experience. He concludes: "Psychology as religion implies imagining all psychological events as effects of Gods in the soul."
Julian Jaynes
Julian Jaynes, primarily in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, proposed that religion (and some other psychological phenomena such as hypnosis and schizophrenia) is a remnant of a relatively recent time in human development, prior to the advent of consciousness. Jaynes hypothesized that hallucinated verbal commands helped non-conscious early man to perform tasks promoting human survival. Starting about 10,000 BCE, selective pressures favored the hallucinated verbal commands for social control, and they came to be perceived as an external, rather than internal, voice commanding the person to take some action. These were hence often explained as originating from invisible gods, spirits, and ancestors.
Hypotheses on the role of religion
There are three primary hypotheses on the role of religion in the modern world.
Secularization
The first hypothesis, secularization, holds that science and technology will take the place of religion. Secularization supports the separation of religion from politics, ethics, and psychology. Taking this position even further, Taylor explains that secularization denies transcendence, divinity, and rationality in religious beliefs.
Religious transformation
Challenges to the secularization hypothesis led to significant revisions, resulting in the religious transformation hypothesis. This perspective holds that general trends towards individualism and social disintegration will produce changes in religion, making religious practice more individualized and spiritually focused. This in turn is expected to produce more spiritual seeking, although not exclusive to religious institutions. Eclecticism, which draws from multiple religious/spiritual systems and New Age movements are also predicted to result.
Cultural divide
In response to the religious transformation hypothesis, Ronald Inglehart piloted the renewal of the secularization hypothesis. His argument hinges on the premise that religion develops to fill the human need for security. Therefore, the development of social and economic security in Europe explains its corresponding secularization due to a lack of need for religion. However, religion continues in the third world where social and economic insecurity is rampant. The overall effect is expected to be a growing cultural disparity.
The idea that religiosity arises from the human need for security has also been furthered by studies examining religious beliefs as a compensatory mechanism of control. These studies are motivated by the idea that people are invested in maintaining beliefs in order and structure to prevent beliefs in chaos and randomness.
In the experimental setting, researchers have also tested compensatory control in regard to individuals' perceptions of external systems, such as religion or government. For example, Kay and colleagues found that in a laboratory setting, individuals are more likely to endorse broad external systems (e.g., religion or sociopolitical systems) that impose order and control on their lives when they are induced with lowered levels of personal control. In this study, researchers suggest that when a person's personal control is lessened, their motivation to believe in order is threatened, resulting in compensation of this threat through adherence to other external sources of control.
Psychometric approaches to religion
Since the 1960s psychologists of religion have used the methodology of psychometrics to assess ways in which a person may be religious. An example is the Religious Orientation Scale of Allport and Ross, which measures how respondents stand on intrinsic and extrinsic religion as described by Allport.
More recent questionnaires include the Age-Universal I-E Scale of Gorsuch and Venable, the Religious Life Inventory of Batson, Schoenrade and Ventis, and the Spiritual Experiences Index-Revised of Genia. The first provides an age-independent measure of Allport and Ross's two religious orientations. The second measures three forms of religious orientation: religion as means (intrinsic), religion as end (extrinsic), and religion as quest. The third assesses spiritual maturity using two factors: Spiritual Support and Spiritual Openness.
Religious orientations and religious dimensions
Some questionnaires, such as the Religious Orientation Scale, relate to different religious orientations, such as intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness, referring to different motivations for religious allegiance. A rather different approach, taken, for example, by Glock and Stark (1965), has been to list different dimensions of religion rather than different religious orientations, which relates to how an individual may manifest different forms of being religious. Glock and Stark's typology described five dimensions of religion – the doctrinal, the intellectual, the ethical-consequential, the ritual, and the experiential. In later works, these authors subdivided the ritual dimension into devotional and public ritual, and also clarified that their distinction of religion along multiple dimensions was not identical to distinguishing religious orientations. Although some psychologists of religion have found it helpful to take a multidimensional approach to religion for the purpose of psychometric scale design, there has been, as Wulff explains, considerable controversy about whether religion should really be seen as multidimensional.
Questionnaires to assess religious experience
What we call religious experiences can differ greatly. Some reports exist of supernatural happenings that it would be difficult to explain from a rational, scientific point of view. On the other hand, there also exist the sort of testimonies that simply seem to convey a feeling of peace or oneness – something which most of us, religious or not, may possibly relate to. In categorizing religious experiences it is perhaps helpful to look at them as explicable through one of two theories: the objectivist thesis or the subjectivist thesis.
An objectivist would argue that the religious experience is a proof of God's existence. However, others have criticised the reliability of religious experiences. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes asked how it was possible to tell the difference between talking to God in a dream, and dreaming about talking to God.
The Subjectivist view argues that it is not necessary to think of religious experiences as evidence for the existence of an actual being whom we call God. From this point of view, the important thing is the experience itself and the effect that it has on the individual.
Developmental approaches to religion
Many have looked at stage models, like those of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, to explain how children develop ideas about God and religion in general.
James Fowler's model
The best-known stage model of spiritual or religious development is that of James W. Fowler, a developmental psychologist at the Candler School of Theology, in his Stages of Faith. He follows Piaget and Kohlberg and has proposed a holistic staged development of faith (or spiritual development) across the lifespan. These stages of faith development were along the lines of Piaget's theory of cognitive development and Kohlberg's stages of moral development.
The book-length study contains six stages of faith development proposed by James Fowler:
Stage 0 – "Primal or Undifferentiated" faith (birth to two years), is characterized by an early learning of the safety of their environment (i.e. warm, safe and secure vs. hurt, neglect and abuse). If consistent nurture is experienced, one will develop a sense of trust and safety about the universe and the divine. Conversely, negative experiences will cause one to develop distrust about the universe and the divine. Transition to the next stage begins with integration of thought and language which facilitates the use of symbols in speech and play.
Stage 1 – "Intuitive-Projective" faith (ages of three to seven), is characterized by the psyche's unprotected exposure to the Unconscious, and marked by a relative fluidity of thought patterns. Religion is learned mainly through experiences, stories, images, and the people that one comes in contact with.
Stage 2 – "Mythic-Literal" faith (mostly in school children), is characterized by persons have a strong belief in the justice and reciprocity of the universe, and their deities are almost always anthropomorphic. During this time metaphors and symbolic language are often misunderstood and are taken literally.
Stage 3 – "Synthetic-Conventional" faith (arising in adolescence; aged 12 to adulthood), is characterized by conformity to authority and the religious development of a personal identity. Any conflicts with one's beliefs are ignored at this stage due to the fear of threat from inconsistencies.
Stage 4 – "Individuative-Reflective" faith (usually mid-twenties to late thirties), is a stage of angst and struggle. The individual takes personal responsibility for his or her beliefs and feelings. As one is able to reflect on one's own beliefs, there is an openness to a new complexity of faith, but this also increases the awareness of conflicts in one's belief.
Stage 5 – "Conjunctive" faith (mid-life crisis), acknowledges paradox and transcendence relating reality behind the symbols of inherited systems. The individual resolves conflicts from previous stages by a complex understanding of a multidimensional, interdependent "truth" that cannot be explained by any particular statement.
Stage 6 – "Universalizing" faith: The individual would treat any person with compassion as he or she views people as from a universal community, and should be treated with universal principles of love and justice.
Fowler's model has inspired a considerable body of empirical research into faith development, although little of such research was ever conducted by Fowler himself. Gary Leak's Faith Development Scale (FDS) has been subject to factor analysis by Leak.
Other hypotheses
Other theorists in developmental psychology have suggested that religiosity comes naturally to young children. Specifically, children may have a natural-born conception of mind-body dualism, which lends itself to beliefs that the mind may live on after the body dies. In addition, children have a tendency to see agency and human design where there is not, and prefer a creationist explanation of the world even when raised by parents who do not.
Researchers have also investigated attachment system dynamics as a predictor of the religious conversion experience throughout childhood and adolescence. One hypothesis is the correspondence hypothesis, which posits that individuals with secure parental attachment are more likely to experience a gradual conversion experience. Under the correspondence hypothesis, internal working models of a person's attachment figure is thought to perpetuate his or her perception of God as a secure base. Another hypothesis relating attachment style to the conversion experience is the compensation hypothesis, which states that individuals with insecure attachments are more likely to have a sudden conversion experience as they compensate for their insecure attachment relationship by seeking a relationship with God.
Researchers have tested these hypotheses using longitudinal studies and individuals' self narratives of their conversion experience. For example, one study investigating attachment styles and adolescent conversions at Young Life religious summer camps resulted in evidence supporting the correspondence hypothesis through analysis of personal narratives and a prospective longitudinal follow-up of Young Life campers, with mixed results for the compensation hypothesis.
James Alcock summarizes a number of components of what he calls the "God engine," a "number of automatic processes and cognitive biases [that] combine to make supernatural belief the automatic default." These include magical thinking, agency detection, theory of mind that leads to dualism, the notion that "objects and events [serve] an intentional purpose," etc.
Evolutionary and cognitive psychology of religion
Evolutionary psychology is based on the hypothesis that, just like the cardiac, pulmonary, urinary, and immune systems, cognition has a functional structure with a genetic basis, and therefore appeared through natural selection. Like other organs and tissues, this functional structure should be universally shared among humans and should solve important problems of survival and reproduction. Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand cognitive processes by understanding the survival and reproductive functions they might serve.
Pascal Boyer is one of the leading figures in the cognitive psychology of religion, a new field of inquiry that is less than fifteen years old, which accounts for the psychological processes that underlie religious thought and practice. In his book Religion Explained, Boyer shows that there is no simple explanation for religious consciousness. Boyer is mainly concerned with explaining the various psychological processes involved in the acquisition and transmission of ideas concerning the gods. Boyer builds on the ideas of cognitive anthropologists Dan Sperber and Scott Atran, who first argued that religious cognition represents a by-product of various evolutionary adaptations, including folk psychology, and purposeful violations of innate expectations about how the world is constructed (for example, bodiless beings with thoughts and emotions) that make religious cognitions striking and memorable.
Religious persons acquire religious ideas and practices through social exposure. The child of a Zen Buddhist will not become an evangelical Christian or a Zulu warrior without the relevant cultural experience. While mere exposure does not cause a particular religious outlook (a person may have been raised a Roman Catholic but leave the church), nevertheless some exposure seems required – this person will never invent Roman Catholicism out of thin air. Boyer says cognitive science can help us to understand the psychological mechanisms that account for these manifest correlations and in so doing enable us to better understand the nature of religious belief and practice.
Boyer moves outside the leading currents in mainstream cognitive psychology and suggests that we can use evolutionary biology to unravel the relevant mental architecture. Our brains are, after all, biological objects, and the best naturalistic account of their development in nature is Darwin's theory of evolution. To the extent that mental architecture exhibits intricate processes and structures, it is plausible to think that this is the result of evolutionary processes working over vast periods of time. Like all biological systems, the mind is optimised to promote survival and reproduction in the evolutionary environment. On this view all specialised cognitive functions broadly serve those reproductive ends.
For Steven Pinker the universal propensity toward religious belief is a genuine scientific puzzle. He thinks that adaptationist explanations for religion do not meet the criteria for adaptations. An alternative explanation is that religious psychology is a by-product of many parts of the mind that originally evolved for other purposes.
Religion and prayer
Religious practice often manifests itself in some form of prayer. Recent studies have focused specifically on the effects of prayer on health. Measures of prayer and the above measures of spirituality evaluate different characteristics and should not be considered synonymous.
Prayer is fairly prevalent in the United States. About 55% of Americans report praying daily. However, the practice of prayer is more prevalent and practiced more consistently among Americans who perform other religious practices. There are four primary types of prayer in the West. Poloma and Pendleton, utilized factor analysis to delineate these four types of prayer: meditative (more spiritual, silent thinking), ritualistic (reciting), petitionary (making requests to God), and colloquial (general conversing with God). Further scientific study of prayer using factor analysis has revealed three dimensions of prayer. Ladd and Spilka's first factor was awareness of self, inward reaching. Their second and third factors were upward reaching (toward God) and outward reaching (toward others). This study appears to support the contemporary model of prayer as connection (whether to the self, higher being, or others).
Dein and Littlewood (2008) suggest that an individual's prayer life can be viewed on a spectrum ranging from immature to mature. A progression on the scale is characterized by a change in the perspective of the purpose of prayer. Rather than using prayer as a means of changing the reality of a situation, a more mature individual will use prayer to request assistance in coping with immutable problems and draw closer to God or others. This change in perspective has been shown to be associated with an individual's passage through adolescence.
Prayer appears to have health implications. Empirical studies suggest that mindfully reading and reciting the Psalms (from scripture) can help a person calm down and focus. Prayer is also positively correlated with happiness and religious satisfaction. A study conducted by Francis, Robbins, Lewis, and Barnes investigated the relationship between self-reported prayer frequency and measures of psychoticism and neuroticism according to the abbreviated form of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQR-A). The study included a sample size of 2306 students attending Protestant and Catholic schools in the highly religious culture of Northern Ireland. The data shows a negative correlation between prayer frequency and psychoticism. The data also shows that, in Catholic students, frequent prayer has a positive correlation to neuroticism scores. Ladd and McIntosh suggest that prayer-related behaviors, such as bowing the head and clasping the hands together in an almost fetal position, are suggestive of "social touch" actions. Prayer in this manner may prepare an individual to carry out positive pro-social behavior after praying, due to factors such as increased blood flow to the head and nasal breathing. Overall, slight health benefits have been found fairly consistently across studies.
Three main pathways to explain this trend have been offered: placebo effect, focus and attitude adjustment, and activation of healing processes. These offerings have been expanded by Breslin and Lewis (2008) who have constructed a five pathway model between prayer and health with the following mediators: physiological, psychological, placebo, social support, and spiritual. The spiritual mediator is a departure from the rest in that its potential for empirical investigation is not currently feasible. Although the conceptualizations of chi, the universal mind, divine intervention, and the like breach the boundaries of scientific observation, they are included in this model as possible links between prayer and health so as to not unnecessarily exclude the supernatural from the broader conversation of psychology and religion.
Religion and ritual
Another significant form of religious practice is ritual. Religious rituals encompass a wide array of practices, but can be defined as the performance of similar actions and vocal expressions based on prescribed tradition and cultural norms.
Scheff suggests that ritual provides catharsis, emotional purging, through distancing. This emotional distancing enables an individual to experience feelings with an amount of separation, and thus with less intensity. However, the conception of religious ritual as an interactive process has since matured and become more scientifically established. From this view, ritual offers a means to catharsis through behaviors that foster connection with others, allowing for emotional expression. This focus on connection contrasts to the separation that seems to underlie Scheff's view.
Additional research suggests a social component of ritual. For instance, findings suggest that ritual performance indicates group commitment and prevents the uncommitted from gaining membership benefits. Ritual may aid in emphasizing moral values that serve as group norms and regulate societies. It may also strengthen commitment to moral convictions and the likelihood of upholding these social expectations. Thus, performance of rituals may foster social-group stability.
Robert Sapolsky sees a similarity between the rituals accompanying obsessive–compulsive disorder and religious rituals. According to him, religious ritual reduces the tension and anxiety associated with the disorder and provides relief resulting from practicing in a social community.
Religion and personal functioning
Religion and health
There is considerable literature on the relationship between religion and health. More than 3000 empirical studies have examined relationships between religion and health, including more than 1200 in the 20th century, and more than 2000 additional studies between 2000 and 2009.
Psychologists consider that religion may benefit both physical and mental health in various ways, including encouraging healthy lifestyles, providing social support networks and encouraging an optimistic outlook on life; prayer and meditation may also benefit physiological functioning. Nevertheless, religion is not a unique source of health and well-being, and there are benefits to nonreligiosity as well. Haber, Jacob and Spangler have considered how different dimensions of religiosity may relate to health benefits in different ways.
Religion and personality
Some studies have examined whether there is a "religious personality." Research on the five factor model of personality suggests that people who identify as religious are more likely to be agreeable and conscientious. Similarly, people who identify as spiritual are more likely to be extrovert and open, although this varies based on the type of spirituality endorsed. For example, people endorsing fundamentalist religious beliefs are more likely to measure low on the Openness factor.
Religion and prejudice
To investigate the salience of religious beliefs in establishing group identity, researchers have also conducted studies looking at religion and prejudice. Some studies have shown that greater religious attitudes may be significant predictors of negative attitudes towards racial or social outgroups. These effects are often conceptualized under the framework of intergroup bias, where religious individuals favor members of their ingroup (ingroup favoritism) and exhibit disfavor towards members of their outgroup (outgroup derogation). Evidence supporting religious intergroup bias has been supported in multiple religious groups, including non-Christian groups, and is thought to reflect the role of group dynamics in religious identification. Many studies regarding religion and prejudice implement religious priming both in the laboratory and in naturalistic settings with evidence supporting the perpetuation of ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation in individuals who are high in religiosity.
Recently, reparative or conversion therapy, a religiously motivated process intended to change an individual's sexuality, has been the subject of scrutiny and has been condemned by some governments, LGBT charities, and therapy/counselling professional bodies.
Religion and drugs
The American psychologist James H. Leuba (1868–1946), in A Psychological Study of Religion, accounts for mystical experience psychologically and physiologically, pointing to analogies with certain drug-induced experiences. Leuba argued forcibly for a naturalistic treatment of religion, which he considered to be necessary if religious psychology were to be looked at scientifically. Shamans all over the world and in different cultures have traditionally used drugs, especially psychedelics, for their religious experiences. In these communities the absorption of drugs leads to dreams (visions) through sensory distortion. The psychedelic experience is often compared to non-ordinary forms of consciousness such as those experienced in meditation, and mystical experiences. Ego dissolution is often described as a key feature of the psychedelic experience.
William James was also interested in mystical experiences from a drug-induced perspective, leading him to make some experiments with nitrous oxide and even peyote. He concludes that while the revelations of the mystic hold true, they hold true only for the mystic; for others they are certainly ideas to be considered, but hold no claim to truth without personal experience of such.
Religion and mental illness
Although many researchers have brought evidence for a positive role that religion plays in health, others have shown that religious beliefs, practices, and experiences may be linked to mental illnesses of various kinds (mood disorders, personality disorders, and psychiatric disorders). In 2012 a team of psychiatrists, behavioral psychologists, neurologists, and neuropsychiatrists from the Harvard Medical School published research which suggested the development of a new diagnostic category of psychiatric disorders related to religious delusion and hyperreligiosity.
They compared the thoughts and behaviors of the most important figures in the Bible (Abraham, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Paul) with patients affected by mental disorders related to the psychotic spectrum using different clusters of disorders and diagnostic criteria (DSM-IV-TR), and concluded that these Biblical figures "may have had psychotic symptoms that contributed inspiration for their revelations", such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, manic depression, delusional disorder, delusions of grandeur, auditory-visual hallucinations, paranoia, Geschwind syndrome (Paul especially), and abnormal experiences associated with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). The authors suggest that Jesus sought to condemn himself to death ("suicide by proxy").
The research went further and also focused on social models of psychopathology, analyzing new religious movements and charismatic cult leaders such as David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians, and Marshall Applewhite, founder of the Heaven's Gate cult. The researchers concluded that "If David Koresh and Marshall Applewhite are appreciated as having psychotic-spectrum beliefs, then the premise becomes untenable that the diagnosis of psychosis must rigidly rely upon an inability to maintain a social group. A subset of individuals with psychotic symptoms appears able to form intense social bonds and communities despite having an extremely distorted view of reality. The existence of a better socially functioning subset of individuals with psychotic-type symptoms is corroborated by research indicating that psychotic-like experiences, including both bizarre and non-bizarre delusion-like beliefs, are frequently found in the general population. This supports the idea that psychotic symptoms likely lie on a continuum."
Religion and psychotherapy
Clients' religious beliefs are increasingly being considered in psychotherapy with the goal of improving service and effectiveness of treatment. A resulting development was theistic psychotherapy. Conceptually, it consists of theological principles, a theistic view of personality, and a theistic view of psychotherapy. Following an explicit minimizing strategy, therapists attempt to minimize conflict by acknowledging their religious views while being respectful of client's religious views. This is argued to up the potential for therapists to directly utilize religious practices and principles in therapy, such as prayer, forgiveness, and grace. In contrast to such an approach, psychoanalyst Robin S. Brown argues for the extent to which our spiritual commitments remain unconscious. Drawing from the work of Jung, Brown suggests that "our biases can only be suspended in the extent to which they are no longer our biases".
Pastoral psychology
One application of the psychology of religion is in pastoral psychology, the use of psychological findings to improve the pastoral care provided by pastors and other clergy, especially in how they support ordinary members of their congregations. Pastoral psychology is also concerned with improving the practice of chaplains in healthcare and in the military. One major concern of pastoral psychology is to improve the practice of pastoral counseling. Pastoral psychology is a topic of interest for professional journals such as the Journal of Psychology and Christianity and the Journal of Psychology and Theology''. In 1984, Thomas Oden severely criticized mid-20th-century pastoral care and the pastoral psychology that guided it as having entirely abandoned its classical/traditional sources, and having become overwhelmingly dominated by modern psychological influences from Freud, Rogers, and others. More recently, others have described pastoral psychology as a field that experiences a tension between psychology and theology.
See also
References
Works cited
Further reading
External links
Division 36: Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality on the American Psychological Association's official website
Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, official website
International Association for the Scientific Study of Religion
International Association for the Psychology of Religion
Centre for Psychology of Religion, Institute IPSY, Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium)
Psychology of religion, Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious studies, Umeå University (Sweden)
Misplaced Faith?: A theory of supernatural belief as misattribution with Luke Galen
Religiosity and Emotion
Psychology of religion pages
Psychology of Religious Doubt
Psychology of religion in Germany
Religion and mental health | 0.791614 | 0.990849 | 0.784371 |
Gender and religion | Gender, defined as the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity, and religion, a system of beliefs and practices followed by a community, share a multifaceted relationship that influences both individual and collective identities. The manner in which individuals express and experience their religious convictions is profoundly shaped by gender. Experts from diverse disciplines such as theology, sociology, anthropology, and gender studies have delved into the effects of gender on religious politics and societal standards. At times, the interplay between gender and religion can confine gender roles, but in other instances, it can empower and uphold them. Such insights shed light on the ways religious doctrines and rituals can simultaneously uphold specific gender expectations and offer avenues for gender expression.
Investigating the relationship between gender and religion entails evaluating sacred texts as well as religious institutions' practices. This investigation is part of a greater interest in the phenomenon of religion and is strongly tied to the larger study of gender and sexuality. Scholars can better comprehend the complex dynamics of gender within religious contexts by researching how societies and cultures develop gender roles and identities, as well as how gender connects with other societal and cultural categories.
Sex differences in religion can be classified as either "internal" or "external". Internal religious issues are studied from the perspective of a given religion, and might include religious beliefs and practices about the roles and rights of men and women in government, education and worship; beliefs about the sex or gender of deities and religious figures; and beliefs about the origin and meaning of human gender. External religious issues can be broadly defined as an examination of a given religion from an outsider's perspective, including possible clashes between religious leaders and laity; and the influence of, and differences between, religious perspectives on social issues.
Gender of deities
The earliest documented religions, and some contemporary animist religions, involve the deification of characteristics of the natural world. These spirits are typically, but not always, gendered. It has been proposed, since the 19th century, that polytheism arose out of animism, as religious epic provided personalities to autochthonous animist spirits in various parts of the world, notably in the development of ancient near eastern and Indo-European literature. Polytheistic gods are also typically gendered. The earliest evidence of monotheism is the worship of the goddess Eurynome, Aten in Egypt, the teaching of Moses in the Torah and Zoroastrianism in Persia. Aten, Yahweh and Ahura Mazda are all masculine deities, embodied only in metaphor, so masculine rather than reproductively male.
Hinduism
Kali, the Hindu goddess of both the life cycle and destructive war, breaks the gender role of women representing love, sex, fertility, and beauty. This Hindu deity reflects the modern view of feminism through their depiction of female strength.
Christianity
In Christianity, one entity of the Trinity, the Son, is believed to have become incarnate as a human male. Christians have traditionally believed that God the Father has masculine gender rather than male sex because the Father has never been incarnated. By contrast, there is less historical consensus on the gender of the Holy Spirit.
In Christianity the gender of God is referenced several times throughout the KJV Bible. One point of reference for GOD being male is found in the Gospel of John when Jesus Christ says to Mary Magdalene, "Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God."
Islam
In Islam, God is not gendered literally or metaphorically. God is referred to with the masculine pronoun in Arabic [Huwa or 'He'], as there is no neuter in the Arabic language. Ascribing natural gender to God is considered heretical because God is described as incomparable to creation. The Quran says: There is nothing like Him, and He ˹alone˺ is the All-Hearing, All-Seeing.
In contrast to Christian theology, Jesus is viewed as a prophet rather than a human male incarnation of God, and the primary sources of Islam [the Quran and Sunnah] do not refer to God as the 'Father'.
Creation myths about human gender
In many stories, man and woman are created at the same time, with equal standing. One example is the creation story in Genesis 1: "And God created the man in his image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them." Some commentators interpret the parallelism to be deliberately stressing that mankind is, in some sense, a "unity in diversity" from a divine perspective (compare e pluribus unum),
and that women as well as men are included in God's image. The first man, Adam, has been viewed as a spiritual being or an ideal who can be distinguished as both male and female; an androgynous being with no sex. Pierre Chaunu argues that Genesis' gender-inclusive conception of humanity contrasts sharply with the views of gender found in older literature from surrounding cultures, and suggests a higher status of women in western society due to Judæo-Christian influence, and based on this verse. Some scholars, such as Philo, argue that the "sexes" were developed through an accidental division of the "true self" which existed prior to being assigned with gender.
In other accounts, man is created first, followed by woman. This is the case in the creation account of Genesis 2, where the first woman (Eve) is created from the rib of the first man (Adam), as a companion and helper. This story about Adam and Eve shows that God created two genders, a woman from a man. God also told the woman that she can only desire the man and that he shall rule over her. This is the earliest idea in catholic religion that says women should only be attracted and loyal to men, therefore supporting the claim that there is only a woman for a man. These two gender creation stories imagine the ideal of the unitary self. However, the unitary self is either androgynous or physically male; both of which are masculine in configuration.
In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes provides an account to explain gender and romantic attraction.
There were originally three sexes: the all-male, the all-female, and the "androgynous", who was half man, half woman. As punishment for attacking the gods, each was split in half. The halves of the androgynous being became heterosexual men and women, while the halves of the all-male and all-female became gays and lesbians, respectively.
Gendered clothing in religion
Among many religions, there are traditional clothing standards unique to each culture. One aspect every religion has in common is modesty among women. There can be many reasons why women specifically are taught to cover up or dress according to a standard, but most reasons are sourced through official religious publications.
God said, in the book of Deuteronomy, “A woman shall not wear a man's garment, nor shall a man put on a woman's cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God." The book intends to set a specific idea of what a man and women should, and should not wear based on their gender, or they will disappoint the Lord. In religion, this is a way to clearly show a gender divide through the idea of individuals should only wear their gender specific clothing in order to meet the religions standards. Gods response to the idea of his creations cross dressing, influences the negative opinion towards transgendered individuals.
Leadership roles
Some religions restrict leadership to males. The ordination of women has been a controversial issue in some religions where either the rite of ordination, or the role that an ordained person fulfills, has traditionally been restricted to men because of cultural or theological prohibitions.
The journey to religious leadership presents distinct challenges for women across various faith traditions. Historically, many religious institutions have been dominated by male leadership, and this has influenced the roles and opportunities available to women. For instance, women are not permitted to become priests in the Catholic Church, and in Orthodox Judaism, the role of a rabbi is traditionally reserved for men. While Islam does permit women to serve as religious leaders, they are typically not allowed to lead mixed-gender prayers. In Hinduism, some sects or regions allow women to become priests, though this remains a rarity.
While many significant religious organizations in the U.S. ordain women and permit them to hold leadership positions, few women have served at the highest levels. For instance, the Episcopal Church had a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, serving as presiding bishop from 2006 to 2015. However, many of the largest denominations in the U.S., such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, do not ordain women or allow them to hold top church leadership roles. Efforts have been made in recent decades to challenge these norms. For example, while roughly six-in-ten American Catholics (59%) in a 2015 Pew Research Center survey expressed support for ordaining women in their church, the official stance remains unchanged.
This underrepresentation underscores the broader societal challenges women face in asserting their leadership in traditionally male-dominated spheres. As the discourse around gender equality continues to evolve, it's crucial to understand and address the systemic barriers that women encounter in religious leadership.
Beginning in the 19th century, some Christian denominations have ordained women. Among those who do not, many believe it is forbidden by . Some of those denominations ordain women to the diaconate, believing this is encouraged by .
Some Islamic communities (mainly outside the Middle East) have recently appointed women as imams, normally with ministries restricted to leading women in prayer and other charitable ministries.
Indian religions
Both masculine and feminine deities feature prominently in Hinduism. The identity of the Vedic writers is not known, but the first hymn of the Rigveda is addressed to the masculine deity Agni, and the pantheon of the Vedas is dominated by masculine gods. The most prominent Avatars of Vishnu are men.
Mostly, the traditional religious leaders of Jainism are men. The 19th tirthankara (traditional leader) Māllīnātha in this half cycle was female.
Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) was a man, but the female Buddha Vajrayogini also plays a role in Buddhism. In some East Asian Buddhist communities, a number of women are ordained as monks as well.
Abrahamic religions
In Abrahamic religions, Abraham himself, Moses, David and Elijah are among the most significant leaders documented according to the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. John the Baptist, Jesus and his apostles, and Saul of Tarsus again give the New Testament an impression of the founders and key figures of Christianity being male dominated. They were followed by a millennium of theologians known as the Church Fathers. Islam was founded by Muhammad, and his successor Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman ibn Affan and Ali, for Sunnis and Ali ibn Abi Talib and The Twelve Imams for those of Shia faith, were also men. On the other hand, The Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth, is not associated with leadership or teaching, but is nonetheless a key figure in Catholicism. Fatimah, daughter of Muhammad, is regarded by Muslims as an exemplar for men and women.
The Baháʼí Faith, a fast growing religion, teaches that men and women are equal. Prominent women celebrated in Baháʼí history include Bahíyyih Khánum, who acted head of the faith for several periods during the ministries of `Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi, and Táhirih, who is also held by Baháʼís as a penultimate leader. Women serve in higher percentages of leadership in appointed and elected national and international institutions of the religion than in the general population. However, only men are allowed to be members of the religion's highest governing body, the Universal House of Justice.
Nakayama Miki was the founder of Tenrikyo, which may be the largest religion to have a woman founder. Ellen G. White was instrumental to the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and is officially considered a prophet by Seventh-day Adventists.
Segregation
Many religions have traditionally practiced sex segregation.
In traditional Jewish synagogues, the women's section is separated from the men's section by a wall or curtain called a mechitza. Men are not permitted to pray in the presence of women, to prevent distraction. The mechitza shown in the picture on the right is one in a synagogue affiliated with the 'left wing' (more modern side) of Modern Orthodox Judaism, which requires the mechitza to be of the height shown in the picture. More traditional or 'right wing' Modern Orthodox Judaism, and all forms of Haredi Judaism, require the mechitza to be of a type which absolutely prevents the men from seeing the women.
Enclosed religious orders are usually segregated by gender.
Sex segregation in Islam includes guidelines on interaction between men and women. Men and women also worship in different areas in most mosques. Both men and women cover their awra when in the presence of members of the opposite sex (who are not close relations).
Roles in marriage
Nearly all religions recognize marriage, and many religions also promote views on appropriate gender roles within marriage.
Christianity
Within Christianity, the two notable views on gender roles in a marriage are complementarianism and egalitarianism. The complementarian view of marriage is widely accepted in Christianity, where the husband is viewed as the leader and the wife is viewed as the follower. Essentially, the man is given more of a headship role and the woman is viewed as a supporting partner. In Genesis 3, Adam named his wife Eve ("life") because she "was the mother of all living" (Genesis 3:20).
In mainstream Christian tradition, the relationship between a husband and wife is believed to mirror the relationship between Christ and the Church. This can be seen in Ephesians 5:25:Husbands love their wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.Christian traditionalists believe that men are meant to be living martyrs for their wives, "giving himself up for her" daily and through acts of unselfish love. The women, on the other hand, are meant to be their helpers.
While complementarianism has been the norm for years, some Christians have moved toward egalitarian views. As the nature of gender roles within societies changes, religious views on gender roles in marriage change as well.
In complementarianism, the relationship between man and woman is compared to the one between Christ and the Church. In the way Christ loved and cared for the Church, a man is expected to do the same for his wife. Brown says that this is what makes a marriage a holy union, rather than a simple contract between the two.
According to Paul, husbands and wives had rights that they could expect from each other. After the death of their husband, women are expected to not marry again because, on the day of resurrection, no one will 'claim' her as their wife.
Marriage, according to Augustine, is a second resort to not being able to remain celibate and a virgin. The role of virginity is one that heavily impacts marriage in general according to Augustine. Virginity and celibacy are extremely important ideals that Christians must carry, but they can marry if they cannot do so. Within a marriage, women were predicted to be more likely to be unfaithful. This left the task of being sure that the wife remained faithful to the husband. Augustine states that although men have dominance over women, they must implement it with compassion and love.
In relation to Augustine's views on marriage and virginity, some women preferred the celibate lifestyle in order to gain freedom from male control. Dennis R. Macdonald estimated that groups of widows and unmarried virgins had an impact on the patriarchal society. Researchers believe that, from a sex and gender view, remaining a virgin was a form of rebellion against male domination. The most direct way for men to dominate women was through marriage, and in remaining celibate, these women did not have that domination over them.
Islam
In Islam, a woman's primary responsibility is usually interpreted as fulfilling her role as a wife and mother, whereas women still have the right and are free to work. A man's role is to work and be able to protect and financially support his wife and family.
In regards to guidelines in marriage, a man is allowed to marry a Muslim, Jewish, Sabaean, or Christian woman whereas a woman is only allowed to marry a Muslim man. Both genders cannot marry nonbelievers or polytheists.
The matter of divorce is discussed in verse 2:228 of the Qu'ran. The Qu'ran instructs women to wait at least three menstrual periods, called Iddah, before committing to a second marriage. The purpose of the Iddah is to ensure that a woman's pregnancy will be linked to the correct biological father. In the case of a Talāq, which is a divorce initiated by the man, the man is supposed to announce the words "I divorce you" aloud three times, each separated by a three-month waiting period. Certain practices of the Talāq divorce allows the "I divorce you" utterance to be completed in one sitting; however, the concept of "Triple Divorce" in one sitting is considered wrong in some branches of Islam such as with the Shia Muslims. During the three-month waiting period, only the man has the right to initiate a marital reunion if both sides desire to reconcile. This yields a gender equality perspective in the sense that women have power over men in regards to finance parallel to how men have power over women in regards to obedience, both of which are only valid to a reasonable extent. While a Ṭalāq can be completed easily, a divorce that is initiated by the woman, called a Khula, is harder to obtain due to a woman's requirement to repay her dowry and give up child custody. More specifically, a woman is to give up custody of her child if the child is over the age of seven. If a woman gains custody of her child who is under the age of seven, she must still forfeit custody upon the child's seventh birthday. Although the Islamic religion requires the woman to repay her dowry, she is also entitled to receive financial support from her former husband if needed. This cycle of financial matters protects the woman's property from being taken advantage of during or after marriage.
Gender and religious expressions
The manner in which individuals express and experience their religious convictions is profoundly shaped by gender. Experts from diverse disciplines such as theology, sociology, anthropology, and gender studies have delved into the effects of gender on religious politics and societal standards. At times, the interplay between gender and religion can confine gender roles, but in other instances, it can empower and uphold them. Such insights shed light on the ways religious doctrines and rituals can simultaneously uphold specific gender expectations and offer avenues for gender expression. Furthermore, gender plays a notable role in patterns of religious conversion. According to the Pew Research Center, an estimated 83.4% of women worldwide identify with a faith group, compared to 79.9% of men. While specific conversion trends, such as women's inclination towards Christianity or men's propensity for conversion in Islam, can vary, it's essential to approach these patterns with an understanding that individual choices are influenced by a myriad of personal, cultural, and societal factors.
Cultural effects on religious practice
Religious worship may vary by individual due to differing cultural experiences of gender.
Greco-Roman Paganism
Both men and women who practiced paganism in ancient civilizations such as Rome and Greece worshiped male and female deities, but goddesses played a much larger role in women's lives. Roman and Greek goddesses' domains often aligned with culturally specific gender expectations at the time which served to perpetrate them in many cases. One such expectation of women was to marry at a relatively young age. The quadrennial Bear Festival, known as Arkteia, was held on the outskirts of Athens in honor of Artemis and involved girls ages seven to fourteen. The girls would compete in public athletic events as Greek men sat as onlookers, observing potential wives.
Demeter, the goddess of fertility, was a prominent deity due to women's ability to relate to her. The myth surrounding Demeter involves her losing her daughter, Persephone, against her will to Hades and the grief she experiences after the event. Mother-daughter relationships were very important to ancient Greeks. The severance of this relationship by fathers and husbands created much strain in young women who were forced to leave their mothers, submit to their husbands, and yield to the patriarchal society. Demeter was honored through female-exclusive ceremonies in various rituals due to her general disdain for the behaviors of men. Aphrodite, too, was honored by similar means. To women during this time period, the thought of Aphrodite's attitude toward males was comforting as she refused to answer to any mortal man, exhibiting the control that mortal women desired to have in their own lives.
Religious teachings on gender-related issues
Abortion
Women choosing to or not choosing to have an abortion is one of many gender related issues among different religions. In many religions, abortion is considered immoral.
The Catholic Church recognizes conception as the beginning of a human life, thus abortion is prohibited under all circumstances. However, according to the Second Vatican Council, women who have had an abortion but are willing to commit to the right of life are ensured forgiveness.
The Catholic Church has thoroughly fought the legalization of abortion and has expressed their thoughts on the issue. They take a pure pro-life stance with the help of protests, presentations, and proposals. They still cannot take a pluralistic stance between the values of life and liberty. Though through media and political delivery, theological problems in the area of one's conscience confuses the rights to religious freedom. Issues of consciousness is only something an individual can possess and yet the Church feels lesser than about the people who choose abortion
Regular church attendance has been shown to correlate with a higher attitude against abortion. This means that most church-goers are pro-life and believe that life begins at conception.
The pastoral message also has to be observed as each member of a church can interpret a message differently. The context of the church has to be considered as well, such as being in an urban or rural environment. The religious messages and how they are exposed in different cultural contexts can determine the effect it has on its listeners. Particularly women, who are more inclined to be religious, are more passionate about the idea of not getting an abortion.
In Hinduism, it is a woman's human duty to produce offspring, thus having an abortion is a violation of that duty. The Vedas, which are age-old sacred Sanskrit texts, suggests that abortion is more sinful than killing a priest or one's own parents. The practice of a woman having an abortion is deemed as unacceptable in the Hindu community, both socially and morally.
On the other hand, some religions recognize that abortion is acceptable only in some circumstances. Mormons believe the act of having an abortion is troublesome and destructive; however, health risks and complications, rape, and closely mating with relatives are the only situations in which abortion is not considered a sin.
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is expressly forbidden in many religions, but typically in casuistic rather than apodictic laws. As such, the rationale for such proscriptions is not clearly evident, though avoidance of procreation and contribution to society via establishing families are sometimes offered as pragmatic considerations.
In general, homosexuality is perceived as sinful in conservative movements, while fully accepted in liberal movements. For example, the Southern Baptist Christian denomination and Islamic community consider homosexuality a sin, whereas the American Baptist denomination perceives homosexuality on an inclusive scale.
Transgender identities
Paganism and Neo-paganism
Many Pagan religions place an emphasis on female divine energy which is manifested as The Goddess. The consensus is unclear on what is considered female and male. During PantheaCon in 2011, a group of Dianic Wiccans performing an all-female ritual turned away trans-women from joining due to their concept of women as capable of experiencing menstruation and childbirth.
Other pagans, however, have embraced a multitude of gender identities by worshiping transgender, intersex, and queer gods from antiquity, such as Greek god, Hermaphroditus.
Religious support for gender equality
Some religions, religious scholars and religious persons have argued that "gender inequality" exists either generally or in certain instances, and have supported a variety of remedies.
Discrimination based on gender and religion is frequently the result of laws and practices that are justified by religious beliefs. Certain religions, for example, forbid women from acting as clergy. The priesthood is reserved for men in the Catholic Church2. While men and women pray separately in Islam, women frequently have restricted room in mosques. Such traditions demonstrate the complicated interplay of prejudice at the intersection of gender and religion.
Sikhs believe in equality of men and women. Gender equality in Sikhism is exemplified by the following quote from Sikh holy scriptures: “From woman, man is born; within woman, man is conceived; to a woman he is engaged and married. Woman becomes his friend; through woman, the future generations come. When his woman dies, he seeks another woman; to woman he is bound. So why call her bad from whom kings are born. From woman, woman is born; without woman, there would be no one at all." – Translated into English from Gurmukhi, Siri Guru Nanak Sahib in Raag Aasaa, Siri Guru Granth Sahib pp 473
Pierre Chaunu has argued that the influence of Christianity promotes equality for women.
Priyamvada Gopal, of Churchill College, Cambridge, argues that increased gender equality is indeed a product of Judeo-Christian doctrine, but not exclusive to it. She expresses concern that gender equality is used by western countries as a rationale for "neocolonialism". Jamaine Abidogun argues that Judeo-Christian influence has indeed shaped gender roles in Nigeria (a strongly Christianised country); however, she does not consider feminism to be a product of Judeo-Christian doctrine, but rather a preferable form of "neocolonialism".
Gender patterns in religious observance
In studies pertaining to gender patterns in religions, it has been widely accepted that females are more likely to be religious than males. In 1997, statistics gathered by Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle theorized this phenomenon into three primary causes. The first explanation is that women feel emotions at greater heights than men do, thus women tend to turn to religion more in times of high emotions such as gratitude or guilt. The second explanation is that female socialization is more likely to align with values that are commonly found in religion such as conflict mediation, tenderness, and humility. In contrast, male socialization is more likely to emphasize rebellion, thus making the guideline aspects of religion less appealing. The third explanation, which is also the most recent theory, is that females are more likely to be able to identify with religion as a natural consequence of societal structures. For example, since a majority of religions emphasize women as caretakers of the home, the societal expectation of women to take greater responsibility than men for the upbringing of a child makes religion an appealing commitment. Another example is that traditionally, men tend to work outside the home whereas women tend to work inside the home, which corresponds to studies that have shown that people are more likely to be religious when working inside of their homes.
The Pew Research Center studied the effects of gender on religiosity throughout the world, finding that women are generally more religious than men, yet the gender gap is greater for Christians than Muslims.
Specific religions
More information on the role of gender in specific religions can be found on the following pages:
Baháʼí Faith – Baháʼí Faith and gender equality
Buddhism – Women in Buddhism
Christianity – Women in Christianity
Mormonism – Women and Mormonism
Hinduism – Women in Hinduism
Islam – Women in Islam
Judaism – Gender and Judaism, Women in Judaism
Sikhism – Women in Sikhism
See also
Thealogy aka Feminine divine
Religion and sexuality
Sex segregation
Transgender people and religion
Anti-gender movement
References
External links
Is Christianity an Inherently Feminine Religion? Brett and Kate McKay
Women in the Bible by the Atheist Foundation of Australia Inc.
Feminism and spirituality | 0.798285 | 0.982565 | 0.784367 |
Religious education | In secular usage, religious education is the teaching of a particular religion (although in the United Kingdom the term religious instruction would refer to the teaching of a particular religion, with religious education referring to teaching about religions in general) and its varied aspects: its beliefs, doctrines, rituals, customs, rites, and personal roles. In Western and secular culture, religious education implies a type of education which is largely separate from academia, and which (generally) regards religious belief as a fundamental tenet and operating modality, as well as a prerequisite for attendance.
The secular concept is substantially different from societies that adhere to religious law, wherein "religious education" connotes the dominant academic study, and in typically religious terms, teaches doctrines which define social customs as "laws" and the violations thereof as "crimes", or else misdemeanors requiring punitive correction.
The free choice of religious education by parents according to their conviction is protected by Convention against Discrimination in Education.
Religious education is a contentious topic everywhere. Some nations, including the United States, neither publicly support religious education nor include religion in the curriculum. In other contexts, such as the United Kingdom, an 'open' religious education has emerged from Christian confessionalism that is intended to promote general religious literacy without imparting a particular religious perspective.
Overview
Since people within a given country often hold varying religious and non-religious beliefs, government-sponsored religious education can be a source of conflict. Countries vary widely in whether religious education is allowed in government-run schools (often called "public schools"). Those that allow it also vary in the type of education provided.
People oppose religious education in public schools on various grounds. One is that it constitutes a state sponsorship or establishment of whatever religious beliefs are taught. Others argue that if a particular religion is taught in school, children who do not belong to that religion will either feel pressure to conform or be excluded from their peers. Proponents argue that religious beliefs have historically socialized people's behavior and morality. They feel that teaching religion in school is important to encourage children to be responsible, spiritually sound adults.
Religious education by religion
Christianity
In some denominations of Christianity, catechesis refers to the religious instruction of children and adult converts.
The Church Educational System of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) provides religious education for the youth and adults in 135 countries.
Islam
In religious Islamic schools children are taught to read and sometimes speak Arabic and memorize the major suras of the Qur'an. In the early 19th century Arabic still had a reputation as the universally understood language of science and medicine in the Islamic world while vernacular languages were spoken only in their respective countries.
In an architectural and historical context, the term generally refers to a particular kind of institution in the historic Muslim world which primarily taught Islamic law and jurisprudence (fiqh), as well as other subjects on occasion. The origin of this type of institution is widely credited to Nizam al-Mulk, a vizier under the Seljuks in the 11th century, who was responsible for building the first network of official madrasas in Iran, Mesopotamia, and Khorasan. From there, the construction of madrasas spread across much of the Muslim world over the next few centuries, often adopting similar models of architectural design.
The madrasas became the longest serving institutions of the Ottoman Empire, beginning service in 1330 and operating for nearly 600 years on three continents. They trained doctors, engineers, lawyers and religious officials, among other members of the governing and political elite. The madrasas were a specific educational institution, with their own funding and curricula, in contrast with the Enderun palace schools attended by Devshirme pupils.
Judaism
Jewish religious education mainly takes two forms: firstly, education regarding the main tenets of the faith and secondly, education regarding the laws and customs of the religion. The ultra-orthodox followers of Haredi Judaism teach only Jewish law and customs to their students, refraining from teaching any secular studies. The followers of Modern Orthodox Judaism, on the other hand, teach both secular studies and religious studies, with an emphasis on mixing Jewish values from the halakha with the secular, modern world. About Jewish religious education in a secular society, Michael Rosenak, an Israeli philosopher of Jewish education, asserts that even when non-religious Jewish educators insist that the instruction of Judaism is not only a religious matter, they agree that “the religious factor” was very important to its culture before secularism dawned on society, and that “an understanding of natural history and literature requires a sense of historical Jewish sensibility.
Approaches in various regions
New Zealand
In New Zealand, "Religious Education" refers to the academic teaching of religious studies. "Religious Instruction" refers to religious faith teaching, which occurs in private religious schools, integrated (religious) state schools or sometimes within Secular NZ State Primary Schools if directed by the individual schools' Board of Trustees. In 2017 around 40% of NZ State Primary Schools carried out religious instruction classes.
There are no officially recognised syllabuses as the school has to be officially closed in order to allow the classes to go ahead. There are organised groups such as the Secular Education Network and the NZ Association of Rationalists and Humanists, who are actively lobbying Government to have legislation changed to remove the classes from state primary schools.
China
In the People's Republic of China, formal religious education is permitted. Religious education usually occurs in scheduled sessions in private homes. Religious teachers usually move on a weekly or monthly circuit, staying as guests in private houses in exchange for teaching.
India
In India, there are a number of private schools run by religious institutions, especially for Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jains and Buddhists. During the era of British rule, Christian private schools were quite prominent and widely attended by both UK (British) and Indian students. Many of the schools established during this era, especially in areas with a heavy Christian population, are still in existence today. In addition to regular formal education, a number of religious institutions have instituted regular informal religious/spiritual education programs for children and adults.
Japan
In Japan, there are many Christian schools and universities with mandatory religious education. Any religious education at private middle and high schools requires the teacher to be accredited by a university teaching the religious education standards. Private schools with a traditional connection to Buddhist sects generally do not mandate any religious study. Religious or political education, or clubs that promote a specific religious or political group, are prohibited at public schools.
Pakistan
In Pakistan, Muslim students must take Islamic studies from primary to higher education. The subject is optional for non-Muslim students, who can choose the subject of ethics instead. The emphasis on religious studies in Pakistan's education system began when the nation was established in 1947. As a result, students in both public and private schools in Pakistan have the opportunity to learn subjects such as arts, science, English, and mathematics. However, in contrast, students in seminaries do not engage in any of these subjects.
South East Asia
In Thailand, Burma and other majority Buddhist societies, Buddhist teachings and social decorum are sometimes taught in public school. Young men are expected to live as monks for several months at one time in their lives during which they can receive religious education.
Iran
About 90 percent of Iranians practice Shi'ism (Islam), the official religion of Iran. Sunni and Shi'i are the two largest branches of Islam, with the overwhelming majority of Iranians practicing Shi'i Islam.
The main religion which is being taught to students in Iran is Islam and its holy book called Quran. Students start to learn it at the elementary and secondary school (typically ages 7–14) and it is compulsory for them to learn it. The government tries to hire teachers who are kind and convincing in order to teach religious content step by step to students. Other religions are not taught in public schools. There are some private schools for the recognized minority groups who have other religions, that is Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Judaism. These schools are supervised by the Ministry of Education which imposes certain curriculum requirements. The directors of these private schools must be Muslim, with few exceptions.
Europe
Austria
Because of Austria's history as a multinational empire that included the largely Islamic Bosnia, Sunni Islam has been taught side by side with Roman Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox classes since the 19th century. However, children belonging to minority religions, such as Judaism, Buddhism and the Latter Day Saint movement also study religious education in their various denominations. At many schools, secular classes in Ethics can be attended alternatively.
Finland
In Finland religious education is mandatory subject both in comprehensive schools (7–16 years) and in senior/upper secondary schools (16–18/19 years). Most of Finnish students study Evangelical Lutheran religious education. A student can receive religious education according to his or her own religion if the denomination is registered in Finland. Since religious education is a compulsory subject, pupils who do not belong to any religious group are taught ethics. Also some non-Lutheran pupils participate in the Evangelical Lutheran religious education.
France
In France, the state recognizes no religion and does not fund religious education. However, the state subsidizes private teaching establishments, including religious ones, under strict conditions of not forcing religion courses on students and not discriminating against students according to religion. An exception is the area of Alsace–Moselle where, for historical reasons (it was ruled by Germany when this system was instituted in the rest of France) under a specific local law, the state offers publicly-sponsored catechesis or instruction in some religions (Catholic, Protestant, Jewish) mostly in accord with the German model.
Germany
Historically, the various confessions in Germany have contributed to primary and secondary education and do so still. Education in Germany still embodies the legacy of the Prussian education system introduced by Frederick the Great in 1763. The curricula of the various states of Germany since then have included not only basic technical skills but also music (singing) and religious (Christian) education in close cooperation with the churches. This has led to the churches being assigned a specific status as legal entity of public law, "Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts" in Germany, which is a legacy of a 1919 Weimar compromise still in force today.
Most of the federal states of Germany, which has a long history of almost even division between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, have an arrangement whereby the religious bodies oversee the training of mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious education teachers.
In one of the federal states this includes Orthodox Christian teachers as well. In Berlin, Bremen (see Bremen clause) and Brandenburg, religious education is not mandatory. E.g. in Bremen, state-authorized "Bible studies" were offered which were not supervised by a specific confession.
The training is supposed to be conducted according to modern standards of the humanities, and by teachers trained at mostly state-run colleges and universities. Those teachers teach religion in public schools, are paid by the state and are bound to the German constitution, as well as answerable to the churches for the content of their teaching. Children who are part of no mainstream religion (this applies e.g. to members of the New Apostolic Church) still have to take part in the classes of one of the confessions or, if they want to opt out, attend classes in Ethics or Philosophy instead. The Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands, an atheist and agnostic association, has adopted to the legal setup of the churches and is now allowed to offer such classes. From the age of 14, children may decide on their own if they want to attend religion classes and, if they do, which of those they are willing to attend. For younger children it is the decision of their parents. The state also subsidizes religious and Waldorf education schools by paying up to 90% of their expenses. These schools have to follow the same curricula as public schools of their federal state, though.
The introduction of Islamic religious education in Germany has faced various burdens and thresholds, but it is being introduced currently. While there are around three million Muslims, mostly of Turkish origin, now in the country (see Islam in Germany), not many of them are members of a legal entity with which the states could arrange such matters (unlike the Christian churches' representatives and the humanists). In 2013, for the first time in German history, the state of Hessen acknowledged a Muslim community, the reform-oriented Ahmadiyya, as Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts for all of Germany, which has been deemed a historical milestone. Ahmadiyya applied for the status just to be able to offer religious education in state schools, but is allowed now to maintain its own cemeteries and have its members' fees collected by the state's church tax system.
Greece
In Greece, students at public primary and secondary schools (typically ages 6–17) learn the basics of the Greek Orthodox faith using the official curriculum. In accordance to EU's religious freedom rules, their parents can opt them out of the religious classes by requesting it in paper without any additional justification. Students above the age of 18 can opt out by themselves. The students that opt-out attend alternative (non-religious) courses.
Universities (which are mostly public) don't have any religious content unless it's related to the studies.
Italy
In Italy, Catholic religious education is a curricula subject for students attending primary and secondary school (ages 6–19), though students can opt out of religious classes and attend alternative courses instead. Alternatively, if religious class takes place in the first or last hour, non-attending students can enter late to school or go out early. It consists of an optional hour a week for any primary and secondary school curriculum.
Data shows that the percentage of students who choose to attend religious class is in steady decline. In 2020, the percentage was 86%.
Religious education was first introduced as a mandatory activity in Italy during the fascist regime, following the 1929 Lateran Treaty, but in 1984 it became optional.
The law n. 186 of 2003 instituted the possibility of a national public recruiting for the religion professors to be enrolled within the Italian primary and secondary schools. The teachers become public servants waged directly by the Minister of Public Education and not removable from their working place. A specific norm enforced the right for enrolled religion professors to be destinated to different teaching matters, compatible with their academic degrees, if they were denied of the needy diocesan license or by effect of a personal request for a job transfer. To be admitted to the public recruiting selection the teachers need a specific teaching license released by their diocesan bishop. In 2004 it was held the first national and public recruiting selection of this type. Another has been forecasted until December 2021, after an agreement signed by Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti and the Italian Minister of Public Education Lucia Azzolina.
On February 13, 2019, the Italian minister Marco Bussetti and the Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi, Prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, signed an agreement for mutual recognition of academic qualifications issued in the universities of Holy See and Italy. The agreement increased significantly the number of degree titles recognized in the Italian public schools.
Religious education in Italian public schools is controversial. For some, studying Catholic religion is important to understand Italy's historic, cultural and artistic heritage, while for others it is considered in contrast with the constitutional principles of secularity and religious freedom and also not appropriate for an increasingly diverse society. Some believe that religious education should be of exclusive competence of families and churches, therefore are opposed to religious education in public schools. However, the study of religion is always an optional choice in the public primary and secondary schools. The history of religions is taught within the scholastic curriculum of history, while some religious aspects are also integrated within the philosophy education of the Italian lyceums.
Latvia
In Latvia, since 2004 parents of the primary school students (grades 1 to 3) can choose Christian classes or the ethics. Christian classes are interdenominational (based on common Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Baptist, Old Believer grounds).
Netherlands
In the Netherlands, a distinction is made between public and special schools. Special schools teach on the basis of religion, philosophy of life or a vision of education. Public school lessons are not based on religion or belief. Public primary schools are most strongly represented in 2019 (31.6%), followed by Roman Catholic schools (30.5%), Protestant Christian primary schools (29.6%) and by primary schools with a denomination in the category 'other special' (8.3%). The relationship between schools with different denominations has remained stable in recent years. The government pays for both types of education. For this, schools must meet conditions. For example, education must be of sufficient quality. There are also requirements, for example, for the minimum number of pupils, the competence of teachers and the number of hours of education.
Poland
In Poland, religious education is optional in state schools. Parents decide whether children should attend religion classes or ethics classes or none of them. When a student reaches the age of 18, only then it becomes their formal autonomous decision to choose either subject or neither of them. Since 2007, grades from religion (or ethics) classes are counted towards the grade point average.
Romania
Religious education is optional in Romanian state schools. Parents can freely choose which religion their children will study, but a majority of religious classes focus on the Romanian Orthodox faith, which is the majority religion in the country.
Turkey
Institutional education in general, and religious education in particular, is centralized in Turkey. This approach began with the Unity of Education Law, which was first drafted in 1924 and preserved in subsequent legal reforms and constitutional changes. Due to the secular revolution, previous practices of the Ottoman education system were abandoned. The newer Unity of Education Law was interpreted as totally excluding religious instruction from public schools. The newly established Republic of Turkey aimed to be secular and more western with the rule of Atatürk. In 1923, changes such as the acceptance of the Latin alphabet, which is taught to pupils in the national schools, and the Gregorian calendar took place in the new established country. With the closure of Madrasas, which were provided for the society to have religious knowledge and education, classes of religion were also abolished from the schools. Religious education such as Quran courses or other religious activities had to be controlled by the government and separated from regular education.
The situation changed in 1946 when the one-party period came to an end. The faculty of Divinity was introduced in 1949 at Ankara University to educate, raise and train Imams, carry out scientific research about religion, mostly Islam. In 1956, as a result of multiparty democracy, a new government led by the former Democratic Party was established. This government introduced a religion course into secondary schools. With the Democrat Party, religion started to show up as a lecture in the schools with the name of ‘The culture of religion and Knowledge of Ethics’ but parents had to give their permission. Furthermore, Imam Hatip schools were established in some cities of Turkey with a limited number of students. In the following years, until the 1980 coup, the number of Imam Hatip Schools and religious education increased in Turkey. After the military coup in 1980, religious education in school was transformed and became a compulsory part of the curriculum, with the "Culture of Religion and Knowledge of Ethics" course. The content of religious education was prepared by the state, which ensured that children were first exposed to accepted interpretations of Islam before being exposed to other religious teachings.
In the late 1990s, the right of students who are graduated from Imam Hatip schools was limited with the education reform bill. Moreover, the middle school Imam Hatip schools converted to regular high schools for students to continue their higher education with other fields rather than Theology or Dignity faculties as their wish. Besides, in the beginning of 2000's a new law led to a decrease in the number of Quran courses because the law introduce for the students to attend Quran courses after they finished their eight year of education rather than five.
United Kingdom
Schools approach the education of faith and religious matters in divergent manners across the four countries that constitute the United Kingdom (UK). For instance, presently schools in England and Northern Ireland respectively must teach a subject called Religious Education (RE), schools in Scotland must teach Religious and Moral Education (RME) and schools in Wales must teach Religion, Values and Ethics (RVE). Despite the matching designation of the subject in England and Northern Ireland (and the similar naming of the subjects more generally across the UK), the subjects have distinct subject matter, which is determined differently.
To expand, in England, RE occupies an unusual position in the curriculum; it is part of the Basic Curriculum and not the National Curriculum. Until the introduction of the National Curriculum, RE was the only compulsory subject in state schools. The most recent and relevant legislation on RE in England is the Education Reform Act 1988. This Act states that each Local Authority in England must create a locally agreed syllabus for RE lessons, for any maintained school in their area without a religious character. Examples of maintained school include community schools, foundation schools, voluntary aided schools and voluntary controlled schools. Local Authorities in England must do this through organising a Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education, in which representatives of local religious faith communities, teachers and the local authority itself participate, to determine the subject aims, approach and matter which will be taught in the schools of the Local Authority. Foundation schools, voluntary aided schools and voluntary controlled schools may have a religious character and/or ethos and this may affect the way which RE is taught in their settings. For instance, in foundation and voluntary controlled schools with a religious character, RE must be taught in accordance with the locally agreed syllabus, unless parents request RE in accordance with the trust deed of the school; in voluntary aided schools, RE must be taught in accordance with the trust deed.
As of 2024, the majority of schools in England are academies. The Academies Act 2010 introduced academies in England; these are funded by the state but exist outside Local Authority control. While academy leaders may choose to follow the locally agreed curriculum for their area, there is no legal condition for them to do so and they may produce their own, provided that it meets the requirements of a locally agreed syllabus, given in section 375(3) of the Education Act 1996 and paragraph 5 of Schedule 19 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. These provisions include that any locally agreed syllabus ‘shall reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian whilst taking account of the teaching and practices of the other principal religions represented in Great Britain'. State school religious education is non-proselytising and covers a variety of faiths, although the legislation requires it to include more Christian content than other faiths. The Education Reform Act 1988 also states that the parents of any pupil attending a maintained school may request that their child does not attend religious worship, attending or receiving any form of RE either wholly or partly, and that this request should be granted and the pupil excused until the request is withdrawn.
In Northern Ireland, RE is taught according to a core curriculum, which was developed by church groups and the Council for Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment (CCEA). The subject includes the study of Christianity, morality and the main religions of the world. In Key Stage 4, pupils should examine the perspectives of different church groups. As in England, parents have the right to withdraw their children from RE lessons.
In Scotland, RME differs in non-denominational schools and Roman Catholic schools. In non-denominational schools, the subject matter includes the study of Christianity, the major world religions, and non-religious beliefs. In Roman Catholic schools, the subject includes the study of Catholic Christianity and the major world religions. As in England and Northern Ireland, parents have the right to withdraw their children from RME lessons. The Church of Scotland does not have schools, although it does often have a presence in Scottish non-denominational institutions.
In Wales, RVE includes the study of Christianity and the other major religions of the world. The subject must also be taught in a way that reflects that a range of philosophical or non-religious beliefs exist in Wales. The subject should always be taught objectively and critically and RE teachers should adopt an unbiased approach to the subject that does not encourage a religious or non-religious point of view. Unlike England, Northern Ireland and Scotland, parents are not permitted to withdraw their children from RVE lessons.
In 2010, academics noted that RE had become overburdened with expectations in the UK, including acquiring and developing knowledge and understanding of Christianity and the other principal religions, developing the ability to make reasoned and informed judgements about religious and moral issues, enhancing pupils' spiritual, moral, cultural and social development, developing positive attitudes towards others.
North America
Canada
In Canada, religious education has varying status. On the one hand, publicly funded and organized separate schools for Roman Catholics and Protestants are mandated in some provinces and in some circumstances by various sections of the Constitution Act, 1867. On the other hand, with a growing level of multiculturalism, particularly in Ontario, debate has emerged as to whether publicly funded religious education for one group is permissible. For example, Newfoundland withdrew funding for Protestant and Roman Catholic schools in 1995, after a constitutional amendment. Quebec abolished religious education funded by the state through the Education Act, 1998, which took effect on July 1 of that same year, again after a constitutional amendment. Quebec re-organized the schools along linguistic rather than religious lines. In Ontario, however, the move to abolish funding has been strongly resisted. In the 2007 provincial election, the topic of funding for faith-based schools that were not Catholic became a major topic. The provincial conservative party was defeated due, in part, to their support of the idea.
United States
In the United States, religious education is often provided voluntarily through supplementary "Sunday school", "Hebrew school", or catechism classes, taught to children at their families' places of worship, either in conjunction with worship services or some other time during the week, after weekday school classes. Some families believe supplementary religious education is inadequate, and send their children to private religious schools, called parochial schools when Catholic, day schools or yeshivas when Jewish. Many faiths also offer private college and graduate-level religious schools or seminaries, some of which are accredited as colleges.
In public schools, U.S. law allows for religious education under released time during school hours; LifeWise Academy and Child Evangelism Fellowship are examples of voluntary Christian programs that utilize this. Additionally, under U.S. law, religious education in public schools is permittable if it is done from a neutral, academic perspective.
See also
Character education
Christian views on the classics
Freedom of education
Islamic studies
Jewish day school
Parochial school
Private school
Religion and children
Religious school
Religious studies
State religion
Tripiṭaka
References
Further reading
Barnes, L. Philip (2012) Debates in Religious Education. UK: Routledge.
Bergulund, Jenny, Shanneik, Yafa and Brian Bocking, eds. Religious Education in a Global-Local World. UK: Springer.
Carper, James C. and Thomas C. Hunt, eds. Religious Schooling in America (Religious Education Press, 1984). For online review see http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10567224.1984.11487803
Jones, Steven. Religious Schooling in America : Private Education and Public Life (ABC-CLIO, 2008)
External links
"Four Seventies Released", Ensign, November 1991.
The Association for Asian Studies. "Session 93: Chinese Lay Buddhists in the Early Twentieth Century and the Question of Secularization: Four Case Studies." Association for Asian Studies, Inc., Mar. 2009. Web. 29 Sept. 2009
"Faith in the System." Crown Copyright, 2007. Web. 29 Sept. 2009
Department of Education. "Overview of Governing Constitutional Principles." 15 Sept. 2003. Web. 29 Sept. 2009
A Cultural Study of Religious Education in America in Feng Chia Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences pp. 149–166, No.18, Jun. 2009, Author: Grace Hui Chin Lin | 0.793253 | 0.98728 | 0.783163 |
Cultural identity | Cultural identity is a part of a person's identity, or their self-conception and self-perception, and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality, gender, or any kind of social group that has its own distinct culture. In this way, cultural identity is both characteristic of the individual but also of the culturally identical group of members sharing the same cultural identity or upbringing. Cultural identity is an unfixed process that is continually evolving within the discourses of social, cultural, and historical experiences. Some people undergo more cultural identity changes as opposed to others, those who change less often have a clear cultural identity. This means that they have a dynamic yet stable integration of their culture.
There are three pieces that make up a person's cultural identity: cultural knowledge, category label, and social connections. Cultural knowledge refers to a person's connection to their identity through understanding their culture's core characteristics. Category label refers to a person's connection to their identity through indirect membership of said culture. Social connections refers to a person's connection to their identity through their social relationships. Cultural identity is developed through a series of steps. First, a person comes to understand a culture through being immersed in those values, beliefs, and practices. Second, the person then identifies as a member of that culture dependent on their rank within that community. Third, they develop relationships such as immediate family, close friends, coworkers, and neighbors.
Culture is a term that is highly complex and often contested with academics recording about 160 variations in meaning. Underpinning the notion of culture is that it is dynamic and changes over time and in different contexts resulting in many people today identifying with one or more cultures and many different ways.
It is a defining feature of a person's identity, contributing to how they see themselves and the groups with which they identify. A person's understanding of their own and other's identities develops from birth and is shaped by the values and attitudes prevalent at home and in the surrounding community.
Description
Various modern cultural studies and social theories have investigated cultural identity and understanding. In recent decades, a new form of identification has emerged that breaks down the understanding of the individual as a coherent whole subject into a collection of various cultural identifiers. These cultural identifiers may be the result of various conditions including: location, sex, race, history, nationality, language, sexuality, religious beliefs, ethnicity, aesthetics, and food. As one author writes:
When talking about identity, we generally define this word as the series of physical features that differentiate a person. Thus at birth, our parents declare us and give us a name with which they will identify us based on whether we are a boy or a girl. Identity is not only a right that declares the name, sex, time, and place that one is born; the word identity goes beyond what we define it. Identity is a function of elements that portrays one in a dynamic way, in constant evolution, throughout the stages of life identity develops based on personal experiences, tastes, and choices of a sexual and religious nature, as well as the social environment, these being some of the main parameters that influence and transform the day to day and allow us to discover a new part of ourselves.
The divisions between cultures can be very fine in some parts of the world, especially in rapidly changing cities where the population is ethnically diverse and social unity is based primarily on locational contiguity.
As a "historical reservoir," culture is an important factor in shaping identity. Since one of the main characteristics of a culture is its "historical reservoir," many if not all groups entertain revisions, either consciously or unconsciously, in their historical record in order to either bolster the strength of their cultural identity or to forge one which gives them precedent for actual reform or change.
Some critics of cultural identity argue that the preservation of cultural identity, being based upon difference, is a divisive force in society and that cosmopolitanism gives individuals a greater sense of shared citizenship. When considering practical association in international society, states may share an inherent part of their 'make up' that gives common ground and an alternative means of identifying with each other. Nations provide the framework for cultural identities called external cultural reality, which influences the unique internal cultural realities of the individuals within the nation.
There is a relationship between cultural identity and new media.
Rather than necessarily representing an individual's interaction within a certain group, cultural identity may be defined by the social network of people imitating and following the social norms as presented by the media. Accordingly, instead of learning behavior and knowledge from cultural/religious groups, individuals may be learning these social norms from the media to build on their cultural identity.
A range of cultural complexities structures the way individuals operate with the cultural realities in their lives. Nation is a large factor of the cultural complexity, as it constructs the foundation for an individual's identity, but it may contrast with one's cultural reality. Cultural identities are influenced by several different factors such as ones religion, ancestry, skin color, language, class, education, profession, skill, family and political attitudes. These factors contribute to the development of one's identity.
History
The history of cultural identity develops out of the observations of a number of social scientists. A history of cultural identity is important because it outlines the understanding of how our identities provide a way to see ourselves in relation to the world in which we live. "Cultural identities...are the natural, and most fundamental, constitutive elements of individual and collective identity."
Franz Boas is an important figure in the creation of the idea of cultural identity. Boas is known for challenging ideas about culture. Boas promoted the importance of viewing a culture from within its own perspective and understanding, not from the outsider's view point. This was a somewhat radical perspective at the time. Additionally, Myron Lustig is credited with contributing the concept of cultural identity theory.
A number of contemporary theorists continue to contribute to the concept of cultural identity. For instance, contemporary work completed by Stuart Hall is considered essential to understand cultural identity. According to Hall, identity is defined by at least two specific actions, which are similarity and difference. Specifically, in settings of slavery and colonization, identity provides a connection to the past as well as disintegration from a shared origination.
Theorists' questions about identity include “whether identity is to be understood as something internal that persists through change or as something ascribed from without that changes according to circumstance." Whatever the case may be, Gleason advocates for “sensitivity to the intrinsic complexities of the subject matter with which it deals, and careful attention to the need for precision and consistency in its application. Cultural identity can also become a marker of difference that requires sensitivity.
Kuper presents concepts on cultural identity within the framework of a power dynamic. He writes, "The privileged lie and mislead, but the oppressed come gradually to appreciate their objective circumstances and formulate a new consciousness that will ultimately liberate them." The consciousness is a facet of their identity. Similarly, identity plays a role in mediating between a human being and the environment in which they exist.
The identity of a person is “a result of socialization and customs” that promotes the maintenance of distinct cultural identities from generation to generation. Additionally, identity can be considered that which forms cultures and results in “dictated appropriate behavior." Put another way, identity may dictate behavior that results in the reification of identity with the individual as a “replicate in miniature of the larger social and cultural entity. Another way to consider cultural identity is that it is “the sum of material wealth and spiritual wealth created by human beings in the practice of social history."
Globalization is connected to influences in economics, politics, and society. Accordingly, globalization has an impact on cultural identity. As societies become even more connected, there are concerns that cultural identities will become homogenized through the increased level of connection and communication. However, there are alternative perspectives on this issue. For instance, Wright theorizes that "The spread of global culture and globalised ideas has led to many movements designed to embrace the uniqueness and diversity of an individual’s particular culture."
Cultural arena
It is also noted that an individual's "cultural arena," or place where one lives, impacts the culture that person abides by. The surroundings, environment, and people in these places play a role in how one feels about the culture they wish to adopt. Many immigrants find the need to change their culture in order to fit into the culture of most citizens in the country. This can conflict with an immigrant's current belief in their culture and might pose a problem, as the immigrant feels compelled to choose between the two presenting cultures.
Some might be able to adjust to the various cultures in the world by committing to two or more cultures. It is not required to stick to one culture. Many people socialize and interact with people in one culture in addition to another group of people in another culture. Thus, cultural identity is able to take many forms and can change depending on the cultural area. The impact of the cultural arena has changed with the advent of the Internet, bringing together groups of people with shared cultural interests who before would have been more likely to integrate into their real-world cultural arena. This adaptability is what allows people to feel a part of society and culture wherever they go.
Language
Language allows for people in a group to communicate their values, beliefs, and customs, all of which contribute to creating a cultural identity. It was for a long time believed that if children lose their languages, they lose part or all of their cultural identity. When students who are non-native English speakers, go to classes where they are required to speak only English, they feel that their native language has no value. Some studies found, that this leads to loss of their culture and language altogether and this can lead to either a massive change in cultural identity, or they find themselves struggling to understand who they are. Language also includes the way people speak with peers, family members, authority figures, and strangers, including the tone and familiarity that is included in the language. The learning process can also be affected by cultural identity via the understanding of specific words, and the preference for specific words when learning and using a second language. Since many aspects of a person's cultural identity can be changed, such as citizenship or influence from outside cultures, language is a major component of cultural identity. However, more recent research could show, that language may be not a crucial part of a person's identity or cultural identity.
Education
Cultural identity is often not discussed in the classroom or learning environment where an instructor presides over the class. This often happens when the instructor attempts to discuss cultural identity and the issues that come with it in the classroom and is met with disagreement and cannot make forward progress in the conversation. Moreover, not talking about cultural identity can lead to issues such as prohibiting growth of education, development of a sense of self, and social competency. In these environments there are often many different cultures and problems can occur due to different worldviews that prevent others from being able to think outwardly about their peers' values and differing backgrounds. If students are able to think outwardly, then they can not only better connect with their peers, but also further develop their own worldview. In addition to this, instructors should take into account the needs of different students' backgrounds in order to best relay the material in a way that engages the student.
When students learn that knowledge and truth are relevant to each person, that instructors do not know everything, and that their own personal experiences dictate what they believe they can better contextualize new information using their own experiences as well as taking into account the different cultural experiences of others. This in turn increases the ability to critically think and challenge new information which benefits all students learning in a classroom setting. There are two ways instructors can better elicit this response from their students through active communication of cultural identity. The first is by having students engage in class discussion with their peers. Doing so creates community and allows for students to share their knowledge as well as question their peers and instructors, thereby, learning about each other's cultural identity and creating acceptance of differing worldviews in the classroom. The second way is by using active learning methods such as "forming small groups and analyzing case studies". Through engaging in active learning students learn that their cultural identity is welcomed and accepted.
Cultural identity and immigrant experience
Identity development among immigrant groups has been studied across a multi-dimensional view of acculturation. Acculturation is the phenomenon that results when groups or individuals from different cultures come into continuous contact with one another and adopt certain values and practices that were not originally their own. Acculturation is unique from assimilation. Dina Birman and Edison Trickett (2001) conducted a qualitative study through informal interviews with first-generation Soviet Jewish refugee adolescents looking at the process of acculturation through three different dimensions: language competence, behavioral acculturation, and cultural identity. The results indicated that "acculturation appears to occur in a linear pattern over time for most dimensions of acculturation, with acculturation to the American culture increasing and acculturation to the Russian culture decreasing. However, Russian language competence for the parents did not diminish with length of residence in the country" (Birman & Trickett, 2001).
In a similar study, Phinney, Horencyzk, Liebkind, and Vedder (2001) focused on a model, which concentrates on the interaction between immigrant characteristics and the responses of the majority society to understand the psychological effects of immigration. The researchers concluded that most studies find that being bicultural, the combination of a strong ethnic and a strong national identity, yields the best adaptation in the new country of residence. An article by LaFromboise, L. K. Colemna, and Gerton, reviews the literature on the impact of being bicultural. It showed that it is possible to have the ability to obtain competence within two cultures without losing one's sense of identity or having to identity with one culture over the other. (LaFromboise Et Al. 1993) The importance of ethnic and national identity in the educational adaptation of immigrants indicates that a bicultural orientation is advantageous for school performance (Portes & Rumbaut, 1990). Educators can assume their positions of power in beneficially impactful ways for immigrant students, by providing them with access to their native cultural support groups, language classes, after-school activities, and clubs in order to help them feel more connected to both native and national cultures. It is clear that the new country of residence can impact immigrants' identity development across multiple dimensions. Biculturalism can allow for a healthy adaptation to life and school. With many new immigrant youth, a school district in Alberta, Canada, has gone as far as to partner with various agencies and professionals in an effort to aid the cultural adjustment of new Filipino immigrant youths. In the study cited, a combination of family workshops and teacher professional development aimed to improve the language learning and emotional development of these youths and families.
School Transitions
How great is "Achievement Loss Associated with the Transition to Middle School and High School"? John W. Alspaugh's research is in the September/October 1998 Journal of Educational Research (vol. 92, no. 1), 2026. Comparing three groups of 16 school districts, the loss was greater where the transition was from sixth grade than from a K-8 system. It was also greater when students from multiple elementary schools merged into a single middle school. Students from both K-8 and middle schools lost achievement in transition to high school, though this was greater for middle school students, and high school dropout rates were higher for districts with grades 6-8 middle schools than for those with K-8 elementary schools.
The Jean S. Phinney Three-Stage Model of Ethnic Identity Development is a widely accepted view of the formation of cultural identity. In this model cultural Identity is often developed through a three-stage process: unexamined cultural identity, cultural identity search, and cultural identity achievement.
Unexamined cultural identity: "a stage where one's cultural characteristics are taken for granted, and consequently there is little interest in exploring cultural issues." This for example is the stage one is in throughout their childhood when one doesn't distinguish between cultural characteristics of their household and others. Usually, a person in this stage accepts the ideas they find on culture from their parents, the media, community, and others.
An example of thought in this stage: "I don't have a culture I'm just an American." "My parents tell me about where they lived, but what do I care? I've never lived there."
Cultural identity search: "is the process of exploration and questioning about one's culture in order to learn more about it and to understand the implications of membership in that culture." During this stage a person will begin to question why they hold their beliefs and compare it to the beliefs of other cultures. For some this stage may arise from a turning point in their life or from a growing awareness of other cultures. This stage is characterized by growing awareness in social and political forums and a desire to learn more about culture. This can be expressed by asking family members questions about heritage, visiting museums, reading of relevant cultural sources, enrolling in school courses, or attendance at cultural events. This stage might have an emotional component as well.
An example of thought in this stage: "I want to know what we do and how our culture is different from others." "There are a lot of non-Japanese people around me, and it gets pretty confusing to try and decide who I am."
Cultural identity achievement: "is characterized by a clear, confident acceptance of oneself and an internalization of one's cultural identity." In this stage people often allow the acceptance of their cultural identity play a role in their future choices such as how to raise children, how to deal with stereotypes and any discrimination and approach negative perceptions. This usually leads to an increase in self-confidence and positive psychological adjustment
The role of the internet
There is a set of phenomena that occur in conjunction between virtual culture – understood as the modes and norms of behavior associated with the internet and the online world – and youth culture. While we can speak of a duality between the virtual (online) and real sphere (face-to-face relations), for youth, this frontier is implicit and permeable. On occasions – to the annoyance of parents and teachers – these spheres are even superposed, meaning that young people may be in the real world without ceasing to be connected.
In the present techno-cultural context, the relationship between the real world and the virtual world cannot be understood as a link between two independent and separate worlds, possibly coinciding at a point, but as a Moebius strip where there exists no inside and outside and where it is impossible to identify limits between both. For new generations, to an ever-greater extent, digital life merges with their home life as yet another element of nature. In this naturalizing of digital life, the learning processes from that environment are frequently mentioned not just since they are explicitly asked but because the subject of the internet comes up spontaneously among those polled. The ideas of active learning, of googling 'when you don't know', of recourse to tutorials for learning a program or a game, or the expression 'I learnt English better and in a more entertaining way by playing' are examples often cited as to why the internet is the place most frequented by the young people polled.
The internet is becoming an extension of the expressive dimension of the youth condition. There, youth talk about their lives and concerns, design the content that they make available to others and assess others' reactions to it in the form of optimized and electronically mediated social approval. Many of today's youth go through processes of affirmation procedures and is often the case for how youth today grow dependent on peer approval. When connected, youth speak of their daily routines and lives. With each post, image or video they upload, they have the possibility of asking themselves who they are and to try out profiles differing from those they assume in the 'real' world. The connections they feel in more recent times have become much less interactive through personal means compared to past generations. The influx of new technology and access has created new fields of research on effects on teens and young adults. They thus negotiate their identity and create senses of belonging, putting the acceptance and censure of others to the test, an essential mark of the process of identity construction.
Youth ask themselves about what they think of themselves, how they see themselves personally and, especially, how others see them. On the basis of these questions, youth make decisions which, through a long process of trial and error, shape their identity. This experimentation is also a form through which they can think about their insertion, membership and sociability in the 'real' world.
From other perspectives, the question arises on what impact the internet has had on youth through accessing this sort of 'identity laboratory' and what role it plays in the shaping of youth identity. On the one hand, the internet enables young people to explore and perform various roles and personifications while on the other, the virtual forums – some of them highly attractive, vivid and absorbing (e.g. video games or virtual games of personification) – could present a risk to the construction of a stable and viable personal identity.
See also
Sources
References
Sources
Gad Barzilai, Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Tan, S.-h. (2005). Challenging citizenship: group membership and cultural identity in a global age. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate.
Bunschoten, R., Binet, H., & Hoshino, T. (2001). Urban flotsam: stirring the city : Chora. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.
Mandelbaum, M. (2000). The new European diasporas: national minorities and conflict in Eastern Europe. New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press
Houtman, G. (1999). Mental culture in Burmese crisis politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. (library.cornell.edu).
Sagasti, F. R., & Alcalde, G. (1999). Development cooperation in a fractured global order: an arduous transition. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre.
Crahan, M. E., & Vourvoulias-Bush, A. (1997). The city and the world: New York's global future. New York: Council on Foreign relations.
Hall, S., & Du Gay, P. (1996). Questions of cultural identity. London: Sage.
Cable, V. (1994). The world's new fissures: identities in crisis. London: Demos.
Berkson, I. B. (1920).Theories of Americanization a critical study, with special reference to the Jewish group. New York City: Teachers College, Columbia University.
Mora, Necha. (2008).
Further reading
Anderson, Benedict (1983). Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
Balibar, Renée & Laporte, Dominique (1974). Le français national: Politique et pratique de la langue nationale sous la Révolution. Paris: Hachette.
(full-text IDENTITIES: how Governed, Who Pays?)
de Certeau, Michel; Julia, Dominique; & Revel, Jacques (1975). Une politique de la langue: La Révolution française et les patois. Paris: Gallimard.
Evangelista, M. (2003). "Culture, Identity, and Conflict: The Influence of Gender," in Conflict and Reconstruction in Multiethnic Societies, Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press
Fishman, Joshua A. (1973). Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Gellner, Ernest (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Gordon, David C. (1978). The French Language and National Identity (1930–1975). The Hague: Mouton.
Milstein, T. & Castro-Sotomayor, J. (2020). "Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity". London, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351068840
Robyns, Clem (1995). "Defending the national identity". In Andreas Poltermann (Ed.), Literaturkanon, Medienereignis, Kultureller Text. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag .
Sparrow, Lise M. (2014). Beyond multicultural man: Complexities of identity. In Molefi Kete Asante, Yoshitaka Miike, & Jing Yin (Eds.), The global intercultural communication reader (2nd ed., pp. 393–414). New York, NY: Routledge.
Stewart, Edward C., & Bennet, Milton J. (1991). American cultural patterns: A cross-cultural perspective (Rev. ed.). Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.
Woolf, Stuart. "Europe and the Nation-State". EUI Working Papers in History 91/11. Florence: European University Institute.
Anthropology
Cultural geography
Identity
Identity
Cross-cultural psychology | 0.785281 | 0.996609 | 0.782618 |
Culture | Culture is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, attitude, and habits of the individuals in these groups. Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.
Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies.
A cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group.
Accepting only a monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change.
Thus in military culture, valor is counted a typical behavior for an individual and duty, honor, and loyalty to the social group are counted as virtues or functional responses in the continuum of conflict. In the practice of religion, analogous attributes can be identified in a social group.
Cultural change, or repositioning, is the reconstruction of a cultural concept of a society. Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies.
Organizations like UNESCO attempt to preserve culture and cultural heritage.
Description
Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies. These include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.
In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been used to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the proletariat and create a false consciousness. Such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.
When used as a count noun, a "culture" is the set of customs, traditions, and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. Culture is the set of knowledge acquired over time. In this sense, multiculturalism values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes "culture" is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture (e.g. "bro culture"), or a counterculture. Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism hold that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture.
Etymology
The modern term "culture" is based on a term used by the ancient Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or "cultura animi", using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a modern context, meaning something similar, but no longer assuming that philosophy was man's natural perfection. His use, and that of many writers after him, "refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human."
In 1986, philosopher Edward S. Casey wrote, "The very word culture meant 'place tilled' in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, 'to inhabit, care for, till, worship' and cultus, 'A cult, especially a religious one.' To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly."
Culture described by Richard Velkley: ... originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meaning in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau's criticism of "modern liberalism and Enlightenment." Thus a contrast between "culture" and "civilization" is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such.
In the words of anthropologist E.B. Tylor, it is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, "Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.
The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is "the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time." Terror management theory posits that culture is a series of activities and worldviews that provide humans with the basis for perceiving themselves as "person[s] of worth within the world of meaning"—raising themselves above the merely physical aspects of existence, in order to deny the animal insignificance and death that Homo sapiens became aware of when they acquired a larger brain.
The word is used in a general sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols and to act imaginatively and creatively. This ability arose with the evolution of behavioral modernity in humans around 50,000 years ago and is often thought to be unique to humans. However, some other species have demonstrated similar, though much less complicated, abilities for social learning. It is also used to denote the complex networks of practices and accumulated knowledge and ideas that are transmitted through social interaction and exist in specific human groups, or cultures, using the plural form.
Change
Raimon Panikkar identified 29 ways in which cultural change can be brought about, including growth, development, evolution, involution, renovation, reconception, reform, innovation, revivalism, revolution, mutation, progress, diffusion, osmosis, borrowing, eclecticism, syncretism, modernization, indigenization, and transformation. In this context, modernization could be viewed as adoption of Enlightenment era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and the notion of progress. Rein Raud, building on the work of Umberto Eco, Pierre Bourdieu and Jeffrey C. Alexander, has proposed a model of cultural change based on claims and bids, which are judged by their cognitive adequacy and endorsed or not endorsed by the symbolic authority of the cultural community in question.
Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change period," driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors. Culture repositioning means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society.
Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change.
Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.
Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, Western restaurant chains and culinary brands sparked curiosity and fascination to the Chinese as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th-century. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct borrowing", on the other hand, tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.
Acculturation has different meanings. Still, in this context, it refers to the replacement of traits of one culture with another, such as what happened to certain Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and transculturation. The transnational flow of culture has played a major role in merging different cultures and sharing thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.
Early modern discourses
German Romanticism
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) formulated an individualist definition of "enlightenment" similar to the concept of : "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." He argued that this immaturity comes not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of courage to think independently. Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged: "" ("Dare to be wise!"). In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective form of : "For Herder, was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people."
In 1795, the Prussian linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests. During the Romantic era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with nationalist movements—such as the nationalist struggle to create a "Germany" out of diverse principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities against the Austro-Hungarian Empire—developed a more inclusive notion of culture as "worldview". According to this school of thought, each ethnic group has a distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the worldviews of other groups. Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between "civilized" and "primitive" or "tribal" cultures.
In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) argued for "the psychic unity of mankind." He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of "elementary ideas"; different cultures, or different "folk ideas", are local modifications of the elementary ideas. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture. Franz Boas (1858–1942) was trained in this tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for the United States.
English Romanticism
In the 19th century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) used the word "culture" to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." This concept of culture is also comparable to the German concept of : "...culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world."
In practice, culture referred to an elite ideal and was associated with such activities as art, classical music, and haute cuisine. As these forms were associated with urban life, "culture" was identified with "civilization" (from ). Another facet of the Romantic movement was an interest in folklore, which led to identifying a "culture" among non-elites. This distinction is often characterized as that between high culture, namely that of the ruling social group, and low culture. In other words, the idea of "culture" that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within European societies.
Matthew Arnold contrasted "culture" with anarchy; other Europeans, following philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contrasted "culture" with "the state of nature." According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the Native Americans who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between "civilized" and "uncivilized." According to this way of thinking, one could classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution. Just as some critics have argued that the distinction between high and low cultures is an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, other critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people is an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects.
Other 19th-century critics, following Rousseau, have accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people's essential nature. These critics considered folk music (as produced by "the folk," i.e., rural, illiterate, peasants) to honestly express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as "noble savages" living authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly stratified capitalist systems of the West.
In 1870 the anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion. According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms. In the process, he redefined culture as a diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of religion.
Anthropology
Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor's definition of culture, in the 20th century "culture" emerged as the central and unifying concept of American anthropology, where it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture: biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and in the United States and Canada, archaeology. The term , or "culture glasses," coined by German American anthropologist Franz Boas, refers to the "lenses" through which a person sees their own culture. Martin Lindstrom asserts that , which allow a person to make sense of the culture they inhabit, "can blind us to things outsiders pick up immediately."
Sociology
The sociology of culture concerns culture as manifested in society. For sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." As such, culture in the sociological field can be defined as the ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together shape a people's way of life. Culture can be either of two types, non-material culture or material culture. Non-material culture refers to the non-physical ideas that individuals have about their culture, including values, belief systems, rules, norms, morals, language, organizations, and institutions, while material culture is the physical evidence of a culture in the objects and architecture they make or have made. The term tends to be relevant only in archeological and anthropological studies, but it specifically means all material evidence which can be attributed to culture, past or present.
Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany (1918–1933), where sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term ('cultural sociology'). Cultural sociology was then reinvented in the English-speaking world as a product of the cultural turn of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and postmodern approaches to social science. This type of cultural sociology may be loosely regarded as an approach incorporating cultural analysis and critical theory. Cultural sociologists tend to reject scientific methods, instead hermeneutically focusing on words, artifacts and symbols. Culture has since become an important concept across many branches of sociology, including resolutely scientific fields like social stratification and social network analysis. As a result, there has been a recent influx of quantitative sociologists to the field. Thus, there is now a growing group of sociologists of culture who are, confusingly, not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstracted postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, and instead, look for a theoretical backing in the more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science.
Early researchers and development of cultural sociology
The sociology of culture grew from the intersection between sociology (as shaped by early theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) with the growing discipline of anthropology, wherein researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describing and analyzing a variety of cultures around the world. Part of the legacy of the early development of the field lingers in the methods (much of cultural, sociological research is qualitative), in the theories (a variety of critical approaches to sociology are central to current research communities), and in the substantive focus of the field. For instance, relationships between popular culture, political control, and social class were early and lasting concerns in the field.
Cultural studies
In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism such as Stuart Hall (1932–2014) and Raymond Williams (1921–1988) developed cultural studies. Following nineteenth-century Romantics, they identified culture with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing). They saw patterns of consumption and leisure as determined by relations of production, which led them to focus on class relations and the organization of production.
In the United Kingdom, cultural studies focuses largely on the study of popular culture; that is, on the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. Richard Hoggart coined the term in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director. Cultural studies in this sense, then, can be viewed as a limited concentration scoped on the intricacies of consumerism, which belongs to a wider culture sometimes referred to as Western civilization or globalism.
From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with that of his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. As the field developed, it began to combine political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies, and art history to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender.
Cultural studies is concerned with the meaning and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television or eating out) in a given culture. It also studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Specifically, culture involves those meanings and practices held independently of reason. Watching television to view a public perspective on a historical event should not be thought of as culture unless referring to the medium of television itself, which may have been selected culturally; however, schoolchildren watching television after school with their friends to "fit in" certainly qualifies since there is no grounded reason for one's participation in this practice.
In the context of cultural studies, a text includes not only written language, but also films, photographs, fashion, or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of culture. Culture, for a cultural-studies researcher, not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups) and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, based on the disciplines of comparative literature and cultural studies.
Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies had originated in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly under the influence of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later that of Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as "capitalist" mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the "culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.
In the United States, Lindlof and Taylor write, "cultural studies [were] grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition." The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom.
The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded. Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts.
In a Marxist view, the mode and relations of production form the economic base of society, which constantly interacts and influences superstructures, such as culture. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product.
This view comes through in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist, and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva is among influential voices at the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.
Petrakis and Kostis (2013) divide cultural background variables into two main groups:
The first group covers the variables that represent the "efficiency orientation" of the societies: performance orientation, future orientation, assertiveness, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance.
The second covers the variables that represent the "social orientation" of societies, i.e., the attitudes and lifestyles of their members. These variables include gender egalitarianism, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, and human orientation.
In 2016, a new approach to culture was suggested by Rein Raud, who defines culture as the sum of resources available to human beings for making sense of their world and proposes a two-tiered approach, combining the study of texts (all reified meanings in circulation) and cultural practices (all repeatable actions that involve the production, dissemination or transmission of purposes), thus making it possible to re-link anthropological and sociological study of culture with the tradition of textual theory.
Psychology
Starting in the 1990s, psychological research on culture influence began to grow and challenge the universality assumed in general psychology. Culture psychologists began to try to explore the relationship between emotions and culture, and answer whether the human mind is independent from culture. For example, people from collectivistic cultures, such as the Japanese, suppress their positive emotions more than their American counterparts. Culture may affect the way that people experience and express emotions. On the other hand, some researchers try to look for differences between people's personalities across cultures. As different cultures dictate distinctive norms, culture shock is also studied to understand how people react when they are confronted with other cultures. LGBT culture is displayed with significantly different levels of tolerance within different cultures and nations. Cognitive tools may not be accessible or they may function differently cross culture. For example, people who are raised in a culture with an abacus are trained with distinctive reasoning style. Cultural lenses may also make people view the same outcome of events differently. Westerners are more motivated by their successes than their failures, while East Asians are better motivated by the avoidance of failure. Culture is important for psychologists to consider when understanding the human mental operation. The notion of the anxious, unstable, and rebellious adolescent has been criticized by experts, such as Robert Epstein, who state that an undeveloped brain is not the main cause of teenagers' turmoils. Some have criticized this understanding of adolescence, classifying it as a relatively recent phenomenon in human history created by modern society, and have been highly critical of what they view as the infantilization of young adults in American society. According to Robert Epstein and Jennifer, "American-style teen turmoil is absent in more than 100 cultures around the world, suggesting that such mayhem is not biologically inevitable. Second, the brain itself changes in response to experiences, raising the question of whether adolescent brain characteristics are the cause of teen tumult or rather the result of lifestyle and experiences." David Moshman has also stated in regards to adolescence that brain research "is crucial for a full picture, but it does not provide an ultimate explanation."
Protection of culture
There are a number of international agreements and national laws relating to the protection of cultural heritage and cultural diversity. UNESCO and its partner organizations such as Blue Shield International coordinate international protection and local implementation. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions deal with the protection of culture. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights deals with cultural heritage in two ways: it gives people the right to participate in cultural life on the one hand and the right to the protection of their contributions to cultural life on the other.
In the 21st century, the protection of culture has been the focus of increasing activity by national and international organizations. The UN and UNESCO promote cultural preservation and cultural diversity through declarations and legally-binding conventions or treaties. The aim is not to protect a person's property, but rather to preserve the cultural heritage of humanity, especially in the event of war and armed conflict. According to Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare. The target of the attack is the identity of the opponent, which is why symbolic cultural assets become a main target. It is also intended to affect the particularly sensitive cultural memory, the growing cultural diversity and the economic basis (such as tourism) of a state, region or municipality.
Tourism is having an increasing impact on the various forms of culture. On the one hand, this can be physical impact on individual objects or the destruction caused by increasing environmental pollution and, on the other hand, socio-cultural effects on society.
See also
Animal culture
Anthropology
Cultural area
Cultural studies
Cultural identity
Cultural tourism
Culture 21 – United Nations plan of action
Outline of culture
Recombinant culture
Semiotics of culture
References
Sources
Further reading
Books
Bastian, Adolf (2009), Encyclopædia Britannica Online
Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy. New York: Macmillan. Third edition, 1882, available online. Retrieved: 2006-06-28.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Press. .
Barzilai, Gad (2003). Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities University of Michigan Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.
Carhart. Michael C. (2007). The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany, Cambridge, Harvard University press.
Cohen, Anthony P. (1985). The Symbolic Construction of Community. New York: Routledge
Dawkins, R. (1999) [1982]. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Oxford Paperbacks.
Findley & Rothney (1986). Twentieth-Century World, Houghton Mifflin
Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York. .
Goodall, J. (1986). The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Hoult, T.F., ed. (1969). Dictionary of Modern Sociology. Totowa, New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams & Co.
Jary, D. and J. Jary (1991). The HarperCollins Dictionary of Sociology. New York: HarperCollins.
Keiser, R. Lincoln (1969). The Vice Lords: Warriors of the Streets. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. .
Kroeber, A.L. and C. Kluckhohn (1952). Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum
Kim, Uichol (2001). "Culture, science and indigenous psychologies: An integrated analysis." In D. Matsumoto (Ed.), Handbook of culture and psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press
McClenon, James. Tylor, Edward B(urnett) (1998) Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Ed. William Swatos and Peter Kivisto. Walnut Creek: AltaMira, pp. 528–529.
Middleton, R. (1990). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. .
O'Neil, D. (2006). Cultural Anthropology Tutorials , Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marco, California. Retrieved: 2006-07-10.
Reagan, Ronald. "Final Radio Address to the Nation" , January 14, 1989. Retrieved June 3, 2006.
Reese, W.L. (1980). Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought. New Jersey US; Sussex, UK: Humanities Press.
UNESCO (2002). Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, issued on International Mother Language Day,
White, L. (1949). The Science of Culture: A study of man and civilization. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Wilson, Edward O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage. .
Articles
The Meaning of "Culture" (2014-12-27), Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
External links
Cultura: International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology
What is Culture?
Social concepts
Social constructionism
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Christianity and other religions | Christianity and other religions documents Christianity's relationship with other world religions, and the differences and similarities.
Christian groups
Christian views on religious pluralism
Western Christian views
Some Christians have argued that religious pluralism is an invalid or a self-contradictory concept. Maximal forms of religious pluralism claim that all religions are equally true, or they claim that one religion can be true for some people and another religion can be true for others. Some Christians hold the view that such pluralism is logically impossible. Catholicism believes that while it is the fullest and most complete revelation of God to man, other Christian denominations have also received genuine revelation from God.
Although Calvinists believe that God and the truth of God cannot be plural, they also believe that those civil ordinances of man which restrain man from doing evil and encourage man to do good, are ordinances of God (regardless of the religion, or the lack of it, of those who wield that power). Christians are obligated to be at peace with all men, as far as it is up to them, and they are also obligated to submit to governments for the Lord's sake, and pray for their enemies. Calvinism is not pacifistic, and as a result, Calvinists have been involved in religious wars, most notably, they were involved in the French Wars of Religion and the English Civil War. Some of the first parts of modern Europe where religious tolerance was practiced had Calvinistic populations, most notably the Netherlands.
Evangelical Christians believe that religious pluralism is heresy and contradicts the Bible.
Eastern Orthodox views
Modern (post-Enlightenment) Christian views
In recent years, some Christian groups have become more open to religious pluralism; this has led to many cases of reconciliation between Christians and people of other faiths. The liberalization of many seminaries and theological institutions, particularly in regards to the rejection of the notion that the Bible is an infallible document, has led to a much more human-centered and secular movement within Mainline Christian denominations, particularly in the United States. Some Mainline churches no longer hold to exclusivist views on salvation.
In recent years there has been much to note in the way of reconciliation between some Christian groups and the Jewish people. Many modern day Christians, including many Catholics and some liberal Protestants, have developed a view of the New Testament as an extended covenant; they believe that Jews are still in a valid relationship with God, and that Jews can avoid damnation and earn a heavenly reward. For these Christians, the New Testament extended God's original covenant to cover non-Jews. The article Christian–Jewish reconciliation deals with this issue in detail.
Multiple smaller Christian groups in the US and Canada have come into being over the last 40 years, such as "Christians for Israel." Their website says that they exist in order to "expand Christian-Jewish dialogue in the broadest sense in order to improve the relationship between Christians and Jews, but also between Church and Synagogue, emphasizing Christian repentance, the purging of anti-Jewish preliminary attitudes and the false 'Replacement' theology rampant throughout Christian teachings."
A number of large Christian groups, including the Catholic Church and several large Protestant churches, have publicly declared that they will no longer proselytize Jews.
Other Modern Christian views, including some conservative Protestants, reject the idea of the New Testament as an extended covenant, and retain the classical Christian view as described earlier.
Modern views specific to Catholicism
For the Catholic Church, there has been a move at reconciliation not only with Judaism, but also Islam. The Second Vatican Council states that salvation includes others who acknowledge the same creator, and explicitly lists Muslims among those (using the term Mohammedans, which was the word commonly used among non-Muslims at the time). The official Catholic position is therefore that Jews, Muslims and Christians (including churches outside of Rome's authority) all acknowledge the same God, though Jews and Muslims have not yet received the gospel while other churches are generally considered deviant to a greater or lesser degree.
The most prominent event in the way of dialogue between religions has arguably been the 1986 Peace Prayer in Assisi, to which Pope John Paul II, against considerable resistance also from within the Roman Catholic church, invited representatives of all world religions. John Paul II’s remarks regarding Christian denominations were found in his Ut unum sint address. This initiative was taken up by the Community of Sant'Egidio, who, with the support of John Paul II, organized yearly peace meetings of religious representatives. These meetings, consisting of round tables on different issues and of a common time of prayer, have done much to further understanding and friendship between religious leaders and to further concrete peace initiatives. In order to avoid the reproaches of syncretism that were leveled at the 1986 Assisi meeting where the representatives of all religions held one common prayer, the follow-up meetings saw the representatives of the different religions pray in different places according to their respective traditions.
The question of whether traditional Chinese ancestor veneration, consists of worshipping a God or veneration of a saint was important to the Roman Catholic church during the Chinese Rites controversy of the early 18th century. This dispute was between the Dominicans who argued that Confucianism and Chinese folk religion was worship, and therefore incompatible with Catholicism, and the Jesuit who argued the reverse. The pope ultimately ruled in favor of the Dominicans, a decision which greatly reduced the role of Catholic missionaries in China. However, this decision was partially reversed by Pope Pius XII in 1939; after this, Chinese customs were no longer considered superstition or idolatry, but a way of honoring esteemed relatives (not entirely dissimilar to the Catholic practice of praying for the dead).
Relationship with the Baháʼí Faith
The Baháʼí Faith believes that there is one God who sends divine messengers to guide humanity throughout time, which is called Progressive revelation (Baháʼí)—and is different from the Christian belief of Progressive revelation (Christian). They believe in the divine knowledge and essence of Jesus, among other messengers such as Muhammad, Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Krishna, and others. Interpretations vary, but the Baháʼí Faith is sometimes considered an Abrahamic faith. The followers of the Baháʼí Faith believe in God, as do Christians, and recognize Jesus' teachings, but they have different views of the Trinity and divinity of Jesus. The Baháʼí view of prophets is that although they have both human and divine characteristics, they are not themselves God, but rather "divine manifestations." They also see the Trinity as symbolic where Jesus and the Holy Spirit are polished mirrors that reflect the pure light from God. Although Baháʼís affirm the Bible as sacred scripture, they do not consider the Bible to be wholly authentic as Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Baháʼí Faith, affirmed that "The Bible is not wholly authentic, and in this respect not to be compared with the Qur’án, and should be wholly subordinated to the authentic Sayings of Bahá’u’lláh."
Baháʼís share some views with Christianity regarding moral and immoral behavior. Baháʼís condemn polygamy, premarital sex, and homosexual acts while treating everyone, including homosexuals, with love, respect, and dignity.
Relationship with Buddhism
In the 19th century, some scholars began to perceive similarities between Buddhist and Christian practices. For example, in 1878, T.W. Rhys Davids wrote that the earliest missionaries to Tibet observed that similarities have been seen in Christianity and Buddhism since the first known contact was made between adherents of the two religions. In 1880 Ernest De Bunsen made similar observations and noted that except for the death of Jesus on the cross, and the Christian doctrine of atonement, the most ancient Buddhist records noted that similarities existed between Buddhist and Christian traditions.
Buddhism and Protestantism came into political conflict in 19th century Sri Lanka and Tibet c. 1904 (the Francis Younghusband Expedition). Various individuals and organizations have helped introduce various strains of Buddhist theology and meditation to several generations of Western spiritual seekers (including some Catholic religious). Relations between both religions are generally good, except in South Korea where Christians have damaged Buddhist temples and engaged in other forms of Christian extremism. The Russian republic of Kalmykia recognizes Tibetan/Lamaist Buddhism and Russian Orthodoxy as its official religions.
Relationship with Druze
Christianity and Druze are Abrahamic religions that share a historical traditional connection with some major theological differences. The two faiths share a common place of origin in the Middle East, and consider themselves to be monotheistic.
The relationship between the Druze and Christians has been characterized by harmony and peaceful coexistence, with amicable relations between the two groups prevailing throughout history, with the exception of some periods, including 1860 Mount Lebanon civil war.
Conversion of Druze to Christianity used to be common practice in the Levant region. Over the centuries, several prominent members of the Druze community have embraced Christianity, including some of Shihab dynasty members, as well as the Abi-Lamma clan.
Christian and Druze communities share a long history of interaction dating back roughly a millennium, particularly in Mount Lebanon. Interaction between Christian communities (Maronites, Eastern Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, and others) and the Unitarian Druze, led to the presence of mixed villages and towns in Mount Lebanon, Chouf, Wadi al-Taym, Jabal al-Druze, the Galilee region, Mount Carmel, and Golan Heights. The Maronite Catholics and the Druze founded modern Lebanon in the early eighteenth century, through a governing and social system known as the "Maronite-Druze dualism" in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate.
Druze doctrine teaches that Christianity is to be "esteemed and praised" as the Gospel writers are regarded as "carriers of wisdom". The Druze faith incorporates some elements of Christianity, and other religious beliefs. The full Druze canon or Druze scripture (Epistles of Wisdom) includes the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Quran and philosophical works by Plato and those influenced by Socrates among works from other religions and philosophers, and adopted some Christian elements. The Druze faith shows influence of Christian monasticism, among other religious practices. Some scholars suggest that early Christian Gnostic beliefs might have influenced Druze theology, particularly in concepts of divine knowledge and reincarnation. These influences and incorporations of Christian elements encompass the adoption of the concept of Christianizing al-Mahdi's persona among the Druze, as well as the integration of verses from the Bible concerning the Messiah by certain Druze founders.
In terms of religious comparison, mainstream Christian denominations do not believe in reincarnation or the transmigration of the soul, contrary to the beliefs of the Druze. Christianity teaches evangelism, often through the establishment of missions, unlike the Druze who do not accept converts to their faith. Marriage outside the Druze faith is rare and is strongly discouraged. Similarities between the Druze and Christians include commonalities in their view of monogamous marriage and divorce, as well as belief in the oneness of God and theophany.
Christianity does not require male circumcision, with covenant theology teaching that the Christian sacrament of baptism fulfills the Israelite practice of circumcision, both being signs and seals of the covenant of grace. Most mainstream Christian denominations currently maintain a neutral position on the practice of non-religious circumcision. Male circumcision is commonly practiced in many predominantly Christian countries and many Christian communities, and in the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church it is seen as a rite of passage. While male Circumcision is widely practiced by the Druze, the procedure is practiced as a cultural tradition, and has no religious significance in the Druze faith. Some Druzes do not circumcise their male children, and refuse to observe this practice.
Both faiths give a prominent place to Jesus: Jesus is the central figure of Christianity, and in the Druze faith, Jesus is considered an important prophet of God, being among the seven prophets who appeared in different periods of history. The Druze revere Jesus "the son of Joseph and Mary" and his four disciples, who wrote the Gospels. According to the Druze manuscripts Jesus is the Greatest Imam and the incarnation of Ultimate Reason (Akl) on earth and the first cosmic principle (Hadd), and regards Jesus and Hamza ibn Ali as the incarnations of one of the five great celestial powers, who form part of their system. In the Druze tradition, Jesus is known under three titles: the True Messiah (al-Masih al-Haq), the Messiah of all Nations (Masih al-Umam), and the Messiah of Sinners. This is due, respectively, to the belief that Jesus delivered the true Gospel message, the belief that he was the Saviour of all nations, and the belief that he offers forgiveness.
Both religions venerate the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, Saint George, Elijah, Luke the Evangelist, Virgin Mary, Job and other common figures. Figures in the Old Testament such as Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses are considered important prophets of God in the Druze faith, being among the seven prophets who appeared in different periods of history. In the Old Testament, Jethro was Moses' father-in-law, a Kenite shepherd and priest of Midian. Shuaib or Jethro of Midian is considered an ancestor of the Druze who revere him as their spiritual founder and chief prophet.
Historians notes that the Druze have historically maintained a positive relationship with Christians, as evidenced by shared traditions and social practices in Mount Lebanon. This interaction has led to overlapping symbols, customs, mutual veneration of saints and their shrines, and shared terminology for God. Sites such as the Church of Saidet et Tallé in Deir el Qamar, historically a popular Marian pilgrimage site among the Druze, exemplify this cultural exchange. The Druze also venerate Christian saints like Saint George and the Prophet Elijah, admired for their "bravery and warrior-like qualities". Scholar Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire observes that these warrior saints resonate with the Druze due to their parallels with Druze militarized traditions.
Relationship with Hinduism
Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity differ in their fundamental beliefs with regard to heaven, hell and reincarnation, to name a few. From the Hindu perspective, heaven (Sanskrit svarga) and hell (Naraka) are temporary places, where every soul has to live, either for the good deeds which they have done or for the sins which they have committed.
There are also significant similarities between Christian and Hindu theology, most notably, both religions present a trinitarian view of God. The Holy Trinity in Christianity, which consists of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, is sometimes seen as being roughly analogous to the Trimurti in Hinduism, whose members—Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—are seen as the three principal manifestations of Brahman, or Godhead. Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva are recognized as distinct deities as opposed to a singular being.
Christian-Hindu relations are a mixed affair. On one hand, Hinduism's natural tendency has been to recognize the divine basis of various other religions, and to revere their founders and saintly practitioners. In Western countries, Vedanta has influenced some Christian thinkers, while others in the anti-cult movement have reacted against the activities of immigrant gurus and their followers. (See also: Pierre Johanns, Abhishiktananda, Bede Griffiths, Dalit theology.)
The Christian Ashram Movement, a movement within Christianity in India, embraces Vedanta and the teachings of the East, attempting to combine the Christian faith with the Hindu ashram model and Christian monasticism with the Hindu sannyasa tradition. Brahmoism is considered a syncretism of Hinduism with Protestantism or Lutheranism.
Relationship with Islam
Islam shares a number of beliefs with Christianity. They share similar views on judgment, heaven, hell, spirits, angels, and a future resurrection. Jesus is acknowledged as the greatest prophet by Muslims. However, while Islam relegates the man Jesus the Christ to a lesser status than God — "in the company of those nearest to God" in the Qur'an, mainstream (Trinitarian) Christianity since the Council of Nicea teaches without question the belief that Jesus is both fully man and fully God the Son, one of the three Hypostases (common English: persons) of Christianity's Trinity, divinely co-equal and co-eternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Both religions share the belief in the virgin birth of Jesus, his miracles and healings, and they also share the belief that he ascended bodily into heaven. However, Jesus is not accepted as the Son of God by Muslims, who strictly maintain the belief that he was a human being who was loved by God and exalted to the ranks of the most righteous by God. They believe that God is a single entity, and do not accept the first person in the Trinity as God as the vast majority of Christians do. Additionally, Muslims do not accept Jesus's literal crucifixion and subsequent resurrection. Since Muslims believe in the worship of a strictly monotheistic form of God the Father who they do not believe assumed human form in the Holy Trinity through Jesus Christ, they do not accept the use of icons to worship God, which they consider shirk (idolatry). Muslim influence played a part in the initiation of iconoclasm and their conquests caused the iconoclasm in the Byzantine Empire. For the same reason, they do not worship or pray to Muhammad, Jesus, or any other prophets; they only pray to God.
Adherents of Islam have historically referred to themselves, Jews, and Christians (among others) as People of the Book since they all base their religion on Abrahamic books that are considered to have a divine origin. Christians, with the notable exception of Chrislam adherents however, neither recognize the Qur'an as a genuine book of divine revelation, nor agree with its lowly assessment of Jesus only as a prophet, on par with Muhammad, nor for that matter accept that Muhammad was a genuine prophet of God. In the 7th century text Concerning Heresy, Saint John of Damascus named Islam as Christological heresy, referring to it as the "heresy of the Ishmaelites" (see medieval Christian views on Muhammad). The position has remained popular in Christian circles well into the 20th century, by theologians such as the Congregationalist cleric Frank Hugh Foster and the Roman Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc, the latter of who described it as "the great and enduring heresy of Mohammed."
Most Muslims, for their part, believe that parts of the Gospels, Torah and Jewish prophetic books have been forgotten, misinterpreted, or distorted by their followers. Based on that perspective, Muslims view the Qur'an as correcting the errors of traditional Judeo-Christianity. For example, with the exception of Messianic Islam and sometimes Koranism, Muslims in general on an anti-Catholic basis reject belief in the Trinity or any other expression of the divinity of Jesus as incompatible with monotheism.
Not surprisingly, the two faiths have often experienced mutual controversy and conflict (an example being the Crusades, fought in response to Islamic conquests and attitudes to non-Muslims, in the near and Middle East). At the same time, much fruitful dialogue has occurred with the Catholic Church as well, especially since in the wake of the modernizing liberal reforms of Vatican 2 regarding proper Catholic relations with many other major world religions. The writings of Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas frequently cite those of the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, as well as Muslim thinker Averroes ('Ibn-Rushd).
On the other hand, the two faiths have experienced mutual peaceful coexistence, interaction, and cultural and sociala, and there was a cultural and human exchange between the Christian and Islamic worlds. The Muslim world is home to some of the world's most ancient Christian communities, and some of the most important cities of the Christian world—including three of its five great patriarchates (Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople). Scholars and intellectuals agree Christians have made significant contributions to Arab and Islamic civilization since the introduction of Islam, and they have had a significant impact contributing the culture of the Middle East and North Africa and other areas. Pew Research Center estimates indicate that in 2010, more than 64 million Christians lived in countries with Muslim majorities (excluding Nigeria). The Pew Forum study finds that Indonesia (21.1 million) has the largest Christian population in the Muslim world, followed by Egypt, Chad and Kazakhstan.
On May 6, 2001 Pope John Paul II, the first pope to pray in a mosque, delivered an address at Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, saying: "It is important that Muslims and Christians continue to explore philosophical and theological questions together, in order to come to a more objective and comprehensive knowledge of each other's religious beliefs. Better mutual understanding will surely lead, at the practical level, to a new way of presenting our two religions not in opposition, as has happened too often in the past, but in partnership for the good of the human family." This Mosque of Damascus is famous for containing the head of John the Baptist.
Relationship with Judaism
The relationship between Christianity and Judaism has been strained. In the past, Christians were often taught that "the Jews" killed Christ, for whose "murder" they bear a collective guilt (an interpretation which most major denominations now reject). Meanwhile, Jews have tended to associate Christianity with various pogroms, or in better times, they have tended to associate it with the dangers of assimilation. Anti-Semitism has a long history in Christianity (see Antisemitism in Christianity), and it is far from dead (for example, it exists in contemporary Russia). However, since the Holocaust, much dialogue which is aimed at Christian–Jewish reconciliation has taken place, and relations between Jews and Christians have greatly improved. Today, many conservative evangelicals support Christian Zionism, much to the irritation of Arab Christians, partly based on the Millennialist belief that the modern state of Israel represents the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.
According to Anna Sapir Abulafia, most scholars agree that Jews and Christians in Latin Christendom lived in relative peace with one another until the 13th century. (the "Constitution for the Jews") was the official position of the papacy regarding Jews throughout the Middle Ages and later. The first papal bull was issued in about 1120 by Calixtus II, intended to protect Jews who suffered during the First Crusade, and was reaffirmed by many popes, even until the 15th century although they were not always strictly upheld. The bull forbade, besides other things, Christians from coercing Jews to convert, or to harm them, or to take their property, or to disturb the celebration of their festivals, or to interfere with their cemeteries, on pain of excommunication.
The phenomenon of Messianic Judaism has become something of an irritant to Jewish / Christian relations. Messianic Jews—who generally seek to combine a Jewish identity with the recognition of Jesus—are rejected by mainstream Jewish groups, who dismiss Messianic Judaism as little more than Christianity with Jewish undertones.
The Jewish conception of the messiah (משיח mashiach in Hebrew) holds certain similarities to that of Christians, yet there are substantial differences. According to Jews, the Hebrew Scriptures contain a small number of prophecies concerning a future descendant of King David, who will be anointed (Hebrew: moshiach) as the Jewish people's new leader and will establish the throne of David in Jerusalem forever. In the Jewish view, this fully human and mortal leader will rebuild the land of Israel and restore the Davidic Kingdom. This subject is covered in the section on Jewish eschatology. Some Christians have a different understanding of the term messiah, and believe that Jesus is the messiah referred to in the Old Testament prophecies; that the kingdom in these prophecies was to be a heavenly kingdom, not an earthly one; and that Jesus' words and actions in the New Testament provide evidence of his identity as messiah and that the remainder of messianic prophecy will be fulfilled in the Second Coming. Other Christians acknowledge the Jewish definition of messiah, and hold that Jesus fulfills this, being 'fully man' (in addition to being 'fully God'), and believe that the Second Coming will establish the Kingdom of God on earth, where Jesus, as messiah and descendant from David, will reign from Jerusalem.
Relationship with Mithraism and Sol Invictus
There are many parallels between Mithraism, the religion of Sol Invictus, and Christianity. Aurelian is believed to have established the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (Day of the Birth of Sol Invictus) as an annual festival held on the day when the sun's daily declination visibly starts rising again after the winter solstice, namely on December 25; the birth of the central figure was thus celebrated on the day which Christians later used to celebrate Jesus' birth (having always celebrated this on Epiphany). Other similarities include the stories of Christ and Mithra as children being visited by shepherds, the trinity, and the immortal soul. Sunday itself was imposed as the official day of rest by Constantine, who referred to it as the Day of the venerable Sun. (Although Christians worshiped on Sunday from at least 150 years before Constantine)
The earliest attestation of Mithraism is Plutarch's record of it being practised in 68BC by Cilician pirates, the first mithraists. Tertullian, a Christian writer who lived between the 2nd and 3rd centuries, admitted there was a strong similarity between the practises of the two faiths:
the devil, ... mimics even the essential portions of the divine sacraments...he baptises some, that is his own believers, ... he promises the forgiveness of sins... Mithraism, .... also celebrates the oblation of bread, and introduces a symbol of the resurrection... - Tertullian,
Justin Martyr, an earlier 2nd century Church Father, agreed that the similarities existed, claiming that Mithraism had copied the Eucharist. Justin argued that the devil had invented Mithraism to mock Christianity. Christian apologist Ronald H. Nash stated:
allegations of an early Christian dependence on Mithraism have been rejected on many grounds. Mithraism had no concept of the death and resurrection of its god and no place for any concept of rebirth -- at least during its early stages...During the early stages of the cult, the notion of rebirth would have been foreign to its basic outlook...Moreover, Mithraism was basically a military cult. Therefore, one must be skeptical about suggestions that it appealed to nonmilitary people like the early Christians.
Relationship with Paganism
Relationship with Scientology
In the 2008 book Vintage Jesus: Timeless Answers to Timely Questions, authors Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears write: "According to Scientology, Jesus is an "implant" forced upon a Thetan about a million years ago", and Jack Huberman writes in 101 People Who Are Really Screwing America that in Scientology Jesus is seen as having been "implanted in humanity's collective memory", by the character Xenu from Scientology space opera.
Professor Paul Blankenship of the Memphis Theological Seminary studied Scientology and commented on this view, saying "They do not do a lot of talking about God or Jesus. It's more getting your mind cleared, and I could see how they could say that that could be compatible. Scientology has not really developed into a complete religious tradition. They may very well develop."
The Church of Scientology claims that their belief system is different from Christianity because it is based “solely on reason” and that its members “possess a practical system of ethics and justice.” The church likewise claims that “anything religious teachers said or Buddha promised, even the visions of Christianity, are attained in Scientology as a result.” Muck, Netland and McDermott emphasize that this clearly shows that Scientology is incompatible with Christianity.
In the book New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America (1995) by Mary Farrell Bednarowski, the author comments that "In the game of life as Scientology understands it, sin does not call for repentance as much as it does the eradication of error, and that must come through the technology, the auditing process, sometimes referred to as pastoral counseling. In fact, in regard to getting rid of sin, Scientology sees parallels between the goals of its technology and Jesus's saving action." Bednarowski quotes from the Scientology publication The Scientology Catechism in noting these parallels between the stated mission of Scientologists and the teachings imparted by Christ to his disciples. She notes that Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is not regarded in Scientology as a "divine savior", but rather a "loved friend and teacher". Writing in Signs of the Times: The New Religious Movements in Theological Perspective (1996), John A. Saliba cites Mary Bednarowski, and goes on to note "Helle Medgaard asserts that Scientology also misunderstands Jesus and repudiates the key Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sins." In his book The Sociology of Religious Movements (1996), William Sims Bainbridge cites the research of Roy Wallis, in noting "Scientology ... has no discernible connection to Christianity".
Possible relationship with Zoroastrianism through Judaism
Many scholars believe that the eschatology of Judaism and the idea of monotheism as a whole possibly originated in Zoroastrianism, and it may have been transferred to Judaism during the Babylonian captivity, and it eventually influenced Christian theology. Bible scholar P.R. Ackroyd states: "the whole eschatological scheme, however, of the Last Judgment, rewards and punishments, etc., within which immortality is achieved, is manifestly Zoroastrian in origin and inspiration." However, the theory is questioned by other mainstream historians and scholars. The Oxford History of the Biblical World states "There is little if any effect of Zoroastrian elements on Judaism in the Persian period." Nevertheless, scholars such as Soloman Nigosian contend, in regarding the similar ideas of Zoroaster and later Jewish writers, that "the ideas were indigenous to Iran...it is hardly conceivable that some of the characteristic ideas and practices in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam came into being without Zoroastrian influence." The new faith (Zoroastrianism) emerged in larger Persian empires. " Zoroastrianism reflected the cosmopolitan society of the empires". During this time Zoroastrianism profoundly effected the beliefs and values of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam ("Traditions & Encounters: A brief global History", Jerry H. Bentley. pg. 93). It is also possible that Zoroastrianism and later Jewish theology came from a common source.
For more on this theory, see Jewish history, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism.
In the Younger Avesta, three divinities of the Zoroastrian pantheon are repeatedly identified as ahuric, meaning that each, as Ahura, act together in both representing and protecting Asha, or the divine truth governing the universe. These three are Ahura Mazda, Mithra and Burz, and hence known as the "Ahuric triad." Similarities with the Christian Trinity can be seen between Ahura Mazda and God the Father, Mithra and Christ the Logos, as well as between Burz and the Holy Spirit, both of which are associated symbolically with water. Both Zoroastrianism and Christianity consider themselves to be monotheistic, but like all other monotheisms they have highlighted certain aspects or energies of the divine to emphasize, and these are not meant to be interpreted as separate divinities. In both religions there are guardian angels, or fravashi, which are considered to be created beings and are distinct from the Energies of God or divine emanations. The Zoroastrian term yazata, however, has variously been interpreted as meaning emanations or "sparks" of the divine, or as being roughly synonymous with the term "angels." There have been various theories on the possible relationship between these aspects of Zoroastrianism and ideas of divine emanation in esoteric Christianity, Jewish Kabbalah, Islamic mysticism (Sufism), and other religious systems, such as Gnosticism, Yazidism, and the Druze, among others.
Sociological aspects
The spread of Christianity has been international, and in some cases it has entirely displaced the religions of those people who it was proselytized to and it has also altered their customs. At times, this centuries-long process has been met with violent opposition, and likewise, the spread of Christianity has been carried out with martial force in some cases. To some extent, the relationship between Christianity and other faiths has been encumbered by this history, and modern Christians, particularly in the West, have expressed embarrassment over the violence which existed in Christianity's past.
The conversion of adherents of other religions is widely accepted within Christianity. Many Christian organizations believe that they have a duty to make converts among every people. In recent years, ecumenism and dialogue between different religions has been endorsed by many official representatives of the Christian churches, as a way of effecting reconciliation between Christian people and people of other faiths, leading to many cases of reconciliation. In some cases, this endorsement is accompanied by a complete disavowal of all proselytizing efforts under the banner of religious pluralism.
This is specially marked by the inauguration, or installation, of Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu from Uganda, on November 29, 2005. Dr Sentamu is the first black African archbishop of the Church of England. He is also the first archbishop to beat bongo drums in the cathedral at his own inauguration. The newspaper Guardian, which dedicated the double middle page of the following day's issue to a full picture of the grinning archbishop in full apparel at the porch of the cathedral, said that:
"Dr Sentamu's sermon was a stern lecture to the Church of England to grow out of being a 'judgmental and moralising' congregation of 'pew-fillers, sermon-taters, Bible readers, even born-again believers and Spirit-filled charismatics' and go out to make friends in the world. 'We have lost the joy and power that makes real disciples and we've become consumers of religion, not disciples of Jesus-Christ', he said. 'Christians, go and make friends among Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, agnostics, atheists, not for the purpose of converting them to your beliefs but for friendship, understanding, listening, hearing.' His remarks were greeted with applause, not with silence as the order of the service instructed."
A special case is the issue of Christian–Jewish reconciliation, in which significant reconciliation has been reached.
Syncretism
Christian converts have often carried some of their former customs into their new faith. On occasion, this has led to syncretisms, that are often not accepted by mainstream Christians:
In Cuban Santería, the West African orishas are venerated in the shape of Catholic saints.
The Chinese Taiping Rebels replaced the Bible with the Confucian classics.
The God's Army of Myanmar mixed Karen traditions with Protestantism.
The Vietnamese syncretic religion Cao Dai locates Jesus in the celestial Council of Great Spirits that directs the universe. It also has a pope with an elaborate hierarchy and its temples are influenced by Catholic churches.
The Lacandon people of Central America acknowledge Äkyantho', the god of foreigners. He has a son named Hesuklistos (Jesus Christ) who is supposed to be the god of the foreigners. They recognize that Hesuklistos is a god but do not feel he is worthy of worship as he is a minor god.
See also
Christ myth theory
Christian views on astrology
Christian views on magic
Comparative religion
Institute for Interreligious Dialogue
Islam and other religions
Jewish views on religious pluralism
Missiology
Theology of religions
References
Further reading
Ingham, Michael, Bp. (1997). Mansions of the Spirit: the Gospel in a Multi-Faith World. Toronto, Ont.: Anglican Book Centre.
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad [2006]. "'Etymythological Othering' and the Power of 'Lexical Engineering' in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. A Socio-Philo(sopho)logical Perspective", Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion, edited by Tope Omoniyi and Joshua A. Fishman, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 237–258. | 0.792687 | 0.986821 | 0.78224 |
Homophily | Homophily is a concept in sociology describing the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others, as in the proverb "". The presence of homophily has been discovered in a vast array of network studies: over have observed homophily in some form or another, and they establish that similarity is associated with connection. The categories on which homophily occurs include age, gender, class, and organizational role.
The opposite of homophily is heterophily or intermingling. Individuals in homophilic relationships share common characteristics (beliefs, values, education, etc.) that make communication and relationship formation easier. Homophily between mated pairs in animals has been extensively studied in the field of evolutionary biology, where it is known as assortative mating. Homophily between mated pairs is common within natural animal mating populations.
Homophily has a variety of consequences for social and economic outcomes.
Types and dimensions
Baseline vs. inbreeding
To test the relevance of homophily, researchers have distinguished between two types:
Baseline homophily: simply the amount of homophily that would be expected by chance given an existing uneven distribution of people with varying characteristics; and
Inbreeding homophily: the amount of homophily over and above this expected value, typically due to personal preferences and choices.
Status vs. value
In their original formulation of homophily, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton (1954) distinguished between status homophily and value homophily; individuals with similar social status characteristics were more likely to associate with each other than by chance:
Status homophily: includes both society-ascribed characteristics (e.g. race, ethnicity, sex, and age) and acquired characteristics (e.g., religion, occupation, behavior patterns, and education).
Value homophily: involves association with others who have similar values, attitudes, and beliefs, regardless of differences in status characteristics.
Dimensions
Race and ethnicity
Social networks in the United States today are strongly divided by race and ethnicity, which account for a large proportion of inbreeding homophily (though classification by these criteria can be problematic in sociology due to fuzzy boundaries and different definitions of race).
Smaller groups have lower diversity simply due to the number of members. This tends to give racial and ethnic minority groups a higher baseline homophily. Race and ethnicity also correlates with educational attainment and occupation, which further increase baseline homophily.
Sex and gender
In terms of sex and gender, the baseline homophily networks were relatively low compared to race and ethnicity. In this form of homophily men and women frequently live together and have large populations that are normally equal in size. It is also common to find higher levels of gender homophily among school students. Most sex homophily are a result of inbreeding homophily.
Age
Most age homophily is of the baseline type. An interesting pattern of inbreeding age homophily for groups of different ages was found by Marsden (1988). It indicated a strong relationship between someone's age and the social distance to other people with regard to confiding in someone. For example, the larger age gap someone had, the smaller chances that they were confided by others with lower ages to "discuss important matters."
Religion
Homophily based on religion is due to both baseline and inbreeding homophily. Those that belong in the same religion are more likely to exhibit acts of service and aid to one another, such as loaning money, giving therapeutic counseling, and other forms of help during moments of emergency. Parents have been shown to have higher levels of religious homophily than nonparent, which supports the notion that religious institutions are sought out for the benefit of children.
Education, occupation and social class
Family of birth accounts for considerable baseline homophily with respect to education, occupation, and social class. In terms of education, there is a divide among those who have a college education and those who do not. Another major distinction can be seen between those with white collar occupations and blue collar occupations.
Interests
Homophily occurs within groups of people that have similar interests as well. We enjoy interacting more with individuals who share similarities with us, so we tend to actively seek out these connections. Additionally, as more users begin to rely on the Internet to find like minded communities for themselves, many examples of niches within social media sites have begun appearing to account for this need. This response has led to the popularity of sites like Reddit in the 2010s, advertising itself as a "home to thousands of communities... and authentic human interaction."
Social media
As social networks are largely divided by race, social-networking websites like Facebook also foster homophilic atmospheres. When a Facebook user 'likes' or interacts with an article or post of a certain ideology, Facebook continues to show that user posts of that similar ideology (which Facebook believes they will be drawn to). In a research article, McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook (2003) write that homogeneous personal networks result in limited "social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience." This homophily can foster divides and echo chambers on social networking sites, where people of similar ideologies only interact with each other.
Causes and effects
Causes
Geography: Baseline homophily often arises when the people who are located nearby also have similar characteristics. People are more likely to have contact with those who are geographically closer than those who are distant. Technology such as the telephone, e-mail, and social networks have reduced but not eliminated this effect.
Family ties: These ties decay slowly, but familial ties, specifically that of domestic partners, fulfill many requisites that generate homophily. Family relationships are generally close and keep frequent contact though they may be at great geographic distances. Ideas that may get lost in other relational contexts, will often instead lead to actions in this setting.
Organizations: School, work, and volunteer activities provide the great majority of non-family ties. Many friendships, confiding relations, and social support ties are formed within voluntary groups. The social homogeneity of most organizations creates a strong baseline homophily in networks that are formed there.
Isomorphic sources: The connections between people who occupy equivalent roles will induce homophily in the system of network ties. This is common in three domains: workplace (e.g., all heads of HR departments will tend to associate with other HR heads), family (e.g., mothers tend to associate with other mothers), and informal networks.
Cognitive processes: People who have demographic similarity tend to own shared knowledge, and therefore they have a greater ease of communication and share cultural tastes, which can also generate homophily.
Effects
According to one study, perception of interpersonal similarity improves coordination and increase the expected payoff of interactions, above and beyond the effect of merely "liking others." Another study claims that homophily produces tolerance and cooperation in social spaces. However, homophilic patterns can also restrict access to information or inclusion for minorities.
Nowadays, the restrictive patterns of homophily can be widely seen within social media. This selectiveness within social media networks can be traced back to the origins of Facebook and the transition of users from MySpace to Facebook in the early 2000s. One study of this shift in a network's user base from (2011) found that this perception of homophily impacted many individuals' preference of one site over another. Most users chose to be more active on the site their friends were on. However, along with the complexities of belongingness, people of similar ages, economic class, and prospective futures (higher education and/or career plans) shared similar reasons for favoring one social media platform. The different features of homophily affected their outlook of each respective site.
The effects of homophily on the diffusion of information and behaviors are also complex. Some studies have claimed that homophily facilitates access information, the diffusion of innovations and behaviors, and the formation of social norms. Other studies, however, highlight mechanisms through which homophily can maintain disagreement, exacerbate polarization of opinions, lead to self segregation between groups, and slow the formation of an overall consensus.
As online users have a degree of power to form and dictate the environment, the effects of homophily continue to persist. On Twitter, terms such as "stan Twitter", "Black Twitter", or "local Twitter" have also been created and popularized by users to separate themselves based on specific dimensions.
Homophily is a cause of homogamy—marriage between people with similar characteristics. Homophily is a fertility factor; an increased fertility is seen in people with a tendency to seek acquaintance among those with common characteristics. Governmental family policies have a decreased influence on fertility rates in such populations.
See also
Groupthink
Echo chamber (media)
References
Interpersonal relationships
Sociological terminology | 0.791401 | 0.988145 | 0.78202 |
Universalism | Universalism is the philosophical and theological concept within Christianity that some ideas have universal application or applicability.
A belief in one fundamental truth is another important tenet in universalism. The living truth is seen as more far-reaching than the national, cultural, or religious boundaries or interpretations of that one truth. A community that calls itself universalist may emphasize the universal principles of most religions, and accept others in an inclusive manner.
In the modern context, Universalism can also mean the Western pursuit of unification of all human beings across geographic and other boundaries under Western values, or the application of really universal or universalist constructs, such as human rights or international law.
Universalism has had an influence on modern-day Hinduism, in turn influencing modern Western spirituality.
Christian universalism refers to the idea that every human will eventually receive salvation in a religious or spiritual sense, a concept also referred to as universal reconciliation.
Philosophy
Universality
In philosophy, universality is the notion that universal facts can be discovered and is therefore understood as being in opposition to relativism and nominalism.
Moral universalism
Moral universalism (also called moral objectivism or universal morality) is the meta-ethical position that some system of ethics applies universally. That system is inclusive of all individuals, regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, or any other distinguishing feature. Moral universalism is opposed to moral nihilism and moral relativism. However, not all forms of moral universalism are absolutist, nor do they necessarily value monism. Many forms of universalism, such as utilitarianism, are non-absolutist. Other forms such as those theorized by Isaiah Berlin, may value pluralist ideals.
Religion
Baháʼí Faith
In the teachings of the Baháʼí Faith, a single God has sent all the historic founders of the world religions in a process of progressive revelation. As a result, the major world religions are seen as divine in origin and are continuous in their purpose. In this view, there is unity among the founders of world religions, but each revelation brings a more advanced set of teachings in human history and none are syncretic. In addition, the Baháʼí teachings acknowledge that in every country and every people God has always revealed the divine purpose via messengers and prophets, masters and sages since time immemorial.
Within this universal view, the unity of humanity is one of the central teachings of the Baháʼí Faith. The Baháʼí teachings state that since all humans have been created in the image of God, God does not make any distinction between people with regard to race, colour or religion. Thus, because all humans have been created equal, they all require equal opportunities and treatment. Hence the Baháʼí view promotes the unity of humanity, and that people's vision should be world-embracing and that people should love the whole world rather than just their nation.
The teaching, however, does not equate unity with uniformity; instead the Baháʼí writings advocate the principle of unity in diversity where the variety in the human race is valued. Operating on a worldwide basis this cooperative view of the peoples and nations of the planet culminates in a vision of the practicality of the progression in world affairs towards, and the inevitability of, world peace.
Buddhism
The term Universalism has been applied to different aspects of Buddhist thought by different modern authors.
The idea of universal salvation is key to the Mahayana school of Buddhism. A common feature of Mahayana Buddhism is the idea that all living beings have Buddha nature and thus all beings can aspire to become bodhisattvas, beings who are on the path to Buddhahood. This capacity is seen as something that all beings in the universe have. This idea has been termed "bodhisattva universalism" by the Buddhist studies scholar Jan Nattier.
The idea of universal Buddha nature has been interpreted in various ways in Buddhism, from the idea that all living beings have Buddha nature and thus can become Buddhas to the idea that because all beings have Buddha nature, all beings will definitely become Buddhas. Some forms of East Asian Mahayana Buddhism even extended the Buddha nature theory to plants and insentient phenomena. Some thinkers (such as Kukai) even promote the idea that the entire universe is the Buddha's body.
The Lotus Sutra, an influential Mahayana scripture, is often seen as promoting the universality of Buddhahood, the Buddha's teaching as well as the equality of all living beings. Mahayana Buddhism also promotes a universal compassion towards all sentient beings and sees all beings as equally deserving of compassion. The doctrine of the One Vehicle (which states that all Buddhist paths lead to Buddhahood) is also often seen as a universalist doctrine.
Adherents to Pure Land Buddhism point to Amitabha Buddha as a Universal Savior. According to the Pure Land Sutras (scriptures), before becoming a Buddha Amitabha vowed that he would save all beings and according to some Pure Land authors, all beings will be eventually saved through the work of Amida Buddha. As such, Pure Land Buddhism is often seen as an expression of a Buddhist universalism that compares to Christian universalism. This comparison has also been commented on by Christian theologians like Karl Barth.
Chinese Buddhism developed a form of Buddhist universalism which saw Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism as different aspects of a single universal truth.
In Western Buddhism, the term Universalism may also refer to an nonsectarian and eclectic form of Buddhism which emphasizes ecumenism among the different Buddhism schools. American clergyman Julius A. Goldwater was one Buddhist figure who promoted a modern kind of Buddhist Universalism. For Goldwater, Buddhism transcends local contexts and culture, and his practice grew increasingly eclectic over time. Goldwater established the nonsectarian Buddhist Brotherhood of America which focused on ecumenical and nonsectarian Buddhism while also drawing on Protestant vocabulary and ideas.
The desire to develop a more universalist and nonsectarian form of Buddhism was also shared by some modernist Japanese Buddhist authors, including the influential D.T. Suzuki.
Christianity
The fundamental idea of Christian universalism is universal reconciliation – that all humans will ultimately receive salvation and be reconciled to God. They will eventually enter God's kingdom in Heaven, through the grace and works of the Lord Jesus Christ. Christian universalists hold that an everlasting hell does not exist (though most believe there is a temporary hell of some kind), and that unending torment was not what Jesus taught. They point to historical evidence showing that many early fathers of the church were universalists and attribute the origin of the idea of hell as eternal punishment to mistranslation. They also appeal to many texts of Scripture to argue that the concept of eternal hell is not biblically or historically supported either in Judaism or early Christianity.
Universalists cite numerous biblical passages which reference the salvation of all beings (such as Jesus' words in John 12:31-32, and Paul's words in Romans 5:18-19). In addition, they argue that an eternal hell is both unjust and contrary to the nature and attributes of a loving God.
The beliefs of Christian universalism are generally compatible with the essentials of Christianity, as they do not contradict any of the central affirmations summarized in the Nicene Creed. More specifically, universalists often emphasize the following teachings:
God is the loving Parent of all people (see Love of God).
Jesus Christ reveals the nature and character of God, and is the spiritual leader of humankind.
Humankind is created with an immortal soul, which death can not end—or a mortal soul that shall be resurrected and preserved by God. A soul which God will not wholly destroy.
Sin has negative consequences for the sinner either in this life or the afterlife. All of God's punishments for sin are corrective and remedial. None of such punishments will last forever, or result in the permanent destruction of a soul. Some Christian universalists believe in the idea of a Purgatorial Hell, or a temporary place of purification that some must undergo before their entrance into Heaven.
In 1899 the Universalist General Convention, later called the Universalist Church of America, adopted the Five Principles: the belief in God, Jesus Christ, the immortality of the human soul, the reality of sin and universal reconciliation.
History
Universalist writers such as George T. Knight have claimed that Universalism was a widely held view among theologians in Early Christianity. These included such important figures such as Alexandrian scholar Origen as well as Clement of Alexandria, a Christian theologian. Origen and Clement both included the existence of a non-eternal Hell in their teachings. Hell was remedial, in that it was a place one went to purge one's sins before entering into Heaven.
Between 1648-1697 English activist Gerrard Winstanley, writer Richard Coppin, and dissenter Jane Leade, each taught that God would grant all human beings salvation. The same teachings were later spread throughout 18th-century France and America by George de Benneville. People who taught this doctrine in America would later become known as the Universalist Church of America. The first Universalist Church in America was founded by John Murray (minister).
The Greek term apocatastasis came to be related by some to the beliefs of Christian universalism, but central to the doctrine was the restitution, or restoration of all sinful beings to God, and to His state of blessedness. In early Patristics, usage of the term is distinct.
Universalist theology
Universalist theology is grounded in history, scripture, and assumptions about the nature of God. That All Shall Be Saved (2019) by Orthodox Christian theologian David Bentley Hart contains arguments from all three areas but with a focus on arguments from the nature of God. Thomas Whittemore wrote the book 100 Scriptural Proofs that Jesus Christ Will Save All Mankind quoting both Old and New Testament verses which support the Universalist viewpoint.
Some Bible verses he cites and are cited by other Christian universalists are:
Luke 3:6: "And all people will see God's salvation." (NIV)
John 17:2: "since thou hast given him power over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom thou hast given him." (RSV)
1 Corinthians 15:22: "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive." (ESV)
2 Peter 3:9: "The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance." (ESV)
1 Timothy 2:3–6: "This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for ALL men—the testimony given in its proper time." (NIV)
1 John 2:2: "He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world." (NIV)
1 Timothy 4:10: "For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe." (ESV)
Romans 5:18: "Then as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man's act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men." (RSV)
Romans 11:32: "For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all." (NIV)
Questions of Biblical Translation
Christian universalists point towards the mistranslations of the Greek word αιών (literally "age," but often assumed to mean "eternity") and its adjectival form αἰώνιος (usually assumed to mean "eternal" or "everlasting"), as giving rise to the idea of an endless hell and the idea that some people will never be saved. For example, Revelation 14:11 says "the smoke of their torment goes up εἰς αἰῶνας αἰώνων" which most literally means "until ages of ages" but is often paraphrased in translations as "forever and ever."
This Greek word is the origin of the modern English word eon, which refers to a period of time or an epoch/age.
The 19th century theologian Marvin Vincent wrote about the word aion, and the supposed connotations of "eternal" or "temporal":
Aion, transliterated aeon, is a period of longer or shorter duration, having a beginning and an end, and complete in itself. [...] Neither the noun nor the adjective, in themselves, carry the sense of endless or everlasting."A number of scholars have argued that, in some cases, the adjective may not indicate duration at all, but may instead have a qualitative meaning. For instance, Dr. David Bentley Hart translates Matthew 25:46 as "And these will go to the chastening of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age." In this reading, Jesus is not necessarily indicating how long the life and punishment last, but instead what kind the life and punishment are—they are "of the age [to come]" rather than being earthly life or punishment. Dr. Thomas Talbott writes:[The writers of the New Testament] therefore came to employ the term aiōnios as an eschatological term, one that functioned as a handy reference to the realities of the age to come. In that way they managed to combine the more literal sense of "that which pertains to an age" with the more religious sense of "that which manifests the presence of God in a special way."Dr. Ken Vincent writes that "When it (aion) was translated into Latin Vulgate, 'aion' became 'aeternam' which means 'eternal'. Likewise, Dr. Ilaria Ramelli explains:The mistranslation and misinterpretation of αἰώνιος as "eternal" (already in Latin, where both αἰώνιος and ἀΐδιος are rendered aeternus and their fundamental semantic difference is blurred) certainly contributed a great deal to the rise of the doctrine of "eternal damnation" and of the "eternity of hell."Among the English translations that do not render αἰώνιος as "eternal" or "everlasting" are Young’s Literal Translation (“age-during”), the Weymouth New Testament ("of the ages”), the Concordant Literal Version ("eonian"), Rotherham's Emphasized Bible ("age-abiding"), Hart's New Testament ("of that Age"), and more.
Catholicism
The Catholic church believes that God judges everyone based only on their moral acts, that no one should be subject to human misery, that everyone is equal in dignity yet distinct in individuality before God, that no one should be discriminated against because of their sin or concupiscence, and that apart from coercion God exhausts every means to save mankind from evil: original holiness being intended for everyone, the irrevocable Old Testament covenants, each religion being a share in the truth, elements of sanctification in non-Catholic Christian communities, the good people of every religion and nation, everyone being called to baptism and confession, and Purgatory, suffrages, and indulgences for the dead. The church believes that everyone is predestined to Heaven, that no one is predestined to Hell, that everyone is redeemed by Christ's Passion, that no one is excluded from the church except by sin, and that everyone can either love God by loving others unto going to Heaven or reject God by sin unto going to Hell. The church believes that God's predestination takes everything into account, and that his providence brings out of evil a greater good, as evidenced, the church believes, by the Passion of Christ being all at once predestined by God, foretold in Scripture, necessitated by original sin, authored by everyone who sins, caused by Christ's executioners, and freely planned and undergone by Christ. The church believes that everyone who goes to Heaven joins the church, and that from the beginning God intended Israel to be the beginning of the church, wherein God would unite all persons to each other and to God. The church believes that Heaven and Hell are eternal.
Hinduism
Author David Frawley says that Hinduism has a "background universalism" and its teachings contain a "universal relevance." Hinduism is also naturally religiously pluralistic. A well-known Rig Vedic hymn says: "Truth is One, though the sages know it variously." Similarly, in the Bhagavad Gītā (4:11), God, manifesting as an incarnation, states: "As people approach me, so I receive them. All paths lead to me." The Hindu religion has no theological difficulties in accepting degrees of truth in other religions. Hinduism emphasizes that everyone actually worships the same God, whether one knows it or not.
While Hinduism has an openness and tolerance towards other religions, it also has a wide range of diversity within it. There are considered to be six orthodox Hindu schools of philosophy/theology, as well as multiple unorthodox or "heterodox" traditions called darshanas.
Hindu universalism
Hindu universalism, also called Neo-Vedanta and neo-Hinduism, is a modern interpretation of Hinduism which developed in response to western colonialism and orientalism. It denotes the ideology that all religions are true and therefore worthy of toleration and respect.
It is a modern interpretation that aims to present Hinduism as a "homogenized ideal of Hinduism" with Advaita Vedanta as its central doctrine. For example, it presents that:
Hinduism embraces universalism by conceiving the whole world as a single family that deifies the one truth, and therefore it accepts all forms of beliefs and dismisses labels of distinct religions which would imply a division of identity.
This modernised re-interpretation has become a broad current in Indian culture, extending far beyond the Dashanami Sampradaya, the Advaita Vedanta Sampradaya founded by Adi Shankara. An early exponent of Hindu Universalism was Ram Mohan Roy, who established the Brahmo Samaj. Hindu Universalism was popularised in the 20th century in both India and the west by Vivekananda and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Veneration for all other religions was articulated by Gandhi:
Western orientalists played an important role in this popularisation, regarding Vedanta to be the "central theology of Hinduism". Oriental scholarship portrayed Hinduism as a "single world religion", and denigrated the heterogeneity of Hindu beliefs and practices as 'distortions' of the basic teachings of Vedanta.
Islam
Islam recognizes to a certain extent the validity of the Abrahamic religions, the Quran identifying Jews, Christians, and "Sabi'un" (usually taken as a reference to the Mandaeans) as "people of the Book" (ahl al-kitab). Later Islamic theologians expanded this definition to include Zoroastrians, and later even Hindus, as the early Islamic empire brought many people professing these religions under its dominion, but the Qur'an explicitly identifies only Jews, Christians, and Sabians as People of the Book., , The relation between Islam and universalism has assumed crucial importance in the context of political Islam or Islamism, particularly in reference to Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, and one of the key contemporary philosophers of Islam.
There are several views within Islam with respect to Universalism. According to the most inclusive teachings all peoples of the book have a chance of salvation. For example, Surah 2:62 states:
However, the most exclusive teachings disagree. For example, Surah 9:5 states:
The interpretation of all of these passages are hotly contested amongst various schools of thought and branches of Islam as is the doctrine of abrogation (naskh) which is used to determine which verses take precedence, based on reconstructed chronology, with later verses superseding earlier ones. The ahadith also play a major role in this, and different schools of thought assign different weightings and rulings of authenticity to different hadith, with the four schools of Sunni thought accepting the Six Authentic Collections, generally along with the Muwatta Imam Malik. Depending on the level of acceptance of rejection of certain traditions, the interpretation of the Koran can be changed immensely, from the Qur'anists who reject the ahadith, to the ahl al-hadith, who hold the entirety of the traditional collections in great reverence.
Some Islamic scholars view the world as bipartite, consisting of the House of Islam, that is, where people live under the Sharia; and the House of War, that is, where the people do not live under Sharia, which must be proselytized using whatever resources available, including, in some traditionalist and conservative interpretations, the use of violence, as holy struggle in the path of God, to either convert its inhabitants to Islam, or to rule them under the Shariah (cf. dhimmi).
Judaism
Judaism teaches that God chose the Jewish people to be in a unique covenant with God, and one of their beliefs is that Jewish people were charged by the Torah with a specific mission—to be a light unto the nations, and to exemplify the covenant with God as described in the Torah to other nations. This view does not preclude a belief that God also has a relationship with other peoples—rather, Judaism holds that God had entered into a covenant with all humanity as Noachides, and that Jews and non-Jews alike have a relationship with God, as well as being universal in the sense that it is open to all mankind.
Modern Jews such as Emmanuel Levinas advocate a universalist mindset that is performed through particularist behavior. An on-line organization, the Jewish Spiritual Leaders Institute founded and led by Steven Blane, who calls himself an "American Jewish Universalist Rabbi", believes in a more inclusive version of Jewish Universalism, stating that "God equally chose all nations to be lights unto the world, and we have much to learn and share with each other. We can only accomplish Tikkun Olam by our unconditional acceptance of each other's peaceful doctrines."
Manichaeism
Manichaeism, like Christian Gnosticism and Zurvanism, was arguably in some ways inherently universalist. Yet in other respects, it was quite contrary to universalistic principles, holding instead to an eternal dualism.
Sikhism
In Sikhism, all the religions of the world are compared to rivers flowing into a single ocean. Although the Sikh gurus did not agree with the practices of fasting, idolatry and pilgrimage during their times, they stressed that all religions should be tolerated. The Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, contains the writings of not just the Sikh guru themselves, but the writings of several Hindu and Muslim saints, known as the Bhagats.
The very first word of the Sikh scripture is "Ik", followed by "Omkar". This literally means that there is only one god, and that one is wholesome, inclusive of the whole universe. It further goes on to state that all of creation, and all energy is part of this primordial being. As such, it is described in scripture over and over again, that all that occurs is part of the divine will, and as such, has to be accepted. It occurs for a reason, even if it is beyond the grasp of one person to understand.
Although Sikhism does not teach that men are created as an image of God, it states that the essence of the One is to be found throughout all of its creation. As was said by Yogi Bhajan, the man who is credited with having brought Sikhism to the West:
The First Sikh Guru, Guru Nanak said himself:
By this, Guru Nanak meant that there is no real "religion" in God's eyes. Unlike many of the major world religions, Sikhism does not have missionaries, instead it believes men have the freedom to find their own path to salvation.
Unitarian Universalism
Unitarian Universalism (UU) is a theologically liberal religion characterized by a "free and responsible search for truth and meaning". Unitarian Universalists do not share a creed; rather, they are unified by their shared search for spiritual growth and by the understanding that an individual's theology is a result of that search and not a result of obedience to an authoritarian requirement. Unitarian Universalists draw from all major world religions and many different theological sources and have a wide range of beliefs and practices.
While having its origins in Christianity, UU is no longer a Christian church. As of 2006, fewer than about 20% of Unitarian Universalists identified themselves as Christian. Contemporary Unitarian Universalism espouses a pluralist approach to religious belief, whereby members may describe themselves as humanist, agnostic, deist, atheist, pagan, Christian, monotheist, pantheist, polytheist, or assume no label at all.
The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) was formed in 1961, a consolidation of the American Unitarian Association, established in 1825, and the Universalist Church of America, established in 1866. It is headquartered in Boston, and mainly serves churches in the United States. The Canadian Unitarian Council became an independent body in 2002.
Zoroastrianism
Some varieties of Zoroastrian (such as Zurvanism) are universalistic in application to all races, but not necessarily universalist in the sense of universal salvation.
Views of the Latter Day Saint Movement
See also
Ananda Marga
Christianity:
Liberal Catholic Church
Primitive Baptist Universalist
Religious Society of Friends
Schwarzenau Brethren
Swedenborgianism (The New Church)
Trinitarian Universalism
Church Universal and Triumphant
Comparative religion
Ecumenism
Hypothetical universalism
George MacDonald
Mahatma Gandhi Foundation
Omnism
Perennial philosophy
Post-theism
Religious liberalism
Religious pluralism
Spannian universalism
Subud
Universal basic income
Universal basic services
Universal health care
Universal suffrage
Universal Sufism
References
Sources
Further reading
Online.
External links
Catholic Encyclopedia article on Universalists as a Protestant denomination
Catholic Encyclopedia article on Apocatastasis/apokatastatis
TentMaker website – Many free books and articles on Universalism
Christian theological movements
Religious philosophical concepts
Philosophical theories
Religious pluralism
Religious terminology | 0.783419 | 0.997852 | 0.781737 |
Humanism | Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential, and agency of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry.
The meaning of the term "humanism" has changed according to successive intellectual movements that have identified with it. During the Italian Renaissance, ancient works inspired Italian scholars, giving rise to the Renaissance humanism movement. During the Age of Enlightenment, humanistic values were reinforced by advances in science and technology, giving confidence to humans in their exploration of the world. By the early 20th century, organizations dedicated to humanism flourished in Europe and the United States, and have since expanded worldwide. In the early 21st century, the term generally denotes a focus on human well-being and advocates for human freedom, autonomy, and progress. It views humanity as responsible for the promotion and development of individuals, espouses the equal and inherent dignity of all human beings, and emphasizes a concern for humans in relation to the world.
Starting in the 20th century, humanist movements are typically non-religious and aligned with secularism. Most frequently, humanism refers to a non-theistic view centered on human agency, and a reliance on science and reason rather than revelation from a supernatural source to understand the world. Humanists tend to advocate for human rights, free speech, progressive policies, and democracy. People with a humanist worldview maintain religion is not a precondition of morality, and object to excessive religious entanglement with education and the state.
Contemporary humanist organizations work under the umbrella of Humanists International. Well-known humanist associations are Humanists UK and the American Humanist Association.
Etymology
The word "humanism" derives from the Latin word , which was first used in ancient Rome by Cicero and other thinkers to describe values related to liberal education. This etymology survives in the modern university concept of the humanities—the arts, philosophy, history, literature, and related disciplines. The word reappeared during the Italian Renaissance as umanista and entered the English language in the 16th century. The word "humanist" was used to describe a group of students of classical literature and those advocating for a classical education.
In 1755, in Samuel Johnson's influential A Dictionary of the English Language, the word humanist is defined as a philologer or grammarian, derived from the French word . In a later edition of the dictionary, the meaning "a term used in the schools of Scotland" was added. In the 1780s, Thomas Howes was one of Joseph Priestley's many opponents during the celebrated Unitarian disputes. Because of the different doctrinal meanings of Unitarian and Unitarianism, Howes used "the more precise appellations of humanists and humanism" when referring to those like Priestley "who maintain the mere humanity of Christ". This theological origin of humanism is considered obsolete.
In the early 19th century, the term humanismus was used in Germany with several meanings and from there, it re-entered the English language with two distinct denotations; an academic term linked to the study of classic literature and a more-common use that signified a non-religious approach to life contrary to theism. It is probable Bavarian theologian Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer coined the term humanismus to describe the new classical curriculum he planned to offer in German secondary schools. Soon, other scholars such as Georg Voigt and Jacob Burckhardt adopted the term. In the 20th century, the word was further refined, acquiring its contemporary meaning of a naturalistic approach to life, and a focus on the well-being and freedom of humans.
Definition
There is no single, widely accepted definition of humanism, and scholars have given different meanings to the term. For philosopher Sidney Hook, writing in 1974, humanists are opposed to the imposition of one culture in some civilizations, do not belong to a church or established religion, do not support dictatorships, and do not justify the use of violence for social reforms. Hook also said humanists support the elimination of hunger and improvements to health, housing, and education. In the same edited collection, Humanist philosopher H. J. Blackham argued humanism is a concept focusing on improving humanity's social conditions by increasing the autonomy and dignity of all humans. In 1999, Jeaneane D. Fowler said the definition of humanism should include a rejection of divinity, and an emphasis on human well-being and freedom. She also noted there is a lack of shared belief system or doctrine but, in general, humanists aim for happiness and self-fulfillment.
In 2015, prominent humanist Andrew Copson defined humanism as follows:
Humanism is naturalistic in its understanding of the universe; science and free inquiry will help us comprehend more about the universe.
This scientific approach does not reduce humans to anything less than human beings.
Humanists place importance of the pursuit of a self-defined, meaningful, and happy life.
Humanism is moral; morality is a way for humans to improve their lives.
Humanists engage in practical action to improve personal and social conditions.
According to the International Humanist and Ethical Union:
Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.
Dictionaries define humanism as a worldview or philosophical stance. According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, humanism is " ... a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values; especially: a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason".
History
Predecessors
Traces of humanism can be found in ancient Greek philosophy. Pre-Socratic philosophers were the first Western philosophers to attempt to explain the world in terms of human reason and natural law without relying on myth, tradition, or religion. Protagoras, who lived in Athens , put forward some fundamental humanist ideas, although only fragments of his work survive. He made one of the first agnostic statements; according to one fragment: "About the gods I am able to know neither that they exist nor that they do not exist nor of what kind they are in form: for many things prevent me for knowing this, its obscurity and the brevity of man's life". Socrates spoke of the need to "know thyself"; his thought changed the focus of then-contemporary philosophy from nature to humans and their well-being. He was a theist executed for atheism, who investigated the nature of morality by reasoning. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) taught rationalism and a system of ethics based on human nature that also parallels humanist thought. In the third century BCE, Epicurus developed an influential, human-centered philosophy that focused on achieving eudaimonia. Epicureans continued Democritus' atomist theory—a materialistic theory that suggests the fundamental unit of the universe is an indivisible atom. Human happiness, living well, friendship, and the avoidance of excesses were the key ingredients of Epicurean philosophy that flourished in and beyond the post-Hellenic world. It is a repeated view among scholars that the humanistic features of ancient Greek thought are the roots of humanism 2,000 years later.
Other predecessor movements that sometimes use the same or equivalent vocabulary to modern Western humanism can be found in Chinese philosophy and religions such as Taoism and Confucianism.
Arabic translations of Ancient Greek literature during the Abbasid Caliphate in the eighth and ninth centuries influenced Islamic philosophers. Many medieval Muslim thinkers pursued humanistic, rational, and scientific discourse in their search for knowledge, meaning, and values. A wide range of Islamic writings on love, poetry, history, and philosophical theology show medieval Islamic thought was open to humanistic ideas of individualism, occasional secularism, skepticism, liberalism, and free speech; schools were established at Baghdad, Basra and Isfahan.
Renaissance
The intellectual movement later known as Renaissance humanism first appeared in Italy and has greatly influenced both contemporaneous and modern Western culture. Renaissance humanism emerged in Italy and a renewed interest in literature and the arts occurred in 13th-century Italy. Italian scholars discovered Ancient Greek thought, particularly that of Aristotle, through Arabic translations from Africa and Spain. Other centers were Verona, Naples, and Avignon. Petrarch, who is often referred to as the father of humanism, is a significant figure. Petrarch was raised in Avignon; he was inclined toward education at a very early age and studied alongside his well-educated father. Petrarch's enthusiasm for ancient texts led him to discover manuscripts such as Cicero's Pro Archia and Pomponius Mela's De Chorographia that were influential in the development of the Renaissance. Petrarch wrote Latin poems such as Canzoniere and De viris illustribus, in which he described humanist ideas. His most-significant contribution was a list of books outlining the four major disciplines—rhetoric, moral philosophy, poetry, and grammar—that became the basis of humanistic studies (studia humanitatis). Petrarch's list relied heavily on ancient writers, especially Cicero.
The revival of classicist authors continued after Petrarch's death. Florence chancellor and humanist Coluccio Salutati made his city a prominent center of Renaissance humanism; his circle included other notable humanists—including Leonardo Bruni, who rediscovered, translated, and popularized ancient texts. Humanists heavily influenced education. Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino Veronese created schools based on humanistic principles; their curriculum was widely adopted and by the 16th century, humanistic paideia was the dominant outlook of pre-university education. Parallel with advances in education, Renaissance humanists made progress in fields such as philosophy, mathematics, and religion. In philosophy, Angelo Poliziano, Nicholas of Cusa, and Marsilio Ficino further contributed to the understanding of ancient classical philosophers and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola undermined the dominance of Aristotelian philosophy by revitalizing Sextus Empiricus' skepticism. Religious studies were affected by the growth of Renaissance humanism when Pope Nicholas V initiated the translation of Hebrew and Greek biblical texts, and other texts in those languages, to contemporaneous Latin.
Humanist values spread from Italy in the 15th century. Students and scholars went to Italy to study before returning to their homelands carrying humanistic messages. Printing houses dedicated to ancient texts were established in Venice, Basel, and Paris. By the end of the 15th century, the center of humanism had shifted from Italy to northern Europe, with Erasmus of Rotterdam being the leading humanist scholar. The longest-lasting effect of Renaissance humanism was its education curriculum and methods. Humanists insisted on the importance of classical literature in providing intellectual discipline, moral standards, and a civilized taste for the elite—an educational approach that reached the contemporary era.
Enlightenment
During the Age of Enlightenment, humanistic ideas resurfaced, this time further from religion and classical literature. Science and intellectualism advanced, and humanists argued that rationality could replace deism as the means with which to understand the world. Humanistic values, such as tolerance and opposition to slavery, started to take shape. New philosophical, social, and political ideas appeared. Some thinkers rejected theism outright; and atheism, deism, and hostility to organized religion were formed. During the Enlightenment, Baruch Spinoza redefined God as signifying the totality of nature; Spinoza was accused of atheism but remained silent on the matter. Naturalism was also advanced by prominent Encyclopédistes. Baron d'Holbach wrote the polemic System of Nature, claiming that religion was built on fear and had helped tyrants throughout history. Diderot and Helvetius combined their materialism with sharp, political critique.
Also during the Enlightenment, the abstract conception of humanity started forming—a critical juncture for the construction of humanist philosophy. Previous appeals to "men" now shifted toward "man"; to illustrate this point, scholar Tony Davies points to political documents like The Social Contract (1762) of Rousseau, in which he says "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains". Likewise, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man uses the singular form of the word, revealing a universal conception of "man". In parallel, Baconian empiricism—though not humanism per se—led to Thomas Hobbes's materialism.
Scholar J. Brent Crosson argues that, while there is a widely-held belief that the birth of humanism was solely a European affair, intellectual thought from Africa and Asia significantly contributed as well. He also notes that during enlightenment, the universal man did not encompass all humans but was shaped by gender and race. According to Crosson, the shift from man to human started during enlightenment and is still ongoing. Crosson also argues that enlightenment, especially in Britain, produced not only a notion of universal man, but also gave birth to pseudoscientific ideas, such as those about differences between races, that shaped European history.
From Darwin to current era
French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) introduced the idea—which is sometimes attributed to Thomas Paine—of a "religion of humanity". According to scholar Tony Davies, this was intended to be an atheist cult based on some humanistic tenets, and had some prominent members but soon declined. It was nonetheless influential during the 19th century, and its humanism and rejection of supernaturalism are echoed in the works of later authors such as Oscar Wilde, George Holyoake—who coined the word secularism—George Eliot, Émile Zola, and E. S. Beesly. Paine's The Age of Reason, along with the 19th-century Biblical criticism of the German Hegelians David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, also contributed to new forms of humanism.
Advances in science and philosophy provided scholars with further alternatives to religious belief. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection offered naturalists an explanation for the plurality of species. Darwin's theory also suggested humans are simply a natural species, contradicting the traditional theological view of humans as more than animals. Philosophers Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx attacked religion on several grounds, and theologians David Strauss and Julius Wellhausen questioned the Bible. In parallel, utilitarianism was developed in Britain through the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism, a moral philosophy, centers its attention on human happiness, aiming to eliminate human and animal pain via natural means. In Europe and the US, as philosophical critiques of theistic beliefs grew, large parts of society distanced themselves from religion. Ethical societies were formed, leading to the contemporary humanist movement.
The rise of rationalism and the scientific method was followed in the late 19th century in Britain by the start of many rationalist and ethical associations, such as the National Secular Society, the Ethical Union, and the Rationalist Press Association. In the 20th century, humanism was further promoted by the work of philosophers such as A. J. Ayer, Antony Flew, and Bertrand Russell, whose advocacy of atheism in Why I Am Not a Christian further popularized humanist ideas. In 1963, the British Humanist Association evolved out of the Ethical Union, and merged with many smaller ethical and rationalist groups. Elsewhere in Europe, humanist organizations also flourished. In the Netherlands, the Dutch Humanist Alliance gained a wide base of support after World War II; in Norway, the Norwegian Humanist Association gained popular support.
In the US, humanism evolved with the aid of significant figures of the Unitarian Church. Humanist magazines began to appear, including The New Humanist, which published the Humanist Manifesto I in 1933. The American Ethical Union emerged from newly founded, small, ethicist societies. The American Humanist Association (AHA) was established in 1941 and became as popular as some of its European counterparts. The AHA spread to all states, and some prominent public figures such as Isaac Asimov, John Dewey, Erich Fromm, Paul Kurtz, Carl Sagan, and Gene Roddenberry became members. Humanist organizations from all continents formed the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), which is now known as Humanists International, and promotes the humanist agenda via the United Nations organizations UNESCO and UNICEF.
Varieties of humanism
Early 20th century naturalists, who viewed their humanism as a religion and participated in church-like congregations, used the term "religious humanism". Religious humanism appeared mostly in the US and is now rarely practiced. The American Humanist Association arose from religious humanism. The same term has been used by religious groups such as the Quakers to describe their humanistic theology.
The term "Renaissance humanism" was given to a tradition of cultural and educational reform engaged in by civic and ecclesiastical chancellors, book collectors, educators, and writers that developed during the 14th and early 15th centuries. By the late 15th century, these academics began to be referred to as umanisti (humanists). While modern humanism's roots can be traced to the Renaissance, Renaissance humanism vastly differs from it.
Other terms using "humanism" in their name include:
Christian humanism: a historical current in the late Middle Ages in which Christian scholars combined Christian faith with interest in classical antiquity and a focus on human well-being.
Ethical humanism: a synonym of Ethical culture, was prominent in the US in the early 20th century and focused on relations between humans.
Scientific humanism: this emphasizes belief in the scientific method as a component of humanism as described in the works of John Dewey and Julian Huxley; scientific humanism is largely synonymous with secular humanism.
Secular humanism: coined in the mid-20th century, it was initially an attempt to denigrate humanism, but some humanist associations embraced the term. Secular humanism is synonymous with the contemporary humanist movement.
Marxist humanism: one of several rival schools of Marxist thought that accepts basic humanistic tenets such as secularism and naturalism, but differs from other strands of humanism because of its vague stance on democracy and rejection of free will.
Digital humanism: an emerging philosophical and ethical framework that seeks to preserve and promote human values, dignity, and well-being in the context of rapid technological advancements, particularly in the digital realm.
These varieties of humanism are now largely of historical interest only. Some ethical movements continue (eg New York Society for Ethical Culture) but in general humanism no longer needs any qualification "because the lifestance is by definition naturalistic, scientific, and secular". However, according to Andrew Copson the view that there are still two types of humanism – religious and secular – "has begun to seriously muddy the conceptual water".
Philosophy
Humanism is strongly linked to rationality. For humanists, humans are reasonable beings, and reasoning and the scientific method are means of finding truth. Humanists argue science and rationality have driven successful developments in various fields while the invocation of supernatural phenomena fails to coherently explain the world. One form of irrational thinking is adducing. Humanists are skeptical of explanations of natural phenomena or diseases that rely on hidden agencies.
Human autonomy is another hallmark of humanist philosophy. For people to be autonomous, their beliefs and actions must be the result of their own reasoning. For humanists, autonomy dignifies each individual; without autonomy, people's humanity is lessened. Humanists also consider human essence to be universal, irrespective of race and social status, diminishing the importance of collective identities and signifying the importance of individuals.
Immanuel Kant provided the modern philosophical basis of the humanist narrative. His theory of critical philosophy formed the basis of the world of knowledge, defending rationalism and grounding it in the empirical world. He also supported the idea of the moral autonomy of the individual, which is fundamental to his philosophy. According to Kant, morality is the product of the way humans live and not a set of fixed values. Instead of a universal ethic code, Kant suggested a universal procedure that shapes the ethics that differ among groups of people.
Philosopher and humanist advocate Corliss Lamont, in his book The Philosophy of Humanism (1997), states:
In the Humanist ethics the chief end of thought and action is to further this-earthly human interests on behalf of the greater glory of people. The watchword of Humanism is happiness for all humanity in this existence as contrasted with salvation for the individual soul in a future existence and the glorification of a supernatural Supreme Being ... It heartily welcomes all life-enhancing and healthy pleasures, from the vigorous enjoyments of youth to the contemplative delights of mellowed age, from the simple gratifications of food and drink, sunshine and sports, to the more complex appreciation of art and literature, friendship and social communion.
Themes
Morality
The humanist attitude toward morality has changed since its beginning. Starting in the 18th century, humanists were oriented toward an objective and universalist stance on ethics. Both Utilitarian philosophy—which aims to increase human happiness and decrease suffering—and Kantian ethics, which states one should act in accordance with maxims one could will to become a universal law, shaped the humanist moral narrative until the early 20th century. Because the concepts of free will and reason are not based on scientific naturalism, their influence on humanists remained in the early 20th century but was reduced by social progressiveness and egalitarianism. As part of social changes in the late 20th century, humanist ethics evolved to support secularism, civil rights, personal autonomy, religious toleration, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism.
A naturalistic criticism of humanistic morality is the denial of the existence of morality. For naturalistic skeptics, morality was not hardwired within humans during their evolution; humans are primarily selfish and self-centered. Defending humanist morality, humanist philosopher John R. Shook makes three observations that lead him to the acceptance of morality. According to Shook, homo sapiens has a concept of morality that must have been with the species since the beginning of human history, developing by recognizing and thinking upon behaviors. He adds morality is universal among human cultures and all cultures strive to improve their moral level. Shook concludes that while morality was initially generated by our genes, culture shaped human morals and continues to do so. He calls "moral naturalism" the view that morality is a natural phenomenon, can be scientifically studied, and is a tool rather than a set of doctrines that was used to develop human culture.
Humanist philosopher Brian Ellis advocates a social humanist theory of morality called "social contractual utilitarianism", which is based on Hume's naturalism and empathy, Aristotelian virtue theory, and Kant's idealism. According to Ellis, morality should aim for eudaimonia, an Aristotelian concept that combines a satisfying life with virtue and happiness by improving societies worldwide. Humanist Andrew Copson takes a consequentialist and utilitarian approach to morality; according to Copson, all humanist ethical traits aim at human welfare. Philosopher Stephen Law emphasizes some principles of humanist ethics; respect for personal moral autonomy, rejection of god-given moral commands, an aim for human well-being, and "emphasiz[ing] the role of reason in making moral judgements".
Humanism's godless approach to morality has driven criticism from religious commentators. The necessity for a divine being delivering sets of doctrines for morals to exist is a common argument; according to Dostoevsky's character Ivan Karamázov in The Brothers Karamazov, "if God does not exist, then everything is permitted". This argument suggests chaos will ensue if religious belief disappears. For humanists, theism is an obstacle to morality rather than a prerequisite for it. According to humanists, acting only out of fear, adherence to dogma, and expectation of a reward is a selfish motivation rather than morality. Humanists point to the subjectivity of the supposedly objective divine commands by referring to the Euthyphro dilemma, originally posed by Socrates: "does God command something because it is good or is something good because God commands it?" If goodness is independent from God, humans can reach goodness without religion but relativism is elicited if God creates goodness. Another argument against this religious criticism is the human-made nature of morality, even through religious means. The interpretation of holy scriptures almost always includes human reasoning; different interpreters reach contradictory theories.
Religion
Humanism has widely been seen as antithetical to religion. Philosopher of religion David Kline, traces the roots of this animosity since the Renaissance, when humanistic views deconstructed the previous religiously defined order. Kline describes several ways this antithesis has evolved. Kline notes the emergence of a confident human-made knowledge, which was a new way of epistemology, repelled the church from its authoritative position. Kline uses the paradigm of non-humanists Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo to illustrate how scientific discoveries added to the deconstruction of the religious narrative in favor of human-generated knowledge. This ultimately uncoupled the fate of humans from the divine will, prompting social and political shifts. The relation of state and citizens changed as civic humanistic principles emerged; people were no longer to be servile to religiously grounded monarchies but could pursue their own destinies. Kline also points at the aspects of personal belief that added to the hostility between humanism and religion. Humanism was linked with prominent thinkers who advocated against the existence of God using rationalistic arguments. Critique of theism continued through the humanistic revolutions in Europe, challenging religious worldviews, attitudes and superstitions on a rational basis—a tendency that continued to the 20th century.
According to Stephen Law, humanist adherence to secularism placed humans at odds with religion, especially nationally dominant religions striving to retain privileges gained in the last centuries. Worth notes religious persons can be secularists. Law notes secularism is criticized for suppressing freedom of expression of religious persons but firmly denies such accusation; instead, he says, secularism protects this kind of freedom but opposes the privileged status of religious views.
According to Andrew Copson, humanism is not incompatible with some aspects of religion. He observes that components like belief, practice, identity, and culture can coexist, allowing an individual who subscribes to only a few religious doctrines to also identify as a humanist. Copson adds that religious critics usually frame humanism as an enemy of religion but most humanists are proponents of religious tolerance or exhibit a curiosity about religion's effects in society and politics, commenting: "Only a few are regularly outraged by other people's false beliefs per se".
The meaning of life
In the 19th century, along with the decline of religion and its accompanied teleology, the question of the meaning of life became more prominent. Unlike religions, humanism does not have a definite view on the meaning of life. Humanists commonly say people create rather than discover meaning. While philosophers such as Nietzsche and Sartre wrote on the meaning of life in a godless world, the work of Albert Camus has echoed and shaped humanism. In Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, he quotes a Greek myth in which the absurd hero Sisyphus is destined to push a heavy rock up a hill; the rock slips back and he must repeat the task. Sisyphus is negating Gods and preset meanings of life, but argues that life has value and significance, and that each individual is able to create their meanings of life. Camus thus highlights the importance of personal agency and self-determination that lie at the centre of humanism.
Personal humanist interpretations of the meaning of life vary from the pursuit of happiness without recklessness and excesses to participation in human history, and connection with loved ones, living animals, and plants. Some answers are close to those of religious discourse if the appeal to divinity is overlooked. According to humanist professor Peter Derks, elements that contribute to the meaning of life are a morally worthy purpose in life, positive self-evaluation, an understanding of one's environment, being seen and understood by others, the ability to emotionally connect with others, and a desire to have a meaning in life. Humanist professor Anthony B. Pinn places the meaning of life in the quest of what he calls "complex subjectivity". Pinn, who is advocating for a non-theistic, humanistic religion inspired by African cultures, says seeking the never-reaching meaning of life contributes to well-being, and that rituals and ceremonies, which are occasions for reflection, provide an opportunity to assess the meaning of life, improving well-being.
In public life
In politics
The hallmark of contemporary humanism in politics is the demand for secularism. Philosopher Alan Haworth said secularism delivers fair treatment to all citizens of a nation-state since all are treated without discrimination; religion is a private issue and the state should have no power over it. He also argues that secularism helps plurality and diversity, which are fundamental aspects of our modern world. While barbarism and violence can be found in most civilizations, Haworth notes religion usually fuels rhetoric and enables these actions. He also said the values of hard work, honesty, and charity are found in other civilizations. According to Haworth, humanism opposes the irrationality of nationalism and totalitarianism, whether these are part of fascism or Marxist–Leninist communism.
According to professor Joseph O. Baker, in political theory, contemporary humanism is formed by two main tendencies; the first is individualistic and the second inclines to collectivism. The trajectory of each tendency can lead to libertarianism and socialism respectively, but a range of combinations exists. Individualistic humanists often have a philosophical perspective of humanism; in politics, these are inclined to libertarianism and in ethics tend to follow a scientistic approach. Collectivists have a more-applied view of humanism, lean toward socialism, and have a humanitarian approach to ethics. The second group has connections with the thought of young Marx, especially his anthropological views rejecting his political practices. A factor that repels many humanists from the libertarian view is the neoliberal or capitalistic consequences they feel it entails.
Humanism has been a part of both major 20th-century ideological currents—liberalism and Marxism. Early 19th-century socialism was connected to humanism. In the 20th century, a humanistic interpretation of Marxism focused on Marx's early writings, viewing Marxism not as "scientific socialism" but as a philosophical critique aimed at the overcoming of "alienation". In the US, liberalism is associated mostly with humanistic principles, which is distinct from the European use of the same word, which has economical connotations. In the post-1945 era, Jean-Paul Sartre and other French existentialists advocated for humanism, linking it to socialism while trying to stay neutral during the Cold War.
In psychology and counseling
Humanist counseling is humanism-inspired applied psychology, which is a major current of counseling. There are various approaches such as discussion and critical thinking, replying to existential anxiety, and focusing on social and political dimensions of problems. Humanist counseling focuses on respecting the client's worldview and placing it in the correct cultural context. The approach emphasizes an individual's inherent drive towards self-actualization and creativity. It also recognizes the importance of moral questions about one's interactions with people according to one's worldview. This is examined using a process of dialogue. Humanist counseling originated in post-World War II Netherlands.
Humanistic counseling is based on the works of psychologists Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. It introduced a positive, humanistic psychology in response to what Rogers and Maslow viewed as the over-pessimistic view of psychoanalysis in the early 1960s. Other sources include the philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology.
Some modern counseling organizations have humanist origins, like the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, which was founded by Harold Blackham, which he developed alongside the British Humanist Association's Humanist Counselling Service. Modern-day humanist pastoral care in the UK and the Netherlands draws on elements of humanistic psychology.
Demographics
Demographic data about humanists is sparse. Scholar Yasmin Trejo examined the results of Pew Research Center's 2014 Religious Landscape Study. Trejo did not use self-identification to measure humanists but combined the answers of two questions: "Do you believe in God or a universal spirit?" (she chose those who answered 'no') and "when it comes to questions of right or wrong, which of the following do you look to most for guidance?" (picking answers 'scientific information' and 'philosophy and reason'). According to Trejo, most humanists identify as atheist or agnostic (37% and 18%), 29% as "nothing in particular", while 16% of humanists identify as religious. She also found most humanists (80%) were raised in a religious background. Sixty percent of humanists are married to non-religious spouses, while one quarter are married to a Christian. There is a gender divide among humanists: 67 percent are male. Trejo says this can be explained by the fact that more males self-identify as atheist, while women have stronger connections to religion because of socialization, community influence, and stereotypes; some women, especially Catholic Latinas, are expected to be religious and many of them abide by their community expectations. Other findings note the high level of education of most humanists, indicating a higher socioeconomic status. The population of humanists is overwhelming non-Hispanic white; according to Trejo, this is because minority groups are usually very religious.
Criticisms
Western and Christian
Criticism of humanism focus on its adherence to human rights, which some critics have called "Western". Critics say humanist values have become a tool of Western moral dominance, which is a form of neo-colonialism that leads to oppression and a lack of ethical diversity. Other critics, namely feminists, black activists, postcolonial critics, and gay and lesbian advocates, say humanism is an oppressive philosophy because it is not free from the biases of the white, heterosexual males who shaped it. History professor Samuel Moyn attacks humanism for its connection to human rights. According to Moyn, the concept of human rights in the 1960s was a declaration of anti-colonial struggle, but that idea was later transformed into an impossible utopian vision, replacing the failing utopias of the 20th century. The humanist use of human rights rhetoric thus turns human rights into a moral tool that is impractical and ultimately non-political. He also notes a commonality between humanism and the Catholic discourse on human dignity.
Anthropology professor Talal Asad argues humanism is a project of modernity and a secularized continuation of Western Christian theology. According to Asad, just as the Catholic Church passed the Christian doctrine of love to Africa and Asia while assisting in the enslavement of large parts of their population, humanist values have at times been a pretext for Western countries to expand their influence to other parts of the world to humanize "barbarians". Asad has also said humanism is not a purely secular phenomenon but takes the idea of the essence of humanity from Christianity. According to Asad, Western humanism cannot incorporate other humanistic traditions, such as those from India and China, without subsuming and ultimately eliminating them.
Sociology professor Didier Fassin has stated that humanism's focus on empathy and compassion, rather than goodness and justice, is a problem. According to Fassin, humanism originated in the Christian tradition, particularly the Parable of the Good Samaritan, in which empathy is universalized. Fassin has also argued that humanism's central essence, the sanctity of human life, is a religious victory hidden in a secular wrapper.
Amoral and materialistic
The main criticism from evangelical Christians, such as Tim LaHaye, is that humanism destroys traditional family and moral values. According to Corliss Lamont, this criticism is a malicious campaign by religious fanatics, the so-called Moral Majority, who need a demonic scapegoat to rally its followers. Other religious opponents scorn humanism by stating it is materialistic thereby diminishing humanity because it denies the spiritual nature and needs of man. Also, because the goal in life is the acquisition of material goods, humanism produces greed and selfishness. In response to this criticism Norman states that there is absolutely no reason why humanists should be committed to the view that the only things worth living for are 'material goods'. Such an accusation, he says, is based on a "sloppy" understanding of materialism. However, he does acknowledge a "tension" in humanism that because of its championing of scientific knowledge, it appears to be committed to a materialistic conception of human beings as physical systems and therefore as not much different from anything else in the universe.
Vague and indefinable
Humanism has frequently been criticised for its vagueness and the difficulty of defining the term. According to Paul Kurtz, “Humanism is so charged with levels of emotion and rhetoric that its meaning is often vague and ambiguous”. For Giustiniani, “the meaning of ‘humanism’ has so many shades that to analyze all of them is hardly feasible”. Nicolas Walter points out that most of the people in the past who have called themselves or been called humanists would reject many of today's tenets. The origins of humanism, he writes, “are so contradictory and confusing that it is often meaningless on its own”. Andrew Copson notes that the suggestion that there are two types of humanism – religious and secular – “has begun to seriously muddy the conceptual water”. According to Tony Davies, “the meaning of ‘humanism’ is the semantic tangle, or grapple, that makes its meaning so difficult to grasp”. For Sarah Bakewell, humanism “is a semantic cloud of meanings and implications, none attachable to any particular theorist or practitioner”.
Yet, the difficulty of defining humanism is not necessarily a problem. Davies avoids offering a definition, choosing instead “to stress the plurality, complexity and fluidity of meanings”. Jeaneane Fowler argues that humanism is indefinable precisely because of its “particular dynamism” and the acknowledged vagueness of the term “far from being a disadvantage, is an asset”.
Antihumanism
Antihumanism is a philosophical theory that rejects humanism as a pre-scientific ideology. This argument developed during the 19th and 20th centuries in parallel with the advancement of humanism. Prominent thinkers questioned the metaphysics of humanism and the human nature of its concept of freedom. Nietzsche, while departing from a humanistic, pro-Enlightenment viewpoint, criticized humanism for illusions on a number of topics, especially the nature of truth. According to Nietzsche, objective truth is an anthropomorphic illusion and humanism is meaningless, and replacing theism with reason and science simply replaces one religion with another.
According to Karl Marx, humanism is a bourgeois project that inaccurately attempts to present itself as radical. After the atrocities of World War II, questions about human nature and the concept of humanity were renewed. During the Cold War, influential Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser introduced the term "theoretical antihumanism" to attack both humanism and humanist-like socialist currents, eschewing more structural and formal interpretations of Marx. According to Althusser, Marx's early writings resonate with the humanistic idealism of Hegel, Kant, and Feuerbach, but Marx radically moved toward scientific socialism in 1845, rejecting concepts such as the essence of man.
Humanist organizations
Humanist organizations exist in several countries. Humanists International is a global organization. The three countries with the highest numbers of Humanist International member organisations are the UK, India, and the US. The largest humanist organisation is the Norwegian Humanist Association. Humanists UK – formerly the British Humanist Association – and the American Humanist Association are two of the oldest humanist organizations.
In 2015, London-based Humanists UK had around 28,000 members. Its membership includes some high-profile people such as Richard Dawkins, Brian Cox, Salman Rushdie, Polly Toynbee, and Stephen Fry, who are known for their participation in public debate, promoting secularism, and objecting to state funding for faith-based institutions. Humanists UK organizes and conducts non-religious ceremonies for weddings, namings, comings of age, and funerals.
The American Humanist Association (AHA) was formed in 1941 from previous humanist associations. Its journal The Humanist is the continuation of a previous publication The Humanist Bulletin. In 1953, the AHA established the "Humanist of the Year" award to honor individuals who promote science. By the 1970s, it became a well-recognized organization, initiating campaigns for abortion rights and opposing discriminatory policies. This resulted in the organization becoming a target of the religious right by the 1980s.
See also
Notes
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
American Humanist Association
International Humanist and Ethical Union
Humanists UK | 0.781969 | 0.999418 | 0.781514 |
Philosophy of religion | Philosophy of religion is "the philosophical examination of the central themes and concepts involved in religious traditions". Philosophical discussions on such topics date from ancient times, and appear in the earliest known texts concerning philosophy. The field involves many other branches of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science.
The philosophy of religion differs from religious philosophy in that it seeks to discuss questions regarding the nature of religion as a whole, rather than examining the problems brought forth by a particular belief-system. The philosophy of religion differs from theology in that it aims to examine religious concepts from an objective philosophical perspective rather than from the perspective of a specific religious tradition. The philosophy of religion also differs from religious studies in that it seeks to evaluate the truth of religious worldviews. It can be carried out dispassionately by those who identify as believers or non-believers.
Overview
Philosopher William L. Rowe characterized the philosophy of religion as: "the critical examination of basic religious beliefs and concepts." Philosophy of religion covers alternative beliefs about God, gods, demons, spirits or all, the varieties of religious experience, the interplay between science and religion, the nature and scope of good and evil, and religious treatments of birth, history, and death. The field also includes the ethical implications of religious commitments, the relation between faith, reason, experience and tradition, concepts of the miraculous, the sacred revelation, mysticism, power, and salvation.
The term philosophy of religion did not come into general use in the West until the nineteenth century, and most pre-modern and early modern philosophical works included a mixture of religious themes and non-religious philosophical questions. In Asia, examples include texts such as the Hindu Upanishads, the works of Daoism and Confucianism and Buddhist texts. Greek philosophies like Pythagoreanism and Stoicism included religious elements and theories about deities, and Medieval philosophy was strongly influenced by the big three monotheistic Abrahamic religions. In the Western world, early modern philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley discussed religious topics alongside secular philosophical issues as well.
The philosophy of religion has been distinguished from theology by pointing out that, for theology, "its critical reflections are based on religious convictions". Also, "theology is responsible to an authority that initiates its thinking, speaking, and witnessing ... [while] philosophy bases its arguments on the ground of timeless evidence."
Some aspects of philosophy of religion have classically been regarded as a part of metaphysics. In Aristotle's Metaphysics, the necessarily prior cause of eternal motion was an unmoved mover, who, like the object of desire, or of thought, inspires motion without itself being moved. Today, however, philosophers have adopted the term "philosophy of religion" for the subject, and typically it is regarded as a separate field of specialization, although it is also still treated by some, particularly Catholic philosophers, as a part of metaphysics.
Basic themes and problems
Ultimate reality
Different religions have different ideas about ultimate reality, its source or ground (or lack thereof) and also about what is the "Maximal Greatness". Paul Tillich's concept of 'Ultimate Concern' and Rudolf Otto's 'Idea of the Holy' are concepts which point to concerns about the ultimate or highest truth which most religious philosophies deal with in some way. One of the main differences among religions is whether the ultimate reality is a personal god or an impersonal reality.
In Western religions, various forms of theism are the most common conceptions, while in Eastern religions, there are theistic and also various non-theistic conceptions of the Ultimate. Theistic vs non-theistic is a common way of sorting the different types of religions.
There are also several philosophical positions with regard to the existence of God that one might take including various forms of theism (such as monotheism and polytheism), agnosticism and different forms of atheism.
Monotheism
Keith Yandell outlines roughly three kinds of historical monotheisms: Greek, Semitic and Hindu. Greek monotheism holds that the world has always existed and does not believe in creationism or divine providence, while Semitic monotheism believes the world was created by a God at a particular point in time and that this God acts in the world. Indian monotheism teaches that the world is beginningless, but that there is God's act of creation which sustains the world.
The attempt to provide proofs or arguments for the existence of God is one aspect of what is known as natural theology or the natural theistic project. This strand of natural theology attempts to justify belief in God by independent grounds. Perhaps most of the philosophy of religion is predicated on natural theology's assumption that the existence of God can be justified or warranted on rational grounds. There has been considerable philosophical and theological debate about the kinds of proofs, justifications and arguments that are appropriate for this discourse.
Non-theistic conceptions
Eastern religions have included both theistic and other alternative positions about the ultimate nature of reality. One such view is Jainism, which holds a dualistic view that all that exists is matter and a multiplicity of souls (jiva), without depending on a supreme deity for their existence. There are also different Buddhist views, such as the Theravada Abhidharma view, which holds that the only ultimately existing things are transitory phenomenal events (dharmas) and their interdependent relations. Madhyamaka Buddhists such as Nagarjuna hold that ultimate reality is emptiness (shunyata) while the Yogacara holds that it is vijñapti (mental phenomena). In Indian philosophical discourses, monotheism was defended by Hindu philosophers (particularly the Nyaya school), while Buddhist thinkers argued against their conception of a creator god (Sanskrit: Ishvara).
The Hindu view of Advaita Vedanta, as defended by Adi Shankara, is a total non-dualism. Although Advaitins do believe in the usual Hindu gods, their view of ultimate reality is a radically monistic oneness (Brahman without qualities) and anything which appears (like persons and gods) is illusory (maya).
The various philosophical positions of Taoism can also be viewed as non-theistic about the ultimate reality (Tao). Taoist philosophers have conceived of different ways of describing the ultimate nature of things. For example, while the Taoist Xuanxue thinker Wang Bi argued that everything is "rooted" inWu (non-being, nothingness), Guo Xiang rejected Wu as the ultimate source of things, instead arguing that the ultimate nature of the Tao is "spontaneous self-production" (zi sheng) and "spontaneous self-transformation" (zi hua).
Traditionally, Jains and Buddhists did not rule out the existence of limited deities or divine beings, they only rejected the idea of a single all-powerful creator God or First cause posited by monotheists.
Knowledge and belief
All religious traditions make knowledge claims which they argue are central to religious practice and to the ultimate solution to the main problem of human life. These include epistemic, metaphysical and ethical claims.
Evidentialism is the position that may be characterized as "a belief is rationally justified only if there is sufficient evidence for it". Many theists and non-theists are evidentialists, for example, Aquinas and Bertrand Russell agree that belief in God is rational only if there is sufficient evidence, but disagree on whether such evidence exists. These arguments often stipulate that subjective religious experiences are not reasonable evidence and thus religious truths must be argued based on non-religious evidence. One of the strongest positions of evidentialism is that by William Kingdon Clifford who wrote: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence". His view of evidentialism is usually read in tandem with William James's article A Will to Believe (1896), which argues against Clifford's principle. More recent supporters of evidentialism include Antony Flew ("The Presumption of Atheism", 1972) and Michael Scriven (Primary philosophy, 1966). Both of them rely on the Ockhamist view that in the absence of evidence for X, belief in X is not justified. Many modern Thomists are also evidentialists in that they hold they can demonstrate there is evidence for the belief in God. Another move is to argue in a Bayesian way for the probability of a religious truth like God, not for total conclusive evidence.
Some philosophers, however, argue that religious belief is warranted without evidence and hence are sometimes called non-evidentialists. They include fideists and reformed epistemologists. Alvin Plantinga and other reformed epistemologists are examples of philosophers who argue that religious beliefs are "properly basic beliefs" and that it is not irrational to hold them even though they are not supported by any evidence. The rationale here is that some beliefs we hold must be foundational and not be based on further rational beliefs. If this is not so, then we risk an infinite regress. This is qualified by the proviso that they can be defended against objections (this differentiates this view from fideism). A properly basic belief is a belief that one can reasonably hold without evidence, such as a memory, a basic sensation or a perception. Plantinga's argument is that belief in God is of this type because within every human mind there is a natural awareness of divinity.
William James in his essay "The Will to Believe" argues for a pragmatic conception of religious belief. For James, religious belief is justified if one is presented with a question which is rationally undecidable and if one is presented with genuine and live options which are relevant for the individual. For James, religious belief is defensible because of the pragmatic value it can bring to one's life, even if there is no rational evidence for it.
Some work in recent epistemology of religion goes beyond debates over evidentialism, fideism, and reformed epistemology to consider contemporary issues deriving from new ideas about knowledge-how and practical skill; how practical factors can affect whether one could know whether theism is true; from formal epistemology's use of probability theory; or from social epistemology (particularly the epistemology of testimony, or the epistemology of disagreement).
For example, an important topic in the epistemology of religion is that of religious disagreement, and the issue of what it means for intelligent individuals of the same epistemic parity to disagree about religious issues. Religious disagreement has been seen as possibly posing first-order or higher-order problems for religious belief. A first order problem refers to whether that evidence directly applies to the truth of any religious proposition, while a higher order problem instead applies to whether one has rationally assessed the first order evidence. One example of a first order problem is the Argument from nonbelief. Higher order discussions focus on whether religious disagreement with epistemic peers (someone whose epistemic ability is equal to our own) demands us to adopt a skeptical or agnostic stance or whether to reduce or change our religious beliefs.
Faith and reason
While religions resort to rational arguments to attempt to establish their views, they also claim that religious belief is at least partially to be accepted through faith, confidence or trust in one's religious belief. There are different conceptions or models of faith, including:
The affective model of faith sees it as a feeling of trust, a psychological state
The special knowledge model of faith as revealing specific religious truths (defended by Reformed epistemology)
The belief model of faith as the theoretical conviction that a certain religious claim is true.
Faith as trusting, as making a fiducial commitment such as trusting in God.
The practical doxastic venture model where faith is seen as a commitment to believe in the trustworthiness of a religious truth or in God. In other words, to trust in God presupposes belief, thus faith must include elements of belief and trust.
The non-doxastic venture model of faith as practical commitment without actual belief (defended by figures such as Robert Audi, J. L. Schellenberg and Don Cupitt). In this view, one need not believe in literal religious claims about reality to have religious faith.
The hope model, faith as hoping
There are also different positions on how faith relates to reason. One example is the belief that faith and reason are compatible and work together, which is the view of Thomas Aquinas and the orthodox view of Catholic natural theology. According to this view, reason establishes certain religious truths and faith (guided by reason) gives us access to truths about the divine which, according to Aquinas, "exceed all the ability of human reason."
Another position on is Fideism, the view that faith is "in some sense independent of, if not outright adversarial toward, reason." Modern philosophers such as Kierkegaard, William James, and Wittgenstein have been associated with this label. Kierkegaard in particular, argued for the necessity of the religious to take a non-rational leap of faith to bridge the gulf between man and God. Wittgensteinian fideism meanwhile sees religious language games as being incommensurate with scientific and metaphysical language games, and that they are autonomous and thus may only be judged on their own standards. The obvious criticism to this is that many religions clearly put forth metaphysical claims.
Several contemporary New Atheist writers which are hostile to religion hold a related view that says that religious claims and scientific claims are opposed to each other and that therefore religions are false.
The Protestant theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) argued that religious believers have no need to prove their beliefs through reason and thus rejected the project of natural theology. According to Barth, human reason is corrupt and God is utterly different from his creatures, thus we can only rely on God's own revelation for religious knowledge. Barth's view has been termed Neo-orthodoxy. Similarly, D.Z. Phillips argues that God is not intelligible through reason or evidence because God is not an empirical object or a 'being among beings'.
As Brian Davies points out, the problem with positions like Barth's is that they do not help us in deciding between inconsistent and competing revelations of the different religions.
Science
The topic of whether religious beliefs are compatible with science and in what way is also another important topic in the philosophy of religion as well as in theology. This field draws the historical study of their interactions and conflicts, such as the debates in the United States over the teaching of evolution and creationism. There are different models of interaction that have been discussed in the philosophical literature, including:
Conflict thesis which sees them as being in constant conflict, such as during the reception of the theory of evolution and the current debate over creationism.
Independence model, both have separate domains, or non-overlapping magisteria
Dialogue model, some overlap between the fields, they remain separate but share some concepts and presuppositions
Integration or unification model includes projects like natural theology and process theology
The field also draws the scientific study of religion, particularly by psychologists and sociologists as well as cognitive scientists. Various theories about religion have arisen from these various disciplines. One example is the various evolutionary theories of religion which see the phenomenon as either adaptive or a by-product. Another can be seen in the various theories put forth by the Cognitive science of religion. Some argued that evolutionary or cognitive theories undermine religious belief.
Religious experience
Closely related to knowledge and belief is how to interpret religious experiences and their potential for providing knowledge. Religious experiences have been recorded throughout all cultures and are widely diverse. These personal experiences tend to be highly important to individuals who undergo them. Discussions about religious experiences can be said to be informed in part by the question: "what sort of information about what there is might religious experience provide, and how could one tell?"
One could interpret these experiences either veridically, neutrally or as delusions. Both monotheistic and non-monotheistic religious thinkers and mystics have appealed to religious experiences as evidence for their claims about ultimate reality. Philosophers such as Richard Swinburne and William Alston have compared religious experiences to everyday perceptions, that is, both are noetic and have a perceptual object, and thus religious experiences could logically be veridical unless we have a good reason to disbelieve them. Other philosophers such as Eleonore Stump and Matthew Benton argue for an interpersonal epistemology on which one can experience and know God in a relational or personal sense.
According to Brian Davies common objections against the veridical force of religious experiences include the fact that experience is frequently deceptive and that people who claim an experience of a god may be "mistakenly identifying an object of their experience", or be insane or hallucinating. However, he argues that we cannot deduce from the fact that our experiences are sometimes mistaken, hallucinations or distorted to the conclusion that all religious experiences are mistaken etc. Indeed, a drunken or hallucinating person could still perceive things correctly, therefore these objections cannot be said to necessarily disprove all religious experiences.
According to C. B. Martin, "there are no tests agreed upon to establish genuine experience of God and distinguish it decisively from the ungenuine", and therefore all that religious experiences can establish is the reality of these psychological states.
Naturalistic explanations for religious experiences are often seen as undermining their epistemic value. Explanations such as the fear of death, suggestion, infantile regression, sexual frustration, neurological anomalies ("it's all in the head") as well as the socio-political power that having such experiences might grant to a mystic have been put forward. More recently, some argued that religious experiences are caused by cognitive misattributions akin to hallucinations, although this was denied by others. A contrary position was taken by Bertrand Russell who compared the veridical value of religious experiences to the hallucinations of a drunk person: "From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes. Each is in an abnormal physical condition, and therefore has abnormal perceptions." However, as William L. Rowe notes:
The hidden assumption in Russell's argument is that bodily and mental states that interfere with reliable perceptions of the physical world also interfere with reliable perceptions of a spiritual world beyond the physical, if there is such a spiritual world to be perceived. Perhaps this assumption is reasonable, but it certainly is not obviously true.
In other words, as argued by C.D. Broad, "one might need to be slightly 'cracked or at least appear to be mentally and physically abnormal in order to perceive the supranormal spiritual world.
William James meanwhile takes a middle course between accepting mystical experiences as veridical or seeing them as delusional. He argues that for the individual who experiences them, they are authoritative and they break down the authority of the rational mind. Not only that, but according to James, the mystic is justified in this. But when it comes to the non-mystic, the outside observer, they have no reason to regard them as either veridical nor delusive.
The study of religious experiences from the perspective of the field of phenomenology has also been a feature of the philosophy of religion. Key thinkers in this field include William Brede Kristensen and Gerard van der Leeuw.
Types
Just like there are different religions, there are different forms of religious experience. One could have "subject/content" experiences (such as a euphoric meditative state) and "subject/consciousness/object" experiences (such as the perception of having seen a god, i.e. theophany). Experiences of theophany are described in ancient Mediterranean religious works and myths and include the story of Semele who died due to her seeing Zeus and the Biblical story of the Burning bush. Indian texts like the Bhagavad Gita also contain theophanic events. The diversity (sometimes to the point of contradiction) of religious experiences has also been used as an argument against their veridical nature, and as evidence that they are a purely subjective psychological phenomenon.
In Western thought, religious experience (mainly a theistic one) has been described by the likes of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Rudolf Otto and William James. According to Schleiermacher, the distinguishing feature of a religious experience is that "one is overcome by the feeling of absolute dependence." Otto meanwhile, argued that while this was an important element, the most basic feature of religious experiences is that it is numinous. He described this as "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self" as well as having the qualities of being a mystery, terrifying and fascinating.
Rowe meanwhile defined a religious experience as "an experience in which one senses the immediate presence of the divine." According to Rowe, religious experiences can be divided in the following manner:
Religious experiences in which one senses the presence of the divine as being distinct from oneself.
Mystical experiences in which one senses one's own union with a divine presence.
The extrovertive way looks outward through the senses into the world around us and finds the divine reality there.
The introvertive way turns inward and finds the divine reality in the deepest part of the self.
Non-monotheistic religions meanwhile also report different experiences from theophany, such as non-dual experiences of oneness and deeply focused meditative states (termed samadhi in Indian religion) as well as experiences of enlightenment in Buddhism, liberation in Hinduism, and kevala in Jainism.
Another typology, offered by Chad Meister, differentiates between three major experiences:
Regenerative experiences, in which an individual feels reborn, transformed or changed radically, usually resulting in religious conversion.
Charismatic experiences, in which special gifts, abilities, or blessings are manifested (such as healing, visions, etc.)
Mystical experiences, which can be described using William James qualifications as being: ineffable, noetic, transient and passive.
Perennialism vs Constructivism
Another debate on this topic is whether all religious cultures share common core mystical experiences (Perennialism) or whether these experiences are in some way socially and culturally constructed (Constructivism or Contextualism). According to Walter Stace all cultures share mystical experiences of oneness with the external world, as well as introverted "Pure Conscious Events" which is empty of all concepts, thoughts, qualities, etc. except pure consciousness. Similarly Ninian Smart argued that monistic experiences were universal. Perennialists tend to distinguish between the experience itself, and its post experience interpretation to make sense of the different views in world religions.
Some constructivists like Steven T. Katz meanwhile have argued against the common core thesis, and for either the view that every mystical experience contains at least some concepts (soft constructivism) or that they are strongly shaped and determined by one's religious ideas and culture (hard constructivism). In this view, the conceptual scheme of any mystic strongly shapes their experiences and because mystics from different religions have very different schemas, there cannot be any universal mystical experiences.
Religion and ethics
All religions argue for certain values and ideas of the moral Good. Non-monotheistic Indian traditions like Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta find the highest Good in nirvana or moksha which leads to release from suffering and the rounds of rebirth and morality is a means to achieve this, while for monotheistic traditions, God is the source or ground of all morality and heaven in the highest human good. The world religions also offer different conceptions of the source of evil and suffering in the world, that is, what is wrong with human life and how to solve and free ourselves from these dilemmas. For example, for Christianity, sin is the source of human problems, while for Buddhism, it is craving and ignorance.
A general question which philosophy of religion asks is what is the relationship, if any, between morality and religion. Brian Davies outlines four possible theses:
Morality somehow requires religion. One example of this view is Kant's idea that morality should lead us to believe in a moral law, and thus to believe in an upholder of that law, that is, God.
Morality is somehow included in religion, "The basic idea here is that being moral is part of what being religious means."
Morality is pointless without religion, for one would have no reason to be moral without it.
Morality and religion are opposed to each other. In this view, belief in a God would mean one would do whatever that God commands, even if it goes against morality. The view that religion and morality are often opposed has been espoused by atheists like Lucretius and Bertrand Russell as well as by theologians like Kierkegaard who argued for a 'teleological suspension of the ethical'.
Monotheistic religions who seek to explain morality and its relationship to God must deal with what is termed the Euthyphro dilemma, famously stated in the Platonic dialogue "Euthyphro" as: "Is the pious (τὸ ὅσιον, i.e. what is morally good) loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" Those who hold that what is moral is so because it is what God commands are defending a version of the Divine command theory.
Another important topic which is widely discussed in Abrahamic monotheistic religious philosophy is the problem of human Free will and God's omniscience. God's omniscience could presumably include perfect knowledge of the future, leading to Theological determinism and thus possibly contradicting with human free will. There are different positions on this including libertarianism (free will is true) and Predestination.
Miracles
Belief in miracles and supernatural events or occurrences is common among world religions. A miracle is an event which cannot be explained by rational or scientific means. The Resurrection of Jesus and the Miracles of Muhammad are examples of miracles claimed by religions.
Skepticism towards the supernatural can be found in early philosophical traditions like the Indian Carvaka school and Greco-Roman philosophers like Lucretius. David Hume, who defined a miracle as "a violation of the laws of nature", famously argued against miracles in Of Miracles, Section X of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748). For Hume, the probability that a miracle has not occurred is always greater than the probability that it has because "as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws [of nature], the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined" (Enquiry. X. p. 173). Hume does not argue that a miracle is impossible, only that it is unreasonable to believe in any testimony of a miracle's occurrence, for evidence for the regularity of natural laws is much stronger than human testimony (which is often in error).
According to Rowe, there are two weaknesses with Hume's argument. First, there could be other forms of indirect evidence for the occurrence of a miracle that does not include testimony of someone's direct experience of it. Secondly, Rowe argues that Hume overestimates "the weight that should be given to past experience in support of some principle thought to be a law of nature." For it is a common occurrence that currently accepted ideas of natural laws are revised due to an observed exception but Hume's argument would lead one to conclude that these exceptions do not occur. Rowe adds that "It remains true, however, that a reasonable person will require quite strong evidence before believing that a law of nature has been violated. It is easy to believe the person who claimed to see water run downhill, but quite difficult to believe that someone saw water run uphill."
Another definition of a miracle is possible however, which is termed the Epistemic theory of miracles and was argued for by Spinoza and St. Augustine. This view rejects that a miracle is a transgression of natural laws, but is simply a transgression of our current understanding of natural law. In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza writes: "miracles are only intelligible as in relation to human opinions, and merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the writer and narrator of the miracle" (Tractatus p. 84). Similarly, R.F. Holland has defined miracle in a naturalistic way in a widely cited paper. For Holland, a miracle need only be an extraordinary and beneficial coincidence interpreted religiously.
Brian Davies notes that even if we can establish that a miracle has occurred, it is hard to see what this is supposed to prove. For it is possible that they arise due to agencies which are unusual and powerful, but not divine.
Afterlife
World religions put forth various theories which affirm life after death and different kinds of postmortem existence. This is often tied to belief in an immortal individual soul or self (Sanskrit: atman) separate from the body which survives death, as defended by Plato, Descartes, Monotheistic religions like Christianity and many Indian philosophers. This view is also a position on the mind body problem, mainly, dualism. This view then must show not only that dualism is true and that souls exist, but also that souls survive death. As Kant famously argued, the mere existence of a soul does not prove its immortality, for one could conceive that a soul, even if it is totally simple, could still fade away or lose its intensity. H. H. Price is one modern philosopher who has speculated at length about what it would be like to be a disembodied soul after death.
One major issue with soul beliefs is that since personhood is closely tied to one's physical body, it seems difficult to make sense of a human being existing apart from their body. A further issue is with continuity of personal identity, that is, it is not easy to account for the claim that the person that exists after bodily death is the same person that existed before.
Bertrand Russell put forth the general scientific argument against the afterlife as follows:
Persons are part of the everyday world with which science is concerned, and the conditions which determine their existence are discoverable...we know that the brain is not immortal, and that the organized energy of a living body becomes, as it were, demobilized at death and therefore not available for collective action. All the evidence goes to show that what we regard as our mental life is bound up with brain structure and organized bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases. The argument is only one of probability, but it is as strong as those upon which most scientific conclusions are based.
Contra Russell, J. M. E. McTaggart argues that people have no scientific proof that the mind is dependent on the body in this particular way. As Rowe notes, the fact that the mind depends on the functions of the body while one is alive is not necessarily proof that the mind will cease functioning after death just as a person trapped in a room while depending on the windows to see the outside world might continue to see even after the room ceases to exist.
Buddhism is one religion which, while affirming postmortem existence (through rebirth), denies the existence of individual souls and instead affirms a deflationary view of personal identity, termed not-self (anatta).
While physicalism has generally been seen as hostile to notions of an afterlife, this need not be the case. Abrahamic religions like Christianity have traditionally held that life after death will include the element of bodily resurrection. One objection to this view is that it seems difficult to account for personal continuity, at best, a resurrected body is a replica of the resurrected person not the same person. One response is the constitution view of persons, which says persons are constituted by their bodies and by a "first-person perspective", the capacity to think of oneself as oneself. In this view, what is resurrected is that first person perspective, or both the person's body and that perspective. An objection to this view is that it seems difficult to differentiate one person's first person perspective from another person's without reference to temporal and spatial relations. Peter van Inwagen meanwhile, offers the following theory:
Perhaps at the moment of each man's death, God removes his corpse and replaces it with a simulacrum which is what is burned or rots. Or perhaps God is not quite so wholesale as this: perhaps He removes for "safekeeping" only the "core person"—the brain and central nervous system—or even some special part of it. These are details. (van Inwagen 1992: 245–46)
This view shows how some positions on the nature of the afterlife are closely tied to and sometimes completely depend upon theistic positions. This close connection between the two views was made by Kant, who argued that one can infer an afterlife from belief in a just God who rewards persons for their adherence to moral law.
Other discussions on the philosophy of the afterlife deal with phenomena such as near death experiences, reincarnation research, and other parapsychological events and hinge on whether naturalistic explanations for these phenomena is enough to explain them or not. Such discussions are associated with philosophers like William James, Henry Sidgwick, C.D. Broad, and H.H. Price.
Diversity and pluralism
The issue of how one is to understand religious diversity and the plurality of religious views and beliefs has been a central concern of the philosophy of religion.
There are various philosophical positions regarding how one is to make sense of religious diversity, including exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism, relativism, atheism or antireligion and agnosticism.
Religious exclusivism is the claim that only one religion is true and that others are wrong. To say that a religion is exclusivistic can also mean that salvation or human freedom is only attainable by the followers of one's religion. This view tends to be the orthodox view of most monotheistic religions, such as Christianity and Islam, though liberal and modernist trends within them might differ. William L Rowe outlines two problems with this view. The first problem is that it is easy to see that if this is true, a large portion of humanity is excluded from salvation and it is hard to see how a loving god would desire this. The second problem is that once we become acquainted with the saintly figures and virtuous people in other religions, it can be difficult to see how we could say they are excluded from salvation just because they are not part of our religion.
A different view is inclusivism, which is the idea that "one's own tradition alone has the whole truth but that this truth is nevertheless partially reflected in other traditions." An inclusivist might maintain that their religion is privileged, they can also hold that other religious adherents have fundamental truths and even that they will be saved or liberated. The Jain view of Anekantavada ('many-sidedness') has been interpreted by some as a tolerant view which is an inclusive acceptance of the partial truth value of non-Jain religious ideas. As Paul Dundas notes, the Jains ultimately held the thesis that Jainism is the final truth, while other religions only contain partial truths. Other scholars such as Kristin Beise Kiblinger have also argued that some of the Buddhist traditions include inclusivist ideas and attitudes.
In the modern Western study of religion, the work of Ninian Smart has also been instrumental in representing a more diverse understanding of religion and religious pluralism. Smart's view is that there are genuine differences between religions.
Pluralism is the view that all religions are equally valid responses to the divine and that they are all valid paths to personal transformation. This approach is taken by John Hick, who has developed a pluralistic view which synthesizes components of various religious traditions. Hick promotes an idea of a noumenal sacred reality which different religions provide us access to. Hick defines his view as "the great world faiths embody different perceptions and conceptions of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real or the Ultimate." For Hick, all religions are true because they all allow us to encounter the divine reality, even if they have different deities and conceptions of it. Rowe notes that a similar idea is proposed by Paul Tillich's concept of Being-itself.
The view of perennialism is that there is a single or core truth or experience which is shared by all religions even while they use different terms and language to express it. This view is espoused by the likes of Aldous Huxley, the thinkers of the Traditionalist School as well as Neo-Vedanta.
Yet another way of responding to the conflicting truth claims of religions is Relativism. Joseph Runzo., one of its most prominent defenders, has argued for henofideism which states that the truth of a religious worldview is relative to each community of adherents. Thus while religions have incompatible views, each one is individually valid as they emerge from individual experiences of a plurality of phenomenal divine realities. According to Runzo, this view does not reduce the incompatible ideas and experiences of different religions to mere interpretations of the Real and thus preserves their individual dignity.
Another response to the diversity and plurality of religious beliefs and deities throughout human history is one of skepticism towards all of them (or even antireligion), seeing them as illusions or human creations which serve human psychological needs. Sigmund Freud was a famous proponent of this view, in various publications such as The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). According to Freud, "Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."
While one can be skeptical towards the claims of religion, one need not be hostile towards religion. Don Cupitt is one example of someone who, while disbelieving in the metaphysical and cosmological claims of his religion, holds that one can practice it with a "non-realist" perspective which sees religious claims as human inventions and myths to live by.
Religious language
The question of religious language and in what sense it can be said to be meaningful has been a central issue of the philosophy of religion since the work of the Vienna circle, a group of philosophers who, influenced by Wittgenstein, put forth the theory of Logical positivism. Their view was that religious language, such as any talk of God cannot be verified empirically and thus was ultimately meaningless. This position has also been termed theological noncognitivism. A similar view can be seen in David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, where he famously wrote that any work which did not include either (1) abstract reasoning on quantity or number or (2) reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence was "nothing but sophistry and illusion".
In a similar vein, Antony Flew, questioned the validity of religious statements because they do not seem to be falsifiable, that is, religious claims do not seem to allow any counter evidence to count against them and thus they seem to be lacking in content. While such arguments were popular in the 1950s and 60s, the verification principle and falsifiability as a criterion for meaning are no longer as widely held. The main problem with verificationism is that it seems to be self refuting, for it is a claim which does not seem to be supported by its own criterion.
As noted by Brian Davies, when talking about God and religious truths, religious traditions tend to resort to metaphor, negation and analogy. The via negativa has been defended by thinkers such as Maimonides who denied that positive statements about God were helpful and wrote: "you will come nearer to the knowledge and comprehension of God by the negative attributes." Similar approaches based on negation can be seen in the Hindu doctrine of Neti neti and the Buddhist philosophy of Madhyamaka.
Wittgenstein's theory of language games also shows how one can use analogical religious language to describe God or religious truths, even if the words one is using do not in this case refer to their everyday sense, i.e. when we say God is wise, we do not mean he is wise in the same sense that a person is wise, yet it can still make sense to talk in this manner. However, as Patrick Sherry notes, the fact that this sort of language may make sense does not mean that one is warranted in ascribing these terms to God, for there must be some connection between the relevant criteria we use in ascribing these terms to conventional objects or subjects and to God. As Chad Meister notes though, for Wittgenstein, a religion's language game need not reflect some literal picture of reality (as a picture theory of meaning would hold) but is useful simply because its ability to "reflect the practices and forms of life of the various religious adherents." Following Wittgenstein, philosophers of religion like Norman Malcolm, B. R. Tilghman, and D. Z. Phillips have argued that instead of seeing religious language as referring to some objective reality, we should instead see it as referring to forms of life. This approach is generally termed non-realist.
Against this view, realists respond that non-realism subverts religious belief and the intelligibility of religious practice. It is hard to see for example, how one can pray to a God without believing that they really exist. Realists also argue that non-realism provides no normative way to choose between competing religions.
Analytic philosophy of religion
In Analytic Philosophy of Religion, James Franklin Harris noted that
As with the study of ethics, early analytic philosophy tended to avoid the study of philosophy of religion, largely dismissing (as per the logical positivists view) the subject as part of metaphysics and therefore meaningless. The collapse of logical positivism renewed interest in philosophy of religion, prompting philosophers like William Alston, John Mackie, Alvin Plantinga, Robert Merrihew Adams, Richard Swinburne, and Antony Flew not only to introduce new problems, but to re-open classical topics such as the nature of miracles, theistic arguments, the problem of evil, the rationality of belief in God, concepts of the nature of God, and many more.
Plantinga, Mackie and Flew debated the logical validity of the free will defense as a way to solve the problem of evil. Alston, grappling with the consequences of analytic philosophy of language, worked on the nature of religious language. Adams worked on the relationship of faith and morality. Analytic epistemology and metaphysics has formed the basis for a number of philosophically-sophisticated theistic arguments, like those of the reformed epistemologists like Plantinga.
Analytic philosophy of religion has also been preoccupied with Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as his interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy of religion. Using first-hand remarks (which would later be published in Philosophical Investigations, Culture and Value, and other works), philosophers such as Peter Winch and Norman Malcolm developed what has come to be known as contemplative philosophy, a Wittgensteinian school of thought rooted in the "Swansea tradition" and which includes Wittgensteinians such as Rush Rhees, Peter Winch and D. Z. Phillips, among others. The name "contemplative philosophy" was first coined by D. Z. Phillips in Philosophy's Cool Place, which rests on an interpretation of a passage from Wittgenstein's "Culture and Value". This interpretation was first labeled, "Wittgensteinian Fideism", by Kai Nielsen but those who consider themselves Wittgensteinians in the Swansea tradition have relentlessly and repeatedly rejected this construal as a caricature of Wittgenstein's considered position; this is especially true of D. Z. Phillips. Responding to this interpretation, Kai Nielsen and D.Z. Phillips became two of the most prominent philosophers on Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion.
See also
List of philosophers of religion
Comparative theology
Conceptions of God
Definition of religion
Issues in Science and Religion
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion by Hegel
Nontheistic religion
Religious naturalism
Religious studies
Philosophical theology
Notes
References
Further reading
Al-Nawawi Forty Hadiths and Commentary, by Arabic Virtual Translation Center; (2010) (Philosophy of Religion from an Islamic Point of View)
The London Philosophy Study Guide offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Philosophy of Religion
William L. Rowe, William J. Wainwright, Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, Third Ed. (Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998)
Religious Studies is an international journal for the philosophy of religion. It is available online and in print and has a fully searchable online archive dating back to Issue 1 in 1965. It currently publishes four issues per year.
Shults, F. LeRon, 2019, "Computer Modeling in Philosophy of Religion", Open Philosophy, (special issue on computer modeling in philosophy) 2(1): 108–125. doi:10.1515/opphil-2019-0011.
Shokhin, Vladimir K., "The Pioneering Appearances of Philosophy of Religion in Europe: François Para du Phanjas on the Nature of Religion", Open Theology 2015, 1: 97-106.
Yandell, Keith E. PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION A contemporary introduction, Routledge, 2002.
Saeed, Abu Hayyan, Fallacies of the Atheists ! Who is the Architect of this Universe ? (February 19, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4731439.
External links
An introduction to the Philosophy of Religion by Paul Newall
Philosophy of Religion Useful annotated index of religious philosophy topics
Philosophy of Religion .Info Introductory articles on philosophical arguments for and against theism
The Australasian Philosophy of Religion Association
Introductory Articles Into the Philosophy of Religion from University of Notre Dame
Hume on Miracles, commentary by Rev Dr Wally Shaw
[Saeed, Abu Hayyan, The objections of Atheists and Orientalists to the Holy Quran and their answers... (January 18, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4698784 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4698784]
R
Religion
Religion and government
Religion and politics
Religious studies | 0.786901 | 0.992899 | 0.781313 |
Postmodern religion | Postmodern religion is any type of religion that is influenced by postmodernism and postmodern philosophies. Examples of religions that may be interpreted using postmodern philosophy include Postmodern Christianity, Postmodern Neopaganism, and Postmodern Buddhism. Postmodern religion is not an attempt to banish religion from the public sphere; rather, it is a philosophical approach to religion that critically considers orthodox assumptions (that may reflect power differences in society rather than universal truths). Postmodern religious systems of thought view realities as plural, subjective, and dependent on the individual's worldview. Postmodern interpretations of religion acknowledge and value a multiplicity of diverse interpretations of truth, being, and ways of seeing. There is a rejection of sharp distinctions and global or dominant metanarratives in postmodern religion, and this reflects one of the core principles of postmodern philosophy. A postmodern interpretation of religion emphasises the key point that religious truth is highly individualistic, subjective, and resides within the individual.
Eclecticism and non-dogmatic theology
According to postmodern philosophy, society is in a state of constant change. There is no absolute version of reality, no absolute truths. Postmodern religion strengthens the perspective of the individual and weakens the strength of institutions and religions that deal with objective realities. Postmodern religion considers that there are no universal religious truths or laws. Rather, reality is shaped by social, historical, and cultural contexts according to the individual, place, and/or time. Individuals may seek to draw eclectically on diverse religious beliefs, practices, and rituals in order to incorporate these into their own religious worldview.
In Japan, Shinto and Buddhist ideas are woven together and coexist. Some people who practice Buddhism may be syncretic in their approach. Syncretism occurs among the Eastern religions. Similarly, versions of Hinduism and Neopaganism may also be interpreted from a postmodern perspective. A postmodern religion can be non-dogmatic, syncretic, and eclectic: in drawing from various faiths and traditions, postmodern religion challenges the notion of absolute truth.
A postmodern interpretation of religion emphasizes the importance of questioning and considering historical bias when studying religion from a historical perspective. For example, doctoral studies in religion at Harvard emphasise studying religion using wider contexts of history and comparative studies. It is these "wider contexts" that make religion a valid subject of postmodern contemplation. Studies of religion are often approached from a historical perspective. A postmodern interpretation of a religion acknowledges that history can be represented in an inherently biased way, reinforcing the mainstream ideologies of those in power.
Versions of truth
Postmodern religion acknowledges and accepts different versions of truth. For example, rituals, beliefs and practices can be invented, transformed, created and reworked based on constantly shifting and changing realities, individual preferences, myths, legends, archetypes, rituals and cultural values and beliefs. Individuals who interpret religion using postmodern philosophy may draw from the histories of various cultures to inform their religious beliefs - they may question, reclaim, challenge and critique representations of religion in history based on the theories of postmodernism, which acknowledge that realities are diverse, subjective and depend on the individual's interests and interpretations.
Appeal to marginalized groups
Members of groups in society who face discrimination or who are marginalized, such as women, the gay community, or ethnic minority groups, may be drawn to postmodern religious thinking. For example, the interpretation of Christianity from a postmodern perspective offers the potential for groups in society, such as the gay community or women, the ability to connect with a version of reality or truth that does not exclude or marginalize them. A postmodern interpretation of religion may focus on considering a religion without orthodox assumptions (that may reflect power differences in society rather than universal truths). In Semitic Neopaganism, a postmodern approach to Neopaganism involves challenging or reclaiming mainstream versions of reality and truth that may be more inclusive of women. Minority groups and the socially or economically disadvantaged may be drawn to follow a postmodern approach to religion because of the way that postmodern philosophy empowers the individual and provides an "emancipatory framework" with which to challenge mainstream ideologies or dominant power structures.
Postmodern interpretations of religion
Christianity
Interpreting Christianity using theories of postmodernism usually involves finding the balance between acknowledging pluralism, a plurality of views and historical influence on doctrine, and avoiding the extremes of postmodernism. Christian philosopher John Riggs proposes that postmodernism and Christianity have much to offer each other. He asserts that Christians who have adopted elements of postmodern thinking still need to acknowledge that some notions of reality need to be fixed and real in order to have "meaningful claims about vital topics such as ethics and God". An example of a specific religious movement that uses postmodern thinking is the Emerging Church.
Neopaganism
Neopaganism can be interpreted from a postmodern perspective. Postmodern religion can be non-dogmatic, syncretic, eclectic, and draw from various faiths and traditions and challenges the notion of absolute truths. Wicca, the largest tradition of Neopaganism, can be interpreted using postmodern philosophies. Postmodern interpretations of Wicca often lead to the practitioner adopting a more eclectic approach, because the very nature of postmodern theory involves the acceptance of many versions of truth and reality.
Eclectic Wicca is the most widely adapted form of Wicca in America today and the core philosophies of postmodern thinking are often used in order to form an interpretation of Wicca that is highly individual and characterized by the subjective questioning of reality and truth. This version of Wicca may draw eclectically from, adapt, challenge, and adopt a wider range of religious beliefs and perspectives, such as Buddhism, Shintoism, Druidism, Hinduism, and Goddess movements such as Dianic Wicca, Celtic Wicca, and Semitic Neopaganism.
Postmodern interpretations of Wicca tend to be context driven, egalitarian, immanent and experiential. Academic texts often represent Wicca in literature and research as a specific tradition that is underpinned by discourses of modernism.
Postmodern spirituality
Postmodern spirituality refers to new forms of spirituality in the contexts of postmodern societies in a globalised world. Former universalistic worldviews of modernity become contested, old explanations and certainties questioned.
See also
Chaos magic
References
Further reading
Ahlbäck, Tore (ed.) (2009): Postmodern spirituality. (based on papers read at the Symposium on Postmodern Spirituality, held at Åbo, Finland, on 11–13 June 2008)
Benedikter, Roland (2006): Postmodern spirituality. A dialogue in five parts - Part V: Can Only A God Save Us? Postmodern Proto-Spirituality And The Current Global Turn To Religion. (online)
Dunn, Patrick (2005): Postmodern Magic: The Art of Magic in the Information Age. St. Paul
Griffin, David Ray (1988): Spirituality and society: postmodern visions. Albany.
Griffin, David Ray (1989): God and religion in the postmodern world: essays in postmodern theology. New York
Hart, Kevin (ed.) (2005): The experience of God. A postmodern response. New York.
King, Ursula (1998): "Spirituality in a postmodern age: faith and praxis in new contexts". In: King, Ursula (ed.) (1998): Faith and Praxis in a Postmodern Age. London.
Muldoon, Tim (2005): Postmodern spirituality and the Ignatian Fundamentum. (short review)(full text)
Philosophical schools and traditions
Postmodernism | 0.81028 | 0.964096 | 0.781188 |
Sect | A sect is a subgroup of a religious, political, or philosophical belief system, typically emerging as an offshoot of a larger organization.Originally, the term referred specifically to religious groups that had separated from a main body, but it can now apply to any group that diverges from a larger organization to follow a distinct set of beliefs and practices. Sects often form when there is a perception of heresy either within the subgroup or from the larger group.
In an Indian context, sect refers to an organized tradition.
Etymology
The word sect originates from the Latin noun secta (a feminine form of a variant past participle of the verb sequi, to follow) which translates to "a way, road". Figuratively, it signifies a (prescribed) way, mode, or manner. Metonymously, sect refers to a discipline or school of thought as defined by a set of methods and doctrines. The various modern usages of the term stem largely from confusion with the homonymous (but etymologically unrelated) Latin word secta (the feminine form of the past participle of the verb secare, to cut).
Sociological definitions and descriptions
Sociologists have developed various definitions and descriptions for the term "sect." Early scholars like Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch (1912) were among the first to define sects within the church-sect typology, viewing them as voluntary associations of individuals who meet specific religious qualifications. Unlike churches, membership in a sect is not inherited at birth; rather, it arises from a person's voluntary acceptance of the sect's doctrines and disciplines, which requires ongoing validation from both the follower and the sect itself. Sects often attract individuals from marginalized or underprivileged social groups and typically form from schisms within established churches that align with the dominant social order.
Sects frequently critique liberal trends within mainstream denominations, advocating for a return to what they view as authentic religious practices. Their beliefs and practices are usually more radical and ethically strict than those of mainstream churches, acting as a form of protest against the prevailing societal values. The American sociologists Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge argue that sects present themselves as authentic, reformed versions of the faith they have separated from, maintaining a high degree of tension with the surrounding society. They further assert that sects have, in contrast to churches, a high degree of tension with the surrounding society. Other sociologists, like Fred Kniss, suggest that sectarianism is best understood through the lens of what the sect opposes. Some religious groups may be in tension primarily with other co-religious groups of different ethnic backgrounds, while others may conflict with society at large rather than the church they originally separated from.
Sectarianism in the sociology of religion, is sometimes defined as a worldview that emphasizes the unique legitimacy of a sect's creed and practices, often heightening tension with broader society by maintaining strict boundaries.
In his book The Road to Total Freedom, the English sociologist Roy Wallis describes that a sect is characterized by "epistemological authoritarianism": meaning it has an authoritative source for determining heresy. According to Wallis, sects claim to have unique and privileged access to truth or salvation, and their followers often view those outside the group as being in error. In contrast, Wallis describes cults as being marked by "epistemological individualism,"
In other languages
The corresponding words for "sect" in European languages other than English – Sekte (German), secte (French), secta (Spanish, Catalan), sectă (Romanian), setta (Italian), seita (Portuguese, Galician), sekta (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Latvian, Lithuanian), sekt (Danish, Estonian, Norwegian, Swedish), sekte (Dutch), szekta (Hungarian), секта (Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian), σέχτα (Greek) – refer to a harmful religious sect and translate into English as "cult".
In Buddhism
The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Religion distinguishes three types of classification of Buddhism, separated into "Movements", "Nikāyas" and "Doctrinal schools":
Schools:
Theravada, primarily in South Asia and Southeast Asia;
Mahāyāna, primarily in East Asia;
Vajrayāna, primarily in Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, India, Mongolia and the Russian republic of Kalmykia.
Nikāyas, or monastic fraternities, three of which survive at the present day:
Theravāda, in Southeast Asia and South Asia;
Dharmaguptaka, in China, Korea and Vietnam;
Mūlasarvāstivāda, in the Tibetan tradition;
In Christianity
While the historical usage of the term "sect" in Christendom has had pejorative connotations, referring to a group or movement with heretical beliefs or practices that deviate from those of groups considered orthodox, its primary meaning is to indicate a community which has separated itself from the larger body from which its members came.
Orthodox
Roman Catholic sects
Protestant sects
In Hinduism
The Indologist Axel Michaels writes in his book about Hinduism that in an Indian context the word "sect does not denote a split or excluded community, but rather an organized tradition, usually established by founder with ascetic practices." According to Michaels, "Indian sects do not focus on heresy, since the lack of a center or a compulsory center makes this impossible – instead, the focus is on adherents and followers."
In Islam
Islam was classically divided into two major sects, known as Sunni Islam and Shia Islam. Kharijite and Murijite Islam were two early Islamic sects. Each sect developed several distinct jurisprudence systems reflecting their own understanding of the Islamic law during the course of the history of Islam.
Current sects
Sunnis are separated into five maddhabs; Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali and Ẓāhirī. The Shia, on the other hand, first developed Kaysanism, which in turn divided into three major groupings known as Fivers, Seveners and Twelvers. The Zaydis separated first. The non-Zaydis were initially called "Rafida". The Rafidis later divided into two sub-groups known as Imamiyyah and Batiniyyah.
The "Imami-Shi'a" later brought into existence Ja'fari jurisprudence. Akhbarism, Usulism, and Shaykhism were all ensued as variations of "Ja'fari fiqh", while Alawites and Alevis who are not the strict followers of "Ja'farism" are developed separately from the teachings of Ithna'ashari Imāms.
Batiniyya groups, on the other hand, were divided into two sub-groups known as Seveners and Ismā'īlīs. Qarmatians who did not follow the Fatimid Caliphate were branched from the Seveners. Those groups of Batiniyya who followed the Fatimids are the ancestors of today's Ismā'īlīs. Druze was emerged as an offshoot of Ismāʿīlism at the beginning of the 11th Century. Isma'ilism at the end of the 11th Century split into two major branches known as Nizārī Ismā'īlī (Assassins of Alamut) and Musta’li Ismaili. As a result of the assassination of Fatimid Caliph Al-Amir bi-Ahkami'l-Lah, Mustaali was once more again divided into Hafizis and Taiyabi Ismailis (Dawoodis, Sulaymanis and Alavis).
The Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali Sunnis, the Twelver groups, the Ismā'īlī groups, the Zaydis, the Ibadis, and the Ẓāhirīs continue to exist. In addition, new sects like Black Muslim movements, Quranists, Salafis, Wahhabis, and Zikris have been emerged independently.
Former sects
The Khawarij were initially divided into five major branches: Sufris, Azariqa, Najdat, Adjarites and Ibadis.
Amman Message
An Islamic convention held in Jordan in July 2005, which brought 200 Muslim scholars from over 50 countries together, announced the official recognition of eight schools of Islamic jurisprudence and the varying schools of Islamic theology. The eight recognized Islamic schools and branches are:
Sunni Hanafi
Sunni Maliki
Sunni Shafi'i
Sunni Hanbali
Shi'i Imāmī (followers of the Ja'fari jurisprudence)
Shi'i Zaydi
Khariji Ibadi
Sunni Ẓāhirī
In Jainism
In Taoism
See also
Non-denominational Islam
Non-denominational Christianity
Non-denominational Judaism
Classifications of religious movements
Cult (religious practice)
New religious movement
One true church
Religious exclusivism
References
External links
Church sect theory by William H. Swatos, Jr . in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Society by Swatos (editor)
Apologetics Index: research resources on cults, sects, and related issues. The publisher operates from an evangelical Christian point of view, but the site links to and presents a variety of viewpoints.
ReligionNewsBlog.com Current news articles about religious cults, sects, and related issues.
Sociology of religion
Pejorative terms | 0.784586 | 0.995242 | 0.780854 |
Morality and religion | The intersections of morality and religion involve the relationship between religious views and morals. It is common for religions to have value frameworks regarding personal behavior meant to guide adherents in determining between right and wrong. These include the Triple Gems of Jainism, Islam's Sharia, Catholicism's Catechism, Buddhism's Noble Eightfold Path, and Zoroastrianism's "good thoughts, good words, and good deeds" concept, among others. Various sources - such as holy books, oral and written traditions, and religious leaders - may outline and interpret these frameworks. Some religious systems share tenets with secular value-frameworks such as consequentialism, freethought, and utilitarianism.
Religion and morality are not synonymous. Though religion may depend on morality,
and even develop alongside morality,
morality does not necessarily depend upon religion, despite some making "an almost automatic assumption" to this effect. According to The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, religion and morality "are to be defined differently and have no definitional connections with each other. Conceptually and in principle, morality and a religious value system are two distinct kinds of value systems or action guides." In the views of some, morality and religion can overlap.
One definition sees morality as an active process which is, "at the very least, the effort to guide one's conduct by reason, that is, doing what there are the best reasons for doing, while giving equal consideration to the interests of all those affected by what one does."
Value judgments can vary greatly between and within the teachings of various religions, past and present. People in some religious traditions, such as Christianity, may derive ideas of right and wrong from the rules and laws set forth in their respective authoritative guides and by their religious leaders.
Divine Command Theory equates morality to adherence to authoritative commands in a holy book. Religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism generally draw from some of the broadest canons of religious works. Researchers have shown interest in the relationship between religion and crime and other behavior that does not adhere to contemporary laws and social norms in various countries. Studies conducted in recent years have explored these relationships, but the results have been mixed and sometimes contradictory.
The ability of religious faiths to provide useful and consistent value frameworks remains a matter of some debate. Some religious commentators have asserted that one cannot lead a moral life without an absolute lawgiver as a guide.
Other observers assert that moral behavior does not rely on religious tenets,
and/or that moral guidelines vary over time
and space
rather than remain absolute,
and secular commentators (such as Christopher Hitchens) point to ethical challenges within various religions that conflict with contemporary social norms.
Relationship between religion and morality
Within the wide range of ethical traditions, religious traditions co-exist with secular value frameworks such as humanism, utilitarianism, and others. There are many types of religious values. Modern monotheistic religions, such as Islam, Judaism, Christianity (and to a certain degree others such as Sikhism) define right and wrong by the laws and rules set forth by their respective gods and as interpreted by religious leaders within the respective faith. Polytheistic religious traditions tend to be less absolute. For example, within Buddhism, the intention of the individual and the circumstances play roles in determining whether an action is right or wrong. Barbara Stoler Miller points out a further disparity between the morals of religious traditions, stating that in Hinduism, "practically, right and wrong are decided according to the categories of social rank, kinship, and stages of life. For modern Westerners, who have been raised on ideals of universality and egalitarianism, this relativity of values and obligations is the aspect of Hinduism most difficult to understand."
According to Stephen Gaukroger: "It was generally assumed in the 17th century that religion provided the unique basis for morality, and that without religion, there could be no morality." This view slowly shifted over time. In 1690, Pierre Bayle asserted that religion "is neither necessary nor sufficient for morality". Modern sources separate the two concepts. For example, The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics says that, For many religious people, morality and religion are the same or inseparable; for them either morality is part of religion or their religion is their morality. For others, especially for nonreligious people, morality and religion are distinct and separable; religion may be immoral or nonmoral, and morality may or should be nonreligious. Even for some religious people the two are different and separable; they may hold that religion should be moral and morality should be, but they agree that they may not be.
Richard Paula and Linda Elder of the Foundation for Critical Thinking assert that, "Most people confuse ethics with behaving in accordance with social conventions, religious beliefs, and the law." They separate the concept of ethics from these topics, stating: The proper role of ethical reasoning is to highlight acts of two kinds: those which enhance the well-being of others—that warrant our praise—and those that harm or diminish the well-being of others—and thus warrant our criticism. They note problems that could arise if religions defined ethics, such as:
religious practices like "torturing unbelievers or burning them alive" potentially being labeled "ethical"
the lack of a common religious baseline across humanity because religions provide different theological definitions for the idea of sin
They further note that various documents, such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights lay out "transcultural" and "trans-religious" ethical concepts and principles—such as slavery, genocide, torture, sexism, racism, murder, assault, fraud, deceit, and intimidation—which require no reliance on religion (or social convention) for us to understand they are "ethically wrong".
Armin Geertz suggests that "the age-old assumption that religion produces morals and values is neither the only, nor the most parsimonious, hypothesis for religion".
Religious frameworks
Religions provide different ways of dealing with moral dilemmas. For example, there is no absolute prohibition on killing in Hinduism, which recognizes that it "may be inevitable and indeed necessary" in certain circumstances. Christian traditions, view certain acts - such as abortion or divorce - in more absolute terms. In the case of divorce, a 2008 study by the Barna Group found that some denominations have a significantly higher divorce-rate than those in non-religious demographic groups (atheists and agnostics). However, Catholics and Evangelical Christians had the lowest divorce-rates and the agnostic/atheist group had by far the lowest number of married couples to begin with.
According to Thomas Dixon, "Many today ... argue that religious beliefs are necessary to provide moral guidance and standards of virtuous conduct in an otherwise corrupt, materialistic, and degenerate world." In the same vein, Christian theologian Ron Rhodes has remarked that "it is impossible to distinguish evil from good unless one has an infinite reference point which is absolutely good". Thomas Dixon states, "Religions certainly do provide a framework within which people can learn the difference between right and wrong."
Religions provide various methods for publicising, announcing and condemning the moral duties and decisions of individuals. A priestly caste may adopt the role of moral guardians.
Sometimes religious and state authorities work well in tandem to police morals, as in the case of god-kings, in medieval Europe or in colonial Massachusetts. But priesthoods may become dependent on secular authorities (a form of Caesaropapism) to promulgate and punish; or priests may come to concentrate on important ritual or ceremony and leave open the way for external preachers of moral revival - such as prophets in Judaism,
Muhammad in Arabia,
or Puritans and non-conformists in England.
Priesthoods may over time develop traditional or geographical inconsistencies in their moral teaching - with the possibility of religious innovators becoming heresiarchs and splitting off into various sects. In this sort of situation a written moral code (perhaps as part of sacred scriptures) may provide useful (even if sometimes inflexible) standardisation.
The interpretation of such written codes may devolve onto the likes of Christian canon lawyers or an Islamic ulama. Overall, the individual believer associated with a well-developed religion may have relatively little room left to make personal moral choices.
Religion and social dimensions
The study of religion and morality is contentious due to conceptual differences. The ethnocentric views on morality, failure to distinguish between in group and out group altruism, and inconsistent definition of religiosity all contribute to conflicting findings. Membership of a religious group can accentuate biases in behavior toward in group versus out group members, which may explain the lower number of interracial friends and greater approval of torture among church members. Furthermore, some studies have shown that religious prosociality is primarily motivated by wanting to appear prosocial, which may be related to the desire to further ones religious group. The egoistically motivated prosociality may also affect self-reports, resulting in biased results. Peer ratings can be biased by stereotypes, and indications of a person's group affiliation are sufficient to bias reporting.
In line with other findings suggesting that religious humanitarianism is largely directed at in-group members, greater religious identification, greater extrinsic religiosity and greater religious fundamentalism were associated with racial prejudice. This is congruent with the fact that 50% of religious congregations in the US are racially segregated, and only 12% have a degree of diversity.
According to global research done by Gallup on people from 145 countries, adherents of all the major world religions who attended religious services in the past week reported higher rates of generosity such as donating money, volunteering, and helping a stranger than do their coreligionists who did not attend services (non-attenders). Even for people who were nonreligious, those who said they attended religious services in the past week exhibited more generous behaviors. Another global study by Gallup on people from 140 countries showed that highly religious people are more likely to help others in terms of donating money, volunteering, and helping strangers despite them having, on average, lower incomes than those who are less religious or nonreligious.
One study on pro-social sentiments showed that non-religious people were more inclined to show generosity in random acts of kindness, such as lending their possessions and offering a seat on a crowded bus or train. Religious people were less inclined when it came to seeing how much compassion motivated participants to be charitable in other ways, such as in giving money or food to a homeless person and to non-believers.
A study found that religious people were more charitable than their irreligious counterparts. The study revealed that forty percent of worship service attending Americans volunteered regularly to help the poor and elderly as opposed to 15% of Americans who never attend services. Moreover, religious individuals were more likely than non-religious individuals to volunteer for school and youth programs (36% vs. 15%), a neighborhood or civic group (26% vs. 13%), and for health care (21% vs. 13%). Other research has shown similar correlations between religiosity and giving.
Some scientific studies show that the degree of religiosity is generally associated with higher ethical attitudes—for example, surveys suggesting a positive connection between faith and altruism.
The overall relationship between faith and crime is unclear. A 2001 review of studies on this topic found "The existing evidence surrounding the effect of religion on crime is varied, contested, and inconclusive, and currently no persuasive answer exists as to the empirical relationship between religion and crime." Dozens of studies have been conducted on this topic since the twentieth century. A 2005 study by Gregory S. Paul argues for a positive correlation between the degree of public religiosity in a society and certain measures of dysfunction, however, an analysis published later in the same journal contends that a number of methodological and theoretical problems undermine any findings or conclusions taken from Paul's research. In another response, Gary Jensen builds on and refines Paul's study. His conclusion is that a "complex relationship" exists between religiosity and homicide "with some dimensions of religiosity encouraging homicide and other dimensions discouraging it".
Some works indicate that some societies with lower religiosity have lower crime rates—especially violent crime, compared to some societies with higher religiosity. Phil Zuckerman notes that Denmark and Sweden, "which are probably the least religious countries in the world, and possibly in the history of the world," enjoy "among the lowest violent crime rates in the world [and] the lowest levels of corruption in the world." However, Zuckerman noted that none of these correlations mean that atheism and non-religiosity cause social well-being, instead existential security is what allows for atheism and non-religion to thrive in these societies.
Modern research in criminology also acknowledges an inverse relationship between religion and crime, with some studies establishing this connection. A meta-analysis of 60 studies on religion and crime concluded, "religious behaviors and beliefs exert a moderate deterrent effect on individuals' criminal behavior". However, in his books about the materialism in Americas Evangelical Churches Ron Sider accuses fellow Christians of failing to do better than their secular counterparts in the percentage adhering to widely held moral standards (e.g., lying, theft and sexual infidelity).
A Georgia State University study published in the academic journal Theoretical Criminology suggests that religion helps criminals to justify their crimes and might "encourage" it. The research concluded that "many street offenders anticipate an early death, making them less prone to delay gratification, more likely to discount the future costs of crime, and thus more likely to offend".
Criticism of religious values
Religious values can diverge from commonly-held contemporary moral positions, such as those on murder, mass atrocities, and slavery. For example, Simon Blackburn states that "apologists for Hinduism defend or explain away its involvement with the caste system, and apologists for Islam defend or explain away its harsh penal code or its attitude to women and infidels". In regard to Christianity, he states that the "Bible can be read as giving us a carte blanche for harsh attitudes to children, the mentally handicapped, animals, the environment, the divorced, unbelievers, people with various sexual habits, and elderly women". He provides examples such as the phrase in Exodus 22:18 that has "helped to burn alive tens or hundreds of thousands of women in Europe and America": "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and notes that the Old Testament God apparently has "no problems with a slave-owning society", considers birth control a crime punishable by death, and "is keen on child abuse". Blackburn notes morally suspect themes in the Bible's New Testament as well.
Philosopher David Hume stated that, "The greatest crimes have been found, in many instances, to be compatible with a superstitious piety and devotion; Hence it is justly regarded as unsafe to draw any inference in favor of a man's morals, from the fervor or strictness of his religious exercises, even though he himself believe them sincere."
Bertrand Russell said, "There are also, in most religions, specific ethical tenets which do definite harm. The Catholic condemnation of birth control, if it could prevail, would make the mitigation of poverty and the abolition of war impossible. The Hindu beliefs that the cow is a sacred animal and that it is wicked for widows to remarry cause quite needless suffering." He asserts that You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs....You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world.
According to Paul Copan, Jewish laws in the Bible show an evolution of moral standards towards protecting the vulnerable, imposing a death penalty on those pursuing forced slavery and identifying slaves as persons and not property.
According to Bertrand Russell, "Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm." He cites an example of a clergyman who was warned by a physician that his wife would die if she had another (her tenth) child, but impregnated her regardless, which resulted in her death. "No one condemned him; he retained his benefice and married again. So long as clergymen continue to condone cruelty and condemn 'innocent' pleasure, they can only do harm as guardians of the morals of the young."
Russell further states that, "The sense of sin which dominates many children and young people and often lasts on into later life is a misery and a source of distortion that serves no useful purpose of any sort or kind." Russel allows that religious sentiments have, historically, sometimes led to morally acceptable behavior, but asserts that, "in the present day, [1954] such good as might be done by imputing a theological origin to morals is inextricably bound up with such grave evils that the good becomes insignificant in comparison."
Secular morality
There are number of secular value frameworks, such as consequentialism, freethought, humanism, and utilitarianism. Yet, there have been opposing views about the ability of both religious and secular moral frameworks to provide useful guides to right and wrong actions.
Various non-religious commentators have supported the ability of secular value frameworks to provide useful guides. Bernard Williams argued that, "Either one's motives for following the moral word of God are moral motives, or they are not. If they are, then one is already equipped with moral motivations, and the introduction of God adds nothing extra. But if they are not moral motives, then they will be motives of such a kind that they cannot appropriately motivate morality at all ... we reach the conclusion that any appeal to God in this connection either adds to nothing at all, or it adds the wrong sort of thing." Other observers criticize religious morals as incompatible with modern social norms. For example, popular atheist Richard Dawkins, writing in The God Delusion, has stated that religious people have committed a wide variety of acts and held certain beliefs through history that we now consider morally repugnant. He has stated that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis held broadly Christian religious beliefs that inspired the Holocaust on account of antisemitic Christian doctrine, that Christians have traditionally imposed unfair restrictions on the legal and civil rights of women, and that Christians have condoned slavery of some form or description throughout most of Christianity's history. According to Paul Copan, the position of the Bible to slaves is a positive one for the slaves in that Jewish laws imposed a death penalty on those pursuing slavery and treated slaves as persons, not property.
By religion
Christian values
Hashkafa
Morality in Islam
Niyama
See also
Ethics in religion
Morality without religion
Notes
a. Zuckerman identifies that Scandinavians have "relatively high rates of petty crime and burglary", but "their overall rates of violent crime—such as murder, aggravated assault, and rape—are among the lowest on earth" (Zuckerman 2008, pp. 5–6).
b. The authors also state that "A few hundred years ago rates of homicide were astronomical in Christian Europe and the American colonies," and "[t]he least theistic secular developing democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards." They argue for a positive correlation between the degree of public religiosity in a society and certain measures of dysfunction, an analysis published later in the same journal argues that a number of methodological problems undermine any findings or conclusions in the research.
References
Religion | 0.789902 | 0.987708 | 0.780193 |
Religious persecution | Religious persecution is the systematic oppression of an individual or a group of individuals as a response to their religious beliefs or affiliations or their lack thereof. The tendency of societies or groups within societies to alienate or repress different subcultures is a recurrent theme in human history. Moreover, because a person's religion frequently determines his or her sense of morality, worldview, self-image, attitudes towards others, and overall personal identity to a significant extent, religious differences can be significant cultural, personal, and social factors.
Religious persecution may be triggered by religious or antireligious stances (when members of a dominant group denigrate religions other than their own or religion itself where the irreligious are the dominant group) or it may be triggered by the state when it views a particular religious group as a threat to its interests or security. At a societal level, the dehumanization of a particular religious group may readily lead to acts of violence or other forms of persecution. Religious persecution may be the result of societal and/or governmental regulation. Governmental regulation refers to the laws which the government imposes in order to regulate a religion, and societal regulation is discrimination against citizens because they adhere to one or more religions. In many countries, religious persecution has resulted in so much violence that it is considered a human rights problem.
Definition
David T. Smith, in Religious Persecution and Political Order in the United States, defines religious persecution as "violence or discrimination against members of a religious minority because of their religious affiliation," referring to "actions that are intended to deprive individuals of their political rights and force minorities to assimilate, leave, or live as second-class citizens. In the aspect of a state's policy, it may be defined as violations of freedom of thought, conscience and belief which are spread in accordance with a systematic and active state policy which encourages actions such as harassment, intimidation and the imposition of punishments in order to infringe or threaten the targeted minority's right to life, integrity or liberty. The distinction between religious persecution and religious intolerance lies in the fact that in most cases, the latter is motivated by the sentiment of the population, which may be tolerated or encouraged by the state. The denial of people's civil rights on the basis of their religion is most frequently described as religious discrimination, rather than religious persecution.
Examples of persecution include the confiscation or destruction of property, incitement of hatred, arrests, imprisonment, beatings, torture, murder, and executions. Religious persecution can be considered the opposite of freedom of religion.
Bateman has differentiated different degrees of persecution. "It must be personally costly... It must be unjust and undeserved... it must be a direct result of one's faith."
Sociological view
From a sociological perspective, the identity formation of strong social groups such as those which are generated by nationalism, ethnicity, or religion, is a causal aspect of practices of persecution. says that it is these communities, which can be a majority or a minority, that generate violence. Since the development of identity involves 'what we are not' as much as 'what we are', there are grounds for the fear that tolerance of 'what we are not' can contribute to the erosion of identity. Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke say that the perception that plurality is dangerous leads to religious persecution. Both the state and any dominant religion, share the concern that to "leave religion unchecked and without adequate controls will result in the uprising of religions that are dangerous to both state and citizenry," and this concern gives both the dominant religion and the state motives for restricting religious activity. Grim and Finke say it is specifically this religious regulation that leads to religious persecution. R.I. Moore says that persecution during the Middle Ages "provides a striking illustration of the classic deviance theory, [which is based on identity formation], as it was propounded by the father of sociology, Émile Durkheim". Persecution is also, often, part of a larger conflict involving emerging states as well as established states in the process of redefining their national identity.
James L.Gibson adds that the greater the attitudes of loyalty and solidarity to the group identity, and the more the benefits to belonging there are perceived to be, the more likely a social identity will become intolerant of challenges. Combining a strong social identity with the state, increases the benefits, therefore it is likely persecution from that social group will increase. Legal restriction from the state relies on social cooperation, so the state in its turn must protect the social group that supports it, increasing the likelihood of persecution from the state as well. Grim and Finke say their studies indicate that the higher the degree of religious freedom, the lower the degree of violent religious persecution. "When religious freedoms are denied through the regulation of religious profession or practice, violent religious persecution and conflict increase."
Perez Zagorin writes "According to some philosophers, tolerance is a moral virtue; if this is the case, it would follow that intolerance is a vice. But virtue and vice are qualities solely of individuals, and intolerance and persecution [in the Christian Middle Ages] were social and collective phenomena sanctioned by society and hardly questioned by anyone. Religious intolerance and persecution, therefore, were not seen as vices, but as necessary and salutary for the preservation of religious truth and orthodoxy and all that was seen to depend upon them." This view of persecution is not limited to the Middle Ages. As Christian R. Raschle and Jitse H. F. Dijkstra, say: "Religious violence is a complex phenomenon that exists in all places and times."
In the ancient societies of Egypt, Greece and Rome, torture was an accepted aspect of the legal system. Gillian Clark says violence was taken for granted in the fourth century as part of both war and punishment; torture from the carnifex, the professional torturer of the Roman legal system, was an accepted part of that system. Except for a few rare exceptions, such as the Persian empire under Cyrus and Darius, Denis Lacorne says that examples of religious tolerance in ancient societies, "from ancient Greece to the Roman empire, medieval Spain to the Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Republic", are not examples of tolerance in the modern sense of the term.
The sociological view regards religious intolerance and persecution as largely social processes that are determined more by the context within which the social community exists than anything else. When governments ensure equal freedom for all, there is less persecution.
Statistics
Statistics from Pew Research Center show that Christianity and Islam are persecuted in more countries around the world than other religions, and that Jews and Muslims are "most likely to live in countries where their groups experience harassment". As of 2018, Christians face harassment in 145 countries, Muslims face harassment in 139 countries, and Jews face harassment in 88 countries. Respectively: Christians account for 31% of the world's population, Muslims account for 24%, and Jews account for 0.2%. According to a 2019 report, government restrictions and social hostilities toward religion have risen in 187 countries.
Forms
Religious cleansing
"Religious cleansing" is sometimes used in reference to the removal of a population from a certain territory based on its religion. More recently, “religious cleansing” has been used in reference to the elimination of all religious structures or all individuals who adhere to a particular religion and live within a larger community which is composed of people who are members of the same ethnicity.
Throughout antiquity, population cleansing was largely motivated by economic and political factors, but occasionally, ethnic factors also played a role. During the Middle Ages, population cleansing took on a largely religious character. The religious motivation for population cleansing lost much of its salience early in the modern era, but until the 18th century, ethnic enmity in Europe continued to be couched in religious terms. Richard Dawkins has argued that references to ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq are euphemisms for what should more accurately be called religious cleansing. According to Adrian Koopman, the widespread use of the term ethnic cleansing in such cases suggests that in many situations, there is confusion between ethnicity and religion.
Ethnicity
Other acts of violence which are not always committed against adherents of particular religions such as war, torture, and ethnic cleansing, may take on the qualities of religious persecution when one or more of the parties which are involved in them are characterized by their religious homogeneity; an example of this occurs when conflicting populations that belong to different ethnic groups also belong to different religions or denominations. The difference between religious and ethnic identity might sometimes be obscure (see Ethnoreligious); nevertheless, cases of genocide in the 20th century cannot be fully-explained by the citation of religious differences. Still, cases of genocide such as the Greek genocide, the Armenian genocide, and the Assyrian genocide are sometimes seen as cases of religious persecution and as a result, the lines between ethnic violence and religious violence are sometimes blurry.
Since the Early modern period, an increasing number of religious cleansings were entwined with ethnic elements. Since religion is an important or a central marker of ethnic identity, some conflicts can best be described as "ethno-religious conflicts".
Nazi antisemitism provides another example of the contentious divide between ethnic persecution and religious persecution, because Nazi propaganda tended to construct its image of Jews by portraying them as people who were members of an inferior race (see Racial antisemitism and Nazi racial theories), it dehumanized and demonized Jews by classifying them as a race rather than a religion. In keeping with what they were taught in Nazi propaganda, the perpetrators of the Holocaust made no distinction between secular Jews, atheistic Jews, orthodox Jews and Jews who had converted to Christianity.
Persecution for heresy and blasphemy
The persecution of beliefs that are deemed schismatic is one thing; the persecution of beliefs that are deemed heretical or blasphemous is another. Although a public disagreement on secondary matters might be serious enough, frequently, it has only led to religious discrimination. On the other hand, the public renunciation of the core elements of a religious doctrine under the same circumstances would have put one in far greater danger. While dissenters from the official Church only faced fines and imprisonment in Protestant England, six people were executed for heresy or blasphemy during the reign of Elizabeth I, and two other people were executed in 1612 during the reign of James I.
Similarly, heretical sects like Cathars, Waldensians and Lollards were brutally suppressed in Western Europe, but in the borderlands of Eastern Europe, at the same time, Catholic Christians and 'schismatic' Orthodox Christians lived side by side after the East-West Schism.
Persecution for political reasons
More than 300 Roman Catholics were put to death for treason by English governments between 1535 and 1681, thus they were officially executed for secular rather than religious offenses. In 1570, Pope Pius V issued his papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, which absolved Catholics from their obligations to the government. This dramatically worsened the persecution of Catholics in England. The 1584 Parliament of England, declared in "An Act against Jesuits, seminary priests, and such other like disobedient persons" that the purpose of all Catholic missionaries who had come to Britain was "to stir up and move sedition, rebellion and open hostility". Consequently, even strictly apolitical priests like Saint John Ogilvie, Dermot O'Hurley, and Robert Southwell were subjected to torture and execution, as were members of the laity like Sts. Margaret Clitherow and Richard Gwyn. This drastically contrasts with the image of the Elizabethan era as a golden age, but compared to the antecedent Marian Persecutions there is an important difference to consider. Queen Mary was motivated by determination to exterminate Protestantism from all her Kingdoms and to restore the independence of the English Church from control by the state. During her short reign from 1553 to 1558, about 290 Protestants were burned at the stake. While Mary's sister Queen Elizabeth I allegedly, "acted out of fear for the security of her realm", she sought to coerce both Catholics and Protestants to embrace a national church that was completely subservient to the state.
Over the centuries that followed, English governments continued to fear and prosecute both real and imaginary conspiracies like the Popish Plot, an alleged plan to assassinate King Charles II and massacre the Protestants of the British Isles. In reality, the plot was a fictitious concoction by Titus Oates and Whig politician Lord Shaftesbury. Before the falsity of their claims were exposed, however, at least 22 innocent clergy and laity, including Archbishop Oliver Plunkett, had been unjustly convicted of high treason and executed at Tyburn.
By location
The descriptive use of the term religious persecution is rather difficult. Religious persecution has occurred in different historical, geographical and social contexts since at least antiquity. Until the 18th century, some groups were nearly universally persecuted for their religious views, such as atheists, Jews and Zoroastrians.
Roman Empire
Early Christianity also came into conflict with the Roman Empire, and it may have been more threatening to the established polytheistic order than Judaism had been, because of the importance of evangelism in Christianity. Under Nero, the Jewish exemption from the requirement to participate in public cults was lifted and Rome began to actively persecute monotheists. This persecution ended in 313 AD with the Edict of Milan, and Christianity was made the official religion of the empire in 380 AD. By the eighth century, Christianity had attained a clear ascendancy across Europe and neighboring regions, and a period of consolidation began which was marked by the pursuit of heretics, heathens, Jews, Muslims, and various other religious groups.
Europe
Religious uniformity in early modern Europe
By contrast to the notion of civil tolerance in early modern Europe, the subjects were required to attend the state church; this attitude can be described as territoriality or religious uniformity, and its underlying assumption is brought to a point by a statement of the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker: "There is not any man of the Church of England, but the same man is also a member of the [English] commonwealth; nor any man a member of the commonwealth, which is not also of the Church of England."
Before a vigorous debate about religious persecution took place in England (starting in the 1640s), for centuries in Europe, religion had been tied to territory. In England, there had been several Acts of Uniformity; in continental Europe, the Latin phrase "cuius regio, eius religio" had been coined in the 16th century and applied as a fundament for the Peace of Augsburg (1555). It was pushed to the extreme by absolutist regimes, particularly by the French kings Louis XIV and his successors. It was under their rule that Catholicism became the sole compulsory allowed religion in France and that the huguenots had to massively leave the country. Persecution meant that the state was committed to secure religious uniformity by coercive measures, as eminently obvious in a statement of Roger L'Estrange: "That which you call persecution, I translate Uniformity".
However, in the 17th century, writers like Pierre Bayle, John Locke, Richard Overton and Roger William broke the link between territory and faith, which eventually resulted in a shift from territoriality to religious voluntarism. It was Locke who, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, defined the state in purely secular terms: "The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests." Concerning the church, he went on: "A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord." With this treatise, John Locke laid one of the most important intellectual foundations of the separation of church and state, which ultimately led to the secular state.
Early modern England
One period of religious persecution which has been extensively studied is early modern England, since the rejection of religious persecution, now common in the Western world, originated there. The English 'Call for Toleration' was a turning point in the Christian debate on persecution and toleration, and early modern England stands out to the historians as a place and time in which literally "hundreds of books and tracts were published either for or against religious toleration."
The most ambitious chronicle of that time is W.K.Jordan's magnum opus The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 1558–1660 (four volumes, published 1932–1940). Jordan wrote as the threat of fascism rose in Europe, and this work is seen as a defense of the fragile values of humanism and tolerance. More recent introductions to this period are Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (2000) by John Coffey and Charitable hatred. Tolerance and intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (2006) by Alexandra Walsham. To understand why religious persecution has occurred, historians like Coffey "pay close attention to what the persecutors said they were doing."
Ecclesiastical dissent and civil tolerance
No religion is free from internal dissent, although the degree of dissent that is tolerated within a particular religious organization can strongly vary. This degree of diversity tolerated within a particular church is described as ecclesiastical tolerance, and is one form of religious toleration. However, when people nowadays speak of religious tolerance, they most often mean civil tolerance, which refers to the degree of religious diversity that is tolerated within the state.
In the absence of civil toleration, someone who finds himself in disagreement with his congregation does not have the option to leave and chose a different faith—simply because there is only one recognized faith in the country (at least officially). In modern western civil law any citizen may join and leave a religious organization at will; In western societies, this is taken for granted, but actually, this legal separation of Church and State only started to emerge a few centuries ago.
In the Christian debate on persecution and toleration, the notion of civil tolerance allowed Christian theologians to reconcile Jesus' commandment to love one's enemies with other parts of the New Testament that are rather strict regarding dissent within the church. Before that, theologians like Joseph Hall had reasoned from the ecclesiastical intolerance of the early Christian church in the New Testament to the civil intolerance of the Christian state.
Russia
The Bishop of Vladimir Feodor turned some people into slaves, others were locked in prison, cut their heads, burnt eyes, cut tongues or crucified on walls. Some heretics were executed by burning them alive. According to an inscription of Khan Mengual-Temir, Metropolitan Kiril was granted the right to heavily punish with death for blasphemy against the Orthodox Church or breach of ecclesiastical privileges. He advised all means of destruction to be used against heretics, but without bloodshed, in the name of 'saving souls'. Heretics were drowned. Novgorod Bishop Gennady Gonzov turned to Tsar Ivan III requesting the death of heretics. Gennady admired the Spanish inquisitors, especially his contemporary Torquemada, who for 15 years of inquisition activity burned and punished thousands of people. As in Rome, persecuted fled to depopulated areas. The most terrible punishment was considered an underground pit, where rats lived. Some people had been imprisoned and tied to the wall there, and untied after their death. Old Believers were persecuted and executed, the order was that even those renouncing completely their beliefs and baptized in the state church to be lynched without mercy. The writer Lomonosov opposed the religious teachings and by his initiative a scientific book against them was published. The book was destroyed, the Russian synod insisted Lomonosov's works to be burned and requested his punishment.
Contemporary
Although his book was written before the September 11 attacks, John Coffey explicitly compares Islamophobia in the contemporary Western world to the English Whig Party's paranoia about the fictitious Popish Plot. Mehdi Ghezali and Murat Kurnaz were among the Muslims who were imprisoned in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, but they were not found to have any connections to terrorism, because they had previously traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan to pursue their religious interests.
The United States submits an annual report on religious freedom and persecution to the Congress. The report contains data which the United States collects from U.S. embassies around the world in collaboration with the Office of International Religious Freedom and other relevant U.S. government and non-governmental institutions. The data is available to the public. The 2018 study details, country by country, the violations of religious freedom taking place in approximately 75% of the 195 countries in the world. Between 2007 and 2017, the PEW organization found that "Christians experienced harassment by governments or social groups in the largest number of countries"—144 countries—but that it is almost equal to the number of countries (142) in which Muslims experience harassment. PEW has published a caution concerning the interpretation of these numbers: "The Center's recent report ... does not attempt to estimate the number of victims in each country... it does not speak to the intensity of harassment..."
No religious group is free from harassment in the contemporary world. Klaus Wetzel, an expert on religious persecution for the German Bundestag, the House of Lords, the US House of Representatives, the European Parliament, and the International Institute for Religious Freedom, explains that "In around a quarter of all countries in the world, the restrictions imposed by governments, or hostilities towards one or more religious groups, are high or very high. Some of the most populous countries in the world belong to this group, such as China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan. Therefore, around three quarters of the world's population live in them."
At the symposium on law and religion in 2014, Michelle Mack said: "Despite what appears to be a near-universal expression of commitment to religious human rights, the frequency-and severity-of religious persecution worldwide is staggering. Although it is impossible to determine with certainty the exact numbers of people persecuted for their faith or religious affiliation, it is unquestioned that "violations of freedom of religion and belief, including acts of severe persecution, occur with fearful frequency." She quotes Irwin Colter, human rights advocate and author as saying "[F]reedom of religion remains the most persistently violated human right in the annals of the species."
Despite the ubiquitous nature of religious persecution, the traditional human rights community typically chooses to emphasize "more tangible encroachments on human dignity," such as violations which are based on race, gender, and class by using national, ethnic, and linguistic groupings rather than religious groupings.
By religion
Persecution of African traditional religions
Traditional African religions have faced religious persecution from Christians and Muslims. Adherents of these religions have been forcefully converted to Islam and Christianity, demonized and marginalized. The atrocities include killings, waging war, destroying of sacred places, and other atrocities.
Persecution of Dogons
For almost 1000 years, the Dogon people, an ancient tribe in Mali had faced religious and ethnic persecution—through jihads by dominant Muslim communities. These jihadic expeditions were undertaken in order to force the Dogon to abandon their traditional religious beliefs and convert to Islam. Such jihads caused the Dogon to abandon their original villages and move up to the cliffs of Bandiagara in search of a place where they could defend themselves more efficiently and escape persecution—which they often did by building their dwellings in little nooks and crannies. In the early era of French colonialism in Mali, the French authorities appointed Muslim relatives of El Hadj Umar Tall as chiefs of the Bandiagara—despite the fact that the area has been a Dogon area for centuries.
In 1864, Tidiani Tall, the nephew and successor of the 19th century Senegambian jihadist and Muslim leader—El Hadj Umar Tall, chose to make Bandiagara the capital of the Toucouleur Empire thereby exacerbating the inter-religious and inter-ethnic conflict. In recent years, the Dogon have accused the Fulanis of supporting Islamic terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and they have also accused the Fulanis of sheltering members of these same terrorist groups in Dogon country, leading to the creation of the Dogon militia Dan Na Ambassagou in 2016—whose aim is to defend the Dogon against systematic attacks. That action resulted in the Ogossagou massacre of Fulanis in March 2019, and the Fula retaliated by committing the Sobane Da massacre in June of that year. In the wake of the Ogossagou massacre, the President of Mali, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta and his government ordered the dissolution of Dan Na Ambassagou—whom they hold partly responsible for the attacks. The Dogon militia group denied its involvement in the massacre and it also rejected calls to disband itself.
Persecution of Serers
The persecution of the Serer people of Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania is multifaceted, and as a result, it includes religious and ethnic elements. The religious and ethnic persecution of the Serer people dates back to the 11th century, when King War Jabi usurped the throne of Tekrur (a part of present-day Senegal) in 1030, and in 1035, he introduced Sharia law and forced his subjects to submit to Islam. With the assistance of his son Leb, their Almoravid allies and other African ethnic groups which had embraced Islam, the Muslim coalition army launched jihads against the Serer people of Tekrur because they refused to abandon the Serer religion in favour of Islam. The number of Serers who were killed is unknown, but the defeat of the Serers at Tekrur triggered their exodus from Tekrur to the south, where they were granted asylum by the lamanes. The persecution of the Serer people continued from the medieval era to the 19th century, resulting in the Battle of Fandane-Thiouthioune. Since the 20th century, the persecution of the Serers has been less visible, nevertheless, they are still the objects of scorn and prejudice.
Persecutions of atheists
Used before the 18th century as an insult, atheism was punishable by death in ancient Greece as well as in the Christian and Muslim worlds during the Middle Ages. Today, atheism is punishable by death in 12 countries (Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, the Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen), all of them Muslim-majority, while "the overwhelming majority" of the 193 United Nations member countries "at best discriminate against citizens who have no belief in a god and at worst they can jail them for offences which are dubbed blasphemy".
State atheism
State atheism has been defined by David Kowalewski as the official "promotion of atheism" by a government, typically by the active suppression of religious freedom and practice. It is a misnomer which is used in reference to a government's anti-clericalism, its opposition to religious institutional power and influence, whether it is real or alleged, in all aspects of public and political life, including the involvement of religion in the everyday life of the citizen.
State atheism was first practiced for a brief period in Revolutionary France and later it was practiced in Revolutionary Mexico and Marxist-Leninist states. The Soviet Union had a long history of state atheism, in which social success largely required individuals to profess atheism, stay away from churches and even vandalize them; this attitude was especially militant during the middle Stalinist era from 1929 to 1939. The Soviet Union attempted to suppress religion over wide areas of its influence, including places like central Asia, and the post-World War II Eastern bloc. One state within that bloc, the Socialist People's Republic of Albania under Enver Hoxha, went so far as to officially ban all religious practices.
Persecution of Baháʼís
The Baháʼís are Iran's largest religious minority, and Iran is the location of one of the seventh largest Baháʼí population in the world, with just over 251,100 as of 2010. Baháʼís in Iran have been subject to unwarranted arrests, false imprisonment, beatings, torture, unjustified executions, confiscation and destruction of property owned by individuals and the Baháʼí community, denial of employment, denial of government benefits, denial of civil rights and liberties, and denial of access to higher education.
More recently, in the later months of 2005, an intensive anti-Baháʼí campaign was conducted by Iranian newspapers and radio stations. The state-run and influential Kayhan newspaper, whose managing editor is appointed by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei The press in Iran, ran nearly three dozen articles defaming the Baháʼí Faith. Furthermore, a confidential letter sent on 29 October 2005 by the Chairman of the Command Headquarters of the Armed Forced in Iran states that the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei has instructed the Command Headquarters to identify people who adhere to the Baháʼí Faith and to monitor their activities and gather any and all information about the members of the Baháʼí Faith. The letter was brought to the attention of the international community by Asma Jahangir, the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights on freedom of religion or belief, in a 20 March 2006 press release .
In the press release the Special Rapporteur states that she "is highly concerned by information she has received concerning the treatment of members of the Baháʼí community in Iran." She further states that "The Special Rapporteur is concerned that this latest development indicates that the situation with regard to religious minorities in Iran is, in fact, deteriorating."
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Persecution of Buddhists
The persecution of Buddhists has been a widespread phenomenon throughout the history of Buddhism, a phenomenon which continues to occur today. As early as the 3rd century AD, Buddhists were persecuted by Kirder, the Zoroastrian high priest of the Sasanian Empire.
Anti-Buddhist sentiments in Imperial China between the 5th and 10th century led to the Four Buddhist Persecutions in China of which the Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution of 845 was probably the most severe. However Buddhism managed to survive but was greatly weakened. During the Northern Expedition, in 1926 in Guangxi, Kuomintang Muslim General Bai Chongxi led his troops in destroying Buddhist temples and smashing idols, turning the temples into schools and Kuomintang party headquarters. During the Kuomintang Pacification of Qinghai, the Muslim General Ma Bufang and his army wiped out many Tibetan Buddhists in the northeast and eastern Qinghai, and destroyed Tibetan Buddhist temples.
The Muslim invasion of the Indian subcontinent was the first great iconoclastic invasion into the Indian subcontinent. According to William Johnston, hundreds of Buddhist monasteries and shrines were destroyed, Buddhist texts were burnt by the Muslim armies, monks and nuns killed during the 12th and 13th centuries in the Indo-Gangetic Plain region. The Buddhist university of Nalanda was mistaken for a fort because of the walled campus. The Buddhist monks who had been slaughtered were mistaken for Brahmins according to Minhaj-i-Siraj. The walled town, the Odantapuri monastery, was also conquered by his forces. Sumpa basing his account on that of Śākyaśrībhadra who was at Magadha in 1200, states that the Buddhist university complexes of Odantapuri and Vikramshila were also destroyed and the monks massacred. Muslim forces attacked the north-western regions of the Indian subcontinent many times. Many places were destroyed and renamed. For example, Odantapuri's monasteries were destroyed in 1197 by Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khilji and the town was renamed. Likewise, Vikramashila was destroyed by the forces of Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khilji around 1200. The sacred Mahabodhi Temple was almost completely destroyed by the Muslim invaders. Many Buddhist monks fled to Nepal, Tibet, and South India to avoid the consequences of war. Tibetan pilgrim Chöjepal (1179–1264), who arrived in India in 1234, had to flee advancing Muslim troops multiple times, as they were sacking Buddhist sites.
In Japan, the haibutsu kishaku during the Meiji Restoration (starting in 1868) was an event triggered by the official policy of separation of Shinto and Buddhism (or shinbutsu bunri). This caused great destruction to Buddhism in Japan, the destruction of Buddhist temples, images and texts took place on a large scale all over the country and Buddhist monks were forced to return to secular life.
During the 2012 Ramu violence in Bangladesh, a 25,000-strong Muslim mob set fire to destroy at least twelve Buddhist temples and around fifty homes throughout the town and surrounding villages after seeing a picture of an allegedly desecrated Quran, which they claimed had been posted on Facebook by Uttam Barua, a local Buddhist man. The actual posting of the photo was not done by the Buddhist who was falsely slandered.
Persecution of Christians
From the beginnings of Christianity as a movement within Judaism, Early Christians were persecuted for their faith at the hands of both Jews and the Roman Empire, which controlled much of the areas where Christianity was first distributed. This continued from the first century until the early fourth, when the religion was legalized by the Edict of Milan, eventually becoming the State church of the Roman Empire. Many Christians fled persecution in the Roman empire by emigrating to the Persian empire where for a century and a half after Constantine's conversion, they were persecuted under the Sassanids, with thousands losing their lives. Christianity continued to spread through "merchants, slaves, traders, captives and contacts with Jewish communities" as well as missionaries who were often killed for their efforts. This killing continued into the Early modern period beginning in the fifteenth century, to the Late modern period of the twentieth century, and into the contemporary period today.
In contemporary society, Christians are persecuted in Iran and other parts of the Middle East, for example, for proselytising, which is illegal there. Of the 100–200 million Christians alleged to be under assault, the majority are persecuted in Muslim-majority nations. Every year, the Christian non-profit organization Open Doors publishes the World Watch List—a list of the top 50 countries which it designates as the most dangerous for Christians.
The 2018 World Watch List has the following countries as its top ten: North Korea, and Eritrea, whose Christian and Muslim religions are controlled by the state, and Afghanistan, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, India and Iran, which are all predominantly non-Christian. Due to the large number of Christian majority countries, differing groups of Christians are harassed and persecuted in Christian countries such as Eritrea and Mexico more often than in Muslim countries, although not in greater numbers.
There are low to moderate restrictions on religious freedom in three-quarters of the world's countries, with high and very high restrictions in a quarter of them, according to the State Department's report on religious freedom and persecution delivered annually to Congress. The Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte—the International Society for Human Rights—in Frankfurt, Germany is a non-governmental organization with 30,000 members from 38 countries who monitor human rights. In September 2009, then chairman Martin Lessenthin, issued a report estimating that 80% of acts of religious persecution around the world were aimed at Christians at that time. According to the World Evangelical Alliance, over 200 million Christians are denied fundamental human rights solely because of their faith.
A report released by the UK's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and a report by the PEW organization studying worldwide restrictions of religious freedom, both have Christians suffering in the highest number of countries, rising from 125 in 2015 to 144 as of 2018. PEW has published a caution concerning the interpretation of these numbers: "The Center's recent report ... does not attempt to estimate the number of victims in each country... it does not speak to the intensity of harassment..." France, who restricts the wearing of the hijab, is counted as a persecuting country equally with Nigeria and Pakistan where, according to the Global Security organization, Christians have been killed for their faith.
In December 2016, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, published a statement that "between 2005 and 2015 there were 900,000 Christian martyrs worldwide—an average of 90,000 per year, marking a Christian as persecuted every 8 minutes." However, the BBC has reported that others such as Open Doors and the International Society for Human Rights have disputed that number's accuracy. Gina Zurlo, the CSGC's assistant director, explained that two-thirds of the 90,000 died in tribal conflicts, and nearly half were victims of the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Klaus Wetzel, an internationally recognized expert on religious persecution, explains that Gordon-Conwell defines Christian martyrdom in the widest possible sense, while Wetzel and Open doors and others such as The International Institute for Religious Freedom (IIRF) use a more restricted definition: "those who are killed, who would not have been killed, if they had not been Christians." Open Doors documents that anti-Christian sentiment is presently based on direct evidence and makes conservative estimates based on indirect evidence. This approach dramatically lowers the numerical count. Open Doors says that, while numbers fluctuate every year, they estimate 11 Christians are currently dying for their faith somewhere in the world every day.
Persecution of Copts
The persecution of Copts is a historical and ongoing issue in Egypt against Coptic Orthodox Christianity and its followers. It is also a prominent example of the poor status of Christians in the Middle East despite the religion being native to the region. Copts are the Christ followers in Egypt, usually Oriental Orthodox, who currently make up around 10% of the population of Egypt—the largest religious minority of that country. Copts have cited instances of persecution throughout their history and Human Rights Watch has noted "growing religious intolerance" and sectarian violence against Coptic Christians in recent years, as well as a failure by the Egyptian government to effectively investigate properly and prosecute those responsible.
The Muslim conquest of Egypt took place in AD 639, during the Byzantine empire. Despite the political upheaval, Egypt remained a mainly Christian, but Copts lost their majority status after the 14th century, as a result of the intermittent persecution and the destruction of the Christian churches there, accompanied by heavy taxes for those who refused to convert. From the Muslim conquest of Egypt onwards, the Coptic Christians were persecuted by different Muslims regimes, such as the Umayyad Caliphate, Abbasid Caliphate, Fatimid Caliphate, Mamluk Sultanate, and Ottoman Empire; the persecution of Coptic Christians included closing and demolishing churches and forced conversion to Islam.
Since 2011 hundreds of Egyptian Copts have been killed in sectarian clashes, and many homes, Churches and businesses have been destroyed. In just one province (Minya), 77 cases of sectarian attacks on Copts between 2011 and 2016 have been documented by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. The abduction and disappearance of Coptic Christian women and girls also remains a serious ongoing problem.
Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses
Political and religious animosity against Jehovah's Witnesses has at times led to mob action and government oppression in various countries. Their stance regarding political neutrality and their refusal to serve in the military has led to imprisonment of members who refused conscription during World War II and at other times where national service has been compulsory. Their religious activities are currently banned or restricted in some countries, including China, Vietnam, and many Islamic states.
In 1933, there were approximately 20,000 Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany, of whom about 10,000 were imprisoned. Jehovah's Witnesses were brutally persecuted by the Nazis, because they refused military service and allegiance to Hitler's National Socialist Party. Of those, 2,000 were sent to Nazi concentration camps, where they were identified by purple triangles; as many as 1,200 died, including 250 who were executed.
In Canada during World War II, Jehovah's Witnesses were interned in camps along with political dissidents and people of Chinese and Japanese descent. Jehovah's Witnesses faced discrimination in Quebec until the Quiet Revolution, including bans on distributing literature or holding meetings.
In 1951, about 9,300 Jehovah's Witnesses in the Soviet Union were deported to Siberia as part of Operation North in April 1951.
In April 2017, the Supreme Court of Russia labeled Jehovah's Witnesses an extremist organization, banned its activities in Russia and issued an order to confiscate the organization's assets.
Authors including William Whalen, Shawn Francis Peters and former Witnesses Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Alan Rogerson and William Schnell have claimed the arrests and mob violence in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s were the consequence of what appeared to be a deliberate course of provocation of authorities and other religious groups by Jehovah's Witnesses. Whalen, Harrison and Schnell have suggested Rutherford invited and cultivated opposition for publicity purposes in a bid to attract dispossessed members of society, and to convince members that persecution from the outside world was evidence of the truth of their struggle to serve God. Watch Tower Society literature of the period directed that Witnesses should "never seek a controversy" nor resist arrest, but also advised members not to co-operate with police officers or courts that ordered them to stop preaching, and to prefer jail rather than pay fines.
Persecution of Druze
Historically the relationship between the Druze and Muslims has been characterized by intense persecution. The Druze faith is often classified as a branch of Isma'ilism. Even though the faith originally developed out of Ismaili Islam, most Druze do not identify as Muslims, and they do not accept the Five Pillars of Islam. The Druze have frequently experienced persecution by different Muslim regimes such as the Shia Fatimid Caliphate, Mamluk, Sunni Ottoman Empire, and Egypt Eyalet. The persecution of the Druze included massacres, demolishing Druze prayer houses and holy places and forced conversion to Islam. Those were no ordinary killings in the Druze's narrative, they were meant to eradicate the whole community according to the Druze narrative. Most recently, the Syrian Civil War, which began in 2011, saw persecution of the Druze at the hands of Islamic extremists.
Ibn Taymiyya a prominent Muslim scholar muhaddith, dismissed the Druze as non-Muslims, and his fatwa cited that Druzes: "Are not at the level of ′Ahl al-Kitāb (People of the Book) nor mushrikin (polytheists). Rather, they are from the most deviant kuffār (Infidel) ... Their women can be taken as slaves and their property can be seized ... they are to be killed whenever they are found and cursed as they described ... It is obligatory to kill their scholars and religious figures so that they do not misguide others", which in that setting would have legitimized violence against them as apostates. Ottomans have often relied on Ibn Taymiyya religious ruling to justify their persecution of Druze.
Persecution of Falun Gong
The persecution of the Falun Gong spiritual practice began with campaigns initiated in 1999 by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to eliminate Falun Gong in China. It is characterised by multifaceted propaganda campaign, a program of enforced ideological conversion and re-education, and a variety of extralegal coercive measures such as arbitrary arrests, forced labor, and physical torture, sometimes resulting in death.
There have being reports of organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners in China. Several researchers—most notably Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas, former parliamentarian David Kilgour, and investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann—estimate that tens of thousands of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience have been killed to supply a lucrative trade in human organs and cadavers.
Persecution of Hindus
For example, Hindus have been one of the targeted and persecuted minorities in Pakistan. Militancy and sectarianism has been rising in Pakistan since the 1990s, and the religious minorities have "borne the brunt of the Islamist's ferocity" suffering "greater persecution than in any earlier decade", states Farahnaz Ispahani—a Public Policy Scholar at the Wilson Center. This has led to attacks and forced conversion of Hindus, and other minorities such as Christians. According to Tetsuya Nakatani—a Japanese scholar of Cultural Anthropology specializing in South Asia refugee history, after the mass exodus of Hindu, Sikh and other non-Muslim refugees during the 1947 partition of British India, there were several waves of Hindu refugees arrival into India from its neighbors. The fearful and persecuted refugee movements were often after various religious riots between 1949 and 1971 that targeted non-Muslims within West Pakistan or East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The status of these persecuted Hindu refugees in India was in political limbo until the passage of Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 by the Indian Government. Systemically in Pakistan, Hindus are persecuted under the government's Blasphemy Law (with often consequence of death irrelevant of the legal claim's accuracy), and as per the rhetoric of mainstream politicians interpreting vague constitutional law, have second-class rights in the nation regarding places of worship and facets of their religion.
Similar concerns about religious persecution of Hindu and other minorities in Bangladesh have also been expressed. A famous report by Dr. Abul Barkat, a famous Bangladeshi economist and research, projects that there will be no Hindus left in Bangladesh in 30 years. The USCIRF notes hundreds of cases of "killings, attempted killings, death threats, assaults, rapes, kidnappings, and attacks on homes, businesses, and places of worship" on religious minorities in 2017. Since the 1990s, Hindus have been a persecuted minority in Afghanistan, and a subject of "intense hate" with the rise of religious fundamentalism in Afghanistan. Their "targeted persecution" triggered an exodus and forced them to seek asylum. The persecuted Hindus have remained stateless and without citizenship rights in India, since it has historically lacked any refugee law or uniform policy for persecuted refugees, state Ashish Bose and Hafizullah Emadi, though the recent Citizen Amendment Act passed by India is a form of solace for those Hindus having entered India before 2015.
The Bangladesh Liberation War (1971) resulted in one of the largest genocides of the 20th century. While estimates of the number of casualties was 3,000,000, it is reasonably certain that Hindus bore a disproportionate brunt of the Pakistan Army's onslaught against the Bengali population of what was East Pakistan. An article in Time magazine dated 2 August 1971, stated "the Hindus, who account for three-fourths of the refugees and a majority of the dead, have borne the brunt of the Muslim military hatred." Senator Edward Kennedy wrote in a report that was part of United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations testimony dated 1 November 1971, "Hardest hit have been members of the Hindu community who have been robbed of their lands and shops, systematically slaughtered, and in some places, painted with yellow patches marked "H". All of this has been officially sanctioned, ordered and implemented under martial law from Islamabad". In the same report, Senator Kennedy reported that 80% of the refugees in India were Hindus and according to numerous international relief agencies such as UNESCO and World Health Organization the number of East Pakistani refugees at their peak in India was close to 10 million. Given that the Hindu population in East Pakistan was around 11 million in 1971, this suggests that up to 8 million, or more than 70% of the Hindu population had fled the country. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Sydney Schanberg covered the start of the war and wrote extensively on the suffering of the East Bengalis, including the Hindus both during and after the conflict. In a syndicated column "The Pakistani Slaughter That Nixon Ignored", he wrote about his return to liberated Bangladesh in 1972. "Other reminders were the yellow "H"s the Pakistanis had painted on the homes of Hindus, particular targets of the Muslim army" (by "Muslim army", meaning the Pakistan Army, which had targeted Bengali Muslims as well), (Newsday, 29 April 1994).
Hindus constitute approximately 0.5% of the total population of the United States. Hindus in the US enjoy both de jure and de facto legal equality. However, a series of attacks were made on people Indian origin by a street gang called the "Dotbusters" in New Jersey in 1987, the dot signifying the Bindi dot sticker worn on the forehead by Indian women. The lackadaisical attitude of the local police prompted the South Asian community to arrange small groups all across the state to fight back against the street gang. The perpetrators have been put to trial. On 2 January 2012, a Hindu worship center in New York City was firebombed. The Dotbusters were primarily based in New York and New Jersey and committed most of their crimes in Jersey City. A number of perpetrators have been brought to trial for these assaults. Although tougher anti-hate crime laws were passed by the New Jersey legislature in 1990, the attacks continued, with 58 cases of hate crimes against Indians in New Jersey reported in 1991.
Persecution of Hindus also contemporarily has been seen in the Indian-controlled state of Jammu and Kashmir. In the Kashmir region, approximately 300 Kashmiri Pandits were killed between September 1989 to 1990 in various incidents. In early 1990, local Urdu newspapers Aftab and Al Safa called upon Kashmiris to wage jihad against India and ordered the expulsion of all Hindus choosing to remain in Kashmir. In the following days masked men ran in the streets with AK-47s, shooting to kill Hindus who would not leave. Notices were placed on the houses of all Hindus, telling them to leave within 24 hours or die. Since March 1990, estimates of between 300,000 and 500,000 pandits have migrated outside Kashmir due to persecution by Islamic fundamentalists in the largest case of ethnic cleansing since the partition of India. Many Kashmiri Pandits have been killed by Islamist militants in incidents such as the Wandhama massacre and the 2000 Amarnath pilgrimage massacre. The incidents of massacring and forced eviction have been termed ethnic cleansing by some observers.
In Bangladesh, on 28 February 2013, the International Crimes Tribunal sentenced Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, the Vice President of the Jamaat-e-Islami to death for the war crimes committed during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Following the sentence, the Hindus were attacked in different parts of the country. Hindu properties were looted, Hindu houses were burnt into ashes and Hindu temples were desecrated and set on fire. This trend has continued, sadly; Islamist groups in Bangladesh, nearing the 50th anniversary of the Bengali Hindu Genocide, set fire to and vandalized several Hindu temples along with 80 houses.
Persecutions of Jews
A major component of Jewish history, persecutions have been committed by Seleucids, ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, Christians (Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant), Muslims, Nazis, etc. Some of the most important events which constitute this history include the 1066 Granada massacre, the Rhineland massacres (by Catholics, but they were committed against papal orders, see also : Sicut Judaeis), the Alhambra Decree which was issued after the Reconquista and the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition, the publication of On the Jews and Their Lies by Martin Luther which furthered Protestant anti-Judaism and was later used to strengthen German antisemitism and justify pogroms and the Holocaust.
According to the FBI's statistics, the majority of religiously motivated hate crimes which are committed in the United States are committed against Jews. In 2018, anti-Jewish hate crimes represented 57.8% of all religiously motivated hate crimes; followed by anti-Muslim hate crimes, which were the second most common, representing 14.5%.
Persecution of Muslims
Persecution of Muslims is the religious persecution that is inflicted upon followers of the Islamic faith. In the early days of Islam at Mecca, the new Muslims were often subjected to abuse and persecution by the pagan Meccans (often called Mushrikin: the unbelievers or polytheists). Muslims were persecuted by Meccans at the time of Muhammed.
Currently, Muslims face religious restrictions in 142 countries according to the PEW report on rising religious restrictions around the world. According to the US State Department's 2019 freedom of religion report, the Central African Republic remains divided between the Christian anti-Balaka and the predominantly Muslim ex-Seleka militia forces with many Muslim communities displaced and not allowed to practice their religion freely. In Nigeria, "conflicts between predominantly Muslim Fulani herdsmen and predominantly Christian farmers in the North Central states continued throughout 2019."
Shia-Sunni conflicts persist. Indonesia is approximately 87% Sunni Muslim, and "Shia and Ahmadi Muslims reported feeling under constant threat." Anti-Shia rhetoric was common throughout 2019 in some online media outlets and on social media."
In Saudi Arabia, the government "is based largely on sharia as interpreted by the Hanbali school of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence. Freedom of religion is not provided under the law." In January and May 2019, police raided predominantly Shia villages in the al-Qatif Governorate... In April the government executed 37 citizens ... 33 of the 37 were from the country's minority Shia community and had been convicted following what they stated were unfair trials for various alleged crimes, including protest-related offenses... Authorities detained ... three Shia Muslims who have written in the past on the discrimination faced by Shia Muslims, with no official charges filed; they remained in detention at year's end... Instances of prejudice and discrimination against Shia Muslims continued to occur..."
Islamophobia continues. In Finland, "A report by the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) said hate crimes and intolerant speech in public discourse, principally against Muslims and asylum seekers (many of whom belong to religious minorities), had increased in recent years... A Finns Party politician publicly compared Muslim asylum seekers to an invasive species." There were several demonstrations by neo-Nazis and nativist groups in 2019. One neo-Nazi group, the NRM (the Nordic Resistance Movement), "continued to post anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic statements online and demonstrated with the anti-immigrant group Soldiers of Odin."
The ongoing Rohingya genocide has resulted in over 25,000 deaths from 2016 to present. Over 700,000 refugees have been sent abroad since 2017. Gang rapes and other acts of sexual violence, mainly against Rohingya women and girls, have also been committed by the Rakhine Buddhists and the Burmese military's soldiers, along with the arson of Rohingya homes and mosques, as well as many other human rights violations.
The Chinese government has persecuted the majority-Muslim Uyghur people and other ethnic and religious minorities in and around the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of the People's Republic of China. Since 2014, the Chinese government, under the direction of the CCP during the administration of CCP general secretary Xi Jinping, has pursued policies leading to more than one million Muslims (the majority of them Uyghurs) being held in secretive internment camps without any legal process in what has become the largest-scale and most systematic detention of ethnic and religious minorities since the Holocaust. The Chinese Government has subjected hundreds of thousands of members of Muslim minority groups living in Xinjiang to forced abortions, forced sterilizations, and the forced administration of contraceptives (including contraceptive implants), methods of birth control that had exempted ethnic minorities up until that point. Uyghurs and members of other minority groups have been made subject to a widespread forced labor apparatus. Uyghurs and other religious minorities detained within the Xinjiang internment camps have also been subjected to systematic rape and torture.
In China, General Secretary Xi Jinping has decreed that all members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) must be "unyielding Marxist atheists". In Xinjiang province, the government enforced restrictions on Muslims. The U.S. government estimates that
Persecution of Pagans and Heathens
Persecutions of Sikhs
Sikhism is a Dharmic religion that originated in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent around the end of the 15th century CE. The Sikh religion developed and evolved during periods of religious persecution, gaining converts from Hinduism and Islam. Mughal emperors of India tortured and executed two of the Sikh gurus—Guru Arjan (1563–1605) and Guru Tegh Bahadur (1621–1675)—after they refused to convert to Islam.
The persecution of Sikhs during the Islamic era triggered the founding of the Khalsa by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699, the Khalsa is an order which was founded for the purpose of protecting the freedom of conscience and religion of the Sikhs, with members expressing the qualities of a Sant-Sipāhī—a saint-soldier.
In February 1762, Afghan emperor Ahmad Shah Durrani perpetrated a massacre against the families and camp followers of the Sikh Army, killing between 10,000 and 30,000 people, in a massacre that is now known as Vadda Ghalughara. Following the massacre, he attacked Amritsar and desecrated the Golden Temple by throwing cow carcasses into its sacred lake and then filling it with rubble from demolished gurdwaras and temples.
According to Ashish Bose, a population research scholar, Sikhs and Hindus were well integrated in Afghanistan until the Soviet invasion when their economic condition worsened. Thereafter, they became the objects of "intense hate" as a result of the rise of religious fundamentalism in Afghanistan. Their "targeted persecution" triggered an exodus and forced them to seek asylum. Many of them started arriving in and after 1992 as refugees in India, with some seeking asylum in the United Kingdom and other western countries. Unlike the arrivals in the West, the persecuted Sikh refugees who arrived in India have remained stateless and lived as refugees because India has historically lacked any refugee law or uniform policy for persecuted refugees, state Ashish Bose and Hafizullah Emadi.
On 7 November 1947, thousands of Hindus and Sikhs were targeted in the Rajouri Massacre in the Jammu and Kashmir princely state. It is estimated 30,000+ Hindus and Sikhs were either killed, abducted or injured. In one instance, on 12 November 1947 alone between 3000 and 7000 were killed. A few weeks after on 25 November 1947, tribal forces began the 1947 Mirpur massacre of thousands more Hindus and Sikhs. An estimated 20,000+ died in the massacre.
In June 1984, during Operation Blue Star, Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian Army to attack the Golden Temple and eliminate any insurgents, as it had been occupied by Sikh separatists who were stockpiling weapons. Later operations by Indian paramilitary forces were initiated to clear the separatists from the countryside of Punjab state.
The 1984 anti-Sikhs riots were a series of pogroms directed against Sikhs in India, by anti-Sikh mobs, in response to the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. There were more than 8,000 deaths, including 3,000 in Delhi.
The violence in Delhi was triggered by the assassination of Indira Gandhi, India's prime minister, on 31 October 1984, by two of her Sikh bodyguards in response to her actions authorising the military operation. After the assassination following Operation Blue Star, many Indian National Congress workers including Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and Kamal Nath were accused of inciting and participating in riots targeting the Sikh population of the capital. The Indian government reported 2,700 deaths in the ensuing chaos. In the aftermath of the riots, the Indian government reported 20,000 had fled the city, however the People's Union for Civil Liberties reported "at least" 1,000 displaced persons. The most affected regions were the Sikh neighbourhoods in Delhi. The Central Bureau of Investigation, the main Indian investigating agency, is of the opinion that the acts of violence were organized with the support from the then Delhi police officials and the central government headed by Indira Gandhi's son, Rajiv Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as Prime Minister after his mother's death and, when asked about the riots, said "when a big tree falls (Mrs. Gandhi's death), the earth shakes (occurrence of riots)" thus trying to justify communal strife.
It has been alleged that at that time, the Indian National Congress's government destroyed evidence and shielded the guilty. The Asian Age front-page story called the government's actions "the Mother of all Cover-ups" There are allegations that the violence was led and often perpetrated by Indian National Congress activists and sympathisers during the riots. The government, then led by the Congress, was widely criticised for doing very little at the time, possibly acting as a conspirator. The conspiracy theory is supported by the fact that voting lists were used to identify Sikh families. Despite the communal conflict and despite the record of the riots, the Indian National Congress claims that it is a secular political party.
The Chittisinghpura massacre, the murder of 35 villagers who were members of the Sikh faith, was committed on 20 March 2000, in the Chittisinghpora (Chittisinghpura) village of the Anantnag district, Jammu and Kashmir, India, on the eve of President Bill Clinton's state visit to India. The identities of the perpetrators of the massacre remain unknown. The Indian government asserts that the massacre was conducted by the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). Pakistani accounts accuse the Indian Army and RSS of the massacre.
On 25 March 2020, ISIS-Haqqani network Gunmen and Suicide bombers attacked the Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib (a Sikh shrine) in Kabul, Afghanistan.
According to reports, about 200 worshipers were inside the building, 25 of them were killed and at least 8 others were wounded after an hour-long siege ended when all of the assailants were killed by responding security forces. At least one child was said to have been among the people who were killed, according to the ministry of interior's statement.
Persecution of Yazidis
The Persecution of Yazidis has been ongoing since at least the 10th century. The Yazidi religion is regarded as devil worship by Islamists. Yazidis have been persecuted by Muslim Kurdish tribes since the 10th century, and they were also persecuted by the Ottoman Empire from the 17th century to the 20th century. After the 2014 Sinjar massacre of thousands of Yazidis by the Islamic State, Yazidis still face violence at the hands of the Turkish Armed Forces and its ally the Syrian National Army, as well as discrimination at the hands of the Kurdistan Regional Government. According to Yazidi tradition (based on oral traditions and folk songs), it is estimated that during the last 800 years, 74 genocides were committed against the Yazidis.
Persecution of Zoroastrians
The persecution of Zoroastrians is the religious persecution which has been inflicted upon adherents of the Zoroastrian faith. The persecution of Zoroastrians has occurred throughout their religion's history. The discrimination and harassment began in the form of sparse violence and forced conversions. According to Zoroastrian records, Muslims destroyed fire temples. Zoroastrians who lived under Muslim rule were required to pay a tax which was called the jizya.
Zoroastrian places of worship were desecrated, fire temples were destroyed and mosques were built in their place. Many libraries were burned and much of the cultural heritage of the Zoroastrians was lost. Gradually, an increasing number of discriminatory laws were passed, these laws regulated the behavior of Zoroastrians and they also limited the Zoroastrians' ability to participate in society. Over time, the persecution of Zoroastrians became more common and it also became widespread, and as a result, the number of believers significantly decreased by force.
Most Zoroastrians were forced to convert to Islam due to the systematic abuse and discrimination which was inflicted upon them by followers of Islam. Once a Zoroastrian family was forced to convert to Islam, the children were sent to an Islamic school, where they were required to learn Arabic and study the teachings of Islam, as a result, some of these people lost their Zoroastrian faith. However, under the Samanids, who were Zoroastrian converts to Islam, the Persian language flourished. On some occasions, the Zoroastrian clergy assisted Muslims when they launched their attacks against people who they considered Zoroastrian heretics.
A Zoroastrian astrologer who was named Mulla Gushtasp predicted the fall of the Zand dynasty to the Qajar army in Kerman. Because of Gushtasp's forecast, the Zoroastrians of Kerman were spared by the conquering army of Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar. Despite the aforementioned favorable incident, the Zoroastrians remained in agony during the Qajar dynasty and as a result, their population continued to decline. Even during the rule of Agha Mohammad Khan, the founder of the dynasty, many Zoroastrians were killed and some of them were taken captive and deported to Azerbaijan. Zoroastrians regard the Qajar period as one of their worst. During the Qajar dynasty, the religious persecution of the Zoroastrians was rampant. Due to their increasing contacts with influential Parsi philanthropists such as Maneckji Limji Hataria, many Zoroastrians left Iran and migrated to India. There, they formed the Iranis, India's second largest Zoroastrian community.
Persecution of philosophers
Throughout the history of philosophy, philosophers have been imprisoned for various offenses by courts and tribunals, often as a result of their philosophical activities, and some of them have even been put to death. The most famous case in which a philosopher was put on trial is the case of Socrates, who was tried for, amongst other charges, corrupting the youth and impiety. Others include:
Giordano Bruno – a pantheist philosopher who was burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition for his heretical religious views and/or his cosmological views;
Tommaso Campanella – he was confined to a convent for his heretical views, chiefly, for his opposition to the authority of Aristotle, and later, he was imprisoned in a castle for 27 years, during which he wrote his most famous works, one of them is The City of the Sun;
Baruch Spinoza – a Jewish philosopher who was put in cherem (similar to excommunication) by the Orthodox Jewish leadership of the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam for heresies when he was 23 years old. His views were controversial, among them, were his ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible, which formed the foundations of modern biblical criticism, and his belief that the nature of the God of Israel is pantheisticic. Prior to his excommunication, Spinoza was attacked on the steps of the Portuguese synagogue by a knife-wielding assailant who shouted "Heretic!", and later his books were added to the Roman Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books.
See also
Blasphemy law
Christian persecution complex
Christian privilege
Conversion of non-Islamic places of worship into mosques
Crimes against humanity
Cultural genocide
Democide
Discrimination
Freedom of religion
Fundamentalism
Genocide
Hindu terrorism
Hindutva
Hindu nationalism
Human rights abuses
Islamic religious police
List of Christian women of the patristic age
Martyr
Oppression
Persecution
Prejudice
Price tag attack policy
Religious abuse
Religious discrimination
Religious fanaticism
Religious intolerance
Religious pluralism
Religious segregation
Religious terrorism
Religious violence
Religious war
Sectarian violence
State atheism
State religion
Talibanization
Notes
References
Further reading
John Coffey (2000), Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689, Studies in Modern History, Pearson Education.
External links
United Nations – Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on freedom of religion or belief
United States Commission on International Religious Freedom
About.com section on Religious Intolerance
U.S. State Department 2006 Annual Report on International Religious Freedom
xTome: News and Information on Religious Freedom
Religious pluralism | 0.783874 | 0.995078 | 0.780016 |
Modern paganism | Modern paganism, also known as contemporary paganism and neopaganism, spans a range of new religious movements variously influenced by the beliefs of pre-modern peoples across Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Despite some common similarities, contemporary pagan movements are diverse, sharing no single set of beliefs, practices, or religious texts. Scholars of religion may study the phenomenon as a movement divided into different religions, while others study neopaganism as a decentralized religion with an array of denominations.
Adherents rely on pre-Christian, folkloric, and ethnographic sources to a variety of degrees; many of them follow a spirituality that they accept as entirely modern, while others claim to adhere to prehistoric beliefs, or else, they attempt to revive indigenous religions as accurately as possible. Modern pagan movements are frequently described on a spectrum ranging from reconstructive, which seeks to revive historical pagan religions; to eclectic movements, which blend elements from various religions and philosophies with historical paganism. Polytheism, animism, and pantheism are common features across pagan theology. Modern pagans can also include atheists, upholding virtues and principles associated with paganism while maintaining a secular worldview. Humanistic, naturalistic, or secular pagans may recognize deities as archetypes or useful metaphors for different cycles of life, or reframe magic as a purely psychological practice.
Contemporary paganism has been associated with the New Age movement, with scholars highlighting their similarities as well as their differences. The academic field of pagan studies began to coalesce in the 1990s, emerging from disparate scholarship in the preceding two decades.
Terminology
Definition
There is "considerable disagreement as to the precise definition and the proper usage" of the term modern paganism. Even within the academic field of pagan studies, there is no consensus about how contemporary paganism can best be defined. Most scholars describe modern paganism as a broad array of different religions, not a single one. The category of modern paganism could be compared to the categories of Abrahamic religions and Indian religions in its structure. A second, less common definition found within pagan studies – promoted by the religious studies scholars Michael F. Strmiska and Graham Harvey – characterises modern paganism as a single religion, of which groups like Wicca, Druidry, and Heathenry are denominations. This perspective has been critiqued, given the lack of core commonalities in issues such as theology, cosmology, ethics, afterlife, holy days, or ritual practices within the pagan movement.
Contemporary paganism has been defined as "a collection of modern religious, spiritual, and magical traditions that are self-consciously inspired by the pre-Judaic, pre-Christian, and pre-Islamic belief systems of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East." Thus it has been said that although it is "a highly diverse phenomenon", "an identifiable common element" nevertheless runs through the pagan movement. Strmiska described paganism as a movement "dedicated to reviving the polytheistic, nature-worshipping pagan religions of pre-Christian Europe and adapting them for the use of people in modern societies." The religious studies scholar Wouter Hanegraaff characterised paganism as encompassing "all those modern movements which are, first, based on the conviction that what Christianity has traditionally denounced as idolatry and superstition actually represents/represented a profound and meaningful religious worldview and, secondly, that a religious practice based on this worldview can and should be revitalized in our modern world."
Discussing the relationship between the different pagan religions, religious studies scholars Kaarina Aitamurto and Scott Simpson wrote that they were "like siblings who have taken different paths in life but still retain many visible similarities". But there has been much "cross-fertilization" between these different faiths: many groups have influenced, and been influenced by, other pagan religions, making clear-cut distinctions among them more difficult for scholars to make. The various pagan religions have been academically classified as new religious movements, with the anthropologist Kathryn Rountree describing paganism as a whole as a "new religious phenomenon". A number of academics, particularly in North America, consider modern paganism a form of nature religion.
Some practitioners completely eschew the use of the term pagan, preferring to use more specific names for their religion, such as "Heathen" or "Wiccan". This is because the term pagan originates in Christian terminology, which individuals who object to the term wish to avoid. Some favor the term "ethnic religion"; the World Pagan Congress, founded in 1998, soon renamed itself the European Congress of Ethnic Religions (ECER), enjoying that term's association with the Greek ethnos and the academic field of ethnology. Within linguistically Slavic areas of Europe, the term "Native Faith" is often favored as a synonym for paganism, rendered as Ridnovirstvo in Ukrainian, Rodnoverie in Russian, and Rodzimowierstwo in Polish. Alternately, many practitioners in these regions view "Native Faith" as a category within modern paganism that does not encompass all pagan religions. Other terms some pagans favor include "traditional religion", "indigenous religion", "nativist religion", and "reconstructionism".
Various pagans who are active in pagan studies, such as Michael York and Prudence Jones, have argued that, due to the similarities of their worldviews, the modern pagan movement can be treated as part of the same global phenomenon as pre-Christian Ancient religions, living Indigenous religions, and world religions like Hinduism, Shinto, and Afro-American religions. They have also suggested that these could all be included under the rubric of "paganism". This approach has been received critically by many specialists in religious studies. Critics have pointed out that such claims would cause problems for analytic scholarship by lumping together belief systems with very significant differences, and that the term would serve modern pagan interests by making the movement appear far larger on the world stage. Doyle White writes that modern religions that draw upon the pre-Christian belief systems of other parts of the world, such as Sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas, cannot be seen as part of the contemporary pagan movement, which is "fundamentally Eurocentric". Similarly, Strmiska stresses that modern paganism should not be conflated with the belief systems of the world's Indigenous peoples because the latter lived under colonialism and its legacy, and that while some pagan worldviews bear similarities to those of indigenous communities, they stem from "different cultural, linguistic, and historical backgrounds".
Reappropriation of "paganism"
Many scholars have favored the use of "neopaganism" to describe this phenomenon, with the prefix "neo-" serving to distinguish the modern religions from their ancient, pre-Christian forerunners. Some pagan practitioners also prefer "neopaganism", believing that the prefix conveys the reformed nature of the religion, such as its rejection of practices such as animal sacrifice. Conversely, most pagans do not use the word neopagan, with some expressing disapproval of it, arguing that the term "neo" offensively disconnects them from what they perceive as their pre-Christian forebears. To avoid causing offense, many scholars in the English-speaking world have begun using the prefixes "modern" or "contemporary" rather than "neo". Several pagan studies scholars, such as Ronald Hutton and Sabina Magliocco, have emphasized the use of the upper-case "Paganism" to distinguish the modern movement from the lower-case "paganism", a term commonly used for pre-Christian belief systems. In 2015, Rountree opined that this lower case/upper case division was "now [the] convention" in pagan studies. Among the critics of the upper-case P are York and Andras Corban-Arthen, president of the ECER. Capitalizing the word, they argue, makes "Paganism" appear as the name of a cohesive religion rather than a generic religious category, and comes off as naive, dishonest or as an unwelcome attempt to disrupt the spontaneity and vernacular quality of the movement.
The term "neo-pagan" was coined in the 19th century in reference to Renaissance and Romanticist Hellenophile classical revivalism. By the mid-1930s "neopagan" was being applied to new religious movements like Jakob Wilhelm Hauer's German Faith Movement and Jan Stachniuk's Polish Zadruga, usually by outsiders and often pejoratively. Pagan as a self-designation appeared in 1964 and 1965, in the publications of the Witchcraft Research Association; at that time, the term was in use by Wiccans in the United States and the United Kingdom, but unconnected to the broader, counterculture pagan movement. The modern popularisation of the terms pagan and neopagan as they are currently understood is largely traced to Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, co-founder of the 1st Neo-Pagan Church of All Worlds who, beginning in 1967 with the early issues of Green Egg, used both terms for the growing movement. This usage has been common since the pagan revival in the 1970s.
According to Strmiska, the reappropriation of the term "pagan" by modern pagans served as "a deliberate act of defiance" against "traditional, Christian-dominated society", allowing them to use it as a source of "pride and power". In this, he compared it to the gay liberation movement's reappropriation of the term "queer", which had formerly been used only as a term of homophobic abuse. He suggests that part of the term's appeal lay in the fact that a large proportion of pagan converts were raised in Christian families, and that by embracing the term "pagan", a word long used for what was "rejected and reviled by Christian authorities", a convert summarizes "in a single word his or her definitive break" from Christianity. He further suggests that the term gained appeal through its depiction in romanticist and 19th-century European nationalist literature, where it had been imbued with "a certain mystery and allure", and that by embracing the word "pagan" modern pagans defy past religious intolerance to honor the pre-Christian peoples of Europe and emphasize those societies' cultural and artistic achievements.
Varieties
Eclectic and reconstructive
Modern pagan attitudes differ regarding the source material surrounding pre-Christian belief systems. Strmiska notes that pagan groups can be "divided along a continuum: at one end are those that aim to reconstruct the ancient religious traditions of a particular ethnic group or a linguistic or geographic area to the highest degree possible; at the other end are those that freely blend traditions of different areas, peoples, and time periods." Strmiska argues that these two poles could be termed reconstructionism and eclecticism, respectively. Reconstructionists do not altogether reject innovation in their interpretation and adaptation of the source material, however they do believe that the source material conveys greater authenticity and thus should be emphasized. They often follow scholarly debates about the nature of such pre-Christian religions, and some reconstructionists are themselves scholars. Eclectic pagans, conversely, seek general inspiration from the pre-Christian past, and do not attempt to recreate past rites or traditions with specific attention to detail.
On the reconstructionist side can be placed those movements which often favour the designation "Native Faith", including Romuva, Heathenry, Roman Traditionalism and Hellenism. On the eclectic side has been placed Wicca, Thelema, Adonism, Druidry, the Goddess Movement, Discordianism and the Radical Faeries.
Strmiska also suggests that this division could be seen as being based on "discourses of identity", with reconstructionists emphasizing a deep-rooted sense of place and people, and eclectics embracing a universality and openness toward humanity and the Earth.
Strmiska nevertheless notes that this reconstructionist-eclectic division is "neither as absolute nor as straightforward as it might appear". He cites the example of Dievturība, a form of reconstructionist paganism that seeks to revive the pre-Christian religion of the Latvian people, by noting that it exhibits eclectic tendencies by adopting a monotheistic focus and ceremonial structure from Lutheranism. Similarly, while examining neo-shamanism among the Sami people of Northern Scandinavia, Siv Ellen Kraft highlights that despite the religion being reconstructionist in intent, it is highly eclectic in the manner in which it has adopted elements from shamanic traditions in other parts of the world.
In discussing Asatro – a form of Heathenry based in Denmark – Matthew Amster notes that it did not fit clearly within such a framework, because while seeking a reconstructionist form of historical accuracy, Asatro strongly eschewed the emphasis on ethnicity that is common to other reconstructionist groups. While Wicca is identified as an eclectic form of paganism, Strmiska also notes that some Wiccans have moved in a more reconstructionist direction by focusing on a particular ethnic and cultural link, thus developing such variants as Norse Wicca and Celtic Wicca. Concern has also been expressed regarding the utility of the term "reconstructionism" when dealing with paganisms in Central and Eastern Europe, because in many of the languages of these regions, equivalents of the term "reconstructionism" – such as the Czech and Lithuanian – are already used to define the secular hobby of historical re-enactment.
Ecologic and secular
The spectrum of modern paganism includes a range of ecologic and explicitly ecocentric practices, which may overlap with scientific pantheism. Pagans may distinguish their beliefs and practices as a form of religious naturalism or naturalist philosophy, with some engaged as humanistic or atheopagans.
Ethnic and regional
For some pagan groups, ethnicity is central to their religion, and some restrict membership to a single ethnic group. Some critics have described this approach as a form of racism. Other pagan groups allow people of any ethnicity, on the view that the gods and goddesses of a particular region can call anyone to their form of worship. Some such groups feel a particular affinity for the pre-Christian belief systems of a particular region with which they have no ethnic link because they see themselves as reincarnations of people from that society. There is greater focus on ethnicity within the pagan movements in continental Europe than within the pagan movements in North America and the British Isles. Such ethnic paganisms have variously been seen as responses to concerns about foreign ideologies, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and anxieties about cultural erosion.
Although they acknowledged that it was "a highly simplified model", Aitamurto and Simpson wrote that there was "some truth" to the claim that leftist-oriented forms of paganism were prevalent in North America and the British Isles while rightist-oriented forms of paganism were prevalent in Central and Eastern Europe. They noted that in these latter regions, pagan groups placed an emphasis on "the centrality of the nation, the ethnic group, or the tribe". Rountree wrote that it was wrong to assume that "expressions of Paganism can be categorized straight-forwardly according to region", but acknowledged that some regional trends were visible, such as the impact of Catholicism on paganism in Southern Europe.
Historicity
Although inspired by the pre-Christian belief systems of the past, modern paganism is not the same phenomenon as these lost traditions and in many respects differs from them considerably. Strmiska stresses that modern paganism is a "new", "modern" religious movement, even if some of its content derives from ancient sources. Contemporary paganism as practiced in the United States in the 1990s has been described as "a synthesis of historical inspiration and present-day creativity".
Eclectic paganism takes an undogmatic religious stance and therefore potentially sees no one as having authority to deem a source apocryphal. Contemporary paganism has therefore been prone to fakelore, especially in recent years as information and misinformation alike have been spread on the Internet and in print media. A number of Wiccan, pagan and even some Traditionalist or Tribalist groups have a history of Grandmother Stories – typically involving initiation by a Grandmother, Grandfather, or other elderly relative who is said to have instructed them in the secret, millennia-old traditions of their ancestors. As this secret wisdom can almost always be traced to recent sources, tellers of these stories have often later admitted they made them up. Strmiska asserts that contemporary paganism could be viewed as a part of the "much larger phenomenon" of efforts to revive "traditional, indigenous, or native religions" that were occurring across the globe.
Beliefs
Beliefs and practices vary widely among different pagan groups; however, there are a series of core principles common to most, if not all, forms of modern paganism. The English academic Graham Harvey noted that pagans "rarely indulge in theology".
Polytheism
One principle of the pagan movement is polytheism, the belief in and veneration of multiple gods or goddesses.
Within the pagan movement, there can be found many deities, both male and female, who have various associations and embody forces of nature, aspects of culture, and facets of human psychology. These deities are typically depicted in human form, and are viewed as having human faults. They are therefore not seen as perfect, but rather are venerated as being wise and powerful. Pagans feel that this understanding of the gods reflected the dynamics of life on Earth, allowing for the expression of humour.
One view in the pagan community is that these polytheistic deities are not viewed as literal entities, but as Jungian archetypes or other psychological constructs that exist in the human psyche. Others adopt the belief that the deities have both a psychological and external existence. Many pagans believe adoption of a polytheistic world-view would be beneficial for western society – replacing the dominant monotheism they see as innately repressive. In fact, many American modern pagans first came to their adopted faiths because it allowed a greater freedom, diversity, and tolerance of worship among the community. This pluralistic perspective has helped the varied factions of modern paganism exist in relative harmony. Most pagans adopt an ethos of "unity in diversity" regarding their religious beliefs.
It is its inclusion of female deity which distinguishes pagan religions from their Abrahamic counterparts.
In Wicca, male and female deities are typically balanced out in a form of duotheism. Among many pagans, there is a strong desire to incorporate the female aspects of the divine in their worship and within their lives, which can partially explain the attitude which sometimes manifests as the veneration of women.
There are exceptions to polytheism in paganism, as seen for instance in the form of Ukrainian paganism promoted by Lev Sylenko, which is devoted to a monotheistic veneration of the god Dazhbog. As noted above, pagans with naturalistic worldviews may not believe in or work with deities at all.
Pagan religions commonly exhibit a metaphysical concept of an underlying order that pervades the universe, such as the concept of harmonia embraced by Hellenists and that of Wyrd found in Heathenry.
Animism and pantheism
A key part of most pagan worldviews is the holistic concept of a universe that is interconnected. This is connected with a belief in either pantheism or panentheism. In both beliefs, divinity and the material or spiritual universe are one. For pagans, pantheism means that "divinity is inseparable from nature and that deity is immanent in nature".
Dennis D. Carpenter noted that the belief in a pantheistic or panentheistic deity has led to the idea of interconnectedness playing a key part in pagans' worldviews. The prominent Reclaiming priestess Starhawk related that a core part of goddess-centred pagan witchcraft was "the understanding that all being is interrelated, that we are all linked with the cosmos as parts of one living organism. What affects one of us affects us all."
Another pivotal belief in the contemporary pagan movement is that of animism. This has been interpreted in two distinct ways among the pagan community. First, it can refer to a belief that everything in the universe is imbued with a life force or spiritual energy. In contrast, some contemporary pagans believe that there are specific spirits that inhabit various features in the natural world, and that these can be actively communicated with. Some pagans have reported experiencing communication with spirits dwelling in rocks, plants, trees and animals, as well as power animals or animal spirits who can act as spiritual helpers or guides.
Animism was also a concept common to many pre-Christian European religions, and in adopting it, contemporary pagans are attempting to "reenter the primeval worldview" and participate in a view of cosmology "that is not possible for most Westerners after childhood."
Nature veneration
All pagan movements place great emphasis on the divinity of nature as a primary source of divine will, and on humanity's membership of the natural world, bound in kinship to all life and the Earth itself. The animistic aspects of pagan theology assert that all things have a soul – not just humans or organic life – so this bond is held with mountains and rivers as well as trees and wild animals. As a result, pagans believe the essence of their spirituality is both ancient and timeless, regardless of the age of specific religious movements. Places of natural beauty are therefore treated as sacred and ideal for ritual, like the nemetons of the ancient Celts.
Many pagans hold that different lands and/or cultures have their own natural religion, with many legitimate interpretations of divinity, and therefore reject religious exclusivism.
While the pagan community has tremendous variety in political views spanning the whole of the political spectrum, environmentalism is often a common feature.
Such views have also led many pagans to revere the planet Earth as Mother Earth, who is often referred to as Gaia after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth.
Practices
Ritual
Pagan ritual can take place in both a public and private setting.
Contemporary pagan ritual is typically geared towards "facilitating altered states of awareness or shifting mind-sets". To induce such altered states of consciousness, pagans use such elements as drumming, visualization, chanting, singing, dancing, and meditation. American folklorist Sabina Magliocco came to the conclusion, based upon her ethnographic fieldwork in California that certain pagan beliefs "arise from what they experience during religious ecstasy".
Sociologist Margot Adler highlighted how several pagan groups, like the Reformed Druids of North America and the Erisian movement incorporate a great deal of play in their rituals rather than having them be completely serious and somber. She noted that there are those who would argue that "the Pagan community is one of the only spiritual communities that is exploring humor, joy, abandonment, even silliness and outrageousness as valid parts of spiritual experience".
Domestic worship typically takes place in the home and is carried out by either an individual or family group. It typically involves offerings – including bread, cake, flowers, fruit, milk, beer, or wine – being given to images of deities, often accompanied with prayers and songs and the lighting of candles and incense.
Common pagan devotional practices have thus been compared to similar practices in Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Roman Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity, but contrasted with that in Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam.
Although animal sacrifice was a common part of pre-Christian ritual in Europe, it is rarely practiced in contemporary paganism.
Festival
Paganism's public rituals are generally calendrical, although the pre-Christian festivals that pagans use as a basis varied across Europe. Nevertheless, common to almost all pagan religions is an emphasis on an agricultural cycle and respect for the dead. Common pagan festivals include those marking the summer solstice and winter solstice as well as the start of spring and the harvest. In Wicca and Druidry, a Wheel of the Year has been developed which typically involves eight seasonal festivals.
Magic
The belief in magical rituals and spells is held by a "significant number" of contemporary pagans. Among those who believe in it, there are a variety of different views about what magic is. Many modern pagans adhere to the definition of magic provided by Aleister Crowley, the founder of Thelema: "the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will". Also accepted by many is the related definition purportedly provided by the ceremonial magician Dion Fortune: "magic is the art and science of changing consciousness according to the Will".
Among those who practice magic are Wiccans, those who identify as neopagan witches, and practitioners of some forms of revivalist neo-Druidism, the rituals of which are at least partially based upon those of ceremonial magic and freemasonry.
History
Early modern period
Discussions about prevailing, returning or new forms of paganism have existed throughout the modern period. Before the 20th century, Christian institutions regularly used paganism as a term for everything outside of Christianity, Judaism and – from the 18th century – Islam. They frequently associated paganism with idolatry, magic and a general concept of "false religion", which for example has made Catholics and Protestants accuse each other of being pagans. Various folk beliefs have periodically been labeled as pagan and churches have demanded that they should be purged. The Western attitude to paganism gradually changed during the early modern period. One reason was increased contacts with areas outside of Europe, which happened through trade, Christian mission and colonization. Increased knowledge of other cultures led to questions of whether their practices even fit into the definitions of religion, and paganism was incorporated in the idea of progress, where it was ranked as a low, undeveloped form of religion. Another reason for change was the circulation of ancient writings such as those attributed to Hermes Trismegistus; this made paganism an intellectual position some Europeans began to self-identify with, starting at the latest in the 15th century with people like Gemistus Pletho, who wanted to establish a new form of Greco-Roman polytheism.
Positive identification with paganism became more common in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it tied in with criticism of Christianity and organized religion, rooted in the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment and Romanticism. The approach to paganism varied during this period; Friedrich Schiller's 1788 poem "Die Götter Griechenlandes" presents ancient Greek religion as a powerful alternative to Christianity, whereas others took interest in paganism through the concept of the noble savage, often associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. During the French Revolution and First French Republic, some public figures incorporated pagan themes in their worldviews. An explicit example was Gabriel André Aucler, who responded to both Christianity and Enlightenment atheism by performing pagan rites and arguing for renewed pagan religiosity in his book La Thréicie (1799).
19th and early 20th centuries
One of the origins of modern pagan movements lies in the romanticist and national liberation movements that developed in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. The publications of studies into European folk customs and culture by scholars like Johann Gottfried Herder and Jacob Grimm resulted in a wider interest in these subjects and a growth in cultural self-consciousness. At the time, it was commonly believed that almost all such folk customs were survivals from the pre-Christian period. These attitudes would also be exported to North America by European immigrants in these centuries.
The Romantic movement of the 18th century led to the re-discovery of Old Gaelic and Old Norse literature and poetry. The 19th century saw a surge of interest in Germanic paganism with the Viking revival in Victorian Britain and Scandinavia, and the Völkisch movement in Germany. These currents coincided with Romanticist interest in folklore and occultism, the widespread emergence of pagan themes in popular literature, and the rise of nationalism.
The rise of modern paganism was aided by the decline in Christianity throughout many parts of Europe and North America, as well as by the concomitant decline in enforced religious conformity and greater freedom of religion that developed, allowing people to explore a wider range of spiritual options and form religious organisations that could operate free from legal persecution.
Historian Ronald Hutton has argued that many of the motifs of 20th century neo-paganism may be traced back to the utopian, mystical counter-cultures of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods (also extending in some instances into the 1920s), via the works of amateur folklorists, popular authors, poets, political radicals and alternative lifestylers.
Prior to the spread of the 20th-century modern pagan movements, a notable instance of self-identified paganism was in Sioux writer Zitkala-sa's essay "Why I Am A Pagan". Published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1902, the Native American activist and writer outlined her rejection of Christianity (referred to as "the new superstition") in favor of a harmony with nature embodied by the Great Spirit. She further recounted her mother's abandonment of Sioux religion and the unsuccessful attempts of a "native preacher" to get her to attend the village church.
In the 1920s Margaret Murray theorized that a secret pagan religion had survived the witchcraft persecutions enacted by the ecclesiastical and secular courts. Historians now reject Murray's theory, as she based it partially upon the similarities of the accounts given by those accused of witchcraft; such similarity is now thought to actually derive from there having been a standard set of questions laid out in the witch-hunting manuals used by interrogators.
In the transition between the 1800s and 1900s, efforts to incorporate pagan-Roman rituals into the Italian national identity were made by archaeologist Giacomo Boni and esoteric circles in Rome.
In 1927, philosopher and esotericist Julius Evola founded the Gruppo di Ur in Rome, along with its journal Ur (1927–1928), involving figures like Arturo Reghini. In 1928, Evola published Imperialismo Pagano, advocating Italian political paganism to oppose the Lateran Pacts. The journal resumed in 1929 as Krur.
A mysterious document published in Krur in 1929, attributed to orientalist Leone Caetani, suggested that Italy's World War I victory and the rise of fascism were influenced by Etruscan-Roman rites.
Late 20th century
The 1960s and 1970s saw a resurgence in neo-Druidism as well as the rise of modern Germanic paganism in the United States and in Iceland. In the 1970s, Wicca was notably influenced by feminism, leading to the creation of an eclectic, Goddess-worshipping movement known as Dianic Wicca. The 1979 publication of Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon and Starhawk's The Spiral Dance opened a new chapter in public awareness of paganism.
With the growth and spread of large, pagan gatherings and festivals in the 1980s, public varieties of Wicca continued to further diversify into additional, eclectic sub-denominations, often heavily influenced by the New Age and counter-culture movements. These open, unstructured or loosely structured traditions contrast with British Traditional Wicca, which emphasizes secrecy and initiatory lineage.
After the fall of fascism, the public focus on pre-Christian Roman spirituality was mainly promoted by Julius Evola. In the 1970s, interest in pagan Romanity and the Gruppo di Ur resurfaced among youth linked to Evola. He also introduced non-Roman religious concepts like Buddhism, Hinduism, and sexual magic.
The Gruppo dei Dioscuri was formed in Rome, Naples, and Messina, publishing four pamphlets before disappearing from public view, though it continued activities from 1969 and remained active in various Italian regions after its founder's death in 2000.
The Evolian journal Arthos, founded in Genoa in 1972 by Renato del Ponte, expressed significant interest in Roman religion. In 1984, the Gruppo Arx revived Messina's Dioscuri activities, and the Pythagorean Association briefly resurfaced in Calabria and Sicily from 1984 to 1988, publishing Yghìeia.
Other publications include the Genoese Il Basilisco (1979–1989), which released several works on pagan studies, and Politica Romana (1994–2004), seen as a high-level Romano-pagan journal. One prominent figure was actor Roberto Corbiletto, who died in a mysterious fire in 1999.
The 1980s and 1990s also saw an increasing interest in serious academic research and reconstructionist pagan traditions. The establishment and growth of the Internet in the 1990s brought rapid growth to these, and other pagan movements. By the time of the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, freedom of religion was legally established across Russia and a number of other newly independent states, allowing for the growth in both Christian and non-Christian religions.
Religious paths and movements
Reconstructionist
In contrast to the eclectic traditions, Polytheistic Reconstructionists practice culturally specific ethnic traditions based on folklore, songs and prayers, as well as reconstructions from the historical record. Hellenic, Roman, Kemetic, Celtic, Germanic, Guanche, Baltic and Slavic reconstructionists aim to preserve and revive the practices and beliefs of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient Egypt, the Celts, the Germanic peoples, the Guanche people, the Balts and the Slavs, respectively.
Germanic
Heathenism, also known as Germanic neopaganism, refers to a series of contemporary pagan traditions based on the historical religions, culture and literature of Germanic-speaking Europe. Heathenry is spread out across northwestern Europe, North America and Australasia, where the descendants of historic Germanic-speaking people now live.
Many Heathen groups adopt variants of Norse mythology as a basis for their beliefs, conceiving of the Earth as on the great world tree Yggdrasil. Heathens believe in multiple polytheistic deities adopted from historical Germanic mythologies. Most are polytheistic realists, believing that the deities are real entities, while others view them as Jungian archetypes.
Celtic
Slavic
Uralic
Baltic
Greek
Roman
Kemetic
Semitic
Beit Asherah (the house of the Goddess Asherah) was one of the first modern pagan synagogues, founded in the early 1990s by Stephanie Fox, Steven Posch, and Magenta Griffiths (Lady Magenta). Magenta Griffiths is High Priestess of the Beit Asherah coven, and a former board member of the Covenant of the Goddess.
Armenian
Chuvash
The Chuvash people, a Turkic ethnic group native to an area stretching from the Volga Region to Siberia, have experienced a pagan revival since the fall of the Soviet Union. While potentially considered a peculiar form of Tengrism, a related revivalist movement of Central Asian traditional religion, Vattisen Yaly (, Tradition of the Old) differs significantly: the Chuvash being a heavily Fennicised and Slavified ethnicity and having had exchanges also with other Indo-European ethnicities, their religion shows many similarities with Finnic and Slavic paganisms; moreover, the revival of Vattisen Yaly in recent decades has occurred following modern pagan patterns. Today the followers of the Chuvash Traditional Religion are called "the true Chuvash". Their main god is Tura, a deity comparable to the Estonian Taara, the Germanic Thunraz and the pan-Turkic Tengri.
Eclectic
Wicca
Wicca is the largest form of modern paganism, as well as the best-known and most extensively studied.
Religious studies scholar Graham Harvey noted that the poem "Charge of the Goddess" remains central to the liturgy of most Wiccan groups. Originally written by Wiccan High Priestess Doreen Valiente in the mid-1950s, the poem allows Wiccans to gain wisdom and experience deity in "the ordinary things in life."
Historian Ronald Hutton identified a wide variety of different sources that influenced Wicca's development, including ceremonial magic, folk magic, Romanticist literature, Freemasonry, and the witch-cult theory of English archaeologist Margaret Murray. English esotericist Gerald Gardner was at the forefront of the burgeoning Wiccan movement. He claimed to have been initiated by the New Forest coven in 1939, and that the religion he discovered was a survival of the pagan witch-cult described in Murray's theory. Various forms of Wicca have since evolved or been adapted from Gardner's British Traditional Wicca or Gardnerian Wicca, such as Alexandrian Wicca. Other forms loosely based on Gardner's teachings are Faery Wicca, Kemetic Wicca, Judeo-paganism or jewitchery, and Dianic Wicca or feminist Wicca, which emphasizes the divine feminine, often creating women-only or lesbian-only groups. In the academic community Wicca has also been interpreted as having close affinities with process philosophy.
In the 1990s, Wiccan beliefs and practices were used as a partial basis for a number of US films and television series, such as The Craft, Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, leading to a surge in teenagers' and young adults' interest and involvement in the religion.
Goddess movement
Goddess spirituality, which is also known as the Goddess movement, is a pagan religion in which a singular, monotheistic Goddess is given predominance. Goddess Spirituality revolves around the sacredness of the female form, and of aspects of women's lives that adherents say have been traditionally neglected in Western society, such as menstruation, sexuality, and maternity.
The Goddess movement draws some of its inspiration from the work of archaeologists such as Marija Gimbutas, whose interpretation of artifacts excavated from "Old Europe" points to societies of Neolithic Europe that were matristic or goddess-centered worshipping a female deity of three primary aspects, which has inspired some modern pagan worshippers of the Triple Goddess.
Adherents of the Goddess Spirituality movement typically envision a history of the world that is different from traditional narratives about the past, emphasising the role of women rather than that of men. According to this view, human society was formerly a matriarchy, with communities being egalitarian, pacifistic, and focused on the worship of the Mother goddess, which was subsequently overthrown by violent and warlike patriarchal hordes – usually Indo-European pastoralists who worshipped male sky-gods, and continued to rule through the form of Abrahamic religions, specifically Christianity in the West. Adherents look for elements of this human history in "theological, anthropological, archaeological, historical, folkloric and hagiographic writings."
Druidry
Druidry shows similar heterogeneity as Wicca. It draws inspirations from historical Druids, the priest caste of the ancient pagan Celts. Druidry dates to the earliest forms of modern paganism: the Ancient Order of Druids founded in 1781 had many aspects of freemasonry, and has practiced rituals at Stonehenge since 1905. George Watson MacGregor Reid founded the Druid Order in its current form in 1909. In 1964 Ross Nichols established the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. In the United States, the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA) was established in 1912, the Reformed Druids of North America (RDNA) in 1963, and Ár nDraíocht Féin (ADF) in 1983 by Isaac Bonewits.
Eco-paganism and Unitarian Universalism
Eco-paganism and Eco-magic, which are offshoots of direct action environmental groups, strongly emphasize fairy imagery and a belief in the possibility of intercession by the fae (fairies, pixies, gnomes, elves, and other spirits of nature and the Otherworlds).
Some Unitarian Universalists are eclectic pagans. Unitarian Universalists look for spiritual inspiration in a wide variety of religious beliefs. The Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans, or CUUPs, encourages its chapters to "use practices familiar to members who attend for worship services but not to follow only one tradition of paganism."
Occultism and ethnic mysticism
In 1925, the Czech esotericist Franz Sättler founded the pagan religion Adonism, devoted to the ancient Greek god Adonis, whom Sättler equated with the Christian Satan, and which purported that the end of the world would come in 2000. Adonism largely died out in the 1930s, but remained an influence on the German occult scene.
Demographics
Establishing precise figures on paganism is difficult. Due to the secrecy and fear of persecution still prevalent among pagans, limited numbers are willing to openly be counted. The decentralised nature of paganism and sheer number of solitary practitioners further complicates matters. Nevertheless, there is a slow growing body of data on the subject. In the US, there are estimated to be between 1 and 1.5 million practitioners.
Europe
Caucasus region
Among Circassians, the Adyghe Habze faith has been revived after the fall of the Soviet Union, and followers of modern pagan faiths were found to constitute 12% in Karachay-Cherkessia and 3% in Kabardino-Balkaria (both republics are multiethnic and also have many non-Circassians, especially Russians and Turkic peoples) In Abkhazia, the Abkhaz native faith has also been revived, and in the 2003 census, 8% of residents identified with it (note again that there are many non-Abkhaz in the state including Georgians, Russians and Armenians); on 3 August 2012 the Council of Priests of Abkhazia was formally constituted in Sukhumi. In North Ossetia, the Uatsdin faith was revived, and in 2012, 29% of the population identified with it (North Ossetia is about 2/3 Ossetian and 1/3 Russian). Modern pagan movements are also present to a lesser degree elsewhere; in Dagestan 2% of the population identified with folk religious movements, while data on modern pagans is unavailable for Chechnya and Ingushetia.
Volga region
The Mari native religion in fact has a continuous existence, but it has co-existed with Orthodox Christianity for centuries and experienced a renewal after the fall of the Soviet Union. A sociological survey conducted in 2004 found that about 15 percent of the population of Mari El consider themselves adherents of the Mari native religion. Since Mari make up just 45 percent of the republic's population of 700,000, this figure means that probably more than a third claim to follow the old religion. The percentage of pagans among the Mari of Bashkortostan and the eastern part of Tatarstan is even higher (up to 69% among women). Mari fled here from forced Christianization in the 17th to 19th centuries. A similar number was claimed by Victor Schnirelmann, for whom between a quarter and a half of the Mari either worship the pagan gods or are members of modern pagan groups.
A modern pagan movement drawing from various syncretic practices that had survived among the Christianised Mari people was initiated in 1990 that was estimated in 2004 to have won the adherence of 2% of the Mordvin people.
Western Europe
A study by Ronald Hutton compared a number of different sources (including membership lists of major UK organizations, attendance at major events, subscriptions to magazines, etc.) and used standard models for extrapolating likely numbers. This estimate accounted for multiple membership overlaps, as well as the number of adherents represented by each attendee of a pagan gathering. Hutton estimated that there are 250,000 modern pagans in the United Kingdom, roughly equivalent to the national Hindu community.
A smaller number is suggested by the results of the 2001 Census, in which a question about religious affiliation was asked for the first time. Respondents were able to write in an affiliation not covered by the checklist of common religions, and a total of 42,262 people from England, Scotland and Wales declared themselves to be pagans by this method. These figures were not released as a matter of course by the Office for National Statistics but were released after an application by the Pagan Federation of Scotland. This is more than many well known traditions such as Rastafarian, Baháʼí and Zoroastrian groups but fewer than the big six of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism and Buddhism. It is also fewer than the adherents of Jediism, whose campaign made their faith the fourth largest religion after Christianity, Islam and Hinduism.
The 2001 UK Census figures did not allow an accurate breakdown of traditions within the pagan heading, as a campaign by the Pagan Federation before the census encouraged Wiccans, Heathens, Druids and others all to use the same write-in term 'pagan' to maximise the numbers reported. However, the 2011 census made it possible to describe oneself as pagan-Wiccan, pagan-Druid and so on. The figures for England and Wales showed 80,153 describing themselves as pagan (or some subgroup thereof). The largest subgroup was Wicca, with 11,766 adherents. The overall numbers of people self-reporting as pagan rose between 2001 and 2011. In 2001, about seven people per 10,000 UK respondents were pagan; in 2011, the number (based on the England and Wales population) was 14.3 people per 10,000 respondents.
Census figures in Ireland do not provide a breakdown of religions outside of the major Christian denominations and other major world religions. A total of 22,497 people stated Other Religion in the 2006 census; and a rough estimate is that there were 2,000–3,000 practicing pagans in Ireland in 2009. Numerous pagan groups – primarily Wiccan and Druidic – exist in Ireland though none is officially recognised by the Government. Irish paganism is often strongly concerned with issues of place and language.
North America
Canada does not provide extremely detailed records of religious adherence. Its statistics service only collects limited religious information each decade. At the 2001 census, there were a recorded 21,080 pagans in Canada.
The United States government does not directly collect religious information. As a result such information is provided by religious institutions and other third-party statistical organisations. Based on the most recent survey by the Pew Forum on religion, there are over one million pagans in the United States. Up to 0.4% of respondents answered "pagan" or "Wiccan" when polled.
According to Helen A. Berger's 1995 survey "The Pagan Census", most American pagans are middle-class, educated, and live in urban/suburban areas on the East and West coasts.
Oceania
In the 2011 Australian Census, 32,083 respondents identified as pagan. Out of 21,507,717 recorded Australians, they compose approximately 0.15% of the population. The Australian Bureau of Statistics classifies paganism as an affiliation under which several sub-classifications may optionally be specified. This includes animism, nature religion, Druidism, pantheism, and Wicca/Witchcraft. As a result, fairly detailed breakdowns of pagan respondents are available.
In 2006, there were at least 6,804 (0.164%) pagans among New Zealand's population of approximately 4 million. Respondents were given the option to select one or more religious affiliations.
Paganism in society
Propagation
Based upon her study of the pagan community in the United States, the sociologist Margot Adler noted that it is rare for pagan groups to proselytize to gain new converts to their faiths. Instead, she argued that "in most cases," converts first become interested in the movement through "word of mouth, a discussion between friends, a lecture, a book, an article or a Web site." She went on to put forward the idea that this typically confirmed "some original, private experience, so that the most common experience of those who have named themselves pagan is something like 'I finally found a group that has the same religious perceptions I always had. A practicing Wiccan herself, Adler used her own conversion to paganism as a case study, remarking that as a child she had taken a great interest in the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece, and had performed her own devised rituals in dedication to them. When she eventually came across the Wiccan religion many years later, she then found that it confirmed her earlier childhood experiences, and that "I never converted in the accepted sense. I simply accepted, reaffirmed, and extended a very old experience".
Folklorist Sabina Magliocco supported this idea, noting that a great many of those Californian pagans whom she interviewed claimed that they had been greatly interested in mythology and folklore as children, imagining a world of "enchanted nature and magical transformations, filled with lords and ladies, witches and wizards, and humble but often wise peasants". Magliocco noted that it was this world that pagans "strive to re-create in some measure". Further support for Adler's ideas came from American Wiccan priestess Judy Harrow, who noted that among her comrades, there was a feeling that "you don't become pagan, you discover that you always were". They have also been supported by Pagan studies scholar Graham Harvey.
Many pagans in North America encounter the movement through their involvement in other hobbies; particularly popular with US pagans are "golden age-type" pastimes such as the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), Star Trek fandom, Doctor Who fandom and comic book fandom. Other ways in which many North American pagans have gotten involved with the movement are through political or ecological activism, such as vegetarian groups, health food stores, or feminist university courses.
Adler went on to note that from those she interviewed and surveyed in the US she could identify a number of common factors that led to people getting involved in paganism: the beauty, vision and imagination that was found within their beliefs and rituals, a sense of intellectual satisfaction and personal growth that they imparted, their support for environmentalism or feminism, and a sense of freedom.
Class, gender and ethnicity
United States
Based upon her work in the United States, Adler found that the pagan movement was "very diverse" in its class and ethnic backgrounds. She went on to remark that she had encountered pagans in jobs that ranged from "fireman to PhD chemist" but that the one thing she thought made them into an "elite" was being avid readers, something that she found to be very common within the pagan community despite the fact that avid readers constituted less than 20% of the general population of the United States at the time. Magliocco came to a somewhat different conclusion based upon her ethnographic research of pagans in California, remarking that the majority were "white, middle-class, well-educated urbanites" but that they were united in finding "artistic inspiration" within "folk and indigenous [American] spiritual traditions,"
The sociologist Regina Oboler examined the role of gender in the American pagan community, arguing that although the movement had been constant in its support for the equality of men and women ever since its foundation, there was still an essentialist view of gender ingrained within it, with female deities being accorded traditional western feminine traits and male deities being similarly accorded what western society saw as masculine traits.
Racism and nationalism
Generally, modern pagan currents in Western countries do not advocate nationalist or far-right ideologies. Instead, they advocate individual self-improvement and liberal values of personal freedom, gender equality, and environmental protection. The nationalist sentiments expressed by modern pagans in Western countries are marginal, so the ideas of cosmopolitanism are prevalent. Faith and dogmas give way to active practices, including psychotechnics, which was extensively influenced by neo-Hinduism. In contrast, many areas of post-Soviet modern paganism, including Russian, are occupied not so much with individual self-improvement as they are occupied with social problems, and they also create nationalist ideologies based on the "invented past".
Modern paganism is one of the directions in the development of romantic nationalism with its components such as the idealization of a particular people's historical or mythological past, dissatisfaction with modernity, and the ease of transition to a radical stage with the postulation of national superiority.
The "volksgeist", which is given great attention within the framework of ethnic nationalism, is often identified with religion, so there is a desire to create or revive one's religion or nationalize one of the world's religions. Heinrich Heine linked nationalism with paganism. The philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who shared Heine's opinion, noted the regularity of the tendency of the transition of German antisemitism into anti-Christianity.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the spiritual crisis in Russia led to a fascination with paganism, at first ancient and then Slavic "native gods," which was especially true for the symbolists. The publicist Daniil Pasmanik (1923) wrote that consistent antisemitism should reject Judaism and Christianity. He noted that this trend had already led Germany to worship Odin and, in the future, in his opinion, would inevitably lead Russia to worship Perun.
German occultism and modern paganism arose in the early 20th century, and they became influential through teachings such as Ariosophy, gaining adherents within the far-right Völkisch movement, which eventually culminated in Nazism. The development of such ideas after World War II gave rise to Wotanism, a white nationalist modern pagan movement at the end of the 20th century.
In Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Völkisch movement, characterized by a racist antisemitic ideology of radical ethnic nationalism of the dominant population, spread. The central elements of the worldview were racism and elitism. The movement included a religious modern pagan component. The ideology developed out of German nationalist romanticism. Nazism is considered one of the movements within the völkisch or as strongly influenced by the völkisch. Völkisch consisted of many religiopolitical groups whose leaders and followers were closely associated with each other and the developing Nazi Party. This ideology significantly impacted various aspects of German culture at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Liberalism and rationalism, which demystified the time-honored order that accepted authorities and prejudices, also caused an adverse reaction from supporters of the völkisch movement. A negative attitude towards modernity characterizes the writings of German nationalist "prophets" such as Paul Delagardie, Julius Lang, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. The movement combined a sentimental patriotic interest in German folklore and local history with anti-urban, back-to-the-earth populism. To overcome what they considered the ailment of scientific and rationalistic modernity, the authors of völkisch found a spiritual solution in the essence of the "people," perceived as genuine, intuitive, even "primitive," in the sense of the location of the "people" on the level with the original (primordial) cosmic order.
Völkisch thinkers tended to idealize the myth of the "original nation", which they believed could still be found in rural Germany, a form of "primitive democracy freely subject to its natural elite". The idea of the "people" was subsequently transformed into the idea of "racial essence", and Völkisch thinkers understood this term as a life-giving and quasi-eternal essence and not as a sociological category, in the same way as they considered "Nature".
Modern pagan ideas were present in Ariosophy, an esoteric teaching created by the Austrian occultists Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels in Austria between 1890 and 1930. The term "ariosophy" can also be used generically to describe the "Aryan"/esoteric teachings of the völkisch subset. The doctrine of Ariosophy was based on pseudoscientific ideas about "Aryan" purity and the mystical unity of spirit and body. It was influenced by the German nationalist völkisch movement, the theosophy of Helena Blavatsky, the Austrian pan-German movement, and social Darwinism and its racist conclusions. Ariosophy influenced the ideology of Nazism.
The works of the Ariosophists describe the prehistoric "Aryan" golden age when the wise keepers of knowledge learned and taught occult racial teachings and ruled over a "racially pure" society. It is alleged that there is an evil conspiracy of anti-German forces, including all "non-Aryan" races, Jews, and the Christian church, seeking to destroy the ideal "Aryan" German world by freeing the "non-Aryan" mob to establish a false equality of the illegitimate (representatives of "non-Aryan" races). History, including wars, economic crises, political uncertainty, and the weakening of the power of the German principle, is seen as the result of racial mixing.
The doctrine had followers in Austria and Germany. Occultism in the doctrines of the Ariosophists was of great importance as a sacral justification for an extreme political position and a fundamental rejection of reality, including socio-economic progress. The Ariosophists sought to predict and justify the "coming era" of the German world order. To counter the modern world, "corrupted" by racial mixing, the Ariosophists created many small circles and secret religious societies to revive the "lost" esoteric knowledge and racial virtues of the ancient Germans to create a new pan-German empire.
To recreate the religion of the ancient Germans, List used the Scandinavian epic and the work of contemporary theosophists, in particular Max Ferdinand Sebaldt von Werth, who described the eugenic practices of the "Aryans", as well as The Secret Doctrine by Helena Blavatsky and The Lost Lemuria by William Scott-Elliot. Influenced by these works, List used the terms "Ario-Germans" and "race" instead of "Germans" and "people", perhaps to emphasize the overlap with the fifth root race in Blavatsky's scheme. List and Lanz developed ideas about the struggle between the "Aryan race of masters" and the "race of slaves" and about the ancestral home of the "Aryans" on the sunken polar island of Arctogea.
In Nazi Germany, Germanic pagan folklore, as a source of primordial moral standards, was revered higher than Christianity associated with Judaism. Many Nazis saw anti-Christianity as a deeper form of antisemitism. Heinrich Himmler spoke of the need to create a "neo-Germanic religion" capable of replacing Christianity. The Old Testament was especially repugnant to the Nazis. Adolf Hitler called it "Satan's Bible". Rosenberg demanded that it be banned as a "vehicle of Jewish influence" and replaced by the Nordic sagas. The Nazi ideology combined the veneration of the "pagan heritage of the ancestors" with puritanical, Christian sexual morality, which the "Nordic" Apollo was supposed to personify.
White supremacist ideologies and neo-Nazism, including ideas of racism, antisemitism, and anti-LGBTQ, have infiltrated or assimilated many Germanic modern pagan movements such as Odinism and some Ásatrú groups, including the Asatru Folk Assembly. These groups believe that the Germanic beliefs they hold constitute the true Caucasoid ethnic religion.
The issue of race is a major source of contention among modern pagans, especially in the United States. In the modern pagan community, one view is that race is entirely a matter of biological heredity, while the opposite position is that race is a social construct rooted in cultural heritage. In US modern pagan discourse, these views are described as völkische and universalist positions, respectively. The two factions, which Jeffrey Kaplan has called the "racist" and "non-racist" camps, often clash, with Kaplan claiming that there is a "virtual civil war" between them within the American modern pagan community. The division into universalists and völkisch also spread to other countries, but had less impact on the more ethnically homogeneous Iceland. A 2015 survey showed that more modern pagans adhere to universalist ideas than völkisch.
Going beyond this binary classification, religious scholar Mattias Gardell divides modern paganism in the United States into three factions according to their racial stance:
the "anti-racist" faction, which denounces any connection between religion and racial identity
the "radical-racist" faction, which believes that members of other racial groups should not follow their religion because racial identity is the natural religion of the "Aryan race"
an "ethnic" faction seeking to forge a middle path by recognizing their religion's roots in Northern Europe and its connection to people of Northern European origin
Religious scholar Stephanie von Schnurbein accepted Gardell's tripartite division, and referred to these groups as the "aracist", "racial-religious", and "ethnic" factions, respectively.
Supporters of the universalist and anti-racist approach believe that the deities of Germanic Europe can call anyone to worship them, regardless of ethnic origin. This group rejects the völkisch focus on race, believing that even unintentionally, such an approach can lead to racist attitudes towards people of non-Northern European origin. Practicing universalists such as Stephan Grundy emphasize that ancient northern Europeans married and had children with members of other ethnic groups, and in Norse mythology, the Æsir did the same with the Vanir, jötnar, and humans, so these modern pagans criticize racist views.
Universalists favorably accept practitioners of modern paganism who are not of Northern European origin; for example, The Troth, based in the United States, has Jewish and African American members, and many of its white members have spouses who belong to different racial groups. While some pagans continue to believe that Germanic paganism is an innate religion, universalists have sometimes argued that this paganism is an innate religion for the lands of Northern Europe and not for a particular race. Universalists often complain that some journalists portray modern paganism as an inherently racist movement, so they use the Internet to highlight their opposition to far-right politics.
In Heathenry, the terms "völkisch", "neo-völkisch", or the Anglicised "folkish" are used both as endonyms and exonyms for groups who believe that the religion is closely related to the claimed biological race. Völkisch practitioners consider paganism to be an indigenous religion of a biologically distinct race that is conceptualized as "White", "Nordic", "Aryan", "Northern European", or "English". Völkisch modern pagans generally regard these classifications as self-evident, despite the academic consensus that race is a cultural construct.
Völkisch groups often use ethnonationalist language and claim that only members of these racial groups are entitled to practice a given religion, taking the pseudoscientific view that "gods and goddesses are encoded in the DNA" of the members of a race. Some practitioners explain the idea of linking their race and religion by saying that religion is inextricably linked to the collective unconscious of that race. The American modern pagan Stephen McNallen developed these ideas into a concept he called "metagenetics". McNallen and many other members of the modern pagan "ethnic" faction explicitly state that they are not racist, although Gardell has noted that their views may be considered racist under specific definitions of the term. Gardell considered many "ethnic" modern pagans to be ethnic nationalists.
Many völkisch practitioners disapprove of multiculturalism and racial mixing in modern Europe, advocating racial separatism. In online media, modern pagan völkische often express a belief in the threat of racial miscegenation, which they blame on the social and political establishment, sometimes claiming that their ideas of racial exclusivity are the result of the threat that other ethnic groups pose to "white" people. While these groups generally claim to be aiming to revive Germanic paganism, their race-centric views have their origins in 19th-century culture, not antiquity. This group's discourse contains the concepts of "ancestors" and "homeland", which are understood very vaguely. Researcher Ethan Doyle White characterizes the position of the Odinic Rite and the Odin Brotherhood as "far right".
Ethnocentric modern pagans are highly critical of their universalist counterparts, often claiming that the latter have been misled by New Age literature and political correctness. Members of the universalist and ethnocentric factions criticize those who adopt an "ethnic" stance. The former view "ethnic" modern paganism as a cover for racism, while the latter view its adherents as race traitors for their refusal to fully accept the superiority of the "white race".
Some modern pagans of the völkisch movement are white supremacists and outright racists representing a "radical racist" faction that uses the names Odinism, Wotanism, and Wodenism. According to Kaplan, these adepts occupy the "most remote corners" of modern paganism. The lines between this form of modern paganism and Nazism are "extremely thin" because its adherents praise Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, claim that the "white race" is threatened with extinction by the efforts of a Jewish world conspiracy, and dismiss Christianity as a work of the Jews.
Many in the inner circle of the terrorist organization The Order, a white supremacist militia operating in the US in the 1980s, called themselves Odinists. Various racist modern pagans supported the Fourteen Words slogan, which was developed by The Order member David Lane. Some racist organizations, such as the Order of Nine Angles and the Black Order, combine elements of modern paganism with Satanism, while other racist modern pagans, such as Wotanist Ron McVan, reject the syncretism of the two religions.
American neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce, the founder of the neo-Nazi organization National Alliance, whose ideas stimulated neo-Nazi terrorism, also created the Cosmotheistic Community Church in 1978. He considered the teaching he created within the framework of this church to be pantheism and leaned towards the "Panaryan" Nordic cults. These cults emphasized the idea of a unique closeness of "white people" with nature and the natural "spiritual essence", which was influenced by the ideas of Savitri Devi. According to the doctrine, each race has its predestined role: "whites" are predisposed to strive for God, blacks strive for laziness, and Jews strive for corruption.
In 1985, Pierce purchased a large piece of land at Mill Point in West Virginia, fenced it in with barbed wire, and began selling books on Western culture and Western "pagan traditions" there. He aimed to save the "white race" away from the federal government. In part, he also drew on British Israelism and the racist religion of Identity Christianity. The "National Alliance" met regularly to discuss the ideas of "cosmotheism". Pierce dismissed Christianity as "one of the chief mental illnesses of our people" through which "Jewish influence" spreads. Pierce saw the proposed government after the "racial revolution" as religious, which would be "more like a holy order." He considered the future religion of the "white race" the "Aryan religion" – the "cosmotheism" that he created.
Sociologist Marlène Laruelle notes the activation of "Aryan" modern paganism in the West and Russia. For example, social movements are thus developing that appeal to the Celtic past and call for a return to the "druidic religions" of pre-Christian Europe. For the most part, the French and German Nouvelle Droite share the common idea of a pan-European unity based on an "Aryan" identity and the desire to part with Christianity, the period of domination of which is seen as two thousand years of "wandering in darkness."
Slavic neopaganism (Rodnoverie) has a close connection with Nazism, reproducing its main ideas: the "Aryan" idea, including the idea of the northern ancestral home (in Rodnoverie, it is in the Russian North, the Northern Urals, or beyond the Arctic Circle); the connection of their people with the "Aryans" or complete identification with them (in Rodnovery, "Slavic-Aryans"); the antiquity of one's people and its racial or cultural superiority over others; their people (or the ancient "Aryans" identified with them) are regarded as cultural tregers, distributors of high culture, founders of great civilizations of antiquity, (in Rodnoverie, Slavic or "Slavic-Aryan" "Vedic" technological pracivilization, "taught" all other peoples), and creators of ancient writing (in Rodnoverie, Slavic runes); "Aryan" proto-language (in Rodnoverie, "Slavic-Aryan" or Old Slavic), from which all or many other languages of the world originated; reliance on esotericism; orientation to the faith of ancestors (hence paganism); anti-Christianity (the idea that Christians seek to enslave the people) and antisemitism (Jews as "racial enemies"); "Aryan" socialism (an integral part of the ideology of Nazism) as the most natural for its people (in Rodnoverie, the "original tribal system" of the Slavs, which is thought of as a kind of "Aryan" socialism); symbols and gestures close to or derived from Nazism, etc.
One of the main starting points for the formation of Slavic neopaganism was the search for a rationale for the national idea. Hence follows an increased interest in the origins of national self-consciousness and the national type of religiosity. In the post-Soviet period, in the conditions of the loss of the great "empire" (USSR), land, and influence and in search of internal and external enemies, neopaganism became widespread among nationalist ideologues, just like in Germany in the 1930s. In Rodnoverie, the unity of the Russian people was undergoing a new re-mythologization with an appeal for support to the ideas of the "golden age", the primordial untainted tradition, and the native land.
Historian Dmitry Shlapentokh wrote that, as in Europe, neopaganism in Russia pushes some of its adherents to antisemitism. This antisemitism is closely related to negative attitudes towards Asians, and this emphasis on racial factors can lead neopagans to neo-Nazism. The tendency of neopagans to antisemitism is a logical development of the ideas of neopaganism and imitation of the Nazis and is also a consequence of some specific conditions of modern Russian politics.
Unlike previous regimes, the current Russian political regime and the ideology of the middle class combine support for Orthodoxy with philosemitism and a positive attitude towards Muslims. These features of the regime contributed to the formation of specific views of neo-Nazi neopagans, which are represented to a large extent among the socially unprotected and marginalized Russian youth. In their opinion, power in Russia was usurped by a cabal of conspirators, including hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, Jews, and Muslims. Contrary to external differences, these forces are believed to have united in their desire to maintain power over the Russian "Aryans".
Some associations of neopaganism, in particular Slavic, are evaluated by researchers as extremist, radical nationalists. In Russia, individual neopagan organizations and essays were included in the list of extremist organizations of the Ministry of Justice of Russia and the Federal List of Extremist Materials, respectively.
The historian and ethnologist Victor Schnirelmann considers Russian neopaganism as a direction of Russian nationalism that denies Russian Orthodoxy as an enduring national value and distinguishes two cardinal tasks that Russian neopaganism sets for itself: the salvation of Russian national culture from the leveling influence of modernization and the protection of the natural environment from the impact of modern civilization. According to Schnirelmann, "Russian neopaganism is a radical variety of conservative ideology, which is distinguished by frank anti-intellectualism and populism."
Religious scholar Alexei Gaidukov considers it wrong to reduce the diversity of native faith groups to nationalism only – he views the ecological direction of Rodnovery as no less significant. Historian and religious scholar Roman Shizhensky believes Rodnovery poses little danger and law enforcement agencies should deal with radical groups.
The Austrian occultist Guido von List, who created the doctrine of Ariosophy, argued that an ancient developed "Ario-Germanic" culture reached its dawn several millennia before Roman colonization and Christianity. According to him, before Charlemagne's forced introduction of Christianity, Wotanism was practiced in what is now the Danubian territory of Germany. List considered Charlemagne the killer of the Saxons in memory of the bloody baptism of the pagans of Northern Germany by him. List considered the entire Christian period as an era of cultural decline, oblivion of the true faith, and unnatural racial mixing, when the "Aryan" ruling caste of priest-kings was forced to hide, secretly saving their sacred knowledge, which now became available to List as a full-fledged aristocratic descendant of this caste.
In Slavic neopaganism, there is the idea of an ancient multi-thousand-year-old and developed civilization of the "Slavs-Aryans", while the entire Christian period seems to be an era of regression and decline, the enslavement of the "Aryans" by foreign missionaries who imposed on them a "slave" (Christian) ideology. Rodnovers often regard these missionaries as Jews, "Judeo-Masons", or their accomplices. At the same time, the Slavic "Aryan" volkhvs or priests had to hide in secret places, preserving the knowledge that was now passed onto their direct descendants, Rodnovers.
The idea of the Jewish-Khazar origin of Prince Vladimir the Great is popular, explaining why he introduced Christianity, an instrument for the enslavement of the "Aryans" by Jews, and staged the genocide of the pagan Slavs. Roman Shizhensky singles out the neopagan myth about Vladimir and characterizes it as one of the most "odious" neopagan historical myths and one of the leading Russian neopagan myths in terms of worldview significance.
The author of this myth is Valery Yemelyanov, one of the founders of Russian neopaganism, who expounded it in his book Dezionization (1970s). Shizhensky notes that the neopagan myth about Vladimir contradicts scientific work on the issue and the totality of historical sources.
Concerning the trend of convergence of neopagan associations from different countries, Andrey Beskov notes that neopagan nationalism is not an obstacle to "neopagan internationalism", and anti-globalism, one of the manifestations of which was the popularity of ethnic religions, itself acquires a global character.
LGBT
The western LGBT community, often marginalized and/or outright rejected by Abrahamic-predominant mainstream religious establishments, has often sought spiritual acceptance and association in neopagan religious/spiritual practice. Pagan-specializing religious scholar Christine Hoff Kraemer wrote, "Pagans tend to be relatively accepting of same-sex relationships, BDSM, polyamory, transgender people, and other expressions of gender and sexuality that are marginalized by mainstream society." Conflict naturally arises, however, as some neopagan belief systems and sect ideologies stem from fundamental beliefs in the male–female gender binary, heterosexual pairing, resulting heterosexual reproduction, and/or gender essentialism.
In response, groups and sects inclusive of or specific to LGBT people have developed. Theologian Jone Salomonsen noted in the 1980s and 1990s that the reclaiming movement of San Francisco featured an unusually high number of LGBT people, particularly bisexuals. Margot Adler noted groups whose practices focused on male homosexuality, such as Eddie Buczynski's Minoan Brotherhood, a Wiccan sect that combines the iconography from ancient Minoan religion with a Wiccan theology and an emphasis on men who love men, and the eclectic pagan group known as the Radical Faeries. When Adler asked one gay male pagan what the pagan community offered members of the LGBT community, he replied, "A place to belong. Community. Acceptance. And a way to connect with all kinds of people – gay, bi, straight, celibate, transgender – in a way that is hard to do in the greater society."
Transgender existence and acceptability is especially controversial in many neopagan sects. One of the most notable of these is Dianic Wicca. This female-only, radical feminist variant of Wicca allows cisgender lesbians but not transgender women. This is due to Dianic belief in gender essentialism; according to founder Zsuzsanna Budapest, "you have to have sometimes [sic] in your life a womb, and ovaries and [menstruate] and not die". This belief and the way it is expressed is often denounced as transphobia and trans-exclusionary radical feminism.
Trans exclusion can also be found in Alexandrian Wicca, whose founder views trans individuals as melancholy people who should seek other beliefs due to the Alexandrian focus on heterosexual reproduction and duality.
Relationship with the New Age movement
Since the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary paganism, or neo-paganism, and the then emergent counterculture, New Age, and hippie movements experienced a degree of cross-pollination. An issue of academic debate has been regarding the connection between these movements. Religious studies scholar Sarah Pike asserted that in the United States, there was a "significant overlap" between modern paganism and New Age, while Aidan A. Kelly stated that paganism "parallels the New Age movement in some ways, differs sharply from it in others, and overlaps it in some minor ways". Ethan Doyle White stated that while the pagan and New Age movements "do share commonalities and overlap", they were nevertheless "largely distinct phenomena."
Hanegraaff suggested that whereas various forms of contemporary paganism were not part of the New Age movement – particularly those who pre-dated the movement – other pagan religions and practices could be identified as New Age. Various differences between the two movements have been highlighted; the New Age movement focuses on an improved future, whereas the focus of Paganism is on the pre-Christian past. Similarly, the New Age movement typically propounds a universalist message which sees all religions as fundamentally the same, whereas paganism stresses the difference between monotheistic religions and those embracing a polytheistic or animistic theology. Further, the New Age movement shows little interest in magic and witchcraft, which are conversely core interests of pagan religions such as Wicca.
Many pagans have sought to distance themselves from the New Age movement, even using "New Age" as an insult within their community, while conversely many involved in the New Age have expressed criticism of paganism for emphasizing the material world over the spiritual.
Many pagans have expressed criticism of the high fees charged by New Age teachers, something not typically present in the pagan movement.
Relationship with Hinduism
Because of their common links to the Proto-Indo-European culture, many adherents of modern paganism have come to regard Hinduism as a spiritual relative. Some modern pagan literature prominently features comparative religion involving European and Indian traditions. The ECER has made efforts to establish mutual support with Hindu groups, as has the Lithuanian Romuva movement.
In India, a prominent figure who made similar efforts was the Hindu revivalist Ram Swarup, who pointed out parallels between Hinduism and European and Arabic paganism. Swarup reached out to modern pagans in the West and also had an influence on Western converts to Hinduism or pro-Hindu activists, notably David Frawley and Koenraad Elst, who both have described Hinduism as a form of paganism. The modern pagan writer Christopher Gérard has drawn much inspiration from Hinduism and visited Swarup in India. Reviewing Gérard's book Parcours païen in 2001, the historian of religion Jean-François Mayer described Gérard's activities as part of the development of a "Western-Hindu 'pagan axis.
Prejudice and opposition
In the Islamic World, pagans are not considered people of the book, so they do not have the same status as Abrahamic religions in Islamic religious law for example, Muslim men cannot marry pagan women while they are allowed to marry among people of the book; and Muslims can eat meat of halal animals that are slaughtered by people of the book, but not that slaughtered by methods of other religions.
Regarding European paganism, In Modern Paganism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives Michael F. Strmiska writes that "in pagan magazines, websites, and Internet discussion venues, Christianity is frequently denounced as an antinatural, antifemale, sexually and culturally repressive, guilt-ridden, and authoritarian religion that has fostered intolerance, hypocrisy, and persecution throughout the world." Further, there is a common belief in the pagan community that Christianity and paganism are opposing belief systems. This animosity is flamed by historical conflicts between Christian and pre-Christian religions, as well as the perceived ongoing Christian disdain from Christians. Some pagans have claimed that Christian authorities have never apologized for the religious displacement of Europe's pre-Christian belief systems, particularly following the Roman Catholic Church's apology for past antisemitism in its A Reflection on the Shoah. They also express disapproval of Christianity's continued missionary efforts around the globe at the expense of indigenous and other polytheistic faiths.
Some Christian authors have published books criticizing modern paganism, while other Christian critics have equated paganism with Satanism, which is often portrayed as such in mainstream entertainment industry.
In areas such as the US Bible Belt, where conservative Christian dominance is strong, pagans have faced continued religious persecution. For instance, Strmiska highlighted instances in both the US and UK in which school teachers were fired when their employers discovered that they were pagan. Thus, many pagans keep their religion private to avoid discrimination and ostracism.
Pagan studies
The earliest academic studies of contemporary paganism were published in the late 1970s and 1980s by scholars like Margot Adler, Marcello Truzzi and Tanya Luhrmann, although it would not be until the 1990s that the actual multidisciplinary academic field of pagan studies properly developed, pioneered by academics such as Graham Harvey and Chas S. Clifton. Increasing academic interest in paganism has been attributed to the new religious movement's increasing public visibility, as it began interacting with the interfaith movement and holding large public celebrations at sites like Stonehenge.
The first international academic conference on the subject of pagan studies was held at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, North-East England in 1993. It was organised by two British religious studies scholars, Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman. In April 1996 a larger conference dealing with contemporary paganism took place at Ambleside in the Lake District. Organised by the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster, North-West England, it was entitled "Nature Religion Today: Western Paganism, Shamanism and Esotericism in the 1990s", and led to the publication of an academic anthology, entitled Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World. In 2004, the first peer-reviewed, academic journal devoted to pagan studies began publication. The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies was edited by Clifton, while the academic publishers AltaMira Press began release of the Pagan Studies Series. From 2008 onward, conferences have been held bringing together scholars specialising in the study of paganism in Central and Eastern Europe.
The relationship between pagan studies scholars and some practising pagans has at times been strained. The Australian academic and practising pagan Caroline Jane Tully argues that many pagans can react negatively to new scholarship regarding historical pre-Christian societies, believing that it is a threat to the structure of their beliefs and to their "sense of identity". She furthermore argues that some of those dissatisfied pagans lashed out against academics as a result, particularly on the Internet.
Criticism
Neopaganism has been criticized on a variety of fronts, ranging from pseudohistory to racial issues to institutional issues. As neopaganism is not a unified religion, it means that the criticisms of certain groups often do not apply to other groups. Criticisms of specific neopagan groups range from criticisms of their belief in gender essentialism to criticisms of their belief in nationalism to criticisms of the worldly focuses of pagan organizations.
See also
Habzism
List of neopagan movements
Mari El
Modern paganism in the United States
Modern paganism in the United Kingdom
Virginia Woolf and the neo-pagans
References
Notes
Citations
Works cited
Web sources
Further reading
External links
The Pagan Federation (paganfed.org) | 0.780867 | 0.998699 | 0.77985 |
Religions by country | This is an overview of religion by country or territory in 2010 according to a 2012
Pew Research Center report. The article Religious information by country gives information from The World Factbook of the CIA and the U.S. Department of State.
World
Africa
Americas
Asia
Europe
Oceania
See also
Religion
Faith
Theocracy
Buddhism by country
Christianity by country (Catholic Church by country, Protestantism by country, Eastern Orthodoxy by country and Oriental Orthodoxy by country)
Hinduism by country
Islam by country
Judaism by country or Jewish population by country
List of religious populations
Importance of religion by country
List of countries by irreligion
Sikhism by country
Religion and geography
Religious information by country
State religion
Notes
References
Adherents.com World Religions Religion Statistics Geography Church Statistics
BBC News's Muslims in Europe: Country guide
CIA FactBook
Religious Intelligence
The University of Virginia
The US State Department's International Religious Freedom Report 2007
The US State Department's Background Notes
Vipassana Foundation's Buddhists around the world
World Statesmen
Catholic Hierarchy's Its Bishops and Dioceses, Current and Past
External links
Geographical Distribution of Major World Religions (showing regional variations inside the same country)
Religion-related lists | 0.782473 | 0.996199 | 0.779499 |
Secularism | Secularism is the principle of seeking to conduct human affairs based on naturalistic considerations, uninvolved with religion. It is most commonly thought of as the separation of religion from civil affairs and the state and may be broadened to a similar position seeking to remove or to minimize the role of religion in any public sphere. Secularism may encapsulate anti-clericalism, atheism, naturalism, non-sectarianism, neutrality on topics of religion, or antireligion. As a philosophy, secularism seeks to interpret life based on principles derived solely from the material world, without recourse to religion. It shifts the focus from religion towards "temporal" and material concerns.
There are distinct traditions of secularism in the West, like the French, Benelux-German, Turkish, and American models, and beyond, as in India, where the emphasis is more on equality before law and state neutrality and equidistance from all religions rather than a complete blanket separation. The latter in the case of India, is termed as interventionist secularism, wherein the state intervenes to abolish practices of religion which it considers against constitutional principles, although this equidistance has been constitutionally understood to not exclude the concept of a God. The purposes and arguments in support of secularism vary widely, ranging from assertions that it is a crucial element of modernization, or that religion and traditional values are backward and divisive, to the claim that it is the only guarantor of free religious exercise.
Variations
Secularism takes different forms with varying stances on where and how religion should be separate from other aspects of society. People of any religious denomination can support a secular society, or adopt the principles of secularism, although secularist identity is often associated with non-religious individuals such as atheists. Political secularism encompasses the schools of thought in secularism that consider the regulation of religion by a secular state. Religious minorities and non-religious citizens in a country tend to support political secularism while members of the majority religion tend to oppose it. Secular nationalists are people that support political secularism within their own state.
Scholars identify several variations of political secularism in society. The strictest form, associated with the French laique model, advocates a state that is both firmly and officially distanced from all religions and non-religious philosophical convictions in all of its manifestations and official dealings, without exception. A more "humanistic" form is indifferent towards religions per se but also advocates for the states to operate on purely a rational basis of evidence-based policy and a focus on human needs and welfare, entailing non-discrimination between peoples of differing religions and non-religious philosophical convictions throughout society. A third "liberal" or "pillarized" form of secularism holds that governments may in some instances express sympathy to, provide funding to, licence state services to, or otherwise allow unique special treatment of religions (common in German-speaking and Benelux secular states), so long as states nevertheless treat these convictions equally, and are neither hostile nor preferential towards any particular set of religious or non-religious philosophical convictions such as humanists. In these countries, secular humanist organizations typically receive state funding according to the same funding formulas used to provide state funding to religious groups. In Indian political discourse, the pejorative term pseudo-secularism is also used to highlight instances where it is believed that while the state purports to be secular, indifferent, or impartial towards religions, its policies in reality favour a particular religion over others.
There are many principles that are associated with all forms of political secularism. It typically promotes legal equality between people of different religions, opposing a legal hierarchy on the basis of religious belief or lack of religious belief. It is also associated with a separation of church and state, considering these to be two distinct entities that should be treated separately. State supremacy is a secular principle that supports obedience to the rule of law over religious diktat or canon law, while internal constraint is a secular principle that opposes governmental control over one's personal life. Under political secularism, the government can enforce how people act but not what they believe. Similarly, freedom of thought is supported by secularism. Order is supported by secularists, specifically in that one's beliefs should not be permitted to disturb the civil peace. Religious tolerance is supported both for people of other religions and for a lack of piety demonstrated by members of one's own religion. Political secularism also supports reason as a virtue. Secularists also support freedom from religion as an extension to freedom of religion.
History
Secularism in practice has existed since ancient times. In societies such as Ancient Greece, a limited secularism was practised in which religion was not involved in governance, though it was still prevalent in public life.
In Europe, secularism emerged in the early modern period. Due to functional differentiation, religion changed from being the predominant lens through which reality was interpreted to providing only an alternative explanatory approach.
In 1636, Roger Williams founded the Providence Plantations as a settlement with total freedom of religion, in present-day Rhode Island. Secular ideas were strongly challenged by religious leaders and the Catholic Church in particular, causing a religious culture war. During the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison incorporated the ideas of John Locke into the government of the United States, including his secularism, though a true secular state was not achieved until the 20th century. French secularism in the Age of Enlightenment was based on Gallicanism, which emphasised state supremacy, as well as anti-clericalism and materialism. Revolutionary France opposed Catholic influence in the country, and it briefly replaced Christianity with the deistic Cult of Reason.
The first to use the already-extant word "secularism" in a modern sense, was the British agnostic writer George Holyoake, in 1851. Finding "atheism" too aggravating, he sought a term that would describe a stance advocating to conduct life based on naturalistic (secular) considerations only, but without necessarily rejecting religion, thus enabling cooperation with believers. Holyoake's definition of secularism differs from its usage by later writers. As the Humanist Heritage website notes, Holyoake provides a definition of secularism "much akin to modern definitions of humanism... broader than just atheism." More modern definitions of secularism are likely to pertain to separation of church and state rather than personal beliefs.
Many Christian countries began to undergo societal secularisation during the 20th century, with levels of belief and practice declining. Sociologists disagree as to whether this represents a periodic fluctuation or a larger trend toward long-term adoption of secularism. The principle of Laïcité, the French notion of strict separation, was enshrined into law in 1905. After the rise to power of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923, Turkish secularism, or laiklik, became a state ideology under Kemalism, aiming to modernise the country. Turkey's secular tradition prior to Atatürk's reforms was limited, and 20th century Turkish secularism was initially modelled after French laïcité. Turkey remains virtually the only Muslim-majority nation with an effective secular government, though secularism remains a controversial ideology in Turkey, and the country's ruling party AKP is more anti-Kemalist than anti-secularist. India became a secular state after it achieved independence in 1947; Mahatma Gandhi supported pluralist secularism as a means to curb tensions in the religiously diverse nation. The Indian model of secularism stressed equality of citizens regardless of faith before the law, along with some separation. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed in 1948, protecting freedom of religion in international law.
State secularism
In political terms, secularism is a movement towards the separation of religion and government, often termed the separation of church and state. This can refer to reducing ties between a government and a state religion, replacing laws based on scripture (such as Halakha, Dharmaśāstra, and Sharia) with civil laws, and eliminating discrimination on the basis of religion. This is said to add to democracy by protecting the rights of religious minorities. Separation of church and state is one possible strategy to be deployed by secular governments. From the democratic to the authoritarian, such governments share a concern to limit the religious side in the relationship. Each state may find its own unique policy prescriptions. These may include separation, careful monitoring and regulation of organized religion such as in France, Turkey, India and others.
In accord with the belief in the separation of church and state, secularists tend to prefer that politicians make decisions for secular rather than religious reasons. In this respect, policy decisions pertaining to topics like abortion, contraception, embryonic stem cell research, same-sex marriage, and sex education are prominently focused upon by American secularist organizations such as the Center for Inquiry. Religious fundamentalists often oppose a secular form of government, arguing that it contradicts the character of historically religious nations, or infringes on their rights to express themselves in the public sphere. In the United States, for example, the word "secularism" became equivalent to "anti-religion" due to such efforts. Religious minorities, however, often support secularism as a means of defending their rights against the majority.
State secularism is most often associated with the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and it plays a major role in Western society. Some of the most well known examples for states considered "constitutionally secular" are the United States, France, Turkey, India, Mexico, and South Korea, though none of these nations have identical forms of governance with respect to religion. For example, in India, secularism does not completely separate state and religion, while in France, secularism precludes such mutual involvement.
Frameworks
Separationist secularism enforces the separation of church and state. Under this system, the state does not support any religious group and does not enforce religious laws. Challenges facing separationist secularism include how the government should regulate secular activities of religious groups and how to govern separately from religion when citizens, including government employees, are religious. The federal judiciary of the United States interpreted the United States Constitution as supporting this system during the 20th century, based on the ideas of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson.
Laïcité is a secularist framework developed and used in France. Under this system, the state has legal supremacy over religion and enforces the restriction of religion in the public sphere. It was established by a 1905 law, and subsequent laws have restricted the use of religious iconography in public or by children. Kemalist secularism, or laiklik, is an adaptation of laïcité that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established in Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s.
Accommodationism is a system of actively supporting religion in general without favouring a specific religious sect. Under this system, the state applies few restrictions to religion and often provides religious organizations with financial support. India uses this system, incorporating Western ideas of secularism in combination with the Indian tradition of religious and ethnic pluralism. One source of disagreement regarding accommodationism in India is the right of Muslims to live under both the civil code and Sharia simultaneously and the complications that result from this. Accommodationism also has a history in the United States, and the U.S. has increasingly moved toward accommodationism in the 21st century.
State atheism is a total ban on religion. Under this system, the state enforces laws that do not allow religious practice or the expression of religious beliefs in society. Unlike other secularist frameworks, state atheism does not permit freedom of thought or the separation of government from personal belief. Because of this distinction, state atheism may or may not be considered a form of secularism. It is typically associated with Marxism and Communist states, in which it is described as "scientific atheism".
Secular society
In studies of religion, modern democracies are generally recognized as secular. This is due to the near-complete freedom of religion (religious beliefs generally are not subject to legal or social sanctions), and the lack of authority of religious leaders over political decisions. Nevertheless, it has been claimed that surveys done by Pew Research Center show Americans as generally being more comfortable with religion playing a major role in public life, while in Europe the impact of the church on public life is declining.
Most societies become increasingly secular as the result of social, economic development and progress, rather than through the actions of a dedicated secular movement. Modern sociology has, since Max Weber, often been preoccupied with the problem of authority in secularised societies and with secularisation as a sociological or historical process. Contemporary ethical debate in the West is often described as "secular", as it is detached from religious considerations. Twentieth-century scholars, whose work has contributed to the understanding of these matters, include Carl L. Becker, Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg, M. H. Abrams, Peter L. Berger, Paul Bénichou and D. L. Munby, among others.
There is not one singular secular culture, as different people identify as secularists for different reasons and under different belief systems. Secularism is typically associated with progressivism and social liberalism. In democratic countries, middle and upper class white urban males with high education are more likely to identify as secularist than any other demographic group. In societies where secularism is more common, such as in Western Europe, demographics of secularists are closer to even. How a society considers what is secular may also change, where nominally spiritual beliefs become part of public or private life without being recognized as religious. As secularists are a minority in most communities, secularism is often stigmatized. Proponents of religious society challenge secular society on the basis of morality, saying that secularism lacks a meaningful way to incentivize moral behaviour among its members.
Secular philosophy
Secularism is considered in political philosophy and philosophy of religion. As a philosophy, secularism is closely associated with naturalism and materialism, rejecting consideration of immaterial or supernatural substances, such as a soul, in favour of a material universe. This secular materialism and rationalism forms the basis of most modern empirical science. During the Age of Enlightenment, liberal European philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all proposed various forms of separation of church and state. The work of well known moral philosophers such as Derek Parfit and Peter Singer, and even the whole field of contemporary bioethics, have been described as explicitly secular or non-religious.
A major issue considered by secular philosophy is the nature of morality in a material universe. Secular ethics and secular morality describe systems of right and wrong that do not depend on religious or supernatural concepts. Much of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is developed in response to this issue. Under secular ethics, good is typically defined as that which contributes to "human flourishing and justice" rather than an abstract or idealized conception of good. Secular ethics are often considered within the frame of humanism.
Secularism in late 20th century political philosophy
It can be seen by many of the organizations (NGOs) for secularism that they prefer to define secularism as the common ground for all life stance groups, religious or atheistic, to thrive in a society that honours freedom of speech and conscience. An example of that is the National Secular Society in the UK. This is a common understanding of what secularism stands for among many of its activists throughout the world. However, many scholars of Christianity and conservative politicians seem to interpret secularism more often than not, as an antithesis of religion and an attempt to push religion out of society and replace it with atheism or a void of values, nihilism. This dual aspect (as noted above in "Secular ethics") has created difficulties in political discourse on the subject. It seems that most political theorists in philosophy following the landmark work of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in 1971 and its following book, Political Liberalism (1993), would rather use the conjoined concept overlapping consensus rather than secularism. In the latter Rawls holds the idea of an overlapping consensus as one of three main ideas of political liberalism. He argues that the term secularism cannot apply; But what is a secular argument? Some think of any argument that is reflective and critical, publicly intelligible and rational, as a secular argument; [...], Nevertheless, a central feature of political liberalism is that it views all such arguments the same way it views religious ones, and therefore these secular philosophical doctrines do not provide public reasons. Secular concepts and reasoning of this kind belong to first philosophy and moral doctrine, and fall outside the domain of the political.Still, Rawl's theory is akin to Holyoake's vision of a tolerant democracy that treats all life stance groups alike. Rawl's idea it that it is in everybody's own interest to endorse "a reasonable constitutional democracy" with "principles of toleration". His work has been highly influential on scholars in political philosophy and his term, overlapping consensus, seems to have for many parts replaced secularism among them. In textbooks on modern political philosophy, like Colin Farrelly's, An Introduction to Contemporary Political Theory, and Will Kymlicka's, Contemporary Political Philosophy, the term secularism is not even indexed and in the former it can be seen only in one footnote. However, there is no shortage of discussion and coverage of the topic it involves. It is just called overlapping consensus, pluralism, multiculturalism or expressed in some other way. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, there is one chapter called "Political secularism", by Rajeev Bhargava. It covers secularism in a global context, and starts with this sentence: "Secularism is a beleaguered doctrine."
See also
Desecularization
Postsecularism
Pseudo-secularism
Secular liberalism
References
Bibliography
Further reading
Cliteur, Paul (2010). The Secular Outlook: In Defense of Moral and Political Secularism.
Jacoby, Susan (2004). Freethinkers: a History of American Secularism. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Asad, Talal (2003). Formations Of The Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford University Press.
Taylor, Charles (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Kosmin, Barry A. and Ariela Keysar (2007). Secularism and Secularity: Contemporary International Perspectives. Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture.
Martin, David (2005). On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Benson, Iain (2004). Considering Secularism in Farrows, Douglas(ed.). Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society McGill-Queens Press.
Berlinerblau, Jacques (2012) "How to be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom"
Cinar, Alev (2006). Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places, and Time. University of Minnesota Press.
Urban, Greg (2008). The circulation of secularism. International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society , Vol. 21, (1–4), December. pp. 17–37.
External links
Iain Benson "Considering Secularism"
Steven Kettell, Secularism and Religion, Oxford Research Encyclopedias.
1851 neologisms
Political philosophy
Religion and politics | 0.779714 | 0.999267 | 0.779143 |
Religious identity | Religious identity is a specific type of identity formation. Particularly, it is the sense of group membership to a religion and the importance of this group membership as it pertains to one's self-concept. Religious identity is not necessarily the same as religiousness or religiosity. Although these three terms share a commonality, religiousness and religiosity refer to both the value of religious group membership as well as participation in religious events (e.g. going to church). Religious identity, on the other hand, refers specifically to religious group membership regardless of religious activity or participation.
Similar to other forms of identity formation, such as ethnic and cultural identity, the religious context can generally provide a perspective from which to view the world, opportunities to socialize with a spectrum of individuals from different generations, and a set of basic principles to live out. These foundations can come to shape an individual's identity.
Despite the implications that religion has on identity development, the identity formation literature has mainly focused on ethnicity and gender and has largely discounted the role of religion. Nevertheless, an increasing number of studies have begun to include religion as a factor of interest. However, many of these studies use religious identity, religiosity, and religiousness interchangeably or solely focus on religious identity and solely religious participation as separate constructs.
Of these types of research studies, researchers have examined the various factors that affect the strength of one's religious identity over time. Factors that have been found to affect levels of religious identity include gender, ethnicity, and generational status.
'Identity' is one of the most used terms in the social sciences and has different senses in different research paradigms. In addition to psychological studies, sociologists and anthropologists also apply the term 'religious identity' and examine its related processes in given social contexts. For example, one important study conducted in the United States after the events of September 11, 2001, explored the meaning-making among American Muslims and how changes in identity ascription (what people think about another group of people) affected how Muslims sought to represent themselves. Other studies have applied concepts appropriated from race and gender identity theory such as disidentification which undermines essentialist accounts of religious identity – that an individual has a 'fixed' religious identity, independent of pre-existing systems of representation and individuals' positioning within them.
Individuals who share the same religious identity are called coreligionists.
History
During the early 1800s in the field of psychology, research on the topic of religion was considered important and ubiquitous. For example, researchers like G. Stanley Hall and William James conducted studies on such topics as religious conversion. In contrast, the public perspective on religion began to shift two decades later. Instead of religion being seen as an integral part of an individual's life and development and thus a necessary topic to research, scientists and scholars alike viewed religion as a hindrance to the progression of science and as a topic no longer applicable to the current times.
Contrary to social scientists' prediction of the general decline of religion over time and increase of secularization leading to a complete abandonment of religious studies, religion did not diminish and was instead acknowledged by researchers as a topic worthwhile to research. Scientists and scholars, like British sociologist John Thompson, realized that despite the neglect of religion in studies, the presence and impact of religion on individuals' lives were undeniable and did not disappear with time. Hence, a body of research on religion began to take root. Particularly, a handful of researchers were interested in examining religious identity during adolescence.
Factors that affect religious identity
Given that religious traditions can be intricately interlaced with various aspects of culture, the religious identity literature has consistently yielded ethnic, gender, and generational differences.
Ethnic differences
According to Social Identity Theory, when individuals of ethnic minority backgrounds feel as if their identity is threatened, they may emphasize their other social identities as a means to maintain a positive self-concept. This idea is supported by the various studies that have shown higher levels of religious identity among ethnic minorities, particularly those from Latino and African American backgrounds, compared to European Americans.
Gender differences
Gender may also impact one's religious identity. Generally, females are more likely than males to attend religious services and express that religion is an important aspect of their lives. Studies have captured this gender difference through observations of females reporting greater religious attitudes. This was also shown in a four-year longitudinal study on religious involvement for adolescents living in rural settings. Females tended to be more involved in church-related activities than males and were more likely to view themselves as religious individuals.
Immigrant generational differences
There are three categories of generational status: First, Second, and Third. An individual who is considered to be first generation is one who was born outside of the country and immigrated. Second generation refers to an individual who was born in the country but whose parent(s) were foreign-born and immigrated. Lastly, third generation refers to an individual and the individual's parents were born in the country.
First and second generation individuals may tend to have particularly higher religious identity levels in comparison to third generation immigrants. In efforts to adjust to the stressful changes associated with the immigration process, finding a community of emotional, social, and financial support, an environment typically provided by a place of worship, may be highly sought after by immigrants. Studies have indeed revealed that adolescents from immigrant families (both first and second generation immigrants) reported higher levels of religious identity compared to adolescents whose parents are not immigrants (third generation).
Institutional factors
Studies suggest that institutional factors impact on religious identity. For example in a study of Christians, Jews and Muslims in English secondary schools adolescents reported negative representations of their religious traditions in the curriculum and common stereotypes held by their peers. These negative ascriptions were perceived by participants to influence their strategies of representing themselves, including hiding their religious affiliations or attempting to pre-empt criticism or bullying by representing the traditions they identified with in an apologetic conciliatory manner.
Religion's status
Research shows that events that undermine the status of a religion decrease religious identification. For example, abuse scandals in the Catholic church have been shown to reduce Catholic identification. This reduction in religious identification was strongest among individuals who identify as Black, are from low-income families, and whose parents have lower levels of education.
Religious identity trajectories
By and large, numerous studies have observed ethnic, gender, and generational differences in religious identity. However, there have not been as many longitudinal studies on the influence of ethnicity, gender, and generational status on individuals' development of religious identity over time. Nevertheless, of the handful of such studies, researchers have focused mainly on adolescence and started to branch out to emerging adulthood.
Adolescence
Researchers have been particularly interested in studying identity during adolescence because it is a developmental period crucial to identity development. During this period, adolescents have opportunities to explore their ethnic, cultural, and religious traditions. However, the freedom and flexibility of their exploration is typically within the constraints of their parents or caregiver.
It was believed that religious identity and participation would both follow the same trajectory and decrease across time; hence, the studies that examined religiousness, which combines the two constructs. Although religious affiliation, identity, and participation are closely related, longitudinal research on adolescents suggests that these constructs have different trajectories from one another. For example, researchers have found that religious affiliation and identity for adolescents remained fairly stable across the high school years, which contradicts the expected change in religious affiliation from affiliated to unaffiliated and decrease in religious identity.
However, the stability of adolescent religious identity parallels that of other social identities such as ethnic identity. Researchers have reasoned that due to adolescents' relatively stable social environment, there is not a strong need to further explore and renegotiate their religious identity. Moreover, religious identity is mainly driven by parents during adolescence. Given that adolescents tend to still live with their parents during high school, there may not be a need to engage in deeper exploration of their religion, which may help explain the observed stable religious identity.
Whereas religious affiliation and identity remain stable, religious participation tends to decrease. Adolescents may exercise their increased autonomy and choose not to attend religious events. Particularly, adolescents may find other activities (e.g. studying, clubs, and sports) vying for their time and resources and choose to prioritize those activities over religious events. The significant decline in religious participation at the end of high school may be a precursor to further decline during emerging adulthood.
Emerging adulthood
Adolescence has been traditionally associated with a time of identity exploration. However, that exploration process is not complete by the end of adolescence. Rather, emerging adulthood, the years between late teens and late twenties, extends the identity formation process from adolescence.
This transitional period is marked by constant changes in romantic love, work, and worldviews and is generally a time of "semiautonomy." With this increased sense of autonomy, emerging adults may choose to further exert their independence by moving away from home and/or by attending college. Through whichever ways that emerging adults choose to exercise their autonomy, they are likely to find themselves in new, diverse environments teeming with a spectrum of vast worldviews.
Despite the necessity for studies on religious identity, there has been limited work on the role of religion in identity formation in emerging adults. Compared to the research in adolescence, there is much less work on the development of religious identity and religious participation across the emerging adulthood years. The combination of immense and frequent changes, increased autonomy, and diverse environments during this period has major ramifications for the development of emerging adults' religious affiliation, religious identity, and religious participation. In the period of emerging adulthood individuals gain a more complex understanding of religious ideas which can lead to periods of questioning, doubt, and conversion. These periods of change in emerging adulthood can lead to longer-term religious ideologies
Religion was believed to have little impact on emerging adults' identity, particularly for those who attend college However, recent research suggests otherwise. According to a study, while 14 percent of college students reported a decrease in religious beliefs throughout college, 48 percent reported stable religious beliefs, and 38 percent reported an increase.
Moreover, another study found that contrary to the expectations of decreased religious identity and religious participation during emerging adulthood, religious identity did not decrease, but religious participation did decline as predicted. Researchers explained that emerging adults are more likely to decrease their involvement in religious activities than they are to completely disaffiliate from their religion or express less importance of religion in their lives.
Additionally, in a study that examined the ways in which religion influenced emerging adults, researchers found that emerging adults' standards of adulthood were dependent upon the religious affiliation of the institution they attended. For example, compared to emerging adults who attended Catholic or public universities, emerging adults who attended Mormon universities rated interdependence, norm compliance, biological transitions, and family capacities as extremely important criteria for adulthood.
In summary, although not all studies on this topic are in agreement, religious identity generally tends to remain stable during emerging adulthood whereas religious participation decreases over time.
See also
Group cohesiveness, the strength of bonds linking members of a social group to one another and to the group as a whole
Ethnic religion
Koinonia, group cohesiveness among Christians
Religion and geography
References
Religion and society | 0.795334 | 0.979521 | 0.779046 |
Qualitative research | Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This type of research typically involves in-depth interviews, focus groups, or field observations in order to collect data that is rich in detail and context. Qualitative research is often used to explore complex phenomena or to gain insight into people's experiences and perspectives on a particular topic. It is particularly useful when researchers want to understand the meaning that people attach to their experiences or when they want to uncover the underlying reasons for people's behavior. Qualitative methods include ethnography, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, communication studies, social work, folklore, educational research, information science and software engineering research.
Background
Qualitative research has been informed by several strands of philosophical thought and examines aspects of human life, including culture, expression, beliefs, morality, life stress, and imagination. Contemporary qualitative research has been influenced by a number of branches of philosophy, for example, positivism, postpositivism, critical theory, and constructivism.
The historical transitions or 'moments' in qualitative research, together with the notion of 'paradigms' (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005), have received widespread popularity over the past decades. However, some scholars have argued that the adoptions of paradigms may be counterproductive and lead to less philosophically engaged communities.
Approaches to inquiry
The use of nonquantitative material as empirical data has been growing in many areas of the social sciences, including learning sciences, development psychology and cultural psychology. Several philosophical and psychological traditions have influenced investigators' approaches to qualitative research, including phenomenology, social constructionism, symbolic interactionism, and positivism.
Philosophical traditions
Phenomenology refers to the philosophical study of the structure of an individual's consciousness and general subjective experience. Approaches to qualitative research based on constructionism, such as grounded theory, pay attention to how the subjectivity of both the researcher and the study participants can affect the theory that develops out of the research. The symbolic interactionist approach to qualitative research examines how individuals and groups develop an understanding of the world. Traditional positivist approaches to qualitative research seek a more objective understanding of the social world. Qualitative researchers have also been influenced by the sociology of knowledge and the work of Alfred Schütz, Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, and Harold Garfinkel.
Sources of data
Qualitative researchers use different sources of data to understand the topic they are studying. These data sources include interview transcripts, videos of social interactions, notes, verbal reports and artifacts such as books or works of art. The case study method exemplifies qualitative researchers' preference for depth, detail, and context. Data triangulation is also a strategy used in qualitative research. Autoethnography, the study of self, is a qualitative research method in which the researcher uses his or her personal experience to understand an issue.
Grounded theory is an inductive type of research, based on ("grounded" in) a very close look at the empirical observations a study yields. Thematic analysis involves analyzing patterns of meaning. Conversation analysis is primarily used to analyze spoken conversations. Biographical research is concerned with the reconstruction of life histories, based on biographical narratives and documents. Narrative inquiry studies the narratives that people use to describe their experience.
Data collection
Qualitative researchers may gather information through observations, note-taking, interviews, focus groups (group interviews), documents, images and artifacts.
Interviews
Research interviews are an important method of data collection in qualitative research. An interviewer is usually a professional or paid researcher, sometimes trained, who poses questions to the interviewee, in an alternating series of usually brief questions and answers, to elicit information. Compared to something like a written survey, qualitative interviews allow for a significantly higher degree of intimacy, with participants often revealing personal information to their interviewers in a real-time, face-to-face setting. As such, this technique can evoke an array of significant feelings and experiences within those being interviewed. Sociologists Bredal, Stefansen and Bjørnholt identified three "participant orientations", that they described as "telling for oneself", "telling for others" and "telling for the researcher". They also proposed that these orientations implied "different ethical contracts between the participant and researcher".
Participant observation
In participant observation ethnographers get to understand a culture by directly participating in the activities of the culture they study. Participant observation extends further than ethnography and into other fields, including psychology. For example, by training to be an EMT and becoming a participant observer in the lives of EMTs, Palmer studied how EMTs cope with the stress associated with some of the gruesome emergencies they deal with.
Recursivity
In qualitative research, the idea of recursivity refers to the emergent nature of research design. In contrast to standardized research methods, recursivity embodies the idea that the qualitative researcher can change a study's design during the data collection phase.
Recursivity in qualitative research procedures contrasts to the methods used by scientists who conduct experiments. From the perspective of the scientist, data collection, data analysis, discussion of the data in the context of the research literature, and drawing conclusions should be each undertaken once (or at most a small number of times). In qualitative research however, data are collected repeatedly until one or more specific stopping conditions are met, reflecting a nonstatic attitude to the planning and design of research activities. An example of this dynamism might be when the qualitative researcher unexpectedly changes their research focus or design midway through a study, based on their first interim data analysis. The researcher can even make further unplanned changes based on another interim data analysis. Such an approach would not be permitted in an experiment. Qualitative researchers would argue that recursivity in developing the relevant evidence enables the researcher to be more open to unexpected results and emerging new constructs.
Data analysis
Qualitative researchers have a number of analytic strategies available to them.
Coding
In general, coding refers to the act of associating meaningful ideas with the data of interest. In the context of qualitative research, interpretative aspects of the coding process are often explicitly recognized and articulated; coding helps to produce specific words or short phrases believed to be useful abstractions from the data.
Pattern thematic analysis
Data may be sorted into patterns for thematic analyses as the primary basis for organizing and reporting the study findings.
Content analysis
According to Krippendorf, "Content analysis is a research technique for making replicable and valid inference from data to their context" (p. 21). It is applied to documents and written and oral communication. Content analysis is an important building block in the conceptual analysis of qualitative data. It is frequently used in sociology. For example, content analysis has been applied to research on such diverse aspects of human life as changes in perceptions of race over time, the lifestyles of contractors, and even reviews of automobiles.
Issues
Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS)
Contemporary qualitative data analyses can be supported by computer programs (termed computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software). These programs have been employed with or without detailed hand coding or labeling. Such programs do not supplant the interpretive nature of coding. The programs are aimed at enhancing analysts' efficiency at applying, retrieving, and storing the codes generated from reading the data. Many programs enhance efficiency in editing and revising codes, which allow for more effective work sharing, peer review, data examination, and analysis of large datasets.
Common qualitative data analysis software includes:
ATLAS.ti
Dedoose (mixed methods)
MAXQDA (mixed methods)
NVivo
QDA MINER
A criticism of quantitative coding approaches is that such coding sorts qualitative data into predefined (nomothetic) categories that are reflective of the categories found in objective science. The variety, richness, and individual characteristics of the qualitative data are reduced or, even, lost.
To defend against the criticism that qualitative approaches to data are too subjective, qualitative researchers assert that by clearly articulating their definitions of the codes they use and linking those codes to the underlying data, they preserve some of the richness that might be lost if the results of their research boiled down to a list of predefined categories. Qualitative researchers also assert that their procedures are repeatable, which is an idea that is valued by quantitatively oriented researchers.
Sometimes researchers rely on computers and their software to scan and reduce large amounts of qualitative data. At their most basic level, numerical coding schemes rely on counting words and phrases within a dataset; other techniques involve the analysis of phrases and exchanges in analyses of conversations. A computerized approach to data analysis can be used to aid content analysis, especially when there is a large corpus to unpack.
Trustworthiness
A central issue in qualitative research is trustworthiness (also known as credibility or, in quantitative studies, validity). There are many ways of establishing trustworthiness, including member check, interviewer corroboration, peer debriefing, prolonged engagement, negative case analysis, auditability, confirmability, bracketing, and balance. Data triangulation and eliciting examples of interviewee accounts are two of the most commonly used methods of establishing the trustworthiness of qualitative studies.
Transferability of results has also been considered as an indicator of validity.
Limitations of qualitative research
Qualitative research is not without limitations. These limitations include participant reactivity, the potential for a qualitative investigator to over-identify with one or more study participants, "the impracticality of the Glaser-Strauss idea that hypotheses arise from data unsullied by prior expectations," the inadequacy of qualitative research for testing cause-effect hypotheses, and the Baconian character of qualitative research. Participant reactivity refers to the fact that people often behave differently when they know they are being observed. Over-identifying with participants refers to a sympathetic investigator studying a group of people and ascribing, more than is warranted, a virtue or some other characteristic to one or more participants. Compared to qualitative research, experimental research and certain types of nonexperimental research (e.g., prospective studies), although not perfect, are better means for drawing cause-effect conclusions.
Glaser and Strauss, influential members of the qualitative research community, pioneered the idea that theoretically important categories and hypotheses can emerge "naturally" from the observations a qualitative researcher collects, provided that the researcher is not guided by preconceptions. The ethologist David Katz wrote "a hungry animal divides the environment into edible and inedible things....Generally speaking, objects change...according to the needs of the animal." Karl Popper carrying forward Katz's point wrote that "objects can be classified and can become similar or dissimilar, only in this way--by being related to needs and interests. This rule applied not only to animals but also to scientists." Popper made clear that observation is always selective, based on past research and the investigators' goals and motives and that preconceptionless research is impossible.
The Baconian character of qualitative research refers to the idea that a qualitative researcher can collect enough observations such that categories and hypotheses will emerge from the data. Glaser and Strauss developed the idea of theoretical sampling by way of collecting observations until theoretical saturation is obtained and no additional observations are required to understand the character of the individuals under study. Bertrand Russell suggested that there can be no orderly arrangement of observations such that a hypothesis will jump out of those ordered observations; some provisional hypothesis usually guides the collection of observations.
In psychology
Community psychology
Autobiographical narrative research has been conducted in the field of community psychology. A selection of autobiographical narratives of community psychologists can be found in the book Six Community Psychologists Tell Their Stories: History, Contexts, and Narrative.
Educational psychology
Edwin Farrell used qualitative methods to understand the social reality of at-risk high school students. Later he used similar methods to understand the reality of successful high school students who came from the same neighborhoods as the at-risk students he wrote about in his previously mentioned book.
Health psychology
In the field of health psychology, qualitative methods have become increasingly employed in research on understanding health and illness and how health and illness are socially constructed in everyday life. Since then, a broad range of qualitative methods have been adopted by health psychologists, including discourse analysis, thematic analysis, narrative analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. In 2015, the journal Health Psychology published a special issue on qualitative research.<ref>Gough, B., & Deatrick, J.A. (eds.)(2015). Qualitative research in health psychology [special issue]. Health Psychology, 34 (4).</ref>
Industrial and organizational psychology
According to Doldor and colleagues organizational psychologists extensively use qualitative research "during the design and implementation of activities like organizational change, training needs analyses, strategic reviews, and employee development plans."
Occupational health psychology
Although research in the field of occupational health psychology (OHP) has predominantly been quantitatively oriented, some OHP researchers have employed qualitative methods. Qualitative research efforts, if directed properly, can provide advantages for quantitatively oriented OHP researchers. These advantages include help with (1) theory and hypothesis development, (2) item creation for surveys and interviews, (3) the discovery of stressors and coping strategies not previously identified, (4) interpreting difficult-to-interpret quantitative findings, (5) understanding why some stress-reduction interventions fail and others succeed, and (6) providing rich descriptions of the lived lives of people at work.Schonfeld, I. S., & Farrell, E. (2010). Qualitative methods can enrich quantitative research on occupational stress: An example from one occupational group. In D. C. Ganster & P. L. Perrewé (Eds.), Research in occupational stress and wellbeing series. Vol. 8. New developments in theoretical and conceptual approaches to job stress (pp. 137-197). Bingley, UK: Emerald. Some OHP investigators have united qualitative and quantitative methods within a single study (e.g., Elfering et al., [2005]); these investigators have used qualitative methods to assess job stressors that are difficult to ascertain using standard measures and well validated standardized instruments to assess coping behaviors and dependent variables such as mood.
Social media psychology
Since the advent of social media in the early 2000s, formerly private accounts of personal experiences have become widely shared with the public by millions of people around the world. Disclosures are often made openly, which has contributed to social media's key role in movements like the #metoo movement.
The abundance of self-disclosure on social media has presented an unprecedented opportunity for qualitative and mixed methods researchers; mental health problems can now be investigated qualitatively more widely, at a lower cost, and with no intervention by the researchers. To take advantage of these data, researchers need to have mastered the tools for conducting qualitative research.
Academic journals
Consumption Markets & Culture
Journal of Consumer Research
Qualitative Inquiry Qualitative Market Research Qualitative Research The Qualitative ReportSee also
Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS)
References
Further reading
Adler, P. A. & Adler, P. (1987). : context and meaning in social inquiry / edited by Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, and Richard A. Shweder
Baškarada, S. (2014) "Qualitative Case Study Guidelines", in The Qualitative Report, 19(40): 1-25. Available from
Creswell, J. W. (2003). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2000). Handbook of qualitative research ( 2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2011). The SAGE Handbook of qualitative research ( 4th ed.). Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
DeWalt, K. M. & DeWalt, B. R. (2002). Participant observation. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Fischer, C.T. (Ed.) (2005). Qualitative research methods for psychologists: Introduction through empirical studies. Academic Press. .
Franklin, M. I. (2012), "Understanding Research: Coping with the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide". London/New York. Routledge
Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gubrium, J. F. and J. A. Holstein. (2000). "The New Language of Qualitative Method." New York: Oxford University Press.
Gubrium, J. F. and J. A. Holstein (2009). "Analyzing Narrative Reality." Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Gubrium, J. F. and J. A. Holstein, eds. (2000). "Institutional Selves: Troubled Identities in a Postmodern World." New York: Oxford University Press.
Hammersley, M. (2008) Questioning Qualitative Inquiry, London, Sage.
Hammersley, M. (2013) What is qualitative research?, London, Bloomsbury.
Holliday, A. R. (2007). Doing and Writing Qualitative Research, 2nd Edition. London: Sage Publications
Holstein, J. A. and J. F. Gubrium, eds. (2012). "Varieties of Narrative Analysis." Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kaminski, Marek M. (2004). Games Prisoners Play. Princeton University Press. .
Malinowski, B. (1922/1961). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Miles, M. B. & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative Data Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Pamela Maykut, Richard Morehouse. 1994 Beginning Qualitative Research. Falmer Press.
Pernecky, T. (2016). Epistemology and Metaphysics for Qualitative Research. London, UK: Sage Publications.
Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research & evaluation methods ( 3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Pawluch D. & Shaffir W. & Miall C. (2005). Doing Ethnography: Studying Everyday Life. Toronto, ON Canada: Canadian Scholars' Press.
Racino, J. (1999). Policy, Program Evaluation and Research in Disability: Community Support for All." New York, NY: Haworth Press (now Routledge imprint, Francis and Taylor, 2015).
Ragin, C. C. (1994). Constructing Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of Method, Pine Forge Press,
Riessman, Catherine K. (1993). "Narrative Analysis." Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Rosenthal, Gabriele (2018). Interpretive Social Research. An Introduction. Göttingen, Germany: Universitätsverlag Göttingen.
Savin-Baden, M. and Major, C. (2013). "Qualitative research: The essential guide to theory and practice." London, Rutledge.
Silverman, David, (ed), (2011), "Qualitative Research: Issues of Theory, Method and Practice". Third Edition. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Sage Publications
Stebbins, Robert A. (2001) Exploratory Research in the Social Sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Taylor, Steven J., Bogdan, Robert, Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods, Wiley, 1998,
Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the field: on writing ethnography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wolcott, H. F. (1995). The art of fieldwork. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Wolcott, H. F. (1999). Ethnography: A way of seeing. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Ziman, John (2000). Real Science: what it is, and what it means''. Cambridge, Uk: Cambridge University Press.
External links
Qualitative Philosophy
C.Wright Mills, On intellectual Craftsmanship, The Sociological Imagination,1959
Participant Observation, Qualitative research methods: a Data collector's field guide
Analyzing and Reporting Qualitative Market Research
Overview of available QDA Software
Videos
Research methods
Psychological methodology | 0.780908 | 0.997602 | 0.779035 |
Religious pluralism | Religious pluralism is an attitude or policy regarding the diversity of religious belief systems co-existing in society. It can indicate one or more of the following:
Recognizing and tolerating the religious diversity of a society or country, promoting freedom of religion, and defining secularism as neutrality (of the state or non-sectarian institution) on issues of religion as opposed to opposition of religion in the public forum or public square that is open to public expression, and promoting friendly separation of religion and state as opposed to hostile separation or antitheism espoused by other forms of secularism.
Any of several forms of religious inclusivism. One such worldview holds that one's own religion is not the sole and exclusive source of truth, and thus acknowledges that at least some truths and true values exist in other religions. Another concept is that two or more religions with mutually exclusive truth claims are equally valid; this may be considered a form of either toleration (a concept that arose as a result of the European wars of religion) or moral relativism.
Perennialism (based on the concept of philosophia perennis) is the understanding that the exclusive claims of different religions turn out, upon closer examination, to be variations of universal truths that have been taught since time immemorial. While some perennialists are universalists who accept religious syncretism, those of the Traditionalist School reject it, and uphold the importance of the historical, "orthodox" faiths.
Sometimes as a synonym for ecumenism, i.e., the promotion of some level of unity, co-operation, and improved understanding between different religions or different denominations within a single religion.
As a term for the condition of harmonious co-existence between adherents of different religions or religious denominations.
Definition and scopes
Religious pluralism, to paraphrase the title of a recent academic work, goes beyond mere toleration. Chris Beneke, in Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism, explains the difference between religious tolerance and religious pluralism by pointing to the situation in the late 18th century United States. By the 1730s, in most colonies religious minorities had obtained what contemporaries called religious toleration: "The policy of toleration relieved religious minorities of some physical punishments and some financial burdens, but it did not make them free from the indignities of prejudice and exclusion. Nor did it make them equal. Those 'tolerated' could still be barred from civil offices, military positions, and university posts." In short, religious toleration is only the absence of religious persecution, and does not necessarily preclude religious discrimination. However, in the following decades something extraordinary happened in the Thirteen Colonies, at least if one views the events from "a late eighteenth-century perspective". Gradually the colonial governments expanded the policy of religious toleration, but then, between the 1760s and the 1780s, they replaced it with "something that is usually called religious liberty". Mark Silka, in "Defining Religious Pluralism in America: A Regional Analysis", states that religious pluralism "enables a country made up of people of different faiths to exist without sectarian warfare or the persecution of religious minorities. Understood differently in different times and places, it is a cultural construct that embodies some shared conception of how a country's various religious communities relate to each other and to the larger nation whole."
Religious pluralism can be defined as "respecting the otherness of others". Freedom of religion encompasses all religions acting within the law in a particular region. Exclusivist religions teach that theirs is the only way to salvation and to religious truth, and some of them would even argue that it is necessary to suppress the falsehoods taught by other religions. Some Protestant sects argue fiercely against Roman Catholicism, and fundamentalist Christians of all kinds teach that religious practices like those of Paganism and witchcraft are pernicious. This was a common historical attitude prior to the Enlightenment, and has appeared as governmental policy into the present day under systems like Afghanistan's Taliban regime, which destroyed the ancient Buddhas of Bamyan. Of course, many religious communities have long been engaged in building peace, justice, and development themselves, and the emergence of the secular peacemaking field has led religious communities to systematize and institutionalize their own peacebuilding and interfaith work. The Catholic Church has worked in development and poverty reduction, human rights, solidarity, and peace, and after World War II, it began to develop specific tools and apply conflict transformation practices.
Giving one religion or denomination special rights that are denied to others can weaken religious pluralism. This situation was observed in Europe through the Lateran Treaty and Church of England. In the modern era, many Islamic countries have laws that criminalize the act of leaving Islam for someone born into a Muslim family, forbid entry to non-Muslims into mosques, and forbid construction of churches, synagogues or temples in their countries.
Relativism, the belief that all religions are equal in their value and that none of the religions give access to absolute truth, is an extreme form of inclusivism. Likewise, syncretism, the attempt to take over creeds of practices from other religions or even to blend practices or creeds from different religions into one new faith is an extreme form of inter-religious dialogue. Syncretism must not be confused with ecumenism, the attempt to bring closer and eventually reunite different denominations of one religion that have a common origin but were separated by a schism.
History
Cultural and religious pluralism has a long history and development that reaches from antiquity to contemporary trends in post-modernity.
German philosophers of religion Ludwig Feuerbach and Ernst Troeltsch concluded that Asian religious traditions, in particular Hinduism and Buddhism, were the earliest proponents of religious pluralism and granting of freedom to the individuals to choose their own faith and develop a personal religious construct within it (see also Relationship between Buddhism and Hinduism); Jainism, another ancient Indian religion, as well as Daoism have also always been inclusively flexible and have long favored religious pluralism for those who disagree with their religious viewpoints. The Age of Enlightenment in Europe triggered a sweeping transformation about religion after the French Revolution (liberalism, democracy, civil and political rights, freedom of thought, separation of Church and State, secularization), with rising acceptance of religious pluralism and decline of Christianity. According to Chad Meister, these pluralist trends in the Western thought, particularly since the 18th century, brought mainstream Christianity and Judaism closer to the Asian traditions of philosophical pluralism and religious tolerance.
Baháʼí Faith
Bahá'u'lláh, founder of Baháʼí Faith, a religion that developed in Persia, having roots in Islam, urged the elimination of religious intolerance. He taught that God is one, and religion has been progressively revealed over time through Manifestations of God, the founders of religion. Bahá'u'lláh taught that Baháʼís must associate with peoples of all religions, whether this is reciprocated or not.
Baháʼís refer to this concept as Progressive revelation, meaning that each religion brings a more advanced understanding of divinity and updated social laws as mankind matures. In this view, God's word is revealed through a series of messengers: Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Báb and Bahá'u'lláh (the founder of the Baháʼí Faith) among them. According to Baháʼí writings, there will not be another messenger for many hundreds of years.
There is also a respect for the religious traditions of the native peoples of the planet who may have little other than oral traditions as a record of their religious figures.
Buddhism
Buddhist doctrine, fundamentally based upon minimizing or negating the suffering which arises from attachment, like its sister Indic religions, opposes exclusivism and emphasizes pluralism. This is not only encapsulated in the life story of the Buddha, who sought many gurus himself before resolving to seek Enlightenment on his own, but also in Buddhist scripture.
The Buddha also himself stated that truth is compromised when an individual is not open to entertaining a wide array of teachings. Moreover, without a pluralist understanding, the Buddha stated that truth cannot be discovered or ascertained such that it is truly known:
In the Lankavatara Sutra, the Buddha gave a long treatise on the idea that various expressions of Truth may seem contradictory or boundless, yet they all speak of Truth itself – emphasizing that an Enlightened One both accepts pluralism in that there are many ways to referring to Truth, but rises above it through the understanding that Truth transcends all labels.
When asked, "Don't all religions teach the same thing? Is it possible to unify them?" the Dalai Lama said:
Classical civilization: Greek and Roman religions
For the Romans, religion was part of the daily life. Each home had a household shrine at which prayers and libations to the family's domestic deities were offered. Neighborhood shrines and sacred places such as springs and groves dotted the city. The Roman calendar was structured around religious observances; in the Imperial Era, as many as 135 days of the year were devoted to religious festivals and games (ludi). Women, slaves and children all participated in a range of religious activities. Some public rituals could be conducted only by women, and women formed what is perhaps Rome's most famous priesthood, the state-supported Vestal Virgins, who tended Rome's sacred hearth for centuries, until disbanded under Christian persecution and domination.
The Romans are known for the great number of deities they honored. The presence of Greeks on the Italian peninsula from the beginning of the historical period influenced Roman culture, introducing some religious practices that became as fundamental as the cult of Apollo. The Romans looked for common ground between their major gods and those of the Greeks, adapting Greek myths and iconography for Latin literature and Roman art. Etruscan religion was also a major influence, particularly on the practice of augury, since Rome had once been ruled by Etruscan kings.
Mystery religions imported from the Near East (Ptolemaic Egypt, Persia and Mesopotamia), which offered initiates salvation through a personal God and eternal life after the death, were a matter of personal choice for an individual, practiced in addition to carrying on one's family rites and participating in public religion. The mysteries, however, involved exclusive oaths and secrecy, conditions that conservative Romans viewed with suspicion as characteristic of "magic", conspiracy, and subversive activity. Sporadic and sometimes brutal attempts were made to suppress religionists who seemed to threaten traditional Roman morality and unity, as with the Senate's efforts to restrict the Bacchanals in 186 BC.
As the Romans extended their dominance throughout the Mediterranean world, their policy in general was to absorb the deities and cults of other peoples rather than try to eradicate them, since they believed that preserving tradition promoted social stability.
One way that Rome incorporated diverse peoples was by supporting their religious heritage, building temples to local deities that framed their theology within the hierarchy of Roman religion. Inscriptions throughout the Empire record the side-by-side worship of local and Roman deities, including dedications made by Romans to local Gods. By the height of the Empire, numerous international deities were cultivated at Rome and had been carried to even the most remote provinces (among them Cybele, Isis, Osiris, Serapis, Epona), and Gods of solar monism such as Mithras and Sol Invictus, found as far north as Roman Britain. Because Romans had never been obligated to cultivate one deity or one cult only, religious tolerance was not an issue in the sense that it is for competing monotheistic religions. The monotheistic rigor of Judaism posed difficulties for Roman policy that led at times to compromise and the granting of special exemptions, but sometimes to intractable conflict.
Christianity
Some Christians have argued that religious pluralism is an invalid or self-contradictory concept.
Maximal forms of religious pluralism claim that all religions are equally true, or that one religion can be true for some and another for others. Most Christians hold this idea to be logically impossible from the principle of contradiction. The two largest Christian branches, the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, both claim to be the "one true church" and that "outside the true Church there is no salvation"; Protestantism however, which has many different denominations, has no consistent doctrine in this regard, and has a variety of different positions regarding religious pluralism.
Other Christians have held that there can be truth value and salvific value in other faith traditions. John Macquarrie, described in the Handbook of Anglican Theologians (1998) as "unquestionably Anglicanism's most distinguished systematic theologian in the second half of the twentieth century", wrote that "there should be an end to proselytizing but that equally there should be no syncretism of the kind typified by the Baháʼí movement" (p. 2). In discussing nine founders of major faith traditions (Moses, Zoroaster, Lao-zu, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Krishna, Jesus, and Muhammad), which he called "mediators between the human and the divine", Macquarrie wrote that:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also teaches a form of religious pluralism, that there is at least some truth in almost all religions and philosophies.
Classical Christian views
Before the Great Schism, mainstream Christianity confessed "one holy catholic and apostolic church", in the words of the Nicene Creed. Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Episcopalians and most Protestant Christian denominations still maintain this belief. Furthermore, the Catholic Church makes the claim that it alone is the one and only true Church founded by Jesus Christ, but the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches also make this claim in respect to themselves.
Church unity for these groups, as in the past, is something very visible and tangible, and schism was just as serious an offense as heresy. Following the Great Schism, Roman Catholicism sees and recognizes the Orthodox Sacraments as valid but illicit and without canonical jurisdiction. Eastern Orthodoxy does not have the concept of "validity" when applied to Sacraments, but it considers the form of Roman Catholic Sacraments to be acceptable, and there is some recognition of Catholic sacraments among some, but not all, Orthodox. Both generally mutually regard each other as "heterodox" and "schismatic", while continuing to recognize each other as Christian, at least secundum quid (see ecumenicism).
Modern Christian views
Some other Protestants hold that only believers who believe in certain fundamental doctrines know the true pathway to salvation. The core of this doctrine is that Jesus Christ was a perfect man, is the Son of God and that he died and rose again for the wrongdoing of those who will accept the gift of salvation. They continue to believe in "one" church, an "invisible church" which encompasses different types of Christians in different sects and denominations, believing in certain issues they deem fundamental, while disunited on a variety of doctrines they deem non-fundamental. Some evangelical Protestants are doubtful if Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox can possibly be members of this "invisible church", and usually they reject religious (typically restorationist) movements rooted in 19th-century American Christianity, such as Mormonism, Christian Science, or Jehovah's Witnesses as not distinctly Christian.
The Catholic Church, unlike some Protestant denominations, affirms "developmental theology", understood to mean that the "Holy Spirit, in and through the evolving and often confused circumstances of concrete history, is gradually bringing the Church to an ever more mature understanding of the deposit of faith (the saving truths entrusted by Jesus Christ to the Apostles—these as such cannot be changed or added to). The Church comes to recognize baptism of desire quite early in its history. Later, the Church realizes that Romans 2:14–16, for example, allows for the salvation of non-Christians who do not have unobstructed exposure to Christian teachings: "When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires.... They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts.... Various forms of "implicit faith" come to hold standing, until at Vatican Council II, the Church declares: "Nor shall divine providence deny the assistance necessary for salvation to those who, without any fault of theirs, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God, and who, not without grace, strive to lead a good life" (#16). Vatican Council II in its Declaration Nostra aetate addresses the non-Christian religions with respect and appreciation, affirming the goodness found in them. Since Vatican Council II, Catholic dialogists in particular are working out the implications of John Paul II's statement, in Redemptor hominis #6 that Christians should recognize "the Holy Spirit operating outside the visible confines of the Mystical Body of Christ." Among these dialogists, Robert Magliola, an affiliate of the Italian community Vangelo e Zen ("The Gospel and Zen"), Desio and Milano, Italy, who taught in predominantly Buddhist cultures for years, and practiced Buddhist-Catholic dialogue there and in the West, and who is widely published in this dialogue, argues the following:
Hinduism
Hinduism is naturally pluralistic as it "acknowledges different forms and representations of the divine, all understood in their relation to the supreme being, Brahman." Historians argue that the differentiations between the various Indic religions of the subcontinent were blurred before their specific codification and separation during British efforts to catalog different Indic philosophies. . Moreover, Hinduism itself is the oldest major religion, explaining a relative lack of antipathy towards specifiable religious traditions – and so the Hindu religion has no theological difficulties in accepting degrees of truth in other religions. From a Vedantic perspective, Swami Bhaskarananda argues that Hinduism emphasizes that everyone actually worships the same God, whether one knows it or not. In the 8th sutra of the Pratyabhijñahrdyam, the Indian philosopher Ksemaraja says that all the siddhantas or theses of all the darsanas (schools of thought) are just the different aspects of the one Atman. It being all-pervading and all-inclusive, from matter to consciousness to nothingness, all are its aspects or its different roles. The Advaita Vedanta philosophy, a widely held view of many Hindus who follow Sanatana Dharma, encompasses pluralism.. Other, lesser-known philosophers have strived to encompass Indic philosophies under traditions other than Advaita, including the Indian philosopher Vijñabhikshu. Thus, the culture of open boundaries and continuous interaction and synthesis between all schools of thought is a very important aspect in understanding Hinduism and its fundamental nature of plurality.
In several mantras, sutras, smriti, and shruti, the idea that there are many ways to approach Truth or an underlying Reality is emphasized.
For example, the Rig Veda states that the Truth can be known in different ways:
The Rig Veda also envisions an ideal world where a diverse collective speaks together to focus upon an idea that pervades all:
The Uddhava Gita is explicit that those interested in spirituality should learn the perspectives of a diverse group of proficient practitioners rather than a singular one who espouses a specific doctrine:
Conversely, the Bhagavad Gita warns against exclusivism:
It also affirms Truth in a variety of spiritual practices:
Islam
Following a period of fighting lasting around a hundred years before 620 AD which mainly involved Arab and Jewish inhabitants of Medina (then known as Yathrib), religious freedom for Muslims, Jews and pagans was declared by Muhammad in the Constitution of Medina. In early Muslim history (until mid 11th century), most Islamic scholars maintained a level of separation from the state which helped to establish some elements of institutional religious freedom. The Islamic Caliphate later guaranteed religious freedom under the conditions that non-Muslim communities accept dhimmi status and their adult males pay the jizya tax instead of the zakat paid by Muslim citizens. Though Dhimmis were not given the same political rights as Muslims, they nevertheless did enjoy equality under the laws of property, contract, and obligation.
Religious pluralism existed in classical Islamic ethics and Sharia, as the religious laws and courts of other religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism, were usually accommodated within the Islamic legal framework, as seen in the early Caliphate, Al-Andalus, Indian subcontinent, and the Ottoman Millet system. In medieval Islamic societies, the qadi (Islamic judges) usually could not interfere in the matters of non-Muslims unless the parties voluntarily choose to be judged according to Islamic law, thus the dhimmi communities living in Islamic states usually had their own laws independent from the Sharia law, such as the Jews who would have their own Halakha courts.
Dhimmis were allowed to operate their own courts following their own legal systems in cases that did not involve other religious groups, or capital offences or threats to public order. Non-Muslims were allowed to engage in religious practices that were usually forbidden by Islamic law, such as the consumption of alcohol and pork, as well as religious practices which Muslims found repugnant, such as the Zoroastrian practice of incestuous "self-marriage" where a man could marry his mother, sister or daughter. According to the famous Islamic legal scholar Ibn Qayyim (1292–1350), non-Muslims had the right to engage in such religious practices even if it offended Muslims, under the conditions that such cases not be presented to Islamic Sharia courts and that these religious minorities believed that the practice in question is permissible according to their religion.
Despite Dhimmis enjoying special statuses under the Caliphates, they were not considered equals, and sporadic persecutions of non-Muslim groups did occur in the history of the Caliphates.
The primary sources that guide Islam, namely Quran and Sunnahs, may be interpreted as promoting the fundamental right to practice an individual's belief. However, the acceptability of religious pluralism within Islam remains a topic of active debate, though the vast majority of Islamic scholars and historical evidences reveal Islam's commitment to no coercion in religion, supporting pluralism in the context of relative toleration. Hamed Kazemzadeh, a pluralist orientalist, argues that cultural absolutism of ours is, of course, today under heavy pressure, a double pressure of defining and semi-bankrupt imperialism and surprisingly strong counter assertive challenge that changed the mentality of Muslims to have a pluralist identity. Then he highlights the policy method of Islam Messenger in the early Islamic civilization toward other religions.
In Surah Al-Tawba, verse 29 demands Muslims to fight all those who do not believe in Islam, including Christians and Jews (People of the Book), until they pay the Jizya, a tax, with willing submission.
Some people have concluded from verse 9:29, that Muslims are commanded to attack all non-Muslims until they pay money, but Shaykh Jalal Abualrub writes:
In Surah Al-Nisa, verse 89 has been misquoted to seem that it says to slay the apostates. In actuality, it only commands Muslims to fight those who practice oppression or persecution or attack the Muslims.
Sufism
The Sufis were practitioners of the esoteric mystic traditions within an Islam at a certain point. Sufism is defined by the Sufi master or Pir (Sufism) or fakeer or Wali in the language of the people by dancing and singing and incorporating various philosophies, theologies, ideologies and religions together (e.g., Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, Platonism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism and so forth with time). Famous Sufi masters include Rumi, Shadhili, Sheikh Farid, Bulleh Shah, Shah Hussain, Shams Tabrizi, Waris Shah, al-Ghazali, Mian Mir, Attar of Nishapur, Amir Khusrow, and Salim Chishti. The Sufis were considered by many to have divine revelations with messages of peace, tolerance, equality, pluralism, love for all and hate for no one, humanitarians, philosophers, psychologists and much more. Many taught that if one wants to change the world, one must change oneself and thereby change the whole world. The views of the Sufi poets, philosophers and theologians have inspired multiple forms of modern-day academia as well as philosophers of other religions. See also Blind men and an elephant. But undoubtedly, the most influential Sufi scholar to have embraced the world is Jalaluddin Muhammad Rumi. He was born in 1207 AD in a northern province of Afghanistan; however, he later had to seek refuge in Turkey following the invasion of Afghanistan by Mongols. Rumi, through his poetry and teachings, propagated inter-faith harmony like none other. He served as a uniting figure for people of different faiths and his followers included Muslims, Christians and Jews. Even today, Rumi's popularity does not cease to exist within the Sufi Muslim community and his message of peace and harmony transcends religious and geographical boundaries.
Rumi says:
I looked for God. I went to a temple, and I didn't find him there. Then I went to a church, and I didn't find him there. And then I went to a mosque, and I didn't find him there. And then finally I looked in my heart, and there he was.
Rumi also says:
How many paths are there to God? There are as many paths to God as there are souls on the Earth.
Rumi also says:
A true Lover doesn't follow any one religion,
be sure of that.
Since in the religion of Love,
there is no irreverence or faith.
When in Love,
body, mind, heart and soul don't even exist.
Become this,
fall in Love,
and you will not be separated again.
Ahmadiyya
Ahmadis recognize many founders of world religions to be from God, who all brought teaching and guidance from God to all peoples. According to the Ahmadiyya understanding of the Quran, every nation in the history of mankind has been sent a prophet, as the Quran states: And there is a guide for every people. Though the Quran mentions only 24 prophets, the founder of Islam, Muhammad states that the world has seen 124,000 prophets. Thus other than the prophets mentioned in the Quran, Ahmadis, with support from theological study also recognize Buddha, Krishna, founders of Chinese religions to be divinely appointed individuals.
The Second Khalifatul Maish of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community writes:
"According to this teaching there has not been a single people at any time in history or anywhere in the world who have not had a warner from God, a teacher, a prophet. According to the Quran there have been prophets at all times and in all countries. India, China, Russia, Afghanistan, parts of Africa, Europe, America—all had prophets according to the theory of divine guidance taught by the Quran. When, therefore, Muslims hear about prophets of other peoples or other countries, they do not deny them. They do not brand them as liars. Muslims believe that other peoples have had their teachers. If other peoples have had prophets, books, and laws, these constitute no difficulty for Islam."
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community wrote in his book A Message of Peace:
"Our God has never discriminated between one people and another. This is illustrated by the fact that all the potentials and capabilities (Prophets) which have been granted to the Aryans (Hindus) have also been granted to the races inhabiting Arabia, Persia, Syria, China, Japan, Europe and America."
In modern practice
Religious pluralism is a contested issue in modern Islamic countries. Twenty-three Islamic countries have laws, as of 2014, which make it a crime, punishable with death penalty or prison, for a Muslim, by birth or conversion, to leave Islam or convert to another religion. In Muslim countries such as Algeria, it is illegal to preach, persuade or attempt to convert a Muslim to another religion. Saudi Arabia and several Islamic nations have strict laws against the construction of Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, Hindu temples and Buddhist stupas anywhere inside the country, by anyone including minorities working there. Brunei in southeast Asia adopted Sharia law in 2013 that prescribes a death penalty for any Muslim who converts from Islam to another religion. Other Islamic scholars state Sharia does not allow non-Muslim minorities to enjoy religious freedoms in a Muslim-majority nation, but other scholars disagree.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a multi-racial and multi-religious nation, where Muslims form the majority. Residents of Pakistan follow many of the major religions. Pakistan's diverse cultural and religious heritage is part of its multicultural history, but there is a lack of tolerance towards religious minorities in Pakistan. Minorities are facing exploitation by extremist groups, and some sections of the society show hatred towards them, religious minorities are not allowed to join the mainstream of the society because of their religion.
Jainism
Anekāntavāda, the principle of relative pluralism, is one of the basic principles of Jainism. In this view, the truth or the reality is perceived differently from different points of view, and no single point of view is the complete truth. Jain doctrine states that an object has infinite modes of existence and qualities and they cannot be completely perceived in all its aspects and manifestations, due to inherent limitations of the humans. Only the Kevalins—the omniscient beings—can comprehend the object in all its aspects and manifestations, and all others are capable of knowing only a part of it. Consequently, no one view can claim to represent the absolute truth—only relative truths. Jains compare all attempts to proclaim absolute truth with andhgajnyaya or the "maxim of the blind men and elephant", wherein all the blind men claimed to explain the true appearance of the elephant, but could only partly succeed due to their narrow perspective. For Jains, the problem with the blind men is not that they claim to explain the true appearance of the elephant; the problem is doing so to the exclusion of all other claims. Since absolute truth is many-sided, embracing any truth to the exclusion of others is to commit the error of ekānta (one-sidedness). Openness to the truths of others is one way in which Jainism embodies religious pluralism.
Sikhism
The Sikh gurus have propagated the message of "many paths" leading to the one God and ultimate salvation for all souls who treading on the path of righteousness. They have supported the view that proponents of all faiths, by doing good and virtuous deeds and by remembering the Lord, can certainly achieve salvation. Sikhs are told to accept all leading faiths as possible vehicles for attaining spiritual enlightenment, provided the faithful study, ponder and practice the teachings of their prophets and leaders. Sikhism had many interactions with Sufism as well as Hinduism, influenced them and was influenced by them.
The Sri Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs, says:
As well as:
Some call the Lord "Ram, Ram", and some "Khuda". Some serve Him as "Gusain", others as "Allah". He is the Cause of causes, and Generous. He showers His Grace and Mercy upon us. Some pilgrims bathe at sacred shrines, others go on Hajj to Mecca. Some do devotional worship, whilst others bow their heads in prayer. Some read the Vedas, and some the Koran. Some wear blue robes, and some wear white. Some call themselves Muslim, and some call themselves Hindu. Some yearn for paradise, and others long for heaven. Says Nanak, one who realizes the Hukam of God's Will, knows the secrets of his Lord Master. (Sri Guru Granth Sahib, page 885)
One who recognizes that all spiritual paths lead to the One shall be emancipated. One who speaks lies shall fall into hell and burn. In all the world, the most blessed and sanctified are those who remain absorbed in Truth. (SGGS Ang 142)
The seconds, minutes, and hours, days, weeks and months and various seasons originate from One Sun; O nanak, in just the same way, the many forms originate from the Creator. (Guru Granth Sahib page 12,13)
The Guru Granth Sahib also says that Bhagat Namdev and Bhagat Kabir, who were both believed to be Hindus, both attained salvation though they were born before Sikhism took root and were clearly not Sikhs. This highlights and reinforces the Guru's saying that "peoples of other faiths" can join with God as true and also at the same time signify that Sikhism is not the exclusive path for liberation.
Additionally the Guru Granth Sahib says:
First, Allah (God) created the Light; then, by His Creative Power, He made all mortal beings. From the One Light, the entire universe welled up. So who is good, and who is bad? ||1||
Again, the Guru Granth Sahib Ji provides this verse:
Naam Dayv the printer, and Kabeer the weaver, obtained salvation through the Perfect Guru. Those who know God and recognize His Shabad ("word") lose their ego and class consciousness. (Guru Granth Sahib page 67)
Most of the 15 Sikh Bhagats who are mentioned in their holy book were non-Sikhs and belonged to Hindu and Muslim faiths, which were the most prevalent religions of this region.
The pluralistic dialogue of Sikhism began with the founder of Sikhism Guru Nanak after becoming enlightened saying the words Na koi hindu na koi musalman – "There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim". He recognised that religious labels held no value and it is the deeds of human that will be judged in the hereafter what we call ourselves religiously holds no value.
Sikhs have been considered eager exponents of interfaith dialogue and not only accept the right of others to practice their faith but have in the past fought and laid down their lives to protect this right for others; the Martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadar, who on the pleas of a pandit of the Kashmiris, agreed to fight against a tyrannic Moghul Empire (that was forcing them to convert to Islam) in order that they might gain the freedom to practice their religion, which differed from his own.
Religious pluralism and human service professions
The concept of religious pluralism is also relevant to human service professions, such as psychology and social work, as well as medicine and nursing, in which trained professionals may interact with clients from diverse faith traditions. For example, psychologist Kenneth Pargament has described four possible stances toward client religious and spiritual beliefs, which he called rejectionist, exclusivist, constructivist, and pluralist. Unlike the constructivist stance, the pluralist stance:
Importantly, "the pluralistic therapist can hold personal religious beliefs while appreciating those of a client with different religious beliefs. The pluralist recognizes that religious value differences can and will exist between counselors and clients without adversely affecting therapy" (p. 168). The stances implied by these four helping orientations on several key issues, such as "should religious issues be discussed in counseling?", have also been presented in tabular form (p. 362, Table 12.1).
The profession of chaplaincy, a religious profession, must also deal with issues of pluralism and the relevance of a pluralistic stance. For example, Friberg argues: "With growing populations of immigrants and adherents of religions not previously seen in significant numbers in North America, spiritual care must take religion and diversity seriously. Utmost respect for the residents' spiritual and religious histories and orientations is imperative" (p. 182).
Skepticism
Argument from inconsistent revelations
The argument from inconsistent revelations is an argument that aims to show that one cannot choose one religion over another since their revelations are inconsistent with each other and that any two religions cannot both be true. The argument appears, among other places, in Voltaire's Candide and Philosophical Dictionary. It is also manifested in Denis Diderot's statement in response to Pascal's wager that, whatever proofs are offered for the existence of God in Christianity or any other religion, "an Imam can reason the same way". Also in response to Pascal's wager, J. L. Mackie said "the church within which alone salvation is to be found is not necessarily the Church of Rome, but perhaps that of the Anabaptists or the Mormons or the Muslim Sunnis or the worshippers of Kali or of Odin".
See also
References
Works cited
.
Ashk Dahlén, 2006, Sirat al-mustaqim: One or Many? Religious Pluralism Among Muslim Intellectuals in Iran in The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Rabi, Oxford.
Eck, Diane (2001) A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation, San Francisco: Harper.
Robert Gordis, 1962, "Ground Rules for a Christian-Jewish Dialogue" in The Root and the Branch, Univ. of Chicago Press.
Robert Gordis et al., 1988, Emet Ve-Emunah: Statement of Principles of Conservative Judaism, Jewish Theological Seminary and the Rabbinical Assembly.
Kenneth Einar Himma (August 2002), "Finding a High Road: The Moral Case for Salvific Pluralism", International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 1–33.
Hutchison, William R. (2003) Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kalmin, Richard (1994), Christians and Heretics in Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity, Harvard Theological Review, Volume 87(2), pp. 155–169.
Leon Klenicki ed., 1991, Toward a Theological Encounter: Jewish Understandings of Christianity, Paulist Press / Stimulus.
Monecal, Maria Rosa (2002),The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.
Hans Ucko ed., 1996, People of God, Peoples of God, WCC Publications.
.
Further reading
Abdelmassieh, Francis (2020). Egyptian-Islamic Views on the Comparison of Religions: Positions of Al-Azhar University Scholars on Muslim-Christian Relations. Münster: LIT.
Albanese, Catherine, America: Religions and Religion. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, 1998,
Wrogemann, Henning (2019). A Theology of Interreligious Relations. Downer's Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press.
External links
Global Centre for Pluralism
Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Initiative
The Pluralism Project: Researching Religious Diversity in the United States
A New Religious America: Managing Religious Diversity in a Democracy: Challenges and Prospects for the 21st Century by Diana Eck, retrieved 2009-07-16.
The Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue
Elijah Interfaith Institute: Inter Religious Dialogue
Buddhism
Standing Up for the Middle Way: A Buddhist Perspective on Religious Freedom
Christianity
Nostra Aetate: Declaration on the Relation of the Catholic Church to Non-Christian Religions
World Council of Churches Bibliography of Works on Religious Pluralism
Hinduism
Big Picture TV Video of Ela Gandhi, granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi, talking about religious pluralism
Islam
Islam and Religious Pluralism by Ayatullah Murtadha Mutahhari
Spiritual Education Lesson Plans for Children
Judaism
The imperative of Religious Pluralism: A Conservative Jewish View
Darbu Emet: A Jewish Statement About Christianity | 0.783884 | 0.993758 | 0.778991 |
Sociology | Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. Regarded as a part of both the social sciences and humanities, sociology uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order and social change. Sociological subject matter ranges from micro-level analyses of individual interaction and agency to macro-level analyses of social systems and social structure. Applied sociological research may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, whereas theoretical approaches may focus on the understanding of social processes and phenomenological method.
Traditional focuses of sociology include social stratification, social class, social mobility, religion, secularization, law, sexuality, gender, and deviance. Recent studies have added socio-technical aspects of the digital divide as a new focus. As all spheres of human activity are affected by the interplay between social structure and individual agency, sociology has gradually expanded its focus to other subjects and institutions, such as health and the institution of medicine; economy; military; punishment and systems of control; the Internet; sociology of education; social capital; and the role of social activity in the development of scientific knowledge.
The range of social scientific methods has also expanded, as social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-20th century, especially, have led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophical approaches towards the analysis of society. Conversely, the turn of the 21st century has seen the rise of new analytically, mathematically, and computationally rigorous techniques, such as agent-based modelling and social network analysis.
Social research has influence throughout various industries and sectors of life, such as among politicians, policy makers, and legislators; educators; planners; administrators; developers; business magnates and managers; social workers; non-governmental organizations; and non-profit organizations, as well as individuals interested in resolving social issues in general.
History
Sociological reasoning predates the foundation of the discipline itself. Social analysis has origins in the common stock of universal, global knowledge and philosophy, having been carried out from as far back as the time of old comic poetry which features social and political criticism, and ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For instance, the origin of the survey can be traced back to at least the Domesday Book in 1086, while ancient philosophers such as Confucius wrote about the importance of social roles.
Medieval Arabic writings encompass a rich tradition that unveils early insights into the field of sociology. Some sources consider Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Muslim scholar from Tunisia, to have been the father of sociology, although there is no reference to his work in the writings of European contributors to modern sociology. Khaldun's Muqaddimah was considered to be amongst the first works to advance social-scientific reasoning on social cohesion and social conflict.
Etymology
The word sociology derives part of its name from the Latin word socius ('companion' or 'fellowship'). The suffix -logy ('the study of') comes from that of the Greek -λογία, derived from λόγος (, 'word' or 'knowledge').
The term sociology was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in an unpublished manuscript. Sociology was later defined independently by French philosopher of science Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in 1838 as a new way of looking at society. Comte had earlier used the term social physics, but it had been subsequently appropriated by others, most notably the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet. Comte endeavored to unify history, psychology, and economics through the scientific understanding of social life. Writing shortly after the malaise of the French Revolution, he proposed that social ills could be remedied through sociological positivism, an epistemological approach outlined in the Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–1842), later included in A General View of Positivism (1848). Comte believed a positivist stage would mark the final era in the progression of human understanding, after conjectural theological and metaphysical phases. In observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science, and having classified the sciences, Comte may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.
Marx
Both Comte and Karl Marx set out to develop scientifically justified systems in the wake of European industrialization and secularization, informed by various key movements in the philosophies of history and science. Marx rejected Comtean positivism but in attempting to develop a "science of society" nevertheless came to be recognized as a founder of sociology as the word gained wider meaning. For Isaiah Berlin, even though Marx did not consider himself to be a sociologist, he may be regarded as the "true father" of modern sociology, "in so far as anyone can claim the title."To have given clear and unified answers in familiar empirical terms to those theoretical questions which most occupied men's minds at the time, and to have deduced from them clear practical directives without creating obviously artificial links between the two, was the principal achievement of Marx's theory. The sociological treatment of historical and moral problems, which Comte and after him, Spencer and Taine, had discussed and mapped, became a precise and concrete study only when the attack of militant Marxism made its conclusions a burning issue, and so made the search for evidence more zealous and the attention to method more intense.
Spencer
Herbert Spencer was one of the most popular and influential 19th-century sociologists. It is estimated that he sold one million books in his lifetime, far more than any other sociologist at the time. So strong was his influence that many other 19th-century thinkers, including Émile Durkheim, defined their ideas in relation to his. Durkheim's Division of Labour in Society is to a large extent an extended debate with Spencer from whose sociology Durkheim borrowed extensively.
Also a notable biologist, Spencer coined the term survival of the fittest. While Marxian ideas defined one strand of sociology, Spencer was a critic of socialism, as well as a strong advocate for a laissez-faire style of government. His ideas were closely observed by conservative political circles, especially in the United States and England.
Foundations of the academic discipline
The first formal Department of Sociology in the world was established in 1892 by Albion Small—from the invitation of William Rainey Harper—at the University of Chicago. The American Journal of Sociology was founded shortly thereafter in 1895 by Small as well.
The institutionalization of sociology as an academic discipline, however, was chiefly led by Émile Durkheim, who developed positivism as a foundation for practical social research. While Durkheim rejected much of the detail of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined its method, maintaining that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisting that they may retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality. Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method (1895). For Durkheim, sociology could be described as the "science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning."
Durkheim's monograph Suicide (1897) is considered a seminal work in statistical analysis by contemporary sociologists. Suicide is a case study of variations in suicide rates among Catholic and Protestant populations, and served to distinguish sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy. It also marked a major contribution to the theoretical concept of structural functionalism. By carefully examining suicide statistics in different police districts, he attempted to demonstrate that Catholic communities have a lower suicide rate than that of Protestants, something he attributed to social (as opposed to individual or psychological) causes. He developed the notion of objective social facts to delineate a unique empirical object for the science of sociology to study. Through such studies he posited that sociology would be able to determine whether any given society is healthy or pathological, and seek social reform to negate organic breakdown, or "social anomie".
Sociology quickly evolved as an academic response to the perceived challenges of modernity, such as industrialization, urbanization, secularization, and the process of rationalization. The field predominated in continental Europe, with British anthropology and statistics generally following on a separate trajectory. By the turn of the 20th century, however, many theorists were active in the English-speaking world. Few early sociologists were confined strictly to the subject, interacting also with economics, jurisprudence, psychology and philosophy, with theories being appropriated in a variety of different fields. Since its inception, sociological epistemology, methods, and frames of inquiry, have significantly expanded and diverged.
Durkheim, Marx, and the German theorist Max Weber are typically cited as the three principal architects of sociology. Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, Lester F. Ward, W. E. B. Du Bois, Vilfredo Pareto, Alexis de Tocqueville, Werner Sombart, Thorstein Veblen, Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, Jane Addams and Karl Mannheim are often included on academic curricula as founding theorists. Curricula also may include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Marianne Weber, Harriet Martineau, and Friedrich Engels as founders of the feminist tradition in sociology. Each key figure is associated with a particular theoretical perspective and orientation.
Further developments
The first college course entitled "Sociology" was taught in the United States at Yale in 1875 by William Graham Sumner. In 1883, Lester F. Ward, who later became the first president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), published Dynamic Sociology—Or Applied social science as based upon statical sociology and the less complex sciences, attacking the laissez-faire sociology of Herbert Spencer and Sumner. Ward's 1,200-page book was used as core material in many early American sociology courses. In 1890, the oldest continuing American course in the modern tradition began at the University of Kansas, lectured by Frank W. Blackmar. The Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago was established in 1892 by Albion Small, who also published the first sociology textbook: An introduction to the study of society. George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, who had met at the University of Michigan in 1891 (along with John Dewey), moved to Chicago in 1894. Their influence gave rise to social psychology and the symbolic interactionism of the modern Chicago School. The American Journal of Sociology was founded in 1895, followed by the ASA in 1905.
The sociological canon of classics with Durkheim and Max Weber at the top owes its existence in part to Talcott Parsons, who is largely credited with introducing both to American audiences. Parsons consolidated the sociological tradition and set the agenda for American sociology at the point of its fastest disciplinary growth. Sociology in the United States was less historically influenced by Marxism than its European counterpart, and to this day broadly remains more statistical in its approach.
The first sociology department established in the United Kingdom was at the London School of Economics and Political Science (home of the British Journal of Sociology) in 1904. Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse and Edvard Westermarck became the lecturers in the discipline at the University of London in 1907. Harriet Martineau, an English translator of Comte, has been cited as the first female sociologist. In 1909, the German Sociological Association was founded by Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, among others. Weber established the first department in Germany at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1919, having presented an influential new antipositivist sociology. In 1920, Florian Znaniecki set up the first department in Poland. The Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt (later to become the Frankfurt School of critical theory) was founded in 1923. International co-operation in sociology began in 1893, when René Worms founded the Institut International de Sociologie, an institution later eclipsed by the much larger International Sociological Association (ISA), founded in 1949.
Theoretical traditions
Positivism and anti-positivism
Positivism
The overarching methodological principle of positivism is to conduct sociology in broadly the same manner as natural science. An emphasis on empiricism and the scientific method is sought to provide a tested foundation for sociological research based on the assumption that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only arrive by positive affirmation through scientific methodology.
The term has long since ceased to carry this meaning; there are no fewer than twelve distinct epistemologies that are referred to as positivism. Many of these approaches do not self-identify as "positivist", some because they themselves arose in opposition to older forms of positivism, and some because the label has over time become a pejorative term by being mistakenly linked with a theoretical empiricism. The extent of antipositivist criticism has also diverged, with many rejecting the scientific method and others only seeking to amend it to reflect 20th-century developments in the philosophy of science. However, positivism (broadly understood as a scientific approach to the study of society) remains dominant in contemporary sociology, especially in the United States.
Loïc Wacquant distinguishes three major strains of positivism: Durkheimian, Logical, and Instrumental. None of these are the same as that set forth by Comte, who was unique in advocating such a rigid (and perhaps optimistic) version. While Émile Durkheim rejected much of the detail of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined its method. Durkheim maintained that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisted that they should retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality. He developed the notion of objective sui generis "social facts" to serve as unique empirical objects for the science of sociology to study.
The variety of positivism that remains dominant today is termed instrumental positivism. This approach eschews epistemological and metaphysical concerns (such as the nature of social facts) in favour of methodological clarity, replicability, reliability and validity. This positivism is more or less synonymous with quantitative research, and so only resembles older positivism in practice. Since it carries no explicit philosophical commitment, its practitioners may not belong to any particular school of thought. Modern sociology of this type is often credited to Paul Lazarsfeld, who pioneered large-scale survey studies and developed statistical techniques for analysing them. This approach lends itself to what Robert K. Merton called middle-range theory: abstract statements that generalize from segregated hypotheses and empirical regularities rather than starting with an abstract idea of a social whole.
Antipositivism
The German philosopher Hegel criticised traditional empiricist epistemology, which he rejected as uncritical, and determinism, which he viewed as overly mechanistic. Karl Marx's methodology borrowed from Hegelian dialecticism but also a rejection of positivism in favour of critical analysis, seeking to supplement the empirical acquisition of "facts" with the elimination of illusions. He maintained that appearances need to be critiqued rather than simply documented. Early hermeneuticians such as Wilhelm Dilthey pioneered the distinction between natural and social science ('Geisteswissenschaft'). Various neo-Kantian philosophers, phenomenologists and human scientists further theorized how the analysis of the social world differs to that of the natural world due to the irreducibly complex aspects of human society, culture, and being.
In the Italian context of development of social sciences and of sociology in particular, there are oppositions to the first foundation of the discipline, sustained by speculative philosophy in accordance with the antiscientific tendencies matured by critique of positivism and evolutionism, so a tradition Progressist struggles to establish itself.
At the turn of the 20th century, the first generation of German sociologists formally introduced methodological anti-positivism, proposing that research should concentrate on human cultural norms, values, symbols, and social processes viewed from a resolutely subjective perspective. Max Weber argued that sociology may be loosely described as a science as it is able to identify causal relationships of human "social action"—especially among "ideal types", or hypothetical simplifications of complex social phenomena. As a non-positivist, however, Weber sought relationships that are not as "historical, invariant, or generalisable" as those pursued by natural scientists. Fellow German sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies, theorised on two crucial abstract concepts with his work on "gemeinschaft and gesellschaft". Tönnies marked a sharp line between the realm of concepts and the reality of social action: the first must be treated axiomatically and in a deductive way ("pure sociology"), whereas the second empirically and inductively ("applied sociology").
Both Weber and Georg Simmel pioneered the "Verstehen" (or 'interpretative') method in social science; a systematic process by which an outside observer attempts to relate to a particular cultural group, or indigenous people, on their own terms and from their own point of view. Through the work of Simmel, in particular, sociology acquired a possible character beyond positivist data-collection or grand, deterministic systems of structural law. Relatively isolated from the sociological academy throughout his lifetime, Simmel presented idiosyncratic analyses of modernity more reminiscent of the phenomenological and existential writers than of Comte or Durkheim, paying particular concern to the forms of, and possibilities for, social individuality. His sociology engaged in a neo-Kantian inquiry into the limits of perception, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?'
Classical theory
The contemporary discipline of sociology is theoretically multi-paradigmatic in line with the contentions of classical social theory. Randall Collins' well-cited survey of sociological theory retroactively labels various theorists as belonging to four theoretical traditions: Functionalism, Conflict, Symbolic Interactionism, and Utilitarianism.
Accordingly, modern sociological theory predominantly descends from functionalist (Durkheim) and conflict (Marx and Weber) approaches to social structure, as well as from symbolic-interactionist approaches to social interaction, such as micro-level structural (Simmel) and pragmatist (Mead, Cooley) perspectives. Utilitarianism (also known as rational choice or social exchange), although often associated with economics, is an established tradition within sociological theory.
Lastly, as argued by Raewyn Connell, a tradition that is often forgotten is that of Social Darwinism, which applies the logic of Darwinian biological evolution to people and societies. This tradition often aligns with classical functionalism, and was once the dominant theoretical stance in American sociology, from , associated with several founders of sociology, primarily Herbert Spencer, Lester F. Ward, and William Graham Sumner.
Contemporary sociological theory retains traces of each of these traditions and they are by no means mutually exclusive.
Functionalism
A broad historical paradigm in both sociology and anthropology, functionalism addresses the social structure—referred to as "social organization" by the classical theorists—with respect to the whole as well as the necessary function of the whole's constituent elements. A common analogy (popularized by Herbert Spencer) is to regard norms and institutions as 'organs' that work towards the proper functioning of the entire 'body' of society. The perspective was implicit in the original sociological positivism of Comte but was theorized in full by Durkheim, again with respect to observable, structural laws.
Functionalism also has an anthropological basis in the work of theorists such as Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown. It is in the latter's specific usage that the prefix "structural" emerged. Classical functionalist theory is generally united by its tendency towards biological analogy and notions of social evolutionism, in that the basic form of society would increase in complexity and those forms of social organization that promoted solidarity would eventually overcome social disorganization. As Giddens states:Functionalist thought, from Comte onwards, has looked particularly towards biology as the science providing the closest and most compatible model for social science. Biology has been taken to provide a guide to conceptualizing the structure and the function of social systems and to analyzing processes of evolution via mechanisms of adaptation. Functionalism strongly emphasizes the pre-eminence of the social world over its individual parts (i.e. its constituent actors, human subjects).
Conflict theory
Functionalist theories emphasize "cohesive systems" and are often contrasted with "conflict theories", which critique the overarching socio-political system or emphasize the inequality between particular groups. The following quotes from Durkheim and Marx epitomize the political, as well as theoretical, disparities, between functionalist and conflict thought respectively:
Symbolic interactionism
Symbolic interaction—often associated with interactionism, phenomenology, dramaturgy, interpretivism—is a sociological approach that places emphasis on subjective meanings and the empirical unfolding of social processes, generally accessed through micro-analysis. This tradition emerged in the Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s, which, prior to World War II, "had been the center of sociological research and graduate study." The approach focuses on creating a framework for building a theory that sees society as the product of the everyday interactions of individuals. Society is nothing more than the shared reality that people construct as they interact with one another. This approach sees people interacting in countless settings using symbolic communications to accomplish the tasks at hand. Therefore, society is a complex, ever-changing mosaic of subjective meanings. Some critics of this approach argue that it only looks at what is happening in a particular social situation, and disregards the effects that culture, race or gender (i.e. social-historical structures) may have in that situation. Some important sociologists associated with this approach include Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, George Homans, and Peter Blau. It is also in this tradition that the radical-empirical approach of ethnomethodology emerges from the work of Harold Garfinkel.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is often referred to as exchange theory or rational choice theory in the context of sociology. This tradition tends to privilege the agency of individual rational actors and assumes that within interactions individuals always seek to maximize their own self-interest. As argued by Josh Whitford, rational actors are assumed to have four basic elements:
"a knowledge of alternatives;"
"a knowledge of, or beliefs about the consequences of the various alternatives;"
"an ordering of preferences over outcomes;" and
"a decision rule, to select among the possible alternatives"
Exchange theory is specifically attributed to the work of George C. Homans, Peter Blau and Richard Emerson. Organizational sociologists James G. March and Herbert A. Simon noted that an individual's rationality is bounded by the context or organizational setting. The utilitarian perspective in sociology was, most notably, revitalized in the late 20th century by the work of former ASA president James Coleman.
20th-century social theory
Following the decline of theories of sociocultural evolution in the United States, the interactionist thought of the Chicago School dominated American sociology. As Anselm Strauss describes, "we didn't think symbolic interaction was a perspective in sociology; we thought it was sociology." Moreover, philosophical and psychological pragmatism grounded this tradition. After World War II, mainstream sociology shifted to the survey-research of Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia University and the general theorizing of Pitirim Sorokin, followed by Talcott Parsons at Harvard University. Ultimately, "the failure of the Chicago, Columbia, and Wisconsin [sociology] departments to produce a significant number of graduate students interested in and committed to general theory in the years 1936–45 was to the advantage of the Harvard department." As Parsons began to dominate general theory, his work primarily referenced European sociology—almost entirely omitting citations of both the American tradition of sociocultural-evolution as well as pragmatism. In addition to Parsons' revision of the sociological canon (which included Marshall, Pareto, Weber and Durkheim), the lack of theoretical challenges from other departments nurtured the rise of the Parsonian structural-functionalist movement, which reached its crescendo in the 1950s, but by the 1960s was in rapid decline.
By the 1980s, most functionalist perspectives in Europe had broadly been replaced by conflict-oriented approaches, and to many in the discipline, functionalism was considered "as dead as a dodo:" According to Giddens:The orthodox consensus terminated in the late 1960s and 1970s as the middle ground shared by otherwise competing perspectives gave way and was replaced by a baffling variety of competing perspectives. This third 'generation' of social theory includes phenomenologically inspired approaches, critical theory, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and theories written in the tradition of hermeneutics and ordinary language philosophy.
Pax Wisconsana
While some conflict approaches also gained popularity in the United States, the mainstream of the discipline instead shifted to a variety of empirically oriented middle-range theories with no single overarching, or "grand", theoretical orientation. John Levi Martin refers to this "golden age of methodological unity and theoretical calm" as the Pax Wisconsana, as it reflected the composition of the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison: numerous scholars working on separate projects with little contention. Omar Lizardo describes the pax wisconsana as "a Midwestern flavored, Mertonian resolution of the theory/method wars in which [sociologists] all agreed on at least two working hypotheses: (1) grand theory is a waste of time; [and] (2) good theory has to be good to think with or goes in the trash bin." Despite the aversion to grand theory in the latter half of the 20th century, several new traditions have emerged that propose various syntheses: structuralism, post-structuralism, cultural sociology and systems theory. Some sociologists have called for a return to 'grand theory' to combat the rise of scientific and pragmatist influences within the tradition of sociological thought (see Duane Rousselle).
Structuralism
The structuralist movement originated primarily from the work of Durkheim as interpreted by two European scholars: Anthony Giddens, a sociologist, whose theory of structuration draws on the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure; and Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist. In this context, 'structure' does not refer to 'social structure', but to the semiotic understanding of human culture as a system of signs. One may delineate four central tenets of structuralism:
Structure is what determines the structure of a whole.
Structuralists believe that every system has a structure.
Structuralists are interested in 'structural' laws that deal with coexistence rather than changes.
Structures are the 'real things' beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning.
The second tradition of structuralist thought, contemporaneous with Giddens, emerges from the American School of social network analysis in the 1970s and 1980s, spearheaded by the Harvard Department of Social Relations led by Harrison White and his students. This tradition of structuralist thought argues that, rather than semiotics, social structure is networks of patterned social relations. And, rather than Levi-Strauss, this school of thought draws on the notions of structure as theorized by Levi-Strauss' contemporary anthropologist, Radcliffe-Brown. Some refer to this as "network structuralism", and equate it to "British structuralism" as opposed to the "French structuralism" of Levi-Strauss.
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralist thought has tended to reject 'humanist' assumptions in the construction of social theory. Michel Foucault provides an important critique in his Archaeology of the Human Sciences, though Habermas (1986) and Rorty (1986) have both argued that Foucault merely replaces one such system of thought with another. The dialogue between these intellectuals highlights a trend in recent years for certain schools of sociology and philosophy to intersect. The anti-humanist position has been associated with "postmodernism", a term used in specific contexts to describe an era or phenomena, but occasionally construed as a method.
Central theoretical problems
Overall, there is a strong consensus regarding the central problems of sociological theory, which are largely inherited from the classical theoretical traditions. This consensus is: how to link, transcend or cope with the following "big three" dichotomies:
subjectivity and objectivity, which deal with knowledge;
structure and agency, which deal with action;
and synchrony and diachrony, which deal with time.
Lastly, sociological theory often grapples with the problem of integrating or transcending the divide between micro, meso, and macro-scale social phenomena, which is a subset of all three central problems.
Subjectivity and objectivity
The problem of subjectivity and objectivity can be divided into two parts: a concern over the general possibilities of social actions, and the specific problem of social scientific knowledge. In the former, the subjective is often equated (though not necessarily) with the individual, and the individual's intentions and interpretations of the objective. The objective is often considered any public or external action or outcome, on up to society writ large. A primary question for social theorists, then, is how knowledge reproduces along the chain of subjective-objective-subjective, that is to say: how is intersubjectivity achieved? While, historically, qualitative methods have attempted to tease out subjective interpretations, quantitative survey methods also attempt to capture individual subjectivities. Qualitative methods take an approach to objective description known as in situ, meaning that descriptions must have appropriate contextual information to understand the information.
The latter concern with scientific knowledge results from the fact that a sociologist is part of the very object they seek to explain, as Bourdieu explains:
Structure and agency
Structure and agency, sometimes referred to as determinism versus voluntarism, form an enduring ontological debate in social theory: "Do social structures determine an individual's behaviour or does human agency?" In this context, agency refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and make free choices, whereas structure relates to factors that limit or affect the choices and actions of individuals (e.g. social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, etc.). Discussions over the primacy of either structure or agency relate to the core of sociological epistemology (i.e. "what is the social world made of?", "what is a cause in the social world, and what is an effect?"). A perennial question within this debate is that of "social reproduction": how are structures (specifically, structures producing inequality) reproduced through the choices of individuals?
Synchrony and diachrony
Synchrony and diachrony (or statics and dynamics) within social theory are terms that refer to a distinction that emerged through the work of Levi-Strauss who inherited it from the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Synchrony slices moments of time for analysis, thus it is an analysis of static social reality. Diachrony, on the other hand, attempts to analyse dynamic sequences. Following Saussure, synchrony would refer to social phenomena as a static concept like a language, while diachrony would refer to unfolding processes like actual speech. In Anthony Giddens' introduction to Central Problems in Social Theory, he states that, "in order to show the interdependence of action and structure…we must grasp the time space relations inherent in the constitution of all social interaction." And like structure and agency, time is integral to discussion of social reproduction.
In terms of sociology, historical sociology is often better positioned to analyse social life as diachronic, while survey research takes a snapshot of social life and is thus better equipped to understand social life as synchronized. Some argue that the synchrony of social structure is a methodological perspective rather than an ontological claim. Nonetheless, the problem for theory is how to integrate the two manners of recording and thinking about social data.
Research methodology
Sociological research methods may be divided into two broad, though often supplementary, categories:
Qualitative designs emphasize understanding of social phenomena through direct observation, communication with participants, or analysis of texts, and may stress contextual and subjective accuracy over generality.
Quantitative designs approach social phenomena through quantifiable evidence, and often rely on statistical analysis of many cases (or across intentionally designed treatments in an experiment) to establish valid and reliable general claims.
Sociologists are often divided into camps of support for particular research techniques. These disputes relate to the epistemological debates at the historical core of social theory. While very different in many aspects, both qualitative and quantitative approaches involve a systematic interaction between theory and data. Quantitative methodologies hold the dominant position in sociology, especially in the United States. In the discipline's two most cited journals, quantitative articles have historically outnumbered qualitative ones by a factor of two. (Most articles published in the largest British journal, on the other hand, are qualitative.) Most textbooks on the methodology of social research are written from the quantitative perspective, and the very term "methodology" is often used synonymously with "statistics". Practically all sociology PhD programmes in the United States require training in statistical methods. The work produced by quantitative researchers is also deemed more 'trustworthy' and 'unbiased' by the general public, though this judgment continues to be challenged by antipositivists.
The choice of method often depends largely on what the researcher intends to investigate. For example, a researcher concerned with drawing a statistical generalization across an entire population may administer a survey questionnaire to a representative sample population. By contrast, a researcher who seeks full contextual understanding of an individual's social actions may choose ethnographic participant observation or open-ended interviews. Studies will commonly combine, or 'triangulate', quantitative and qualitative methods as part of a 'multi-strategy' design. For instance, a quantitative study may be performed to obtain statistical patterns on a target sample, and then combined with a qualitative interview to determine the play of agency.
Sampling
Quantitative methods are often used to ask questions about a population that is very large, making a census or a complete enumeration of all the members in that population infeasible. A 'sample' then forms a manageable subset of a population. In quantitative research, statistics are used to draw inferences from this sample regarding the population as a whole. The process of selecting a sample is referred to as 'sampling'. While it is usually best to sample randomly, concern with differences between specific subpopulations sometimes calls for stratified sampling. Conversely, the impossibility of random sampling sometimes necessitates nonprobability sampling, such as convenience sampling or snowball sampling.
Methods
The following list of research methods is neither exclusive nor exhaustive:
Archival research (or the Historical method): Draws upon the secondary data located in historical archives and records, such as biographies, memoirs, journals, and so on.
Content analysis: The content of interviews and other texts is systematically analysed. Often data is 'coded' as a part of the 'grounded theory' approach using qualitative data analysis (QDA) software, such as Atlas.ti, MAXQDA, NVivo, or QDA Miner.
Experimental research: The researcher isolates a single social process and reproduces it in a laboratory (for example, by creating a situation where unconscious sexist judgements are possible), seeking to determine whether or not certain social variables can cause, or depend upon, other variables (for instance, seeing if people's feelings about traditional gender roles can be manipulated by the activation of contrasting gender stereotypes). Participants are randomly assigned to different groups that either serve as controls—acting as reference points because they are tested with regard to the dependent variable, albeit without having been exposed to any independent variables of interest—or receive one or more treatments. Randomization allows the researcher to be sure that any resulting differences between groups are the result of the treatment.
Longitudinal study: An extensive examination of a specific person or group over a long period of time.
Observation: Using data from the senses, the researcher records information about social phenomenon or behaviour. Observation techniques may or may not feature participation. In participant observation, the researcher goes into the field (e.g. a community or a place of work), and participates in the activities of the field for a prolonged period of time in order to acquire a deep understanding of it. Data acquired through these techniques may be analysed either quantitatively or qualitatively. In the observation research, a sociologist might study global warming in some part of the world that is less populated.
Program Evaluation is a systematic method for collecting, analyzing, and using information to answer questions about projects, policies and programs, particularly about their effectiveness and efficiency. In both the public and private sectors, stakeholders often want to know whether the programs they are funding, implementing, voting for, or objecting to are producing the intended effect. While program evaluation first focuses on this definition, important considerations often include how much the program costs per participant, how the program could be improved, whether the program is worthwhile, whether there are better alternatives, if there are unintended outcomes, and whether the program goals are appropriate and useful.
Survey research: The researcher gathers data using interviews, questionnaires, or similar feedback from a set of people sampled from a particular population of interest. Survey items from an interview or questionnaire may be open-ended or closed-ended. Data from surveys is usually analysed statistically on a computer.
Computational sociology
Sociologists increasingly draw upon computationally intensive methods to analyse and model social phenomena. Using computer simulations, artificial intelligence, text mining, complex statistical methods, and new analytic approaches like social network analysis and social sequence analysis, computational sociology develops and tests theories of complex social processes through bottom-up modelling of social interactions.
Although the subject matter and methodologies in social science differ from those in natural science or computer science, several of the approaches used in contemporary social simulation originated from fields such as physics and artificial intelligence. By the same token, some of the approaches that originated in computational sociology have been imported into the natural sciences, such as measures of network centrality from the fields of social network analysis and network science. In relevant literature, computational sociology is often related to the study of social complexity. Social complexity concepts such as complex systems, non-linear interconnection among macro and micro process, and emergence, have entered the vocabulary of computational sociology. A practical and well-known example is the construction of a computational model in the form of an "artificial society", by which researchers can analyse the structure of a social system.
Subfields
Culture
Sociologists' approach to culture can be divided into "sociology of culture" and "cultural sociology"—terms which are similar, though not entirely interchangeable. Sociology of culture is an older term, and considers some topics and objects as more or less "cultural" than others. Conversely, cultural sociology sees all social phenomena as inherently cultural. Sociology of culture often attempts to explain certain cultural phenomena as a product of social processes, while cultural sociology sees culture as a potential explanation of social phenomena.
For Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." While early theorists such as Durkheim and Mauss were influential in cultural anthropology, sociologists of culture are generally distinguished by their concern for modern (rather than primitive or ancient) society. Cultural sociology often involves the hermeneutic analysis of words, artefacts and symbols, or ethnographic interviews. However, some sociologists employ historical-comparative or quantitative techniques in the analysis of culture, Weber and Bourdieu for instance. The subfield is sometimes allied with critical theory in the vein of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and other members of the Frankfurt School. Loosely distinct from the sociology of culture is the field of cultural studies. Birmingham School theorists such as Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall questioned the division between "producers" and "consumers" evident in earlier theory, emphasizing the reciprocity in the production of texts. Cultural Studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power. For example, a study of a subculture (e.g. white working class youth in London) would consider the social practices of the group as they relate to the dominant class. The "cultural turn" of the 1960s ultimately placed culture much higher on the sociological agenda.
Art, music and literature
Sociology of literature, film, and art is a subset of the sociology of culture. This field studies the social production of artistic objects and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire (1992). None of the founding fathers of sociology produced a detailed study of art, but they did develop ideas that were subsequently applied to literature by others. Marx's theory of ideology was directed at literature by Pierre Macherey, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. Weber's theory of modernity as cultural rationalization, which he applied to music, was later applied to all the arts, literature included, by Frankfurt School writers such as Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. Durkheim's view of sociology as the study of externally defined social facts was redirected towards literature by Robert Escarpit. Bourdieu's own work is clearly indebted to Marx, Weber and Durkheim.
Criminality, deviance, law and punishment
Criminologists analyse the nature, causes, and control of criminal activity, drawing upon methods across sociology, psychology, and the behavioural sciences. The sociology of deviance focuses on actions or behaviours that violate norms, including both infringements of formally enacted rules (e.g., crime) and informal violations of cultural norms. It is the remit of sociologists to study why these norms exist; how they change over time; and how they are enforced. The concept of social disorganization is when the broader social systems leads to violations of norms. For instance, Robert K. Merton produced a typology of deviance, which includes both individual and system level causal explanations of deviance.
Sociology of law
The study of law played a significant role in the formation of classical sociology. Durkheim famously described law as the "visible symbol" of social solidarity. The sociology of law refers to both a sub-discipline of sociology and an approach within the field of legal studies. Sociology of law is a diverse field of study that examines the interaction of law with other aspects of society, such as the development of legal institutions and the effect of laws on social change and vice versa. For example, an influential recent work in the field relies on statistical analyses to argue that the increase in incarceration in the US over the last 30 years is due to changes in law and policing and not to an increase in crime; and that this increase has significantly contributed to the persistence of racial stratification.
Communications and information technologies
The sociology of communications and information technologies includes "the social aspects of computing, the Internet, new media, computer networks, and other communication and information technologies."
Internet and digital media
The Internet is of interest to sociologists in various ways, most practically as a tool for research and as a discussion platform. The sociology of the Internet in the broad sense concerns the analysis of online communities (e.g. newsgroups, social networking sites) and virtual worlds, meaning that there is often overlap with community sociology. Online communities may be studied statistically through network analysis or interpreted qualitatively through virtual ethnography. Moreover, organizational change is catalysed through new media, thereby influencing social change at-large, perhaps forming the framework for a transformation from an industrial to an informational society. One notable text is Manuel Castells' The Internet Galaxy—the title of which forms an inter-textual reference to Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy. Closely related to the sociology of the Internet is digital sociology, which expands the scope of study to address not only the internet but also the impact of the other digital media and devices that have emerged since the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Media
As with cultural studies, media study is a distinct discipline that owes to the convergence of sociology and other social sciences and humanities, in particular, literary criticism and critical theory. Though neither the production process nor the critique of aesthetic forms is in the remit of sociologists, analyses of socializing factors, such as ideological effects and audience reception, stem from sociological theory and method. Thus the 'sociology of the media' is not a subdiscipline per se, but the media is a common and often indispensable topic.
Economic sociology
The term "economic sociology" was first used by William Stanley Jevons in 1879, later to be coined in the works of Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel between 1890 and 1920. Economic sociology arose as a new approach to the analysis of economic phenomena, emphasizing class relations and modernity as a philosophical concept. The relationship between capitalism and modernity is a salient issue, perhaps best demonstrated in Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and Simmel's The Philosophy of Money (1900). The contemporary period of economic sociology, also known as new economic sociology, was consolidated by the 1985 work of Mark Granovetter titled "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness". This work elaborated the concept of embeddedness, which states that economic relations between individuals or firms take place within existing social relations (and are thus structured by these relations as well as the greater social structures of which those relations are a part). Social network analysis has been the primary methodology for studying this phenomenon. Granovetter's theory of the strength of weak ties and Ronald Burt's concept of structural holes are two of the best known theoretical contributions of this field.
Work, employment, and industry
The sociology of work, or industrial sociology, examines "the direction and implications of trends in technological change, globalization, labour markets, work organization, managerial practices and employment relations to the extent to which these trends are intimately related to changing patterns of inequality in modern societies and to the changing experiences of individuals and families the ways in which workers challenge, resist and make their own contributions to the patterning of work and shaping of work institutions."
Education
The sociology of education is the study of how educational institutions determine social structures, experiences, and other outcomes. It is particularly concerned with the schooling systems of modern industrial societies. A classic 1966 study in this field by James Coleman, known as the "Coleman Report", analysed the performance of over 150,000 students and found that student background and socioeconomic status are much more important in determining educational outcomes than are measured differences in school resources (i.e. per pupil spending). The controversy over "school effects" ignited by that study has continued to this day. The study also found that socially disadvantaged black students profited from schooling in racially mixed classrooms, and thus served as a catalyst for desegregation busing in American public schools.
Environment
Environmental sociology is the study of human interactions with the natural environment, typically emphasizing human dimensions of environmental problems, social impacts of those problems, and efforts to resolve them. As with other sub-fields of sociology, scholarship in environmental sociology may be at one or multiple levels of analysis, from global (e.g. world-systems) to local, societal to individual. Attention is paid also to the processes by which environmental problems become defined and known to humans. As argued by notable environmental sociologist John Bellamy Foster, the predecessor to modern environmental sociology is Marx's analysis of the metabolic rift, which influenced contemporary thought on sustainability. Environmental sociology is often interdisciplinary and overlaps with the sociology of risk, rural sociology and the sociology of disaster.
Human ecology
Human ecology deals with interdisciplinary study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments. In addition to Environmental sociology, this field overlaps with architectural sociology, urban sociology, and to some extent visual sociology. In turn, visual sociology—which is concerned with all visual dimensions of social life—overlaps with media studies in that it uses photography, film and other technologies of media.
Social pre-wiring
Social pre-wiring deals with the study of fetal social behavior and social interactions in a multi-fetal environment. Specifically, social pre-wiring refers to the ontogeny of social interaction. Also informally referred to as, "wired to be social". The theory questions whether there is a propensity to socially oriented action already present before birth. Research in the theory concludes that newborns are born into the world with a unique genetic wiring to be social.
Circumstantial evidence supporting the social pre-wiring hypothesis can be revealed when examining newborns' behavior. Newborns, not even hours after birth, have been found to display a preparedness for social interaction. This preparedness is expressed in ways such as their imitation of facial gestures. This observed behavior cannot be attributed to any current form of socialization or social construction. Rather, newborns most likely inherit to some extent social behavior and identity through genetics.
Principal evidence of this theory is uncovered by examining Twin pregnancies. The main argument is, if there are social behaviors that are inherited and developed before birth, then one should expect twin foetuses to engage in some form of social interaction before they are born. Thus, ten foetuses were analyzed over a period of time using ultrasound techniques. Using kinematic analysis, the results of the experiment were that the twin foetuses would interact with each other for longer periods and more often as the pregnancies went on. Researchers were able to conclude that the performance of movements between the co-twins were not accidental but specifically aimed.
The social pre-wiring hypothesis was proved correct: The central advance of this study is the demonstration that 'social actions' are already performed in the second trimester of gestation. Starting from the 14th week of gestation twin foetuses plan and execute movements specifically aimed at the co-twin. These findings force us to predate the emergence of social behavior: when the context enables it, as in the case of twin foetuses, other-directed actions are not only possible but predominant over self-directed actions.
Family, gender, and sexuality
Family, gender and sexuality form a broad area of inquiry studied in many sub-fields of sociology. A family is a group of people who are related by kinship ties :- Relations of blood / marriage / civil partnership or adoption. The family unit is one of the most important social institutions found in some form in nearly all known societies. It is the basic unit of social organization and plays a key role in socializing children into the culture of their society. The sociology of the family examines the family, as an institution and unit of socialization, with special concern for the comparatively modern historical emergence of the nuclear family and its distinct gender roles. The notion of "childhood" is also significant. As one of the more basic institutions to which one may apply sociological perspectives, the sociology of the family is a common component on introductory academic curricula. Feminist sociology, on the other hand, is a normative sub-field that observes and critiques the cultural categories of gender and sexuality, particularly with respect to power and inequality. The primary concern of feminist theory is the patriarchy and the systematic oppression of women apparent in many societies, both at the level of small-scale interaction and in terms of the broader social structure. Feminist sociology also analyses how gender interlocks with race and class to produce and perpetuate social inequalities. "How to account for the differences in definitions of femininity and masculinity and in sex role across different societies and historical periods" is also a concern.
Health, illness, and the body
The sociology of health and illness focuses on the social effects of, and public attitudes toward, illnesses, diseases, mental health and disabilities. This sub-field also overlaps with gerontology and the study of the ageing process. Medical sociology, by contrast, focuses on the inner-workings of the medical profession, its organizations, its institutions and how these can shape knowledge and interactions. In Britain, sociology was introduced into the medical curriculum following the Goodenough Report (1944).
The sociology of the body and embodiment takes a broad perspective on the idea of "the body" and includes "a wide range of embodied dynamics including human and non-human bodies, morphology, human reproduction, anatomy, body fluids, biotechnology, genetics". This often intersects with health and illness, but also theories of bodies as political, social, cultural, economic and ideological productions. The ISA maintains a Research Committee devoted to "the Body in the Social Sciences".
Death, dying, bereavement
A subfield of the sociology of health and illness that overlaps with cultural sociology is the study of death, dying and bereavement, sometimes referred to broadly as the sociology of death. This topic is exemplified by the work of Douglas Davies and Michael C. Kearl.
Knowledge and science
The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arises, and of the effects prevailing ideas have on societies. The term first came into widespread use in the 1920s, when a number of German-speaking theorists, most notably Max Scheler, and Karl Mannheim, wrote extensively on it. With the dominance of functionalism through the middle years of the 20th century, the sociology of knowledge tended to remain on the periphery of mainstream sociological thought. It was largely reinvented and applied much more closely to everyday life in the 1960s, particularly by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and is still central for methods dealing with qualitative understanding of human society (compare socially constructed reality). The "archaeological" and "genealogical" studies of Michel Foucault are of considerable contemporary influence.
The sociology of science involves the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing "with the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity." Important theorists in the sociology of science include Robert K. Merton and Bruno Latour. These branches of sociology have contributed to the formation of science and technology studies. Both the ASA and the BSA have sections devoted to the subfield of Science, Knowledge and Technology. The ISA maintains a Research Committee on Science and Technology.
Leisure
Sociology of leisure is the study of how humans organize their free time. Leisure includes a broad array of activities, such as sport, tourism, and the playing of games. The sociology of leisure is closely tied to the sociology of work, as each explores a different side of the work–leisure relationship. More recent studies in the field move away from the work–leisure relationship and focus on the relation between leisure and culture. This area of sociology began with Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.
Peace, war, and conflict
This subfield of sociology studies, broadly, the dynamics of war, conflict resolution, peace movements, war refugees, conflict resolution and military institutions. As a subset of this subfield, military sociology aims towards the systematic study of the military as a social group rather than as an organization. It is a highly specialized sub-field which examines issues related to service personnel as a distinct group with coerced collective action based on shared interests linked to survival in vocation and combat, with purposes and values that are more defined and narrower than within civil society. Military sociology also concerns civilian-military relations and interactions between other groups or governmental agencies. Topics include the dominant assumptions held by those in the military, changes in military members' willingness to fight, military unionization, military professionalism, the increased utilization of women, the military industrial-academic complex, the military's dependence on research, and the institutional and organizational structure of military.
Political sociology
Historically, political sociology concerned the relations between political organization and society. A typical research question in this area might be: "Why do so few American citizens choose to vote?" In this respect questions of political opinion formation brought about some of the pioneering uses of statistical survey research by Paul Lazarsfeld. A major subfield of political sociology developed in relation to such questions, which draws on comparative history to analyse socio-political trends. The field developed from the work of Max Weber and Moisey Ostrogorsky.
Contemporary political sociology includes these areas of research, but it has been opened up to wider questions of power and politics. Today political sociologists are as likely to be concerned with how identities are formed that contribute to structural domination by one group over another; the politics of who knows how and with what authority; and questions of how power is contested in social interactions in such a way as to bring about widespread cultural and social change. Such questions are more likely to be studied qualitatively. The study of social movements and their effects has been especially important in relation to these wider definitions of politics and power.
Political sociology has also moved beyond methodological nationalism and analysed the role of non-governmental organizations, the diffusion of the nation-state throughout the Earth as a social construct, and the role of stateless entities in the modern world society. Contemporary political sociologists also study inter-state interactions and human rights.
Population and demography
Demographers or sociologists of population study the size, composition and change over time of a given population. Demographers study how these characteristics impact, or are impacted by, various social, economic or political systems. The study of population is also closely related to human ecology and environmental sociology, which studies a population's relationship with the surrounding environment and often overlaps with urban or rural sociology. Researchers in this field may study the movement of populations: transportation, migrations, diaspora, etc., which falls into the subfield known as mobilities studies and is closely related to human geography. Demographers may also study spread of disease within a given population or epidemiology.
Public sociology
Public sociology refers to an approach to the discipline which seeks to transcend the academy in order to engage with wider audiences. It is perhaps best understood as a style of sociology rather than a particular method, theory, or set of political values. This approach is primarily associated with Michael Burawoy who contrasted it with professional sociology, a form of academic sociology that is concerned primarily with addressing other professional sociologists. Public sociology is also part of the broader field of science communication or science journalism.
Race and ethnic relations
The sociology of race and of ethnic relations is the area of the discipline that studies the social, political, and economic relations between races and ethnicities at all levels of society. This area encompasses the study of racism, residential segregation, and other complex social processes between different racial and ethnic groups. This research frequently interacts with other areas of sociology such as stratification and social psychology, as well as with postcolonial theory. At the level of political policy, ethnic relations are discussed in terms of either assimilationism or multiculturalism. Anti-racism forms another style of policy, particularly popular in the 1960s and 1970s.
Religion
The sociology of religion concerns the practices, historical backgrounds, developments, universal themes and roles of religion in society. There is particular emphasis on the recurring role of religion in all societies and throughout recorded history. The sociology of religion is distinguished from the philosophy of religion in that sociologists do not set out to assess the validity of religious truth-claims, instead assuming what Peter L. Berger has described as a position of "methodological atheism". It may be said that the modern formal discipline of sociology began with the analysis of religion in Durkheim's 1897 study of suicide rates among Roman Catholic and Protestant populations. Max Weber published four major texts on religion in a context of economic sociology and social stratification: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1915), The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (1915), and Ancient Judaism (1920). Contemporary debates often centre on topics such as secularization, civil religion, the intersection of religion and economics and the role of religion in a context of globalization and multiculturalism.
Social change and development
The sociology of change and development attempts to understand how societies develop and how they can be changed. This includes studying many different aspects of society, for example demographic trends, political or technological trends, or changes in culture. Within this field, sociologists often use macrosociological methods or historical-comparative methods. In contemporary studies of social change, there are overlaps with international development or community development. However, most of the founders of sociology had theories of social change based on their study of history. For instance, Marx contended that the material circumstances of society ultimately caused the ideal or cultural aspects of society, while Weber argued that it was in fact the cultural mores of Protestantism that ushered in a transformation of material circumstances. In contrast to both, Durkheim argued that societies moved from simple to complex through a process of sociocultural evolution. Sociologists in this field also study processes of globalization and imperialism. Most notably, Immanuel Wallerstein extends Marx's theoretical frame to include large spans of time and the entire globe in what is known as world systems theory. Development sociology is also heavily influenced by post-colonialism. In recent years, Raewyn Connell issued a critique of the bias in sociological research towards countries in the Global North. She argues that this bias blinds sociologists to the lived experiences of the Global South, specifically, so-called, "Northern Theory" lacks an adequate theory of imperialism and colonialism.
There are many organizations studying social change, including the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations, and the Global Social Change Research Project.
Social networks
A social network is a social structure composed of individuals (or organizations) called "nodes", which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige. Social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals. An underlying theoretical assumption of social network analysis is that groups are not necessarily the building blocks of society: the approach is open to studying less-bounded social systems, from non-local communities to networks of exchange. Drawing theoretically from relational sociology, social network analysis avoids treating individuals (persons, organizations, states) as discrete units of analysis, it focuses instead on how the structure of ties affects and constitutes individuals and their relationships. In contrast to analyses that assume that socialization into norms determines behaviour, network analysis looks to see the extent to which the structure and composition of ties affect norms. On the other hand, recent research by Omar Lizardo also demonstrates that network ties are shaped and created by previously existing cultural tastes. Social network theory is usually defined in formal mathematics and may include integration of geographical data into sociomapping.
Social psychology
Sociological social psychology focuses on micro-scale social actions. This area may be described as adhering to "sociological miniaturism", examining whole societies through the study of individual thoughts and emotions as well as behaviour of small groups. One special concern to psychological sociologists is how to explain a variety of demographic, social, and cultural facts in terms of human social interaction. Some of the major topics in this field are social inequality, group dynamics, prejudice, aggression, social perception, group behaviour, social change, non-verbal behaviour, socialization, conformity, leadership, and social identity. Social psychology may be taught with psychological emphasis. In sociology, researchers in this field are the most prominent users of the experimental method (however, unlike their psychological counterparts, they also frequently employ other methodologies). Social psychology looks at social influences, as well as social perception and social interaction.
Stratification, poverty and inequality
Social stratification is the hierarchical arrangement of individuals into social classes, castes, and divisions within a society. Modern Western societies stratification traditionally relates to cultural and economic classes arranged in three main layers: upper class, middle class, and lower class, but each class may be further subdivided into smaller classes (e.g. occupational). Social stratification is interpreted in radically different ways within sociology. Proponents of structural functionalism suggest that, since the stratification of classes and castes is evident in all societies, hierarchy must be beneficial in stabilizing their existence. Conflict theorists, by contrast, critique the inaccessibility of resources and lack of social mobility in stratified societies.
Karl Marx distinguished social classes by their connection to the means of production in the capitalist system: the bourgeoisie own the means, but this effectively includes the proletariat itself as the workers can only sell their own labour power (forming the material base of the cultural superstructure). Max Weber critiqued Marxist economic determinism, arguing that social stratification is not based purely on economic inequalities, but on other status and power differentials (e.g. patriarchy). According to Weber, stratification may occur among at least three complex variables:
Property (class): A person's economic position in a society, based on birth and individual achievement. Weber differs from Marx in that he does not see this as the supreme factor in stratification. Weber noted how managers of corporations or industries control firms they do not own; Marx would have placed such a person in the proletariat.
Prestige (status): A person's prestige, or popularity in a society. This could be determined by the kind of job this person does or wealth.
Power (political party): A person's ability to get their way despite the resistance of others. For example, individuals in state jobs, such as an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or a member of the United States Congress, may hold little property or status but they still hold immense power.
Pierre Bourdieu provides a modern example in the concepts of cultural and symbolic capital. Theorists such as Ralf Dahrendorf have noted the tendency towards an enlarged middle-class in modern Western societies, particularly in relation to the necessity of an educated work force in technological or service-based economies. Perspectives concerning globalization, such as dependency theory, suggest this effect owes to the shift of workers to the developing countries.
Urban and rural sociology
Urban sociology involves the analysis of social life and human interaction in metropolitan areas. It is a discipline seeking to provide advice for planning and policy making. After the Industrial Revolution, works such as Georg Simmel's The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) focused on urbanization and the effect it had on alienation and anonymity. In the 1920s and 1930s The Chicago School produced a major body of theory on the nature of the city, important to both urban sociology and criminology, utilizing symbolic interactionism as a method of field research. Contemporary research is commonly placed in a context of globalization, for instance, in Saskia Sassen's study of the "global city". Rural sociology, by contrast, is the analysis of non-metropolitan areas. As agriculture and wilderness tend to be a more prominent social fact in rural regions, rural sociologists often overlap with environmental sociologists.
Community sociology
Often grouped with urban and rural sociology is that of community sociology or the sociology of community. Taking various communities—including online communities—as the unit of analysis, community sociologists study the origin and effects of different associations of people. For instance, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies distinguished between two types of human association: gemeinschaft (usually translated as "community") and gesellschaft ("society" or "association"). In his 1887 work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Tönnies argued that Gemeinschaft is perceived to be a tighter and more cohesive social entity, due to the presence of a "unity of will". The 'development' or 'health' of a community is also a central concern of community sociologists also engage in development sociology, exemplified by the literature surrounding the concept of social capital.
Other academic disciplines
Sociology overlaps with a variety of disciplines that study society, in particular social anthropology, political science, economics, social work and social philosophy. Many comparatively new fields such as communication studies, cultural studies, demography and literary theory, draw upon methods that originated in sociology. The terms "social science" and "social research" have both gained a degree of autonomy since their origination in classical sociology. The distinct field of social anthropology or anthroposociology is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and Commonwealth and much of Europe (France in particular), where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology (or under the relatively new designation of sociocultural anthropology).
Sociology and applied sociology are connected to the professional and academic discipline of social work. Both disciplines study social interactions, community and the effect of various systems (i.e. family, school, community, laws, political sphere) on the individual. However, social work is generally more focused on practical strategies to alleviate social dysfunctions; sociology in general provides a thorough examination of the root causes of these problems. For example, a sociologist might study why a community is plagued with poverty. The applied sociologist would be more focused on practical strategies on what needs to be done to alleviate this burden. The social worker would be focused on action; implementing theses strategies "directly" or "indirectly" by means of mental health therapy, counselling, advocacy, community organization or community mobilization.
Social anthropology is the branch of anthropology that studies how contemporary living human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology, like sociologists, investigate various facets of social organization. Traditionally, social anthropologists analyzed non-industrial and non-Western societies, whereas sociologists focused on industrialized societies in the Western world. In recent years, however, social anthropology has expanded its focus to modern Western societies, meaning that the two disciplines increasingly converge.
Sociocultural anthropology, which includes linguistic anthropology, is concerned with the problem of difference and similarity within and between human populations. The discipline arose concomitantly with the expansion of European colonial empires, and its practices and theories have been questioned and reformulated along with processes of decolonization. Such issues have re-emerged as transnational processes have challenged the centrality of the nation-state to theorizations about culture and power. New challenges have emerged as public debates about multiculturalism, and the increasing use of the culture concept outside of the academy and among peoples studied by anthropology. These times are not "business-as-usual" in the academy, in anthropology, or in the world, if ever there were such times.
Irving Louis Horowitz, in his The Decomposition of Sociology (1994), has argued that the discipline, while arriving from a "distinguished lineage and tradition", is in decline due to deeply ideological theory and a lack of relevance to policy making: "The decomposition of sociology began when this great tradition became subject to ideological thinking, and an inferior tradition surfaced in the wake of totalitarian triumphs." Furthermore: "A problem yet unmentioned is that sociology's malaise has left all the social sciences vulnerable to pure positivism—to an empiricism lacking any theoretical basis. Talented individuals who might, in an earlier time, have gone into sociology are seeking intellectual stimulation in business, law, the natural sciences, and even creative writing; this drains sociology of much needed potential." Horowitz cites the lack of a 'core discipline' as exacerbating the problem. Randall Collins, the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History journal, has voiced similar sentiments: "we have lost all coherence as a discipline, we are breaking up into a conglomerate of specialities, each going on its own way and with none too high regard for each other."
In 2007, The Times Higher Education Guide published a list of 'The most cited authors of books in the Humanities' (including philosophy and psychology). Seven of the top ten are listed as sociologists: Michel Foucault (1), Pierre Bourdieu (2), Anthony Giddens (5), Erving Goffman (6), Jürgen Habermas (7), Max Weber (8), and Bruno Latour (10).
Journals
The most highly ranked general journals which publish original research in the field of sociology are the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review. The Annual Review of Sociology, which publishes original review essays, is also highly ranked. Many other generalist and specialized journals exist.
See also
Bibliography of sociology
Critical juncture theory
Cultural theory
Engaged theory
Historic recurrence
History of the social sciences
List of sociologists
Outline of sociology
Political sociology
Post-industrial society
Social theory
Social psychology
Sociological Francoism
Notes
References
Citations
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<ref name="transformation325">Harriss, John. The Second Great Transformation? Capitalism at the End of the Twentieth Century in Allen, T. and Thomas, Alan (eds) Poverty and Development in the 21st Century', Oxford University Press, Oxford. p. 325.</ref>
}}
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Guide to the University of Chicago Department of Sociology Interviews 1972 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center
Guide to the University of Chicago Department of Sociology Records 1924-2001 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center
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The Nordic Sociological Association (NSA)
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Religious cosmology | Religious cosmology is an explanation of the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of the universe from a religious perspective. This may include beliefs on origin in the form of a creation myth, subsequent evolution, current organizational form and nature, and eventual fate or destiny. There are various traditions in religion or religious mythology asserting how and why everything is the way it is and the significance of it all. Religious cosmologies describe the spatial lay-out of the universe in terms of the world in which people typically dwell as well as other dimensions, such as the seven dimensions of religion; these are ritual, experiential and emotional, narrative and mythical, doctrinal, ethical, social, and material.
Religious mythologies may include descriptions of an act or process of creation by a creator deity or a larger pantheon of deities, explanations of the transformation of chaos into order, or the assertion that existence is a matter of endless cyclical transformations. Religious cosmology differs from a strictly scientific cosmology informed by contemporary astronomy, physics, and similar fields, and may differ in conceptualizations of the world's physical structure and place in the universe, its creation, and forecasts or predictions on its future.
The scope of religious cosmology is more inclusive than a strictly scientific cosmology (physical cosmology and quantum cosmology) in that religious cosmology is not limited to experiential observation, testing of hypotheses, and proposals of theories; for example, religious cosmology may explain why everything is the way it is or seems to be the way it is and prescribing what humans should do in context. Variations in religious cosmology include Zoroastrian cosmology, those such as from India Buddhism, Hindu, and Jain; the religious beliefs of China, Chinese Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, Japan's Shintoisim and the beliefs of the Abrahamic faiths, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Religious cosmologies have often developed into the formal logics of metaphysical systems, such as Platonism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Taoism, Kabbalah, Wuxing or the great chain of being.
Zoroastrian
In Zoroastrian cosmology, universe is the manifestation of a cosmic conflict between Existence and non-existence, Good and evil and light and darkness which spans over a period of 12000 years. It is subdivided into four equal periods of 3000 years each. The first period is known as Infinite Time. During this period the good and the evil remained in perfect balance in their respective spheres. For 3000 years Ahura Mazda dwelt in the region of light, while his opponent Ahirman or Angra Mainyu, the evil spirit, remained confined to the region of darkness. A great Void separated them both. At the end of the first period, Ahirman crossed the void and attacked Ahura Mazda. Knowing that the battle would continue forever, Ahura Mazda recited Ahuna Vairya, the most sacred hymn of Avesta and repelled him back. Having lost the battle, Angra Mainyu withdrew hastily into his dark world and remained there for another 3000 years. During this interlude, Ahura Mazda brings forth the entire creation. He creates the six Amesha Spentas or the Holy Immortals and several angel spirits or Yazatas. He brought forth the primeval Ox and the primeval man (Gayomart). Then he creates the material creation such as water, air, earth and the metals.
Biblical cosmology and Abrahamic faiths
The universe of the ancient Israelites was made up of a flat disc-shaped Earth floating on water, heaven above, underworld below. Humans inhabited Earth during life and the underworld after death, and the underworld was morally neutral; only in Hellenistic times (after c.330 BC) did Jews begin to adopt the Greek idea that it would be a place of punishment for misdeeds, and that the righteous would enjoy an afterlife in heaven. In this period too the older three-level cosmology was widely replaced by the Greek concept of a spherical Earth suspended in space at the centre of a number of concentric heavens. The belief that God created matter from nothing is called creatio ex nihilo (as opposed to creatio ex materia). It is the accepted orthodoxy of most denominations of Judaism and Christianity. Most denominations of Christianity and Judaism believe that a single, uncreated God was responsible for the creation of the cosmos.
In his 2023 apostolic exhortation, Laudate Deum, Pope Francis outlines several ways in which the human relationship with the created cosmos might be understood:
the world that surrounds us can be treated as "an object of exploitation, unbridled use and unlimited ambition" or "a mere 'setting' in which we can develop our lives";
the human being is extraneous, a foreign element capable only of harming the environment;
human beings "are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it". This is the interpretation he supports.
Islam teaches that God created the universe, including Earth's physical environment and human beings. The highest goal is to visualize the cosmos as a book of symbols for meditation and contemplation for spiritual upliftment or as a prison from which the human soul must escape to attain true freedom in the spiritual journey to God.
Indian
Buddhism
In Buddhism, like other Indian religions, there is no ultimate beginning nor final end to the universe. It considers all existence as eternal, and believes there is no creator god. Buddhism views the universe as impermanent and always in flux. This cosmology is the foundation of its Samsara theory, that evolved over time the mechanistic details on how the wheel of mundane existence works over the endless cycles of rebirth and redeath. In early Buddhist traditions, Saṃsāra cosmology consisted of five realms through which wheel of existence recycled. This included hells (niraya), hungry ghosts (pretas), animals (tiryak), humans (manushya), and gods (devas, heavenly). In latter traditions, this list grew to a list of six realms of rebirth, adding demi-gods (asuras). The "hungry ghost, heavenly, hellish realms" respectively formulate the ritual, literary and moral spheres of many contemporary Buddhist traditions.
According to Akira Sadakata, the Buddhist cosmology is far more complex and uses extraordinarily larger numbers than those found in Vedic and post-Vedic Hindu traditions. It also shares many ideas and concepts, such as those about Mount Meru. The Buddhist thought holds that the six cosmological realms are interconnected, and everyone cycles life after life, through these realms, because of a combination of ignorance, desires and purposeful karma, or ethical and unethical actions.
Hindu
The Hindu cosmology, like the Buddhist and Jain cosmology, considers all existence as cyclic. With its ancient roots, Hindu texts propose and discuss numerous cosmological theories. Hindu culture accepts this diversity in cosmological ideas and has lacked a single mandatory view point even in its oldest known Vedic scriptures, the Rigveda. Alternate theories include a universe cyclically created and destroyed by god, or goddess, or no creator at all, or a golden egg or womb (Hiranyagarbha), or self-created multitude of universes with enormous lengths and time scales. The Vedic literature includes a number of cosmology speculations, one of which questions the origin of the cosmos and is called the Nasadiya sukta:
{{quote|
<poem>
Neither being (sat) nor non-being was as yet. What was concealed?
And where? And in whose protection?…Who really knows?
Who can declare it? Whence was it born, and whence came this creation?
The devas (gods) were born later than this world's creation,
so who knows from where it came into existence? None can know from where
creation has arisen, and whether he has or has not produced it.
He who surveys it in the highest heavens,
He alone knows or perhaps He does not know."
</poem>
|Rig Veda 10. 129}}
Time is conceptualized as a cyclic Yuga with trillions of years. In some models, Mount Meru plays a central role.
Beyond its creation, Hindu cosmology posits divergent theories on the structure of the universe, from being 3 lokas to 12 lokas (worlds) which play a part in its theories about rebirth, samsara and karma.
The complex cosmological speculations found in Hinduism and other Indian religions, states Bolton, is not unique and are also found in Greek, Roman, Irish and Babylonian mythologies, where each age becomes more sinful and of suffering.
Jain
Jain cosmology considers the loka, or universe, as an uncreated entity, existing since infinity, having no beginning or an end. Jain texts describe the shape of the universe as similar to a man standing with legs apart and arm resting on his waist. This Universe, according to Jainism, is narrow at the top, broad at the middle and once again becomes broad at the bottom.
of Ācārya Jinasena is famous for this quote:
Chinese
There is a "primordial universe" Wuji (philosophy), and Hongjun Laozu, water or qi.道教五方三界諸天「氣數」說探源 It transformed into Taiji then multiplied into everything known as the Wuxing.太極初探 The Pangu legend tells a formless chaos coalesced into a cosmic egg. Pangu emerged (or woke up) and separated Yin from Yang with a swing of his giant axe, creating the Earth (murky Yin) and the Sky (clear Yang). To keep them separated, Pangu stood between them and pushed up the Sky. After Pangu died, he became everything.
Gnosticism
Gnostic teachings were contemporary with those of Neoplatonism. Gnosticism is an imprecise label, covering monistic as well as dualistic conceptions. Usually the higher worlds of Light, called the Pleroma or "fullness", are radically distinct from the lower world of Matter. The emanation of the Pleroma and its godheads (called Aeons'') is described in detail in the various Gnostic tracts, as is the pre-creation crisis (a cosmic equivalent to the "fall" in Christian thought) from which the material world comes about, and the way that the divine spark can attain salvation.
Serer religion
Serer religion posits that, Roog, the creator deity, is the point of departure and conclusion. As farming people, trees play an important role in Serer religious cosmology and creation mythology. The Serer high priests and priestesses (the Saltigues) chart the star Sirius, known as "Yoonir" in the Serer language and some of the Cangin languages. This star enables them to give accurate information as to when Serer farmers should start planting seeds among other things relevant to Serer lives and Serer country. "Yoonir" is the symbol of the universe in Serer cosmology and creation mythology.
A similar set of beliefs related also to Sirius has been observed among Dogon people of Mali.
See also
References
Bibliography
External links
Esotericism
Cosmology | 0.785239 | 0.991451 | 0.778526 |
History of religion | The history of religion refers to the written record of human religious feelings, thoughts, and ideas. This period of religious history begins with the invention of writing about 5,200 years ago (3200 BCE). The prehistory of religion involves the study of religious beliefs that existed prior to the advent of written records. One can also study comparative religious chronology through a timeline of religion, or the interrelationships and historical diversification of religious ideologies through the use of evolutionary philosophy and broad comparativism. Writing played a major role in standardizing religious texts regardless of time or location and making easier the memorization of prayers and divine rules.
The concept of "religion" was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written.
The word religion as used in the 21st century does not have an obvious pre-colonial translation into non-European languages. The anthropologist Daniel Dubuisson writes that "what the West and the history of religions in its wake have objectified under the name 'religion' is ... something quite unique, which could be appropriate only to itself and its own history".
History of study
The school of religious history called the , a late 19th-century German school of thought, originated the systematic study of religion as a socio-cultural phenomenon. It depicted religion as evolving with human culture, from polytheism to monotheism.
The emerged at a time when scholarly study of the Bible and of church history flourished in Germany and elsewhere (see higher criticism, also called the historical-critical method). The study of religion is important: religion and similar concepts have often shaped civilizations' law and moral codes, social structure, art and music.
In order to better understand the origin and current diversity of religious belief systems throughout the world, recent studies have attempted to focus on historical interrelationships and diversification of all major organized religions, applying modern evolutionary philosophy to the comparative analysis of putative ideological groups. These studies take an agnostic, pluralistic approach in the hope of moving beyond chauvinistic cultural tribalism, which is increasingly interfering with our ability to understand "other" cultures and address growing global challenges.
Origin
The earliest archeological evidence interpreted by some as suggestive of the emergence of religious ideas dates back several hundred thousand years, to the Middle and Lower Paleolithic periods: some archaeologists conclude that the apparently intentional burial of archaic humans, Neanderthals and even Homo naledi as early as 300,000 years ago is proof that religious ideas already existed, but such a connection is entirely conjectural. Other evidence that some infer as indicative of religious ideas includes symbolic artifacts from Middle Stone Age sites in Africa. However, the interpretation of early paleolithic artifacts, with regard to how they relate to religious ideas, remains controversial . Archeological evidence from more recent periods is less controversial. Scientists generally interpret a number of artifacts from the Upper Paleolithic (50,000–13,000 BCE) as representing religious ideas. Examples of Upper Paleolithic remains that some associate with religious beliefs include the lion man, the Venus figurines, and the elaborate ritual burial from Sungir.
In the 19th century, researchers proposed various theories regarding the origin of religion, challenging earlier claims of a Christianity-like urreligion. Early theorists, such as Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), emphasized the concept of animism, while archaeologist John Lubbock (1834–1913) used the term "fetishism". Meanwhile, the religious scholar Max Müller (1823–1900) theorized that religion began in hedonism and the folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831–1880) suggested that religion began in "naturalism" – by which he meant mythological explanations for natural events. All of these theories have been widely criticized since then; there is no broad consensus regarding the origin of religion.
Pre-pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) Göbekli Tepe, the oldest potentially religious site yet discovered anywhere includes circles of erected massive T-shaped stone pillars, the world's oldest known megaliths decorated with abstract, enigmatic pictograms and carved-animal reliefs. The site, near the home place of original wild wheat, was built before the so-called Neolithic Revolution, i.e., the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry around 9000 BCE. But the construction of Göbekli Tepe implies organization of an advanced order not hitherto associated with Paleolithic, PPNA, or PPNB societies. The site, abandoned around the time the first agricultural societies started, is still being excavated and analyzed, and thus might shed light on the significance it had, if any, for the religions of older, foraging communities, as well as for the general history of religions.
The Pyramid Texts from ancient Egypt, the oldest known religious texts in the world, date to between 2400 and 2300 BCE.
The earliest records of Indian religion are the Vedas, composed during the Vedic Period.
Surviving early copies of religious texts include:
The Upanishads, some of which date to the mid-first millennium BCE.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, representing fragmentary texts of the Hebrew Tanakh.
Complete Hebrew texts, also of the Tanakh, but translated into the Greek language (Septuagint 300–200 BCE), were in wide use by the early 1st century CE.
The Zoroastrian Avesta, from a Sassanian-era master copy.
Axial age
Some historians have labelled the period from 900 to 200 BCE as the "axial age", a term coined by German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). According to Jaspers, in this era of history "the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently... And these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today." Intellectual historian Peter Watson has summarized this period as the foundation time of many of humanity's most influential philosophical traditions, including monotheism in Persia and Canaan, Platonism in Greece, Buddhism and Jainism in India, and Confucianism and Taoism in China. These ideas would become institutionalized in time – note for example Ashoka's role in the spread of Buddhism, or the role of Neoplatonic philosophy in Christianity at its foundation.
The historical roots of Jainism in India date back to the 9th century BCE with the rise of Parshvanatha and his non-violent philosophy.
Middle Ages
World religions of the present day established themselves throughout Eurasia during the Middle Ages by:
Christianization of the Western world
Buddhist missions to East Asia
the decline of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent
the spread of Islam throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa and parts of Europe and India
During the Middle Ages, Muslims came into conflict with Zoroastrians during the Muslim conquest of Persia (633–654); Christians fought against Muslims during the Arab–Byzantine wars (7th to 11th centuries), the Crusades (1095 onward), the Reconquista (718–1492), the Ottoman wars in Europe (13th century onwards) and the Inquisition; Shamanism was in conflict with Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims and Christians during the Mongol invasions and conquests (1206–1337); and Muslims clashed with Hindus and Sikhs during the Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent (8th to 16th centuries).
Many medieval religious movements continued to emphasize mysticism, such as the Cathars and related movements in the West, the Jews in Spain (see Zohar), the Bhakti movement in India and Sufism in Islam. Monotheism and related mysticisms reached definite forms in Christian Christology and in Islamic Tawhid. Hindu monotheist notions of Brahman likewise reached their classical form with the teaching of Adi Shankara (788–820).
Modern Ages
From the 15th century to the 19th century, European colonisation resulted in the spread of Christianity to Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas, Australia and the Philippines. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century played a major role in the rapid spread of the Protestant Reformation under leaders such as Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564). Wars of religion broke out, culminating in the Thirty Years' War which ravaged Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. The 18th century saw the beginning of secularisation in Europe, a trend which gained momentum after the French Revolution broke out in 1789. By the late 20th century, religion had declined in most of Europe.
See also
Growth of religion
Historiography of religion
Religion and politics
Christianity and politics
Judaism and politics
Political aspects of Islam
Women and religion
Women as theological figures
List of founders of religious traditions
List of religions and spiritual traditions
List of religious movements that began in the United States
Shamanism and ancestor worship
Prehistoric religion
Shamanism
Animism
Ancestor worship
Tribal religion
Panentheism
Sikhism
Neoplatonism
Eastern Orthodoxy
Polytheism
Ancient Near Eastern religion, Egyptian mythology
Ancient Greek religion, Ancient Roman religion
Germanic paganism, Finnish Paganism, Norse paganism
Maya religion, Inca religion, Aztec religion
Neopaganism, Polytheistic reconstructionism
Monotheism
Aten
Baháʼí Faith
History of the Baháʼí Faith
Judaism
History of Mandaeism
Neoplatonism
History of Christianity
History of the Catholic Church
History of Protestantism
History of Jehovah's Witnesses
Mormonism
History of the Latter Day Saint movement
History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
History of Islam
Zoroastrianism
Monism
History of Buddhism
History of Jainism
History of Hinduism
Dualism
Gnosticism
New religious movements
Rastafari movement
History of Wicca
Timeline of Scientology
Adventism
Jehovah's Witnesses
Mormonism
Pentecostalism
Bábism
Bahá'í Faith
Spiritualism
History of Spiritism
Thelema
Ahmadiyya
Nation of Islam
References
Citations
Sources
Further reading
Armstrong, Karen. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1994) excerpt and text search
Armstrong, Karen. Islam: A Short History (2002) excerpt and text search
Bowker, John Westerdale, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (2007) excerpt and text search 1126pp
Carus, Paul. The history of the devil and the idea of evil: from the earliest times to the present day (1899) full text
Eliade, Mircea, and Joan P. Culianu. The HarperCollins Concise Guide to World Religion: The A-to-Z Encyclopedia of All the Major Religious Traditions (1999) covers 33 principal religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Jainism, Judaism, Islam, Shinto, Shamanism, Taoism, South American religions, Baltic and Slavic religions, Confucianism, and the religions of Africa and Oceania.
Eliade, Mircea ed. Encyclopedia of Religion (16 vol. 1986; 2nd ed 15 vol. 2005; online at Gale Virtual Reference Library). 3300 articles in 15,000 pages by 2000 experts.
Ellwood, Robert S. and Gregory D. Alles. The Encyclopedia of World Religions (2007), p 528; for middle schools
Gilley, Sheridan; Shiels, W. J. History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present (1994), p. 590.
Lacroix, Paul. Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance (London: Bickers & Son, 1870)
Marshall, Peter. "(Re)defining the English Reformation," Journal of British Studies, July 2009, Vol. 48#3 pp 564–586
Rüpke, Jörg, Religion, EGO – European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, 2020, retrieved: March 8, 2021.
Schultz, Kevin M.; Harvey, Paul. "Everywhere and Nowhere: Recent Trends in American Religious History and Historiography," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, March 2010, Vol. 78#1 pp. 129–162
Wilson, John F. Religion and the American Nation: Historiography and History (2003) p. 119.
External links
Historyofreligions.com
The history of religious and philosophical ideas, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas
History of Religion as flash animation
The history and origins of world religions depicted as a navigable tree
Religious studies | 0.78036 | 0.997415 | 0.778343 |
Folk religion | In religious studies and folkloristics, folk religion, traditional religion, or vernacular religion comprises various forms and expressions of religion that are distinct from the official doctrines and practices of organized religion. The precise definition of folk religion varies among scholars. Sometimes also termed popular belief, it consists of ethnic or regional religious customs under the umbrella of a religion; but outside official doctrine and practices.
The term "folk religion" is generally held to encompass two related but separate subjects. The first is the religious dimension of folk culture, or the folk-cultural dimensions of religion. The second refers to the study of syncretism between two cultures with different stages of formal expression, such as the melange of African folk beliefs and Roman Catholicism that led to the development of Vodun and Santería, and similar mixtures of formal religions with folk cultures. In China, folk Protestantism had its origins with the Taiping Rebellion.
Chinese folk religion, folk Christianity, folk Hinduism, and folk Islam are examples of folk religion associated with major religions. The term is also used, especially by the clergy of the faiths involved, to describe the desire of people who otherwise infrequently attend religious worship, do not belong to a church or similar religious society, and who have not made a formal profession of faith in a particular creed, to have religious weddings or funerals, or (among Christians) to have their children baptised.
Definition
In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, John Bowker characterized "folk religion" as either "religion which occurs in small, local communities which does not adhere to the norms of large systems" or "the appropriation of religious beliefs and practices at a popular level."
Don Yoder argued that there were five separate ways of defining folk religion. The first was a perspective rooted in a cultural evolutionary framework which understood folk religion as representing the survivals of older forms of religion; in this, it would constitute "the survivals, in an official religious context, of beliefs and behaviour inherited from earlier stages of the culture's development". This definition would view folk religion in Catholic Europe as the survivals of pre-Christian religion and the folk religion in Protestant Europe as the survivals of Medieval Catholicism. The second definition identified by Yoder was the view that folk religion represented the mixture of an official religion with forms of ethnic religion; this was employed to explain the place of folk religion in the syncretic belief systems of the Americas, where Christianity had blended with the religions of indigenous American and African communities.
Yoder's third definition was that often employed within folkloristics, which held that folk religion was "the interaction of belief, ritual, custom, and mythology in traditional societies", representing that which was often pejoratively characterised as superstition. The fourth definition provided by Yoder stated that folk religion represented the "folk interpretation and expression of religion". Noting that this definition would not encompass beliefs that were largely unconnected from organised religion, such as in witchcraft, he therefore altered this definition by including the concept of "folk religiosity", thereby defining folk religion as "the deposit in culture of folk religiosity, the full range of folk attitudes to religion". His fifth and final definition represented a "practical working definition" that combined elements from these various other definitions. Thus, he summarized folk religion as "the totality of all those views and practices of religion that exist among the people apart from and alongside the strictly theological and liturgical forms of the official religion".
Yoder described "folk religion" as existing "in a complex society in relation to and in tension with the organized religion(s) of that society. Its relatively unorganized character differentiates it from organized religion".
Alternately, the sociologist of religion Matthias Zic Varul defined "folk religion" as "the relatively un-reflected aspect of ordinary practices and beliefs that are oriented towards, or productive of, something beyond the immediate here-and-now: everyday transcendence".
In sociology, folk religion is often contrasted with elite religion. Folk religion is defined as the beliefs, practices, rituals and symbols originating from sources other than the religion's leadership. Folk religion in many instances is tolerated by the religion's leadership, although they may consider it an error. A similar concept is lived religion, the study of religion as practiced by believers.
The term folk religion came to be increasingly rejected in the 1990s and 2000s by scholars seeking more precise terminology.
Problems with the term folk religion
Yoder noted that one problem with the use of the term folk religion was that it did not fit into the work of those scholars who used the term "religion" in reference solely to organized religion. He highlighted the example of the prominent sociologist of religion Émile Durkheim, who insisted that religion was organized in order to contrast it with magic. Yoder noted that scholars adopting these perspectives often preferred the term "folk belief" over "folk religion".
A second problem with the use of the term folk religion that Yoder highlighted was that some scholars, particularly those operating in the sociology of religion, used the term as a synonym for ethnic religion (which is alternately known as national religion or tribal religion), meaning a religion closely tied to a particular ethnic or national group and is thus contrasted with a "universal religion" which cuts across ethnic and national boundaries. Among the scholars to have adopted this use of terminology are E. Wilbur Bock.
The folklorist Leonard Norman Primiano argued that the use of the term folk religion, as well as related terms like "popular religion" and "unofficial religion", by scholars, does an extreme disservice to the forms of religiosity that scholars are examining, because – in his opinion – such terms are "residualistic, [and] derogatory". He argued that using such terminology implies that there is "a pure element" to religion "which is in some way transformed, even contaminated, by its exposure to human communities". As a corrective, he suggested that scholars use "vernacular religion" as an alternative. Defining this term, Primiano stated that "vernacular religion" is, "by definition, religion as it is lived: as human beings encounter, understand, interpret, and practice it. Since religion inherently involves interpretation, it is impossible for the religion of an individual not to be vernacular".
Kapaló was critical of this approach, deeming it mistaken and arguing that switching from "folk religion" to "vernacular religion" results in the scholar "picking up a different selection of things from the world". He cautioned that both terms carried an "ideological and semantic load" and warned scholars to pay attention to the associations that each word had.
Historical study
In Europe the study of "folk religion" emerged from the study of religiöse Volkskunde, a German term which was used in reference to "the religious dimension of folk-culture, or the folk-cultural dimension of religion". This term was first employed by a German Lutheran preacher, Paul Drews, in a 1901 article that he published which was titled "Religiöse Volkskunde, eine Aufgabe der praktischen Theologie". This article was designed to be read by young Lutheran preachers leaving the seminary, to equip them for the popular variants of Lutheranism that they would encounter among their congregations and which would differ from the official, doctrinal Lutheranism that they had been accustomed to. Although developing within a religious environment, the term came to be adopted by German academics in the field of folkloristics. During the 1920s and 1930s, theoretical studies of religiöse Volkskunde had been produced by the folklorists Josef Weigert, Werner Boette, and Max Rumpf, all of whom had focused on religiosity within German peasant communities. Over the coming decades, Georg Schreiber established an Institut für religiöse Volkskund in Munich while a similar department was established in Salzburg by Hanns Koren. Other prominent academics involved in the study of the phenomenon were Heinrich Schauert and Rudolf Kriss, the latter of whom collected one of the largest collections of folk-religious art and material culture in Europe, later housed in Munich's Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. Throughout the 20th century, many studies were made of folk religion in Europe, paying particular attention to such subjects as pilgrimage and the use of shrines.
In the Americas, the study of folk religion developed among cultural anthropologists studying the syncretistic cultures of the Caribbean and Latin America. The pioneer in this field was Robert Redfield, whose 1930 book Tepoztlán: A Mexican Village contrasted and examined the relationship between "folk religion" and "official religion" in a peasant community. Yoder later noted that although the earliest known usage of the term "folk religion" in the English language was unknown, it probably developed as a translation of the German Volksreligion. One of the earliest prominent usages of the term was in the title of Joshua Trachtenberg's 1939 work Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion. The term also gained increasing usage within the academic field of comparative religion, appearing in the titles of Ichiro Hori's Folk Religion in Japan, Martin Nilsson's Greek Folk Religion, and Charles Leslie's reader, the Anthropology of Folk Religion. Courses on the study of folk religion came to be taught at various universities in the United States, such as John Messenger's at Indiana University and Don Yoder's at the University of Pennsylvania.
Although the subject of folk religion fell within the remit of scholars operating in both folkloristics and religious studies, by 1974 Yoder noted that U.S.-based academics in the latter continued to largely ignore it, instead focusing on the study of theology and institutionalised religion; he contrasted this with the situation in Europe, where historians of religion had devoted much time to studying folk religiosity. He also lamented that many U.S.-based folklorists also neglected the subject of religion because it did not fit within the standard genre-based system for cataloguing folklore.
Chinese folk religion
Chinese folk religion is one of the labels used to describe the collection of ethnic religious traditions which have historically comprised the predominant belief system in China and among Han Chinese ethnic groups up to the present day. The devotion includes the veneration of forces of nature and ancestors, exorcism of demonic forces, and a belief in the rational order of nature, balance in the universe and reality that can be influenced by human beings and their rulers, as well as spirits and gods. Worship is devoted to a hierarchy of gods and immortals, who can be deities of phenomena, of human behaviour, or progenitors of lineages. Stories regarding some of these gods are collected into the body of Chinese mythology. By the 11th century (Song period), these practices had been blended with Buddhist ideas of karma (one's own doing) and rebirth, and Taoist teachings about hierarchies of deities, to form the popular religious system which has lasted in many ways until the present day.
Chinese folk religion is sometimes categorized with Taoism, since over the centuries institutional Taoism has been attempting to assimilate or administer local religions. More accurately, Taoism emerged from and overlaps with folk religion and Chinese philosophy. Chinese folk religion is sometimes seen as a constituent part of Chinese traditional religion, but more often, the two are regarded as synonymous. With around 454 million adherents, or about 6.6% of the world population, Chinese folk religion is one of the major religious traditions in the world. In the People's Republic of China, more than 30% of the population follows Chinese popular religion or Taoism.
Despite being heavily suppressed during the last two centuries, from the Taiping Rebellion to the Cultural Revolution, it is currently experiencing a modern revival in both Mainland China and Taiwan. Various forms have received support by the Government of the People's Republic of China, such as Mazuism in Southern China (officially about 160 million Chinese people are worshippers of Mazu), Huangdi worship, Black Dragon worship in Shaanxi, and Cai Shen worship.
The term Shenism was first published by AJA Elliot in 1955 to describe Chinese folk religion in Southeast Asia.
Indigenous Philippine folk religions
Indigenous Philippine folk religions are the distinct native religions of various ethnic groups in the Philippines, where most follow belief systems in line with animism. Generally, these indigenous folk religions are referred to as Anitism or Bathalism. Some of these beliefs stem from pre-Christian religions that were especially influenced by Hinduism and were regarded by the Spanish as "myths" and "superstitions" in an effort to de-legitimize legitimate precolonial beliefs by forcefully replacing those native beliefs with colonial Catholic Christian myths and superstitions. Today, some of these precolonial beliefs are still held by Filipinos, especially in the provinces.
Folk Islam
Folk Islam is an umbrella term used to collectively describe forms of Islam that incorporate native folk beliefs and practices. Folk Islam has been described as the Islam of the "urban poor, country people, and tribes", in contrast to orthodox or "high" Islam (Gellner, 1992). Sufi concepts, which are found in orthodox Islam as well, and perennialism and syncretism are often integrated into Folk Islam.
Folk Christianity
Folk Christianity is defined differently by various scholars. Christianity as most people live it – a term used to "overcome the division of beliefs into mainstream and heterodox",
Christianity as impacted by superstition as practiced by certain geographical Christian groups, and Christianity defined "in cultural terms without reference to the theologies and histories."
Folk Judaism
In one of the first major academic works on the subject, titled Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion, Joshua Trachtenberg provided a definition of Jewish folk religion as consisting of ideas and practices that, whilst not meeting with the approval of religious leaders, enjoyed wide popularity such that they must be included in what he termed the field of religion. This included unorthodox beliefs about demons and angels, and magical practices.
Later studies have emphasized the significance of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem to the many Jewish folk customs linked to mourning and in particular to the belief in hibbut ha-qever (torture of the grave) a belief that the dead are tortured in their grave for three days after burial by demons until they remember their names. This idea began with early eschatological aggadah and was then further developed by the kabbalists.
Raphael Patai has been acknowledged as one of the first to utilize anthropology to study Jewish folk religion. In particular he has drawn attention to the important role of the female divine element, which he sees in the goddess Asherah, the Shekhinah, the Matronit, and Lilith.
Writer Stephen Sharot has stated that Jewish popular religion in common with other forms of folk religion, has a focus on the apotropaic, or thaumaturgical, i.e. it is used to assist in protecting the individual from sickness, and misfortune. He emphasizes that while Rabbinical Judaism dealt with orthodox Jewish ritual, and Halakha, magicians claimed to use unorthodox magical rituals to help people in everyday life. He points to the example of a relatively professionalised type of magician being the Baal Shem of Poland, who beginning in the 16th century thrived with the popularity of practical Kabbalah in the 18th century. These ba'alei shem promised to use their knowledge of the names of god, and the angels, along with exorcism, chiromancy, and herbal medicine to bring harm to enemies, and success in areas of social life such as marriage, and childbirth.
Charles Liebman has written that the essence of the folk religion of American Jews is their social ties to one another, illustrated by the finding that religious practices that would prevent social integration – such as a strict interpretation of dietary laws and the Sabbath – have been abandoned, whilst the practices that are followed – such as the Passover Seder, social rites of passage, and the High Holy Days – are ones that strengthen Jewish family and community integration. Liebman described the rituals and beliefs of contemporary Jewish folk religion in his works, The Ambivalent American Jew (1973) and American Jewry: Identity and Affiliation.
Folk Hinduism
June McDaniel (2007) classifies Hinduism into six major kinds and numerous minor kinds, in order to understand the expression of emotions among the Hindus. According to McDaniel, one of the major kinds is Folk Hinduism, based on local ethnic traditions and tribal cults of local deities and is the oldest, non-literate system of Indian religions. Folk Hinduism involves worship of deities which are not found in Hindu scriptures. It involves worship of Gramadevata (village deity), Kuladevata (household deity) and local deities. It is a folk religion, polytheist and animistic belief based on locality. These religions have their own priests, who worship regional deities.
During the 19th century, scholars had divided Hinduism and Brahmanism. Brahmanism was referred to as an intellectual, classical tradition based on Sanskrit scriptures, while Hinduism was associated with superstitious folk tradition. The folk tradition refers to the aspects of the Hindu tradition that exist in tension with the Sanskritic tradition based on textual authority. According to M. N. Srinivas (1976), folk Hinduism is relevant in the urban context, but it is neglected in ethnographic studies due to its negative connotations with folk (rural masses, illiterate). According to Chris Fuller (1994), popular Hinduism is not degenerate textual Hinduism in light of ethnographic evidence, although the category of folk Hinduism remains tenuous. According to Michael Witzel (1998), the folk religion is the religion of Prakrit speaking and Dravidian speaking lower caste while the Vedic Hinduism which comprises Vedas and Upanishads is the religion of Sanskrit speaking upper caste. According to Asko Parpola (2015), the folk village Hinduism is surviving from pre-rig vedic Indo-Aryan times and Indus valley culture.
See also
References
Sources
Further reading
Allen, Catherine. The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989; second edition, 2002.
Badone, Ellen, ed. Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Bastide, Roger. The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations. Trans. by Helen Sebba. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Blackburn, Stuart H. Death and Deification: Folk Cults in Hinduism, History of Religions (1985).
Brintnal, Douglas. Revolt against the Dead: The Modernization of a Mayan Community in the Highlands of Guatemala. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979.
Christian, William A., Jr. Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Gellner, David N. Hinduism. None, one or many?, Social Anthropology (2004), 12: 367–371 Cambridge University* Johnson, Paul Christopher. Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Gorshunova, Olga V. (2008). Svjashennye derevja Khodzhi Barora…, ( Sacred Trees of Khodzhi Baror: Phytolatry and the Cult of Female Deity in Central Asia) in Etnoragraficheskoe Obozrenie, No. 1, pp. 71–82. ISSN 0869-5415. .
Kononenko, Natalie "Vernacular religion on the prairies: negotiating a place for the unquiet dead," Canadian Slavonic Papers 60, no. 1-2 (2018)
Nutini, Hugo. Ritual Kinship: Ideological and Structural Integration of the Compadrazgo System in Rural Tlaxcala. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Nutini, Hugo. Todos Santos in Rural Tlaxcala: A Syncretic, Expressive, and Symbolic Analysis of the Cult of the Dead. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Panchenko, Aleksandr. ‘Popular Orthodoxy’ and identity in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia , Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities. Ed. by Mark Bassin and Catriona Kelly. Cambridge, 2012, pp. 321–340
Sinha, Vineeta. Problematizing Received Categories: Revisiting ‘Folk Hinduism’ and ‘Sanskritization’, Current Sociology, Vol. 54, No. 1, 98–111 (2006)
Sinha, Vineeta. Persistence of ‘Folk Hinduism’ in Malaysia and Singapore, Australian Religion Studies Review Vol. 18 No. 2 (Nov 2005):211–234
Stuart H. Blackburn, Inside the Drama-House: Rama Stories and Shadow Puppets in South India, UCP (1996), ch. 3: " Ambivalent Accommodations: Bhakti and Folk Hinduism".
Taylor, Lawrence J. Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
External links
Folk Christianity in the Philippines
"Myths over Miami" : an account of the folk religion of children living in homeless shelters in Miami, circa 1997.
Anthropology of religion
Religious practices | 0.779271 | 0.998318 | 0.77796 |
Agnostic theism | Agnostic theism, agnostotheism, or agnostitheism is the philosophical view that encompasses both theism and agnosticism. An agnostic theist believes in the existence of one or more gods, but regards the basis of this proposition as unknown or inherently unknowable. The agnostic theist may also or alternatively be agnostic regarding the properties of the god or gods that they believe in.
Views of agnostic theism
There are numerous beliefs that can be included in agnostic theism, such as fideism, the doctrine that knowledge depends on faith or revelation; not all agnostic theists are fideists. Since agnosticism is in the philosophical rather than religious sense an epistemological position on knowledge regarding the divine and does not forbid belief in the existence of one or more deities, it is considered to be compatible with both atheistic and theistic positions.
The classical philosophical understanding of knowledge is that knowledge is justified true belief. The founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl, may have well exemplified this definition. Seidner expands upon this example and stresses Frankl's characterization of unconscious. Agnostic theism could be interpreted as an admission that it is not possible to justify one's belief in a god sufficiently for it to be considered known. This may be because they consider faith a requirement of their religion, or because of the influence of plausible-seeming scientific or philosophical criticism.
Christian agnostics practice a distinct form of agnosticism that applies only to the attributes of the Christian god. They hold that it is difficult or impossible to be sure of anything beyond the basic tenets of the Christian faith. They believe that the Christian god exists, that Jesus has a special relationship with him and is in some way divine, and that God might perhaps be worshipped. This belief system has deep roots in Judaism and the early days of the Christian Church.
See also
Agnostic atheism
Christian agnosticism
Cosmological argument
Deism
Doubt: Philosophy and ethics
Epistemology: Belief
Faith
Fideism
Ietsism
Ignosticism
Negative theology
Numinous
Secular theology
Sola fide
Truth
Unitarian Universalism
Unknown God
References
External links
Epistemology - from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
AGNOSTICISM - from Dictionary of the History of Ideas
Agnosticism
Theism
Philosophy of religion | 0.783327 | 0.993012 | 0.777853 |
Pluriculturalism | Pluriculturalism is an approach to the self and others as complex rich beings which act and react from the perspective of multiple identifications and experiences which combine to make up their pluricultural repertoire. Identity or identities are the by-products of experiences in different cultures and with people with different cultural repertoires. As an effect, multiple identifications create a unique personality instead of or more than a static identity. An individual's pluriculturalism includes their own cultural diversity and their awareness and experience with the cultural diversity of others. It can be influenced by their job or occupational trajectory, geographic location, family history and mobility, leisure or occupational travel, personal interests or experience with media. The term pluricultural competence is a consequence of the idea of plurilingualism. There is a distinction between pluriculturalism and multiculturalism.
Spain has been referred to as a pluricultural country, due to its nationalisms and regionalisms.
See also
Multiculturalism
Cultural diversity
Interculturalism
Intercultural communication
Polyethnicity
References
Identity politics
Multiculturalism
Social theories
Sociology of culture | 0.79042 | 0.98374 | 0.777568 |
Human science | Human science (or human sciences in the plural) studies the philosophical, biological, social, justice, and cultural aspects of human life. Human science aims to expand the understanding of the human world through a broad interdisciplinary approach. It encompasses a wide range of fields - including history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, justice studies, evolutionary biology, biochemistry, neurosciences, folkloristics, and anthropology. It is the study and interpretation of the experiences, activities, constructs, and artifacts associated with human beings. The study of human sciences attempts to expand and enlighten the human being's knowledge of its existence, its interrelationship with other species and systems, and the development of artifacts to perpetuate the human expression and thought. It is the study of human phenomena. The study of the human experience is historical and current in nature. It requires the evaluation and interpretation of the historic human experience and the analysis of current human activity to gain an understanding of human phenomena and to project the outlines of human evolution. Human science is an objective, informed critique of human existence and how it relates to reality.Underlying human science is the relationship between various humanistic modes of inquiry within fields such as history, sociology, folkloristics, anthropology, and economics and advances in such things as genetics, evolutionary biology, and the social sciences for the purpose of understanding our lives in a rapidly changing world. Its use of an empirical methodology that encompasses psychological experience in contrasts with the purely positivistic approach typical of the natural sciences which exceeds all methods not based solely on sensory observations. Modern approaches in the human sciences integrate an understanding of human structure, function on and adaptation with a broader exploration of what it means to be human. The term is also used to distinguish not only the content of a field of study from that of the natural science, but also its methodology.
Meaning of 'science'
Ambiguity and confusion regarding the usage of the terms 'science', 'empirical science', and 'scientific method' have complicated the usage of the term 'human science' with respect to human activities. The term 'science' is derived from the Latin scientia, meaning 'knowledge'. 'Science' may be appropriately used to refer to any branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged to show the operation of general laws.
However, according to positivists, the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, which comes from the positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific methods the application of knowledge, or mathematics. As a result of the positivist influence, the term science is frequently employed as a synonym for empirical science. Empirical science is knowledge based on the scientific method, a systematic approach to verification of knowledge first developed for dealing with natural physical phenomena and emphasizing the importance of experience based on sensory observation. However, even with regard to the natural sciences, significant differences exist among scientists and philosophers of science with regard to what constitutes valid scientific method—for example, evolutionary biology, geology and astronomy, studying events that cannot be repeated, can use the method of historical narratives. More recently, usage of the term has been extended to the study of human social phenomena. Thus, natural and social sciences are commonly classified as science, whereas the study of classics, languages, literature, music, philosophy, history, religion, and the visual and performing arts are referred to as the humanities. Ambiguity with respect to the meaning of the term science is aggravated by the widespread use of the term formal science with reference to any one of several sciences that is predominantly concerned with abstract form that cannot be validated by physical experience through the senses, such as logic, mathematics, and the theoretical branches of computer science, information theory, and statistics.
History
The phrase 'human science' in English was used during the 17th-century scientific revolution, for example by Theophilus Gale, to draw a distinction between supernatural knowledge (divine science) and study by humans (human science). John Locke also uses 'human science' to mean knowledge produced by people, but without the distinction. By the 20th century, this latter meaning was used at the same time as 'sciences that make human beings the topic of research'.
Early development
The term "moral science" was used by David Hume (1711–1776) in his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals to refer to the systematic study of human nature and relationships. Hume wished to establish a "science of human nature" based upon empirical phenomena, and excluding all that does not arise from observation. Rejecting teleological, theological and metaphysical explanations, Hume sought to develop an essentially descriptive methodology; phenomena were to be precisely characterized. He emphasized the necessity of carefully explicating the cognitive content of ideas and vocabulary, relating these to their empirical roots and real-world significance.
A variety of early thinkers in the humanistic sciences took up Hume's direction. Adam Smith, for example, conceived of economics as a moral science in the Humean sense.
Later development
Partly in reaction to the establishment of positivist philosophy and the latter's Comtean intrusions into traditionally humanistic areas such as sociology, non-positivistic researchers in the humanistic sciences began to carefully but emphatically distinguish the methodological approach appropriate to these areas of study, for which the unique and distinguishing characteristics of phenomena are in the forefront (e.g., for the biographer), from that appropriate to the natural sciences, for which the ability to link phenomena into generalized groups is foremost. In this sense, Johann Gustav Droysen contrasted the humanistic science's need to comprehend the phenomena under consideration with natural science's need to explain phenomena, while Windelband coined the terms idiographic for a descriptive study of the individual nature of phenomena, and nomothetic for sciences that aim to defthe generalizing laws.
Wilhelm Dilthey brought nineteenth-century attempts to formulate a methodology appropriate to the humanistic sciences together with Hume's term "moral science", which he translated as Geisteswissenschaft - a term with no exact English equivalent. Dilthey attempted to articulate the entire range of the moral sciences in a comprehensive and systematic way. Meanwhile, his conception of “Geisteswissenschaften” encompasses also the abovementioned study of classics, languages, literature, music, philosophy, history, religion, and the visual and performing arts. He characterized the scientific nature of a study as depending upon:
The conviction that perception gives access to reality
The self-evident nature of logical reasoning
The principle of sufficient reason
But the specific nature of the Geisteswissenschaften is based on the "inner" experience (Erleben), the "comprehension" (Verstehen) of the meaning of expressions and "understanding" in terms of the relations of the part and the whole – in contrast to the Naturwissenschaften, the "explanation" of phenomena by hypothetical laws in the "natural sciences".
Edmund Husserl, a student of Franz Brentano, articulated his phenomenological philosophy in a way that could be thought as a bthesis of Dilthey's attempt. Dilthey appreciated Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (1900/1901, the first draft of Husserl's Phenomenology) as an “ep"epoch-making"istemological foundation of fors conception of Geisteswissenschaften.
In recent years, 'human science' has been used to refer to "a philosophy and approach to science that seeks to understand human experience in deeply subjective, personal, historical, contextual, cross-cultural, political, and spiritual terms. Human science is the science of qualities rather than of quantities and closes the subject-object split in science. In particular, it addresses the ways in which self-reflection, art, music, poetry, drama, language and imagery reveal the human condition. By being interpretive, reflective, and appreciative, human science re-opens the conversation among science, art, and philosophy."
Objective vs. subjective experiences
Since Auguste Comte, the positivistic social sciences have sought to imitate the approach of the natural sciences by emphasizing the importance of objective external observations and searching for universal laws whose operation is predicated on external initial conditions that do not take into account differences in subjective human perception and attitude. Critics argue that subjective human experience and intention plays such a central role in determining human social behavior that an objective approach to the social sciences is too confining. Rejecting the positivist influence, they argue that the scientific method can rightly be applied to subjective, as well as objective, experience. The term subjective is used in this context to refer to inner psychological experience rather than outer sensory experience. It is not used in the sense of being prejudiced by personal motives or beliefs.
Human science in universities
Since 1878, the University of Cambridge has been home to the Moral Sciences Club, with strong ties to analytic philosophy.
The Human Science degree is relatively young. It has been a degree subject at Oxford since 1969. At University College London, it was proposed in 1973 by Professor J. Z. Young and implemented two years later. His aim was to train general science graduates who would be scientifically literate, numerate and easily able to communicate across a wide range of disciplines, replacing the traditional classical training for higher-level government and management careers. Central topics include the evolution of humans, their behavior, molecular and population genetics, population growth and aging, ethnic and cultural diversity ,and human interaction with the environment, including conservation, disease ,and nutrition. The study of both biological and social disciplines, integrated within a framework of human diversity and sustainability, should enable the human scientist to develop professional competencies suited to address such multidimensional human problems.
In the United Kingdom, Human Science is offered at the degree level at several institutions which include:
University of Oxford
University College London (as Human Sciences and as Human Sciences and Evolution)
King's College London (as Anatomy, Developmental & Human Biology)
University of Exeter
Durham University (as Health and Human Sciences)
Cardiff University (as Human and Social Sciences)
In other countries:
Osaka University
Waseda University
Tokiwa University
Senshu University
Aoyama Gakuin University (As College of Community Studies)
Kobe University
Kanagawa University
Bunkyo University
Sophia University
Ghent University (in the narrow sense, as Moral sciences, "an integrated empirical and philosophical study of values, norms and world views")
See also
History of the Human Sciences (journal)
Social science
Humanism
Humanities
References
Bibliography
Flew, A. (1986). David Hume: Philosopher of Moral Science, Basil Blackwell, Oxford
Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
External links
Institute for Comparative Research in Human and Social Sciences (ICR) -Japan
Human Science Lab -London
Human Science(s) across Global Academies
Marxism philosophy | 0.783629 | 0.991869 | 0.777257 |
Secular humanism | Secular humanism is a philosophy, belief system, or life stance that embraces human reason, logic, secular ethics, and philosophical naturalism, while specifically rejecting religious dogma, supernaturalism, and superstition as the basis of morality and decision-making.
Secular humanism posits that human beings are capable of being ethical and moral without religion or belief in a deity. It does not, however, assume that humans are either inherently good or evil, nor does it present humans as being superior to nature. Rather, the humanist life stance emphasizes the unique responsibility facing humanity and the ethical consequences of human decisions. Fundamental to the concept of secular humanism is the strongly held viewpoint that ideology—be it religious or political—must be thoroughly examined by each individual and not simply accepted or rejected on faith. Along with this, an essential part of secular humanism is a continually adapting search for truth, primarily through science and philosophy. Many secular humanists derive their moral codes from a philosophy of utilitarianism, ethical naturalism, or evolutionary ethics, and some advocate a science of morality.
Humanists International, founded by Julian Huxley and Jaap van Praag, is the world union of more than one hundred humanist, rationalist, irreligious, atheist, Bright, secular, Ethical Culture, and freethought organizations in more than 40 countries. The "Happy Human" is recognized as the official symbol of humanism internationally, used by secular humanist organizations in every part of the world.
The term itself is not uncontested. "Secular humanism" is not a universally used phrase, and is most prevalent in the United States. Most member organisations of Humanists International, for example, use simply the term "humanism" to refer to this concept, with some commentators remarking that "'hyphenated humanism' easily becomes more about the adjective than its referent".
Terminology
The meaning of the phrase secular humanism has evolved over time. The phrase has been used since at least the 1930s by Anglican priests, and in 1943, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, was reported as warning that the "Christian tradition... was in danger of being undermined by a 'Secular Humanism' which hoped to retain Christian values without Christian faith." During the 1960s and 1970s the term was embraced by some humanists who considered themselves anti-religious, as well as those who, although not critical of religion in its various guises, preferred a non-religious approach. The release in 1980 of A Secular Humanist Declaration by the newly formed Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (CODESH, later the Council for Secular Humanism, which with CSICOP in 1991 jointly formed the Center for Inquiry and in 2015 both ceased separate operations, becoming CFI programs) gave secular humanism an organisational identity within the United States; but no overall organisation involved currently uses a name featuring "secular humanism".
However, many adherents of the approach reject the use of the word secular as obfuscating and confusing, and consider that the term secular humanism has been "demonized by the religious right... All too often secular humanism is reduced to a sterile outlook consisting of little more than secularism slightly broadened by academic ethics. This kind of 'hyphenated humanism' easily becomes more about the adjective than its referent". Adherents of this view, including Humanists International and the American Humanist Association, consider that the unmodified but capitalized word Humanism should be used. The endorsement by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) of the capitalization of the word Humanism, and the dropping of any adjective such as secular, is quite recent. The American Humanist Association began to adopt this view in 1973, and the IHEU formally endorsed the position in 1989. In 2002 the IHEU General Assembly unanimously adopted the Amsterdam Declaration, which represents the official defining statement of World Humanism for Humanists. This declaration makes exclusive use of capitalized Humanist and Humanism, which is consistent with IHEU's general practice and recommendations for promoting a unified Humanist identity. To further promote Humanist identity, these words are also free of any adjectives, as recommended by prominent members of IHEU. Such usage is not universal among IHEU member organizations, though most of them do observe these conventions.
History
Historical use of the term humanism (reflected in some current academic usage), is related to the writings of pre-Socratic philosophers. These writings were lost to European societies until Renaissance scholars rediscovered them through Muslim sources and translated them from Arabic into European languages. Thus the term humanist can mean a humanities scholar, as well as refer to The Enlightenment/ Renaissance intellectuals, and those who have agreement with the pre-Socratics, as distinct from secular humanists.
Secularism
In 1851 George Holyoake coined the term "secularism" to describe "a form of opinion which concerns itself only with questions, the issues of which can be tested by the experience of this life".
The modern secular movement coalesced around Holyoake, Charles Bradlaugh and their intellectual circle. The first secular society, the Leicester Secular Society, dates from 1851. Similar regional societies came together to form the National Secular Society in 1866.
Positivism and the Church of Humanity
Holyoake's secularism was strongly influenced by Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism and of modern sociology. Comte believed human history would progress in a "law of three stages" from a theological phase, to the "metaphysical", toward a fully rational "positivist" society. In later life, Comte had attempted to introduce a "religion of humanity" in light of growing anti-religious sentiment and social malaise in revolutionary France. This religion would necessarily fulfil the functional, cohesive role that supernatural religion once served.
Although Comte's religious movement was unsuccessful in France, the positivist philosophy of science itself played a major role in the proliferation of secular organizations in the 19th century in England. Richard Congreve visited Paris shortly after the French Revolution of 1848 where he met Auguste Comte and was heavily influenced by his positivist system. He founded the London Positivist Society in 1867, which attracted Frederic Harrison, Edward Spencer Beesly, Vernon Lushington, and James Cotter Morison amongst others.
In 1878, the Society established the Church of Humanity under Congreve's direction. There they introduced sacraments of the Religion of Humanity and published a co-operative translation of Comte's Positive Polity. When Congreve repudiated their Paris co-religionists in 1878, Beesly, Harrison, Bridges, and others formed their own positivist society, with Beesly as president, and opened a rival centre, Newton Hall, in a courtyard off Fleet Street.
The New York City version of the church was established by English immigrant Henry Edger. The American version of the "Church of Humanity" was largely modeled on the English church. Like the English version, it was not atheistic and had sermons and sacramental rites. At times the services included readings from conventional religious works like the Book of Isaiah. It was not as significant as the church in England, but did include several educated people.
Ethical movement
Another important precursor was the ethical movement of the 19th century. The South Place Ethical Society was founded in 1793 as the South Place Chapel on Finsbury Square, on the edge of the City of London, and in the early nineteenth century was known as "a radical gathering-place". At that point it was a Unitarian chapel, and that movement, like Quakers, supported female equality. Under the leadership of Reverend William Johnson Fox, it lent its pulpit to activists such as Anna Wheeler, one of the first women to campaign for feminism at public meetings in England, who spoke in 1829 on "rights of women". In later decades, the chapel changed its name to the South Place Ethical Society, now the Conway Hall Ethical Society. Today Conway Hall explicitly identifies itself as a humanist organisation, albeit one primarily focused on concerts, events, and the maintenance of its humanist library and archives. It bills itself as "The landmark of London's independent intellectual, political and cultural life."
In America, the ethical movement was propounded by Felix Adler, who established the New York Society for Ethical Culture in 1877. By 1886, similar societies had sprouted up in Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis.
These societies all adopted the same statement of principles:
The belief that morality is independent of theology;
The affirmation that new moral problems have arisen in modern industrial society which have not been adequately dealt with by the world's religions;
The duty to engage in philanthropy in the advancement of morality;
The belief that self-reform should go in lock step with social reform;
The establishment of republican rather than monarchical governance of Ethical societies;
The agreement that educating the young is the most important aim.
In effect, the movement responded to the religious crisis of the time by replacing theology with unadulterated morality. It aimed to "disentangle moral ideas from religious doctrines, metaphysical systems, and ethical theories, and to make them an independent force in personal life and social relations." Adler was also particularly critical of the religious emphasis on creed, believing it to be the source of sectarian bigotry. He therefore attempted to provide a universal fellowship devoid of ritual and ceremony, for those who would otherwise be divided by creeds. Although the organisation was overwhelmingly made up of (and entirely led by) atheists, and were many of the same people as in the secular movement, Ethical organisations at that time publicly avoided debate about religious beliefs, publicly advocating neither atheism nor theism, agnosticism nor deism, instead stressing "deed without creed" and a "purely human basis" for morality.
The first ethical society along these lines in Britain was founded in 1886. By 1896 the four London societies formed the Union of Ethical Societies, and between 1905 and 1910 there were over fifty societies in Great Britain, seventeen of which were affiliated with the Union. The Union of Ethical Societies would later incorporate as the Ethical Union, a registered charity, in 1928. Under the leadership of Harold Blackham, it renamed itself the British Humanist Association in 1967. It became the Humanists UK in 2017.
Secular humanism
In the 1930s, "humanism" was generally used in a religious sense by the Ethical movement in the United States, and not much favoured among the non-religious in Britain. Yet "it was from the Ethical movement that the non-religious philosophical sense of Humanism gradually emerged in Britain, and it was from the convergence of the Ethical and Rationalist movements that this sense of Humanism eventually prevailed throughout the Freethought movement".
As an organised movement in its own right, humanism emerged from vibrant non-religious movements of the 18th and 19th centuries such as the Owenites, Ethical Culture, the freethinkers, secularists, and positivists, as well as a few non-religious radical Unitarian congregations. The first Humanist Manifesto announced the humanist movement by that name to the public in 1933, following work at the University of Chicago across the 1920s. The American Humanist Association was incorporated as an Illinois non-profit organization in 1943. The International Humanist and Ethical Union was founded in 1952, when a gathering of world Humanists met under the leadership of Sir Julian Huxley. The British Humanist Association took that name in 1967, but had developed from the Union of Ethical Societies which had been founded by Stanton Coit in 1896.
Manifestos and declarations
Humanists have put together various Humanist Manifestos, in attempts to unify the Humanist identity.
The original signers of the first Humanist Manifesto of 1933, declared themselves to be religious humanists. Because, in their view, traditional religions were failing to meet the needs of their day, the signers of 1933 declared it a necessity to establish a religion that was a dynamic force to meet the needs of the day. However, this "religion" did not profess a belief in any god. Since then two additional Manifestos were written to replace the first. In the Preface of Humanist Manifesto II, in 1973, the authors Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson assert that faith and knowledge are required for a hopeful vision for the future. Manifesto II references a section on religion and states traditional religion renders a disservice to humanity. Manifesto II recognizes the following groups to be part of their naturalistic philosophy: "scientific", "ethical", "democratic", "religious", and "Marxist" humanism.
International Humanist and Ethical Union
In 2002, the IHEU General Assembly unanimously adopted the Amsterdam Declaration 2002 which represents the official defining statement of World Humanism.
All member organisations of the International Humanist and Ethical Union are required by bylaw 5.1 to accept the Minimum Statement on Humanism:
Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.
To promote and unify "Humanist" identity, prominent members of the IHEU have endorsed the following statements on Humanist identity:
All Humanists, nationally and internationally, should always use the one word Humanism as the name of Humanism: no added adjective, and the initial letter capital (by life stance orthography);
All Humanists, nationally and internationally, should use a clear, recognizable and uniform symbol on their publications and elsewhere: our Humanist symbol the "Happy Human";
All Humanists, nationally and internationally, should seek to establish recognition of the fact that Humanism is a life stance.
Council for Secular Humanism
According to the Council for Secular Humanism, within the United States, the term "secular humanism" describes a world view with the following elements and principles:
Need to test beliefs – A conviction that dogmas, ideologies and traditions, whether religious, political or social, must be weighed and tested by each individual and not simply accepted by faith.
Reason, evidence, scientific method – A commitment to the use of critical reason, factual evidence and scientific method of inquiry in seeking solutions to human problems and answers to important human questions.
Fulfillment, growth, creativity – A primary concern with fulfillment, growth and creativity for both the individual and humankind in general.
Search for truth – A constant search for objective truth, with the understanding that new knowledge and experience constantly alter our imperfect perception of it.
This life – A concern for this life (as opposed to an afterlife) and a commitment to making it meaningful through better understanding of ourselves, our history, our intellectual and artistic achievements, and the outlooks of those who differ from us.
Ethics – A search for viable individual, social and political principles of ethical conduct, judging them on their ability to enhance human well-being and individual responsibility.
Justice and fairness – an interest in securing justice and fairness in society and in eliminating discrimination and intolerance.
Building a better world – A conviction that with reason, an open exchange of ideas, good will, and tolerance, progress can be made in building a better world for ourselves and our children.
A Secular Humanist Declaration was issued in 1980 by the Council for Secular Humanism's predecessor, CODESH. It lays out ten ideals: Free inquiry as opposed to censorship and imposition of belief; separation of church and state; the ideal of freedom from religious control and from jingoistic government control; ethics based on critical intelligence rather than that deduced from religious belief; moral education; religious skepticism; reason; a belief in science and technology as the best way of understanding the world; evolution; and education as the essential method of building humane, free, and democratic societies.
American Humanist Association
A general outline of Humanism is also set out in the Humanist Manifesto prepared by the American Humanist Association.
Ethics and relationship to religious belief
In the 20th and 21st centuries, members of Humanist organizations have disagreed as to whether Humanism is a religion. They categorize themselves in one of three ways. Religious (or ethical) humanism, in the tradition of the earliest humanist organizations in the UK and US, attempts to fulfil the traditional social role of religion. Contemporary use of the word "religious" did not have the same connotations as its today. Secular humanism considers all forms of religion, including religious humanism, to be superseded.
However, distinctions between "ethical" and "secular" humanists are for the most part historical, and practically meaningless in the present day or to contemporary individuals who identify with humanism. Since the mid-20th century, the development of new concepts such as the "life stance" (which encompasses both humanist views and religious outlooks) has defused this conflict. Most humanist organisations identify with "humanism" without a pre-modifier (such a "secular" or "ethical") and assert humanism as a non-religious philosophy or approach to life. Generally speaking, all humanists, including religious humanists, reject deference to supernatural beliefs; promote the practical, methodological naturalism of science; and largely endorse the stance of metaphysical naturalism. The result is an approach to issues in a secular way. Humanism addresses ethics without reference to the supernatural as well, attesting that ethics is a human enterprise (see naturalistic ethics).
Accounts of humanism are also careful not to treat secular humanism analogously with religions, which implies a community who strictly attempt to adhere to the same obligations or beliefs. Holding a secular humanist philosophy does not prescribe a specific theory of morality or code of ethics. As stated by the Council for Secular Humanism,
Secular humanists affirm that with the present state of scientific knowledge, dogmatic belief in an absolutist moral or ethical system (e.g. Kantian, Islamic, Christian) is unreasonable. However, it affirms that individuals engaging in rational moral/ethical deliberations can discover some universal "objective standards".
Many humanists adopt principles of the Golden Rule. Some believe that universal moral standards are required for the proper functioning of society. However, they believe such necessary universality can and should be achieved by developing a richer notion of morality through reason, experience and scientific inquiry rather than through faith in a supernatural realm or source.
Humanists Andrew Copson and Alice Roberts, in their casual introduction to humanism The Little Book of Humanism, propose that a distinctive aspect of humanist morality is its recognition that every moral situation is in some sense unique, and so potentially calls for different approach than the last (i.e. the ability to vacillate situationally between consequentialism and virtue ethics). In the book, they quote from Kristen Bell's advocacy of moral particularism as developed by Jonathan Dancy.
Humanism is compatible with atheism, and by definition usually entails at least a form of weak or agnostic atheism, and agnosticism,
but being atheist or agnostic does not automatically make one a humanist. Nevertheless, humanism is diametrically opposed to state atheism.
According to Paul Kurtz, considered by some to be the founder of the American secular humanist movement, one of the differences between Marxist–Leninist atheists and humanists is the latter's commitment to "human freedom and democracy" while stating that the militant atheism of the Soviet Union consistently violated basic human rights.
Kurtz also stated that the "defense of religious liberty is as precious to the humanist as are the rights of the believers". Greg M. Epstein states that, "modern, organized Humanism began, in the minds of its founders, as nothing more nor less than a religion without a God".
Many humanists address ethics from the point of view of ethical naturalism, and some support an actual science of morality.
Modern context
Secular humanist organizations are found in all parts of the world. Those who call themselves humanists are estimated to number between four and five million people worldwide in 31 countries, but there is uncertainty because of the lack of universal definition throughout censuses. Humanism is a non-theistic belief system and, as such, it could be a sub-category of "Religion" only if that term is defined to mean "Religion and (any) belief system". This is the case in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights on freedom of religion and beliefs. Many national censuses contentiously define Humanism as a further sub-category of the sub-category "No Religion", which typically includes atheist, rationalist and agnostic thought. In England, Wales 25% of people specify that they have 'No religion' up from 15% in 2001 and in Australia, around 30% of the population specifies "No Religion" in the national census. In the US, the decennial census does not inquire about religious affiliation or its lack; surveys report the figure at roughly 13%. In the 2001 Canadian census, 16.5% of the populace reported having no religious affiliation. In the 2011 Scottish census, 37% stated they had no religion up from 28% in 2001. One of the largest Humanist organizations in the world (relative to population) is Norway's Human-Etisk Forbund, which had over 86,000 members out of a population of around 4.6 million in 2013 – approximately 2% of the population.
The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) is the worldwide umbrella organization for those adhering to the Humanist life stance. It represents the views of over three million Humanists organized in over 100 national organizations in 30 countries. Originally based in the Netherlands, the IHEU now operates from London. Some regional groups that adhere to variants of the Humanist life stance, such as the humanist subgroup of the Unitarian Universalist Association, do not belong to the IHEU. Although the European Humanist Federation is also separate from the IHEU, the two organisations work together and share an agreed protocol.
Starting in the mid-20th century, religious fundamentalists and the religious right began using the term "secular humanism" in hostile fashion. Francis A. Schaeffer, an American theologian based in Switzerland, seizing upon the exclusion of the divine from most humanist writings, argued that rampant secular humanism would lead to moral relativism and ethical bankruptcy in his book How Should We Then Live: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (1976). Schaeffer portrayed secular humanism as pernicious and diabolical, and warned it would undermine the moral and spiritual tablet of America. His themes have been very widely repeated in Fundamentalist preaching in North America. Toumey (1993) found that secular humanism is typically portrayed as a vast evil conspiracy, deceitful and immoral, responsible for feminism, pornography, abortion, homosexuality, and New Age spirituality. In certain areas of the world, Humanism finds itself in conflict with religious fundamentalism, especially over the issue of the separation of church and state. Many Humanists see religions as superstitious, repressive and closed-minded, while religious fundamentalists may see Humanists as a threat to the values set out in their sacred texts.
In recent years, humanists such as Dwight Gilbert Jones and R. Joseph Hoffmann have decried the over-association of Humanism with affirmations of non-belief and atheism. Jones cites a lack of new ideas being presented or debated outside of secularism, while Hoffmann is unequivocal: "I regard the use of the term 'humanism' to mean secular humanism or atheism to be one of the greatest tragedies of twentieth century movementology, perpetrated by second-class minds and perpetuated by third-class polemicists and village atheists. The attempt to sever humanism from the religious and the spiritual was a flatfooted, largely American way of taking on the religious right. It lacked finesse, subtlety, and the European sense of history."
Humanist celebrations
Humanism, as a term which describes a person's non-religious views, comes with no obligation to celebrate or revere specific days in the year as a religion would. As a result, individual humanists choose of their own accord whether to take part in prevailing national holidays where they live. For example, humanists in Europe and North America typically celebrate holidays, such as Christmas, but as secular holidays rather than Christian festivals. Other humanists choose to mark the winter and summer solstices and the equinoxes. European humanists may often emphasise the fact that human beings have found reasons to celebrate at these times in the Northern Hemisphere for thousands of years before the arrival of Christianity. Humanists may also identify culturally with religious traditions and holidays celebrated in their family in the community. For example, humanists with a Jewish identity will often celebrate most Jewish holidays in a secular manner.
Humanists International endorses World Humanist Day (21 June), Darwin Day (12 February), Human Rights Day (10 December) and HumanLight (23 December) as official days of humanist celebration, though none are yet a public holiday. Humanist organisations typically organise events around these dates which draw attention to their programmes of activities.
In many countries, humanist celebrants (officiants) perform celebrancy services for weddings, funerals, child namings, coming of age ceremonies, and other rituals. In countries like Scotland and Norway, these are extremely popular. In Scotland, more people have a humanist wedding than are married by any religious denomination, including Scotland's largest churches; over 20% of Scottish weddings are humanist. In Norway, over 20% of young people choose humanist coming-of-age ceremonies every year.
Legal mentions in the United States
The issue of whether and in what sense secular humanism might be considered a religion, and what the implications of this would be, has become the subject of legal maneuvering and political debate in the United States. The first reference to "secular humanism" in a US legal context was in 1961, although church-state separation lawyer Leo Pfeffer had referred to it in his 1958 book, Creeds in Competition.
Hatch amendment
The Education for Economic Security Act of 1984 included a section, Section 20 U.S.C.A. 4059, which initially read: "Grants under this subchapter ['Magnet School Assistance'] may not be used for consultants, for transportation or for any activity which does not augment academic improvement." With no public notice, Senator Orrin Hatch tacked onto the proposed exclusionary subsection the words "or for any course of instruction the substance of which is Secular Humanism". Implementation of this provision ran into practical problems because neither the Senator's staff, nor the Senate's Committee on Labor and Human Resources, nor the Department of Justice could propose a definition of what would constitute a "course of instruction the substance of which is Secular Humanism". So, this determination was left up to local school boards. The provision provoked a storm of controversy which within a year led Senator Hatch to propose, and Congress to pass, an amendment to delete from the statute all reference to secular humanism. While this episode did not dissuade fundamentalists from continuing to object to what they regarded as the "teaching of Secular Humanism", it did point out the vagueness of the claim.
Case law
Torcaso v. Watkins
The phrase "secular humanism" became prominent after it was used in the United States Supreme Court case Torcaso v. Watkins. In the 1961 decision, Justice Hugo Black commented in a footnote, "Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others."
Fellowship of Humanity v. County of Alameda
The footnote in Torcaso v. Watkins referenced Fellowship of Humanity v. County of Alameda, a 1957 case in which an organization of humanists sought a tax exemption on the ground that they used their property "solely and exclusively for religious worship." Despite the group's non-theistic beliefs, the court determined that the activities of the Fellowship of Humanity, which included weekly Sunday meetings, were analogous to the activities of theistic churches and thus entitled to an exemption. The Fellowship of Humanity case itself referred to Humanism but did not mention the term secular humanism. Nonetheless, this case was cited by Justice Black to justify the inclusion of secular humanism in the list of religions in his note. Presumably Justice Black added the word secular to emphasize the non-theistic nature of the Fellowship of Humanity and distinguish their brand of humanism from that associated with, for example, Christian humanism.
Washington Ethical Society v. District of Columbia
Another case alluded to in the Torcaso v. Watkins footnote, and said by some to have established secular humanism as a religion under the law, is the 1957 tax case of Washington Ethical Society v. District of Columbia, 249 F.2d 127 (D.C. Cir. 1957). The Washington Ethical Society functions much like a church, but regards itself as a non-theistic religious institution, honoring the importance of ethical living without mandating a belief in a supernatural origin for ethics. The case involved denial of the Society's application for tax exemption as a religious organization. The U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the Tax Court's ruling, defined the Society as a religious organization, and granted its tax exemption. The Society terms its practice Ethical Culture. Though Ethical Culture is based on a humanist philosophy, it is regarded by some as a type of religious humanism. Hence, it would seem most accurate to say that this case affirmed that a religion need not be theistic to qualify as a religion under the law, rather than asserting that it established generic secular humanism as a religion.
In the cases of both the Fellowship of Humanity and the Washington Ethical Society, the court decisions turned not so much on the particular beliefs of practitioners as on the function and form of the practice being similar to the function and form of the practices in other religious institutions.
Peloza v. Capistrano School District
The implication in Justice Black's footnote that secular humanism is a religion has been seized upon by religious opponents of the teaching of evolution, who have made the argument that teaching evolution amounts to teaching a religious idea. The claim that secular humanism could be considered a religion for legal purposes was examined by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Peloza v. Capistrano School District, 37 F.3d 517 (9th Cir. 1994), cert. denied, 515 U.S. 1173 (1995). In this case, a science teacher argued that, by requiring him to teach evolution, his school district was forcing him to teach the "religion" of secular humanism. The Court responded, "We reject this claim because neither the Supreme Court, nor this circuit, has ever held that evolutionism or Secular Humanism are 'religions' for Establishment Clause purposes." The Supreme Court refused to review the case.
The decision in a subsequent case, Kalka v. Hawk et al., offered this commentary:
The Court's statement in Torcaso does not stand for the proposition that humanism, no matter in what form and no matter how practiced, amounts to a religion under the First Amendment. The Court offered no test for determining what system of beliefs qualified as a "religion" under the First Amendment. The most one may read into the Torcaso footnote is the idea that a particular non-theistic group calling itself the "Fellowship of Humanity" qualified as a religious organization under California law.
Controversy
Decisions about tax status have been based on whether an organization functions like a church. On the other hand, Establishment Clause cases turn on whether the ideas or symbols involved are inherently religious. An organization can function like a church while advocating beliefs that are not necessarily inherently religious. Author Marci Hamilton has pointed out: "Moreover, the debate is not between secularists and the religious. The debate is believers and non-believers on the one side debating believers and non-believers on the other side. You've got citizens who are [...] of faith who believe in the separation of church and state and you have a set of believers who do not believe in the separation of church and state."
In the 1987 case of Smith v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County a group of plaintiffs brought a case alleging that the school system was teaching the tenets of an anti-religious religion called "secular humanism" in violation of the Establishment Clause. The complainants asked that 44 different elementary through high school level textbooks (including books on home economics, social science and literature) be removed from the curriculum. Federal judge William Brevard Hand ruled for the plaintiffs agreeing that the books promoted secular humanism, which he ruled to be a religion. The Eleventh Circuit Court unanimously reversed him, with Judge Frank stating that Hand held a "misconception of the relationship between church and state mandated by the establishment clause," commenting also that the textbooks did not show "an attitude antagonistic to theistic belief. The message conveyed by these textbooks is one of neutrality: the textbooks neither endorse theistic religion as a system of belief, nor discredit it".
Notable humanists
Manifestos
There are numerous Humanist Manifestos and Declarations, including the following:
Humanist Manifesto I (1933)
Humanist Manifesto II (1973)
A Secular Humanist Declaration (1980)
A Declaration of Interdependence (1988)
IHEU Minimum Statement on Humanism (1996)
HUMANISM: Why, What, and What For, in 882 Words (1996)
Humanist Manifesto 2000: A Call for a New Planetary Humanism (2000)
The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles
Amsterdam Declaration (2002)
Humanism and Its Aspirations: Humanist Manifesto III, a Successor to the Humanist Manifesto of 1933 (2003)
Alternatives to the Ten Commandments
Related organizations
See also
Wikibooks
Thinking And Moral Problems
Religions And Their Source
Purpose
Developing A Universal Religion, four parts of a Wikibook
Notes and references
Further reading
Bullock, Alan. The Humanist Tradition in the West (1985), by a leading historian.
Coleman, T. J. III, (interviewer), Tom Flynn (interviewee) (2014, January), "Tom Flynn on 'Secular Humanism'", The Religious Studies Project Podcast Series
Friess, Horace L., Felix Adler and Ethical Culture (1981).
Pfeffer, Leo. "The 'Religion' of Secular Humanism", Journal of Church and State, Summer 1987, Vol. 29 Issue 3, pp. 495–507
Radest, Howard B. The Devil and Secular Humanism: The Children of the Enlightenment (1990) – a favorable account
Toumey, Christopher P. "Evolution and secular humanism", Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Summer 1993, Vol. 61 Issue 2, pp. 275–301, focused on fundamentalist attacks.
Pinker, Steven Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018), Penguin Books
Primary sources
Adler, Felix. An Ethical Philosophy of Life (1918).
Ericson, Edward L. The Humanist Way: An introduction to ethical humanist religion (1988).
Frankel, Charles. The Case for Modern Man (1956).
Hook, Sidney. Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th century (1987).
Huxley, Julian. Essay of a Humanist (1964).
Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not a Christian (1957). | 0.778922 | 0.997755 | 0.777174 |
Secular religion | A secular religion is a communal belief system that often rejects or neglects the metaphysical aspects of the supernatural, commonly associated with traditional religion, instead placing typical religious qualities in earthly, or material, entities. Among systems that have been characterized as secular religions are liberalism, anarchism, communism, nazism, fascism, Jacobinism, Juche, Maoism, Religion of Humanity, the cults of personality, the Cult of Reason and Cult of the Supreme Being.
Contemporary characterizations
The term secular religion is often applied today to communal belief systems—as for example with the view of love as the postmodern secular religion. Paul Vitz applied the term to modern psychology in as much as it fosters a cult of the self, explicitly calling "the self-theory ethic ... this secular religion". Sport has also been considered as a new secular religion, particularly with respect to Olympism. For Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, belief in them as a new secular religion was explicit and lifelong.
Political religion
The theory of political religion concerns governmental ideologies whose cultural and political backing is so strong that they are said to attain power equivalent to those of a state religion, with which they often exhibit significant similarities in both theory and practice. In addition to basic forms of politics, like parliament and elections, it also holds an aspect of "sacralization" related to the institutions contained within the regime and also provides the inner measures traditionally considered to be religious territory, such as ethics, values, symbols, myths, rituals, archetypes and for example a national liturgical calendar.
Political religious organizations, such as the National Socialist and Communist Parties, adhered to the idealization of cultural and political power over the country at large. The church body of the state no longer held control over the practices of religious identity. Because of this, National Socialism was countered by many political and religious organizations as being a political religion, based on the dominance which the National Socialist regime had (Gates and Steane). Political religions generally vie with existing traditional religions, and may try to replace or eradicate them. The term was given new attention by the political scientist Hans Maier.
Totalitarian societies are perhaps more prone to political religion, but various scholars have described features of political religion even in democracies, for instance American civil religion as described by Robert Bellah in 1967.
The term is sometimes treated as synonymous with civil religion, but although some scholars use the terms equivalently, others see a useful distinction, using "civil religion" as something weaker, which functions more as a socially unifying and essentially conservative force, whereas a political religion is radically transformational, even apocalyptic.
Overview
The term political religion is based on the observation that sometimes political ideologies or political systems display features more commonly associated with religion. Scholars who have studied these phenomena include William Connolly in political science, Christoph Deutschmann in sociology, Emilio Gentile in history, Oliver O'Donovan in theology and others in psychology. A political religion often occupies the same ethical, psychological and sociological space as a traditional religion, and as a result it often displaces or co-opts existing religious organizations and beliefs. The most central marker of a political religion involves the sacralization of politics, for example an overwhelming religious feeling when serving one's country, or the devotion towards the Founding Fathers of the United States. Although a political religion may co-opt existing religious structures or symbolism, it does not itself have any independent spiritual or theocratic elements—it is essentially secular, using religious motifs and methods for political purposes, if it does not reject religious faith outright. Typically, a political religion is considered to be secular, but more radical forms of it are also transcendental.
Origin of the theory
The 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) argued that all societies need a religion to hold men together. Because Christianity tended to pull men away from earthly matters, Rousseau advocated a "civil religion" that would create the links necessary for political unity around the state. The Swiss Protestant theologian Adolf Keller (1872–1963) argued that Marxism in the Soviet Union had been transformed into a secular religion. Before emigrating to the United States, the German-born political philosopher Eric Voegelin wrote a book entitled The political religions. Other contributions on "political religion" (or associated terms such as "secular religion", "lay religion" or "public religion") were made by Luigi Sturzo (1871–1959), Paul Tillich (1886–1965), Gerhard Leibholz (1901–1982), Waldemar Gurian (1902–1954), Raymond Aron (1905–1983) and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Some saw such "religions" as a response to the existential void and nihilism caused by modernity, mass society and the rise of a bureaucratic state, and in political religions "the rebellion against the religion of God" reached its climax. They also described them as "pseudo-religions", "substitute religions", "surrogate religions", "religions manipulated by man" and "anti-religions". Yale political scientist Juan Linz and others have noted that the secularization of the twentieth century had created a void which could be filled by an ideology claiming a hold on ethical and identical matters as well, making the political religions based on totalitarianism, universalism and messianic missions (such as Manifest Destiny) possible.
Suppression of religious beliefs
Political religions sometimes compete with existing religions, and try, if possible, to replace or eradicate them. Loyalty to other entities, such as a church or a deity, are often viewed as interfering with loyalty to the political religion. The authority of religious leaders also presents a threat to the authority of the political religion. As a result, some or all religious sects may be suppressed or banned. An existing sect may be converted into a state religion, but dogma and personnel may be modified to suit the needs of the party or state.
Juan Linz has posited the friendly form of separation of church and state as the counterpole of political religion but describes the hostile form of separation of church and state as moving toward political religion as found in totalitarianism.
Absolute loyalty
Loyalty to the state or political party and acceptance of the government/party ideology are paramount. Dissenters may be expelled, ostracized, discriminated against, imprisoned, "re-educated", or killed. Loyalty oaths or membership in a dominant (or sole) political party may be required for employment, obtaining government services, or simply as routine. Criticism of the government may be a serious crime. Enforcement can range from ostracism by one's neighbours to execution. In a political religion, you are either with the system or against it.
Cult of personality
A political religion often elevates its leaders to near-godlike status. Displays of leaders in the form of posters or statues may be mandated in public areas and even private homes. Children may be required to learn the state's version of the leaders' biographies in school.
Myths of origin
Political religions often rely on a myth of origin that may have some historical basis but is usually idealized and sacralized. Current leaders may be venerated as descendants of the original fathers. There may also be holy places or shrines that relate to the myth of origin.
Historical cases
Revolutionary France
Revolutionary France was well noted for being the first state to reject religion altogether. Radicals intended to replace Christianity with a new state religion, or a deistic ideology. Maximilien Robespierre rejected atheistic ideologies and intended to create a new religion. Churches were closed, and Catholic Mass was forbidden. The Cult of the Supreme Being was well known for its derided festival, which led to the Thermidorian reaction and the fall of Robespierre.
Fascism
Italian fascism
According to Emilio Gentile, "Fascism was the first and prime instance of a modern political religion." "This religion sacralized the state and assigned it the primary educational task of transforming the mentality, the character, and the customs of Italians. The aim was to create a 'new man', a believer in and an observing member of the cult of Fascism."
"The argument [that fascism was a 'political religion'] tends to involve three main claims: I) that fascism was characterized by a religious form, particularly in terms of language and ritual; II) that fascism was a sacralized form of totalitarianism, which legitimized violence in defence of the nation and regeneration of a fascist 'new man'; and III) that fascism took on many of the functions of religion for a broad swathe of society."
Nazi Germany
"Among committed [Nazi] believers, a mythic world of eternally strong heroes, demons, fire and sword—in a word, the fantasy world of the nursery—displaced reality." Heinrich Himmler was fascinated by the occult, and sought to turn the SS into the basis of an official state cult.
Soviet Union
In 1936 a Protestant priest referred explicitly to communism as a new secular religion. A couple of years later, on the eve of World War II, F. A. Voigt characterised both Marxism and National Socialism as secular religions, akin at a fundamental level in their authoritarianism and messianic beliefs as well as in their eschatological view of human History. Both, he considered, were waging religious war against the liberal enquiring mind of the European heritage.
After the war, the social philosopher Raymond Aron would expand on the exploration of communism in terms of a secular religion; while A. J. P. Taylor, for example, would characterise it as "a great secular religion....the Communist Manifesto must be counted as a holy book in the same class as the Bible".
Klaus-Georg Riegel argued that "Lenin's utopian design of a revolutionary community of virtuosi as a typical political religion of an intelligentsia longing for an inner-worldly salvation, a socialist paradise without exploitation and alienation, to be implanted in the Russian backward society at the outskirts of the industrialised and modernised Western Europe."
See also
References
Further reading
A. Bergesen, The Sacred and the Subversive (1984)
E. B. Koenker, Secular Salvations (1965)
H. Kelsen, Secular Religion (1964)
T. Nyirkos, Secular Religions: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2024.
Gentile, "Political Religion: A Concept and its Critics - A Critical Survey," Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 25
Wolfgang Hardtwig (2001) "Political Religion in Modern Germany: Reflections on Nationalism, Socialism, and National Socialism", Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Volume 28
Jacques Ellul, The New Demons. Trans. C. Edward Hopkin. New York: Seabury, 1975. London: Mowbrays, 1975.
External links
Political Religions section of Religion Compass
Religion and Foreign Policy Initiative Council on Foreign Relations.
Conference on Political religions in the modern era, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 7–9 May 2004
Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, "Special Issue: Political Religions as a characteristic of the 20th century", Volume 6 Number 1/June 2005, Taylor & Francis (requires subscription)
Religion and atheism
Ideologies | 0.782362 | 0.993001 | 0.776887 |
Values education | Values education is the process by which people give moral values to each other. According to Powney et al. It can be an activity that can take place in any human organisation. During which people are assisted by others, who may be older, in a condition experienced to make explicit our ethics in order to assess the effectiveness of these values and associated behaviour for their own and others' long term well-being, and to reflect on and acquire other values and behaviour which they recognise as being more effective for long term well-being of self and others. There is a difference between literacy and education.
There has been very little reliable research on the results of values education classes, but there are some encouraging preliminary results.
One definition refers to it as the process that gives young people an initiation into values, giving knowledge of the rules needed to function in this mode of relating to other people and to seek the development in the student a grasp of certain underlying principles, together with the ability to apply these rules intelligently, and to have the settled disposition to do so Some researchers use the concept values education as an umbrella of concepts that include moral education and citizenship education instead. Values education topics can address to varying degrees are character, moral development, Religious Education, Spiritual development, citizenship education, personal development, social development and cultural development.
There is a further distinction between explicit values education and implicit values education where:
explicit values education is associated with those different pedagogies, methods or programmes that teachers or educators use in order to create learning experiences for students when it comes to value questions.
Another definition of value education is "learning about self and wisdom of life" in a self-exploratory, systematic and scientific way through formal education. According to C.V.Good'value education is the aggregate of all the process by means of which a person develops abilities and other forms of behaviour of the positive values in the society in which he lives.
Commonality in many "educations"
Moral education
Morals as socio-legal-religious norms are supposed to help people behave responsibly. However, not all morals lead to responsible behaviour. Values education can show which morals are "bad" morals and which are "good". The change in behaviour comes from confusing questions about right and wrong.
American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg who specialized in research on moral education and reasoning, and
was best known for his theory of stages of moral development, believed children needed to be in an environment that allowed for open and public discussion of day-to-day conflicts and problems to develop their moral reasoning ability.
Teacher education
Cross has made a start at documenting some teacher training attempts.
Multinational school-based values education schemes
Living Values Education Programme
This project of worldwide proportions inspired by the new religious movement called the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University incorporates twelve values (unity, peace, happiness, hope, humility, simplicity, trust, freedom, co-operation, honesty, courage, love), and has formed the basis of the whole-school ethos approach in schools such as West Kidlington Primary School, Kidlington whose head master Neil Hawkes and Values education coordinators Linda Heppenstall used the work and other programmes to help them form a values-based school. The Living Values Education Programme website lists 54 countries where values education projects are undertaken.
Human Values Foundation
The Human Values Foundation was established in 1995 to make available worldwide, a comprehensive values-themed programme for children from 4 to 12 years entitled "Education in Human Values". Its fully resourced lesson plans utilise familiar teaching techniques of discussion, story-telling, quotations, group singing, activities to reinforce learning and times of quiet reflection. Following the success of "EHV", a second programme was published – Social and Emotional Education ("SEE"), primarily for ages 12 to 14+ but it has also proved constructive for older children identified as likely to benefit from help getting their lives 'back on track. The programmes enable children and young people to explore and put into practice a wide spectrum of values with the potential to enrich their lives. Through experiential learning, over time participants develop a well-considered personal morality, all the while gaining invaluable emotional and social skills to help them lead happy, fulfilled, successful lives.
Character education
Character education is an umbrella term generally used to describe the teaching of children in a manner that will help them develop as personal and social beings. However, this definition requires research to explain what is meant by "personal and social being". Concepts that fall under this term include social and emotional learning, moral reasoning/cognitive development, life skills education, health education; violence prevention, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and conflict resolution and mediation. Lickona (1996) mentions eleven principles of successful character education. It seems to have been applied in the UK and the United States
Science of Living
Science of Living (Jeevan Vigyan; Jeevan = Life and Vigyan = Science) is a detailed program that complements the current educational approach with spiritual and value-based learning. While both mental and physical development is needed for a student's growth, Jeevan Vigyan adds a third pillar – that of emotional intelligence and morality (or values) – to education in schools and colleges. A combination of theory and practice, Jeevan Vigyan draws on the findings of various life sciences as well as nutritional sciences. Our parasympathetic nervous system and endocrinal system are known to be the drivers of our emotions and our behaviour. These biological centres can be influenced the Science of Living through a system of yogic exercises, breathing exercises, meditation and contemplation. Science of Living's source of inspiration is Jain Acharya Ganadhipati Shri Tulsi (1914–1997). His thoughts were further developed and expanded by Acharya Shri Mahapragya (1920–2010). Currently, Muni Shri Kishan Lal Ji, under the leadership of Acharya Shri Mahashraman, is the Principal of SOL.
Examples of values education from around the world
Taylor gives a thorough overview of values education in 26 European countries.
Australia
The Australian Government currently funds Values education in its schools, with its own publications and funding of school forums on values education at all levels of education. It also helps in becoming a better person. A conference on "Moral Education and Australian Values" was held in 2007 at Monash University.
India
The Indian Government currently promote Values education in its schools. The Ministry of Human Resource Development has taken a strong step to introduce values among schools and teachers training centres.
Indonesia
A key feature of education in Indonesia is the five principles of Pancasila.
Japan
Elementary school and middle school students from first to ninth grades will be taught the importance of life, to listen to others with different opinions, to be fair, respect their country and learn about foreign cultures.
Singapore
Teacher training institutions in Singapore all have curricular for learning to teach civics and moral education programmes – but students do not take these as seriously as they should due to lack of assessment. The reason has been said to be the lack of innovative teaching approaches such as discourse pedagogy.
Slovenia
There is an obligatory school subject that includes the aspect of values education and Citizenship Culture and Ethics. It is taught in 7th or 8th grade of primary school. Besides this, there are two elective subjects that partly deal with values education: Religions and Ethics (for 7th, 8th, and 9th grade) and Philosophy for children (Critical thinking, Ethical exploring, Me and the other; for 7th, 8th, and 9th grade). The Slovenian educational system does not require special training in the field of values education for teachers that teach mentioned subjects.
Sweden
Values education is a part of Swedish schools. Whereas the formal curricula are about educating students to be competent democratic citizens by practising student participation, qualitative studies have shown that in everyday school life, values education and school democracy often appeared to be reduced to traditional disciplining with a high focus on rules and regulations. This in turn evokes some critiques among students. Most research on values education in Sweden is done by qualitative methods, especially ethnographic or field studies as well as a focus group and interview studies. Some studies have been conducted by survey and other quantitative methods. In addition, theoretical work with roots in Dewey and Habermas has been done on deliberative democracy and deliberative conversations in schools.
Thailand
In Thailand, values have traditionally been taught within the context of Buddhist religious education. Since 1982 there has been a revival of applied values as an extracurricular activity suitable for Buddhist, Moslem and Christian students alike to prepare Thai students for the effects of globalization.
United Kingdom
Since 1988 the British government, although not recognising or calling it values education, has promoted and respected values in the guise of spiritual, moral, social and cultural development (SMSCD) leaving the initiative to individual schools to decide how values education standards should be met. It is not clear whether there are standards of values education.
The Government and state school systems have never called it "values education". Values education courses in Britain may be implemented in the form of government-supported campaigns such as Social & Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL, but are more often provided by local experts in the form of Living Values Education Programme.
One headteacher in Cornwall has achieved national recognition for his work on character development and "virtues", at Kehelland Village School, based on Baha'i teachings. He was asked to develop the primary section of the University of Birmingham's Character Education pack for use with the national curriculum.
See also
Democratic education
Educational psychology
Emotional and behavioral disorders
Ethics
Holistic education
Moral psychology
Political philosophy
Preschool
Social psychology
Socialization
Society for Values in Higher Education
Sociology
Special education
Value (ethics)
References
External links
Philosophy of Value-Oriente Education - i
Philosophy of Value-Oriented Education – ii
Philosophy of value-oriented education– iii
Educational programs | 0.780604 | 0.995205 | 0.776861 |
Growth of religion | Growth of religion involves the spread of individual religions and the increase in the numbers of religious adherents around the world. In sociology, desecularization is the proliferation or growth of religion, most commonly after a period of previous secularization. Statistics commonly measure the absolute number of adherents, the percentage of the absolute growth per-year, and the growth of converts in the world.
Studies in the 21st century suggest that, in terms of percentage and worldwide spread, Islam is the fastest-growing major religion in the world. A comprehensive religious forecast for 2050 by the Pew Research Center predicts that the global Muslim population will grow at a faster rate than the Christian population – primarily due to the average younger age, and higher fertility rate of Muslims. Religious conversion has no net impact on the Muslim population growth. In fact, conversion will have little impact on the size of religious groups.
It is projected that birth rate – rather than conversion – will prove the main factor in the growth of any given religion. While according to other various scholars and sources Pentecostalism – a Protestant Christian movement – is the fastest growing religion in the world, this growth is primarily due to religious conversion and denomination switching among Christians.
Counting the number of converts to a religion can prove difficult. Although some national censuses ask people about their religion, they do not ask if they have converted to their presently espoused faith. Additionally, in some countries, legal and social consequences make conversion difficult. For example, individuals can receive a capital punishment if they openly leave Islam in some Muslim countries.
Statistical data on conversion to and from Islam are scarce. According to a study published in 2011 by Pew Research, what little information is available may suggest that religious conversion has no net impact on the Muslim population, as the number of people who convert to Islam is roughly similar to those who leave Islam.
Some religions proselytise vigorously (Christianity and Islam, for example), while others (such as Judaism and Hinduism) do not generally encourage conversions into their ranks. Some faiths grow exponentially at first (especially, for example, along trade routes
or for reasons of social prestige),
only for their zeal to wane (note the flagging case of Zoroastrianism). The growth of a religion can interact with factors such as persecution, entrenched rival religions (such as established religions), and religious market saturation.
Growth of religious groups
Buddhism
Buddhism is based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha, who was born in modern day Nepal and lived and taught in India in the 5th century BC. The majority of Buddhists live in Asia; Europe and North America also have populations exceeding one million. According to scholars of religious demographics, there are between 488 million, 495 million, and 535 million Buddhists in the world.
According to Johnson and Grim, Buddhism has grown from a total of 138 million adherents in 1910, of which 137 million were in Asia, to 495 million in 2010, of which 487 million are in Asia. According to them, there was a fast annual growth of Buddhism in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and several Western European countries (1910–2010). More recently (2000–2010), the countries with highest growth rates are Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and some African countries. The Australian Bureau of Statistics, through statistical analysis, held Buddhism to be the fastest-growing spiritual tradition in Australia in terms of percentage gain, with a growth of 79.1% for the period 1996 to 2001 (200,000→358,000).
Buddhism is the majority and state religion in seven countries: Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Mongolia, Thailand, Cambodia, Bhutan and Laos.
Buddhism is the majority religion in the following nine countries: Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Bhutan, Mongolia, Japan and Singapore.
Special administrative areas in China are Buddhist majority areas such as Macau, Hong Kong and Tibet.
Kalmykia is the only Buddhist majority region in Europe. It is an autonomous republic in Russia.
According to a 2012 Pew Research Center survey, over the next four decades the number of Buddhists around the world is expected to decrease from 487 million in 2010 to 486 million in 2050. The decline is due to several factors such as the low fertility level among Buddhists (1.6 children per woman), and the old age (median age of 34), compared to the overall population. According to the Pew Research Center published on 2010, religious conversion may have little impact on the Buddhists population between 2010 and 2050; Buddhists are expected to lose 2.9 million adherents between 2010 and 2050.
According to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, between 2010 and 2015 "an estimated 32 million babies were born to Buddhist mothers and roughly 20 million Buddhists died, meaning that the natural increase in the Buddhists population – i.e., the number of births minus the number of deaths – was 12 million over this period". According to the same study Buddhists "are projected to decline in absolute number, dropping 7% from nearly 500 million in 2015 to 462 million in 2060. Low fertility rates and aging populations in countries such as China, Thailand and Japan are the main demographic reasons for the expected shrinkage in the Buddhist population in the years ahead".
Chinese traditional religion
According to a survey of religion in China in the year 2010, the number of people practicing some form of Chinese folk religion is near to 950 million (70% of the Chinese), of which 173 million (13%) practice some form of Taoist-defined folk faith. Further in detail, 12 million people have passed some formal initiation into Taoism, or adhere to the official Chinese Taoist Association. Comparing this with other surveys, evidence suggests that nowadays three-fifths to four-fifths of the Chinese believe in folk religion. This shows a significant growth from the 300–400 million people practicing Chinese traditional religion that were estimated in the 1990s and early 2000s.
This growth reverses the rapid decline that Chinese traditional religion faced in the 20th century. Moreover, Chinese religion has also spread throughout the world following the emigration of Chinese populations, with 672,000 adherents in Canada as of 2010.
According to scholars Miikka Ruokanen and Paulos Huang of University of Helsinki, the rebirth of traditional religion in China is faster and larger than the spread of other religions in the country, such as Buddhism and Christianity:
The number of adherents of the Chinese traditional religion is difficult to count, because of :
The Chinese folk religion is a "diffused religion" rather than "institutional". It is a meaning system of social solidarity and identity, ranging from the kinship systems to the community, the state, and the economy, that serves to integrate Chinese culture.
Christianity
According to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey, there are 2.2 billion Christians around the world in 2010, up from about 600 million in 1910. And according to a 2012 Pew Research Center survey, within the next four decades, Christians will remain the world's largest religion; if current trends continue, by 2050 the number of Christians will reach 3 billion (or 31.4%). According to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, by 2060 Christians will remain the world's largest religion; and the number of Christians will reach 3.05 billion (or 31.8%). According to scholar Mark Juergensmeyer of University of California, Berkeley, the global Christian population increased at an average annual rate of 2.3%, while Roman Catholicism is growing by 1.3% annually, Protestantism is growing by 3.3% annually, and Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism is growing by 7% annually. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Christianity (growth rate, 1.38%) is one of the six fastest-growing religions in the world, with high birth rates and conversions in the global South were being cited as the major reasons of the Christian population growth.
By 2050, the Christian population is expected to exceed 3 billion. Christians have 2.7 children per woman, which is above replacement level (2.1). The birth rate is expected to be the main factor in the growth of Christianity. According to Pew Research Center study, by 2050 the number of Christians in absolute number is expected to grow to more than double in the next few decades, from 517 million to 1.1 billion in Sub Saharan Africa, from 531 million to 665 million in Latin America and Caribbean, from 287 million to 381 million in Asia, and from 266 million to 287 million in North America. By 2050, Christianity is expected to remain the majority of population and the largest religious group in Latin America and Caribbean (89%), North America (66%), Europe (65.2%) and Sub Saharan Africa (59%).
Europe was the home for the world's largest Christian population for the past 1,000 years, but since 2015 Christians in Africa and Latin America respectively surpass the Europe Christian population because of the high fertility rate there. in 2018 a new data from the Gordon Theological Seminary shows that, for the first time ever, more number of Christians live in Africa than on any other single continent: "The results show Africa on top with 631 million Christian residents, Latin America in 2nd place with 601 million Christians, and Europe in 3rd place with 571 million Christians". In 2017 Christianity added nearly 50 million people due to factors such as birth rate and religious conversion. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, between 2010 and 2015 "an estimated 223 million babies were born to Christian mothers and roughly 107 million Christians died, meaning that the natural increase in the Christian population – i.e., the number of births minus the number of deaths – was 116 million over this period".
According to Mark Jürgensmeyer of the University of California, popular Protestantism is one of the most dynamic religious movements in the contemporary world. According to various scholars and sources Pentecostalism – a Protestant Christian movement – is the fastest growing religion in the world, this growth is primarily due to religious conversion. According to Pulitzer Center 35,000 people become Pentecostal or "Born again" every day. According to scholar Keith Smith of Georgia State University "many scholars claim that Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious phenomenon in human history", and according to scholar Peter L. Berger of Boston University "the spread of Pentecostal Christianity may be the fastest growing movement in the history of religion". Changes in worldwide Protestantism over the last century have been significant. Since 1900, due primarily to conversion, Protestantism has spread rapidly in Africa, Asia, Oceania and Latin America. That caused Protestantism to be called a primarily non-Western religion. Much of the growth has occurred after World War II, when decolonization of Africa and abolition of various restrictions against Protestants in Latin American countries occurred. According to one source, Protestants constituted respectively 2.5%, 2%, 0.5% of Latin Americans, Africans and Asians. In 2000, percentage of Protestants on mentioned continents was 17%, more than 27% and 5.5%, respectively.
The significant growth of Christianity in non-Western countries led to regional distribution changes of Christians. In 1900, Europe and the Americas were home to the vast majority of the world's Christians (93%). Besides, Christianity has grown enormously in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. In 2010, 26% of the world's Christians lived in Europe, followed by 24.4% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 23.8% in Sub-Saharan Africa, 13.2% in Asia and the Pacific, 12.3% in North America, and 1% in the Middle East and North Africa. The study also suggested that by 2050, the global Christian population will change considerably. By 2050, 38% of the world's Christians will live in the Sub-Saharan Africa, followed by 23% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 16% in Europe, 13% in Asia and the Pacific and 10% of the world's Christians will live in North America.
In mid-2005 Christianity adds about 65.1 million people annually due to factors such as birth rate and religious conversion, while losing 27.4 million people annually due to factors such as death rate and religious apostasy. Most of the net growth in the numbers of Christians is in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Christianity is still the largest religion in Western Europe, according to a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center, 71.0% of the Western European population identified themselves as Christians, however, most of them are non-practicing and non- church-attending. According to the same study, a large majority of those who raised as Christians (83%) in Western Europe, still identified themselves as Christians today. On the other hand, Central and Eastern European countries did not experience a decline in the percentage of Christians, as the proportion of Christians in these countries have mostly been stable or even increasing. Christianity is still the largest religion in Central and Eastern Europe, according to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center, the share of adults who identify themselves as Eastern Orthodox in Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria has been significantly increased between 1991 and 2015. According to scholar Barry John Tolmay of University of Pretoria there are increasing signs of a Christian revival in Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria.
According to a 2005 paper submitted to a meeting of the American Political Science Association, most of Christianity's growth has occurred in non-Western countries. The paper concludes that the Pentecostalism movement is the fastest-growing religion worldwide. Protestantism is growing primarily as a result of historic missionary activity and the recently high fertility rate in Africa, and due primarily to conversion in China. According to scholar Paul Freston of Wilfrid Laurier University Pentecostalism continues to grow in Latin America, "both by conversion and by high birth rates". According to scholar Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University "converts to Protestantism find their incomes, education levels, hygiene and social networks expanding". According to scholar Terence Chong, since 1980s Protestantism is expanding in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, and South Korea. According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center, around 9% of Latin Americans were raised as Protestant, but nearly 19% now identify themselves as Protestants.
The US Department of State estimated in 2005 that Protestants in Vietnam may have grown by 600% over the previous 10 years. According to Pew Research Center, "largely through the efforts of missionaries and churches, Christianity has grown rapidly in South Korea over the past century", and has grown from 1% in 1900, to 20.7% in 1985 and to 29.3% in 2010, And the Catholic Church has increased its membership by 70% in the last ten years, according to Pew Research Center, "the growth of Catholics has occurred across all age groups, among men and women and across all education levels. In Singapore, the percentage of Christians among Singaporeans increased from 12.7%, in 1990, to 17.5%, in 2010. According to scholar Michael Nai-Chiu Poon of University of Toronto conversion to Christianity is increasing among Chinese Singaporeans.
In recent years, the number of Chinese Christians has increased significantly; Christians were 4 million before 1949 (3 million Catholics and 1 million Protestants), and are reaching 67 million today. Christianity is reportedly the fastest growing religion in China with an average annual rate of 7% as of 2015. Some reports also show that the number of the Chinese Indonesians Christians have increased, according to scholar Gavin W. Jones of Australian National University, "there has been a rapid growth in the number of Chinese Christians" in Indonesia, and "conversion of Chinese to Christianity accelerated in the 1960s, especially in East Java, and for Indonesia as a whole the proportion of Chinese who were Catholics rose from 2 percent in 1957 to 6 percent in 1969". Professor Aris Ananta reported in 2008 that "anecdotal evidence suggests that more Buddhist Chinese have become Christians as they increased their standards of education, because Christianity, unlike Buddhism, is often associated with 'modernity' and Western education", although there are no stats to support this. According to a poll conducted by the Gallup Organization in 2006, Christianity has increased significantly in Japan, particularly among youth, and a high number of teens are becoming Christians.
In 1900, there were only 8.7 million adherents of Christianity in Africa, while in 2010 there were 390 million. It is expected that by 2025 there will be 600 million Christians in Africa. In Nigeria, the percentage of Christians has grown from 21.4%, in 1953, to 50.8%, in 2010. In South Africa, Pentecostalism has grown from 0.2%, in 1951, to 7.6%, in 2001. According to Pew Research Center the number of Catholics in Africa has increased from one million in 1901 to 329,882,000 in 2010. From 2015 to 2016, Africa saw an increase of more than 6,265,000 Catholics.
Catholic Church membership in 2013 was 1.254 billion, which is 17.7% of the world population, an increase from 437 million, in 1950 and 654 million, in 1970. The main growth areas have been Asia and Africa, 39% and 32%, respectively, since 2000.
Since 2010, the rate of increase was of 0.3% in the Americas and Europe. On the other hand, Eric Kaufman, of University of London, argued that the main reason for the expansion of Catholicism and conservative Protestantism along with other religions is because their religions tend to be "pro-natal" and they have more children, and not due to religious conversion.
The total Protestant population has reached 1.17 billion in 2024. Protestantism is one of the most dynamic religious movements in the contemporary world. Evangelical Christian denominations also are among the fastest-growing denominations in some Catholic Christian countries, such as Brazil and France (France going from 2% to 3% of the population). In Brazil, the total number of Protestants jumped from 16.2% in 2000 to 22.2% in 2010 (for the first time, the percentage of Catholics in Brazil is less than 70%). These cases do not contribute to a growth of Christianity overall, but rather to a substitution of a brand of Christianity with another one.
According to the records of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its membership has grown every decade since its beginning in the 1830s, it is among the top ten largest Christian denominations in the U.S., and it was the fastest growing church in the U.S. in 2012.
The 19th century saw at least 250,000 Jews convert to Christianity according to existing records of various societies. Data from the Pew Research Center has it that, as of 2013, about 1.6 million adult American Jews identify themselves as Christians, most as Protestants. According to the same data, most of the Jews who identify themselves as some sort of Christian (1.6 million) were raised as Jews or are Jews by ancestry. According to a 2012 study, 17% of Jews in Russia identify themselves as Christians. According to study by Pew Research Center in 2021, around 19% of American those who say they were raised Jewish or who had at least one Jewish parent now identify as Christian.
According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey from the University of Melbourne, since the 1960s there has been a substantial increase in the number of conversions from Islam to Christianity, mostly to the Evangelical and Pentecostal forms. According to Blainey, this is due to several reasons, including the lack of ties of Evangelical Christianity with colonial powers in contrast to Roman Catholic and Mainline Protestant Churches, as well as the rising of Islamism, which lead some Muslims to look towards other religions such as Christianity through evangelical activity in the visual and audio media, as well as irreligion. Many Muslims who convert to Christianity face social and governmental persecution. Khalil Bilici, while admitting that the limitations of their 2007 study database are too small, found a good number of Middle Eastern people are likely to convert to Christianity after leaving Islam.
According to the World Christian Encyclopedia estimate significantly more people have converted to Christianity from Islam in the 21st century than at any other point in Islamic history. The 2015 Believers in Christ from a Muslim Background: A Global Census study published by Baylor University institute for studies of religion estimates that 10.2 million Muslims converted to Christianity based on global missionary data. Countries with the largest numbers of Muslims converted to Christianity according to this study include Indonesia (6,500,000), Nigeria (600,000), Iran (500,000 versus only 500 in 1979), the United States (450,000), Ethiopia (400,000) and Algeria (380,000). Indonesia is home to the largest Christian community made up of converts from their former Islamic faith; according to various sources, since the mid and late 1960s, between two million to 2.5 million Muslims converted to Christianity.
Christians of Muslim background communities can be found in Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Georgia (Abkhazia), Germany, Greece, India (kashmir), Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sweden, Syria, Tanzania, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, the United States, Uzbekistan, and other countries. According to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2007, experts estimated that thousands of Muslims in the Western world converted to Christianity annually, but were not publicized due to fear of retribution.
According to scholar Rob Scott of University of Tasmania in 2010 there were "approximately 180,000 Arab Americans and about 130,000 Iranian Americans who converted from Islam to Christianity", Scholar Dudley Woodberry form Fuller Theological Seminary estimated approximately that 20,000 Muslims converts to Christianity annually in the United States. Also according to the historian Daniel Pipes of Harvard University and University of Chicago, and a researcher specializing in criticism of Islam, "reports of widespread conversions of Muslims to Christianity come from regions as disparate as Algeria, Albania, Syria, and Kurdistan", in northern Iraq and Algeria, the conversions of Kurds and Berbers to Christianity are unusually high. According to Guinness, approximately 12.5 million more people who converted to Islam than people who converted to Christianity between 1990 and 2000. According to scholar Ladan Boroumand "Iran today is witnessing the highest rate of Christianization in the world", and according to scholar Shay Khatiri of Johns Hopkins University "Islam is the fastest shrinking religion in there [Iran], while Christianity is growing the fastest", and in 2018 "up to half a million Iranians are Christian converts from Muslim families, and most of these Christians are evangelicals", and he adds "recent estimates claim that the number might have climbed up to somewhere between 1 million and 3 million". Converting to Christianity is growing among Muslims in the Albanian diaspora, Iranian diaspora, and Syrian diaspora, and among Muslim Maghrebis in France, and Kurds and Turks in Germany. According to scholars Felix Wilfred from the University of Madras and Chris Hann from the University of Cambridge and Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, since the fall of communism, the number of Muslim converts to Christianity in Kyrgyzstan has been increased. Some scholars and media reports indicate that in the Middle East there been increasing numbers of conversions to Christianity among the Berbers, Kurds, Persians, and Turks, and among some religious minorities such as Alawites and Druze. Churches in Europe say that there is an increase in the number of Muslims converting to Christianity among immigrants.
Religious conversions are projected to have a "modest impact on changes in the religious groups including Christian population" between 2010 and 2050; and may negatively affect the growth of Christian population and its share of the world's populations "slightly". According to the same study Christianity, is expected to lose a net of 66 million adherents (40 million converts versus 106 million apostate) mostly to religiously unaffiliated category between 2010 and 2050. It is also expected that Christianity may have the largest net losses in terms of religious conversion. However, these forecasts lack reliable data on religious conversion in China, but according to media reports and expert assessments, it is possible that the rapid growth of Christianity in China may maintain, or even increase, the current numerical advantage of Christianity as the largest religion in the world. This scenario (Chinese scenario) is based primarily on sensitivity tests. Large increases in the developing world (around 23,000 per day) have been accompanied by substantial declines in the developed world, mainly in Western Europe and North America. By 2050, Christianity is expected to remain the majority religion in the United States (66.4%, down from 78.3% in 2010), and the number of Christians in absolute numbers is expected to grow from 243 million to 262 million.
According to the Pew Research Center, Christianity is declining in the United States while non-Christian faiths are growing. The 2014 Religious Landscape Study finds a large majority (87.6%) of those who were raised as Christians in the United States still identify as such, while the rest who no longer identify as Christians mostly identify as religiously unaffiliated, and the number of those leaving Christianity in the United States is greater than the number of converts; however, the number of those convert to evangelical Christianity in the United States is greater than the number of those leaving that faith. While on the other hand, in 2017, scholars Landon Schnabel and Sean Bock at Harvard University and Indiana University argued that while "Mainline Protestant" churches has declined in the United States since the late 1980s, but many of them do not leave Christianity, but rather convert to another Christian denomination, in particularly to evangelicalism. Schnabel and Bock argued also that evangelicalism and Conservative Christianity has persisted and expanded in the United States. And according to Eric Kaufmann from Harvard University and University of London, Christian fundamentalism is expanding in the United States.
According to study published by the missionary statistician and professor David B. Barrett of Columbia University, and professor of global Christianity, historian George Thomas Kurian, and both are work on World Christian Encyclopedia, approximately 2.7 million converting to Christianity annually from another religion, World Christian Encyclopedia also cited that Christianity ranks at first place in net gains through religious conversion. On the other hand, demographer Conrad Hackett of Pew Research Center stated that the World Christian Encyclopedia gives a higher estimate for percent Christian when compared to other cross-national data sets. While according to the book The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, which written by professor of the Christian mission, Charles E. Farhadian, and professor of psychology, Lewis Rambo, in mid-2005 approximately 15.5 million converted to Christianity from another religion, while approximately 11.7 million left Christianity, most of them becoming irreligious, resulting in a net gain of 3.8 million.
According to scholar Philip Jenkins Christianity is growing rapidly in China and some other Asian countries and sub-Saharan Africa. According to a study by a scholar Fenggang Yang from Purdue University, Christianity is "spreading among the Chinese of South-East Asia", and "Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity is growing more quickly in China", also according to him, more than half of them have university degrees. According to a report by the Singapore Management University, more people in Southeast Asia are converting to Christianity, and these new converts are mostly Chinese business managers. According to scholar Juliette Koning and Heidi Dahles of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam there is a "rapid expansion of charismatic Christianity from the 1980s onwards. Singapore, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Malaysia are said to have the fastest-growing Christian communities and the majority of the new believers are "upwardly mobile, urban, middle-class Chinese". Asia has the second largest Pentecostal-charismatic Christians of any continent, with the number growing from 10 million to 135 million between 1970 and 2000". According to the Council on Foreign Relations the "number of Chinese Protestants has grown by an average of 10 percent annually since 1979". According to scholar Todd Hartch of Eastern Kentucky University, by 2005, around 6 million Africans converted to Christianity annually. While the exact number of Dalit converts to Christianity in India is not available, scholar William R. Burrow of Colorado State University estimated that about 8% of Dalit have converted to Christianity. According to a 2021 study by the Pew Research Center, Christianity in India gained an increase from conversion, most of the Christian converts in India are former Hindus.
It has been reported also that increasing numbers of young people or educated people are becoming Christians in several countries such as China,Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. It has also been reported that conversion into Christianity is significantly increasing among Korean, Chinese, and Japanese in the United States. By 2012 percentage of Christians on mentioned communities was 71%, more than 30% and 37%, respectively. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, between 1965 and 1985 about 2.5 million Indonesians converted from Islam to Christianity. Many people who convert to Christianity face persecution.
Deism
The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) survey estimated that between 1990 and 2001 the number of self-identifying deists grew from 6,000 to 49,000, representing about 0.02% of the US population at the time.
Druze
Druze is a major religion in the Levant region. Druzites or Al-Muwaḥḥidūn are an Arabic-speaking esoteric ethnoreligious group; the number of Druzites worldwide is between 800,000 and one million, with the vast majority residing in the Levant. Even though the faith originally developed out of Ismaili Islam, Druze do not identify as a branch of Islam and view themselves as a separate religion. The Druze faith do not accept converts to their faith, nor practice proselytism. Over the centuries a number of the Druze embraced Christianity, Islam and other religions.
The Druzites reside primarily in Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. Syria is home to the largest Druzite community in the world, according to a study published by Columbia University, the number of Syrian Druze increased from 684,000 in 2010 to 730,000 in mid of 2018. The Lebanese Druze have the lowest fertility among all age groups after the Lebanese Christians.
According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics in 2017, the Israeli Druze population growth rate of 1.4%, which is lower than the Muslim population growth rate (2.5%) and the total population growth (1.7%), but higher than the Arab Christian population growth rate (1.0%). At the end of 2017, the average age of the Israeli Druze was 27.9. About 26.3% of the Israeli Druze population are under 14 years old and about 6.1% of the Israeli Druze are 65 years and over. Since the year 2000, the Israeli Druze community has witnessed a significant decrease in fertility-rate and a significant increase in life expectancy. The fertility rate for Israeli Druze in 2017 is 2.1 children per woman, while the fertility rate among Jewish women (3.2) and Muslim women (3.4) and the fertility rate among Israeli Christian women (1.9).
Hinduism
Hinduism is the third largest religion in the world. Hindus made up about 17% of the world's population in 2010. According to Pew Research Center 99% of Hindus lived in the Indo-Pacific region in 2010. According to Pew Forum, Hindus are anticipated to continue to be concentrated primarily in the Indo-Pacific region in 2050. Hinduism is the largest religion in the countries of India, Nepal, Mauritius and Guyana. Approximately 90% of the world's Hindus live in India. 79.8% of India's population is Hindu, accounting for about 90% of Hindus worldwide. Hinduism's 10-year growth rate is estimated at 15% (based on the period 1991 to 2001), corresponding to a yearly growth close to 2%. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, between 2010 and 2015 "an estimated 109 million babies were born to Hindu mothers and roughly 42 million Hindus died, meaning that the natural increase in the Hindus population – i.e., the number of births minus the number of deaths – was 67 million over this period".
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Hinduism (1.52%) is one of the six fastest-growing religions in the world, with high birth rates in India being cited as the major reasons of the Hindu population growth.
Hinduism is a growing religion in countries such as Ghana, Russia, and the United States. According to 2011 census, Hinduism has become the fastest-growing religion in Australia since 2006, due to migration from India and Fiji.
Generally, the term "conversion" is not applicable to Hindu traditions. According to Arvind Sharma, Hinduism "is typically quite comfortable with multiple religious participation, multiple religious affiliations, and even with multiple religious identities." However, some Hindu groups are known for running religious conversion which has been termed as Ghar Wapsi. According to proponents of Hindutva, such as Sangh Parivar, the process is called "reconversion" of Christians and Muslims who were previously converted.
Islam
Modern growth
Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world. In 1990, 1.1 billion people were Muslims, while in 2010, 1.6 billion people were Muslims. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as of 2007 estimated that the fastest-growing religion of the world to be Islam (1.84%), high birth rates as the reason for the growths. According to the BBC, a comprehensive American study concluded in 2009 that the number of Muslims worldwide stood at about 23% of the world's population with 60% of the world's Muslims living in Asia.
According to the same study "globally, Muslims have the highest fertility rate, an average of 3.1 children per woman – well above replacement level (2.1)", and "in all major regions where there is a sizable Muslim population, Muslim fertility exceeds non-Muslim fertility". From 1990 to 2010, the global Muslim population increased at an average annual rate of 2.2%. By 2030 Muslims are projected to represent about 26.4% of the global population (out of a total of 7.9 billion people). According to a 2019 study by the Pew Research Center; "around the globe, Muslims have higher fertility rates than Christians on average. Muslim women's low educational attainment is a likely factor; demographers find that higher educational attainment among women is tied to lower fertility rates".
On the other hand, in 2010, the Pew Forum found "that statistical data for Muslim conversions is scarce and as per their little available information, there is no substantial net gain or loss of Muslims due to religious conversion. It also stated that "the number of people who embrace Islam and the number of those who leave Islam are roughly equal. Thus, this report excludes religious conversion as a direct factor from the projection of Muslim population growth." People switching their religions will likely have no effect on the growth of the Muslim population, as the number of people who convert to Islam is roughly similar to those who leave Islam. Another study found that the number of people who will leave Islam is 9,400,000 and the number of converts to Islam is 12,620,000 so the net gain to Islam through conversion should be 3 million between 2010 and 2050, mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa (2.9 million). The growth of Islam from 2010 to 2020 has been estimated at 1.70% due to high birthrates in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The report also shows that the fall in the birth rate of Muslims slowed down the growth rate from 1990 to 2010. It is due to the fall of the fertility rate in many Muslim majority countries. Despite the decline, Muslims still have the highest birth rate among the world's major religious groups. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the World Christian Database as of 2007 has Islam as the fastest-growing religion in the world. A 2007 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report argued that some Muslim population projections are overestimated, as they assume that all descendants of Muslims will become Muslims even in cases of mixed parenthood.
According to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, between 2010 and 2015 "an estimated 213 million babies were born to Muslim mothers and roughly 61 million Muslims died, meaning that the natural increase in the Muslim population – i.e., the number of births minus the number of deaths – was 152 million over this period", and it added small net gains through religious conversion into Islam (420,000). According to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, by 2060 Muslims will remain the second world's largest religion; and if current trends continue, the number of Muslims will reach 2.9 billion (or 31.1%).
It was reported in 2013 that around 5,000 British people convert to Islam every year, with most of them being women. According to an earlier 2001 census, surveys found that there was an increase of 60,000 conversions to Islam in the United Kingdom. Many converts to Islam said that they suffered from hostility from their families after converting. According to a report by CNN, "Islam has drawn converts from all walks of life, most notably African-Americans". Studies estimated about 30,000 converting to Islam annually in the United States. According to The New York Times, an estimated 25% of American Muslims are converts, these converts are mostly African American. According to The Huffington Post, "observers estimate that as many as 20,000 Americans convert to Islam annually.", most of them are women and African-Americans. Experts say that conversions to Islam have doubled in the past 25 years in France, among the six million Muslims in France, about 100,000 are converts. On the other hand, according to Pew Research, the number of American converts to Islam is roughly equal to the number of American Muslims who leave Islam and this is unlike other religions in the United States where the number of those who leave these religions is greater than the number of those who convert to it, and most people who leave Islam become unaffiliated, according to same study ex-Muslims were more likely to be Christians compare to ex-Hindus or ex-Jews.
Resurgent Islam is one of the most dynamic religious movements in the contemporary world. The Vatican's 2008 yearbook of statistics revealed that for the first time, Islam has outnumbered the Roman Catholics globally. It stated that, "Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world", and stated that, "It is true that while Muslim families, as is well known, continue to make a lot of children, Christian ones on the contrary tend to have fewer and fewer". According to Foreign Policy, high birth rates were cited as the reason for the Muslim population growth. With 3.1 children per woman, Muslims have higher fertility levels than the world's overall population between 2010 and 2015. High fertility is a major driver of projected Muslim population growth around the world and in particular regions. Between 2010 and 2015, with exception of the Middle East and North Africa, Muslim fertility of any other region in the world was higher than the rate for the region as a whole. While Muslim birth rates are expected to experience a decline, it will remain above replacement level and higher fertility than the world's overall by 2050. As per U.N.'s global population forecasts, as well as the
Pew Research projections, over time fertility rates generally converge toward the
replacement level. Globally, Muslims were younger (median age of 23) than the overall population (median age of 28) as of 2010. While decline of Muslim birth rates in coming years have also been well documented. According to David Ignatius, there is major decline in Muslim fertility rates as pointed out by Nicholas Eberstadt. Based on the data from 49 Muslim-majority countries and territories, he found that Muslims' birth rate has significantly dropped for 41% between 1975 and 1980 to 2005–10 while the global population decline was 33% during that period. It also stated that over a 50% decline was found in 22 Muslim countries and over a 60% decline in Iran, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Libya, Albania, Qatar and Kuwait.
According to the religious forecast for 2050 by Pew Research Center, between 2010 and 2050 modest net gains through religious conversion are expected for Muslims (3 million) and most of the net gains through religious conversion for Muslims found in Sub Saharan Africa (2.9 million). The study also reveals that, due to young age & relatively high fertility rate among Muslims by 2050 there will be near parity between Muslims (2.8 billion, or 30% of the population) and Christians (2.9 billion, or 31%), possibly for the first time in history. While both religions will grow but Muslim population will exceed the Christian population and by 2100, Muslim population (35%) will be 1% more than the Christian population (34%). By the end of 2100 Muslims are expected to outnumber Christians. According to the same study, Muslims population growth is twice of world's overall population growth due to young age and relatively high fertility rate and as a result Muslims are projected to rise to 30% (2050) of the world's population from 23% (2010).
While the total Fertility Rate of Muslims in North America is 2.7 children per woman in the 2010 to 2015 period, well above the regional average (2.0) and the replacement level (2.1). Europe's Muslim population also has higher fertility (2.1) than other religious groups in the region, well above the regional average (1.6). A new study of Population Reference Bureau by demographers Charles Westoff and Tomas Frejka suggests that the fertility gap between Muslims and non-Muslims is shrinking and although the Muslim immigrants do have more children than other Europeans their fertility tends to decline over time, often faster than among non-Muslims.
Generally, there are few reports about how many people leave Islam in Muslim majority countries. The main reason for this is the social and legal repercussions associated with leaving Islam in many Muslim majority countries, up to and including the death penalty for apostasy. On the other hand, the increasingly large ex-Muslim communities in the Western world that adhere to no religion have been well documented. A 2007 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report argued that some Muslim population projections are overestimated, as they assume that all descendants of Muslims will become Muslims even in cases of mixed parenthood. Equally, Darren E. Sherkat questioned in Foreign Affairs whether some of the Muslim growth projections are accurate as they do not take into account the increasing number of non-religious Muslims. Quantitative research is lacking, but he believes the European trend mirrors the American: data from the General Social Survey in the United States show that 32 percent of those raised Muslim no longer embrace Islam in adulthood, and 18 percent hold no religious identification. Many Muslims who leave Islam face social rejection or imprisonment and sometimes murder or other penalties. According to Harvard University professor Robert D. Putnam, there is increasing numbers of Americans who are leaving their faith and becoming unaffiliated and the average Iranian American is slightly less religious than the average American. According to Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans, the number of Iranian Americans Muslims decreased from 42% in 2008 to 31% in 2012 according to a telephone survey around the Los Angeles region. A June 2020 online survey found a much smaller percentage of Iranians stating they believe in Islam, with half of those surveyed indicating they had lost their religious faith. The poll, conducted by the Netherlands-based GAMAAN (Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran), using online polling to provide greater anonymity for respondents, surveyed 50,000 Iranians and found 32% identified as Shia, 5% as Sunni and 3% as Sufi Muslim. A survey conducted by Pew Research Center in 2017 found that conversion has a negative impact on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe, with roughly 160,000 more people leaving Islam than converting into Islam between 2010 and 2016.
By 2010 an estimated 44 million Muslims were living in Europe (6%), up from 4.1% in 1990. By 2030, Muslims are expected to make up 8% of Europe's population including an estimated 19 million in the EU (3.8%), including 13 million foreign-born Muslim immigrants. Islam is widely considered as the fastest growing religion in Europe due primarily to immigration and above average birth rates. Between 2010 and 2015 the Muslim fertility rate in Europe was (2.1). On the other hand, the fertility rate in Europe as a whole was (1.6). Pew study also reveals that Muslims are younger than other Europeans. In 2010, the median age of Muslims throughout Europe was (32), eight years younger than the median for all Europeans (40). According to a religious forecast for 2050 by Pew Research Center conversion does not add significantly to the growth of the Muslim population in Europe, according to the same study the net loss is (−60,000) due to religious switching.
The Pew Research Center notes that "the data that we have isn't pointing in the direction of 'Eurabia' at all", and predicts that the percentage of Muslims is estimated to rise to 8% in 2030, due to immigration and above-average birth rates. And only two western European countries – France and Belgium – will become around 10 percent Muslim, by 2030. According to Justin Vaïsse the fertility rate of Muslim immigrants declines with integration. He further points out that Muslims are not a monolithic or cohesive group, Most academics who have analysed the demographics dismiss the predictions that the EU will have Muslim majorities.
It is completely reasonable to assume that the overall Muslim population in Europe will increase, and Muslim citizens have and will have a significant impact on European life. The prospect of a homogeneous Muslim community per se, or a Muslim majority in Europe is however out of the question. Eric Kaufman of University of London denied the claims of Eurabia. According to him, Muslims will be a significant minority rather than majority in Europe and as per their projections for 2050 in the Western Europe, there will be 10–15 per cent Muslim population in high immigration countries such as Germany, France and the UK. Eric Kaufman also argue that the main reason why Islam is expanding along with other religions, is not because of conversion to Islam, but primarily to the nature of the religion, as he calls it "pro-natal", where Muslims tend to have more children. Doug Saunders states that by 2030 Muslims and Non-Muslims birth rates will be equal in Germany, Greece, Spain and Denmark without taking account of the Muslims immigration to these countries. He also states that Muslims & Non-Muslims fertility rate difference will decrease from 0.7 to 0.4 and this different will continue to shrink as a result of which Muslims and non-Muslims fertility rate will be identical by 2050.
It is often reported from various sources, including the German domestic intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst), that Salafism is the fastest-growing Islamic movement in the world.
In 2010 Asia was home for (62%) of the world's Muslims, and about (20%) of the world's Muslims lived in the Middle East and North Africa, (16%) in Sub Saharan Africa, and 2% in Europe. By 2050 Asia will be home to (52.8%) of the world's Muslims, and about (24.3%) of the world's Muslims will live in Sub Saharan Africa, (20%) the Middle East and North Africa, and 2% in Europe. As per the Pew Research study, Muslim populations will grow in absolute number in all regions of the world between 2010 and 2050. The Muslim population in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to reach nearly 1.5 billion by 2050, up from roughly 1 billion in 2010. The growth of Muslims is also expected in the Middle East-North Africa region, It is projected to increase from about 300 million in 2010 to more than 550 million in 2050. Besides, the Muslim population in sub-Saharan Africa is forecast to grow from about 250 million in 2010 to nearly 670 million in 2050 which is more than double. The absolute number of Muslims is also expected to increase in regions with smaller Muslim populations such as Europe and North America, due to young age & relatively high fertility rate. In Europe Muslim population will be nearly double (from 5.9% to 10.2%). In North America, it will grow 1% to 2%. In Asia Pacific region, Muslims will surpass the Hindus by the time. In Latin America and Caribbean Muslim population will stay 0.1% by 2050.
In 2010 Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria was home for (47.8%) of the world's Muslims.
Historical growth within the Middle East
There exist different views among scholars about the spread of Islam. Islam began in Arabia and from 633 AD until the late 10th century it was spread through conquests, far-reaching trade and missionary activity.
According to Rodney Stark, Islam was spread after military conquests after Arab armies began overtaking Christian regions from Syria to North Africa and Spain, as well as Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Hindu regions in Central Asia, parts of South Asia and Southeast Asia via military invasions, traders and Sufi missionaries. According to some scholars, the Jizya (poll tax) was the most important factor in the mass conversion to Islam, the tax paid by all non-Muslims (Dhimmis – which translated means "protected persons") in Islamic empires While other scholars oppose this belief, because the jizya was not of great value, and those who could not pay it were exempt from it. (such as Christians under the Ottoman Empire's authority, Hindus and Buddhists under regime of Muslim invaders, Coptic Christians under administration of the Muslim Arabs, Zoroastrians living under Islamic rule in ancient Persia, and also with Jewish communities in the medieval Arab world) while some scholars indicate that some Muslim rulers in India did not consistently collect the jizya (poll tax) from Dhimmis. Under Islamic law, Muslims are required to pay Zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam. Muslims take 2.5% out of their salaries and use the funds give to the needy. Since non-Muslims are not required to pay Zakat nor entitled to benefit from it, they had to support their own poor and in addition they had to pay Jizya if they wanted the same protections the Muslims received.
In India, Islam was brought by various traders and rulers from Afghanistan and other places.
According to other scholars, many converted for a whole host of reasons, the main statement of which was evangelization by Muslims, though there were several instances where some were pressured to convert owing to internal violence and friction between the Christian and Muslim communities, according to historian Philip Jenkins.
However John L. Esposito, a scholar on the subject of Islam in The Oxford History of Islam states that the spread of Islam "was often peaceful and sometimes even received favorably by Christians". In a 2008 conference on religion at Yale University's The MacMillan Center Initiative on Religion, Politics, and Society which hosted a speech from Hugh Kennedy, he stated forced conversions played little part in the history of the spread of the faith. However, the poll tax known as Jizyah may have played a part in converting people over to Islam but as Britannica notes "The rate of taxation and methods of collection varied greatly from province to province and were greatly influenced by local pre-Islamic customs" and there were even cases when Muslims had the tax levied against them, on top of Zakat. Hugh Kennedy has also discussed the Jizyah issue and stated that Muslim governments discouraged conversion but were unable to prevent it.
Judaism
Today, the majority of the world's Jewish population is concentrated in two countries, the United States and Israel, in 2013, the United States and Israel were collectively home to more than 80 percent of the global Jewish population, each country having approximately 41 percent of the world's Jews. Israel is the only country with a Jewish population that is consistently growing through natural population growth and extensive immigration, although the Jewish populations of other countries, in Europe and North America, have recently increased through immigration. In the Diaspora, in almost every country the Jewish population in general is either declining or steady, but Orthodox and Haredi Jewish communities, whose members often shun birth control for religious reasons, have experienced rapid population growth.
Orthodox and Conservative Judaism discourage proselytism to non-Jews, but many Jewish groups have tried to reach out to the assimilated Jewish communities of the Diaspora in order for them to reconnect to their Jewish roots. Additionally, while in principle Reform Judaism favors seeking new members for the faith, this position has not translated into active proselytism, instead of taking the form of an effort to reach out to non-Jewish spouses of intermarried couples. Studies have shown that Haredi Jews population is rising rapidly due to the young age and very high fertility-rate, especially in Israel.
The overall growth rate of Jews in Israel is 1.7% annually. The diaspora countries, by contrast, have low Jewish birth rates, an increasingly elderly age composition, and a negative balance of people leaving Judaism versus those joining.
There is also a trend of Orthodox movements reaching out to secular Jews in order to give them a stronger Jewish identity so there is less chance of intermarriage. As a result of the efforts by these and other Jewish groups over the past 25 years, there has been a trend (known as the Baal teshuva movement) for secular Jews to become more religiously observant, though the demographic implications of the trend are unknown. Additionally, there is also a growing rate of conversion to Jews by Choice of gentiles who make the decision to head in the direction of becoming Jews.
Rates of interreligious marriage vary widely: In the United States, it is just under 50 percent, in the United Kingdom, around 53 percent; in France; around 30 percent, and in Australia and Mexico, as low as 10 percent. In the United States, only about a third of children from intermarriages affiliate with Jewish religious practice. The result is that most countries in the Diaspora have steady or slightly declining religiously Jewish populations as Jews continue to assimilate into the countries in which they live.
In 1939, the core Jewish population reached its historical peak of 17 million (0.8% of the global population). Because of the Holocaust, the number had been reduced to 11 million by the end of 1945. The population grew again to around 13 million by the 1970s, but has since recorded near-zero growth until around 2005 due to low fertility rates and to assimilation. Since 2005, the world's Jewish population has been growing modestly at a rate of around 0.78% (in 2013). This increase primarily reflects the rapid growth of Haredi and some Orthodox sectors, who are becoming a growing proportion of Jews.
According to the Pew Research Center published on 2010, religious conversion may have little impact on the Jewish population between 2010 and 2050; Jews are expected to lose 0.3 million adherents, between 2010 and 2050. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, over the next four decades the number of Jews around the world is expected to increase from 14.2 million in 2015 to 16.3 million in 2060.
Baháʼí Faith
As of around 2020, there were about 8 million Bahá'ís in the world. In 2013, two scholars of demography wrote that, "The Baha'i Faith is the only religion to have grown faster in every United Nations region over the past 100 years than the general population; Bahaʼi [sic] was thus the fastest-growing religion between 1910 and 2010, growing at least twice as fast as the population of almost every UN region."
The largest proportions of the total world Bahá'í population were found in sub-Saharan Africa (29.9%) and South Asia (26.8%), followed by Southeast Asia (12.7%) and Latin America (12.2%). Lesser populations are found in North America (7.6%) and the Middle East/North Africa (6.2%), while the smallest populations in Europe (2.0%), Australasia (1.6%), and Northeast Asia (0.9%). In 2015, the internationally recognized religion was the second-largest international religion in Iran, Panama, Belize, Bolivia, Zambia, and Papua New Guinea; and the third-largest in Chad, and Kenya.
From the Bahá'í Faith's origins in the 19th century until the 1950s, the vast majority of Baháʼís were found in Iran; converts from outside Iran were mostly found in India and the Western world. From having roughly 200,000 Baháʼís in 1950, the religion grew to having over 4 million by the late 1980s, with a widespread international distribution. Most of the growth in the late 20th century was seeded out of North America by means of the planned migration of individuals. Yet, rather than being a cultural spread from either Iran or North America, in 2001, sociologist David Barrett wrote that the Baháʼí Faith is, "A world religion with no racial or national focus". However, the growth has not been even. From the late 1920s to the late 1980s the religion was harassed and banned in the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc, and then again from the 1970s into the 1990s across some countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The most intense opposition has been in Iran and neighboring Shia-majority countries, considered by some scholars and watch agencies as a case of attempted genocide. Meanwhile in other times or places the religion has experienced surges in growth. Before it was banned in certain countries, the religion "hugely increased" in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1989 the Universal House of Justice named Bolivia, Bangladesh, Haiti, India, Liberia, Peru, the Philippines, and Taiwan as countries where growth in the religion had been notable in the previous decades. Bahá'í sources state "more than five million" Bahá'ís in 1991-2. However, since around 2001 the Universal House of Justice has prioritized statistics of the community by their levels of activity rather than simply their population of avowed adherents or numbers of local assemblies.
Because Bahá'ís do not represent the majority of the population in any country, and most often represent only a tiny fraction of countries' total populations, there are problems of under-reporting. In addition, there are examples where the adherents have their highest density among minorities in societies who face their own challenges.
Nonreligious
In terms of absolute numbers, irreligion appears to be increasing (along with secularization generally). (See the geographic distribution of atheism.)
According to Pew Research Center survey in 2012, religiously unaffiliated (include agnostic and atheist) make up about 18.2% of Europe's population, and they make up the majority of the population in only two European countries: Czech Republic (76%) and Estonia (60%). According to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, between 2010 and 2015 "an estimated 68 million babies were born to religiously unaffiliated mothers and roughly 42 million religiously unaffiliated died, meaning that the natural increase in the religiously unaffiliated population – i.e., the number of births minus the number of deaths – was 26 million over this period". As for religious conversion, the religiously unaffiliated is expected to have the largest net gains through religious conversion between 2010 and 2050, notably on Europe and Americas. However, religiously unaffiliated is expected to grow slightly due to a decrease in the fertility rate among the religiously unaffiliated population.
The American Religious Identification Survey gave nonreligious groups the largest gain in terms of absolute numbers: 14.3 million (8.4% of the population) to 29.4 million (14.1% of the population) for the period 1990–2001 in the U.S. A 2012 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reports, "The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling."
A similar pattern has been found in other countries such as Australia, Canada, and Mexico. According to statistics in Canada, the number of "Nones" increased by about 60% between 1985 and 2004. In Australia, census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics give "no religion" the largest gains in absolute numbers over the 15 years from 1991 to 2006, from 2,948,888 (18.2% of the population that answered the question) to 3,706,555 (21.0% of the population that answered the question). According to INEGI, in Mexico, the number of atheists grows annually by 5.2%, while the number of Catholics grows by 1.7%. In New Zealand, 39% of the population are irreligious, making it the country with the largest irreligious population percentage in the Oceania region.
According to a religious forecast for 2050 by Pew Research Center, the percentage of the world's population that is unaffiliated or nonreligious is expected to drop, from 16% of the world's total population in 2010 to 13% in 2050. The decline is largely due to the advanced age (median age of 34) and low fertility among unaffiliated or Nonreligious (1.7 children per woman in the 2010–2015 period). Sociologist Phil Zuckerman's global studies on atheism have indicated that global atheism may be in decline due to irreligious countries having the lowest birth rates in the world and religious countries having higher birth rates in general.
According to Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, by 2050 unaffiliated or nonreligious are expected to account for 27% of North America total population (up from 17.1% as in 2010), and 23% of Europe total population (up from 18% as in 2010). The religiously unaffiliated are stationed largely in the Asia-Pacific region, where 76% resided in that region in 2010, and is expected to be 68% by 2050. The share of the global unaffiliated population living in Europe is projected to grow from 12% in 2010 to 13% in 2050. The proportion of the global religiously unaffiliated living in North America will rise from 5% in 2010, to 9% in 2050.
According to the Pew Research Center, religious conversion may have a modest impact on religiously unaffiliated population between 2010 and 2050; religiously unaffiliated are expected to gain 61 million adherents. The largest net movement is expected to be into the religiously unaffiliated category between 2010 and 2050.
Sikhism
Sikhism was founded by Guru Nanak in the 15th century. The religion began in the region of Punjab in eastern Pakistan and Northwest India. Today, India is home to the largest Sikh population with 1.7% of its population, or about 20 million people identifying as Sikh. Within India, a majority of Sikhs live in the state of Punjab. Outside of India, the largest Sikh communities are in the core Anglosphere, with around 771,790 in Canada (2.1% Sikh), 524,529 in the United Kingdom (0.8% Sikh), 280,000 in the United States (0.08% Sikh), 210,400 in Australia (0.8% Sikh), and 40,908 in New Zealand (0.9% Sikh).
Primarily for socio-economic reasons (Sikhs being the wealthiest and most educated of India's four major religious groups), Indian Sikhs have the lowest adjusted growth rate of any major religious group in India, at 8.4% per decade (from 2001 to 2011), compared to the national rate of 17.7% per decade. Sikhs have the lowest fertility rate amongst India's four major religious groups, at 1.6 children per woman in 2019-20. The Sikh population has the lowest gender balance in India, with only 903 women per 1,000 men according to the 2011 Indian census, although the sex ratio at birth for Indian Sikhs has rapidly improved from 130 male births per 100 female births in 2001 to 110 male births per 100 female births in 2019-21, now only slightly above the average for India as a whole (108 male births per female births). In contrast to the religion's slowing growth in India, Sikhism is the fastest growing religion in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Johnson and Barrett (2004) estimate that the global Sikh population increases annually by 392,633 (1.7% per year, based on 2004 figures); this percentage includes births, deaths, and conversions. The estimated world's Sikh population was over 30 million in 2020, and it will reach 42 million by 2050. It is expected to increase up to 62 million by 2100, given that the anticipated growth rate of 1.7% per year and adding at least 400,000 followers annually. By 2050, according to Pew research center based on growth rate of current Sikh population between (2001–2011), India will have 27,129,086 Sikhs by half-century which will be more than that of any country including the Western world.
Wicca
The American Religious Identification Survey gives Wicca an average annual growth of 143% for the period 1990 to 2001 (from 8,000 to 134,000 – U.S. data / similar for Canada & Australia). According to Anne Elizabeth Wynn of The Statesman, "The two most recent American Religious Identification Surveys declare Wicca, one form of paganism, as the fastest growing spiritual identification in America". Mary Jones says Wicca is one of the fastest-growing religions in the United States as well. Wicca, which is largely a "Pagan" religion primarily attracts followers of nature-based religions in, as an example, the Southeast Valley region of the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area.
Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrianism was founded during the early Persian Empire in the 6th century BCE by Zarathustra. It served as the state religion of the ancient Iranian empires for more than a millennium, from around 600 BCE to 650 CE, but declined from the 7th century onwards following the Muslim conquest of Persia of 633–654. Zoroastrianism declined as forced conversion increased with the rise of Islam. From the 10th century onwards, Zoroastrians emigrated to Gujarat, India where they found asylum from unjust persecutions and since then are called Parsi, since Indians called Persia Faras and hence named them Parsi. Recent estimates place the current number of Zoroastrians at around 110,000–120,000, at most with the majority living in India, Iran, and North America; their number has been thought to be declining.
India has the world's largest Zoroastrian population who are called Parsis. According to the 2011 Census of India, there are 57,264 Parsis in India. According to the National Commission for Minorities, there are a "variety of causes that are responsible for this steady decline in the population of the community", the most significant of which were childlessness and migration- Demographic trends project that by the year 2020 the Parsis will number only 23,000. The Parsis will then cease to be called a community and will be labeled a 'tribe'. One-fifth of the decrease in population is attributed to migration. A slower birthrate than deathrate accounts for the rest: as of 2001, Parsis over the age of 60 make up for 31% of the community. Only 4.7% of the Parsi community are under 6 years of age, which translates to 7 births per year per 1,000 individuals. Concerns have been raised in recent years over the rapidly declining population of the Parsi community in India.
There has been recent conversions of Kurds from Islam to Zoroastrianism in Kurdistan for different reasons, including a sense of national and/or ethnic identity or for recent conflicts with radical Muslims, which had been enthusiastically received by Zoroastrians worldwide.
The number of Kurdish Zoroastrians, along with those of non-ethnic converts, has been estimated differently. The Zoroastrian Representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq has said that as many as 14,000 people in Iraqi Kurdistan have converted to Zoroastrianism recently, with community leaders repeating this and speculating that even more Zoroastrians in the region are practicing their faith secretly. However, this has not been confirmed by independent sources.
Overall statistics
Data collection
Statistics on religious adherence are difficult to gather and often contradictory; statistics for the change of religious adherence are even more so, requiring multiple surveys separated by many years using the same data gathering rules. This has only been achieved in rare cases, and then only for particular countries, such as the American Religious Identification Survey in the United States, or census data from Australia (which has included a voluntary religious question since 1911).
Historical growth
The World Religion Database (WRD) is a peer-reviewed database of international religious statistics based on research conducted at the Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs at Boston University. It is published by Brill and is the most comprehensive database of religious demographics available to scholars, providing data for all of the world's countries. Adherence data is largely compiled from census and surveys. The database groups adherents into 18 broadly-defined categories: Agnostics, Atheists, Baháʼís, Buddhists, Chinese folk-religionists, Christians, Confucianists, Daoists, Ethnoreligionists, Hindus, Jains, Jews, Muslims, New Religionists, Shintoists, Sikhs, Spiritists, and Zoroastrians. The WRD is edited by demographers Todd M. Johnson and Brian J. Grim.
Future change
Projections of future religious adherence are based on assumptions that trends, total fertility rates, life expectancy, political climate, conversion rates, secularization, etc. will continue. Such forecasts cannot be validated empirically and are contentious, but are useful for comparison.
Future change by conversion
According to the Pew Research Center published in 2010, religious conversion may have little impact on religious demographics between 2010 and 2050. Christianity is expected to lose a net of 66 million adherents mostly to religiously unaffiliated, while religiously unaffiliated are expected to gain 61 million adherents. Islam is expected to gain 3.2 million followers, while Buddhists and Jews are expected to lose 2.9 million and 0.3 million adherents, respectively.
The largest net gains for the religiously unaffiliated between 2010 and 2050 are expected in North America (+26 million), Europe (+24 million), Latin America (+6 million), and the Asia-Pacific region (4 million). Islam is projected to have a net gain of followers in Sub-Saharan Africa (+2.9 million) and Asia-Pacific (+0.95 million), but net loss of followers in North America (-0.58 million) and Europe (-0.06 million). Christianity is expected to have the largest net loss of followers between 2010 and 2050 in North America (-28 million), Europe (-24 million), Latin America and the Caribbean (-9.5 million), sub-Saharan Africa (-3 million), and Asia-Pacific (2.4 million).
Only in recent decades have surveys begun to measure changes in religious identity among individuals. Religious switching is a sensitive topic in India, and carries social and legal repercussions including the death penalty for apostasy in Muslim-majority countries. In China it is difficult to project rates at which Christianity, Islam and Buddhism are gaining converts, nor what are the retention rates among converts.
These forecasts lack reliable data on religious conversion in China, but according to media reports and expert assessments, it is possible that the rapid growth of Christianity in China may maintain, or even increase, the current numerical advantage of Christianity as the largest religion in the world and may negatively affect the growth of the Religiously Unaffiliated. This scenario (Chinese scenario) is based primarily on sensitivity tests.
See also
History of religion
List of religious populations
Major religious groups
Trends in adherence
Notes
Citations
References
Carolyn Chen, Russell Jeung. Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation. NYU Press, 2012. .
Miikka Ruokanen, Paulos Zhanzhu Huang. Christianity and Chinese Culture. William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2011. .
Religion on the Move!: New Dynamics of Religious Expansion in a Globalizing World, BRILL, 21 November 2012, Afe Adogame, Shobana Shankar, 2012.
The report provides a comprehensive analysis of the global religious landscape, revealing the size and distribution of major religious groups as of 2023.
External links
Think religion is in decline? Look at who is 'going forth and multiplying' , Vancouver Sun, 2014
Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century by Eric Kaufmann, Belfer Center, Harvard University/Birkbeck College, University of London (PDF)
FAQ from Adherents.com describing why it is difficult to measure the fastest-growing religion
Religious Projections for the Next 200 Years from World Network of Religious Futurists
Religious studies
Religious demographics | 0.777913 | 0.998622 | 0.776841 |
Apologetics | Apologetics (from Greek ) is the religious discipline of defending religious doctrines through systematic argumentation and discourse. Early Christian writers (c. 120–220) who defended their beliefs against critics and recommended their faith to outsiders were called Christian apologists. In 21st-century usage, apologetics is often identified with debates over religion and theology.
Etymology
The term apologetics derives from the Ancient Greek word . In the Classical Greek legal system, the prosecution delivered the , the accusation or charge, and the defendant replied with an , the defence. The was a formal speech or explanation to reply to and rebut the charges. A famous example is Socrates' Apologia defense, as chronicled in Plato's Apology.
In the Koine Greek of the New Testament, the Apostle Paul employs the term apologia in his trial speech to Festus and Agrippa when he says "I make my defense" in Acts 26:2. A cognate form appears in Paul's Letter to the Philippians as he is "defending the gospel" in Philippians 1:7, and in "giving an answer" in 1 Peter 3:15.
Although the term apologetics has Western, primarily Christian origins and is most frequently associated with the defense of Christianity, the term is sometimes used referring to the defense of any religion in formal debate involving religion.
Apologetic positions
Baháʼí Faith
Many apologetic books have been written in defence of the history or teachings of the Baháʼí Faith. The religion's founders wrote several books presenting proofs of their religion; among them are the Báb's Seven Proofs and Bahá'u'lláh's Kitáb-i-Íqán. Later Baháʼí authors wrote prominent apologetic texts, such as Mírzá Abu'l-Fadl's The Brilliant Proof and Udo Schaefer et al.'s Making the Crooked Straight.
Buddhism
One of the earliest Buddhist apologetic texts is The Questions of King Milinda, which deals with the Buddhist metaphysics such as the "no-self" nature of the individual and characteristics such as wisdom, perception, volition, feeling, consciousness and the soul. In the Meiji Era (1868-1912), encounters between Buddhists and Christians in Japan as a result of increasing contact between Japan and other nations may have prompted the formation of Japanese New Buddhism, including the apologetic Shin Bukkyō magazine. In recent times, A. L. De Silva, an Australian convert to Buddhism, has written a book, Beyond Belief, providing Buddhist apologetic responses and a critique of Christian Fundamentalist doctrine. Gunapala Dharmasiri wrote an apologetic critique of the Christian concept of God from a Theravadin Buddhist perspective.
Christianity
Christian apologetics combines Christian theology, natural theology, and philosophy in an attempt to present a rational basis for the Christian faith, to defend the faith against objections and misrepresentation, and to show that the Christian doctrine is the only world-view that is faultless and consistent with all fundamental knowledge and questions.
Christian apologetics has taken many forms over the centuries. In the Roman Empire, Christians were severely persecuted, and many charges were brought against them. Examples in the Bible include the Apostle Paul's address to the Athenians in the Areopagus (Acts 17: 22-34). J. David Cassel gives several examples: Tacitus wrote that Nero fabricated charges that Christians started the burning of Rome. Other charges included cannibalism (due to a literal interpretation of the Eucharist) and incest (due to early Christians' practice of addressing each other as "brother" and "sister"). Paul the Apostle, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and others often defended Christianity against charges that were brought to justify persecution.
Later apologists have focused on providing reasons to accept various aspects of Christian belief. Christian apologists of many traditions, in common with Jews, Muslims, and some others, argue for the existence of a unique and personal God. Theodicy is one important aspect of such arguments, and Alvin Plantinga's arguments have been highly influential in this area. Many prominent Christian apologists are scholarly philosophers or theologians, frequently with additional doctoral work in physics, cosmology, comparative religions, and other fields. Others take a more popular or pastoral approach. Some prominent modern apologists are Douglas Groothuis, Frederick Copleston, John Lennox, Walter R. Martin, Dinesh D'Souza, Douglas Wilson, Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Clark, Francis Schaeffer, Greg Bahnsen, Edward John Carnell, James White, R. C. Sproul, Hank Hanegraaff, Alister McGrath, Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, Peter Kreeft, G. K. Chesterton, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Hugh Ross, David Bentley Hart, Gary Habermas, Norman Geisler, Scott Hahn, RC Kunst, Trent Horn, and Jimmy Akin.
Apologists in the Catholic Church include Bishop Robert Barron, G. K. Chesterton, Dr. Scott Hahn, Trent Horn, Jimmy Akin, Patrick Madrid, Kenneth Hensley, Karl Keating, Ronald Knox, and Peter Kreeft.
John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was an English convert to Roman Catholicism, later made a cardinal, and beatified in 2010. In early life he was a major figure in the Oxford Movement to bring the Church of England back to its Catholic roots. Eventually his studies in history persuaded him to become a Roman Catholic. When John Henry Newman entitled his spiritual autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua',' in 1864, he was playing upon both this connotation, and the more commonly understood meaning of an expression of contrition or regret.
Christian apologists employ a variety of philosophical and formal approaches, including ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments. The Christian presuppositionalist approach to apologetics uses the transcendental argument for the existence of God.
Tertullian was an early Christian apologist. He was born, lived, and died in Carthage. He is sometimes known as the "Father of the Latin Church". He introduced the term Trinity to the Christian vocabulary and probably the formula "three Persons, one Substance" as the Latin "tres Personae, una Substantia" (from the Koine Greek "treis Hypostaseis, Homoousios"), and the terms Vetus Testamentum (Old Testament) and Novum Testamentum (New Testament).
Latter-day Saints
There are Latter-day Saint apologists who focus on the defense of Mormonism, including early church leaders, such as Parley P. Pratt, John Taylor, B. H. Roberts, and James E. Talmage, and modern figures, such as Hugh Nibley, Daniel C. Peterson, John L. Sorenson, John Gee, Orson Scott Card, and Jeff Lindsay.
Several well known apologetic organizations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, such as the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (a group of scholars at Brigham Young University) and FairMormon (an independent, not-for-profit group run by Latter Day Saints), have been formed to defend the doctrines and history of the Latter Day Saint movement in general and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in particular.
Deism
Deism is a form of theism in which God created the universe and established rationally comprehensible moral and natural laws but no longer intervenes in human affairs. Deism is a natural religion where belief in God is based on application of reason and evidence observed in the designs and laws found in nature. The World Order of Deists maintains a web site presenting deist apologetics that demonstrate the existence of God based on evidence and reason, absent divine revelation.
Hinduism
Hindu apologetics began developing during the British colonial period. A number of Indian intellectuals had become critical of the British tendency to devalue the Hindu religious tradition. As a result, these Indian intellectuals, as well as a handful of British Indologists, were galvanized to examine the roots of the religion as well as to study its vast arcana and corpus in an analytical fashion. This endeavor drove the deciphering and preservation of Sanskrit. Many translations of Hindu texts were produced which made them accessible to a broader reading audience.
In the early 18th century, Christian missionary Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg engaged in dialogues with several Tamil-speaking "Malabarian" Hindu priests, and recorded arguments of these Hindu apologists. These records include German-language reports submitted to the Lutheran headquarters in Halle, and 99 letters written by the Hindu priests to him (later translated into German under the title Malabarische Korrespondenz from 1718 onwards).
During 1830–1831, missionary John Wilson engaged in debates with Hindu apologists in Bombay. In 1830, his protege Ram Chandra, a Hindu convert to Christianity, debated with several Hindu Brahmin apologists in public. Hindu pandit Morobhatt Dandekar summarized his arguments from his 1831 debate with Wilson in a Marathi-language work titled Shri-Hindu-dharma-sthapana. Narayana Rao, another Hindu apologist, wrote Svadesha-dharma-abhimani in response to Wilson.
In the mid-19th century, several Hindu apologist works were written in response to John Muir's Mataparīkṣā. These include Mata-parīkṣā-śikṣā (1839) by Somanatha of Central India, Mataparīkṣottara (1840) by Harachandra Tarkapanchanan of Calcutta, Śāstra-tattva-vinirṇaya (1844-1845) by Nilakantha Gore of Benares, and a critique (published later in 1861 as part of Dharmādharma-parīkṣā-patra) by an unknown Vaishnava writer.
A range of Indian philosophers, including Swami Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghose, have written rational explanations regarding the values of the Hindu religious tradition. More modern proponents such as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi have also tried to correlate recent developments from quantum physics and consciousness research with Hindu concepts. The late Reverend Pandurang Shastri Athavale has given a plethora of discourses regarding the symbolism and rational basis for many principles in the Vedic tradition. In his book The Cradle of Civilization, David Frawley, an American who has embraced the Vedic tradition, has characterized the ancient texts of the Hindu heritage as being like "pyramids of the spirit".
Islam
'''Ilm al-Kalām, literally "science of discourse", usually foreshortened to kalam and sometimes called Islamic scholastic theology, is an Islamic undertaking born out of the need to establish and defend the tenets of Islamic faith against skeptics and detractors. A scholar of kalam is referred to as a mutakallim (plural mutakallimūn) as distinguished from philosophers, jurists, and scientists.
Judaism
Jewish apologetic literature can be traced back as far as Aristobulus of Paneas, though some discern it in the works of Demetrius the chronographer (3rd century BCE) traces of the style of "questions" and "solutions" typical of the genre. Aristobulus was a Jewish philosopher of Alexandria and the author of an apologetic work addressed to Ptolemy VI Philometor. Josephus's Contra Apion is a wide-ranging defense of Judaism against many charges laid against Judaism at that time, as too are some of the works of Philo of Alexandria.
In response to modern Christian missionaries, and congregations that "are designed to appear Jewish, but are actually fundamentalist Christian churches, which use traditional Jewish symbols to lure the most vulnerable of our Jewish people into their ranks", Jews for Judaism is the largest counter-missionary organization in existence, today. Kiruv Organization (Mizrachi), founded by Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi, and Outreach Judaism, founded by Rabbi Tovia Singer, are other prominent international organizations that respond "directly to the issues raised by missionaries and cults, by exploring Judaism in contradistinction to fundamentalist Christianity."
Pantheism
Some pantheists have formed organizations such as the World Pantheist Movement and the Universal Pantheist Society to promote and defend the belief in pantheism.
Native Americans
In a famous speech called "Red Jacket on Religion for the White Man and the Red" in 1805, Seneca chief Red Jacket gave an apologetic for Native American religion.
In literature
Plato's Apology may be read as both a religious and literary apology; however, more specifically literary examples may be found in the prefaces and dedications, which proceed many Early Modern plays, novels, and poems. Eighteenth century authors such as Colley Cibber, Frances Burney, and William Congreve, to name but a few, prefaced the majority of their poetic work with such apologies. In addition to the desire to defend their work, the apologetic preface often suggests the author's attempt to humble his- or herself before the audience.
See also
Christian apologetics
Dawah
Existence of God
Kalam
List of apologetic works
References
Bibliography
External links
Rhetoric
Persuasion | 0.778589 | 0.997742 | 0.776831 |
Ontology | Ontology is the philosophical study of being. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of reality and every entity within it. To articulate the basic structure of being, ontology examines what all entities have in common and how they are divided into fundamental classes, known as categories. An influential distinction is between particular and universal entities. Particulars are unique, non-repeatable entities, like the person Socrates. Universals are general, repeatable entities, like the color green. Another contrast is between concrete objects existing in space and time, like a tree, and abstract objects existing outside space and time, like the number 7. Systems of categories aim to provide a comprehensive inventory of reality, employing categories such as substance, property, relation, state of affairs, and event.
Ontologists disagree about which entities exist on the most basic level. Platonic realism asserts that universals have objective existence. Conceptualism says that universals only exist in the mind while nominalism denies their existence. There are similar disputes about mathematical objects, unobservable objects assumed by scientific theories, and moral facts. Materialism says that, fundamentally, there is only matter while dualism asserts that mind and matter are independent principles. According to some ontologists, there are no objective answers to ontological questions but only perspectives shaped by different linguistic practices.
Ontology uses diverse methods of inquiry. They include the analysis of concepts and experience, the use of intuitions and thought experiments, and the integration of findings from natural science. Applied ontology employs ontological theories and principles to study entities belonging to a specific area. It is of particular relevance to information and computer science, which develop conceptual frameworks of limited domains. These frameworks are used to store information in a structured way, such as a college database tracking academic activities. Ontology is closely related to metaphysics and relevant to the fields of logic, theology, and anthropology.
The origins of ontology lie in the ancient period with speculations about the nature of being and the source of the universe, including ancient Indian, Chinese, and Greek philosophy. In the modern period, philosophers conceived ontology as a distinct academic discipline and coined its name.
Definition
Ontology is the study of being. It is the branch of philosophy that investigates the nature of existence, the features all entities have in common, and how they are divided into basic categories of being. It aims to discover the foundational building blocks of the world and characterize reality as a whole in its most general aspects. In this regard, ontology contrasts with individual sciences like biology and astronomy, which restrict themselves to a limited domain of entities, such as living entities and celestial phenomena. In some contexts, the term ontology refers not to the general study of being but to a specific ontological theory within this discipline. It can also mean a conceptual scheme or inventory of a particular domain.
Ontology is closely related to metaphysics but the exact relation of these two disciplines is disputed. According to a traditionally influential characterization, metaphysics is the study of fundamental reality in the widest sense while ontology is the subdiscipline of metaphysics that restricts itself to the most general features of reality. This view sees ontology as general metaphysics, which is to be distinguished from special metaphysics focused on more specific subject matters, like God, mind, and value. A different conception understands ontology as a preliminary discipline that provides a complete inventory of reality while metaphysics examines the features and structure of the entities in this inventory. Another conception says that metaphysics is about real being while ontology examines possible being or the concept of being. It is not universally accepted that there is a clear boundary between metaphysics and ontology. Some philosophers use both terms as synonyms.
The word ontology has its roots in the ancient Greek terms (, meaning ) and (, meaning ), literally, . The ancient Greeks did not use the term ontology, which was coined by philosophers in the 17th century.
Basic concepts
Being
Being, or existence, is the main topic of ontology. It is one of the most general and fundamental concepts, encompassing the whole of reality and every entity within it. In its widest sense, being only contrasts with non-being or nothingness. It is controversial whether a more substantial analysis of the concept or meaning of being is possible. One proposal understands being as a property possessed by every entity. Critics of this view argue that an entity without being cannot have any properties, meaning that being cannot be a property since properties presuppose being. A different suggestion says that all beings share a set of essential features. According to the Eleatic principle, "power is the mark of being", meaning that only entities with a causal influence truly exist. According to a controversial proposal by philosopher George Berkeley, all existence is mental, expressed in his slogan "to be is to be perceived".
Depending on the context, the term being is sometimes used with a more limited meaning to refer only to certain aspects of reality. In one sense, being is unchanging and impermanent and is distinguished from becoming, which implies change. Another contrast is between being, as what truly exists, and phenomena, as what merely appears to exist. In some contexts, being expresses the fact that something is while essence expresses its qualities or what it is like.
Ontologists often divide being into fundamental classes or highest kinds, called categories of being. Proposed categories include substance, property, relation, state of affairs, and event. They can be used to provide systems of categories, which offer a comprehensive inventory of reality in which every entity belongs to exactly one category. Some philosophers, like Aristotle, say that entities belonging to different categories exist in distinct ways. Others, like John Duns Scotus, insist that there are no differences in the mode of being, meaning that everything exists in the same way. A related dispute is whether some entities have a higher degree of being than others, an idea already found in Plato's work. The more common view in contemporary philosophy is that a thing either exists or not with no intermediary states or degrees.
The relation between being and non-being is a frequent topic in ontology. Influential issues include the status of nonexistent objects and why there is something rather than nothing.
Particulars and universals
A central distinction in ontology is between particular and universal entities. Particulars, also called individuals, are unique, non-repeatable entities, like Socrates, the Taj Mahal, and Mars. Universals are general, repeatable entities, like the color green, the form circularity, and the virtue courage. Universals express aspects or features shared by particulars. For example, Mount Everest and Mount Fuji are particulars characterized by the universal mountain.
Universals can take the form of properties or relations. Properties express what entities are like. They are features or qualities possessed by an entity. Properties are often divided into essential and accidental properties. A property is essential if an entity must have it; it is accidental if the entity can exist without it. For instance, having three sides is an essential property of a triangle while being red is an accidental property. Relations are ways how two or more entities stand to one another. Unlike properties, they apply to several entities and characterize them as a group. For example, being a city is a property while being east of is a relation, as in "Kathmandu is a city" and "Kathmandu is east of New Delhi". Relations are often divided into internal and external relations. Internal relations depend only on the properties of the objects they connect, like the relation of resemblance. External relations express characteristics that go beyond what the connected objects are like, such as spatial relations.
Substances play an important role in the history of ontology as the particular entities that underlie and support properties and relations. They are often considered the fundamental building blocks of reality that can exist on their own, while entities like properties and relations cannot exist without substances. Substances persist through changes as they acquire or lose properties. For example, when a tomato ripens, it loses the property green and acquires the property red.
States of affairs are complex particular entities that have several other entities as their components. The state of affairs "Socrates is wise" has two components: the individual Socrates and the property wise. States of affairs that correspond to reality are called facts. Facts are truthmakers of statements, meaning that whether a statement is true or false depends on the underlying facts.
Events are particular entities that occur in time, like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first moon landing. They usually involve some kind of change, like the lawn becoming dry. In some cases, no change occurs, like the lawn staying wet. Complex events, also called processes, are composed of a sequence of events.
Concrete and abstract objects
Concrete objects are entities that exist in space and time, such as a tree, a car, and a planet. They have causal powers and can affect each other, like when a car hits a tree and both are deformed in the process. Abstract objects, by contrast, are outside space and time, such as the number 7 and the set of integers. They lack causal powers and do not undergo changes. It is controversial whether or in what sense abstract objects exist and how people can know about them.
Concrete objects encountered in everyday life are complex entities composed of various parts. For example, a book is made up of two covers and pages between them. Each of these components is itself constituted of smaller parts, like molecules, atoms, and elementary particles. Mereology studies the relation between parts and wholes. One position in mereology says that every collection of entities forms a whole. According to a different view, this is only the case for collections that fulfill certain requirements, for instance, that the entities in the collection touch one another. The problem of material constitution asks whether or in what sense a whole should be considered a new object in addition to the collection of parts composing it.
Abstract objects are closely related to fictional and intentional objects. Fictional objects are entities invented in works of fiction. They can be things, like the One Ring in J. R. R. Tolkien's book series The Lord of the Rings, and people, like the Monkey King in the novel Journey to the West. Some philosophers say that fictional objects are one type of abstract object, existing outside space and time. Others understand them as artifacts that are created as the works of fiction are written. Intentional objects are entities that exist within mental states, like perceptions, beliefs, and desires. For example, if a person thinks about the Loch Ness Monster then the Loch Ness Monster is the intentional object of this thought. People can think about existing and non-existing objects, making it difficult to assess the ontological status of intentional objects.
Other concepts
Ontological dependence is a relation between entities. An entity depends ontologically on another entity if the first entity cannot exist without the second entity. For instance, the surface of an apple cannot exist without the apple. An entity is ontologically independent if it does not depend on anything else, meaning that it is fundamental and can exist on its own. Ontological dependence plays a central role in ontology and its attempt to describe reality on its most fundamental level. It is closely related to metaphysical grounding, which is the relation between a ground and facts it explains.
An ontological commitment of a person or a theory is an entity that exists according to them. For instance, a person who believes in God has an ontological commitment to God. Ontological commitments can be used to analyze which ontologies people explicitly defend or implicitly assume. They play a central role in contemporary metaphysics when trying to decide between competing theories. For example, the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument defends mathematical Platonism, asserting that numbers exist because the best scientific theories are ontologically committed to numbers.
Possibility and necessity are further topics in ontology. Possibility describes what can be the case, as in "it is possible that extraterrestrial life exists". Necessity describes what must be the case, as in "it is necessary that three plus two equals five". Possibility and necessity contrast with actuality, which describes what is the case, as in "Doha is the capital of Qatar". Ontologists often use the concept of possible worlds to analyze possibility and necessity. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. For example, Haruki Murakami was born in 1949 in the actual world but there are possible worlds in which he was born at a different date. Using this idea, possible world semantics says that a sentence is possibly true if it is true in at least one possible world. A sentence is necessarily true if it is true in all possible worlds.
In ontology, identity means that two things are the same. Philosophers distinguish between qualitative and numerical identity. Two entities are qualitatively identical if they have exactly the same features, such as perfect identical twins. This is also called exact similarity and indiscernibility. Numerical identity, by contrast, means that there is only a single entity. For example, if Fatima is the mother of Leila and Hugo then Leila's mother is numerically identical to Hugo's mother. Another distinction is between synchronic and diachronic identity. Synchronic identity relates an entity to itself at the same time. Diachronic identity relates an entity to itself at different times, as in "the woman who bore Leila three years ago is the same woman who bore Hugo this year".
Branches
There are different and sometimes overlapping ways to divide ontology into branches. Pure ontology focuses on the most abstract topics associated with the concept and nature of being. It is not restricted to a specific domain of entities and studies existence and the structure of reality as a whole. Pure ontology contrasts with applied ontology, also called domain ontology. Applied ontology examines the application of ontological theories and principles to specific disciplines and domains, often in the field of science. It considers ontological problems in regard to specific entities such as matter, mind, numbers, God, and cultural artifacts.
Social ontology, a major subfield of applied ontology, studies social kinds, like money, gender, society, and language. It aims to determine the nature and essential features of these concepts while also examining their mode of existence. According to a common view, social kinds are useful constructions to describe the complexities of social life. This means that they are not pure fictions but, at the same time, lack the objective or mind-independent reality of natural phenomena like elementary particles, lions, and stars. In the fields of computer science, information science, and knowledge representation, applied ontology is interested in the development of formal frameworks to encode and store information about a limited domain of entities in a structured way. A related application in genetics is Gene Ontology, which is a comprehensive framework for the standardized representation of gene-related information across species and databases.
Formal ontology is the study of objects in general while focusing on their abstract structures and features. It divides objects into different categories based on the forms they exemplify. Formal ontologists often rely on the tools of formal logic to express their findings in an abstract and general manner. Formal ontology contrasts with material ontology, which distinguishes between different areas of objects and examines the features characteristic of a specific area. Examples are ideal spatial beings in the area of geometry and living beings in the area of biology.
Descriptive ontology aims to articulate the conceptual scheme underlying how people ordinarily think about the world. Prescriptive ontology departs from common conceptions of the structure of reality and seeks to formulate a new and better conceptualization.
Another contrast is between analytic and speculative ontology. Analytic ontology examines the types and categories of being to determine what kinds of things could exist and what features they would have. Speculative ontology aims to determine which entities actually exist, for example, whether there are numbers or whether time is an illusion.
Metaontology studies the underlying concepts, assumptions, and methods of ontology. Unlike other forms of ontology, it does not ask "what exists" but "what does it mean for something to exist" and "how can people determine what exists". It is closely related to fundamental ontology, an approach developed by philosopher Martin Heidegger that seeks to uncover the meaning of being.
Schools of thought
Realism and anti-realism
The term realism is used for various theories that affirm that some kind of phenomenon is real or has mind-independent existence. Ontological realism is the view that there are objective facts about what exists and what the nature and categories of being are. Ontological realists do not make claims about what those facts are, for example, whether elementary particles exist. They merely state that there are mind-independent facts that determine which ontological theories are true. This idea is denied by ontological anti-realists, also called ontological deflationists, who say that there are no substantive facts one way or the other. According to philosopher Rudolf Carnap, for example, ontological statements are relative to language and depend on the ontological framework of the speaker. This means that there are no framework-independent ontological facts since different frameworks provide different views while there is no objectively right or wrong framework.
In a more narrow sense, realism refers to the existence of certain types of entities. Realists about universals say that universals have mind-independent existence. According to Platonic realists, universals exist not only independent of the mind but also independent of particular objects that exemplify them. This means that the universal red could exist by itself even if there were no red objects in the world. Aristotelian realism, also called moderate realism, rejects this idea and says that universals only exist as long as there are objects that exemplify them. Conceptualism, by contrast, is a form of anti-realism, stating that universals only exist in the mind as concepts that people use to understand and categorize the world. Nominalists defend a strong form of anti-realism by saying that universals have no existence. This means that the world is entirely composed of particular objects.
Mathematical realism, a closely related view in the philosophy of mathematics, says that mathematical facts exist independently of human language, thought, and practices and are discovered rather than invented. According to mathematical Platonism, this is the case because of the existence of mathematical objects, like numbers and sets. Mathematical Platonists say that mathematical objects are as real as physical objects, like atoms and stars, even though they are not accessible to empirical observation. Influential forms of mathematical anti-realism include conventionalism, which says that mathematical theories are trivially true simply by how mathematical terms are defined, and game formalism, which understands mathematics not as a theory of reality but as a game governed by rules of string manipulation.
Modal realism is the theory that in addition to the actual world, there are countless possible worlds as real and concrete as the actual world. The primary difference is that the actual world is inhabited by us while other possible worlds are inhabited by our counterparts. Modal anti-realists reject this view and argue that possible worlds do not have concrete reality but exist in a different sense, for example, as abstract or fictional objects.
Scientific realists say that the scientific description of the world is an accurate representation of reality. It is of particular relevance in regard to things that cannot be directly observed by humans but are assumed to exist by scientific theories, like electrons, forces, and laws of nature. Scientific anti-realism says that scientific theories are not descriptions of reality but instruments to predict observations and the outcomes of experiments.
Moral realists claim that there exist mind-independent moral facts. According to them, there are objective principles that determine which behavior is morally right. Moral anti-realists either claim that moral principles are subjective and differ between persons and cultures, a position known as moral relativism, or outright deny the existence of moral facts, a view referred to as moral nihilism.
By number of categories
Monocategorical theories say that there is only one fundamental category, meaning that every single entity belongs to the same universal class. For example, some forms of nominalism state that only concrete particulars exist while some forms of bundle theory state that only properties exist. Polycategorical theories, by contrast, hold that there is more than one basic category, meaning that entities are divided into two or more fundamental classes. They take the form of systems of categories, which list the highest genera of being to provide a comprehensive inventory of everything.
The closely related discussion between monism and dualism is about the most fundamental types that make up reality. According to monism, there is only one kind of thing or substance on the most basic level. Materialism is an influential monist view; it says that everything is material. This means that mental phenomena, such as beliefs, emotions, and consciousness, either do not exist or exist as aspects of matter, like brain states. Idealists take the converse perspective, arguing that everything is mental. They may understand physical phenomena, like rocks, trees, and planets, as ideas or perceptions of conscious minds. Neutral monism occupies a middle ground by saying that both mind and matter are derivative phenomena. Dualists state that mind and matter exist as independent principles, either as distinct substances or different types of properties. In a slightly different sense, monism contrasts with pluralism as a view not about the number of basic types but the number of entities. In this sense, monism is the controversial position that only a single all-encompassing entity exists in all of reality. Pluralism is more commonly accepted and says that several distinct entities exist.
By fundamental categories
The historically influential substance-attribute ontology is a polycategorical theory. It says that reality is at its most fundamental level made up of unanalyzable substances that are characterized by universals, such as the properties an individual substance has or relations that exist between substances. The closely related to substratum theory says that each concrete object is made up of properties and a substratum. The difference is that the substratum is not characterized by properties: it is a featureless or bare particular that merely supports the properties.
Various alternative ontological theories have been proposed that deny the role of substances as the foundational building blocks of reality. Stuff ontologies say that the world is not populated by distinct entities but by continuous stuff that fills space. This stuff may take various forms and is often conceived as infinitely divisible. According to process ontology, processes or events are the fundamental entities. This view usually emphasizes that nothing in reality is static, meaning that being is dynamic and characterized by constant change. Bundle theories state that there are no regular objects but only bundles of co-present properties. For example, a lemon may be understood as a bundle that includes the properties yellow, sour, and round. According to traditional bundle theory, the bundled properties are universals, meaning that the same property may belong to several different bundles. According to trope bundle theory, properties are particular entities that belong to a single bundle.
Some ontologies focus not on distinct objects but on interrelatedness. According to relationalism, all of reality is relational at its most fundamental level. Ontic structural realism agrees with this basic idea and focuses on how these relations form complex structures. Some structural realists state that there is nothing but relations, meaning that individual objects do not exist. Others say that individual objects exist but depend on the structures in which they participate. Fact ontologies present a different approach by focusing on how entities belonging to different categories come together to constitute the world. Facts, also known as states of affairs, are complex entities; for example, the fact that the Earth is a planet consists of the particular object the Earth and the property being a planet. Fact ontologies state that facts are the fundamental constituents of reality, meaning that objects, properties, and relations cannot exist on their own and only form part of reality to the extent that they participate in facts.
In the history of philosophy, various ontological theories based on several fundamental categories have been proposed. One of the first theories of categories was suggested by Aristotle, whose system includes ten categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, date, posture, state, action, and passion. An early influential system of categories in Indian philosophy, first proposed in the Vaisheshika school, distinguishes between six categories: substance, quality, motion, universal, individuator, and inherence. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism includes a system of twelve categories, which Kant saw as pure concepts of understanding. They are subdivided into four classes: quantity, quality, relation, and modality. In more recent philosophy, theories of categories were developed by C. S. Peirce, Edmund Husserl, Samuel Alexander, Roderick Chisholm, and E. J. Lowe.
Others
The dispute between constituent and relational ontologies concerns the internal structure of concrete particular objects. Constituent ontologies say that objects have an internal structure with properties as their component parts. Bundle theories are an example of this position: they state that objects are bundles of properties. This view is rejected by relational ontologies, which say that objects have no internal structure, meaning that properties do not inhere in them but are externally related to them. According to one analogy, objects are like pin-cushions and properties are pins that can be stuck to objects and removed again without becoming a real part of objects. Relational ontologies are common in certain forms of nominalism that reject the existence of universal properties.
Hierarchical ontologies state that the world is organized into levels. Entities on all levels are real but low-level entities are more fundamental than high-level entities. This means that they can exist without high-level entities while high-level entities cannot exist without low-level entities. One hierarchical ontology says that elementary particles are more fundamental than the macroscopic objects they compose, like chairs and tables. Other hierarchical theories assert that substances are more fundamental than their properties and that nature is more fundamental than culture. Flat ontologies, by contrast, deny that any entity has a privileged status, meaning that all entities exist on the same level. For them, the main question is only whether something exists rather than identifying the level at which it exists.
The ontological theories of endurantism and perdurantism aim to explain how material objects persist through time. Endurantism is the view that material objects are three-dimensional entities that travel through time while being fully present in each moment. They remain the same even when they gain or lose properties as they change. Perdurantism is the view that material objects are four-dimensional entities that extend not just through space but also through time. This means that they are composed of temporal parts and, at any moment, only one part of them is present but not the others. According to perdurantists, change means that an earlier part exhibits different qualities than a later part. When a tree loses its leaves, for instance, there is an earlier temporal part with leaves and a later temporal part without leaves.
Differential ontology is a poststructuralist approach interested in the relation between the concepts of identity and difference. It says that traditional ontology sees identity as the more basic term by first characterizing things in terms of their essential features and then elaborating differences based on this conception. Differential ontologists, by contrast, privilege difference and say that the identity of a thing is a secondary determination that depends on how this thing differs from other things.
Object-oriented ontology belongs to the school of speculative realism and examines the nature and role of objects. It sees objects as the fundamental building blocks of reality. As a flat ontology, it denies that some entities have a more fundamental form of existence than others. It uses this idea to argue that objects exist independently of human thought and perception.
Methods
Methods of ontology are ways of conducting ontological inquiry and deciding between competing theories. There is no single standard method; the diverse approaches are studied by metaontology.
Conceptual analysis is a method to understand ontological concepts and clarify their meaning. It proceeds by analyzing their component parts and the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a concept applies to an entity. This information can help ontologists decide whether a certain type of entity, such as numbers, exists. Eidetic variation is a related method in phenomenological ontology that aims to identify the essential features of different types of objects. Phenomenologists start by imagining an example of the investigated type. They proceed by varying the imagined features to determine which ones cannot be changed, meaning they are essential. The transcendental method begins with a simple observation that a certain entity exists. In the following step, it studies the ontological repercussions of this observation by examining how it is possible or which conditions are required for this entity to exist.
Another approach is based on intuitions in the form of non-inferential impressions about the correctness of general principles. These principles can be used as the foundation on which an ontological system is built and expanded using deductive reasoning. A further intuition-based method relies on thought experiments to evoke new intuitions. This happens by imagining a situation relevant to an ontological issue and then employing counterfactual thinking to assess the consequences of this situation. For example, some ontologists examine the relation between mind and matter by imagining creatures identical to humans but without consciousness.
Naturalistic methods rely on the insights of the natural sciences to determine what exists. According to an influential approach by Willard Van Orman Quine, ontology can be conducted by analyzing the ontological commitments of scientific theories. This method is based on the idea that scientific theories provide the most reliable description of reality and that their power can be harnessed by investigating the ontological assumptions underlying them.
Principles of theory choice offer guidelines for assessing the advantages and disadvantages of ontological theories rather than guiding their construction. The principle of Ockham's Razor says that simple theories are preferable. A theory can be simple in different respects, for example, by using very few basic types or by describing the world with a small number of fundamental entities. Ontologists are also interested in the explanatory power of theories and give preference to theories that can explain many observations. A further factor is how close a theory is to common sense. Some ontologists use this principle as an argument against theories that are very different from how ordinary people think about the issue.
In applied ontology, ontological engineering is the process of creating and refining conceptual models of specific domains. Developing a new ontology from scratch involves various preparatory steps, such as delineating the scope of the domain one intends to model and specifying the purpose and use cases of the ontology. Once the foundational concepts within the area have been identified, ontology engineers proceed by defining them and characterizing the relations between them. This is usually done in a formal language to ensure precision and, in some cases, automatic computability. In the following review phase, the validity of the ontology is assessed using test data. Various more specific instructions for how to carry out the different steps have been suggested. They include the Cyc method, Grüninger and Fox's methodology, and so-called METHONTOLOGY. In some cases, it is feasible to adapt a pre-existing ontology to fit a specific domain and purpose rather than creating a new one from scratch.
Related fields
Ontology overlaps with many disciplines, including logic, the study of correct reasoning. Ontologists often employ logical systems to express their insights, specifically in the field of formal ontology. Of particular interest to them is the existential quantifier, which is used to express what exists. In first-order logic, for example, the formula states that dogs exist. Some philosophers study ontology by examining the structure of thought and language, saying that they reflect the structure of being. Doubts about the accuracy of natural language have led some ontologists to seek a new formal language, termed ontologese, for a better representation of the fundamental structure of reality.
Ontologies are often used in information science to provide a conceptual scheme or inventory of a specific domain, making it possible to classify objects and formally represent information about them. This is of specific interest to computer science, which builds databases to store this information and defines computational processes to automatically transform and use it. For instance, to encode and store information about clients and employees in a database, an organization may use an ontology with categories such as person, company, address, and name. In some cases, it is necessary to exchange information belonging to different domains or to integrate databases using distinct ontologies. This can be achieved with the help of upper ontologies, which are not limited to one specific domain. They use general categories that apply to most or all domains, like Suggested Upper Merged Ontology and Basic Formal Ontology.
Similar applications of ontology are found in various fields seeking to manage extensive information within a structured framework. Protein Ontology is a formal framework for the standardized representation of protein-related entities and their relationships. Gene Ontology and Sequence Ontology serve a similar purpose in the field of genetics. Environment Ontology is a knowledge representation focused on ecosystems and environmental processes. Friend of a Friend provides a conceptual framework to represent relations between people and their interests and activities.
The topic of ontology has received increased attention in anthropology since the 1990s, sometimes termed the "ontological turn". This type of inquiry is focused on how people from different cultures experience and understand the nature of being. Specific interest has been given to the ontological outlook of Indigenous people and how it differs from a Western perspective. As an example of this contrast, it has been argued that various indigenous communities ascribe intentionality to non-human entities, like plants, forests, or rivers. This outlook is known as animism and is also found in Native American ontologies, which emphasize the interconnectedness of all living entities and the importance of balance and harmony with nature.
Ontology is closely related to theology and its interest in the existence of God as an ultimate entity. The ontological argument, first proposed by Anselm of Canterbury, attempts to prove the existence of the divine. It defines God as the greatest conceivable being. From this definition it concludes that God must exist since God would not be the greatest conceivable being if God lacked existence. Another overlap in the two disciplines is found in ontological theories that use God or an ultimate being as the foundational principle of reality. Heidegger criticized this approach, terming it ontotheology.
History
The roots of ontology in ancient philosophy are speculations about the nature of being and the source of the universe. Discussions of the essence of reality are found in the Upanishads, ancient Indian scriptures dating from as early as 700 BCE. They say that the universe has a divine foundation and discuss in what sense ultimate reality is one or many. Samkhya, the first orthodox school of Indian philosophy, formulated an atheist dualist ontology based on the Upanishads, identifying pure consciousness and matter as its two foundational principles. The later Vaisheshika school proposed a comprehensive system of categories. In ancient China, Laozi's (6th century BCE) Taoism examines the underlying order of the universe, known as Tao, and how this order is shaped by the interaction of two basic forces, yin and yang. The philosophical movement of Xuanxue emerged in the 3rd century CE and explored the relation between being and non-being.
Starting in the 6th century BCE, Presocratic philosophers in ancient Greece aimed to provide rational explanations of the universe. They suggested that a first principle, such as water or fire, is the primal source of all things. Parmenides (c. 515–450 BCE) is sometimes considered the founder of ontology because of his explicit discussion of the concepts of being and non-being. Inspired by Presocratic philosophy, Plato (427–347 BCE) developed his theory of forms. It distinguishes between unchangeable perfect forms and matter, which has a lower degree of existence and imitates the forms. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) suggested an elaborate system of categories that introduced the concept of substance as the primary kind of being. The school of Neoplatonism arose in the 3rd century CE and proposed an ineffable source of everything, called the One, which is more basic than being itself.
The problem of universals was an influential topic in medieval ontology. Boethius (477–524 CE) suggested that universals can exist not only in matter but also in the mind. This view inspired Peter Abelard (1079–1142 CE), who proposed that universals exist only in the mind. Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274 CE) developed and refined fundamental ontological distinctions, such as the contrast between existence and essence, between substance and accidents, and between matter and form. He also discussed the transcendentals, which are the most general properties or modes of being. John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) argued that all entities, including God, exist in the same way and that each entity has a unique essence, called haecceity. William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347 CE) proposed that one can decide between competing ontological theories by assessing which one uses the smallest number of elements, a principle known as Ockham's razor.
In Arabic-Persian philosophy, Avicenna (980–1037 CE) combined ontology with theology. He identified God as a necessary being that is the source of everything else, which only has contingent existence. In 8th-century Indian philosophy, the school of Advaita Vedanta emerged. It says that only a single all-encompassing entity exists, stating that the impression of a plurality of distinct entities is an illusion. Starting in the 13th century CE, the Navya-Nyāya school built on Vaisheshika ontology with a particular focus on the problem of non-existence and negation. 9th-century China saw the emergence of Neo-Confucianism, which developed the idea that a rational principle, known as li, is the ground of being and order of the cosmos.
René Descartes (1596–1650) formulated a dualist ontology at the beginning of the modern period. It distinguishes between mind and matter as distinct substances that causally interact. Rejecting Descartes's dualism, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) proposed a monist ontology according to which there is only a single entity that is identical to God and nature. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), by contrast, said that the universe is made up of many simple substances, which are synchronized but do not interact with one another. John Locke (1632–1704) proposed his substratum theory, which says that each object has a featureless substratum that supports the object's properties. Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was influential in establishing ontology as a distinct discipline, delimiting its scope from other forms of metaphysical inquiry. George Berkeley (1685–1753) developed an idealist ontology according to which material objects are ideas perceived by minds.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) rejected the idea that humans can have direct knowledge of independently existing things and their nature, limiting knowledge to the field of appearances. For Kant, ontology does not study external things but provides a system of pure concepts of understanding. Influenced by Kant's philosophy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) linked ontology and logic. He said that being and thought are identical and examined their foundational structures. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) rejected Hegel's philosophy and proposed that the world is an expression of a blind and irrational will. Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924) saw absolute spirit as the ultimate and all-encompassing reality while denying that there are any external relations.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) developed phenomenology and employed its method, the description of experience, to address ontological problems. This idea inspired his student Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) to clarify the meaning of being by exploring the mode of human existence. Jean-Paul Sartre responded to Heidegger's philosophy by examining the relation between being and nothingness from the perspective of human existence, freedom, and consciousness. Based on the phenomenological method, Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950) developed a complex hierarchical ontology that divides reality into four levels: inanimate, biological, psychological, and spiritual.
Alexius Meinong (1853–1920) articulated a controversial ontological theory that includes nonexistent objects as part of being. Arguing against this theory, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) formulated a fact ontology known as logical atomism. This idea was further refined by the early Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and inspired D. M. Armstrong's (1926–2014) ontology. Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), by contrast, developed a process ontology. Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) questioned the objectivity of ontological theories by claiming that what exists depends on one's linguistic framework. He had a strong influence on Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), who analyzed the ontological commitments of scientific theories to solve ontological problems. Quine's student David Lewis (1941–2001) formulated the position of modal realism, which says that possible worlds are as real and concrete as the actual world. Since the end of the 20th century, interest in applied ontology has risen in computer and information science with the development of conceptual frameworks for specific domains.
See also
References
Notes
Citations
Sources
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Emic and etic | In anthropology, folkloristics, linguistics, and the social and behavioral sciences, emic and etic refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained.
The "emic" approach is an insider's perspective, which looks at the beliefs, values, and practices of a particular culture from the perspective of the people who live within that culture. This approach aims to understand the cultural meaning and significance of a particular behavior or practice, as it is understood by the people who engage in it.
The "etic" approach, on the other hand, is an outsider's perspective, which looks at a culture from the perspective of an outside observer or researcher. This approach tends to focus on the observable behaviors and practices of a culture, and aims to understand them in terms of their functional or evolutionary significance. The etic approach often involves the use of standardized measures and frameworks to compare different cultures and may involve the use of concepts and theories from other disciplines, such as psychology or sociology.
The emic and etic approaches each have their own strengths and limitations, and each can be useful in understanding different aspects of culture and behavior. Some anthropologists argue that a combination of both approaches is necessary for a complete understanding of a culture, while others argue that one approach may be more appropriate depending on the specific research question being addressed.
Definitions
"The emic approach investigates how local people think...". How they perceive and categorize the world, their rules for behavior, what has meaning for them, and how they imagine and explain things. "The etic (scientist-oriented) approach shifts the focus from local observations, categories, explanations, and interpretations to those of the anthropologist. The etic approach realizes that members of a culture often are too involved in what they are doing... to interpret their cultures impartially. When using the etic approach, the ethnographer emphasizes what he or she considers important."
Although emics and etics are sometimes regarded as inherently in conflict and one can be preferred to the exclusion of the other, the complementarity of emic and etic approaches to anthropological research has been widely recognized, especially in the areas of interest concerning the characteristics of human nature as well as the form and function of human social systems.
Emic and etic approaches of understanding behavior and personality fall under the study of cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology states that people are shaped by their cultures and their subcultures, and we must account for this in the study of personality. One way is looking at things through an emic approach. This approach "is culture specific because it focuses on a single culture and it is understood on its own terms." As explained below, the term "emic" originated from the specific linguistic term "phonemic", from phoneme, which is a language-specific way of abstracting speech sounds.
An 'emic' account is a description of behavior or a belief in terms meaningful (consciously or unconsciously) to the actor; that is, an emic account comes from a person within the culture. Almost anything from within a culture can provide an emic account.
An 'etic' account is a description of a behavior or belief by a social analyst or scientific observer (a student or scholar of anthropology or sociology, for example), in terms that can be applied across cultures; that is, an etic account attempts to be 'culturally neutral', limiting any ethnocentric, political or cultural bias or alienation by the observer.
When these two approaches are combined, the "richest" view of a culture or society can be understood. On its own, an emic approach would struggle with applying overarching values to a single culture. The etic approach is helpful in enabling researchers to see more than one aspect of one culture, and in applying observations to cultures around the world.
History
The terms were coined in 1954 by linguist Kenneth Pike, who argued that the tools developed for describing linguistic behaviors could be adapted to the description of any human social behavior. As Pike noted, social scientists have long debated whether their knowledge is objective or subjective. Pike's innovation was to turn away from an epistemological debate, and turn instead to a methodological solution. Emic and etic are derived from the linguistic terms phonemic and phonetic, respectively, where a phone is a distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words, whereas a phoneme is a speech sound in a given language that, if swapped with another phoneme, could change one word to another. The possibility of a truly objective description was discounted by Pike himself in his original work; he proposed the emic-etic dichotomy in anthropology as a way around philosophic issues about the very nature of objectivity.
The terms were also championed by anthropologists Ward Goodenough and Marvin Harris with slightly different connotations from those used by Pike. Goodenough was primarily interested in understanding the culturally specific meaning of specific beliefs and practices; Harris was primarily interested in explaining human behavior.
Pike, Harris, and others have argued that cultural "insiders" and "outsiders" are equally capable of producing emic and etic accounts of their culture. Some researchers use "etic" to refer to objective or outsider accounts, and "emic" to refer to subjective or insider accounts.
Margaret Mead was an anthropologist who studied the patterns of adolescence in Samoa. She discovered that the difficulties and the transitions that adolescents faced are culturally influenced. The hormones that are released during puberty can be defined using an etic framework, because adolescents globally have the same hormones being secreted. However, Mead concluded that how adolescents respond to these hormones is greatly influenced by their cultural norms. Through her studies, Mead found that simple classifications about behaviors and personality could not be used because peoples’ cultures influenced their behaviors in such a radical way. Her studies helped create an emic approach of understanding behaviors and personality. Her research deduced that culture has a significant impact in shaping an individual's personality.
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst, is a researcher who took an emic approach in his studies. Jung studied mythology, religion, ancient rituals, and dreams, leading him to believe that there are archetypes that can be identified and used to categorize people's behaviors. Archetypes are universal structures of the collective unconscious that refer to the inherent way people are predisposed to perceive and process information. The main archetypes that Jung studied were the persona (how people choose to present themselves to the world), the anima and animus (part of people experiencing the world in viewing the opposite sex, that guides how they select their romantic partner), and the shadow (dark side of personalities because people have a concept of evil; well-adjusted people must integrate both good and bad parts of themselves). Jung looked at the role of the mother and deduced that all people have mothers and see their mothers in a similar way; they offer nurture and comfort. His studies also suggest that "infants have evolved to suck milk from the breast, it is also the case that all children have inborn tendencies to react in certain ways." This way of looking at the mother is an emic way of applying a concept cross-culturally and universally.
Importance as regards personality
Emic and etic approaches are important to understanding personality because problems can arise "when concepts, measures, and methods are carelessly transferred to other cultures in attempts to make cross-cultural generalizations about personality." It is hard to apply certain generalizations of behavior to people who are so diverse and culturally different. One example of this is the F-scale (Macleod). The F-scale, which was created by Theodor Adorno, is used to measure authoritarian personality, which can, in turn, be used to predict prejudiced behaviors. This test, when applied to Americans accurately depicts prejudices towards black individuals. However, when a study was conducted in South Africa using the F-Scale, (Pettigrew and Friedman) results did not predict any prejudices towards black individuals. This study used emic approaches of study by conducting interviews with the locals and etic approaches by giving participants generalized personality tests.
See also
Exonym and endonym
Other explorations of the differences between reality and humans' models of it:
Blind men and an elephant
Emic and etic units
Internalism and externalism
Map–territory relation
References
Further reading
External links
Emic and Etic Standpoints for the Description of Behavior, chapter 2 in Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, vol 2, by Kenneth Pike (published in 1954 by Summer Institute of Linguistics)
Anthropology
Dichotomies
Ethnography
Folklore
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Religiosity and intelligence | The study of religiosity and intelligence explores the link between religiosity and intelligence or educational level (by country and on the individual level). Religiosity and intelligence are both complex topics that include diverse variables, and the interactions among those variables are not always well understood. For instance, intelligence is often defined differently by different researchers; also, all scores from intelligence tests are only estimates of intelligence, because one cannot achieve concrete measurements of intelligence (as one would of mass or distance) due to the concept’s abstract nature. Religiosity is also complex, in that it involves wide variations of interactions of religious beliefs, practices, behaviors, and affiliations, across a diverse array of cultures.
The study on religion and intelligence has been ongoing since the 1920s and conclusions and interpretations have varied in the literature due to different measures for both religiosity and intelligence. Some studies find negative correlation between intelligence quotient (IQ) and religiosity. However, such studies and others have found the effect to be small, not generalizable, and unable to predict religiosity from intelligence correlations alone. Some have suggested that nonconformity, cognitive style, and coping mechanism play a role while others suggest that any correlations are due to a complex range of social, gender, economic, educational and historical factors, which interact with religion and IQ in different ways. Less developed and poorer countries tend to be more religious, perhaps because religions play a more active social, moral and cultural role in those countries.
Studies on analytic thinking and nonbelievers suggest that analytical thinking does not imply better reflection on religious matters or disbelief. A cross-cultural study observed that analytic thinking was not a reliable metric to predict disbelief. A review of the literature on cognitive style found that there are no correlations between rationality and belief/disbelief and that upbringing, whether religious or not, better explains why people end up religious or not.
A global study on educational attainment found that Jews, Christians, religiously unaffiliated persons, and Buddhists have, on average, higher levels of education than the global average. Numerous factors affect both educational attainment and religiosity.
Definitions and issues
Intelligence
The definitions of intelligence are controversial since at least 70 definitions have been found among diverse fields of research. Some groups of psychologists have suggested the following definitions:
From "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" (1994), an op-ed statement in the Wall Street Journal signed by fifty-two researchers (out of 131 total invited to sign).
From "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" (1995), a report published by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association:
Intelligence is a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn. There are several ways to more specifically define intelligence. In some cases, intelligence may include traits such as creativity, personality, character, knowledge, or wisdom. However, some psychologists prefer not to include these traits in the definition of intelligence.
A widely researched index or classification of intelligence among scientists is intelligence quotient (IQ). IQ is a summary index, calculated by testing individuals' abilities in a variety of tasks and producing a composite score to represent overall ability, e.g., Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. It is used to predict educational outcomes and other variables of interest.
Others have attempted to measure intelligence indirectly by looking at individuals' or group's educational attainment, although this risks bias from other demographic factors, such as age, income, gender and cultural background, all of which can affect educational attainment.
Dissatisfaction with traditional IQ tests has led to the development of alternative theories. In 1983, Howard Gardner proposed the theory of multiple intelligences, which broadens the conventional definition of intelligence, to include logical, linguistic, spatial, musical, kinesthetic, naturalist, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences.
He chose not to include spiritual intelligence amongst his "intelligences" due to the challenge of codifying quantifiable scientific criteria, but suggested an "existential intelligence" as viable.
Religiosity
The term religiosity refers to degrees of religious behaviour, belief, or spirituality. The measurement of religiosity is hampered by the difficulties involved in defining what is meant by the term. Numerous studies have explored the different components of religiosity, with most finding some distinction between religious beliefs/doctrine, religious practice, and spirituality. Studies can measure religious practice by counting attendance at religious services, religious beliefs/doctrine by asking a few doctrinal questions, and spirituality by asking respondents about their sense of oneness with the divine or through detailed standardized measurements. When religiosity is measured, it is important to specify which aspects of religiosity are referred to.
According to Mark Chaves, decades of anthropological, sociological, and psychological research have established that "religious congruence" (the assumption that religious beliefs and values are tightly integrated in an individual's mind or that religious practices and behaviors follow directly from religious beliefs or that religious beliefs are chronologically linear and stable across different contexts) is actually rare. People’s religious ideas are fragmented, loosely connected, and context-dependent, as in all other domains of culture and in life. The beliefs, affiliations, and behaviors of any individual are complex activities that have many sources including culture. As examples of religious incongruence he notes, "Observant Jews may not believe what they say in their Sabbath prayers. Christian ministers may not believe in God. And people who regularly dance for rain don’t do it in the dry season."
Demographic studies often show wide diversity of religious beliefs, belonging, and practices in both religious and non-religious populations. For instance, out of Americans who are not religious and not seeking religion, 68% believe in God, 12% are atheists, and 17% are agnostics; as for self-identification of religiosity, 18% consider themselves religious, 37% consider themselves spiritual but not religious, and 42% consider themselves neither spiritual nor religious, while 21% pray every day and 24% pray once a month. Global studies on religion also show diversity.
Religion and belief in gods are not necessarily synonymous since nontheistic religions exist including within traditions like Hinduism and Christianity. According to anthropologist Jack David Eller, "atheism is quite a common position, even within religion" and that "surprisingly, atheism is not the opposite or lack, let alone the enemy, of religion but is the most common form of religion."
Studies comparing religious belief and IQ
In a 2013 meta-analysis of 63 studies, led by professor Miron Zuckerman, a correlation of -.20 to -.25 between religiosity and IQ was particularly strong when assessing beliefs (which in their view reflects intrinsic religiosity), but the negative effects were less defined when behavioral aspects of religion (such as church-going) were examined. They note limitations on this since viewing intrinsic religiosity as being about religious beliefs represents American Protestantism more than Judaism or Catholicism, both of which see behavior as just as important as religious beliefs. They also noted that the available data did not allow adequate consideration of the role of religion type and of culture in assessing the relationship between religion and intelligence. Most of the studies reviewed were American and 87% of participants in those studies were from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. They noted, "Clearly, the present results are limited to Western societies." The meta-analysis discussed three possible explanations: First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma, although this theory was contradicted in mostly atheist societies such as the Scandinavian populations, where the religiosity-IQ relationship still existed. Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs. Third, Intelligent people may have less need for religious beliefs and practices, as some of the functions of religiosity can be given by intelligence instead. Such functions include the presentation of a sense that the world is orderly and predictable, a sense of personal control and self-regulation and a sense of enhancing self-esteem and belongingness.
However, a 2016 re-analysis of the Zuckerman et al study, found that the negative intelligence-religiosity associations were weaker and less generalizable across time, space, samples, measures, and levels of analysis, but still robust. For example, the negative intelligence–religiosity association was insignificant with samples using men, pre-college participants, and taking into account grade point average. When other variables like education and quality of human conditions were taken into account, positive relation between IQ and disbelief in God was reduced. According to Dutton and Van der Linden, the re-analysis had controls that were too strict (life quality index and proximity of countries) and also some of the samples used problematic proxies of religiosity, which took away from the variance in the correlations. As such, the reduction of significance in the negative correlation likely reflected a sample anomaly. They also did observe that the "weak but significant" correlation of -.20 on intelligence and religiosity from the Zuckerman study was also found when comparing intelligence with other variables like education and income.
Zuckerman et al. did an updated metanalysis in 2019 with 83 studies and the negative correlation got weaker to -.20 to -.23. Zuckerman acknowledges that the correlation is small, not generalizable beyond Western (mainly American) contexts, that explanations not relating to intelligence likely explain religiosity better, and that predicting religiosity from intelligence for individuals is fallible.
Researcher Helmuth Nyborg and Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Ulster, compared belief in God and IQs. Using data from a U.S. study of 6,825 adolescents, the authors found that the average IQ of atheists was 6 points higher than the average IQ of non-atheists. The authors also investigated the link between belief in a god and average national IQs in 137 countries. The authors reported a correlation of 0.60 between atheism rates and level of intelligence, which was determined to be "highly statistically significant". ('Belief in a god' is not identical to 'religiosity.' Some nations have high proportions of people who do not believe in a god, but who may nevertheless be highly religious, following non-theistic belief systems such as Buddhism or Taoism.)
Other researchers found Nyborg and Lynn's findings questionable since sporadic and inconsistent estimates were the basis for atheism rates, multiple factors better explain the fluctuations, including reversals, in both religion and IQ by nations through time; data that contradicted their hypothesis was minimized, and secularization debates among scholars were ignored, all of which rendered any predictability as unreliable.
The Lynn et al. paper findings were discussed by Professor Gordon Lynch, from London's Birkbeck College, who expressed concern that the study failed to take into account a complex range of social, economic and historical factors, each of which has been shown to interact with religion and IQ in different ways. Gallup surveys, for example, have found that the world's poorest countries are consistently the most religious, perhaps because religion plays a more functional role (helping people cope) in poorer nations. Even at the scale of the individual, IQ may not directly cause more disbelief in gods. Dr. David Hardman of London Metropolitan University says: "It is very difficult to conduct true experiments that would explicate a causal relationship between IQ and religious belief." He adds that other studies do nevertheless correlate IQ with being willing or able to question beliefs.
In a sample of 2307 adults in the US., IQ was found to negatively correlate with self reports of religious identification, private practice or religion, mindfulness, religious support, and fundamentalism, but not spirituality. The relationships were relatively unchanged after controlling for personality, education, age, and gender, and were typically modest. The study was limited only to Christian denominations.
A critical review of the research on intelligence and religiosity by Sickles et al. observed that conclusions vary widely in the literature because most studies use inconsistent and poor measures for both religiosity and intelligence. Furthermore, they noted intelligence differences seen between people of varying religious beliefs and non-theists is most likely the result of educational differences that are in turn the result of holding fundamentalist religious beliefs rather than the result of innate differences in intelligence between them.
According to Dutton et al. negative correlations on religion may be correlated with autistic spectrum on specialized learning ability since when members of the same ethnic group are compared there are very few differences in IQ in general.
In non-western countries like Korea, where religion is seen differently than in the West, non-religious people had lower mean IQs than religious persons.
A 2022 metanalysis of 89 studies found a small and weak negative correlation of -.14 and noted that the findings were not generalizable beyond a Western contexts.
Studies examining theistic and atheistic cognitive style
The idea that analytical thinking makes one less likely to be religious is an idea supported by Gervais and Noernzayan's 2012 study They observed that intuitive thinking tended to increase intrinsic religiosity, intuitive religious belief and belief in supernatural entities. They also added a causative element, finding that subtly triggering analytic thinking can increase religious disbelief. They concluded that "Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief." While these studies linked religious disbelief to analytical rather than intuitive thinking, they urged caution in the interpretation of these results, noting that they were not judging the relative merits of analytic and intuitive thinking in promoting optimal decision making, or the merits or validity of religiosity as a whole.
In 2017, Calin-Jageman replicated the Gervais 2012 experiment and found no link between analytic thinking and decrease in religious belief. In another replication attempt, another team failed to get the same results as Gervais and Noernzayan . For which, Gervais and Noernzayan acknowledged that they no longer felt confident in their original 2012 findings.
In 2018, Gervais et al did a follow up study to assess if analytic thinking correlated with atheism in 13 different countries and found that cross-culturally, the relation is very weak and fickle and that culture plays a bigger role than analytic thinking on core beliefs.
Harvard researchers found evidence suggesting that all religious beliefs become more confident when participants are thinking intuitively (atheists and theists each become more convinced). Thus reflective thinking generally tends to create more qualified, doubted belief. Reflective thinking was further correlated with greater changes in beliefs since childhood: these changes were towards atheism for the most reflective participants, and towards greater belief in a god for the most intuitive thinkers. The study controlled for personality differences and cognitive ability, suggesting the differences were due to thinking styles – not simply IQ or raw cognitive ability. An experiment in the study found that participants moved towards greater belief in a god after writing essays about how intuition yielded a right answer or reflection yielded a wrong answer (and conversely, towards atheism if primed to think about either a failure of intuition or success of reflection). The authors say it is all evidence that a relevant factor in religious belief is thinking style. The authors add that, even if intuitive thinking tends to increase belief in a god, "it does not follow that reliance on intuition is always irrational or unjustified."
A 2017 study re-analyzed the relationship between intuitive and analytical thinking and its correlation with supernatural belief among three measurements (Pilgrimage setting, supernatural attribution, brain stimulation) and found no significant correlation.
Reviewing psychological studies on atheists, Miguel Farias noted that studies concluding that analytical thinking leads to lower religious belief "do not imply that atheists are more conscious or reflective of their own beliefs, or that atheism is the outcome of a conscious refutation of previously held religious beliefs" since they too have variant beliefs such as in conspiracy theories of the naturalistic variety. He notes that studies on deconversion indicate that a greater proportion of people who leave religion do so for motivational rather than rational reasons, and the majority of deconversions occur in adolescence and young adulthood when one is emotionally volatile. Furthermore, he notes that atheists are indistinguishable from New Age individuals or Gnostics since there are commonalities such as being individualistic, non-conformist, liberal, and valuing hedonism and sensation.
Concerning the cognitive science studies on atheists, Johnathan Lanman notes that there are implicit and explicit beliefs which vary among individuals. An individual's atheism and theism may be related to the amount of "credibility enhancing displays" (CRED) one experiences in that those who are exposed more to theistic CRED will likely be theist and those who have less exposure to theistic CRED will likely be atheists.
Neurological research on mechanisms of belief and non-belief, using Christians and atheists as subjects, by Harris et al. have shown that the brain networks involved in evaluating the truthfulness of both religious and non religious statements are generally the same regardless of religiosity. However, the activity within these networks differed across the religiosity of statements, with the religious statements activating the insula and anterior cingulate cortex to a greater degree, and the non religious statements activating hippocampal and superior frontal regions to a greater degree. The areas associated with religious statements are generally associated with salient emotional processing, while areas associated with non religious statements are generally associated with memory. The association between the salience network and religious statements is congruent with the cognitive theory proposed by Boyer that the implausibility of religious propositions are offset by their salience. The same neural networks were active in both Christians and atheists even when dealing with "blasphemous statements" to each other's worldviews. Furthermore, it supports the idea that "intuition" and "reason" are not two separate and segregated activities but are intertwined in both theists and atheists.
A 2024 review of the literature on cognitive style noted that cognitive scientists understand there to be two systems of the mind: intuition and rationality, which intersect and overlap. Though some studies initially found some correlations between rationality and cognitive style, such studies failed when replicated independently by scientists. Based on the updated research, there are no correlations between rationality and belief/disbelief and instead other factors such as upbringing, whether religious or not, better explains why people end up religious or not.
Studies examining religiosity and emotional intelligence
A small 2004 study by Ellen Paek examined the extent to which religiosity (in which only Christians were surveyed), operationalized as religious orientation and religious behaviour, is related to the controversial idea of emotional intelligence (EI). The study examined the extent to which religious orientation and behavior were related to self-reported EI in 148 church-attending adult Christians. (Non-religious individuals were not part of the study.) The study found that the individuals' self-reported religious orientation was positively correlated with their perceiving themselves to have greater EI. While the number of religious group activities was positively associated with perceived EI, the number of years of church attendance was unrelated. Significant positive correlations were also found between level of religious commitment and perceived EI. Thus, the Christian volunteers were more likely to consider themselves emotionally intelligent if they spent more time in group activities and had more commitment to their beliefs.
Tischler, Biberman and McKeage warn that there is still ambiguity in the above concepts. In their 2002 article, entitled "Linking emotional intelligence, spirituality and workplace performance: Definitions, models and ideas for research", they reviewed literature on both EI and various aspect of spirituality. They found that both EI and spirituality appear to lead to similar attitudes, behaviors and skills, and that there often seems to be confusion, intersection and linking between the two constructs.
Recently, Łowicki and Zajenkowski investigated the potential associations between various aspects of religious belief and ability and trait EI. In their first study they found that ability EI was positively correlated with general level of belief in God or a higher power. Their next study, conducted among Polish Christians, replicated the previous result and revealed that both trait and ability EI were negatively related to extrinsic religious orientation and negative religious coping.
Studies exploring religiosity and educational attainment
The relationship between the level of religiosity and one's level of education has been a philosophical, as well as a scientific and political concern since the second half of the 20th century.
The parameters in this field are slightly different compared to those brought forward above: if the "level of religiosity" remains a concept which is difficult to determine scientifically, on the contrary, the "level of education" is, indeed, easy to compile, official data on this topic being publicly accessible to anyone in most countries.
Different studies available show contrasting conclusions. An analysis of World Values Survey data showed that in most countries, there is no significant relationship between education and religious attendance, with some differences between "Western" countries and former socialist countries, which the authors attribute to historical, political, and economic factors, not intelligence. Other studies have noted a positive relationship.
A 2016 Pew Center global study on religion and education around the world ranked Jews as the most educated (13.4 years of schooling) followed by Christians (9.3 years of schooling). The religiously unaffiliated—a category which includes atheists, agnostics and those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular”—ranked overall as the third most educated religious group (8.8 years of schooling) followed by Buddhists (7.9 years of schooling), Muslims (5.6 years of schooling), and Hindus (5.6 years of schooling). In the youngest age (25-34) group surveyed, Jews averaged 13.8 years of schooling, the unaffiliated group averaged 10.3 years of schooling, Christians averaged 9.9 years of schooling, Buddhists averaged 9.7 years of schooling, Hindus averaged 7.1 years of schooling, and Muslims averaged 6.7 years of schooling. 61% of Jews, 20% of Christians, 16% of the unaffiliated, 12% of Buddhists, 10% of Hindus, and 8% of Muslims have graduate and post-graduate degrees. The study observed that the probability of having a college degree in the U.S. is higher for all religious minorities surveyed (perhaps partly due to selective immigration policies that favor highly skilled applicants), including the unaffiliated group which ranks in the fifth place, being higher than the national average of 39%.
See also
Outline of human intelligence
Psychology of religion
Relationship between religion and science
Heritability of IQ
Environment and intelligence
References
Further reading
Factors related to intelligence
Religion and science | 0.781556 | 0.993624 | 0.776573 |
Moral relativism | Moral relativism or ethical relativism (often reformulated as relativist ethics or relativist morality) is used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and cultures. An advocate of such ideas is often referred to as a relativist.
Descriptive moral relativism holds that people do, in fact, disagree fundamentally about what is moral, without passing any evaluative or normative judgments about this disagreement. Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that moral claims contain an implicit indexical, such that some aspect of the claim—say, its truth-value—varies with individuals or groups. Normative moral relativism holds that everyone ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when large disagreements about morality exist. Though often intertwined, these are distinct positions. Each can be held independently of the others.
American philosopher Richard Rorty in particular has argued that the label of being a "relativist" has become warped and turned into a sort of pejorative. He has written specifically that thinkers labeled as such usually simply believe "that the grounds for choosing between such [philosophical] opinions is less algorithmic than had been thought", not that every single conceptual idea is as valid as any other. In this spirit, Rorty has lamented that "philosophers have... become increasingly isolated from the rest of culture."
Moral relativism has been debated for thousands of years across a variety of contexts during the history of civilization. Arguments of particular notability have been made in areas such as ancient Greece and historical India while discussions have continued to the present day. Besides the material created by philosophers, the concept has additionally attracted attention in diverse fields including art, religion, and science.
Variations
Descriptive
Descriptive moral relativism is merely the positive or descriptive position that there exist, in fact, fundamental disagreements about the right course of action even when the same facts hold true and the same consequences seem likely to arise. It is the observation that different cultures have different moral standards.
Descriptive relativists do not necessarily advocate the tolerance of all behavior in light of such disagreement; that is to say, they are not necessarily normative relativists. Likewise, they do not necessarily make any commitments to the semantics, ontology, or epistemology of moral judgement; that is, not all descriptive relativists are meta-ethical relativists.
Descriptive relativism is a widespread position in academic fields such as anthropology and sociology, which simply admit that it is incorrect to assume that the same moral or ethical frameworks are always in play in all historical and cultural circumstances.
Meta-ethical
Meta-ethical moral relativists believe not only that people disagree about moral issues, but that terms such as "good", "bad", "right" and "wrong" do not stand subject to universal truth conditions at all; rather, they are relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of an individual or a group of people. The American anthropologist William Graham Sumner was an influential advocate of this view. He argues in his 1906 work Folkways that what people consider right and wrong is shaped entirely—not primarily—by the traditions, customs, and practices of their culture. Moreover, since in his analysis of human understanding there cannot be any higher moral standard than that provided by the local morals of a culture, no trans-cultural judgement about the rightness or wrongness of a culture's morals could possibly be justified.
Meta-ethical relativists are, first, descriptive relativists: they believe that, given the same set of facts, some societies or individuals will have a fundamental disagreement about what a person ought to do or prefer (based on societal or individual norms). What's more, they argue that one cannot adjudicate these disagreements using any available independent standard of evaluation—any appeal to a relevant standard would always be merely personal or at best societal.
This view contrasts with moral universalism, which argues that, even though well-intentioned persons disagree, and some may even remain unpersuadable (e.g. someone who is closed-minded), there is still a meaningful sense in which an action could be more "moral" (morally preferable) than another; that is, they believe there are objective standards of evaluation that seem worth calling "moral facts"—regardless of whether they are universally accepted.
Normative
Normative moral relativists believe not only the meta-ethical thesis, but that it has normative implications on what we ought to do. Normative moral relativists argue that meta-ethical relativism implies that we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when it runs counter to our personal or cultural moral standards. Most philosophers do not agree, partially because of the challenges of arriving at an "ought" from relativistic premises. Meta-ethical relativism seems to eliminate the normative relativist's ability to make prescriptive claims. In other words, normative relativism may find it difficult to make a statement like "we think it is moral to tolerate behaviour" without always adding "other people think intolerance of certain behaviours is moral". Philosophers like Russell Blackford even argue that intolerance is, to some degree, important. As he puts it, "we need not adopt a quietism about moral traditions that cause hardship and suffering. Nor need we passively accept the moral norms of our own respective societies, to the extent that they are ineffective or counterproductive or simply unnecessary". That is, it is perfectly reasonable (and practical) for a person or group to defend their subjective values against others, even if there is no universal prescription or morality. We can also criticize other cultures for failing to pursue even their own goals effectively.
The moral relativists may also still try to make sense of non-universal statements like "in this country, it is wrong to do X" or even "to me, it is right to do Y".
Moral universalists argue further that their system often does justify tolerance, and that disagreement with moral systems does not always demand interference, and certainly not aggressive interference. For example, the utilitarian might call another society's practice 'ignorant' or 'less moral', but there would still be much debate about courses of action (e.g. whether to focus on providing better education, or technology, etc.).
History
Moral relativism encompasses views and arguments that people in various cultures have held over several thousand years. For example, the ancient Jaina Anekantavada principle of Mahavira (c. 599–527 BC) states that truth and reality are perceived differently from diverse points of view, and that no single point of view is the complete truth; and the Greek philosopher Protagoras (c. 481–420 BC) famously asserted that "man is the measure of all things". The Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–420 BC) observed that each society regards its own belief system and way of doing things as better than all others. Sextus Empiricus and other ancient Pyrrhonist philosophers denied the existence of objective morality.
In the early modern era Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) notably held that nothing is inherently good or evil. The 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) serves in several important respects as the father both of modern emotivism and of moral relativism, though Hume himself did not espouse relativism. He distinguished between matters of fact and matters of value, and suggested that moral judgments consist of the latter, for they do not deal with verifiable facts obtained in the world, but only with our sentiments and passions. But Hume regarded some of our sentiments as universal. He famously denied that morality has any objective standard, and suggested that the universe remains indifferent to our preferences and our troubles.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) believed that we have to assess the value of our values since values are relative to one's goals and one's self. He emphasized the need to analyze our moral values and how much impact they may have on us. The problem with morality, according to Nietzsche, is that those who were considered "good" were the powerful nobles who had more education, and considered themselves better than anyone below their rank. Thus, what is considered good is relative. A "good man" is not questioned on whether or not there is a "bad", such as temptations, lingering inside him and he is considered to be more important than a man who is considered "bad" who is considered useless to making the human race better because of the morals we have subjected ourselves to. But since what is considered good and bad is relative, the importance and value we place on them should also be relative. He proposed that morality itself could be a danger. Nietzsche believed that morals should be constructed actively, making them relative to who we are and what we, as individuals, consider to be true, equal, good and bad, etc. instead of reacting to moral laws made by a certain group of individuals in power.
One scholar, supporting an anti-realist interpretation, concludes that "Nietzsche's central argument for anti-realism about value is explanatory: moral facts don't figure in the 'best explanation' of experience, and so are not real constituents of the objective world. Moral values, in short, can be 'explained away.
It is certain that Nietzsche criticizes Plato's prioritization of transcendence as the Forms. The Platonist view holds that what is 'true', or most real, is something which is other-worldly while the (real) world of experience is like a mere 'shadow' of the Forms, most famously expressed in Plato's allegory of the cave. Nietzsche believes that this transcendence also had a parallel growth in Christianity, which prioritized life-denying moral qualities such as humility and obedience through the church. (See Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, etc.)
Anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) have cautioned observers against ethnocentricism—using the standards of their own culture to evaluate their subjects of study. Benedict said that transcendent morals do not exist—only socially constructed customs do (see cultural relativism); and that in comparing customs, the anthropologist "insofar as he remains an anthropologist ... is bound to avoid any weighting of one in favor of the other". To some extent, the increasing body of knowledge of great differences in belief among societies caused both social scientists and philosophers to question whether any objective, absolute standards pertaining to values could exist. This led some to posit that differing systems have equal validity, with no standard for adjudicating among conflicting beliefs. The Finnish philosopher-anthropologist Edward Westermarck (1862–1939) ranks as one of the first to formulate a detailed theory of moral relativism. He portrayed all moral ideas as subjective judgments that reflect one's upbringing. He rejected G.E. Moore's (1873–1958) ethical intuitionism—in vogue during the early part of the 20th century, and which identified moral propositions as true or false, and known to us through a special faculty of intuition—because of the obvious differences in beliefs among societies, which he said provided evidence of the lack of any innate, intuitive power.
Arguments for meta-ethical relativism
Scientific
Morality and evolution
Research within evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, ethology, and evolutionary anthropology has claimed that morality is a natural phenomenon that was shaped by evolutionary mechanisms. In this case, morality is defined as the set of relative social practices that promote the survival and successful reproduction of the species, or even multiple cooperating species.
Literary
The literary perspectivism begins at the different versions of the Greek myths. Symbolism created multiple suggestions for a verse. Structuralism teaches us the polysemy of the poems.
Examples of relativistic literary works: Gogol's Dead Souls; The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell; Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro.
Criticisms of meta-ethical relativism
Philosophical
R. M. Hare
Some philosophers, for example R. M. Hare (1919–2002), argue that moral propositions remain subject to human logical rules, notwithstanding the absence of any factual content, including those subject to cultural or religious standards or norms. Thus, for example, they contend that one cannot hold contradictory ethical judgments. This allows for moral discourse with shared standards, notwithstanding the descriptive properties or truth conditions of moral terms. They do not affirm or deny that moral facts exist, only that human logic applies to our moral assertions; consequently, they postulate an objective and preferred standard of moral justification, albeit in a very limited sense. Nevertheless, according to Hare, human logic shows the error of relativism in one very important sense (see Hare's Sorting out Ethics). Hare and other philosophers also point out that, aside from logical constraints, all systems treat certain moral terms alike in an evaluative sense. This parallels our treatment of other terms such as less or more, which meet with universal understanding and do not depend upon independent standards (for example, one can convert measurements). It applies to good and bad when used in their non-moral sense, too; for example, when we say, "this is a good wrench" or "this is a bad wheel". This evaluative property of certain terms also allows people of different beliefs to have meaningful discussions on moral questions, even though they may disagree about certain "facts".
Walter Terence Stace
"Ethical Relativity" is the topic of the first two chapters in The Concept of Morals, in which Walter Terence Stace argues against moral absolutism, but for moral universalism.
Philosophical poverty
Critics propose that moral relativism fails because it rejects basic premises of discussions on morality, or because it cannot arbitrate disagreement. Many critics, including Ibn Warraq and Eddie Tabash, have suggested that meta-ethical relativists essentially take themselves out of any discussion of normative morality, since they seem to be rejecting an assumption of such discussions: the premise that there are right and wrong answers that can be discovered through reason. Practically speaking, such critics will argue that meta-ethical relativism may amount to moral nihilism, or else incoherence.
These critics argue specifically that the moral relativists reduce the extent of their input in normative moral discussions to either rejecting the very having of the discussion, or else deeming both disagreeing parties to be correct. For instance, the moral relativist can only appeal to preference to object to the practice of murder or torture by individuals for hedonistic pleasure. This accusation that relativists reject widely held terms of discourse is similar to arguments used against other "discussion-stoppers" like some forms of solipsism or the rejection of induction.
Philosopher Simon Blackburn made a similar criticism, and explains that moral relativism fails as a moral system simply because it cannot arbitrate disagreements.
Other criticism
Some arguments come when people question which moral justifications or truths are said to be relative. Because people belong to many groups based on culture, race, religion, etc., it is difficult to claim that the values of the group have authority for the members. A part of meta-ethical relativism is identifying which group of people those truths are relative to. Another component is that many people belong to more than one group. The beliefs of the groups that a person belongs to may be fundamentally different, and so it is hard to decide which are relative and which win out. A person practicing meta-ethical relativism would not necessarily object to either view, but develop an opinion and argument.
Religious
Protestantism
Roman Catholicism
Catholic and some secular intellectuals attribute the perceived post-war decadence of Europe to the displacement of absolute values by moral relativism. Pope Benedict XVI, Marcello Pera and others have argued that after about 1960, Europeans massively abandoned many traditional norms rooted in Christianity and replaced them with continuously evolving relative moral rules. In this view, sexual activity has become separated from procreation, which led to a decline in the importance of families and to depopulation. The most authoritative response to moral relativism from the Catholic perspective can be found in Veritatis Splendor, an encyclical by Pope John Paul II. Many of the main criticisms of moral relativism by the Catholic Church relate largely to modern controversies, such as elective abortion.
Buddhism
Bhikkhu Bodhi, an American Buddhist monk, has written:
By assigning value and spiritual ideals to private subjectivity, the materialistic world view ... threatens to undermine any secure objective foundation for morality. The result is the widespread moral degeneration that we witness today. To counter this tendency, mere moral exhortation is insufficient. If morality is to function as an efficient guide to conduct, it cannot be propounded as a self-justifying scheme but must be embedded in a more comprehensive spiritual system which grounds morality in a transpersonal order. Religion must affirm, in the clearest terms, that morality and ethical values are not mere decorative frills of personal opinion, not subjective superstructure, but intrinsic laws of the cosmos built into the heart of reality.
Views commonly confused with moral relativism
Moral relativism vs ethical subjectivism
Moral relativism is a distinct position from ethical subjectivism (the view that the truth of ethical claims are not mind independent). While these views are often held together, they do not entail each other. For example, someone who claims "something is morally right for me to do because the people in my culture think it is right" is both a moral relativist (because what is right and wrong depends on who is doing it), and an ethical subjectivist (because what is right and wrong is determined by mental states, i.e. what people think is right and wrong).
However, someone who thinks that what is right and wrong is whatever a deity thinks is right or wrong would be a subjectivist (morality is based on mental states), but not a relativist (morality is the same for everyone). In contrast, someone who claims that to act ethically you must follow the laws of your country would be a relativist (morality is dependent on who you are), but not a subjectivist (morality is based on facts about the world, not mental states).
Moral relativism vs moral anti-realism
Depending on how a moral relativist position is constructed, it may or may not be independent of moral realism. Moral realists are committed to some version of the following three claims:
Semantic thesis: Moral statements have meaning, they express propositions, or are the kind of things that can be true or false.
Alethic thesis: Some moral propositions are true.
Metaphysical thesis: The metaphysical status of moral facts is robust and ordinary, not importantly different from other facts about the world.
While many moral relativists deny one or more of these claims, and therefore could be moral anti-realists, a denial is not required. A moral relativist who claims that you should act according to the laws in whatever country you are a citizen of, accepts all three claims: moral facts express propositions that can be true or false (you can see if a given action is against the law or not), some moral propositions are true (some actions abide by the laws in someone's country), and moral facts are ordinary (laws are not mental states, they are physical objects in the world). However, this view is a relativist one as it is dependent on the country you are a citizen of.
See also
References
Bibliography
Guy Ankerl, Global Communication without Universal Civilization. vol I: Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. (Geneva, INUPRESS, 2000. )
Joxe Azurmendi 1998: "The violence and the search for new values" in Euskal Herria krisian, (Elkar, 1999), pp. 11–116.
Kurt Baier, "Difficulties in the Emotive-Imperative Theory" in Paul W Taylor (editor): The Moral Judgement: Readings in Contemporary Meta-Ethics Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (mentor)
Panayot Butchvarov, "Skepticism in Ethics" (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1989).
Ronald F. Duska, "What's the Point of a Business Ethics Course?", 1 Business Ethics Quarterly 335–352(1991), reprinted in Sterling Harwood, ed., Business as Ethical and Business as Usual (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996), pp. 11–21.
R.M. Hare, Sorting out Ethics (Oxford University Press)
Gilbert Harman & Judith Jarvis Thomson, Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity (Blackwell Publishing), 1996.
Sterling Harwood, "Taking Ethics Seriously -- Moral Relativism versus Moral Realism" in Sterling Harwood, ed., Business as Ethical and Business as Usual (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996), pp. 2–4.
Sterling Harwood, "Against MacIntyre's Relativistic Communitarianism" in Sterling Harwood, ed., Business as Ethical and Business as Usual (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996), pp. 5–10.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford University Press)
Steven Lukes, Moral Relativism, Picador, 2008.
G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge University Press)
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism is a Humanism" in Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. by Walter Kaufmann (World Publishing Company)
Walter Terence Stace, The Concept of Morals, (The MacMillan Company, 1937, reprinted, 1975 by Permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., (Macmillan Publishers), ), See Chapters 1 and 2 entitled "Ethical Relativity", pp 1–68.
Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (University of Chicago Press)
Edward Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas Macmillan, 1906.
Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard University Press)
David B. Wong, Moral Relativity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 248 pages.
Paul Julian. Minimal Truth, Moral Conflict and Metaethical Relativism. 2006.
External links
Moral Relativism entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Living with Relativism
Relativism
Metaethics
Relativism
Postmodernism
Ethical theories | 0.778131 | 0.997062 | 0.775845 |
Biocentrism (ethics) | Biocentrism (from Greek βίος bios, "life" and κέντρον kentron, "center"), in a political and ecological sense, as well as literally, is an ethical point of view that extends inherent value to all living things. It is an understanding of how the earth works, particularly as it relates to its biosphere or biodiversity. It stands in contrast to anthropocentrism, which centers on the value of humans. The related ecocentrism extends inherent value to the whole of nature.
Advocates of biocentrism often promote the preservation of biodiversity, animal rights, and environmental protection. The term has also been employed by advocates of "left biocentrism", which combines deep ecology with an "anti-industrial and anti-capitalist" position (according to David Orton et al.).
Definition
In the simplest of terms as well as form, biocentrism is just the belief that all living organisms, regardless of species, complexity, or traits, individually possess equal value and the same exact right to live.
Usually, the term biocentrism encompasses all environmental ethics that "extend the status of moral object from human beings to all living things in nature". Biocentric ethics calls for a rethinking of the relationship between humans and nature. It states that nature does not exist simply to be used or consumed by humans, but that humans are simply one species amongst many, and that because we are part of an ecosystem, any actions which negatively affect the living systems of which we are a part adversely affect us as well, whether or not we maintain a biocentric worldview. Biocentrists observe that all species have inherent value, and that humans are not "superior" to other species in a moral or ethical sense.
The four main pillars of a biocentric outlook are:
Humans and all other species are members of Earth's community.
All species are part of a system of interdependence.
All living organisms pursue their own "good" in their own ways.
Human beings are not inherently superior to other living things.
The most important of these four main pillars is likely the idea that human beings are not inherently superior to other living things. People have divergent views on many specific aspects of almost everything. Not all biocentrists even subscribe to the abstract concept of value, which is why heavy emphasis is placed on the fourth pillar.
Relationship with animals and environment
Biocentrism views individual species as parts of the living biosphere. It observes the consequences of reducing biodiversity on both small and large scales and points to the inherent value all species have to the environment.
The environment is seen for what it is; the biosphere within which we live and depend on the maintaining of its diversity for our health. From these observations the ethical points are raised.
History and development
Biocentric ethics differs from classical and traditional ethical thinking. Rather than focusing on strict moral rules, as in Classical ethics, it focuses on attitudes and character. In contrast with traditional ethics, it is nonhierarchical and gives priority to the natural world rather than to humankind exclusively.
Biocentric ethics includes Albert Schweitzer's ethics of "Reverence for Life", Peter Singer's ethics of Animal Liberation and Paul W. Taylor's ethics of biocentric egalitarianism.
Albert Schweitzer's "reverence for life" principle was a precursor of modern biocentric ethics. In contrast with traditional ethics, the ethics of "reverence for life" denies any distinction between "high and low" or "valuable and less valuable" life forms, dismissing such categorization as arbitrary and subjective. Conventional ethics concerned itself exclusively with human beings—that is to say, morality applied only to interpersonal relationships—whereas Schweitzer's ethical philosophy introduced a "depth, energy, and function that differ[s] from the ethics that merely involved humans". "Reverence for life" was a "new ethics, because it is not only an extension of ethics, but also a transformation of the nature of ethics".
Similarly, Peter Singer argues that non-human animals deserve the same equality of consideration that we extend to human beings. His argument is roughly as follows:
Membership in the species Homo sapiens is the only criterion of moral importance that includes all humans and excludes all non-humans.
Using membership in the species Homo sapiens as a criterion of moral importance is completely arbitrary.
Of the remaining criteria we might consider, only sentience is a plausible criterion of moral importance.
Using sentience as a criterion of moral importance entails that we extend the same basic moral consideration (i.e. "basic principle of equality") to other sentient creatures that we do to human beings.
Therefore, we ought to extend to animals the same equality of consideration that we extend to human beings.
Singer's work, while notable in the canon of environmental ethics, should not be considered as fully biocentric. Singer's ethics is extended from humans to nonhuman animals because the criterion for moral inclusion (sentience) is found in both humans and nonhuman animals, thus it would be arbitrary to deny it to nonhuman animals simply because they were not human. However, not all biological entities are sentient, consider: algae, plants and trees, fungi, lichens, mollusks, protozoa, for example. For an ethical theory to be biocentric, it must have a reason for extending ethical inclusion to the entire biosphere (as in Taylor and Schweitzer). The requirement for environmental ethics to move beyond sentience as criteria for inclusion in the moral realm is discussed in Tom Regan's 1981 paper "The Nature and Possibility of an Environmental Ethic".
Biocentrism is most commonly associated with the work of Paul W. Taylor, especially his book Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (1986). Taylor maintains that biocentrism is an "attitude of respect for nature", whereby one attempts to make an effort to live one's life in a way that respects the welfare and inherent worth of all living creatures. Taylor states that:
Humans are members of a community of life along with all other species, and on equal terms.
This community consists of a system of interdependence between all members, both physically, and in terms of relationships with other species.
Every organism is a "teleological centre of life", that is, each organism has a purpose and a reason for being, which is inherently "good" or "valuable".
Humans are not inherently superior to other species.
Historian Donald Worster traces today's biocentric philosophies, which he sees as part of a recovery of a sense of kinship between man and nature, to the reaction by the British intelligencia of the Victorian era against the Christian ethic of dominion over nature. He has pointed to Charles Darwin as an important spokesman for the biocentric view in ecological thought and quotes from Darwin's Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837): If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, diseases, death, suffering and famine—our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusement—they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor—we may be all netted together.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species. This publication sparked the beginning of biocentrist views by introducing evolution and "its removal of humans from their supernatural origins and
placement into the framework of natural laws".
The work of Aldo Leopold has also been associated with biocentrism. The essay "The Land Ethic" in Leopold's book Sand County Almanac (1949) points out that although throughout history women and slaves have been considered property, all people have now been granted rights and freedoms. Leopold notes that today land is still considered property as people once were. He asserts that ethics should be extended to the land as "an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity". He argues that while people's instincts encourage them to compete with others, their ethics encourage them to co-operate with others. He suggests that "the land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land". In a sense this attitude would encourage humans to co-operate with the land rather than compete with it.
Outside of formal philosophical works biocentric thought is common among pre-colonial tribal peoples who knew no world other than the natural world.
In law
The paradigm of biocentrism and the values that it promotes are beginning to be used in law.
In recent years (as of 2011), cities in Maine, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Virginia have adopted laws that protect the rights of nature. The purpose of these laws is to prevent the degradation of nature, especially by corporations who may want to exploit natural resources and land space, and to also use the environment as a dumping ground for toxic waste.
The first country to include rights of nature in its constitution is Ecuador (see 2008 Constitution of Ecuador). Article 71 states that nature "has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes".
In religion
Islam
In Islam:
In Islam, biocentric ethics stem from the belief that all of creation belongs to Allah (God), not humans, and to assume that non-human animals and plants exist merely to benefit humankind leads to environmental destruction and misuse. As all living organisms exist to praise God, human destruction of other living things prevents the earth's natural and subtle means of praising God. The Qur'an acknowledges that humans are not the only all-important creatures and emphasizes a respect for nature. Muhammad was once asked whether there would be a reward for those who show charity to nature and animals, to which he replied, "for charity shown to each creature with a wet heart [i.e. that is alive], there is a reward."
Hinduism
In Hinduism:
Hinduism contains many elements of biocentrism. In Hinduism, humans have no special authority over other creatures, and all living things have souls ('atman'). Brahman (God) is the "efficient cause" and Prakrti (nature), is the "material cause" of the universe. However, Brahman and Prakrti are not considered truly divided: "They are one in [sic] the same, or perhaps better stated, they are the one in the many and the many in the one."
However, while Hinduism does not give the same direct authority over nature that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god grants, they are subject to a "higher and more authoritative responsibility for creation". The most important aspect of this is the doctrine of Ahimsa (non-violence). The Yājñavalkya Smṛti warns, "the wicked person who kills animals which are protected has to live in hell fire for the days equal to the number of hairs on the body of that animal". The essential aspect of this doctrine is the belief that the Supreme Being incarnates into the forms of various species. The Hindu belief in Saṃsāra (the cycle of life, death and rebirth) encompasses reincarnation into non-human forms. It is believed that one lives 8,400,000 lifetimes before one becomes a human. Each species is in this process of samsara until one attains moksha (liberation).
Another doctrinal source for the equal treatment of all life is found in the Rigveda. The Rigveda states that trees and plants possess divine healing properties. It is still popularly believed that every tree has a Vriksa-devata (a tree deity). Trees are ritually worshiped through prayer, offerings, and the sacred thread ceremony. The Vriksa-devata worshiped as manifestations of the Divine. Tree planting is considered a religious duty.
Jainism
In Jainism:
The Jaina tradition exists in tandem with Hinduism and shares many of its biocentric elements.
Ahimsa (non-violence), the central teaching of Jainism, means more than not hurting other humans. It means intending not to cause physical, mental or spiritual harm to any part of nature. In the words of Mahavira: 'You are that which you wish to harm.' Compassion is a pillar of non-violence. Jainism encourages people to practice an attitude of compassion towards all life.
The principle of interdependence is also very important in Jainism. This states that all of nature is bound together, and that "if one does not care for nature one does not care for oneself.".
Another essential Jain teaching is self-restraint. Jainism discourages wasting the gifts of nature, and encourages its practitioners to reduce their needs as far as possible. Gandhi, a great proponent of Jainism, once stated "There is enough in this world for human needs, but not for human wants."
Buddhism
In Buddhism:
The Buddha's teachings encourage people "to live simply, to cherish tranquility, to appreciate the natural cycle of life". Buddhism emphasizes that everything in the universe affects everything else. "Nature is an ecosystem in which trees affect climate, the soil, and the animals, just as the climate affects the trees, the soil, the animals and so on. The ocean, the sky, the air are all interrelated, and interdependent—water is life and air is life."
Although this holistic approach is more ecocentric than biocentric, it is also biocentric, as it maintains that all living things are important and that humans are not above other creatures or nature. Buddhism teaches that "once we treat nature as our friend, to cherish it, then we can see the need to change from the attitude of dominating nature to an attitude of working with nature—we are an intrinsic part of all existence rather than seeing ourselves as in control of it."
Christianity
Within the Catholic tradition of Christian thought, Pope Benedict XVI noted that "the Church’s magisterium expresses grave misgivings about notions of the environment inspired by ecocentrism and biocentrism". This, he stated, was because "such notions eliminate the difference of identity and worth between the human person and other living things. In the name of a supposedly egalitarian vision of the "dignity" of all living creatures, such notions end up abolishing the distinctiveness and superior role of human beings."
Criticism
Biocentrism has faced criticism for a number of reasons. Some of this criticism grows out of the concern that biocentrism is an anti-human paradigm and that it will not hesitate to sacrifice human well-being for the greater good. Biocentrism has also been criticized for its individualism; emphasizing too much on the importance of individual life and neglecting the importance of collective groups, such as an ecosystem.
A more complex form of criticism focuses on the contradictions of biocentrism. Opposed to anthropocentrism, which sees humans as having a higher status than other species, biocentrism puts humans on a par with the rest of nature, and not above it. In his essay A Critique of Anti-Anthropocentric Biocentrism Richard Watson suggests that if this is the case, then "Human ways—human culture—and human actions are
as natural as the ways in which any other species of animals behaves". He goes on to suggest that if humans must change their behavior to refrain from disturbing and damaging the natural environment, then that results in setting humans apart from other species and assigning more power to them. This then takes us back to the basic beliefs of anthropocentrism. Watson also claims that the extinction of species is "Nature's way" and that if humans were to instigate their own self-destruction by exploiting the rest of nature, then so be it. Therefore, he suggests that the real reason humans should reduce their destructive behavior in relation to other species is not because we are equals but because the destruction of other species will also result in our own destruction. This view also brings us back to an anthropocentric perspective.
See also
Anarcho-primitivism
Animal cognition
Biodiversity
Biophilia hypothesis
Biotic ethics
Deep ecology
Earth jurisprudence
Ecoauthoritarianism
Ecocentrism
Eco-nationalism
Environmental philosophy
Gaia hypothesis
Gaia philosophy
Green anarchism
Green conservatism
Green libertarianism
Intrinsic value (animal ethics)
Neo-luddite
Painism
Primitivism
Religion and environmentalism
Sentiocentrism
Speciesism
Stewardship (theology)
References
Further reading
Coghlan et al (2021). A bolder One Health: expanding the moral circle to optimize health for all. One Health Outlook.
Deep ecology
Environmental ethics | 0.781289 | 0.99224 | 0.775226 |
Existential crisis | Existential crises are inner conflicts characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning and confusion about one's personal identity. They are accompanied by anxiety and stress, often to such a degree that they disturb one's normal functioning in everyday life and lead to depression. Their negative attitude towards meaning reflects characteristics of the philosophical movement of existentialism. The components of existential crises can be divided into emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects. Emotional components refer to the feelings, such as emotional pain, despair, helplessness, guilt, anxiety, or loneliness. Cognitive components encompass the problem of meaninglessness, the loss of personal values or spiritual faith, and thinking about death. Behavioral components include addictions, and anti-social and compulsive behavior.
Existential crises may occur at different stages in life: the teenage crisis, the quarter-life crisis, the mid-life crisis, and the later-life crisis. Earlier crises tend to be forward-looking: the individual is anxious and confused about which path in life to follow regarding education, career, personal identity, and social relationships. Later crises tend to be backward-looking. Often triggered by the impression that one is past one's peak in life, they are usually characterized by guilt, regret, and a fear of death. If an earlier existential crisis was properly resolved, it is easier for the individual to resolve or avoid later crises. Not everyone experiences existential crises in their life.
The problem of meaninglessness plays a central role in all of these types. It can arise in the form of cosmic meaning, which is concerned with the meaning of life at large or why we are here. Another form concerns personal secular meaning, in which the individual tries to discover purpose and value mainly for their own life. Finding a source of meaning may resolve a crisis, like altruism, dedicating oneself to a religious or political cause, or finding a way to develop one's potential. Other approaches include adopting a new system of meaning, learning to accept meaninglessness, cognitive behavioral therapy, and the practice of social perspective-taking.
Negative consequences of existential crisis include anxiety and bad relationships on the personal level as well as a high divorce rate and decreased productivity on the social level. Some questionnaires, such as the Purpose in Life Test, measure whether someone is currently undergoing an existential crisis. Outside its main use in psychology and psychotherapy, the term "existential crisis" refers to a threat to the existence of something.
Definition
In psychology and psychotherapy, the term "existential crisis" refers to a form of inner conflict. It is characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning and is accompanied by various negative experiences, such as stress, anxiety, despair, and depression. This often happens to such a degree that it disturbs one's normal functioning in everyday life. The inner nature of this conflict sets existential crises apart from other types of crises that are mainly due to outward circumstances, like social or financial crises. Outward circumstances may still play a role in triggering or exacerbating an existential crisis, but the core conflict happens on an inner level. The most common approach to resolving an existential crisis consists in addressing this inner conflict and finding new sources of meaning in life.
The core issue responsible for the inner conflict is the impression that the individual's desire to lead a meaningful life is thwarted by an apparent lack of meaning, also because they feel much confusion about what meaning really is, and are constantly questioning themselves. In this sense, existential crises are crises of meaning. This is often understood through the lens of the philosophical movement known as existentialism. One important aspect of many forms of existentialism is that the individual seeks to live in a meaningful way but finds themselves in a meaningless and indifferent world. The exact term "existential crisis" is not commonly found in the traditional existentialist literature in philosophy. But various closely related technical terms are discussed, such as existential dread, existential vacuum, existential despair, existential neurosis, existential sickness, anxiety, and alienation.
Different authors focus in their definitions of existential crisis on different aspects. Some argue that existential crises are at their core crises of identity. On this view, they arise from a confusion about the question "Who am I?" and their goal is to achieve some form of clarity about oneself and one's position in the world. As identity crises, they involve intensive self-analysis, often in the form of exploring different ways of looking at oneself. They constitute a personal confrontation with certain key aspects of the human condition, like existence, death, freedom, and responsibility. In this sense, the person questions the very foundations of their life. Others emphasize the confrontation with human limitations, such as death and lack of control. Some stress the spiritual nature of existential crises by pointing out how outwardly successful people may still be severely affected by them if they lack the corresponding spiritual development.
The term "existential crisis" is most commonly used in the context of psychology and psychotherapy. But it can also be employed in a more literal sense as a crisis of existence to express that the existence of something is threatened. In this sense, a country, a company, or a social institution faces an existential crisis if political tensions, military threats , high debt, or social changes may have as a result that the corresponding entity ceases to exist.
Components
Existential crises are usually seen as complex phenomena that can be understood as consisting of various components. Some approaches distinguish three types of components belonging to the fields of emotion, cognition, and behavior. Emotional aspects correspond to what it feels like to have an existential crisis. It is usually associated with emotional pain, despair, helplessness, guilt, anxiety, and loneliness. On the cognitive side, the affected are often confronted with a loss of meaning and purpose together with the realization of one's own end. Behaviorally, existential crises may express themselves in addictions and anti-social behavior, sometimes paired with ritualistic behavior, loss of relationships, and degradation of one's health. While manifestations of these three components can usually be identified in every case of an existential crisis, there are often significant differences in how they manifest. Nonetheless, it has been suggested that these components can be used to give a more unified definition of existential crises.
Emotional
On the emotional level, existential crises are associated with unpleasant experiences, such as fear, anxiety, panic, and despair. They can be categorized as a form of emotional pain whereby people lose trust and hope. This pain often manifests in the form of despair and helplessness. The despair may be caused by being unable to find meaning in life, which is associated both with a lack of motivation and the absence of inner joy. The impression of helplessness arises from being unable to find a practical response to deal with the crisis and the associated despair. This helplessness concerns specifically a form of emotional vulnerability: the individual is not just subject to a wide range of negative emotions, but these emotions often seem to be outside the person's control. This feeling of vulnerability and lack of control can itself produce further negative impressions and may lead to a form of panic or a state of deep mourning.
But on the other hand, there is also often an impression in the affected that they are in some sense responsible for their predicament. This is the case, for example, if the loss of meaning is associated with bad choices in the past for which the individual feels guilty. But it can also take the form of a more abstract type of bad conscience as existential guilt. In this case, the agent carries a vague sense of guilt that is free-floating in the sense that it is not tied to any specific wrongdoing by the agent. Especially in existential crises in the later parts of one's life, this guilt is often accompanied by a fear of death. But just as in the case of guilt, this fear may also take a more abstract form as an unspecific anxiety associated with a sense of deficiency and meaninglessness.
As crises of identity, existential crises often lead to a disturbed sense of personal integrity. This can be provoked by the apparent meaninglessness of one's life together with a general lack of motivation. Central to the sense of personal integrity are close relationships with oneself, others, and the world. The absence of meaning usually has a negative impact on these relationships. As a lack of a clear purpose, it threatens one's personal integrity and can lead to insecurity, alienation, and self-abandonment. The negative impact on one's relationships with others is often experienced as a form of loneliness.
Depending on the person and the crisis they are suffering, some of these emotional aspects may be more or less pronounced. While they are all experienced as unpleasant, they often carry within them various positive potentials as well that can push the person in the direction of positive personal development. Through the experience of loneliness, for example, the person may achieve a better understanding of the substance and importance of relationships.
Cognitive
The main cognitive aspect of existential crises is the loss of meaning and purpose. In this context, the term "meaninglessness" refers to the general impression that there is no higher significance, direction, or purpose in our actions or in the world at large. It is associated with the question of why one is doing what one is doing and why one should continue. It is a central topic in existentialist psychotherapy, which has as one of its main goals to help the patient find a proper response to this meaninglessness. In Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, for example, the term existential vacuum is used to describe this state of mind. Many forms of existentialist psychotherapy aim to resolve existential crises by assisting the patient in rediscovering meaning in their life. Closely related to meaninglessness is the loss of personal values. This means that things that seemed valuable to the individual before, like the relation to a specific person or success in their career, may now appear insignificant or pointless to them. If the crisis is resolved, it can lead to the discovery of new values.
Another aspect of the cognitive component of many existential crises concerns the attitude to one's personal end, i.e. the realization that one will die one day. While this is not new information as an abstract insight, it takes on a more personal and concrete nature when one sees oneself confronted with this fact as a concrete reality one has to face. This aspect is of particular relevance for existential crises occurring later in life or when the crisis was triggered by the loss of a loved one or by the onset of a terminal disease. For many, the issue of their own death is associated with anxiety. But it has also been argued that the contemplation of one's death may act as a key to resolving an existential crisis. The reason for this is that the realization that one's time is limited can act as a source of meaning by making the remaining time more valuable and by making it easier to discern the bigger issues that matter in contrast to smaller everyday issues that can act as distractions. Important factors for dealing with imminent death include one's religious outlook, one's self-esteem, and social integration as well as one's future prospects.
Behavioral
Existential crises can have various effects on the individual's behavior. They often lead a person to isolate themself and engage less in social interactions. For example, one's communication to one's housemates may be limited to very brief responses like a simple "yes" or "no" in order to avoid a more extended exchange or the individual reduces various forms of contact that are not strictly speaking necessary. This can result in a long-term deterioration and loss of one's relationships. In some cases, existential crises may also express themselves in overtly anti-social behavior, like hostility or aggression. These negative impulses can also be directed at the person themselves, leading to self-injury and, in the worst case, suicide.
Addictive behavior is also seen in people going through an existential crisis. Some turn to drugs in order to lessen the impact of the negative experiences whereas others hope to learn through the non-ordinary drug experiences to cope with the existential crisis. While this type of behavior can succeed in providing a short-term relief of the effects of the existential crisis, it has been argued that it is usually maladaptive and fails on the long-term level. This way, the crises may even be further exacerbated. For the affected, it is often difficult to distinguish the need for pleasure and power from the need for meaning, thereby leading them on a wrong track in their efforts to resolve the crisis. The addictions themselves or the stress associated with existential crises can result in various health problems, ranging from high blood pressure to long-term organ damage and increased likelihood of cancer.
Existential crises may also be accompanied by ritualistic behavior. In some cases, this can have positive effects to help the affected transition to a new outlook on life. But it might also take the form of compulsive behavior that acts more as a distraction than as a step towards a solution. Another positive behavioral aspect concerns the tendency to seek therapy. This tendency reflects the awareness of the affected of the gravity of the problem and their desire to resolve it.
Types
Different types of existential crises are often distinguished based on the time in one's life when they occur. This approach rests on the idea that, depending on one's stage in life, individuals are faced with different issues connected to meaning and purpose. They lead to different types of crises if these issues are not properly resolved. The stages are usually tied to rough age groups but this correspondence is not always accurate since different people of the same age group may find themselves in different life situations and different stages of development. Being aware of these differences is central for properly assessing the issue at the core of a specific crisis and finding a corresponding response to resolve it.
The most well-known existential crisis is the mid-life crisis and a lot of research is directed specifically at this type of crisis. But researchers have additionally discovered various other existential crises belonging to different types. There is no general agreement about their exact number and periodization. Because of this, the categorizations of different theorists do not always coincide but they have significant overlaps. One categorization distinguishes between the early teenage crisis, the sophomore crisis, the adult crisis, the mid-life crisis, and the later-life crisis. Another focuses only on the sophomore crisis, the adult crisis, and the later-life crisis but defines them in wider terms. The sophomore crisis and the adult crisis are often treated together as forms of the quarter-life crisis.
There is wide agreement that the earlier crises tend to be more forward-looking and are characterized by anxiety and confusion about the path in life one wants to follow. The later crises, on the other hand, are more backward-looking, often in the form of guilt and regrets, while also concerned with the problem of one's own mortality.
These different crises can affect each other in various ways. For example, if an earlier crisis was not properly resolved, later crises may impose additional difficulties for the affected. But even if an earlier crisis was fully resolved, this does not guarantee that later crises will be successfully resolved or avoided altogether.
Another approach distinguishes existential crises based on their intensity. Some theorists use the terms existential vacuum and existential neurosis to refer to different degrees of existential crisis. On this view, an existential vacuum is a rather common phenomenon characterized by the frequent recurrence of subjective states like boredom, apathy, and emptiness. Some people experience this only in their free time but are otherwise not troubled by it. The term "Sunday neurosis" is often used in this context. An existential vacuum becomes an existential neurosis if it is paired with overt clinical neurotic symptoms, such as depression or alcoholism.
Teenage
The early teenage crisis involves the transition from childhood to adulthood and is centered around the issue of developing one's individuality and independence. This concerns specifically the relation to one's family and often leads to spending more time with one's peers instead. Various rebellious and anti-social behavior seen sometimes in this developmental stage, like stealing or trespassing, may be interpreted as attempts to achieve independence. It can also give rise to a new type of conformity concerning, for example, how the teenager dresses or behaves. This conformity tends to be not in relation to one's family or public standards but to one's peer group or adored celebrities. But this may be seen as a temporary step in order to distance oneself from previously accepted standards with later steps emphasizing one's independence also from one's peer group and celebrity influences. A central factor for resolving the early teenage crisis is that meaning and purpose are found in one's new identity since independence without it can result in the feeling of being lost and may lead to depression. Another factor pertains to the role of the parents. By looking for signs of depression, they may become aware that a teenager is going through a crisis. Examples include a change of appetite, sleep behavior is different; sleeps more or less, grades take a dive in a short amount of time, they are less social and more isolated, and start to become easily irritated. If parents regularly talk to their teenagers and ask them questions, it is more likely that they detect the presence of a crisis.
Quarter-life, sophomore, and adult
The term "quarter-life crisis" is often used to refer to existential crises occurring in early adulthood, i.e. roughly during the ages between 18 and 30. Some authors distinguish between two separate crises that may occur at this stage in life: the sophomore crisis and the adult crisis. The sophomore crisis affects primarily people in their late teenage years or their early 20s. It is also referred to as "sophomore slump", specifically when it affects students. It is the first time that serious questions about the meaning of life and one's role in the world are formulated. At this stage, these questions have a direct practical relation to one's future. They apply to what paths one wants to choose in life, like which career to focus on and how to form successful relationships. At the center of the sophomore crisis is the anxiety over one's future, i.e. how to lead one's life and how to best develop and employ one's abilities. Existential crisis often specifically affect high achievers who fear that they do not reach their highest potential since they lack a secure plan for the future. To solve them, it is necessary to find meaningful answers to these questions. Such answers may result in practical commitments and can inform later life decisions. Some people who have already made their career choices at a very early age may never experience a sophomore crisis. But such decisions can lead to problems later on since they are usually mainly informed by the outlook of one's social environment and less by the introspective insight into one's individual preferences. If there turns out to be a big discrepancy between the two, it can provoke a more severe form of the sophomore crisis later on. James Marcia defines this early commitment without sufficient exploration as identity foreclosure.
The adult crisis usually starts in the mid- to late 20s. The issues faced in it overlap to some extent with the ones in the sophomore crisis, but they tend to be more complex issues of identity. As such, they also circle around one's career and one's path in life. But they tend to take more details into account, like one's choice of religion, one's political outlook, or one's sexuality. Resolving the adult crisis means having a good idea of who one is as a person and being comfortable with this idea. It is usually associated with reaching full adulthood, having completed school, working full-time, having left one's home, and being financially independent. Being unable to resolve the adult crisis may result in disorientation, a lack of confidence in one's personal identity, and depression.
Mid-life
Among the different types of existential crises, the mid-life crisis is the one most widely discussed. It often sets in around the age of 40 and can be triggered by the impression that one's personal growth is obstructed. This may be combined with the sense that there is a significant distance between one's achievement and one's aspirations. In contrast to the earlier existential crises, it also involves a backward-looking component: previous choices in life are questioned and their meaning for one's achievements are assessed. This may lead to regrets and dissatisfaction with one's life choices on various topics, such as career, partner, children, social status, or missed opportunities. The tendency to look backward is often connected to the impression that one is past one's peak period in life.
Sometimes five intermediary stages are distinguished: accommodation, separation, liminality, reintegration, and individuation. In these stages, the individual first adapts to changed external demands, then addresses the distance between their innate motives and the external persona, next rejects their previously adaptive persona, later adopts their new persona, and lastly becomes aware of the external consequences associated with these changes.
Mid-life crises can be triggered by specific events such as losing a job, forced unemployment, extramarital affairs, separation, death of a loved one, or health problems. In this sense, the mid-life crisis can be understood as a period of transition or reevaluation in which the individual tries to adapt to their changed situation in life, both in response to the particular triggering event and to the more general changes that come with age.
Various symptoms are associated with mid-life crises, such as stress, boredom, self-doubt, compulsivity, changes in the libido and sexual preferences, rumination, and insecurity. In public discourse, the mid-life crisis is primarily associated with men, often in direct relation to their career. But it affects women just as well. An additional factor here is the limited time left in their reproductive period or the onset of the menopause. Between 8 and 25 percent of Americans over the age of thirty-five have experienced a mid-life crisis.
Both the severity and the length of the mid-life crisis are often affected by whether and how well the earlier crises were resolved. People who managed to resolve earlier crises well tend to feel more fulfilled with their life choices, which also reflects in how their meaningfulness is perceived when looking back on them. But it does not ensure that they still appear meaningful from one's current perspective.
Later-life
The later-life crisis often occurs around one's late 60s. It may be triggered by events such as retirement, the death of a loved one, serious illness, or imminent death. At its core is a backward-looking reflection on how one led one's life and the choices one made. This reflection is usually motivated by a desire to have lived a valuable and meaningful life paired with an uncertainty of one's success. A contemplation of one's past wrongdoings may also be motivated by a desire to find a way to make up for them while one still can. It can also express itself in a more theoretical form as trying to assess whether one's life made a positive impact on one's more immediate environment or the world at large. This is often associated with the desire to leave a positive and influential legacy behind.
Because of its backward-looking nature, there may be less one can do to truly resolve the crisis. This is true especially for people who arrive at a negative assessment of their life. An additional impeding factor in contrast to earlier crises is that individuals are often unable to find the energy and youthfulness necessary to make meaningful changes to their lives. Some suggest that developing an acceptance of the reality of death may help in the process. Other suggestions focus less on outright resolving the crisis but more on avoiding or minimizing its negative impact. Recommendations to this end include looking after one's physical, economic, and emotional well-being as well as developing and maintaining a social network of support. The best way to avoid the crisis as much as possible may be to ensure that one's earlier crises in life are resolved.
Meaninglessness
Most theorists see meaninglessness as the central issue around which existential crises revolve. In this sense, they may be understood as crises of meaning. The issue of meaning and meaninglessness concerns various closely related questions. Understood in the widest sense, it involves the global questions of the meaning of life in general, why we are here, or for what purpose we live. Answers to this question traditionally take the form of religious explanations, for example, that the world was created by God according to His purpose and that each thing is meaningful because it plays a role for this higher purpose. This is sometimes termed cosmic meaning in contrast to the secular personal meaning an individual seeks when asking in what way their particular life is meaningful or valuable. In this personal sense, it is often connected with a practical confusion about how one should live one's life or why one should continue doing what one does. This can express itself in the feeling that one has nothing to live for or to hope for. Sometimes this is even interpreted in the sense that there is no right and wrong or good and evil. While it may be more and more difficult in the contemporary secular world to find cosmic meaning, it has been argued that to resolve the problem of meaninglessness, it is sufficient for the individual to find a secular personal meaning to hold onto.
The issue of meaninglessness becomes a problem because humans seem to have a strong desire or need for meaning. This expresses itself both emotionally and practically since goals and ideals are needed to structure one's life. The other side of the problem is given in the fact that there seems to be no such meaning or that the world is at its bottom contingent and could have existed in a very different way or not at all. The world's contingency and indifference to human affairs are often referred to as the absurd in the existentialist literature. The problem can be summarized through the question "How does a being who needs meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?". Various practitioners of existential psychotherapy have affirmed that the loss of meaning plays a role for the majority of people requiring psychotherapy and is the central issue for a significant number of them. But this loss has its most characteristic expression in existential crises.
Various factors affect whether life is experienced as meaningful, such as social relationships, religion, and thoughts about the past or future. Judgments of meaning are quite subjective. They are a form of global assessment since they take one's life as a whole into consideration. It is sometimes argued that the problem of a loss of meaning is particularly associated with modern society. This is often based on the idea that people tended to be more grounded in their immediate social environment, their profession, and their religion in premodern times.
Sources of meaning
It is usually held that humans have a need for meaning. This need may be satisfied by finding an accessible source of meaning. Religious faith can be a source of meaning and many studies demonstrate that it is associated with self-reported meaning in life. Another important source of meaning is due to one's social relationships. Lacking or losing a source of meaning, on the other hand, often leads to an existential crisis. In some cases, this change is clearly linked to a specific source of meaning that becomes inaccessible. For example, a religious person confronted with the vast extent of death and suffering may find their faith in a benevolent, omnipotent God shattered and thereby lose the ability to find meaning in life. For others, a concrete threat of imminent death, for example, due to the disruption of the social order, can have a similar effect. If the individual is unable to assimilate, reinterpret, or ignore this type of threatening information, the loss of their primary source of meaning may force them to reevaluate their system of meaning in life from the ground up. In this case, the person is entering an existential crisis, which can bring with it the need to question what other sources of meaning are accessible to them or whether there is meaning at all. Many different sources of meaning are discussed in the academic literature. Discovering such a source for oneself is often key to resolving an existential crisis. The sources discussed in the literature can be divided into altruism, dedication to a cause, creativity, hedonism, self-actualization, and finding the right attitude.
Altruism refers to the practice or attitude based on the desire to benefit others. Altruists aim to make the world a better place than they found it. This can happen in various ways. On a small scale, one may try to be kinder to the people in one's immediate social environment. It can include the effort to become aware of their problems and try to help them, directly or indirectly. But the altruistic attitude may also express itself in a less personal form towards strangers, for example, by donating money to charities. Effective altruism is an example of a contemporary movement promoting altruism and providing concrete advice on how to live altruistically. It has been argued that altruism can be a strong source of meaning in one's life. This is also reflected in the fact that altruists tend to enjoy higher levels of well-being as well as increased physical and mental health.
Dedicating oneself to a cause can act as a closely related source of meaning. In many cases, the two overlap, if altruism is the primary motivation. But this is not always the case since the fascination with a cause may not be explicitly linked to the desire to benefit others. It consists in devoting oneself fully to producing something greater than oneself. A diverse set of causes can be followed this way, ranging from religious goals, political movements, or social institutions to scientific or philosophical ventures. Such causes provide meaning to one's life to the extent that one participates in the meaningfulness of the cause by working towards it and realizing it.
Creativity refers to the activity of creating something new and exciting. It can act as a source of meaning even if it is not obvious that the creation serves a specific purpose. This aspect is especially relevant in the field of art, where it is sometimes claimed that the work of art does not need an external justification since it is "its own excuse for being". It has been argued that for many great artists, their keener vision of the existential dilemma of the human condition was the cause of their creative efforts. These efforts in turn may have served them as a form of therapy. But creativity is not limited to art. It can be found and practiced in many different fields, both on a big and a small scale, such as in science, cooking, gardening, writing, regular work, or romantic relationships.
The hedonistic approach can also constitute a source of meaning. It is based on the idea that a life enjoyed to the fullest extent is meaningful even if it lacks any higher overarching purpose. For this perspective, it is relevant that hedonism is not understood in a vulgar sense, i.e. as the pursuit of sensory pleasures characterized by a disregard of the long-term consequences. While such a lifestyle may be satisfying in certain respects, a more refined form of hedonism that includes other forms of pleasures and considers their long-term consequences is more commonly recommended in the academic literature. This wider sense also includes more subtle pleasures such as looking at fine art or engaging in a stimulating intellectual conversation. In this way, life can be meaningful to the individual if it is seen as a gift evoking a sense of astonishment at its miracle and a general appreciation of it.
According to the perspective of self-actualization, each human carries within themselves a potential of what they may become. The purpose of life then is to develop oneself to realize this potential and successfully doing so increases the individual's well-being and sense of meaningfulness. In this sense, just like an acorn has the potential to become an oak, so an infant has the potential to become a fully actualized adult with various virtues and skills based on their inborn talents. The process of self-actualization is sometimes understood in terms of a hierarchy: certain lower potentials have to be actualized before the actualization of higher potentials becomes possible.
Most of the approaches mentioned so far have clear practical implications in that they affect how the individual interacts with the world. The attitudinal approach, on the other hand, identifies different sources of meaning based only on taking the right attitude towards life. This concerns specifically negative situations in which one is faced with a fate that one cannot change. In existential crises, this often expresses itself in the feeling of helplessness. The idea is that in such situations one can still find meaning based on taking a virtuous or admirable attitude towards one's suffering, for example, by remaining courageous.
Whether a certain source of meaning is accessible differs from person to person. It may also depend on the stage in life one finds oneself in, similar to how different stages are often associated with different types of existential crises. It has been argued, for example, that the concern with oneself and one's own well-being found in self-actualization and hedonism tends to be associated more with earlier stages in life. The concern with others or the world at large found in altruism and the dedication to a cause, on the other hand, is more likely found in later stages in life, for example, when an older generation aims to pass on their knowledge and improve the lives of a younger generation.
Consequences, clinical manifestation, and measurement
Going through an existential crisis is associated with a variety of consequences, both for the affected individual and their social environment. On the personal level, the immediate effects are usually negative since experiencing an existential crisis is connected to stress, anxiety, and the formation of bad relationships. This can lead all the way to depression if existential crises are not resolved. On the social level, they cause a high divorce rate and an increased number of people being unable to make significant positive contributions to society, for example, due to a lack of drive resulting from depression. But if resolved properly, they can also have positive effects by pushing the affected to address the underlying issue. Individuals may thereby find new sources of meaning, develop as a person, and thereby improve their way of life. In the sophomore crisis, for example, this can happen by planning ahead and thereby making more conscious choices in how to lead one's life.
Being aware of the symptoms and consequences of existential crises on the personal level is important for psychotherapists so they can arrive at an accurate diagnosis. But this is not always easy since the symptoms usually differ from person to person. In this sense, the lack of meaning at the core of existential crises can express itself in several different ways. For some, it may lead them to become overly adventurous and zealous. In their attempt to wrest themselves free from meaninglessness, they are desperate to indiscriminately dedicate themselves to any cause. They might do so without much concern for the concrete content of the cause or for their personal safety. It has been argued that this type of behavior is present in some hardcore activists. This may be understood as a form of defense mechanism in which the individual engages fanatically in activities in response to a deep sense of purposelessness. It can also express itself in a related but less dramatic way as compulsive activity. This may take various forms, such as workaholism or the obsessive pursuit of prestige, or material acquisitions. This is sometimes referred to as false centering or inauthenticity since the activity is pursued more as a distraction and less because it is in itself fulfilling to the agent. It can provide a temporary alleviation by helping the individual drain their energy and thus distract them from the threat of meaninglessness.
Another response consists in an overt declaration of nihilism characterized by a pervasive tendency to discredit activities purported by others to have meaning. Such an individual may, for example, dismiss altruism out of hand as a disingenuous form of selfishness or see all leaders as motivated by their lust for power rather than inspired by a grand vision. In some more extreme forms of crisis, the individual's behavior may show severe forms of aimlessness and apathy, often accompanied by depression. Being unable to find good reasons for making an effort, such a person remains inactive for extended periods of time, such as staying in bed all day. If they engage in a behavior, they may do so indiscriminately without much concern for what they are doing.
Indirect factors for determining the severeness of an existential crisis include job satisfaction and the quality of one's relationships. For example, physical violence or constant fighting in a relationship may be interpreted as external signs of a serious existential crisis. Various empirical studies have shown that a lack of sense of meaning in life is associated with psychopathology. Having a positive sense of meaning, on the other hand, is associated with deeply held religious beliefs, having a clear life goal, and having dedicated oneself to a cause.
Measurement
Different suggestions have been made concerning how to measure whether someone has an existential crisis, to what degree it is present, and which approach to resolving it might be promising. These methods can help therapists and counselors to understand both whether their client is going through an existential crisis and, if so, how severe their crisis is. But they can also be used by theorists in order to identify how existential crises correlate with other phenomena, such as depression, gender, or poverty.
One way to assess this is through questionnaires focusing on topics like the meaning of life, such as the Purpose in Life Test and the Life Regard Index. The Purpose in Life Test is widely used and consists of 20 items rated on a seven-point scale, such as "In life I have: (1) no goals or aims at all ... (7) very clear goals and aims" or "With regard to death, I am (1) unprepared and frightened ... (7) prepared and unafraid".
Resolution
Since existential crises can have a crippling effect on people, it is important to find ways to resolve them. Different forms of resolution have been proposed. The right approach often depends on the type of crisis experienced. Many approaches emphasize the importance of developing a new stage of intellectual functioning in order to resolve the inner conflict. But others focus more on external changes. For example, crises related to one's sexual identity and one's level of independence may be resolved by finding a partner matching one's character and preferences. Positive indicators of marital success include having similar interests, engaging in common activities, and having a similar level of education. Crises centering around one's professional path may also be approached more externally by finding the right type of career. In this respect, important factors include that the career matches both one's interests and one's skills to avoid a job that is unfulfilling, lacks engagement, or is overwhelming.
But the more common approach aims at changing one's intellectual functioning and inner attitude. Existential psychotherapists, for example, usually try to resolve existential crises by helping the patient to rediscover meaning in their life. Sometimes this takes the form of finding a spiritual or religious purpose in life, such as dedicating oneself to an ideal or discovering God. Other approaches focus less on the idea of discovering meaning and more on the idea of creating meaning. This is based on the idea that meaning is not something independent of the agent out there but something that has to be created and maintained. However, there are also types of existentialist psychotherapy that accept the idea that the world is meaningless and try to develop the best way of coping with this fact. The different approaches to resolving the issue of meaninglessness are sometimes divided into a leap of faith, the reasoned approach, and nihilism. Another classification categorizes possible resolutions as isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation. Methods from cognitive behavior therapy have also been used to treat existential crises by bringing about a change in the individual's intellectual functioning.
Leap of faith, reasoned approach, and nihilism
Since existential crises circle around the idea of being unable to find meaning in life, various resolutions focus on specifically this aspect. Sometimes three different forms of this approach are distinguished. On the one hand, the individual may perform a leap of faith and affirm a new system of meaning without a previous in-depth understanding of how secure it is as a source of meaning. Another method consists in carefully considering all the relevant factors and thereby rebuilding and justifying a new system of meaning. A third approach goes against these two by denying that there is actual meaning. It consists in accepting the meaninglessness of life and learning how to deal with it without the illusion of meaning.
A leap of faith implies committing oneself to something one does not fully understand. In the case of existential crises, the commitment involves the faith that life is meaningful even though the believer lacks a reasoned justification. This leap is motivated by the strong desire that life is meaningful and triggered as a response to the threat posed to the fulfillment of this desire by the existential crisis. For whom this is psychologically possible, this may be the fastest way to bypass an existential crisis. This option may be more available to people oriented toward intuitive processing and less to people who favor a more rational approach since it has less need for a thorough reflection and introspection. It has been argued that the meaning acquired through a leap of faith may be more robust than in other cases. One reason for this is that since it is not based on empirical evidence for it, it is also less vulnerable to empirical evidence against it. Another reason concerns the flexibility of intuition to selectively disregard threatening information on the one hand and to focus instead on validating cues.
More rationally inclined persons tend to focus more on a careful evaluation of the sources of meaning based on solid justification through empirical evidence. If successful, this approach has the advantage of providing the individual with a concrete and realistic understanding of how their life is meaningful. It can also constitute a very robust source of meaning if it is based on solid empirical evidence and thorough understanding. The system of meaning arrived at may be very idiosyncratic by being based on the individual's values, preferences, and experiences. On a practical level, it often leads to a more efficient realization of this meaning since the individual can focus more exclusively on this factor. If someone determines that family life is their main source of meaning, for example, they may focus more intensely on this aspect and take a less involved stance towards other areas in life, such as success at work. In comparison to the leap of faith, this approach offers more room for personal growth due to the cognitive labor in the form of reflection and introspection involved in it and the self-knowledge resulting from this process. One of the drawbacks of this approach is that it can take a considerable amount of time to complete and rid oneself of the negative psychological consequences. If successful, the foundations arrived at this way may provide a solid basis to withstand future existential crises. But success is not certain and even after a prolonged search, the individual might still be unable to identify a significant source of meaning in their life.
If the search for meaning in either way fails, there is still another approach to resolving the issue of meaninglessness in existential crises: to find a way to accept that life is meaningless. This position is usually referred to as nihilism. One can distinguish a local and a global version of this approach, depending on whether the denial of meaningfulness is only directed at a certain area of life or at life as a whole. It becomes necessary if the individual arrives at the justifiable conclusion that life is, after all, meaningless. This conclusion may be intolerable initially, since humans seem to have a strong desire to lead a meaningful life, sometimes referred to as the will to meaning. Some theorists, such as Viktor Frankl, see this desire even as the primary motivation of all individuals. One difficulty with this negative stance towards meaning is that it seems to provide very little practical guidance in how to live one's life. So even if an individual has resolved their existential crises this way, they may still lack an answer to the question of what they should do with their life. Positive aspects of this stance include that it can lead to a heightened sense of freedom by being unbound from any predetermined purpose. It also exemplifies the virtue of truthfulness by being able to acknowledge an inconvenient truth instead of escaping into the convenient illusion of meaningfulness.
Isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation
According to Peter Wessel Zapffe, life is essentially meaningless but this does not mean that we are automatically doomed to unresolvable existential crises. Instead, he identifies four ways of dealing with this fact without falling into an existential depression: isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation. Isolation involves a dismissal of destructive thoughts and feelings from consciousness. Physicians and medical students, for example, may adopt a detached and technical stance in order to better deal with the tragic and disgusting aspects of their vocation. Anchoring involves a dedication to certain values and practical commitments that give the individual a sense of assurance. This often happens collectively, for example, through devotion to a common religion, but it can also happen individually. Distraction is a more temporary form of withdrawing one's attention from the meaninglessness of certain life situations that do not provide any significant contributions to the construction of our self. Sublimation is the rarest of these mechanisms. Its essential characteristic setting it apart from the other mechanisms is that it uses the pain of living and transforms it into a work of art or another creative expression.
Cognitive behavioral therapy and social perspective-taking
Some approaches from the field of cognitive behavioral therapy adjust and employ treatments for depression to resolve existential crises. One fundamental idea in cognitive behavior theory is that various psychological problems arise due to inaccurate core beliefs about oneself, such as beliefs that one is worthless, helpless, or incompetent. These problematic core beliefs may lie dormant for extended periods. But when activated by certain life events, they may express themselves in the form of recurrent negative and damaging thoughts. This can lead, among other things, to depression. Cognitive behavioral therapy then consists in raising the awareness of the affected person in regards to these toxic thought patterns and the underlying core beliefs while training to change them. This can happen by focusing on one's immediate present, being goal-oriented, role-playing, or behavioral experiments.
A closely related method employs the practice of social perspective-taking. Social perspective-taking involves the ability to assess one's situation and character from the point of view of a different individual. This enables the individual to step outside their own immediate perspective while taking into consideration how others see the individual and thus reach a more integral perspective.
Unresolved crises
Existential crises sometimes pass even if the underlying issue is not resolved. This may happen, for example, if the issue is pushed into the background by other concerns and thus remains present only in a masked or dormant state. But even in this state, it may have unconscious effects on how people lead their life, like career choices. It can also increase the likelihood of suffering another existential crisis later on in life and might make resolving these later crises more difficult. It has been argued that many existential crises in contemporary society are not resolved. The reason for this may be a lack of clear awareness of the nature, importance, and possible treatments of existential crises.
Cultural context
In the 19th century, Thomas Carlyle wrote of how the loss of faith in God results in an existential crisis which he called the "Centre of Indifference", wherein the world appears cold and unfeeling and the individual considers himself to be without worth. Søren Kierkegaard considered that angst and existential despair would appear when an inherited or borrowed world-view (often of a collective nature) proved unable to handle unexpected and extreme life-experiences. Friedrich Nietzsche extended his views to suggest that the death of God—the loss of collective faith in religion and traditional morality—created a more widespread existential crisis for the philosophically aware.
Existential crisis has indeed been seen as the inevitable accompaniment of modernism (1890–1945). Whereas Émile Durkheim saw individual crises as the by-product of social pathology and a (partial) lack of collective norms, others have seen existentialism as arising more broadly from the modernist crisis of the loss of meaning throughout the modern world.<ref>M. Hardt/K. Weeks, The Jameson Reader (2000) p. 265</ref> Its twin answers were either a religion revivified by the experience of anomie (as with Martin Buber), or an individualistic existentialism based on facing directly the absurd contingency of human fate within a meaningless and alien universe, as with Sartre and Camus.
Irvin Yalom, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, has made fundamental contributions to the field of existential psychotherapy. Rollo May is another of the founders of this approach.
Fredric Jameson has suggested that postmodernism, with its saturation of social space by a visual consumer culture, has replaced the modernist angst of the traditional subject, and with it the existential crisis of old, by a new social pathology of flattened affect and a fragmented subject.
Historical context
Existential crises are often seen as a phenomenon associated specifically with modern society. One important factor in this context is that various sources of meaning, such as religion or being grounded in one's local culture and immediate social environment, are less important in the contemporary context.
Another factor in modern society is that individuals are faced with a daunting number of decisions to make and alternatives to choose from, often without any clear guidelines on how to make these choices. The high difficulty for finding the best alternative and the importance of doing so are often the cause of anxiety and may lead to an existential crisis. For example, it was very common for a long time in history for a son to simply follow his father's profession. In contrast to this, the modern schooling system presents students with different areas of study and interest, thereby opening a wide range of career opportunities to them. The problem brought about by this increased freedom is sometimes referred to as the agony of choice. The increased difficulty is described in Barry Schwartz's law, which links the costs, time, and energy needed to make a well-informed choice to the number of alternatives available.
See also
Absurdism
Why there is anything at all
Antinatalism
"Dark Night of the Soul"
Depersonalization
Duḥkha
Ego death
Limit situation
Scholarly approaches to mysticism
Positive disintegration
The Sickness unto Death Spiritual crisis
References
Further reading
J. Watson, Caring Science as Sacred Science 2005. Chapter 4: "Existential Crisis in Science and Human Sciences".
T.M. Cousineau, A. Seibring, M.T. Barnard, P-673 Making meaning of infertility: Existential crisis or personal transformation? Fertility and Sterility, 2006.
Sanders, Marc, Existential Depression. How to recognize and cure life-related sadness in gifted people'', 2013.
External links
Alan Watts on meaningless life, and its resolution
Crisis
Personal life
Philosophy of life
Popular psychology
Psychological concepts
Psychotherapy
Religion and mental health
Suffering | 0.77574 | 0.999122 | 0.775059 |
Divine law | Divine law is any body of law that is perceived as deriving from a transcendent source, such as the will of God or godsin contrast to man-made law or to secular law. According to Angelos Chaniotis and Rudolph F. Peters, divine laws are typically perceived as superior to man-made laws, sometimes due to an assumption that their source has resources beyond human knowledge and human reason. Believers in divine laws might accord them greater authority than other laws, for example by assuming that divine law cannot be changed by human authorities.
According to Chaniotis, divine laws are noted for their apparent inflexibility. The introduction of interpretation into divine law is a controversial issue, since believers place high significance on adhering to the law precisely. Opponents to the application of divine law typically deny that it is purely divine and point out human influences in the law. These opponents characterize such laws as belonging to a particular cultural tradition. Conversely, adherents of divine law are sometimes reluctant to adapt inflexible divine laws to cultural contexts.
Medieval Christianity assumed the existence of three kinds of laws: divine law, natural law, and man-made law. Theologians have substantially debated the scope of natural law, with the Enlightenment encouraging greater use of reason and expanding the scope of natural law and marginalizing divine law in a process of secularization.
Since the authority of divine law is rooted in its source, the origins and transmission-history of divine law are important.
Conflicts frequently arise between secular understandings of justice or morality and divine law.
Religious law, such as canon law, includes both divine law and additional interpretations, logical extensions, and traditions.
See also
Biblical law in Christianity
Dharma
Halakha
Law and religion
Mitzvah
Morality and religion
Regulative principle of worship, debate over the scope of divine law in 17th-century English Christian practices
Rule according to higher law
Sharia, Islamic law
Ten Commandments
Theocracy
Notes
Citations
References
Further reading
Canosa, J. (2009). The Efficacy of the Divine Law in the Administrative Justice in the Church. Ius Canonicum, 49, 549. https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/iuscan49&i=555
McCall, B. M. (2011). Consulting the Architect When Problems Arise-The Divine Law. Geo. JL & Pub. Pol'y, 9, 103.
Rubin, A. P. (1992). International Law in the age of Columbus. Netherlands International Law Review, 39(1), 5-35.
Rumble, W. E. (1979). Divine Law, Utilitarian Ethics, and Positivist Jurisprudence: A Study of the Legal Philosophy of John Austin. Am. J. Juris., 24, 139.
External links
Catholic Encyclopedia: Moral Aspect of Divine Law
Christian terminology
Philosophy of law
Religious ethics
Religious law
Theories of law
Concepts in political philosophy | 0.782497 | 0.990328 | 0.774928 |
Interfaith dialogue | Interfaith dialogue, also known as interreligious dialogue, refers to cooperative, constructive, and positive interaction between people of different religious traditions (i.e. "faiths") and/or spiritual or humanistic beliefs, at both the individual and institutional levels.
Throughout the world there are local, regional, national and international interfaith initiatives; many are formally or informally linked and constitute larger networks or federations. The often quoted statement "There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. There will be no peace among the religions without dialogue among the religions" was formulated by Hans Küng, a Professor of Ecumenical Theology and President of the Global Ethic Foundation. Interfaith dialogue forms a major role in the study of religion and peacebuilding.
Definition
The Archdiocese of Chicago's Office for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs defines "the difference between ecumenical, interfaith, and interreligious relations", as follows:
"ecumenical" as "relations and prayer with other Christians",
"interfaith" as "relations with members of the 'Abrahamic faiths' (Jewish, Muslim and Christian traditions)," and
"interreligious" as "relations with other religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism".
Some interfaith dialogues have more recently adopted the name interbelief dialogue, while other proponents have proposed the term interpath dialogue, to avoid implicitly excluding atheists, agnostics, humanists, and others with no religious faith but with ethical or philosophical beliefs, as well as to be more accurate concerning many world religions that do not place the same emphasis on "faith" as do some Western religions. Similarly, pluralistic rationalist groups have hosted public reasoning dialogues to transcend all worldviews (whether religious, cultural or political), termed transbelief dialogue. To some, the term interreligious dialogue has the same meaning as interfaith dialogue. The World Council of Churches states: "Following the lead of the Roman Catholic Church, other churches and Christian religious organizations, such as the World Council of Churches, have increasingly opted to use the word interreligious rather than interfaith to describe their own bilateral and multilateral dialogue and engagement with other religions. [...] the term interreligious is preferred because we are referring explicitly to dialogue with those professing religions – who identify themselves explicitly with a religious tradition and whose work has a specific religious affiliation and is based on religious foundations."
History
History records examples of interfaith initiatives throughout the ages, with varying levels of success in establishing one of three types of "dialogue" to engender, as recently described, either understanding, teamwork, or tolerance:
"In the dialogue of the head, we mentally reach out to the other to learn from those who think differently from us."
"In the dialogue of the hands, we all work together to make the world a better place in which we must all live together."
"In the dialogue of the heart, we share the experience of the emotions of those different from us."
The historical effectiveness of interfaith dialogue is an issue of debate. Friar James L. Heft, in a lecture on "The Necessity of Inter-Faith Diplomacy," spoke about the conflicts among practitioners of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Noting that except for the Convivencia in the 14th and 15th centuries, believers in these religions have either kept their distance or have been in conflict, Heft maintains, "there has been very little genuine dialogue" between them. "The sad reality has been that most of the time Jews, Muslims and Christians have remained ignorant about each other, or worse, especially in the case of Christians and Muslims, attacked each other."
In contrast, The Pluralism Project at Harvard University says, "Every religious tradition has grown through the ages in dialogue and historical interaction with others. Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been part of one another's histories, have shared not only villages and cities, but ideas of God and divine revelation."
The importance of Abrahamic interfaith dialogue in the present has been bluntly presented: "We human beings today face a stark choice: dialogue or death!"
More broadly, interfaith dialogue and action have occurred over many centuries:
In the 16th century, the Emperor Akbar encouraged tolerance in Mughal India, a diverse nation with people of various faith backgrounds, including Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Christianity.
Religious pluralism can also be observed in other historical contexts, including Muslim Spain. Zarmanochegas (Zarmarus) (Ζαρμανοχηγὰς) was a monk of the Sramana tradition (possibly, but not necessarily a Buddhist) from India who journeyed to Antioch and Athens while Augustus (died 14 CE) was ruling the Roman Emprire.
"Disputation of Barcelona – religious disputation between Jews and Christians in 1263. The apostate Paulus [Pablo] Christiani proposed to King James I of Aragon that a formal public religious disputation on the fundamentals of faith should be held between him and R. Moses b. Nahman (Nachmanides) whom he had already encountered in Gerona. The disputation took place with the support of the ecclesiastical authorities and the generals of the Dominican and Franciscan orders, while the king presided over a number of sessions and took an active part in the disputation. The Dominicans Raymond de Peñaforte, Raymond Martini, and Arnold de Segarra, and the general of the Franciscan order in the kingdom, Peter de Janua, were among the Christian disputants. The single representative for the Jewish side was Naḥmanides. The four sessions of the disputation took place on July 20, 27, 30, and 31, 1263 (according to another calculation, July 20, 23, 26, and 27). Naḥmanides was guaranteed complete freedom of speech in the debate; he took full advantage of the opportunity thus afforded and spoke with remarkable frankness. Two accounts of the disputation, one in Hebrew written by Naḥmanides and a shorter one in Latin, are the main sources for the history of this important episode in Judeo-Christian polemics. According to both sources the initiative for the disputation and its agenda were imposed by the Christian side, although the Hebrew account tries to suggest a greater involvement of Naḥmanides in finalizing the items to be discussed. When the ecclesiastics who saw the "not right" turn the disputation was taking, due to Nahmanides persuasive argumentation, they urged that it should be ended as speedily as possible. It was, therefore, never formally concluded, but interrupted. According to the Latin record of the proceedings, the disputation ended because Nahmanides fled prematurely from the city. In fact, however, he stayed on in Barcelona for over a week after the disputation had been suspended in order to be present in the synagogue on the following Sabbath when a conversionist sermon was to be delivered. The king himself attended the synagogue and gave an address, an event without medieval precedent. Nahmanides was permitted to reply on this occasion. The following day, after receipt of a gift of 300 sólidos from the king, he returned home."
"While the Disputation may have been a great achievement for Paulus Christiani in his innovative use of rabbinic sources in Christian missionary efforts, for Naḥmanides it represented an additional example of the wise and courageous leadership which he offered his people."
19th-century initiatives
The 1893 Parliament of World Religions at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois is "often regarded as the birth of the interfaith movement". The congress was the first organized, international gathering of religious leaders. Since its first meeting in 1893, there have been eight meetings including one in 2015.
20th-century initiatives
In 1900, the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF) was founded under a name different from its current one. In 1987, its statement of purpose was revised to include advancing "understanding, dialogue and readiness to learn and promotes sympathy and harmony among the different religious traditions". In 1990, its membership was enlarged "to include all the world's major religious groups". In 1996, IARF's World Congress included representatives of Palestinian and Israeli IARF groups and Muslim participants made presentations.
In December 1914, just after World War I began, a group of Christians gathered in Cambridge, England to found the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) "in hopes of bringing people of faith together to promote peace, and it went on to become a leading interfaith voice for non-violence and non-discrimination". It has branches and affiliated groups in over 50 countries on every continent. The membership includes "Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Indigenous religious practitioners, Baháʼí, and people of other faith traditions, as well as those with no formal religious affiliation".
In 1936, the World Congress of Faiths (WCF) formed in London. It is "one of the oldest interfaith bodies in the world". One of its purposes is to bring "people of faith together to enrich their understandings of their own and others' traditions". It does this by offering opportunities "to meet, explore, challenge and understand different faith traditions through events from small workshops to large conferences, partnership working, online conversation, and publications".
In 1949, following the devastation of World War II, the Fellowship In Prayer was founded in 1949 by Carl Allison Evans and Kathryn Brown. Evans believed that unified prayer would "bridge theological or structural religious differences", would "open the mind and heart of the prayer to a new understanding of and appreciation for the beliefs and values of those following different spiritual paths", and would "advance interfaith understanding and mutual respect among religious traditions",
In 1952, the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) was founded in Amsterdam. It serves as "the sole world umbrella organisation embracing Humanist, atheist, rationalist, secularist, skeptic, laique, ethical cultural, freethought and similar organisations world-wide". IHEU's "vision is a Humanist world; a world in which human rights are respected and everyone is able to live a life of dignity". It implements its vision by seeking "to influence international policy through representation and information, to build the humanist network, and let the world know about the worldview of Humanism".
Between 1956 and 1964, the Benedictine monastery of Toumliline hosted conferences called "International Meetings" which hosted Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars such as Louis Massignon, Emmanuel Levinas and Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
In 1958, the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) began. Since then, it "has been at the forefront of promoting the sympathetic study and understanding of world religions. It has supported academic inquiry and international understanding in this field through its residential community," and "its research efforts and funding, and its public programs and publications".
In 1960, Juliet Hollister (1916–2000) created the Temple of Understanding (TOU) to provide "interfaith education" with the purpose of "breaking down prejudicial boundaries". The Temple of Understanding "over several years hosted meetings that paved the way for the North American Interfaith Network (NAIN)".
In the late 1960s, interfaith groups such as the Clergy And Laity Concerned (CALC) joined around Civil Rights issues for African-Americans and later were often vocal in their opposition to the Vietnam War.
In 1965, "about 100 Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergy" formed Clergy Concerned about Vietnam (CCAV). Its purpose was "to challenge U.S. policy on Vietnam". When the group admitted laity, it renamed itself National Emergency Committee of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam (CALCAV) In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. used its platform for his "Beyond Vietnam" speech. Later, CALCAV addressed other issues of social justice issues and changed its name to become simply Clergy and Laymen Concerned (CALC).
In 1965, during Vatican II, it was decided that relations with all religions should be developed. To do this, Pope Paul VI established a special secretariat (later a pontifical council) for relationships with non-Christians. The papal encyclical Ecclesiam Suam emphasized the importance of positive encounter between Christians and people of other faith traditions. The Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) of 1965, spelled out the pastoral dimensions of this relationship.
In 1967, the World Council of Churches conference "proved to be a landmark both as the beginning of serious interest in interfaith dialogue as such in the WCC, and as the first involvement in the ecumenical discussion of the Vatican Secretariat for Non-Christians".
In 1970, the first World Conference of Religions for Peace was held in Kyoto, Japan. Religions for Peace is "the world's largest and most representative multi-religious coalition advancing common action for peace". Its work includes "dialogue" that "bears fruit in common concrete action". Through the organization, diverse religious communities discern "deeply held and widely shared" moral concerns, such as, "transforming violent conflict, promoting just and harmonious societies, advancing human development and protecting the earth".
In 1977, the Dialogue Interreligieux Monastique - Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (DIMMID) is created in Peterborough, Massachusetts and Loppem, Belgium. The aim of this Benedictine and Cistercian organisation is to foster religious dialogue with other monastic communities across all religions.
In 1978, the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington (IFC) was formed. "The IFC brings together eleven historic faith communities to promote dialogue, understanding and a sense of community and to work cooperatively for justice throughout the District of Columbia region." Members include the Baháʼí Faith, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Jain, Jewish, Latter-day Saints, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Sikh and Zoroastrian faith communities.
In 1981, Minhaj-ul-Quran was founded. It is "a Pakistan-based international organization working to promote peace, tolerance, interfaith harmony and education, tackle extremism and terrorism, engage with young Muslims for religious moderation, promote women's rights, development and empowerment, and provide social welfare and promotion of human rights". Minhaj-ul-Quran offers free download of books.
On October 27, 1986 Pope John Paul II had a day of prayer at Assisi and invited "about fifty Christians and fifty leaders of other faiths". In his book One Christ–Many Religions, S. J. Samartha says that the importance of that day of prayer for "interreligious relationships cannot be overestimated" and gives "several reasons" for its importance:
"It conferred legitimacy to Christian initiatives in interreligious dialogues."
"It was seen as an event of theological significance."
"Assisi was recognized as an act of dialogue in the highest degree."
"It emphasized the religious nature of peace."
However, Samartha added, two points caused "disquiet" to people of faiths other than Christian:
The Pope's insistence on Christ as the only source of peace.
For the prayers Christians were taken to one place and people of other faiths to another place.
Besides, the disquiet caused by the Pope's day of prayer, there is an ongoing "suspicion" by "neighbors of other faiths" that "dialogues may be used for purposes of Christian mission".
In 1991, Harvard University's Diana L. Eck launched the Pluralism Project by teaching a course on "World Religions in New England," in which students explored the "diverse religious communities in the Boston area". This project was expanded to charting "the development of interfaith efforts throughout the United States" and then the world. The Pluralism Project posts the information on the Pluralism Project website.
In 1993, on the centennial of its first conference, the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions hosted a conference in Chicago with 8,000 participants from faith backgrounds around the world. "The Parliament is the oldest, the largest, and the most inclusive gathering of people of all faith and traditions." The organization hosts meetings around the world every few years. Its 2015 conference decided to hold meetings every two years.
In 1994, the Interfaith Alliance was created "to celebrate religious freedom and to challenge the bigotry and hatred arising from religious and political extremism infiltrating American politics". As of 2016, the Interfaith Alliance has 185,000 members across the country made up of 75 faith traditions as well as those of no faith tradition. The Interfaith Alliance works to (1) "respect the inherent rights of all individuals–as well as their differences", (2) "promote policies that protect vital boundaries between religion and government", and (3) "unite diverse voices to challenge extremism and build common ground".
In 1995, the Interfaith Center at the Presidio was founded with "a multi-faith Board". The center is a San Francisco Bay Area "interfaith friendship-building" that welcomes "people of all faiths". The center is committed to "healing and peacemaking within, between, and among religious and spiritual traditions".
In 1996, the Center for Interfaith Relations in Louisville, Kentucky established the Festival of Faiths, a multi-day event that promotes interfaith understanding, cooperation and action.
In 1996, Kim Bobo founded the Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) organization. Today IWJ includes a national network of more than 70 local interfaith groups, worker centers and student groups, making it the leading national organization working to strengthen the religious community's involvement in issues of workplace justice.
In 1997, the Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY) was founded by the Very Rev. James Parks Morton, former Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. ICNY's historic partners have included the New York State Unified Court System, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, UJA-Federation of New York, the Center for Court Innovation, the Harlem Community Justice Center, CONNECT and the city's nine Social Work Schools. ICNY works with hundreds of grassroots and immigrant religious leaders from fifteen different faith and ethnic traditions. Its "long-term goal is to help New York City become a nationally and internationally-recognized model for mutual understanding and cooperation among faith traditions".
In 1998, the Muslim Christian Dialogue Forum was formed "to promote religious tolerance between Muslims and Christians so that they could work for the promotion of peace, human rights, and democracy". On December 8, 2015, the Forum sponsored a seminar on the subject of "Peace on Earth" at the Forman Christian College. The purpose was to bring the Muslim and Christian communities together to defeat "terrorism and extremism".
In 1998 the Forum on Religion and Ecology was founded at a conference at the United Nations. The Forum arose from 10 conferences at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions on World Religions and Ecology from 1996 to 1998. The Forum has continued the interreligious dialogue of the role of religions in retrieving, reevaluating, and reconstructing their traditions to meet the growing environmental and social challenges of our time. Through conferences, publications, and educational materials the Forum promotes cooperation in and among the world's religions for a flourishing Earth community. Its website includes sections on all world's religions, highlight engaged grassroots project and ecojustice work.
In 1998, Interfaith Power & Light (IPL) began as a project of the Episcopal Church's Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, California. Building on its initial success, the IPL model has "been adopted by 40 state affiliates", and IPL is "working to establish Interfaith Power & Light programs in every state". Ecological sustainability is central to IPL's "faith-based activism". The organization's work is reported in its Fact Sheet and 1915 Annual Report.
In 1999, The Rumi Forum (RF) was founded by the Turkish Hizmet [Service to Humanity] Movement. RF's mission is "to foster intercultural dialogue, stimulate thinking and exchange of opinions on supporting and fostering democracy and peace and to provide a common platform for education and information exchange". In particular, the Forum is interested in "pluralism, peace building and conflict resolution, intercultural and interfaith dialogue, social harmony and justice, civil rights and community cohesion".
21st-century initiatives
In 2000, the United Religions Initiative (URI) was founded "to promote enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings". It now claims "more than 790 member groups and organizations, called Cooperation Circles, to engage in community action such as conflict resolution and reconciliation, environmental sustainability, education, women's and youth programs, and advocacy for human rights".
In 2001, after the September 11 attacks, "interfaith relations proliferated". "Conversations about the urgency of interfaith dialogue and the need to be knowledgeable about the faith of others gained traction in new ways."
In 2001, the Children of Abraham Institute ("CHAI") was founded "to articulate the 'hermeneutics of peace' ... that might be applied to bringing Jewish, Muslim, and Christian religious, social, and political leaders into shared study not only of the texts of Scripture but also of the paths and actions of peace that those texts demand".
In 2001, the Interfaith Encounter Association (IEA) was established in Israel. Its impetus dates from the late 1950s in Israel when a group of visionaries (which included Martin Buber) recognised the need for interfaith dialogue. IEA is dedicated to promoting "coexistence in the Middle East through cross-cultural study and inter-religious dialogue". It forms and maintains "on-going interfaith encounter groups, or centers, that bring together neighboring communities across the country. Each center is led by an interfaith coordinating team with one person for each community in the area."
In 2002 the Messiah Foundation International was formed as "an interfaith, non-religious, spiritual organisation". The organisation comprises "people belonging to various religions and faiths" who "strive to bring about widespread divine love and global peace".
In 2002, the World Council of Religious Leaders (WCRL) was launched in Bangkok. It is "an independent body" that brings religious resources to support the work of the United Nations and its agencies around the world, nation states and other international organizations, in the "quest for peace". It offers "the collective wisdom and resources of the faith traditions toward the resolution of critical global problems". The WCRL is not a part of the United Nations.
In 2002, Eboo Patel, a Muslim, started the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) with a Jewish friend and an evangelical Christian staff worker. The IFYC was started to bring students of different religions "together not just to talk, but to work together to feed the hungry, tutor children or build housing". The IFYC builds religious pluralism by "respect for people's diverse religious and non-religious identities" and "common action for the common good".
In 2003, the Jordanian Interfaith Coexistence Research Center (JICRC) was founded by The Very Reverend Father Nabil Haddad. It "focuses on grassroots interfaith dialogue and coexistence". JICRC provides "advice to government and non-government organizations and individual decision makers regarding questions of inter-religious understanding" and "participates in interfaith efforts on the local, regional, and international levels".
In 2006, the Coexist Foundation was established. Its mission is "to advance social cohesion through education and innovation" and "to strengthen the bond that holds a society together through a sustainable model of people working and learning together" in order to reduce "prejudice, hate and violence".
In 2007, the Greater Kansas City Festival of Faiths put on its first festival. The festival's goals include: increased participation in interfaith experience and fostering dialogue. Festivals include dramatic events and speakers to "expand interaction and appreciation for different worldviews and religious traditions" One-third of the attendees are 'first-timers' to any interfaith activity.
On October 13, 2007, Muslims expanded their message. In A Common Word Between Us and You, 138 Muslim scholars, clerics and intellectuals unanimously came together for the first time since the days of the Prophet[s] to declare the common ground between Christianity and Islam.
In 2007, the biennial interfaith Insight Film Festival began. It encourages "filmmakers throughout the world to make films about 'faith'". The Festival invites "participants from all faith backgrounds" as a way contributing "to understanding, respect and community cohesion".
In 2008, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin established the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation (CJCUC). The center was founded to "begin a theological dialogue" between Jews and Christians with the belief that in dialogue the two faiths will "find far more which unites" them than divides them. The center, currently located at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, engages in Hebraic Bible Study for Christians, from both the local community and from abroad, has organized numerous interfaith praise initiatives, such as Day to Praise, and has established many fund-raising initiatives such as Blessing Bethlehem which aim to aid the persecuted Christian community of Bethlehem, in part, and the larger persecuted Christian community of the Middle East region and throughout the world.
In 2008, through the collaboration of the Hebrew Union College, Omar Ibn Al-Khattab Foundation, and the University of Southern California, the Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement was created. The center was "inspired by USC President Steven B. Sample's vision of increasing collaboration between neighboring institutions in order to benefit both the university and the surrounding community". Its mission is "to promote dialogue, understanding and grassroots, congregational and academic partnerships among the oldest and the newest of the Abrahamic faiths while generating a contemporary understanding in this understudied area and creating new tools for interfaith communities locally, nationally and beyond."
July 2008 – A historic interfaith dialogue conference was initiated by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to solve world problems through concord instead of conflict. The conference was attended by religious leaders of different faiths such as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism and was hosted by King Juan Carlos of Spain in Madrid.
January 2009, at Gujarat's Mahuva, the Dalai Lama inaugurated an interfaith "World Religions-Dialogue and Symphony" conference convened by Hindu preacher Morari Bapu from January 6 to 11, 2009. This conference explored ways and means to deal with the discord among major religions, according to Morari Bapu. Participants included Prof. Samdhong Rinpoche on Buddhism, Diwan Saiyad Zainul Abedin Ali Sahib (Ajmer Sharif) on Islam, Dr. Prabalkant Dutt on non-Catholic Christianity, Swami Jayendra Saraswathi on Hinduism and Dastur Dr. Peshtan Hormazadiar Mirza on Zoroastrianism.
In 2009, the Vancouver School of Theology opened the Iona Pacific Inter-religious Centre. The Centre "models dialogical, constructive, and innovative research, learning and social engagement". The centre operates under the leadership of Principal and Dean, Dr. Wendy Fletcher, and Director, Rabbi Dr. Robert Daum.
In 2009, the Charter for Compassion was unveiled to the world. The Charter was inspired by Karen Armstrong when she received the 2008 TED Prize. She made a wish that the TED community would "help create, launch, and propagate a Charter for Compassion". After the contribution of thousands of people the Charter was compiled and presented. Charter for Compassion International serves as "an umbrella for people to engage in collaborative partnerships worldwide" by "concrete, practical actions".
In 2009, Council of Interfaith Communities (CIC) was incorporated in Washington, District of Columbia. It mission was "to be the administrative and ecclesiastical home for independent interfaith/multifaith churches, congregations and seminaries in the USA" and to honor "Interfaith as a spiritual expression". The CIC is one component of the World Council of Interfaith Communities.
In 2009, Project Aladdin, an initiative of cultural diplomacy and interreligious dialogue was founded in Paris. It was initiated by the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and sponsored by former French president Jacques Chirac and Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan. Its initial purpose was to counter Holocaust denial in the Muslim world by translating and publishing important Shoah scholarship in Arabic. It has since expanded its mission to combat intolerance, racism, and hate speech against minorities in general.
In 2010, Interfaith Partners of South Carolina was formed. It was the first South Carolina statewide diversity interfaith organization.
In 2010, Project Interfaith began its work. 35 volunteers began recording interviews with people in Omaha, Nebraska. Working in pairs, the volunteers were paired up and given a Flip Video camera to record the interviews. The interviewees were asked three questions: (1) "How do you identify yourself spiritually and why?," (2) "What is a stereotype that impacts you based on your religious and spiritual identity?," and (3) "How welcoming do you find our community for your religious or spiritual path?" The recorded interviews were posted on social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. Project Interfaith terminated in 2015.
In 2010, the Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development (ICSD) was established. ICSD is the largest interfaith environmental organization in the Middle East. Its work is bringing together "faith groups, religious leaders, and teachers to promote peace and sustainability".
In 2011, President Obama issued the Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge by sending a letter to all presidents of institutions of higher education in the United States. The goals of the Challenge included maximizing "the education contributions of community-based organizations, including faith and interfaith organizations". By 2015, more than 400 institutions of higher education had responded to the Challenge. In the 2015 Annual President's Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge Gathering, international participants were hosted for the first time.
In 2012, the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID) opened in Vienna, Austria. The board of directors included Jews, Christians, and Muslims. A rabbi on the board said that "the prime purpose is to empower the active work of those in the field, whether in the field of dialogue, of social activism or of conflict resolution". A Muslim member of the board said that "the aim is to promote acceptance of other cultures, moderation and tolerance". According to KAICIID officials, "the center is independent and would not be promoting any one religion".
In February 2016, the International Partnership on Religion and Sustainable Development (PaRD) was launched at the 'Partners for Change' conference in Berlin. The network connects government bodies, faith-based organisations and civil-society agencies from around the world to encourage communication on religion and sustainable development.
In 2016, the National Catholic Muslim Dialogue (NCMD) was established in the United States. This is a joint venture between the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Circle of North America, Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, and the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County. The NCMD was an outgrowth of longstanding regional dialogues in the United States co-sponsored by the USCCB and their regional partners.
In February 2017, Sister Lucy Kurien, founder of Maher NGO, founded the Interfaith Association for Service to Humanity and Nature in Pune, India. She defines interfaith spirituality as, "We respect and love all religions. We never put down anyone's religion, or uphold one religion to the exclusion of others. What we want is to believe and respect interfaith religion, inclusive of all faith traditions. In our community spiritual practices, we invoke our prayers to the Divine, rather than invoking any particular name or form of God to the exclusion of others." As of October 2017, this new community has 198 members from 8 countries.
In 2023, The Abrahamic Family House of Worship, an interfaith complex in Abu Dhabi, inspired by the Document on Human Fraternity signed by Pope Francis and Ahmed El-Tayeb in 2019 was completed. It consists of three separate structures: St. Francis of Assisi Church, Imam Al-Tayeb Mosque, and Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue. The project was announced in 2019 and inaugurated in 2023. The complex serves as a community for inter-religious dialogue and exchange, as well as a physical manifestation of the Document on Human Fraternity. The design was prepared by Adjaye Associates, headed by David Adjaye. The three houses of worship have been named after the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, St. Francis of Assisi, and Moses Ben Maimon. The purpose is to represent interfaith co-existence, preserve the unique character of the religions represented, and build bridges between human civilization and the Abrahamic messages.
The United States Institute of Peace published works on interfaith dialogue and peacebuilding including a Special Report on Evaluating Interfaith Dialogue
Religious intolerance persists
The above section recounts a "long history of interfaith dialogue". However, a 2014 article in The Huffington Post stated "religious intolerance is still a concern that threatens to undermine the hard work of devoted activists over the decades". Nevertheless, the article expressed hope that continuing "interfaith dialogue can change this".
Policies of religions
A PhD thesis Dialogue Between Christians, Jews and Muslims argues that "the paramount need is for barriers against non-defensive dialogue conversations between Christians, Jews, and Muslims to be dismantled to facilitate development of common understandings on matters that are deeply divisive". As of 2012, the thesis says that this has not been done.
Baháʼí Faith
Interfaith and multi-faith interactivity is integral to the teachings of the Baháʼí Faith. Its founder Bahá'u'lláh enjoined his followers to "consort with the followers of all religions in a spirit of friendliness and fellowship". Baháʼís are often at the forefront of local inter-faith activities and efforts. Through the Baháʼí International Community agency, the Baháʼís also participate at a global level in inter-religious dialogue both through and outside of the United Nations processes.
In 2002 the Universal House of Justice, the global governing body of the Baháʼís, issued a letter to the religious leadership of all faiths in which it identified religious prejudice as one of the last remaining "isms" to be overcome, enjoining such leaders to unite in an effort to root out extreme and divisive religious intolerance.
Buddhism
Buddhism has historically been open to other religions. Ven. Dr. K. Sri Dhammananda stated:
The fourteenth century Zen master Gasan Joseki indicated that the Gospels were written by an enlightened being:
"And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these... Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself."
Gasan said: "Whoever uttered those words I consider an enlightened man."
The 14th Dalai Lama has done a great deal of interfaith work throughout his life. He believes that the "common aim of all religions, an aim that everyone must try to find, is to foster tolerance, altruism and love". He met with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in 1973. He met with Pope John Paul II in 1980 and also later in 1982, 1986, 1988, 1990, and 2003. During 1990, he met in Dharamsala with a delegation of Jewish teachers for an extensive interfaith dialogue. He has since visited Israel three times and met during 2006 with the Chief Rabbi of Israel. In 2006, he met privately with Pope Benedict XVI. He has also met the late Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Robert Runcie, and other leaders of the Anglican Church in London, Gordon B. Hinckley, late President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), as well as senior Eastern Orthodox Church, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Sikh officials.
In 2010, the Dalai Lama was joined by Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, and Islamic scholar Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University when Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion hosted a "Summit on Happiness".
Christianity
Traditional Christian doctrine is Christocentric, meaning that Christ is held to be the sole full and true revelation of the will of God for humanity. In a Christocentric view, the elements of truth in other religions are understood in relation to the fullness of truth found in Christ. God is nevertheless understood to be free of human constructions. Therefore, God the Holy Spirit is understood as the power who guides non-Christians in their search for truth, which is held to be a search for the mind of Christ, even if "anonymously", in the phrase of Catholic theologian Karl Rahner. For those who support this view, anonymous Christians belong to Christ now and forever and lead a life fit for Jesus' commandment to love, even though they never explicitly understand the meaning of their life in Christian terms.
While the conciliar document Nostra aetate has fostered widespread dialogue, the declaration Dominus Iesus nevertheless reaffirms the centrality of the person of Jesus Christ in the spiritual and cultural identity of Christians, rejecting various forms of syncretism.
Pope John Paul II was a major advocate of interfaith dialogue, promoting meetings in Assisi in the 1980s. Pope Benedict XVI took a more moderate and cautious approach, stressing the need for intercultural dialogue, but reasserting Christian theological identity in the revelation of Jesus of Nazareth in a book published with Marcello Pera in 2004. In 2013, Pope Francis became the first Catholic leader to call for "sincere and rigorous" interbelief dialogue with atheists, both to counter the assertion that Christianity is necessarily an "expression of darkness of superstition that is opposed to the light of reason", and to assert that "dialogue is not a secondary accessory of the existence of the believer" but instead is a "profound and indispensable expression ... [of] faith [that] is not intransigent, but grows in coexistence that respects the other."
In traditional Christian doctrine, the value of inter-religious dialogue had been confined to acts of love and understanding toward others either as anonymous Christians or as potential converts.
In mainline Protestant traditions, however, as well as in the emerging church, these doctrinal constraints have largely been cast off. Many theologians, pastors, and lay people from these traditions do not hold to uniquely Christocentric understandings of how God was in Christ. They engage deeply in interfaith dialogue as learners, not converters, and desire to celebrate as fully as possible the many paths to God.
Much focus in Christian interfaith dialogue has been put on Christian–Jewish reconciliation. One of the oldest successful dialogues between Jews and Christians has been taking place in Mobile, Alabama. It began in the wake of the call of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) of the Roman Catholic Church for increased understanding between Christians and Jews. The organization has recently moved its center of activity to Spring Hill College, a Catholic Jesuit institution of higher learning located in Mobile. Reconciliation has been successful on many levels, but has been somewhat complicated by the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East, where a significant minority of Arabs are Christian.
Judaism
The Modern Orthodox movement allows narrow exchanges on social issues, while warning to be cautious in discussion of doctrine.
Reform Judaism, Reconstructionist Judaism and Conservative Judaism encourage interfaith dialogue.
Building positive relations between Jews and members of other religious communities has been an integral component of Reform Judaism's "DNA" since the movement was founded in Germany during the early 19th century, according to Rabbi A. James Rudin. It began with Israel Jacobson, a layman and pioneer in the development of what emerged as Reform Judaism, who established an innovative religious school in Sessen, Germany in 1801 that initially had 40 Jewish and 20 Christian students. "Jacobson's innovation of a 'mixed' student body reflected his hopes for a radiant future between Jews and Christians."
Moravian born Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who founded the Reform movement in the United States, sought close relations with Christian church leaders. To that end, he published a series of lectures in 1883 entitled "Judaism and Christianity: Their Agreements and Disagreements". Wise emphasized what he believed linked the two religions in an inextricable theological and human bond: the biblical "Sinaitic revelation" as "... the acknowledged law of God". Rabbi Leo Baeck, the leader of the German Jewish community who survived his incarceration in the Terezin concentration camp, offered these words in his 1949 presidential address to the World Union for Progressive Judaism in London: "...as in a great period of the Middle Ages, [Jews and Muslims] are ...almost compelled to face each other... not only in the sphere of policy [the State of Israel in the Middle East], but also in the sphere of religion; there is the great hope... they will ...meet each other on joint roads, in joint tasks, in joint confidences in the future. There is the great hope that Judaism can thus become the builder of a bridge, the 'pontifex' between East and West."
In the 1950s and 60s, as interfaith civic partnerships between Jews and Christians in the United States became more numerous, especially in the suburbs, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism, URJ) created a department mainly to promote positive Christian-Jewish relations and civic partnerships. Interfaith relations have since been expanded to include Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and members of other faith communities.
In 2013, Rabbi Marc Schneier and Imam Shamsi Ali coauthored a book Sons of Abraham: A Candid Conversation about the Issues That Divide and Unite Jews and Muslims.
Schneier and Ali write about the importance of civil interfaith discussions. Based on their experience, Schneier and Ali believe that other "Jews and Muslims can realize that they are actually more united than divided in their core beliefs".
Interests in interfaith relations require an awareness of the range of Jewish views on such subjects as mission and the holy land.
Islam
Islam has long encouraged dialogue to reach truth. Dialogue is particularly encouraged amongst the People of the Book (Jews, Christians and Muslims) as the Quran states, "Say, "O People of the Scripture, come to a word that is equitable between us and you – that we will not worship except Allah and not associate anything with Him and not take one another as lords instead of Allah." But if they turn away, then say, "Bear witness that we are Muslims [submitting to Him]" [3:64].
Many traditional and religious texts and customs of the faith have encouraged this, including specific verses in the Quran, such as: "O people! Behold, we have created you from a male and a female and have made you into nations and tribes so that you might come to know one another. Verily, the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one who is most deeply conscious of Him. Behold, God is all-knowing, all-aware" [Qur'an 49:13].
In recent times, Muslim theologians have advocated inter-faith dialogue on a large scale, something which is new in a political sense. The declaration A Common Word of 2007 was a public first in Christian-Islam relations, trying to work out a moral common ground on many social issues. This common ground was stated as "part of the very foundational principles of both faiths: love of the One God, and love of the neighbour". The declaration asserted that "these principles are found over and over again in the sacred texts of Islam and Christianity".
Interfaith dialogue integral to Islam
A 2003 book called Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism contains a chapter by Amir Hussain on "Muslims, Pluralism, and Interfaith Dialogue" in which he shows how interfaith dialogue has been an integral part of Islam from its beginning. Hussain writes that "Islam would not have developed if it had not been for interfaith dialogue". From his "first revelation" for the rest of his life, Muhammad was "engaged in interfaith dialogue" and "pluralism and interfaith dialogue" have always been important to Islam. For example, when some of Muhammad's followers suffered "physical persecution" in Mecca, he sent them to Abyssinia, a Christian nation, where they were "welcomed and accepted" by the Christian king. Another example is Córdoba, Andalusia in Muslim Spain, in the ninth and tenth centuries. Córdoba was "one of the most important cities in the history of the world". In it, "Christians and Jews were involved in the Royal Court and the intellectual life of the city". Thus, there is "a history of Muslims, Jews, Christians, and other religious traditions living together in a pluralistic society". Turning to the present, Hussain writes that in spite of Islam's history of "pluralism and interfaith dialogue", Muslims now face the challenge of conflicting passages in the Qur'an some of which support interfaith "bridge-building", but others can be used "justify mutual exclusion".
In October 2010, as a representative of Shia Islam, Ayatollah Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad, professor at the Shahid Beheshti University of Tehran, addressed the Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Catholic Bishops. In the address he spoke about "the rapport between Islam and Christianity" that has existed throughout the history of Islam as one of "friendship, respect and mutual understanding".
Book about Jewish–Muslim dialogue
In 2013, Rabbi Marc Schneier (Jewish) and Imam Shamsi Ali (Muslim) coauthored a book Sons of Abraham with the subtitle A Candid Conversation about the Issues That Divide and Unite Jews and Muslims. As Rabbi Marc Schneier and Imam Shamsi Ali show, "by reaching a fuller understanding of one another's faith traditions, Jews and Muslims can realize that they are actually more united than divided in their core beliefs". By their fuller understanding, they became "defenders of each other's religion, denouncing the twin threats of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and promoting interfaith cooperation". In the book, regarding the state of Jewish-Muslim dialogue, although Rabbi Schneier acknowledges a "tremendous growth", he does not think that "we are where we want to be".
Ahmadiyya
The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community was founded in 1889. Its members "exceeding tens of millions" live in 206 countries. It rejects "terrorism in any form". It broadcasts its "message of peace and tolerance" over a satellite television channel MTA International Live Streaming, on its internet website, and by its Islam International Publications. A 2010 story in the BBC News said that the Ahmadi "is regarded by orthodox Muslims as heretical", The story also reported persecution and violent attacks against the Ahmadi.
According to the Ahmadiyya understanding, interfaith dialogues are an integral part of developing inter-religious peace and the establishment of peace. The Ahmadiyya Community has been organising interfaith events locally and nationally in various parts of the world in order to develop a better atmosphere of love and understanding between faiths. Various speakers are invited to deliver a talk on how peace can be established from their own or religious perspectives.
Preconditions
In her 2008 book The Im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue, Catherine Cornille outlines her preconditions for "constructive and enriching dialogue between religions". In summary, they include "doctrinal humility, commitment to a particular religion, interconnection, empathy, and hospitality". In full, they include the following:
humility (causes a respect of a person's view of other religions)
commitment (causes a commitment to faith that simultaneously accept tolerance to other faiths)
interconnection (causes the recognition of shared common challenges such as the reconciliation of families)
empathy (causes someone to view another religion from the perspective of its believers)
hospitability (like the tent of Abraham, that was open on all four sides as a sign of hospitality to any newcomer).
Breaking down the walls that divides faiths while respecting the uniqueness of each tradition requires the courageous embrace of all these preconditions.
In 2016, President Obama made two speeches that outlined preconditions for meaningful interfaith dialogue: On February 3, 2016, he spoke at the Islamic Society of Baltimore and on February 4, 2016, at the National Prayer Breakfast. The eight principles of interfaith relations as outlined by Obama were as follows:
Relationship building requires visiting each other.
Relationship requires learning about the others' history.
Relationship requires an appreciation of the other.
Relationship requires telling the truth.
Relationships depend on living up to our core theological principles and values.
Relationships offer a clear-headed understanding of our enemies.
Relationships help us overcome fear.
Relationship requires solidarity.
United Nations support
The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations is an initiative to prevent violence and support social cohesion by promoting intercultural and interfaith dialogue. The UNAOC was proposed by the President of the Spanish Government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero at the 59th General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005. It was co-sponsored by the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
In 2008, Anwarul Karim Chowdhury said: "Interfaith dialogue is absolutely essential, relevant, and necessary. ... If 2009 is to truly be the Year of Interfaith Cooperation, the U.N. urgently needs to appoint an interfaith representative at a senior level in the Secretariat."
The Republic of the Philippines will host a Special Non-Aligned Movement Ministerial Meeting on Interfaith Dialogue and Cooperation for Peace and Development from March 16 to 18 in Manila. During the meeting, to be attended by ministers of foreign affairs of the NAM member countries, a declaration in support of interfaith dialogue initiatives will be adopted. An accompanying event will involve civil society activities.
In 2010, HM King Abdullah II addressed the 65th UN General Assembly and proposed the idea for a 'World Interfaith Harmony Week' to further broaden his goals of faith-driven world harmony by extending his call beyond the Muslim and Christian community to include people of all beliefs, those with no set religious beliefs as well. A few weeks later, HRH Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad presented the proposal to the UN General Assembly, where it was adopted unanimously as a UN Observance Event. The first week of February, every year, has been declared a UN World Interfaith Harmony Week. The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre released a document which summarises the key events leading up to the UN resolution as well as documenting some Letters of Support and Events held in honour of the week.
Research on interfaith dialogue
In the emerging field of Interreligious studies, historians, sociologists, and other scholars have conducted research on interfaith dialogue activities, methods, and outcomes. Notably, in 2013, there were several academic initiatives, including the founding of the Interfaith and Interreligious Studies Group at the American Academy of Religion, Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the United States Department of State, and a call for an interfaith studies field was published by Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith Youth Core, who subsequently helped the funding of academic programs at U.S. universities. Academic journals were started, including the Journal of Interreligious Studies and Interreligious Studies and Intercultural Theology.[citation needed]
Criticism
Religious sociologist Peter L. Berger argued that one can reject interfaith dialogue on moral grounds in certain cases. The example he gave was that of a dialogue with imams who legitimate ISIS, saying such discussions ought to be avoided so as not to legitimate a morally repugnant theology.
The theological foundations of interreligious dialogue have also been critiqued on the grounds that any interpretation of another faith tradition will be predicated on a particular cultural, historical and anthropological perspective
Criticism by specific religious groups
Many Traditionalist Catholics, including Sedevacantists or the Society of St. Pius X, are critical of interfaith dialogue as a harmful novelty. They argue that the Second Vatican Council altered the previous notion of the Catholic Church's supremacy over other religious groups or bodies, as well as demoted traditionalist practices associated with Roman Catholicism. In addition, these Catholics contend that, for the sake of collegial peace, tolerance and mutual understanding, interreligious dialogue devalues the divinity of Jesus Christ and the revelation of the Triune God by placing Christianity on the same footing as other religions that worship other deities. Some Evangelical Christians also are critical of dialogues with Catholics.
In the case of Hinduism, it has been argued that interfaith "dialogue ... has [in fact] become the harbinger of violence. This is not because 'outsiders' have studied Hinduism or because the Hindu participants are religious 'fundamentalists' but because of the logical requirements of such a dialogue". With a detailed analysis of "two examples from Hinduism studies", S.N. Balagangadhara and Sarah Claerhout argue that, "in certain dialogical situations, the requirements of reason conflict with the requirements of morality".
The Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir rejects the concept of interfaith dialogue, stating that it is a western tool to enforce non-Islamic policies in the Islamic world.
In Modern Orthodox Judaism, the 1964 essay "Confrontation" by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik has widely been seen as "a ban on theological dialogue", though it may be seen as a statement that there were not sufficient conditions for equal and respectful dialogue.
Criticism of dialogue events
Some critics of interfaith dialogue may not object to dialogue itself, but instead are critical of specific events claiming to carry on the dialogue. For example, the French Algerian prelate Pierre Claverie was at times critical of formal inter-religious conferences between Christians and Muslims which he felt remained too basic and surface-level. He shunned those meetings since he believed them to be generators of slogans and for the glossing over of theological differences. However, he had such an excellent knowledge of Islam that the people of Oran called him "the Bishop of the Muslims" which was a title that must have pleased him since he had dreamed of establishing true dialogue among all believers irrespective of faith or creed. Claverie also believed that the Islamic faith was authentic in practice focusing on people rather than on theories. He said that: "dialogue is a work to which we must return without pause: it alone lets us disarm the fanaticism; both our own and that of the other". He also said that "Islam knows how to be tolerant". In 1974 he joined a branch of Cimade which was a French NGO dedicated to aiding the oppressed and minorities.
See also
Buddhism and Christianity
Buddhism and Hinduism
Buddhism and Jainism
Centre for Dialogue
Chrislam (Yoruba)
Daughters of Abraham
Esalen Institute
Fethullah Gülen
Galibi Order
Galip Hassan Kuscuoglu
Gamaliel's principle
Gülen movement
International Center for Religion & Diplomacy
Interreligious studies
Interspirituality
List of founders of religious traditions
Living Interfaith Church
Multifaith space
Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue
Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim–Christian Understanding
Relations between Catholicism and Judaism
Roland de Corneille
Saltley Gate Peace Group
Scriptural Reasoning
Seventh-day Adventist interfaith relations
Subud
Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding
The Elijah Interfaith Institute
World Religion Day
References
Further reading
Abdelmassieh, Francis (2020). Egyptian-Islamic Views on the Comparison of Religions: Positions of Al-Azhar University Scholars on Muslim-Christian Relations. Münster: LIT.
Hick, John, ed. (1974). Truth and Dialogue: the Relationship between World Religions, in series, Studies in Philosophy and Religion. London: Sheldon Press. 164 p. N.B.: Also published in the U.S.A. under slightly divergent title, Truth and Dialogue in World Religions. .
Smart, Ninian (1969). The Religious Experience of Mankind. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Wrogemann, Henning (2019). A Theology of Interreligious Relations. Downer's Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press.
External links
Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Initiative
Institute of Interfaith Dialogue
Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue
Nonprofit Research Collection on Interfaith Organizing Published on IssueLab
The Interfaith Observer
Interfaith.org
Dialogica (Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations) | 0.780725 | 0.992387 | 0.774781 |
Conscience | A conscience is a cognitive process that elicits emotion and rational associations based on an individual's moral philosophy or value system. Conscience stands in contrast to elicited emotion or thought due to associations based on immediate sensory perceptions and reflexive responses, as in sympathetic central nervous system responses. In common terms, conscience is often described as leading to feelings of remorse when a person commits an act that conflicts with their moral values. The extent to which conscience informs moral judgment before an action and whether such moral judgments are or should be based on reason has occasioned debate through much of modern history between theories of basics in ethic of human life in juxtaposition to the theories of romanticism and other reactionary movements after the end of the Middle Ages.
Religious views of conscience usually see it as linked to a morality inherent in all humans, to a beneficent universe and/or to divinity. The diverse ritualistic, mythical, doctrinal, legal, institutional and material features of religion may not necessarily cohere with experiential, emotive, spiritual or contemplative considerations about the origin and operation of conscience. Common secular or scientific views regard the capacity for conscience as probably genetically determined, with its subject probably learned or imprinted as part of a culture.
Commonly used metaphors for conscience include the "voice within", the "inner light", or even Socrates' reliance on what the Greeks called his "daimōnic sign", an averting (ἀποτρεπτικός apotreptikos) inner voice heard only when he was about to make a mistake. Conscience, as is detailed in sections below, is a concept in national and international law, is increasingly conceived of as applying to the world as a whole, has motivated numerous notable acts for the public good and been the subject of many prominent examples of literature, music and film.
Views
Although humanity has no generally accepted definition of conscience or universal agreement about its role in ethical decision-making, three approaches have addressed it:
Religious views
Secular views
Philosophical views
Religious
In the literary traditions of the Upanishads, Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, conscience is the label given to attributes composing knowledge about good and evil, that a soul acquires from the completion of acts and consequent accretion of karma over many lifetimes. According to Adi Shankara in his Vivekachudamani morally right action (characterised as humbly and compassionately performing the primary duty of good to others without expectation of material or spiritual reward), helps "purify the heart" and provide mental tranquility but it alone does not give us "direct perception of the Reality". This knowledge requires discrimination between the eternal and non-eternal and eventually a realization in contemplation that the true self merges in a universe of pure consciousness.
In the Zoroastrian faith, after death a soul must face judgment at the Bridge of the Separator; there, evil people are tormented by prior denial of their own higher nature, or conscience, and "to all time will they be guests for the House of the Lie." The Chinese concept of Ren, indicates that conscience, along with social etiquette and correct relationships, assist humans to follow The Way (Tao) a mode of life reflecting the implicit human capacity for goodness and harmony.
Conscience also features prominently in Buddhism. In the Pali scriptures, for example, Buddha links the positive aspect of conscience to a pure heart and a calm, well-directed mind. It is regarded as a spiritual power, and one of the "Guardians of the World". The Buddha also associated conscience with compassion for those who must endure cravings and suffering in the world until right conduct culminates in right mindfulness and right contemplation. Santideva (685–763 CE) wrote in the Bodhicaryavatara (which he composed and delivered in the great northern Indian Buddhist university of Nalanda) of the spiritual importance of perfecting virtues such as generosity, forbearance and training the awareness to be like a "block of wood" when attracted by vices such as pride or lust; so one can continue advancing towards right understanding in meditative absorption. Conscience thus manifests in Buddhism as unselfish love for all living beings which gradually intensifies and awakens to a purer awareness where the mind withdraws from sensory interests and becomes aware of itself as a single whole.
The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations that conscience was the human capacity to live by rational principles that were congruent with the true, tranquil and harmonious nature of our mind and thereby that of the Universe: "To move from one unselfish action to another with God in mind. Only there, delight and stillness ... the only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts."
The Islamic concept of Taqwa is closely related to conscience. In the Qur’ān verses 2:197 & 22:37 Taqwa refers to "right conduct" or "piety", "guarding of oneself" or "guarding against evil". Qur’ān verse 47:17 says that God is the ultimate source of the believer's taqwā which is not simply the product of individual will but requires inspiration from God. In Qur’ān verses 91:7–8, God the Almighty talks about how He has perfected the soul, the conscience and has taught it the wrong (fujūr) and right (taqwā). Hence, the awareness of vice and virtue is inherent in the soul, allowing it to be tested fairly in the life of this world and tried, held accountable on the day of judgment for responsibilities to God and all humans.
Qur’ān verse 49:13 states: "O humankind! We have created you out of male and female and constituted you into different groups and societies, so that you may come to know each other-the noblest of you, in the sight of God, are the ones possessing taqwā." In Islam, according to eminent theologians such as Al-Ghazali, although events are ordained (and written by God in al-Lawh al-Mahfūz, the Preserved Tablet), humans possess free will to choose between wrong and right, and are thus responsible for their actions; the conscience being a dynamic personal connection to God enhanced by knowledge and practise of the Five Pillars of Islam, deeds of piety, repentance, self-discipline and prayer; and disintegrated and metaphorically covered in blackness through sinful acts. Marshall Hodgson wrote the three-volume work: The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization.
In the Protestant Christian tradition, Martin Luther insisted in the Diet of Worms that his conscience was captive to the Word of God, and it was neither safe nor right to go against conscience. To Luther, conscience falls within the ethical, rather than the religious, sphere. John Calvin saw conscience as a battleground: "the enemies who rise up in our conscience against his Kingdom and hinder his decrees prove that God's throne is not firmly established therein". Many Christians regard following one's conscience as important as, or even more important than, obeying human authority. According to the bible, written in Romans 2:15, conscience is the one bearing witness, accusing or excusing one another, so we would know when we break the law written in our hearts; the guilt we feel when we do something wrong tells us that we need to repent." This can sometimes (as with the conflict between William Tyndale and Thomas More over the translation of the Bible into English) lead to moral quandaries: "Do I unreservedly obey my Church/priest/military/political leader or do I follow my own inner feeling of right and wrong as instructed by prayer and a personal reading of scripture?" Some contemporary Christian churches and religious groups hold the moral teachings of the Ten Commandments or of Jesus as the highest authority in any situation, regardless of the extent to which it involves responsibilities in law. In the Gospel of John (7:53–8:11) (King James Version) Jesus challenges those accusing a woman of adultery stating: "'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.' And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one" [However the word 'conscience' is not in the original New Testament Greek, and is not in the vast majority of Bible versions.] (see Jesus and the woman taken in adultery). In the Gospel of Luke (10: 25–37) Jesus tells the story of how a despised and heretical Samaritan (see Parable of the Good Samaritan) who (out of compassion/pity - the word 'conscience' is not used) helps an injured stranger beside a road, qualifies better for eternal life by loving his neighbor, than a priest who passes by on the other side.
This dilemma of obedience in conscience to divine or state law, was demonstrated dramatically in Antigone's defiance of King Creon's order against burying her brother an alleged traitor, appealing to the "unwritten law" and to a "longer allegiance to the dead than to the living".
Catholic theology sees conscience as the last practical "judgment of reason which at the appropriate moment enjoins [a person] to do good and to avoid evil". The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) describes: "Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, tells him inwardly at the right movement: do this, shun that. For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. His dignity lies in observing this law, and by it he will be judged. His conscience is man’s most secret core, and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths." Thus, conscience is not like the will, nor a habit like prudence, but "the interior space in which we can listen to and hear the truth, the good, the voice of God. It is the inner place of our relationship with Him, who speaks to our heart and helps us to discern, to understand the path we ought to take, and once the decision is made, to move forward, to remain faithful" In terms of logic, conscience can be viewed as the practical conclusion of a moral syllogism whose major premise is an objective norm and whose minor premise is a particular case or situation to which the norm is applied. Thus, Catholics are taught to carefully educate themselves as to revealed norms and norms derived therefrom, so as to form a correct conscience. Catholics are also to examine their conscience daily and with special care before confession. Catholic teaching holds that, "Man has the right to act according to his conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience. Nor must he be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters". This right of conscience does not allow one to arbitrarily disagree with Church teaching and claim that one is acting in accordance with conscience. A sincere conscience presumes one is diligently seeking moral truth from authentic sources, that is, seeking to conform oneself to that moral truth by listening to the authority established by Christ to teach it. Nevertheless, despite one's best effort, "[i]t can happen that moral conscience remains in ignorance and makes erroneous judgments about acts to be performed or already committed ... This ignorance can often be imputed to personal responsibility ... In such cases, the person is culpable for the wrong he commits." The Catholic Church has warned that "rejection of the Church's authority and her teaching ... can be at the source of errors in judgment in moral conduct". An example of someone following his conscience to the point of accepting the consequence of being condemned to death is Sir Thomas More (1478-1535). A theologian who wrote on the distinction between the 'sense of duty' and the 'moral sense', as two aspects of conscience, and who saw the former as some feeling that can only be explained by a divine Lawgiver, was John Henry Cardinal Newman. A well known saying of him is that he would first toast on his conscience and only then on the pope, since his conscience brought him to acknowledge the authority of the pope.
Judaism arguably does not require uncompromising obedience to religious authority; the case has been made that throughout Jewish history, rabbis have circumvented laws they found unconscionable, such as capital punishment. Similarly, although an occupation with national destiny has been central to the Jewish faith (see Zionism) many scholars (including Moses Mendelssohn) stated that conscience as a personal revelation of scriptural truth was an important adjunct to the Talmudic tradition. The concept of inner light in the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers is associated with conscience. Freemasonry describes itself as providing an adjunct to religion and key symbols found in a Freemason Lodge are the square and compasses explained as providing lessons that Masons should "square their actions by the square of conscience", learn to "circumscribe their desires and keep their passions within due bounds toward all mankind." The historian Manning Clark viewed conscience as one of the comforters that religion placed between man and death but also a crucial part of the quest for grace encouraged by the Book of Job and the Book of Ecclesiastes, leading us to be paradoxically closest to the truth when we suspect that what matters most in life ("being there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for") can never happen. Leo Tolstoy, after a decade studying the issue (1877–1887), held that the only power capable of resisting the evil associated with materialism and the drive for social power of religious institutions, was the capacity of humans to reach an individual spiritual truth through reason and conscience. Many prominent religious works about conscience also have a significant philosophical component: examples are the works of Al-Ghazali, Avicenna, Aquinas, Joseph Butler and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (all discussed in the philosophical views section).
Secular
The secular approach to conscience includes psychological, physiological, sociological, humanitarian, and authoritarian views. Lawrence Kohlberg considered critical conscience to be an important psychological stage in the proper moral development of humans, associated with the capacity to rationally weigh principles of responsibility, being best encouraged in the very young by linkage with humorous personifications (such as Jiminy Cricket) and later in adolescents by debates about individually pertinent moral dilemmas. Erik Erikson placed the development of conscience in the 'pre-schooler' phase of his eight stages of normal human personality development. The psychologist Martha Stout terms conscience "an intervening sense of obligation based in our emotional attachments." Thus a good conscience is associated with feelings of integrity, psychological wholeness and peacefulness and is often described using adjectives such as "quiet", "clear" and "easy".
Sigmund Freud regarded conscience as originating psychologically from the growth of civilisation, which periodically frustrated the external expression of aggression: this destructive impulse being forced to seek an alternative, healthy outlet, directed its energy as a superego against the person's own "ego" or selfishness (often taking its cue in this regard from parents during childhood). According to Freud, the consequence of not obeying our conscience is guilt, which can be a factor in the development of neurosis; Freud claimed that both the cultural and individual super-ego set up strict ideal demands with regard to the moral aspects of certain decisions, disobedience to which provokes a 'fear of conscience'.
Antonio Damasio considers conscience an aspect of extended consciousness beyond survival-related dispositions and incorporating the search for truth and desire to build norms and ideals for behavior.
Conscience as a society-forming instinct
Michel Glautier argues that conscience is one of the instincts and drives which enable people to form societies: groups of humans without these drives or in whom they are insufficient cannot form societies and do not reproduce their kind as successfully as those that do.
Charles Darwin considered that conscience evolved in humans to resolve conflicts between competing natural impulses-some about self-preservation but others about safety of a family or community; the claim of conscience to moral authority emerged from the "greater duration of impression of social instincts" in the struggle for survival. In such a view, behavior destructive to a person's society (either to its structures or to the persons it comprises) is bad or "evil". Thus, conscience can be viewed as an outcome of those biological drives that prompt humans to avoid provoking fear or contempt in others; being experienced as guilt and shame in differing ways from society to society and person to person. A requirement of conscience in this view is the capacity to see ourselves from the point of view of another person. Persons unable to do this (psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists) therefore often act in ways which are "evil".
Fundamental in this view of conscience is that humans consider some "other" as being in a social relationship. Thus, nationalism is invoked in conscience to quell tribal conflict and the notion of a Brotherhood of Man is invoked to quell national conflicts. Yet such crowd drives may not only overwhelm but redefine individual conscience. Friedrich Nietzsche stated: "communal solidarity is annihilated by the highest and strongest drives that, when they break out passionately, whip the individual far past the average low level of the 'herd-conscience.'" Jeremy Bentham noted that: "fanaticism never sleeps ... it is never stopped by conscience; for it has pressed conscience into its service." Hannah Arendt in her study of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, notes that the accused, as with almost all his fellow Germans, had lost track of his conscience to the point where they hardly remembered it; this wasn't caused by familiarity with atrocities or by psychologically redirecting any resultant natural pity to themselves for having to bear such an unpleasant duty, so much as by the fact that anyone whose conscience did develop doubts could see no one who shared them: "Eichmann did not need to close his ears to the voice of conscience ... not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a "respectable voice", with the voice of the respectable society around him".
Sir Arthur Keith in 1948 developed the Amity-enmity complex. We evolved as tribal groups surrounded by enemies; thus conscience evolved a dual role; the duty to save and protect members of the in-group, and the duty to show hatred and aggression towards any out-group.
An interesting area of research in this context concerns the similarities between our relationships and those of animals, whether animals in human society (pets, working animals, even animals grown for food) or in the wild. One idea is that as people or animals perceive a social relationship as important to preserve, their conscience begins to respect that former "other", and urge actions that protect it. Similarly, in complex territorial and cooperative breeding bird communities (such as the Australian magpie) that have a high degree of etiquettes, rules, hierarchies, play, songs and negotiations, rule-breaking seems tolerated on occasions not obviously related to survival of the individual or group; behaviour often appearing to exhibit a touching gentleness and tenderness.
Evolutionary biology
Contemporary scientists in evolutionary biology seek to explain conscience as a function of the brain that evolved to facilitate altruism within societies. In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins states that he agrees with Robert Hinde's Why Good is Good, Michael Shermer's The Science of Good and Evil, Robert Buckman's Can We Be Good Without God? and Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, that our sense of right and wrong can be derived from our Darwinian past. He subsequently reinforced this idea through the lens of the gene-centered view of evolution, since the unit of natural selection is neither an individual organism nor a group, but rather the "selfish" gene, and these genes could ensure their own "selfish" survival by, inter alia, pushing individuals to act altruistically towards its kin.
Neuroscience and artificial conscience
Numerous case studies of brain damage have shown that damage to areas of the brain (such as the anterior prefrontal cortex) results in the reduction or elimination of inhibitions, with a corresponding radical change in behaviour. When the damage occurs to adults, they may still be able to perform moral reasoning; but when it occurs to children, they may never develop that ability.
Attempts have been made by neuroscientists to locate the free will necessary for what is termed the 'veto' of conscience over unconscious mental processes (see Neuroscience of free will and Benjamin Libet) in a scientifically measurable awareness of an intention to carry out an act occurring 350–400 microseconds after the electrical discharge known as the 'readiness potential.'
Jacques Pitrat claims that some kind of artificial conscience is beneficial in artificial intelligence systems to improve their long-term performance and direct their introspective processing.
Philosophical
The word "conscience" derives etymologically from the Latin conscientia, meaning "privity of knowledge"
or "with-knowledge". The English word implies internal awareness of a moral standard in the mind concerning the quality of one's motives, as well as a consciousness of our own actions. Thus conscience considered philosophically may be first, and perhaps most commonly, a largely unexamined "gut feeling" or "vague sense of guilt" about what ought to be or should have been done. Conscience in this sense is not necessarily the product of a process of rational consideration of the moral features of a situation (or the applicable normative principles, rules or laws) and can arise from parental, peer group, religious, state or corporate indoctrination, which may or may not be presently consciously acceptable to the person ("traditional conscience"). Conscience may be defined as the practical reason employed when applying moral convictions to a situation ("critical conscience"). In purportedly morally mature mystical people who have developed this capacity through daily contemplation or meditation combined with selfless service to others, critical conscience can be aided by a "spark" of intuitive insight or revelation (called marifa in Islamic Sufi philosophy and synderesis in medieval Christian scholastic moral philosophy). Conscience is accompanied in each case by an internal awareness of 'inner light' and approbation or 'inner darkness' and condemnation as well as a resulting conviction of right or duty either followed or declined.
Medieval
The medieval Islamic scholar and mystic Al-Ghazali divided the concept of Nafs (soul or self (spirituality)) into three categories based on the Qur’an:
Nafs Ammarah (12:53) which "exhorts one to freely indulge in gratifying passions and instigates to do evil"
Nafs Lawammah (75:2) which is "the conscience that directs man towards right or wrong"
Nafs Mutmainnah (89:27) which is "a self that reaches the ultimate peace"
The medieval Persian philosopher and physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi believed in a close relationship between conscience or spiritual integrity and physical health; rather than being self-indulgent, man should pursue knowledge, use his intellect and apply justice in his life. The medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna, whilst imprisoned in the castle of Fardajan near Hamadhan, wrote his famous isolated-but-awake "Floating Man" sensory deprivation thought experiment to explore the ideas of human self-awareness and the substantiality of the soul; his hypothesis being that it is through intelligence, particularly the active intellect, that God communicates truth to the human mind or conscience. According to the Islamic Sufis conscience allows Allah to guide people to the marifa, the peace or "light upon light" experienced where a Muslim's prayers lead to a melting away of the self in the inner knowledge of God; this foreshadowing the eternal Paradise depicted in the Qur’ān.
Some medieval Christian scholastics such as Bonaventure made a distinction between conscience as a rational faculty of the mind (practical reason) and inner awareness, an intuitive "spark" to do good, called synderesis arising from a remnant appreciation of absolute good and when consciously denied (for example to perform an evil act), becoming a source of inner torment. Early modern theologians such as William Perkins and William Ames developed a syllogistic understanding of the conscience, where God's law made the first term, the act to be judged the second and the action of the conscience (as a rational faculty) produced the judgement. By debating test cases applying such understanding conscience was trained and refined (i.e. casuistry).
In the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas regarded conscience as the application of moral knowledge to a particular case (S.T. I, q. 79, a. 13). Thus, conscience was considered an act or judgment of practical reason that began with synderesis, the structured development of our innate remnant awareness of absolute good (which he categorised as involving the five primary precepts proposed in his theory of Natural Law) into an acquired habit of applying moral principles. According to Singer, Aquinas held that conscience, or conscientia was an imperfect process of judgment applied to activity because knowledge of the natural law (and all acts of natural virtue implicit therein) was obscured in most people by education and custom that promoted selfishness rather than fellow-feeling (Summa Theologiae, I–II, I). Aquinas also discussed conscience in relation to the virtue of prudence to explain why some people appear to be less "morally enlightened" than others, their weak will being incapable of adequately balancing their own needs with those of others.
Aquinas reasoned that acting contrary to conscience is an evil action but an errant conscience is only blameworthy if it is the result of culpable or vincible ignorance of factors that one has a duty to have knowledge of. Aquinas also argued that conscience should be educated to act towards real goods (from God) which encouraged human flourishing, rather than the apparent goods of sensory pleasures. In his Commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics Aquinas claimed it was weak will that allowed a non-virtuous man to choose a principle allowing pleasure ahead of one requiring moral constraint.
Thomas A Kempis in the medieval contemplative classic The Imitation of Christ (ca 1418) stated that the glory of a good man is the witness of a good conscience. "Preserve a quiet conscience and you will always have joy. A quiet conscience can endure much, and remains joyful in all trouble, but an evil conscience is always fearful and uneasy." The anonymous medieval author of the Christian mystical work The Cloud of Unknowing similarly expressed the view that in profound and prolonged contemplation a soul dries up the "root and ground" of the sin that is always there, even after one's confession and however busy one is in holy things: "therefore, whoever would work at becoming a contemplative must first cleanse his [or her] conscience." The medieval Flemish mystic John of Ruysbroeck likewise held that true conscience has four aspects that are necessary to render a man just in the active and contemplative life: "a free spirit, attracting itself through love"; "an intellect enlightened by grace", "a delight yielding propension or inclination" and "an outflowing losing of oneself in the abyss of ... that eternal object which is the highest and chief blessedness ... those lofty amongst men, are absorbed in it, and immersed in a certain boundless thing."
Modern
Benedict de Spinoza in his Ethics, published after his death in 1677, argued that most people, even those that consider themselves to exercise free will, make moral decisions on the basis of imperfect sensory information, inadequate understanding of their mind and will, as well as emotions which are both outcomes of their contingent physical existence and forms of thought defective from being chiefly impelled by self-preservation. The solution, according to Spinoza, was to gradually increase the capacity of our reason to change the forms of thought produced by emotions and to fall in love with viewing problems requiring moral decision from the perspective of eternity. Thus, living a life of peaceful conscience means to Spinoza that reason is used to generate adequate ideas where the mind increasingly sees the world and its conflicts, our desires and passions sub specie aeternitatis, that is without reference to time. Hegel's obscure and mystical Philosophy of Mind held that the absolute right of freedom of conscience facilitates human understanding of an all-embracing unity, an absolute which was rational, real and true. Nevertheless, Hegel thought that a functioning State would always be tempted not to recognize conscience in its form of subjective knowledge, just as similar non-objective opinions are generally rejected in science. A similar idealist notion was expressed in the writings of Joseph Butler who argued that conscience is God-given, should always be obeyed, is intuitive, and should be considered the "constitutional monarch" and the "universal moral faculty": "conscience does not only offer itself to show us the way we should walk in, but it likewise carries its own authority with it." Butler advanced ethical speculation by referring to a duality of regulative principles in human nature: first, "self-love" (seeking individual happiness) and second, "benevolence" (compassion and seeking good for another) in conscience (also linked to the agape of situational ethics). Conscience tended to be more authoritative in questions of moral judgment, thought Butler, because it was more likely to be clear and certain (whereas calculations of self-interest tended to probable and changing conclusions). John Selden in his Table Talk expressed the view that an awake but excessively scrupulous or ill-trained conscience could hinder resolve and practical action; it being "like a horse that is not well wayed, he starts at every bird that flies out of the hedge".
As the sacred texts of ancient Hindu and Buddhist philosophy became available in German translations in the 18th and 19th centuries, they influenced philosophers such as Schopenhauer to hold that in a healthy mind only deeds oppress our conscience, not wishes and thoughts; "for it is only our deeds that hold us up to the mirror of our will"; the good conscience, thought Schopenhauer, we experience after every disinterested deed arises from direct recognition of our own inner being in the phenomenon of another, it affords us the verification "that our true self exists not only in our own person, this particular manifestation, but in everything that lives. By this the heart feels itself enlarged, as by egotism it is contracted."
Immanuel Kant, a central figure of the Age of Enlightenment, likewise claimed that two things filled his mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily they were reflected on: "the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me ... the latter begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity but which I recognise myself as existing in a universal and necessary (and not only, as in the first case, contingent) connection." The 'universal connection' referred to here is Kant's categorical imperative: "act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." Kant considered critical conscience to be an internal court in which our thoughts accuse or excuse one another; he acknowledged that morally mature people do often describe contentment or peace in the soul after following conscience to perform a duty, but argued that for such acts to produce virtue their primary motivation should simply be duty, not expectation of any such bliss. Rousseau expressed a similar view that conscience somehow connected man to a greater metaphysical unity. John Plamenatz in his critical examination of Rousseau's work considered that conscience was there defined as the feeling that urges us, in spite of contrary passions, towards two harmonies: the one within our minds and between our passions, and the other within society and between its members; "the weakest can appeal to it in the strongest, and the appeal, though often unsuccessful, is always disturbing. However, corrupted by power or wealth we may be, either as possessors of them or as victims, there is something in us serving to remind us that this corruption is against nature."
Other philosophers expressed a more sceptical and pragmatic view of the operation of "conscience" in society.
John Locke in his Essays on the Law of Nature argued that the widespread fact of human conscience allowed a philosopher to infer the necessary existence of objective moral laws that occasionally might contradict those of the state. Locke highlighted the metaethics problem of whether accepting a statement like "follow your conscience" supports subjectivist or objectivist conceptions of conscience as a guide in concrete morality, or as a spontaneous revelation of eternal and immutable principles to the individual: "if conscience be a proof of innate principles, contraries may be innate principles; since some men with the same bent of conscience prosecute what others avoid." Thomas Hobbes likewise pragmatically noted that opinions formed on the basis of conscience with full and honest conviction, nevertheless should always be accepted with humility as potentially erroneous and not necessarily indicating absolute knowledge or truth. William Godwin expressed the view that conscience was a memorable consequence of the "perception by men of every creed when the descend into the scene of busy life" that they possess free will. Adam Smith considered that it was only by developing a critical conscience that we can ever see what relates to ourselves in its proper shape and dimensions; or that we can ever make any proper comparison between our own interests and those of other people. John Stuart Mill believed that idealism about the role of conscience in government should be tempered with a practical realisation that few men in society are capable of directing their minds or purposes towards distant or unobvious interests, of disinterested regard for others, and especially for what comes after them, for the idea of posterity, of their country, or of humanity, whether grounded on sympathy or on a conscientious feeling. Mill held that certain amount of conscience, and of disinterested public spirit, may fairly be calculated on in the citizens of any community ripe for representative government, but that "it would be ridiculous to expect such a degree of it, combined with such intellectual discernment, as would be proof against any plausible fallacy tending to make that which was for their class interest appear the dictate of justice and of the general good."
Josiah Royce (1855–1916) built on the transcendental idealism view of conscience, viewing it as the ideal of life which constitutes our moral personality, our plan of being ourself, of making common sense ethical decisions. But, he thought, this was only true insofar as our conscience also required loyalty to "a mysterious higher or deeper self".
In the modern Christian tradition this approach achieved expression with Dietrich Bonhoeffer who stated during his imprisonment by the Nazis in World War II that conscience for him was more than practical reason, indeed it came from a "depth which lies beyond a man's own will and his own reason and it makes itself heard as the call of human existence to unity with itself." For Bonhoeffer a guilty conscience arose as an indictment of the loss of this unity and as a warning against the loss of one's self; primarily, he thought, it is directed not towards a particular kind of doing but towards a particular mode of being. It protests against a doing which imperils the unity of this being with itself. Conscience for Bonhoeffer did not, like shame, embrace or pass judgment on the morality of the whole of its owner's life; it reacted only to certain definite actions: "it recalls what is long past and represents this disunion as something which is already accomplished and irreparable". The man with a conscience, he believed, fights a lonely battle against the "overwhelming forces of inescapable situations" which demand moral decisions despite the likelihood of adverse consequences. Simon Soloveychik has similarly claimed that the truth distributed in the world, as the statement about human dignity, as the affirmation of the line between good and evil, lives in people as conscience.
As Hannah Arendt pointed out, however, (following the utilitarian John Stuart Mill on this point): a bad conscience does not necessarily signify a bad character; in fact only those who affirm a commitment to applying moral standards will be troubled with remorse, guilt or shame by a bad conscience and their need to regain integrity and wholeness of the self. Representing our soul or true self by analogy as our house, Arendt wrote that "conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home." Arendt believed that people who are unfamiliar with the process of silent critical reflection about what they say and do will not mind contradicting themselves by an immoral act or crime, since they can "count on its being forgotten the next moment;" bad people are not full of regrets. Arendt also wrote eloquently on the problem of languages distinguishing the word consciousness from conscience. One reason, she held, was that conscience, as we understand it in moral or legal matters, is supposedly always present within us, just like consciousness: "and this conscience is also supposed to tell us what to do and what to repent; before it became the lumen naturale or Kant's practical reason, it was the voice of God."
Albert Einstein, as a self-professed adherent of humanism and rationalism, likewise viewed an enlightened religious person as one whose conscience reflects that he "has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings and aspirations to which he clings because of their super-personal value."
Einstein often referred to the "inner voice" as a source of both moral and physical knowledge: "Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not the real thing. The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings one closer to the secrets of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice."
Simone Weil who fought for the French resistance (the Maquis) argued in her final book The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind that for society to become more just and protective of liberty, obligations should take precedence over rights in moral and political philosophy and a spiritual awakening should occur in the conscience of most citizens, so that social obligations are viewed as fundamentally having a transcendent origin and a beneficent impact on human character when fulfilled. Simone Weil also in that work provided a psychological explanation for the mental peace associated with a good conscience: "the liberty of men of goodwill, though limited in the sphere of action, is complete in that of conscience. For, having incorporated the rules into their own being, the prohibited possibilities no longer present themselves to the mind, and have not to be rejected."
Alternatives to such metaphysical and idealist opinions about conscience arose from realist and materialist perspectives such as those of Charles Darwin. Darwin suggested that "any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or as nearly as well developed, as in man." Émile Durkheim held that the soul and conscience were particular forms of an impersonal principle diffused in the relevant group and communicated by totemic ceremonies. AJ Ayer was a more recent realist who held that the existence of conscience was an empirical question to be answered by sociological research into the moral habits of a given person or group of people, and what causes them to have precisely those habits and feelings. Such an inquiry, he believed, fell wholly within the scope of the existing social sciences. George Edward Moore bridged the idealistic and sociological views of 'critical' and 'traditional' conscience in stating that the idea of abstract 'rightness' and the various degrees of the specific emotion excited by it are what constitute, for many persons, the specifically 'moral sentiment' or conscience. For others, however, an action seems to be properly termed 'internally right', merely because they have previously regarded it as right, the idea of 'rightness' being present in some way to his or her mind, but not necessarily among his or her deliberately constructed motives.
The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in A Very Easy Death (Une mort très douce, 1964) reflects within her own conscience about her mother's attempts to develop such a moral sympathy and understanding of others.
Michael Walzer claimed that the growth of religious toleration in Western nations arose amongst other things, from the general recognition that private conscience signified some inner divine presence regardless of the religious faith professed and from the general respectability, piety, self-limitation, and sectarian discipline which marked most of the men who claimed the rights of conscience. Walzer also argued that attempts by courts to define conscience as a merely personal moral code or as sincere belief, risked encouraging an anarchy of moral egotisms, unless such a code and motive was necessarily tempered with shared moral knowledge: derived either from the connection of the individual to a universal spiritual order, or from the common principles and mutual engagements of unselfish people. Ronald Dworkin maintains that constitutional protection of freedom of conscience is central to democracy but creates personal duties to live up to it: "Freedom of conscience presupposes a personal responsibility of reflection, and it loses much of its meaning when that responsibility is ignored. A good life need not be an especially reflective one; most of the best lives are just lived rather than studied. But there are moments that cry out for self-assertion, when a passive bowing to fate or a mechanical decision out of deference or convenience is treachery, because it forfeits dignity for ease." Edward Conze stated it is important for individual and collective moral growth that we recognise the illusion of our conscience being wholly located in our body; indeed both our conscience and wisdom expand when we act in an unselfish way and conversely "repressed compassion results in an unconscious sense of guilt."
The philosopher Peter Singer considers that usually when we describe an action as conscientious in the critical sense we do so in order to deny either that the relevant agent was motivated by selfish desires, like greed or ambition, or that he acted on whim or impulse.
Moral anti-realists debate whether the moral facts necessary to activate conscience supervene on natural facts with a posteriori necessity; or arise a priori because moral facts have a primary intension and naturally identical worlds may be presumed morally identical. It has also been argued that there is a measure of moral luck in how circumstances create the obstacles which conscience must overcome to apply moral principles or human rights and that with the benefit of enforceable property rights and the rule of law, access to universal health care plus the absence of high adult and infant mortality from conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and famine, people in relatively prosperous developed countries have been spared pangs of conscience associated with the physical necessity to steal scraps of food, bribe tax inspectors or police officers, and commit murder in guerrilla wars against corrupt government forces or rebel armies. Roger Scruton has claimed that true understanding of conscience and its relationship with morality has been hampered by an "impetuous" belief that philosophical questions are solved through the analysis of language in an area where clarity threatens vested interests. Susan Sontag similarly argued that it was a symptom of psychological immaturity not to recognise that many morally immature people willingly experience a form of delight, in some an erotic breaking of taboo, when witnessing violence, suffering and pain being inflicted on others. Jonathan Glover wrote that most of us "do not spend our lives on endless landscape gardening of our self" and our conscience is likely shaped not so much by heroic struggles, as by choice of partner, friends and job, as well as where we choose to live. Garrett Hardin, in a famous article called "The Tragedy of the Commons", argues that any instance in which society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself or herself for the general good—by means of his or her conscience—merely sets up a system which, by selectively diverting societal power and physical resources to those lacking in conscience, while fostering guilt (including anxiety about his or her individual contribution to over-population) in people acting upon it, actually works toward the elimination of conscience from the race.
John Ralston Saul expressed the view in The Unconscious Civilization that in contemporary developed nations many people have acquiesced in turning over their sense of right and wrong, their critical conscience, to technical experts; willingly restricting their moral freedom of choice to limited consumer actions ruled by the ideology of the free market, while citizen participation in public affairs is limited to the isolated act of voting and private-interest lobbying turns even elected representatives against the public interest.
Some argue on religious or philosophical grounds that it is blameworthy to act against conscience, even if the judgement of conscience is likely to be erroneous (say because it is inadequately informed about the facts, or prevailing moral (humanist or religious), professional ethical, legal and human rights norms). Failure to acknowledge and accept that conscientious judgements can be seriously mistaken, may only promote situations where one's conscience is manipulated by others to provide unwarranted justifications for non-virtuous and selfish acts; indeed, insofar as it is appealed to as glorifying ideological content, and an associated extreme level of devotion, without adequate constraint of external, altruistic, normative justification, conscience may be considered morally blind and dangerous both to the individual concerned and humanity as a whole. Langston argues that philosophers of virtue ethics have unnecessarily neglected conscience for, once conscience is trained so that the principles and rules it applies are those one would want all others to live by, its practise cultivates and sustains the virtues; indeed, amongst people in what each society considers to be the highest state of moral development there is little disagreement about how to act. Emmanuel Levinas viewed conscience as a revelatory encountering of resistance to our selfish powers, developing morality by calling into question our naive sense of freedom of will to use such powers arbitrarily, or with violence, this process being more severe the more rigorously the goal of our self was to obtain control.
In other words, the welcoming of the Other, to Levinas, was the very essence of conscience properly conceived; it encouraged our ego to accept the fallibility of assuming things about other people, that selfish freedom of will "does not have the last word" and that realising this has a transcendent purpose: "I am not alone ... in conscience I have an experience that is not commensurate with any a priori [see a priori and a posteriori] framework-a conceptless experience."
Conscientious acts and the law
In the late 13th and early 14th centuries, English litigants began to petition the Lord Chancellor of England for relief from unjust judgments. As Keeper of the King's Conscience, the Chancellor intervened to allow for "merciful exceptions" to the King's laws, "to ensure that the King's conscience was right before God". The Chancellor's office evolved into the Court of Chancery and the Chancellor's decisions evolved into the body of law known as equity.
English humanist lawyers in the 16th and 17th centuries interpreted conscience as a collection of universal principles given to man by god at creation to be applied by reason; this gradually reforming the medieval Roman law-based system with forms of action, written pleadings, use of juries and patterns of litigation such as Demurrer and Assumpsit that displayed an increased concern for elements of right and wrong on the actual facts. A conscience vote in a parliament allows legislators to vote without restrictions from any political party to which they may belong. In his trial in Jerusalem Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann claimed he was simply following legal orders under paragraph 48 of the German Military Code which provided: "punishability of an action or omission is not excused on the ground that the person considered his behaviour required by his conscience or the prescripts of his religion". The United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) which is part of international customary law specifically refers to conscience in Articles 1 and 18. Likewise, the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) mentions conscience in Article 18.1. It has been argued that these articles provide international legal obligations protecting conscientious objectors from service in the military.
John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice defines a conscientious objector as an individual prepared to undertake, in public (and often despite widespread condemnation), an action of civil disobedience to a legal rule justifying it (also in public) by reference to contrary foundational social virtues (such as justice as liberty or fairness) and the principles of morality and law derived from them. Rawls considered civil disobedience should be viewed as an appeal, warning or admonishment (showing general respect and fidelity to the rule of law by the non-violence and transparency of methods adopted) that a law breaches a community's fundamental virtue of justice. Objections to Rawls' theory include first, its inability to accommodate conscientious objections to the society's basic appreciation of justice or to emerging moral or ethical principles (such as respect for the rights of the natural environment) which are not yet part of it and second, the difficulty of predictably and consistently determining that a majority decision is just or unjust. Conscientious objection (also called conscientious refusal or evasion) to obeying a law, should not arise from unreasoning, naive "traditional conscience", for to do so merely encourages infantile abdication of responsibility to calibrate the law against moral or human rights norms and disrespect for democratic institutions. Instead it should be based on "critical conscience' – seriously thought out, conceptually mature, personal moral or religious beliefs held to be fundamentally incompatible (that is, not merely inconsistent on the basis of selfish desires, whim or impulse), for example, either with all laws requiring conscription for military service, or legal compulsion to fight for or financially support the State in a particular war. A famous example arose when Henry David Thoreau the author of Walden was willingly jailed for refusing to pay a tax because he profoundly disagreed with a government policy and was frustrated by the corruption and injustice of the democratic machinery of the state. A more recent case concerned Kimberly Rivera, a private in the US Army and mother of four children who, having served 3 months in Iraq War decided the conflict was immoral and sought refugee status in Canada in 2012 (see List of Iraq War resisters), but was deported and arrested in the US.
In the Second World War, Great Britain granted conscientious-objection status not just to complete pacifists, but to those who objected to fighting in that particular war; this was done partly out of genuine respect, but also to avoid the disgraceful and futile persecutions of conscientious objectors that occurred during the First World War.
Amnesty International organises campaigns to protect those arrested and or incarcerated as a prisoner of conscience because of their conscientious beliefs, particularly concerning intellectual, political and artistic freedom of expression and association. Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, was the winner of the 2009 Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award. In legislation, a conscience clause is a provision in a statute that excuses a health professional from complying with the law (for example legalising surgical or pharmaceutical abortion) if it is incompatible with religious or conscientious beliefs.
Expressed justifications for refusing to obey laws because of conscience vary. Many conscientious objectors are so for religious reasons—notably, members of the historic peace churches are pacifist by doctrine. Other objections can stem from a deep sense of responsibility toward humanity as a whole, or from the conviction that even acceptance of work under military orders acknowledges the principle of conscription that should be everywhere condemned before the world can ever become safe for real democracy. A conscientious objector, however, does not have a primary aim of changing the law. John Dewey considered that conscientious objectors were often the victims of "moral innocency" and inexpertness in moral training: "the moving force of events is always too much for conscience". The remedy was not to deplore the wickedness of those who manipulate world power, but to connect conscience with forces moving in another direction- to build institutions and social environments predicated on the rule of law, for example, "then will conscience itself have compulsive power instead of being forever the martyred and the coerced." As an example, Albert Einstein who had advocated conscientious objection during the First World War and had been a longterm supporter of War Resisters' International reasoned that "radical pacifism" could not be justified in the face of Nazi rearmament and advocated a world federalist organization with its own professional army.
Samuel Johnson pointed out that an appeal to conscience should not allow the law to bring unjust suffering upon another. Conscience, according to Johnson, was nothing more than a conviction felt by ourselves of something to be done or something to be avoided; in questions of simple unperplexed morality, conscience is very often a guide that may be trusted. But before conscience can conclusively determine what morally should be done, he thought that the state of the question should be thoroughly known. "No man's conscience", said Johnson "can tell him the right of another man ... it is a conscience very ill informed that violates the rights of one man, for the convenience of another."
Civil disobedience as non-violent protest or civil resistance are also acts of conscience, but are designed by those who undertake them chiefly to change, by appealing to the majority and democratic processes, laws or government policies perceived to be incoherent with fundamental social virtues and principles (such as justice, equality or respect for intrinsic human dignity). Civil disobedience, in a properly functioning democracy, allows a minority who feel strongly that a law infringes their sense of justice (but have no capacity to obtain legislative amendments or a referendum on the issue) to make a potentially apathetic or uninformed majority take account of the intensity of opposing views. A notable example of civil resistance or satyagraha ("satya" in sanskrit means "truth and compassion", "agraha" means "firmness of will") involved Mahatma Gandhi making salt in India when that act was prohibited by a British statute, in order to create moral pressure for law reform. Rosa Parks similarly acted on conscience in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama refusing a legal order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger; her action (and the similar earlier act of 15-year-old Claudette Colvin) leading to the Montgomery bus boycott. Rachel Corrie was a US citizen allegedly killed by a bulldozer operated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) while involved in direct action (based on the non-violent principles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi) to prevent demolition of the home of local Palestinian pharmacist Samir Nasrallah. Al Gore has argued "If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration." In 2011, NASA climate scientist James E. Hansen, environmental leader Phil Radford and Professor Bill McKibben were arrested for opposing a tar sands oil pipeline and Canadian renewable energy professor Mark Jaccard was arrested for opposing mountain-top coal mining; in his book Storms of my Grandchildren Hansen calls for similar civil resistance on a global scale to help replace the 'business-as-usual' Kyoto Protocol cap and trade system, with a progressive carbon tax at emission source on the oil, gas and coal industries – revenue being paid as dividends to low carbon footprint families.
Notable historical examples of conscientious noncompliance in a different professional context included the manipulation of the visa process in 1939 by Japanese Consul-General Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas (the temporary capital of Lithuania between Germany and the Soviet Union) and by Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary in 1944 to allow Jews to escape almost certain death. Ho Feng-Shan the Chinese Consul-General in Vienna in 1939, defied orders from the Chinese ambassador in Berlin to issue Jews with visas for Shanghai. John Rabe a German member of the Nazi Party likewise saved thousands of Chinese from massacre by the Japanese military at Nanjing. The White Rose German student movement against the Nazis declared in their 4th leaflet: "We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!" Conscientious noncompliance may be the only practical option for citizens wishing to affirm the existence of an international moral order or 'core' historical rights (such as the right to life, right to a fair trial and freedom of opinion) in states where non-violent protest or civil disobedience are met with prolonged arbitrary detention, torture, forced disappearance, murder or persecution.
The controversial Milgram experiment into obedience by Stanley Milgram showed that many people lack the psychological resources to openly resist authority, even when they are directed to act callously and inhumanely against an innocent victim.
World conscience
World conscience is the universalist idea that with ready global communication, all people on earth will no longer be morally estranged from one another, whether it be culturally, ethnically, or geographically; instead they will conceive ethics from the utopian point of view of the universe, eternity or infinity, rather than have their duties and obligations defined by forces arising solely within the restrictive boundaries of "blood and territory".
Often this derives from a spiritual or natural law perspective, that for world peace to be achieved, conscience, properly understood, should be generally considered as not necessarily linked (often destructively) to fundamentalist religious ideologies, but as an aspect of universal consciousness, access to which is the common heritage of humanity. Thinking predicated on the development of world conscience is common to members of the Global Ecovillage Network such as the Findhorn Foundation, international conservation organisations like Fauna and Flora International, as well as performers of world music such as Alan Stivell. Non-government organizations, particularly through their work in agenda-setting, policy-making and implementation of human rights-related policy, have been referred to as the conscience of the world
Edward O Wilson has developed the idea of consilience to encourage coherence of global moral and scientific knowledge supporting the premise that "only unified learning, universally shared, makes accurate foresight and wise choice possible". Thus, world conscience is a concept that overlaps with the Gaia hypothesis in advocating a balance of moral, legal, scientific and economic solutions to modern transnational problems such as global poverty and global warming, through strategies such as environmental ethics, climate ethics, natural conservation, ecology, cosmopolitanism, sustainability and sustainable development, biosequestration and legal protection of the biosphere and biodiversity. The NGO 350.org, for example, seeks to attract world conscience to the problems associated with elevation in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.
The microcredit initiatives of Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus have been described as inspiring a "war on poverty that blends social conscience and business savvy".
The Green party politician Bob Brown (who was arrested by the Tasmanian state police for a conscientious act of civil disobedience during the Franklin Dam protest) expresses world conscience in these terms: "the universe, through us, is evolving towards experiencing, understanding and making choices about its future'; one example of policy outcomes from such thinking being a global tax (see Tobin tax) to alleviate global poverty and protect the biosphere, amounting to 1/10 of 1% placed on the worldwide speculative currency market. Such an approach sees world conscience best expressing itself through political reforms promoting democratically based globalisation or planetary democracy (for example internet voting for global governance organisations (see world government) based on the model of "one person, one vote, one value") which gradually will replace contemporary market-based globalisation.
The American cardiologist Bernard Lown and the Russian cardiologist Yevgeniy Chazov were motivated in conscience through studying the catastrophic public health consequences of nuclear war in establishing International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 and continues to work to "heal an ailing planet".Worldwide expressions of conscience contributed to the decision of the French government to halt atmospheric nuclear tests at Mururoa in the Pacific in 1974 after 41 such explosions (although below-ground nuclear tests continued there into the 1990s).
A challenge to world conscience was provided by an influential 1968 article by Garrett Hardin that critically analyzed the dilemma in which multiple individuals, acting independently after rationally consulting self-interest (and, he claimed, the apparently low 'survival-of-the-fittest' value of conscience-led actions) ultimately destroy a shared limited resource, even though each acknowledges such an outcome is not in anyone's long-term interest. Hardin's conclusion that commons areas are practicably achievable only in conditions of low population density (and so their continuance requires state restriction on the freedom to breed), created controversy additionally through his direct deprecation of the role of conscience in achieving individual decisions, policies and laws that facilitate global justice and peace, as well as sustainability and sustainable development of world commons areas, for example including those officially designated such under United Nations treaties (see common heritage of humanity). Areas designated common heritage of humanity under international law include the Moon, Outer Space, deep sea bed, Antarctica, the world cultural and natural heritage (see World Heritage Convention) and the human genome. It will be a significant challenge for world conscience that as world oil, coal, mineral, timber, agricultural and water reserves are depleted, there will be increasing pressure to commercially exploit common heritage of mankind areas.
The philosopher Peter Singer has argued that the United Nations Millennium Development Goals represent the emergence of an ethics based not on national boundaries but on the idea of one world. Ninian Smart has similarly predicted that the increase in global travel and communication will gradually draw the world's religions towards a pluralistic and transcendental humanism characterized by an "open spirit" of empathy and compassion.
Noam Chomsky has argued that forces opposing the development of such a world conscience include free market ideologies that valorise corporate greed in nominal electoral democracies where advertising, shopping malls and indebtedness, shape citizens into apathetic consumers in relation to information and access necessary for democratic participation. John Passmore has argued that mystical considerations about the global expansion of all human consciousness, should take into account that if as a species we do become something much superior to what we are now, it will be as a consequence of conscience not only implanting a goal of moral perfectibility, but assisting us to remain periodically anxious, passionate and discontented, for these are necessary components of care and compassion. The Committee on Conscience of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has targeted genocides such as those in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, the Congo and Chechnya as challenges to the world's conscience. Oscar Arias Sanchez has criticised global arms industry spending as a failure of conscience by nation states: "When a country decides to invest in arms, rather than in education, housing, the environment, and health services for its people, it is depriving a whole generation of its right to prosperity and happiness. We have produced one firearm for every ten inhabitants of this planet, and yet we have not bothered to end hunger when such a feat is well within our reach. This is not a necessary or inevitable state of affairs. It is a deliberate choice" (see Campaign Against Arms Trade). US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, after meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama during the 2008 violent protests in Tibet and aftermath said: "The situation in Tibet is a challenge to the conscience of the world." Nelson Mandela, through his example and words, has been described as having shaped the conscience of the world. The Right Livelihood Award is awarded yearly in Sweden to those people, mostly strongly motivated by conscience, who have made exemplary practical contributions to resolving the great challenges facing our planet and its people. In 2009, for example, along with Catherine Hamlin (obstetric fistula and see fistula foundation)), David Suzuki (promoting awareness of climate change) and Alyn Ware (nuclear disarmament), René Ngongo shared the Right Livelihood Award "for his courage in confronting the forces that are destroying the Congo Basin's rainforests and building political support for their conservation and sustainable use". Avaaz is one of the largest global on-line organizations launched in January 2007 to promote conscience-driven activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, animal rights, corruption, poverty, and conflict, thus "closing the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want".
Notable examples of modern acts based on conscience
In a notable contemporary act of conscience, Christian bushwalker Brenda Hean protested against the flooding of Lake Pedder despite threats and that ultimately led to her death. Another was the campaign by Ken Saro-Wiwa against oil extraction by multinational corporations in Nigeria that led to his execution. So too was the act by the Tank Man, or the Unknown Rebel photographed holding his shopping bag in the path of tanks during the protests at Beijing's Tiananmen Square on 5 June 1989. The actions of United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld to try to achieve peace in the Congo despite the (eventuating) threat to his life were strongly motivated by conscience as is reflected in his diary, Vägmärken (Markings). Another example involved the actions of Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr to try to prevent the My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War. Evan Pederick voluntarily confessed and was convicted of the Sydney Hilton bombing stating that his conscience could not tolerate the guilt and that "I guess I was quite unique in the prison system in that I had to keep proving my guilt, whereas everyone else said they were innocent." Vasili Arkhipov was a Russian naval officer on out-of-radio-contact Soviet submarine B-59 being depth-charged by US warships during the Cuban Missile Crisis whose dissent when two other officers decided to launch a nuclear torpedo (unanimous agreement to launch was required) may have averted a nuclear war. In 1963 Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc performed a famous act of self-immolation to protest against alleged persecution of his faith by the Vietnamese Ngo Dinh Diem regime.
Conscience played a major role in the actions by anaesthetist Stephen Bolsin to whistleblow (see list of whistleblowers) on incompetent paediatric cardiac surgeons at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Jeffrey Wigand was motivated by conscience to expose the Big Tobacco scandal, revealing that executives of the companies knew that cigarettes were addictive and approved the addition of carcinogenic ingredients to the cigarettes. David Graham, a Food and Drug Administration employee, was motivated by conscience to whistleblow that the arthritis pain-reliever Vioxx increased the risk of cardiovascular deaths although the manufacturer suppressed this information. Rick Piltz, from the U.S. global warming Science Program, blew the whistle on a White House official who ignored majority scientific opinion to edit a climate change report ("Our Changing Planet") to reflect the Bush administration's view that the problem was unlikely to exist. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist, was imprisoned and allegedly tortured for his act of conscience in throwing his shoes at George W. Bush. Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli former nuclear technician, acted on conscience to reveal details of Israel's nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986; was kidnapped by Israeli agents, transported to Israel, convicted of treason and spent 18 years in prison, including more than 11 years in solitary confinement.
At the awards ceremony for the 200 metres at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City John Carlos, Tommie Smith and Peter Norman ignored death threats and official warnings to take part in an anti-racism protest that destroyed their respective careers. W. Mark Felt an agent of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation who retired in 1973 as the Bureau's Associate Director, acted on conscience to provide reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with information that resulted in the Watergate scandal. Conscience was a major factor in US Public Health Service officer Peter Buxtun revealing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to the public. The 2008 attack by the Israeli military on civilian areas of Palestinian Gaza was described as a "stain on the world's conscience". Conscience was a major factor in the refusal of Aung San Suu Kyi to leave Burma despite house arrest and persecution by the military dictatorship in that country.
Conscience was a factor in Peter Galbraith's criticism of fraud in the 2009 Afghanistan election despite it costing him his United Nations job. Conscience motivated Bunnatine Greenhouse to expose irregularities in the contracting of the Halliburton company for work in Iraq. Naji al-Ali a popular cartoon artist in the Arab world, loved for his defense of the ordinary people, and for his criticism of repression and despotism by both the Israeli military and Yasser Arafat's PLO, was murdered for refusing to compromise with his conscience. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya provided (prior to her murder) an example of conscience in her opposition to the Second Chechen War and then-Russian President Vladimir Putin. Conscience motivated the Russian human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, who was abducted and murdered in Grozny, Chechnya in 2009. The Death of Neda Agha-Soltan arose from conscience-driven protests against the 2009 Iranian presidential election. Muslim lawyer Shirin Ebadi (winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize) has been described as the 'conscience of the Islamic Republic' for her work in protecting the human rights of women and children in Iran. The human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, often referred to as the 'conscience of China' and who had previously been arrested and allegedly tortured after calling for respect for human rights and for constitutional reform, was abducted by Chinese security agents in February 2009. 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo in his final statement before being sentenced by a closed Chinese court to over a decade in jail as a political prisoner of conscience stated: "For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit." Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer in Russia, was arrested, held without trial for almost a year and died in custody, as a result of exposing corruption. On 6 October 2001 Laura Whittle was a naval gunner on HMAS Adelaide (FFG 01) under orders to implement a new border protection policy when they encountered the SIEV-4 (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel-4) refugee boat in choppy seas. After being ordered to fire warning shots from her 50 calibre machinegun to make the boat turn back she saw it beginning to break up and sink with a father on board holding out his young daughter that she might be saved (see Children Overboard Affair). Whittle jumped without a life vest 12 metres into the sea to help save the refugees from drowning thinking "this isn't right; this isn't how things should be." In February 2012 journalist Marie Colvin was deliberately targeted and killed by the Syrian Army in Homs during the 2011–2012 Syrian uprising and Siege of Homs, after she decided to stay at the "epicentre of the storm" in order to "expose what is happening". In October 2012 the Taliban organised the attempted murder of Malala Yousafzai a teenage girl who had been campaigning, despite their threats, for female education in Pakistan. In December 2012 the 2012 Delhi gang rape case was said to have stirred the collective conscience of India to civil disobedience and public protest at the lack of legal action against rapists in that country (see Rape in India) In June 2013 Edward Snowden revealed details of a US National Security Agency internet and electronic communication PRISM (surveillance program) because of a conscience-felt obligation to the freedom of humanity greater than obedience to the laws that bound his employment.
In literature, art, film, and music
The ancient epic of the Indian subcontinent, the Mahabharata of Vyasa, contains two pivotal moments of conscience. The first occurs when the warrior Arjuna being overcome with compassion against killing his opposing relatives in war, receives counsel (see Bhagavad-Gita) from Krishna about his spiritual duty ("work as though you are performing a sacrifice for the general good"). The second, at the end of the saga, is when king Yudhishthira having alone survived the moral tests of life, is offered eternal bliss, only to refuse it because a faithful dog is prevented from coming with him by purported divine rules and laws. The French author Montaigne (1533–1592) in one of the most celebrated of his essays ("On experience") expressed the benefits of living with a clear conscience: "Our duty is to compose our character, not to compose books, to win not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live properly". In his famous Japanese travel journal Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North) composed of mixed haiku poetry and prose, Matsuo Bashō (1644–94) in attempting to describe the eternal in this perishable world is often moved in conscience; for example by a thicket of summer grass being all that remains of the dreams and ambitions of ancient warriors. Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale" in The Canterbury Tales recounts how a young suitor releases a wife from a rash promise because of the respect in his conscience for the freedom to be truthful, gentle and generous.
The critic A. C. Bradley discusses the central problem of Shakespeare's tragic character Hamlet as one where conscience in the form of moral scruples deters the young Prince with his "great anxiety to do right" from obeying his father's hell-bound ghost and murdering the usurping King ("is't not perfect conscience to quit him with this arm?" (v.ii.67)).
Bradley develops a theory about Hamlet's moral agony relating to a conflict between "traditional" and "critical" conscience: "The conventional moral ideas of his time, which he shared with the Ghost, told him plainly that he ought to avenge his father; but a deeper conscience in him, which was in advance of his time, contended with these explicit conventional ideas. It is because this deeper conscience remains below the surface that he fails to recognise it, and fancies he is hindered by cowardice or sloth or passion or what not; but it emerges into light in that speech to Horatio. And it is just because he has this nobler moral nature in him that we admire and love him". The opening words of Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 ("They that have pow'r to hurt, and will do none") have been admired as a description of conscience. So has John Donne's commencement of his poem :s:Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward: "Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this, Th' intelligence that moves, devotion is;"
Anton Chekhov in his plays The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters describes the tortured emotional states of doctors who at some point in their careers have turned their back on conscience. In his short stories, Chekhov also explored how people misunderstood the voice of a tortured conscience. A promiscuous student, for example, in The Fit describes it as a "dull pain, indefinite, vague; it was like anguish and the most acute fear and despair ... in his breast, under the heart" and the young doctor examining the misunderstood agony of compassion experienced by the factory owner's daughter in From a Case Book calls it an "unknown, mysterious power ... in fact close at hand and watching him." Characteristically, Chekhov's own conscience drove him on the long journey to Sakhalin to record and alleviate the harsh conditions of the prisoners at that remote outpost. As Irina Ratushinskaya writes in the introduction to that work: "Abandoning everything, he travelled to the distant island of Sakhalin, the most feared place of exile and forced labour in Russia at that time. One cannot help but wonder why? Simply, because the lot of the people there was a bitter one, because nobody really knew about the lives and deaths of the exiles, because he felt that they stood in greater need of help that anyone else. A strange reason, maybe, but not for a writer who was the epitome of all the best traditions of a Russian man of letters. Russian literature has always focused on questions of conscience and was, therefore, a powerful force in the moulding of public opinion."
E. H. Carr writes of Dostoevsky's character the young student Raskolnikov in the novel Crime and Punishment who decides to murder a 'vile and loathsome' old woman money lender on the principle of transcending conventional morals: "the sequel reveals to us not the pangs of a stricken conscience (which a less subtle writer would have given us) but the tragic and fruitless struggle of a powerful intellect to maintain a conviction which is incompatible with the essential nature of man." Hermann Hesse wrote his Siddhartha to describe how a young man in the time of the Buddha follows his conscience on a journey to discover a transcendent inner space where all things could be unified and simply understood, ending up discovering that personal truth through selfless service as a ferryman. J. R. R. Tolkien in his epic The Lord of the Rings describes how only the hobbit Frodo is pure enough in conscience to carry the ring of power through war-torn Middle-earth to destruction in the Cracks of Doom, Frodo determining at the end to journey without weapons, and being saved from failure by his earlier decision to spare the life of the creature Gollum. Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote that Albert Camus was the writer most representative of the Western consciousness and conscience in its relation to the non-Western world. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird portrays Atticus Finch (played by Gregory Peck in the classic film from the book (see To Kill a Mockingbird)) as a lawyer true to his conscience who sets an example to his children and community.
The Robert Bolt play A Man For All Seasons focuses on the conscience of Catholic lawyer Thomas More in his struggle with King Henry VIII ("the loyal subject is more bounden to be loyal to his conscience than to any other thing"). George Orwell wrote his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four on the isolated island of Jura, Scotland to describe how a man (Winston Smith) attempts to develop critical conscience in a totalitarian state which watches every action of the people and manipulates their thinking with a mixture of propaganda, endless war and thought control through language control (double think and newspeak) to the point where prisoners look up to and even love their torturers. In the Ministry of Love, Winston's torturer (O'Brien) states: "You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable".
A tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica depicting a massacre of innocent women and children during the Spanish Civil War is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council room, demonstrably as a spur to the conscience of representatives from the nation states. Albert Tucker painted Man's Head to capture the moral disintegration, and lack of conscience, of a man convicted of kicking a dog to death.
The impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo in 1878 that "one must never let the fire in one's soul die, for the time will inevitably come when it will be needed. And he who chooses poverty for himself and loves it possesses a great treasure and will hear the voice of his conscience address him every more clearly. He who hears that voice, which is God's greatest gift, in his innermost being and follows it, finds in it a friend at last, and he is never alone! ... That is what all great men have acknowledged in their works, all those who have thought a little more deeply and searched and worked and loved a little more than the rest, who have plumbed the depths of the sea of life."
The 1957 Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal portrays the journey of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) returning disillusioned from the crusades ("what is going to happen to those of us who want to believe, but aren't able to?") across a plague-ridden landscape, undertaking a game of chess with the personification of Death until he can perform one meaningful altruistic act of conscience (overturning the chess board to distract Death long enough for a family of jugglers to escape in their wagon). The 1942 Casablanca centers on the development of conscience in the cynical American Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in the face of oppression by the Nazis and the example of the resistance leader Victor Laszlo.The David Lean and Robert Bolt screenplay for Doctor Zhivago (an adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel) focuses strongly on the conscience of a doctor-poet in the midst of the Russian Revolution (in the end "the walls of his heart were like paper").The 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner focuses on the struggles of conscience between and within a bounty hunter (Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford)) and a renegade replicant android (Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer)) in a future society which refuses to accept that forms of artificial intelligence can have aspects of being such as conscience.
Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his last great choral composition the Mass in B minor (BWV 232) to express the alternating emotions of loneliness, despair, joy and rapture that arise as conscience reflects on a departed human life. Here JS Bach's use of counterpoint and contrapuntal settings, his dynamic discourse of melodically and rhythmically distinct voices seeking forgiveness of sins ("Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis") evokes a spiraling moral conversation of all humanity expressing his belief that "with devotional music, God is always present in his grace".
Ludwig van Beethoven's meditations on illness, conscience and mortality in the Late String Quartets led to his dedicating the third movement of String Quartet in A Minor (1825) Op. 132 (see String Quartet No. 15) as a "Hymn of Thanksgiving to God of a convalescent". John Lennon's work "Imagine" owes much of its popular appeal to its evocation of conscience against the atrocities created by war, religious fundamentalism and politics. The Beatles George Harrison-written track "The Inner Light" sets to Indian raga music a verse from the Tao Te Ching that "without going out of your door you can know the ways of heaven'. In the 1986 movie The Mission the guilty conscience and penance of the slave trader Mendoza is made more poignant by the haunting oboe music of Ennio Morricone ("On Earth as it is in Heaven") The song Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest is based on a traditional Baegu lullaby from the Solomon Islands called "Rorogwela" in which a young orphan is comforted as an act of conscience by his older brother. The Dream Academy song 'Forest Fire' provided an early warning of the moral dangers of our 'black cloud' 'bringing down a different kind of weather ... letting the sunshine in, that's how the end begins."
The American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) presents the Conscience-in-Media Award to journalists whom the society deems worthy of recognition for demonstrating "singular commitment to the highest principles of journalism at notable personal cost or sacrifice".
The Ambassador of Conscience Award, Amnesty International's most prestigious human rights award, takes its inspiration from a poem written by Irish Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney called "The Republic of Conscience".
See also
Amity-enmity complex
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, chapter XXVII: "Of Identity and Diversity"
A Tale for the Time Being
Altruism
Confidant
Conscientious objector
Conscientiousness
Consciousness
Ethics
Evolutionary ethics
Evolution of morality
Free will
Guilt
Inner light
Jiminy Cricket, symbol of conscience in Pinocchio (1940 film)
List of nonviolence scholars and leaders
Mind–body problem
Moral emotions
Moral value
Morality
Outline of self
Philosophy of mind
Rationality and power
Rationality
Reason
Sraosha, Deity of Conscience
Social conscience
Subtle body
Synderesis
Further reading
References
External links
Concepts in ethics
Concepts in social philosophy
Personality
Philosophy of life
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Homosexuality and religion | The relationship between religion and homosexuality has varied greatly across time and place, within and between different religions and denominations, with regard to different forms of homosexuality and bisexuality. The present-day doctrines of the world's major religions and their denominations differ in their attitudes toward these sexual orientations. Adherence to anti-gay religious beliefs and communities is correlated with the prevalence of emotional distress and suicidality in sexual minority individuals, and is a primary motivation for seeking conversion therapy.
Among the religious denominations which generally reject these orientations, there are many different types of opposition, ranging from quietly discouraging homosexual activity, explicitly forbidding same-sex sexual practices among their adherents and actively opposing social acceptance of homosexuality, supporting criminal sanctions up to capital punishment, and even to condoning extrajudicial killings. Religious fundamentalism often correlates with anti-homosexual bias. Psychological research has connected religiosity with homophobic attitudes and physical antigay hostility, and has traced religious opposition to gay adoption to collectivistic values (loyalty, authority, purity) and low flexibility in existential issues, rather than to high prosocial inclinations for the weak. Attitudes toward homosexuality have been found to be determined not only by personal religious beliefs, but by the interaction of those beliefs with the predominant national religious context—even for people who are less religious or who do not share their local dominant religious context. Many argue that it is homosexual actions which are sinful, rather than same-sex attraction itself. To this end, some discourage labeling individuals according to sexual orientation. Several organizations assert that conversion therapy can help diminish same-sex attraction.
Some adherents of many religions view homosexuality and bisexuality positively, and some denominations routinely bless same-sex marriages and support LGBT rights, a growing trend as much of the developed world enacts laws supporting LGBT rights.
Historically, some cultures and religions accommodated, institutionalized, or revered same-sex love and sexuality; such mythologies and traditions can be found around the world. While Hinduism does not condemn homosexuality exclusively, it does often have a negative view on sexual activity generally (especially for the upper class of monks and priests), and one can find numerous portrayals of homosexuality in Hindu literature and artworks. Sikh wedding ceremonies are non-gender specific, and so same-sex marriage is possible within Sikhism.
Regardless of their position on homosexuality, many people of faith look to both sacred texts and tradition for guidance on this issue. However, the authority of various traditions or scriptural passages and the correctness of translations and interpretations are continually disputed.
Specific religious groups
Ancient Mesopotamian religion
Individuals who went against the traditional gender binary were heavily involved in the cult of Inanna, an ancient Mesopotamian goddess. During Sumerian times, a set of priests known as gala worked in Inanna's temples, where they performed elegies and lamentations. Men who became gala sometimes adopted female names and their songs were composed in the Sumerian eme-sal dialect, which, in literary texts, is normally reserved for the speech of female characters. Some Sumerian proverbs seem to suggest that gala had a reputation for engaging in anal sex with men. During the Akkadian Period, kurgarrū and assinnu were servants of Ishtar who dressed in female clothing and performed war dances in Ishtar's temples. Several Akkadian proverbs seem to suggest that they may have also had homosexual proclivities. Gwendolyn Leick, an anthropologist known for her writings on Mesopotamia, has compared these individuals to the contemporary Indian hijra. In one Akkadian hymn, Ishtar is described as transforming men into women. Some modern pagans include Inanna in their worship.
Abrahamic religions
The Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have traditionally forbidden sodomy, believing and teaching that such behavior is sinful. Today some denominations within these religions are accepting of homosexuality and inclusive of homosexual people, such as Reform Judaism, the United Church of Christ and the Metropolitan Community Church. Some Presbyterian, Anglican, Lutheran, and Methodist churches welcome members regardless of same-sex sexual practices, with some provinces allowing for the ordination and inclusion of gay and lesbian clerics, and affirmation of same-sex unions. Reform Judaism incorporates lesbian and gay rabbis and same-sex marriage liturgies, while Reconstructionist Judaism and Conservative Judaism in the US allows for lesbian and gay rabbis and same-sex unions.
Judaism
The Torah (first five books of the Hebrew Bible) is the primary source for Jewish views on homosexuality. It states that: "[A man] shall not lie with another man as [he would] with a woman, it is (, "abomination")" (Leviticus 18:22). (Like many similar commandments, the stated punishment for willful violation is the death penalty, although in practice rabbinic Judaism no longer believes it has the authority to implement death penalties.)
Orthodox Judaism views homosexual acts as sinful. In recent years, there have been approaches claiming that only the sexual anal act is forbidden and considered an abomination by the Torah, while sexual orientation and even other sexual activities are not considered a sin. Conservative Judaism has engaged in an in-depth study of homosexuality since the 1990s, with various rabbis presenting a wide array of responsa (papers with legal arguments) for communal consideration. The official position of the movement is to welcome homosexual Jews into their synagogues, and also campaign against any discrimination in civil law and public society, but also to uphold a ban on anal sex as a religious requirement.
Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism in North America and Liberal Judaism in the United Kingdom view homosexuality to be acceptable on the same basis as heterosexuality. Progressive Jewish authorities believe either that traditional laws against homosexuality are no longer binding or that they are subject to changes that reflect a new understanding of human sexuality. Some of these authorities rely on modern biblical scholarship suggesting that the prohibition in the Torah was intended to ban coercive or ritualized male-male sex, such as those practices ascribed to Egyptian and Canaanite fertility cults and temple prostitution.
Christianity
The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and its traditional interpretations in Judaism and Christianity have historically affirmed and endorsed a patriarchal and heteronormative approach towards human sexuality, favouring exclusively penetrative vaginal intercourse between men and women within the boundaries of marriage over all other forms of human sexual activity, including autoeroticism, masturbation, oral sex, non-penetrative and non-heterosexual sexual intercourse (all of which have been labeled as "sodomy" at various times), believing and teaching that such behaviors are forbidden because they are considered sinful, and further compared to or derived from the behavior of the alleged residents of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Christian denominations hold a variety of views on homosexual sex, ranging from outright condemnation to complete acceptance. Throughout the majority of Christian history, most Christian theologians and denominations have considered homosexual sex as immoral or sinful. Most Christian denominations welcome people attracted to the same sex, but teach that homosexual sex is sinful. These denominations include the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox church, the Oriental Orthodox churches, Confessional Lutheran denominations such as the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, and some other mainline denominations, such as the Reformed Church in America and the American Baptist Church, as well as Conservative Evangelical organizations and churches, such as the Evangelical Alliance, and fundamentalist groups and churches, such as the Southern Baptist Convention. Pentecostal churches such as the Assemblies of God, as well as Restorationist churches, like Iglesia ni Cristo, the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also take the position that homosexual sexual activity is sinful.
Liberal Christians are generally supportive of homosexuals. Some Christian denominations do not view monogamous same sex relationships as bad or evil. These include the United Church of Canada, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the churches of the Old Catholic Union of Utrecht, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, the Church of Sweden, the Lutheran, reformed and united churches in Evangelical Church of Germany, the Church of Denmark, the Icelandic Church, the Church of Norway and the Protestant Church of the Netherlands. In particular, the Metropolitan Community Church, a denomination of 40,000 members, was founded specifically to serve the Christian LGBT community, and is devoted to being open and affirming to LGBTQ people. The United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church (UMC) and the Alliance of Baptists also condone gay marriage, and some parts of the Anglican and Lutheran churches allow for the blessing of gay unions. Within the Anglican communion there are openly gay clergy; for example, Gene Robinson and Mary Glasspool are openly homosexual bishops in the US Episcopal Church and Eva Brunne in Lutheran Church of Sweden. The Episcopal Church's recent actions vis-a-vis homosexuality have brought about increased ethical debate and tension within the Church of England and worldwide Anglican churches. In the United States and many other nations, the religious people are becoming more affirming of same-sex relationships. Even those in denominations with official stances are liberalizing, though not as quickly as those in more affirming religious groups.
Passages from the Mosaic Covenant and its broader Old Testament context have been interpreted to mean that anyone who is engaging in homosexual practices should be punished with death (Leviticus 20:13; cf. Genesis 19:4–25; Judges 19:22–20:48; 2 Peter 2:6–10; Jude 7). HIV/AIDS has also been portrayed by some Christian fundamentalists such as Fred Phelps and Jerry Falwell as a punishment by God against homosexuals. In the 20th century, theologians like Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann, Hans Küng, John Robinson, Bishop David Jenkins, Don Cupitt, and Bishop Jack Spong challenged traditional theological positions and understandings of the Bible; following these developments some have suggested that passages have been mistranslated, are taken out of context, or that they do not refer to what is generally understood as "homosexuality."
Conservative denominations generally oppose same-sex sexual relations based on Old Testament and New Testament texts that describe human sexual relations as strictly heterosexual by God's design. As such, it is argued that sexual desires and actions that contradict God's design are deemed sinful and are condemned by God (e.g. Leviticus 18:22; cf. Leviticus 20:13). Since love does not rejoice in unrighteousness or iniquity (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:6), and since homosexual desires and actions are believed to remain contrary to God's design and condemned by God as sinful/iniquity (e.g. in general, Romans 126–27; passively, 1 Corinthians 6:96:9; actively, including but not limited to pederasty, 1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:9-11; considered sexually immoral, Galatians 5:19-21; Colossians 3:5-7; Ephesians 5:3), adherents of conservative denominations believe that genuine love for God and humanity is best expressed by following God rather than the world (Acts 5:29; cf. Jeremiah 23:1-40; Romans 12:9).
While the Catholic view is founded on a natural law argument informed by scripture and proposed by Thomas Aquinas, the traditional conservative Protestant view is based on an interpretation of scripture alone. Protestant conservatives also see homosexual relationships as an impediment to heterosexual relationships. They interpret some Biblical passages to be commandments to be heterosexually married. Catholics, on the other hand, have accommodated unmarried people as priests, monks, nuns and single lay people for over 1,000 years. A number of self-described gay and 'ex-gay' Christians have reported satisfaction in mixed-orientation marriages.
Catholic Church
The Catholic Church teaches that those who are attracted to persons of the same sex are called to practice chastity, just like everyone else has to before they get married. The Catholic Church does not regard homosexual activity as an expression of the marital sacrament, which it teaches is only possible within a lifelong commitment of a marriage between a man and a woman. According to the Church's sexual ethics, homosexual activity falls short in the complementarity (male and female organs complement each other) and fecundity (openness to new life) of the sexual act. Few studies of parishioners' individual views are sometimes at variance with the church's non-acceptance of homosexuality.
Latter-day Saints
All homosexual or same-sex sexual activity is forbidden by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in its law of chastity, and the church teaches that God does not approve of same-sex marriage and may punish same-sex sexual behavior with a disciplinary council. Members of the church who experience homosexual attractions, including those who self-identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual remain in good standing in the church if they abstain from same-sex marriage and all sexual relations outside an opposite-sex marriage, but all, including those participating in same-sex activity and relationships, are allowed to attend weekly church worship services. However, in order to receive church ordinances such as baptism, and to enter church temples, adherents are required to abstain from same-sex relations. Additionally, in the church's plan of salvation noncelibate gay and lesbian individuals will not be allowed in the top tier of heaven to receive exaltation unless they repent, and a heterosexual marriage is a requirement for exaltation.
The LDS Church previously taught that homosexuality was a curable condition and counseled members that they could and should change their attractions and provided therapy and programs with that goal. From 1976 until 1989 the Church Handbook called for church discipline for members attracted to the same sex equating merely being homosexual with the seriousness of acts of adultery and child molestation—even celibate gay people were subject to excommunication. Church publications now state that "individuals do not choose to have such attractions", its church-run therapy services no longer provides sexual orientation change efforts, and the church has no official stance on the causes of homosexuality. These current teachings and policies leave homosexual members with the option of potentially harmful attempts to change their sexual orientation, entering a mixed-orientation opposite-sex marriage, or living a celibate lifestyle without any sexual expression (including masturbation).
Islam
Classical Islamic jurists did not deal with homosexuality as a sexual orientation, since the latter concept is modern and has no equivalent in traditional law, which dealt with it under the technical terms of liwata and zinā. Most legal schools treat homosexual intercourse with penetration similarly to unlawful heterosexual intercourse under the rubric of zinā, but there are differences of opinion with respect to methods of punishment, as evident from an eleventh-century discussion among the scholars of Baghdad. Some gay individuals undergo sex reassignment surgery to transition into the opposite gender to legally marry.
The discourse on homosexuality in Islam is primarily concerned with activities between men. There are, however, a few hadiths that mention homosexual behavior among women. Although punishment for lesbianism is rarely mentioned in the histories, al-Tabari records an example of the execution in the year 170 AH (786 or 787 AD) of a pair of lesbian slavegirls in the harem of al-Hadi in a collection of highly critical anecdotes pertaining to that Caliph's actions as ruler.
Some jurists viewed sexual intercourse as possible only for an individual who possesses a phallus, hence those definitions of sexual intercourse that rely on the entry of as little as the corona of the phallus into a partner's orifice. Since women do not possess a phallus and, in this interpretation, cannot have intercourse with one another, they are therefore physically incapable of committing zinā.
Bahá'í Faith
Bahá'í law limits permissible sexual relations to those between a man and a woman in marriage. Believers are expected to abstain from sex outside matrimony. Bahá'ís do not, however, attempt to impose their moral standards on those who have not accepted the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh. The Bahá'í Faith takes no position on the sexual practices of those who are not adherents. While requiring uprightness in all matters of morality, whether sexual or otherwise, the Bahá’í teachings also take account of human frailty and call for tolerance and understanding in regard to human failings. In this context, to regard homosexuals with prejudice would be contrary to the spirit of the Bahá’í teachings.
Bahá'í Faith does not acknowledge marriage outside of one man and one woman; therefore, anyone not practicing heterosexual relationships cannot marry and must always remain celibate.
Indian religions
Among the religions that originated in ancient and medieval India, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, teachings regarding homosexuality are less clear than among the Abrahamic traditions, and religious authorities voice diverse opinions. Sikhism has no specific teachings about homosexuality and the Sikh holy scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, does not explicitly mention heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality. The universal goal of a Sikh is to have no hate or animosity to any person, regardless of factors like race, caste, color, creed or gender. Hinduism is diverse, with no supreme governing body, but the majority of swamis opposed same-sex relationships in a 2004 survey, and a minority supported them. Ancient religious texts such as the Vedas do not restrict homosexuality and often refer to people of a third gender known as hijra, who are neither female nor male. Some see this third gender as an ancient parallel to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex identities.
Hinduism
Hinduism does not have a central authority. Many Hindu sects have taken various positions on homosexuality, ranging from positive to neutral or antagonistic. Referring to the nature of Samsara, the Rigveda, one of the four canonical sacred texts of Hinduism says 'Vikruti Evam Prakriti' (Perversity/diversity is what nature is all about, or, What seems unnatural is also natural). A "third gender" has been acknowledged within numerous Hindu texts. Several Hindu texts, such as Manu Smriti and Sushruta Samhita, assert that some people are born with either mixed male and female natures, or sexually neuter, as a matter of natural biology (while at the same time there are examples of speaking negatively in regards to male homosexuality as shown by the Manu Smrititi and Arthashastra). In addition, each Hindu denomination had developed distinct rules regarding sexuality, as Hinduism is not unified and is decentralized in essence.
Hindu groups are historically not unified regarding the issue of homosexuality, each one having a distinct doctrinal view.
The Indian Kama Sutra, written around 150 BC, contains passages describing eunuchs or "third-sex" males performing oral sex on men. The text describes Kama as one of the three objectives to be achieved in life. Though it forbids the educated Brahmins, bureaucrats and wisemen from practicing Auparishtaka (oral sex).
Similarly, some medieval Hindu temples and artifacts openly depict both male homosexuality and lesbianism within their carvings, such as the temple walls at Khajuraho. Some infer from these images that at least part of the Hindu society and religion were previously more open to variations in human sexuality than they are at present.
Ayoni sex, which includes oral and anal sex, never came to be viewed as much of a sin like in Christianity nor a serious crime and could be practiced in some cases. Close friendship between people of same genders has also been seen as permissible in Hindu texts.
Several Hindu priests have performed same-sex marriages, arguing that love is the result of attachments from previous births and that marriage, as a union of spirit, is transcendental to gender.
Buddhism
The most common formulation of Buddhist ethics are the Five Precepts and the Eightfold Path, one should neither be attached to nor crave sensual pleasure. The third of the Five Precepts is "To refrain from committing sexual misconduct." However, "sexual misconduct" is a broad term, and is subjected to interpretation relative to the social norms of the followers.
The determination of whether or not same-gender relations are appropriate for a layperson is not considered a religious matter by many Buddhists.
According to the Pāli Canon and Āgama (the Early Buddhist scriptures), there is not any saying that same or opposite gender relations have anything to do with sexual misconduct, and some Theravada monks express that same-gender relations do not violate the rule to avoid sexual misconduct, which means not having sex with someone under age (thus protected by their parents or guardians), someone betrothed or married or who has taken vows of religious celibacy.
Some later traditions gradually began to add new restrictions on sexual misconduct, like non-vagina sex, though some academics argue it usually involves situations seen as coerced sex. This non-vagina sex as sexual misconduct view is not based on Buddha's teachings, but from later Abhidharma texts.
Buddhism is often characterized as distrustful of sensual enjoyment and sexuality in general. Traditionally, sex and lust are seen as hindering to spiritual progress in most schools of Buddhism; as such monks are expected to refrain from all sexual activity, and the Vinaya (the first book of the Tripitaka) specifically prohibits sexual intercourse, then further explain that anal, oral, and vaginal intercourse amount to sexual intercourse, which will result in permanent exclusion from Sangha. A notable exception in the history of Buddhism occurred in Japan during the Edo period, in which male homosexuality, or more specifically, love between young novices and older monks, were celebrated.
References to pandaka, a eunuch/impotence category that is sometimes interpreted to include homosexual males, can be found throughout the Pali canon as well as other Sanskrit scriptures. In the Chinese version of Sarvastivada Vinaya, the pandaka is mentioned as also trying to have sex with women, not just men. Leonard Zwilling refers extensively to Buddhaghosa's Samantapasadika, where pandaka are described as being filled with defiled passions and insatiable lusts, and are dominated by their libido. Some texts of the Abhidharma state that a pandaka cannot achieve enlightenment in their own lifetime, (but must wait for rebirth) and Asanga and Vasubandhu discussed if a pandaka was able to be enlightened or not. According to one scriptural story, Ananda—Buddha's cousin and disciple—was a pandaka in one of his many previous lives.
Some later classic Buddhist masters and texts disallow contact between monks/Bodhisattva and pandakas/women and classify non-vagina sex as sexual misconduct, including for lay followers.
The third of the five precepts of Buddhism states that one is to refrain from sexual misconduct; this precept has sometimes been interpreted to include homosexuality. The Dalai Lama of the Gelug sect of Tibetan Buddhism previously interpreted sexual misconduct to include lesbian and gay sex, and indeed any sex other than penis-vagina intercourse, including oral sex, anal sex, and masturbation or other sexual activity with the hand; the only time sex is acceptable is when it performed for its purpose of procreation. In 2009, when interviewed by Canadian TV news anchor Evan Solomon on CBC News: Sunday about whether or not homosexuality is acceptable in Buddhism, the Dalai Lama responded that "it is sexual misconduct." However, the Dalai Lama supports human rights for all, "regardless of sexual orientation." In the most recent interview on this topic (March 10, 2014), the Dalai Lama said gay marriage is "OK", provided it is not in contradiction with the values of one's chosen religion. Also in an Indian and Tibetan tradition, the Nalandabodhi sangha has stated that they are welcoming of all sexual orientations.
In Thailand, some accounts propose that "homosexuality arises as a karmic consequence of violating Buddhist proscriptions against heterosexual misconduct. These karmic accounts describe homosexuality as a congenital condition which cannot be altered, at least in a homosexual person's current lifetime, and have been linked with calls for compassion and understanding from the non-homosexual populace." However, Buddhist leaders in Thailand have also condemned homosexuality, ousted monks accused of homosexual acts, and banned kathoey from ordination. In 2009, Senior monk Phra Maha Wudhijaya Vajiramedh introduced a "good manners" curriculum for novices in the monkhood, stating to the BBC that he was concerned by "the flamboyant behaviour of gay and transgender monks, who can often be seen wearing revealingly tight robes, carrying pink purses and having effeminately-shaped eyebrows." However, in Thailand, several leaders in the Theravada tradition including Phra Payom Kalayano have expressed support for LGBT rights.
A later popular Japanese legend attributed the introduction of monastic homosexuality to Japan to Shingon founder Kukai, although scholars now dismiss the veracity of this assertion, pointing out his strict adherence to the Vinaya. Nonetheless, the legend served to "affirm same sex relation between men and boys in seventeenth century Japan." However, Japanese Buddhist scholar and author of "Wild Azaleas" Kitamura Kigin argued that there was a tendency in monasteries to avoid heterosexuality and to encourage homosexuality.
Although Mahayana Buddhism has some texts against homosexuality (from later Abhidharma texts and Buddhist apocrypha), the majority of its teachings assert that all beings who correctly practice the dharma may reach enlightenment, since all possess an innate Buddha nature. Enlightenment being achievable even in a single life. Some Mahayana Buddhist leaders were active in the movement for same-sex marriage rights in Taiwan which legalized same-sex marriages in 2019.
Well known Zen Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh, notes the spirit of Buddhism is inclusiveness and states "when you look at the ocean, you see different kinds of waves, many sizes and shapes, but all the waves have water as their foundation and substance. If you are born gay or lesbian, your ground of being is the same as mine. We are different, but we share the same ground of being."
The capacity of Buddhism to reform itself and its great variety of distinct beliefs and schools, provide many liberal streams of Buddhism, which are accepting of all sexual orientations. Reformists of Buddhism are mainly predominant in cosmopolitan cities. In global traditions, there is a widescale support for LGBT rights including the European Buddhist Union, the Buddhist Churches of America, many Shin Buddhist groups, and Zen leaders such as Thich Nhat Hanh. The Federation of Australian Buddhist Councils (FABC), representing Buddhist laypeople, and the Australian Sangha Association vocally supported same-sex marriage in Australia. Soka Gakkai International-USA (SGI-USA) is the most diverse Buddhist community in the United States with more than 500 chapters and some 100 centers throughout the country supports LGBT rights. In a PEW research poll, 88% of American Buddhists stated that homosexuality should be accepted. This was a higher level of support than any other religious group studied.
Sikhism
Sikhism has no specific teachings about homosexuality and the Sikh holy scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, does not explicitly mention heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality. The universal goal of a Sikh is to have no hate or animosity to any person, regardless of factors like race, caste, color, creed or gender.
Akal Takhat, the highest religious authority of the Sikhs, issued an edict (hukamnaama) in 2005 against any homosexual marriage in front of Sikh Scriptures (11th Guru of the Sikhs—Shri Guru Granth Sahib). This was again reiterated when one couple performed an Anand Karaj (Sikh religious marriage) of two homosexual men in 2020 in California. The couple was thrown out of the Sikh religion for this violation.
Gurbani based view:
In Sikh Scripture
In Guru Granth Sahib, marriage is seen as a union of souls. In Sikhism, the soul is seen as genderless, and the outward appearance of human beings (man, woman) is a temporary state. Same-sex marriage advocates refer to this fact.
Zoroastrianism
The Vendidad, one of the later Zoroastrian texts composed in the Artificial Young Avestan language, has not been dated precisely. It is thought that some concepts of law, uncleanliness, dualism, and salvation were shared between the religions, and subsequent interactions between the religions are documented by events such as the release of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity by Zoroastrian Cyrus the Great in 537 BC, and the Biblical account of the Magi visiting the infant Jesus.
The Vendidad generally promotes procreation: "the man who has a wife is far above him who lives in continence; he who keeps a house is far above him who has none; he who has children is far above the childless man; he who has riches is far above him who has none." It details the penance for a worshipper who submits to sodomy under force as "Eight hundred stripes with the Aspahe-astra, eight hundred stripes with the Sraosho-charana." (equal to the penalty for breaking a contract with the value of an ox), and declares that for those participating voluntarily "For that deed there is nothing that can pay, nothing that can atone, nothing that can cleanse from it; it is a trespass for which there is no atonement, for ever and ever". However, those not practicing the Religion of Mazda were pardoned for past actions upon conversion. It has been argued that, in ancient times, those prohibitions against sodomy did not apply to eunuchs.
East Asian religions
Among the Taoic religions of East Asia, such as Taoism, passionate homosexual expression is usually discouraged because it is believed to not lead to human fulfillment.
Burmese folk religion
Many Nat Kadaws in traditional Burmese folk religion are members of the LGBT community.
Chinese folk religion
Tu'er Shen, also known as the Rabbit God, is a gay Chinese deity. In 2006, Lu Wei-ming founded a temple for Tu'er Shen and Taoist worship in Yonghe District in the New Taipei City in Taiwan. About 9,000 pilgrims visit the temple each year praying for a suitable (same-sex) partner. The Wei-ming temple also performs love ceremonies for gay couples. It is the world's only religious shrine for homosexuals.
Confucianism
Confucianism, being primarily a social and political philosophy, focused little on sexuality; whether homosexual or heterosexual. However, the ideology did emphasize male friendships, and Louis Crompton has argued that the "closeness of the master-disciple bond it fostered may have subtly facilitated homosexuality". Homosexuality is not mentioned in the Analects of Confucius.
Đạo Mẫu
In Vietnam, many LGBT people find a safe community within the Đạo Mẫu religion, which is worship of the mother god. Many LGBT people act as mediums during Đạo Mẫu rituals.
Shinto
Historically, Shinto "had no special code of morals and seems to have regarded sex as a natural phenomenon to be enjoyed with few inhibitions." While Shinto beliefs are diverse, Japanese Shinto does not condemn homosexuality, and the formally organized Konkokyo sect is fully affirming. Multiple Shinto leaders advocated in support of gay marriage in Hawaii.
Taoism
There is no single official position on homosexuality in Taoism, as the term Taoism is used to describe a number of disparate religious traditions encompassing a variety of views. Although Taoist alchemy generally emphasized that ejaculation in heterosexual relationships represented a draining of the male's "life essence," this concept was not generally extended to non-heterosexual sex.
In a similar way to Buddhism, Taoist schools sought throughout history to define what would be sexual misconduct. Broadly speaking, the precept against "sexual misconduct" in Taoism relates to extramarital sex. The term for a married couple (夫婦) usually in Chinese suggests a male with a female, though Taoist scripture itself does not explicitly say anything against same-sex relations. Many sorts of precepts mentioned in the Yunji Qiqian, The Mini Daoist Canon, does not explicitly say anything against same-gender relations as well.
Homosexuality is not unknown in Taoist history, such as during the Tang dynasty when Taoist nuns exchanged love poems. As a sexual misconduct however would depend on what sect or school they were from as some traditions considered homosexuality to be misconduct and others did not mention it at all. There are also certain talismans recorded in different traditions that claim to "cure" a person of the "homosexual disease/desire". Attitudes about homosexuality within Taoism often reflect the values and sexual norms of broader Chinese society and what region of China the sect resided in (see Homosexuality in China).
African Diasporic religions
Candomblé
Within Candomblé, a syncretic religion found primarily in Brazil, there is widespread (though not universal) support for gay rights, many members are LGBT, and have performed gay marriages. In Candomblé, homosexuality is usually accepted and explained by the sex of one's orisha. Homosexuality would be more probable in a man with a female orisha, a woman with a male orisha, or any of them with an androgynous orisha (such as Olokun).
Haitian Vodou
Homosexuality is religiously acceptable in Haitian Vodou. The lwa or loa (spirits) Erzulie Dantor and Erzulie Freda are often associated with and viewed as protectors of queer people. The lao Ghede Nibo is sometimes depicted as an effeminate drag queen and inspires those he inhabits to lascivious sexuality of all kinds.
Santería
Practitioners of Santería, primarily found in Cuba, generally (though not universally) welcome LGBT members and include them in religious or ritual activities.
Umbanda
Also a Brazilian syncretic religion, Umbanda houses generally support LGBT rights and have performed gay marriages.
New religious movements
Antoinism
Antoinism, a new religious movement founded in Belgium in 1910, does not provide any prescription on issues such as sexuality, as it considers that this is not related to spirituality; homosexuality is not deemed a sin and there is nothing wrong to be gay and antoinist.
Eckankar
Eckankar, an American new religious movement founded by Paul Twitchell in 1965, says on its website that "where legally recognized, same-sex marriages are performed, in the form of the ECK Wedding Ceremony, by ordained ministers of Eckankar".
Neo-Druidism
The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids is a worldwide group dedicated to practicing, teaching, and developing modern Druidry and has more than 25,000 members in 50 countries. The Order is LGBT-affirming within a larger framework of support for civil rights, love of justice, and the love of all existences.
Raëlism
Raëlism, an international new religious movement and UFO religion which was founded in France in 1974, promotes a positive outlook towards human sexuality, including homosexuality. Its founder Raël recognised same-sex marriage, and a Raëlian press release stated that sexual orientation is genetic and it also likened discrimination against gay people to racism. Some Raëlian leaders have performed licensed same-sex marriages.
Santa Muerte
The cult of Santa Muerte is a new religious movement centered on the worship of Santa Muerte, a cult image, female deity, and folk saint which is popularly revered in Mexican Neopaganism and folk Catholicism. A personification of death, she is associated with healing, protection, and safe delivery to the afterlife by her devotees. Santa Muerte is also revered and seen as a saint and protector of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) communities in Mexico, since LGBTQ+ people are considered and treated as outcasts by the Catholic Church, evangelical churches, and Mexican society at large. Many LGBTQ+ people ask her for protection from violence, hatred, disease, and to help them in their search for love. Her intercession is commonly invoked in same-sex marriage ceremonies performed in Mexico. The Iglesia Católica Tradicional México-Estados Unidos, also known as the Church of Santa Muerte, recognizes gay marriage and performs religious wedding ceremonies for homosexual couples. According to R. Andrew Chesnut, Ph.D. in Latin American history and professor of Religious studies, the cult of Santa Muerte is the single fastest-growing new religious movement in the Americas.
Pre-colonial religions of the Americas
Many Nations had respected ceremonial, religious, and social roles for gender nonconforming Native American and First Nations communities, and these roles still exist. Homosexual and gender-variant individuals were also common among other pre-conquest civilizations in Latin America, such as the Aztecs, Mayans, Quechuas, Moches, Zapotecs, and the Tupinambá of Brazil and were accepted in their various religions.
However, the indigenous peoples of the Americas include hundreds of cultures with varying views on sex, gender, and spirituality. Additionally, First Nations and indigenous views on gender and sexuality may not fall within modern Western categorizations of sex and gender.
Pre-colonial religions of the Philippines
Filipino shamans, often known as babaylan held positions of authority as religious leaders or healers in some precolonial Philippine societies. Cross-dressing or gender nonconforming males sometimes took on the role of the female babaylan. Early historical accounts record the existence of male babaylans who wore female clothes and took the demeanor of a woman. Anatomy was not the only basis for gender. Being male or female was based primarily on occupation, appearance, actions and sexuality. A male babaylan could partake in romantic and sexual relations with other men without being judged by society. A small number of Filipinos practice local indigenous religions today.
Paganism
Radical Faeries
The Radical Faeries are a worldwide queer spiritual movement, founded in 1979 in the United States.
Wicca
The Wiccan Charge of the Goddess, one of the most famous texts in Neopaganism, states in the words of the Goddess, "all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals". In traditional forms of Wicca, such as Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca, magic is often performed between a man and a woman, and the "Great Rite" is a sex ritual performed between a Priest and Priestess representing the God and Goddess; however, this is not generally seen as excluding homosexuals or magic between same-sex couples. While many groups still insist that initiations be conferred from man to woman or woman to man, Wicca has become a very diverse religion with varying views. As there is no central governing body nor a core authoritative text, individual covens and practitioners often establish their own guidelines. Many self-initiates are LGBTQ+ and form queer-centered covens and traditions.
Satanism
Both major Satanic traditions, The Satanic Temple and the Church of Satan, emphasise the right of the individual to free sexual expression. Lucien Greaves, spokesperson of The Satanic Temple, has stated the Temple "will always fight... to the death to ensure that there are equal rights for the gay community."
Unitarian Universalism
The first ordained minister of a major religious sect in the U.S. or Canada to come out as gay was the UU Minister James Stoll in 1969. There have been denominational resolutions supporting LGBTQ people since 1970, when a resolution was passed that condemned discrimination against homosexuals. Unitarian Universalism was the first denomination to accept openly transgender people as full members with eligibility to become clergy; in 1988 the first openly transgender person was ordained by the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA).
The UUA has supported marriage equality since 1996 and compared those who resisted such equality to the resistance to the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and the end of anti-miscegenation laws. Three-quarters of all UU congregations have undertaken a series of organizational, procedural, and practical steps to become acknowledged as a "Welcoming Congregation": a congregation that is intentionally welcoming and inclusive of LGBTQ members. On June 29, 1984, the UUA became the first major denomination "to approve religious blessings on homosexual unions." Unitarian Universalists were in the forefront of the work to make same-sex marriages legal in their local states and provinces, as well as on the national level. In May 2004, Arlington Street Church, Boston, was the site of the first state-sanctioned same-sex marriage in the United States. LGBTQ people are regularly ordained as ministers, and have also served at the highest levels of leadership in the denomination, including as president of the Canadian Unitarian Council, interim co-president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and co-moderator of the UUA.
Humanism
Humanism is a non-religious, non-theistic approach to life that supports full equality for LGBTQ individuals, including the right to marry. Humanism and Its Aspirations, a statement of humanist principles from the American Humanist Association, states that "humanists are concerned for the well being of all, are committed to diversity, and respect those of differing yet humane views...work to uphold the equal enjoyment of human rights and civil liberties in an open, secular society and maintain it is a civic duty to participate in the democratic process and a planetary duty to protect nature's integrity, diversity, and beauty in a secure, sustainable manner." The American Humanist Association provides an LGBT Humanist Pride award and has funded an LGBT-inclusive prom for Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Mississippi. The organisation LGBT Humanists UK "is a United Kingdom-based not-for-profit that campaigns for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equality and human rights and promotes Humanism as an ethical worldview." It was formerly an independent group, but since 2012 has been a part of the charity Humanists UK. In 2009 they gave Stephen Fry an award "for his services to humanism and gay rights."
Humanists UK Chief Executive Andrew Copson, who is gay, once wrote that "humanists have always been champions of LGBT rights" and cited his organisation's many years campaigning for decriminalisation and LGBT equality in the UK, including legal same-sex marriages. He pointed out the large number of LGBT people in the movement, including Stephen Fry, Christian Jessen, and Peter Tatchell, as well as historical associations with humanism like the writer Virginia Woolf and E M Forster. In a statement following the Orlando nightclub shooting for the International Humanist and Ethical Union, of which Copson is also President, he went further, saying "Humanism is the ultimate, long-standing and unfaltering ally of LGBTI people everywhere".
Unification Church
Unification Church views heterosexual marriage which becomes "fruitful" by raising their children as God's ideal. Any other sexual relationship, than between husband and wife, is considered a sin.
Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon opposed homosexuality and free sex and in some of his speeches compared such relationships to "dirty dung filled water" and that "Satan and dirty dung-eating dogs go after that". He prophesied that "gays will be eliminated" in a "purge on God's orders".
Religious groups and public policy
Opposition to same-sex marriage and LGBT rights is often associated with conservative religious views. The American Family Association and other religious groups have promoted boycotts of corporations whose policies support the LGBT community.
In conservative Islamic nations, laws generally prohibit same-sex sexual behaviour, and interpretation of Sharia Law on male homosexuality carries the death penalty. This has been condemned as a violation of human rights by human rights organisation Amnesty International and by the writers of the Yogyakarta principles. With the signature of the US in 2009, the proposed UN declaration on LGBT rights has now been signed by every European secular state and all western nations, as well as other countries—67 members of the UN in total. An opposing statement put forward by Muslim nations was signed by 57 member states, mostly in Africa and Asia. 68 out of the total 192 countries have not yet signed either statement. In 2011 the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a landmark resolution initiated by South Africa supporting LGBT rights (See Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the United Nations).
See also
Culture war
LGBT rights by country or territory
Religion and sexuality
Religious trauma syndrome
The Bible and homosexuality
Side A, Side B, Side X, Side Y (theological views)
References
Notes
Citations
Sources
John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, University Of Chicago Press, 1st ed. 1980 , paperback November 2005
Claussen, D. S. 2002. Sex, Religion, Media. Rowman & Littlefield.
Etengoff, C. & Daiute, C., (2015). Clinicians’ perspectives of religious families’ and gay men’s negotiation of sexual orientation disclosure and prejudice, Journal of Homosexuality, 62(3), 394-426.
Etengoff, C. & Daiute, C. (2014). Family Members’ Uses of Religion in Post–Coming-Out Conflicts With Their Gay Relative. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. 6(1), 33-43.
Hurteau, P. (2013). Male Homosexualities and World Religions, Palgrave. .
Johnson, P. and Vanderbeck, R.M. (2014) Law, Religion and Homosexuality, Abingdon: Routledge.
Mathew Kuefler (editor), The Boswell Thesis : Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, University Of Chicago Press, November 2005
Macnutt, Francis (2006) "Can Homosexuality Be Healed?" publisher 'Chosen Books',
Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (eds.), "Islamic Homosexualities: culture, history, and literature" NYU Press New York 1997
Arlene Swidler: Homosexuality and World Religions. Valley Forge 1993.
Wafer, Jim (1991) "The Taste of Blood: Spirit Possession in Brazilian Candomblé" UPP Philadelphia
Wafer, Jim (1997) "Muhammad and Male Homosexuality" in "Islamic Homosexualities: culture, history, and literature" by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (eds.), NYU Press New York
Wafer, Jim (1997) "The Symbolism of Male Love in Islamic Mysthical Literature" in "Islamic Homosexualities: culture, history, and literature" by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (eds.), NYU Press New York 1997
Sexual ethics
Homosexuality | 0.779445 | 0.993838 | 0.774642 |
Dualism in cosmology | Dualism or dualistic cosmology is the moral or belief that two fundamental concepts exist, which often oppose each other. It is an umbrella term that covers a diversity of views from various religions, including both traditional religions and scriptural religions.
Moral dualism is the belief of the great complement of, or conflict between, the benevolent and the malevolent. It simply implies that there are two moral opposites at work, independent of any interpretation of what might be "moral" and independent of how these may be represented. Moral opposites might, for example, exist in a worldview that has one god, more than one god, or none. By contrast, duotheism, bitheism or ditheism implies (at least) two gods. While bitheism implies harmony, ditheism implies rivalry and opposition, such as between good and evil, or light and dark, or summer and winter. For example, a ditheistic system could be one in which one god is a creator and the other a destroyer. In theology, dualism can also refer to the relationship between the deity and creation or the deity and the universe (see theistic dualism). That form of dualism is a belief shared in certain traditions of Christianity and Hinduism. Alternatively, in ontological dualism, the world is divided into two overarching categories. Within Chinese culture and philosophy the opposition and combination of the universe's two basic principles are expressed as yin and yang and are traditionally foundational doctrine of Taoism, Confucianism and some Chinese Buddhist Schools.
Many myths and creation motifs with dualistic cosmologies have been described in ethnographic and anthropological literature. The motifs conceive the world as being created, organized, or influenced by two demiurges, culture heroes, or other mythological beings, who compete with each other or have a complementary function in creating, arranging or influencing the world. There is a huge diversity of such cosmologies. In some cases, such as among the Chukchi, the beings collaborate rather than compete, and they contribute to the creation in a coequal way. In many other instances the two beings are not of the same importance or power (sometimes, one of them is even characterized as gullible). Sometimes they can be contrasted as good versus evil. They may be often believed to be twins or at least brothers. Dualistic motifs in mythologies can be observed in all inhabited continents. Zolotarjov concludes that they cannot be explained by diffusion or borrowing but are rather of convergent origin. They are related to a dualistic organization of society (moieties); in some cultures, the social organization may have ceased to exist, but mythology preserves the memory in more and more disguised ways.
Moral dualism
Moral dualism is the belief of the great complement or conflict between the benevolent and the malevolent. Like ditheism/bitheism (see below), moral dualism does not imply the absence of monist or monotheistic principles. Moral dualism simply implies that there are two moral opposites at work, independent of any interpretation of what might be "moral" and—unlike ditheism/bitheism—independent of how these may be represented.
For example, Mazdaism (Mazdean Zoroastrianism) is both dualistic and monotheistic (but not monist by definition) since in that philosophy God—the Creator—is purely good, and the antithesis—which is also uncreated–is an absolute one. Mandaeism is monotheistic and Gnostic and in its cosmology, the World of Light that is good, is contrasted with the World of Darkness or underworld (alma d-hšuka) that is evil. Zurvanism (Zurvanite Zoroastrianism) and Manichaeism are representative of dualistic and monist philosophies since each has a supreme and transcendental First Principle from which the two equal-but-opposite entities then emanate. This is also true for the suppressed Christian gnostic religions, such as Bogomils, Catharism, and so on. More complex forms of monist dualism also exist, for instance in Hermeticism, where Nous "thought"—that is described to have created man—brings forth both good and evil, dependent on interpretation, whether it receives prompting from the God or from the Demon. Duality with pluralism is considered a logical fallacy.
History
Moral dualism began as a theological belief. Dualism was first seen implicitly in Egyptian religious beliefs by the contrast of the gods Set (disorder, death) and Osiris (order, life). The first explicit conception of dualism came from the Ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism around the mid-fifth century BC. Zoroastrianism is a monotheistic religion that believes that Ahura Mazda is the eternal creator of all good things. Any violations of Ahura Mazda's order arise from druj, which is everything uncreated. From this comes a significant choice for humans to make. Either they fully participate in human life for Ahura Mazda or they do not and give druj power. Personal dualism is even more distinct in the beliefs of later religions.
The religious dualism of Christianity between good and evil is not a perfect dualism as God (good) will inevitably destroy Satan (evil). Early Christian dualism is largely based on Platonic Dualism (See: Neoplatonism and Christianity). There is also a personal dualism in Christianity with a soul-body distinction based on the idea of an immaterial Christian soul.
Duotheism, bitheism, ditheism
When used with regards to multiple gods, dualism may refer to duotheism, bitheism, or ditheism. Although ditheism/bitheism imply moral dualism, they are not equivalent: ditheism/bitheism implies (at least) two gods, while moral dualism does not necessarily imply theism (theos = god) at all.
Both bitheism and ditheism imply a belief in two equally powerful gods with complementary or antonymous properties; however, while bitheism implies harmony, ditheism implies rivalry and opposition, such as between good and evil, bright and dark, or summer and winter. For example, a ditheistic system would be one in which one god is creative, the other is destructive (cf. theodicy). In the original conception of Zoroastrianism, for example, Ahura Mazda was the spirit of ultimate good, while Ahriman (Angra Mainyu) was the spirit of ultimate evil.
In a bitheistic system, by contrast, where the two deities are not in conflict or opposition, one could be male and the other female (cf. duotheism). One well-known example of a bitheistic or duotheistic theology based on gender polarity is found in the neopagan religion of Wicca. In Wicca, dualism is represented in the belief of a god and a goddess as a dual partnership in ruling the universe. This is centered on the worship of a divine couple, the Moon Goddess and the Horned God, who are regarded as lovers. However, there is also a ditheistic theme within traditional Wicca, as the Horned God has dual aspects of bright and dark - relating to day/night, summer/winter - expressed as the Oak King and the Holly King, who in Wiccan myth and ritual are said to engage in battle twice a year for the hand of the Goddess, resulting in the changing seasons. (Within Wicca, bright and dark do not correspond to notions of "good" and "evil" but are aspects of the natural world, much like yin and yang in Taoism.)
Radical and mitigated dualism
Radical Dualism – or absolute Dualism which posits two co-equal divine forces. Manichaeism conceives of two previously coexistent realms of light and darkness which become embroiled in conflict, owing to the chaotic actions of the latter. Subsequently, certain elements of the light became entrapped within darkness; the purpose of material creation is to enact the slow process of extraction of these individual elements, at the end of which the kingdom of light will prevail over darkness. Manicheanism likely inherits this dualistic mythology from Zoroastrianism, in which the eternal spirit Ahura Mazda is opposed by his antithesis, Angra Mainyu; the two are engaged in a cosmic struggle, the conclusion of which will likewise see Ahura Mazda triumphant. The 'Hymn of the Pearl' included the belief that the material world corresponds to some sort of malevolent intoxication brought about by the powers of darkness to keep elements of the light trapped inside it in a state of drunken distraction.
Mitigated Dualism – is where one of the two principles is in some way inferior to the other. Such classical Gnostic movements as the Sethians conceived of the material world as being created by a lesser divinity than the true God that was the object of their devotion. The spiritual world is conceived of as being radically different from the material world, co-extensive with the true God, and the true home of certain enlightened members of humanity; thus, these systems were expressive of a feeling of acute alienation within the world, and their resultant aim was to allow the soul to escape the constraints presented by the physical realm.
However, bitheistic and ditheistic principles are not always so easily contrastable, for instance in a system where one god is the representative of summer and drought and the other of winter and rain/fertility (cf. the mythology of Persephone). Marcionism, an early Christian sect, held that the Old and New Testaments were the work of two opposing gods: both were First Principles, but of different religions.
Theistic dualism
In theology, dualism can refer to the relationship between God and creation or God and the universe. This form of dualism is a belief shared in certain traditions of Christianity and Hinduism.
Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrianism or "Mazdayasna" is one of the world's oldest continuously-practiced religions, based on the teachings of the Iranian-speaking prophet Zoroaster. It has a dualistic cosmology of good and evil and an eschatology which predicts the ultimate conquest of evil by good. Zoroastrianism exalts an uncreated and benevolent deity of wisdom known as Ahura Mazda as its supreme being.
Manichaeism
Manichaeism was a major religion founded in the 3rd century AD by the Parthian prophet Mani, in the Sasanian Empire. Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. Its beliefs were based on local Mesopotamian religious movements and Gnosticism.
The dualism between God and Creation has existed as a central belief in multiple historical sects and traditions of Christianity, including Marcionism, Catharism, Paulicianism, and other forms of Gnostic Christianity. Christian dualism refers to the belief that God and creation are distinct, but interrelated through an indivisible bond. However, Gnosticism is a diverse, syncretistic religious movement consisting of various belief systems generally united in a belief in a distinction between a supreme, transcendent God and a blind, evil demiurge responsible for creating the material universe, thereby trapping the divine spark within matter. Gnosticism is not limited to Christianity, and also incorporates beliefs from other Abrahamic traditions, such as early Jewish sects.
In sects like the Cathars and the Paulicians, this is a dualism between the material world, created by an evil god, and a moral god. Historians divide Christian dualism into absolute dualism, which held that the good and evil gods were equally powerful, and mitigated dualism, which held that material evil was subordinate to the spiritual good. The belief, by Christian theologians who adhere to a libertarian or compatibilist view of free will, that free will separates humankind from God has also been characterized as a form of dualism. The theologian Leroy Stephens Rouner compares the dualism of Christianity with the dualism that exists in Zoroastrianism and the Samkhya tradition of Hinduism. The theological use of the word dualism dates back to 1700, in a book that describes the dualism between good and evil.
The tolerance of dualism ranges widely among the different Christian traditions. As a monotheistic religion, the conflict between dualism and monism has existed in Christianity since its inception. The 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia describes that, in the Catholic Church, "the dualistic hypothesis of an eternal world existing side by side with God was of course rejected" by the thirteenth century, but mind–body dualism was not. The problem of evil is difficult to reconcile with absolute monism, and has prompted some Christian sects to veer towards dualism. Gnostic forms of Christianity were more dualistic, and some Gnostic traditions posited that the Devil was separate from God as an independent deity. The Christian dualists of the Byzantine Empire, the Paulicians, were seen as Manichean heretics by Byzantine theologians. This tradition of Christian dualism, founded by Constantine-Silvanus, argued that the universe was created through evil and separate from a moral God.
Cathars
The Cathars, a Christian sect in southern France, believed that there was a dualism between two gods, one representing good and the other representing evil. Whether or not the Cathari possessed direct historical influence from ancient Gnosticism is a matter of dispute, as the basic conceptions of Gnostic cosmology are to be found in Cathar beliefs (most distinctly in their notion of a lesser creator god), though unlike the second century Gnostics, they did not apparently place any special relevance upon knowledge (gnosis) as an effective salvific force. In any case, the Roman Catholic Church denounced the Cathars as heretics, and sought to crush the movement in the 13th century. The Albigensian Crusade was initiated by Pope Innocent III in 1208 to remove the Cathars from Languedoc in France, where they were known as Albigensians. The Inquisition, which began in 1233 under Pope Gregory IX, also targeted the Cathars.
In Hinduism
The Dvaita Vedanta school of Indian philosophy espouses a dualism between God and the universe by theorizing the existence of two separate realities. The first and the more important reality is that of Shiva or Shakti or Vishnu or Brahman. Shiva or Shakti or Vishnu is the supreme Self, God, the absolute truth of the universe, the independent reality. The second reality is that of dependent but equally real universe that exists with its own separate essence. Everything that is composed of the second reality, such as individual soul (Jiva), matter, etc. exist with their own separate reality. The distinguishing factor of this philosophy as opposed to Advaita Vedanta (monistic conclusion of Vedas) is that God takes on a personal role and is seen as a real eternal entity that governs and controls the universe. Because the existence of individuals is grounded in the divine, they are depicted as reflections, images or even shadows of the divine, but never in any way identical with the divine. Salvation therefore is described as the realization that all finite reality is essentially dependent on the Supreme.
Ontological dualism
Alternatively, dualism can mean the tendency of humans to perceive and understand the world as being divided into two overarching categories. In this sense, it is dualistic when one perceives a tree as a thing separate from everything surrounding it. This form of ontological dualism exists in Taoism and Confucianism and a foundational theory within Traditional Chinese medicine, beliefs that divide the universe into the complementary oppositions of yin and yang. In traditions such as classical Hinduism (Samkhya, Yoga, Vaisheshika and the later Vedanta schools, which accepted the theory of Gunas), Chinese Pure land and Zen Buddhism or Islamic Sufism, a key to enlightenment is "transcending" this sort of dualistic thinking, without merely substituting dualism with monism or pluralism.
In Chinese philosophy
The opposition and combination of the universe's two basic principles of yin and yang is a large part of Chinese philosophy, and is an important feature of Taoism, both as a philosophy and as a religion, although the concept developed much earlier. Some argue that yin and yang were originally an earth and sky god, respectively.
Some of the common associations with yang and yin, respectively, are: male and female, light and dark, active and passive, motion and stillness. Some scholars believe that the two ideas may have originally referred to two opposite sides of a mountain, facing towards and away from the sun. The yin and yang symbol actually has very little to do with Western dualism; instead it represents the philosophy of balance, where two opposites co-exist in harmony and are able to transmute into each other. In the yin-yang symbol there is a dot of yin in yang and a dot of yang in yin. In Taoism, this symbolizes the inter-connectedness of the opposite forces as different aspects of Tao, the First Principle. Contrast is needed to create a distinguishable reality, without which we would experience nothingness. Therefore, the independent principles of yin and yang are actually dependent on one another for each other's distinguishable existence.
The complementary dualistic concept seen in yin and yang represent the reciprocal interaction throughout nature, related to a feedback loop, where opposing forces do not exchange in opposition but instead exchange reciprocally to promote stabilization similar to homeostasis. An underlying principle in Taoism states that within every independent entity lies a part of its opposite. Within sickness lies health and vice versa. This is because all opposites are manifestations of the single Tao, and are therefore not independent from one another, but rather a variation of the same unifying force throughout all of nature.
In other religions
Samoyed peoples
In a Nenets myth, Num and Nga collaborate and compete with each other, creating land, there are also other myths about competing-collaborating demiurges.
Comparative studies of Kets and neighboring peoples
Among others, also dualistic myths were investigated in researches which tried to compare the mythologies of Siberian peoples and settle the problem of their origins. Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov compared the mythology of Ket people with those of speakers of Uralic languages, assuming in the studies, that there are modelling semiotic systems in the compared mythologies; and they have also made typological comparisons. Among others, from possibly Uralic mythological analogies, those of Ob-Ugric peoples and Samoyedic peoples are mentioned. Some other discussed analogies (similar folklore motifs, and purely typological considerations, certain binary pairs in symbolics) may be related to dualistic organization of society—some of such dualistic features can be found at these compared peoples. It must be admitted that, for Kets, neither dualistic organization of society nor cosmological dualism has been researched thoroughly: if such features existed at all, they have either weakened or remained largely undiscovered; although there are some reports on division into two exogamous patrilinear moieties, folklore on conflicts of mythological figures, and also on cooperation of two beings in creating the land: the diving of the water fowl. If we include dualistic cosmologies meant in broad sense, not restricted to certain concrete motifs, then we find that they are much more widespread, they exist not only among some Siberian peoples, but there are examples in each inhabited continent.
Chukchi
A Chukchi myth and its variations report the creation of the world; in some variations, it is achieved by the collaboration of several beings (birds, collaborating in a coequal way; or the creator and the raven, collaborating in a coequal way; or the creator alone, using the birds only as assistants).
Fuegians
All three Fuegian tribes had dualistic myths about culture heroes. The Yámana have dualistic myths about the two brothers. They act as culture heroes, and sometimes stand in an antagonistic relation with each other, introducing opposite laws. Their figures can be compared to the Kwanyip-brothers of the Selk'nam. In general, the presence of dualistic myths in two compared cultures does not imply relatedness or diffusion necessarily.
See also
Didache – The Two Ways
Duality
Mind-body dualism
Cosmotheism
Evil twin
Gnosticism
Pantheism
Nondualism
Table of Opposites
Trinity
Yanantin (complementary dualism in Native South American culture)
Footnotes
Bibliography
External links
"Duality" entry in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology
"Dualism in Philosophy and Religion" in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas
Religious cosmologies
Religious existentialism | 0.778163 | 0.995369 | 0.774559 |
Ethos | Ethos ( or ) is a Greek word meaning 'character' that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology; and the balance between caution and passion. The Greeks also used this word to refer to the power of music to influence emotions, behaviors, and even morals. Early Greek stories of Orpheus exhibit this idea in a compelling way. The word's use in rhetoric is closely based on the Greek terminology used by Aristotle in his concept of the three artistic proofs or modes of persuasion alongside pathos and logos. It gives credit to the speaker, or the speaker is taking credit.
Etymology and origin
Ethos (, ; plurals: ethe, ; ethea, ) is a Greek word originally meaning "accustomed place" (as in "the habitats of horses/", Iliad 6.511, 15.268), "custom, habit", equivalent to Latin mores.
Ethos forms the root of ethikos, meaning "morality, showing moral character". As an adjective in the neuter plural form ta ethika.
Current usage
In modern usage, ethos denotes the disposition, character, or fundamental values peculiar to a specific person, people, organization, culture, or movement. For example, the poet and critic T. S. Eliot wrote in 1940 that "the general ethos of the people they have to govern determines the behavior of politicians". Similarly the historian Orlando Figes wrote in 1996 that in Soviet Russia of the 1920s "the ethos of the Communist party dominated every aspect of public life".
Ethos may change in response to new ideas or forces. For example, according to the Jewish historian Arie Krampf, ideas of economic modernization which were imported into Palestine in the 1930s brought about "the abandonment of the agrarian ethos and the reception of...the ethos of rapid development".
Rhetoric
In rhetoric, ethos (credibility of the speaker) is one of the three artistic proofs (pistis, πίστις) or modes of persuasion (other principles being logos and pathos) discussed by Aristotle in 'Rhetoric' as a component of argument. Speakers must establish ethos from the start. This can involve "moral competence" only; Aristotle, however, broadens the concept to include expertise and knowledge. Ethos is limited, in his view, by what the speaker says. Others, however, contend that a speaker's ethos extends to and is shaped by the overall moral character and history of the speaker—that is, what people think of his or her character before the speech has even begun (cf Isocrates).
According to Aristotle, there are three categories of ethos:
phronesis – useful skills and practical wisdom
arete – virtue, goodwill
eunoia – goodwill towards the audience
In a sense, ethos does not belong to the speaker but to the audience and it's appealing to the audience's emotions. Thus, it is the audience that determines whether a speaker is a high- or a low-ethos speaker. Violations of ethos include:
The speaker has a direct interest in the outcome of the debate (e.g. a person pleading innocence of a crime);
The speaker has a vested interest or ulterior motive in the outcome of the debate;
The speaker has no expertise (e.g. a lawyer giving a speech on space flight is less convincing than an astronaut giving the same speech).
Completely dismissing an argument based on any of the above violations of ethos is an informal fallacy (Appeal to motive). The argument may indeed be suspect; but is not, in itself, invalid.
Modern interpretations
Although Plato never uses the term "ethos" in his extant corpus; scholar Collin Bjork, a communicator, podcaster, and digital rhetorician, argues that Plato dramatizes the complexity of rhetorical ethos in the Apology of Socrates. For Aristotle, a speaker's ethos was a rhetorical strategy employed by an orator whose purpose was to "inspire trust in his audience" (Rhetorica 1380). Ethos was therefore achieved through the orator's "good sense, good moral character, and goodwill", and central to Aristotelian virtue ethics was the notion that this "good moral character" was increased in virtuous degree by habit (Rhetorica 1380). Ethos also is related to a character's habit as well (The Essential Guide to Rhetoric, 2018). The person's character is related to a person's habits (The Essential Guide to Rhetoric, 2018). Aristotle links virtue, habituation, and ethos most succinctly in Book II of Nicomachean Ethics: "Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching [...] while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name ethike is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit)" (952). Discussing women and rhetoric, scholar Karlyn Kohrs Campbell notes that entering the public sphere was considered an act of moral transgression for females of the nineteenth century: "Women who formed moral reform and abolitionist societies, and who made speeches, held conventions, and published newspapers, entered the public sphere and thereby lost their claims to purity and piety" (13). Crafting an ethos within such restrictive moral codes, therefore, meant adhering to membership of what Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner have theorized as counter publics. While Warner contends that members of counter publics are afforded little opportunity to join the dominant public and therefore exert true agency, Nancy Fraser has problematized Habermas's conception of the public sphere as a dominant "social totality" by theorizing "subaltern counter publics", which function as alternative publics that represent "parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs" (67).
Though feminist rhetorical theorists have begun to offer ways of conceiving of ethos that are influenced by postmodern concepts of identity, they remain cognizant of how these classical associations have shaped and still do shape women's use of the rhetorical tool. Johanna Schmertz draws on Aristotelian ethos to reinterpret the term alongside feminist theories of subjectivity, writing that, "Instead of following a tradition that, it seems to me, reads ethos somewhat in the manner of an Aristotelian quality proper to the speaker's identity, a quality capable of being deployed as needed to fit a rhetorical situation, I will ask how ethos may be dislodged from identity and read in such a way as to multiply the positions from which women may speak" (83). Rhetorical scholar and Kate Ronald's claim that "ethos is the appeal residing in the tension between the speaker's private and public self", (39) also presents a more postmodern view of ethos that links credibility and identity. Similarly, Nedra Reynolds and Susan Jarratt echo this view of ethos as a fluid and dynamic set of identifications, arguing that "these split selves are guises, but they are not distortions or lies in the philosopher's sense. Rather they are 'deceptions' in the sophistic sense: recognition of the ways one is positioned multiply differently" (56).
Rhetorical scholar Michael Halloran has argued that the classical understanding of ethos "emphasizes the conventional rather than the idiosyncratic, the public rather than the private" (60). Commenting further on the classical etymology and understanding of ethos, Halloran illuminates the interdependence between ethos and cultural context by arguing that "To have ethos is to manifest the virtues most valued by the culture to and for which one speaks" (60). While scholars do not all agree on the dominant sphere in which ethos may be crafted, some agree that ethos is formed through the negotiation between private experience and the public, rhetorical act of self-expression. Karen Burke LeFevre's argument in Invention as Social Act situates this negotiation between the private and the public, writing that ethos "appears in that socially created space, in the 'between', the point of intersection between speaker or writer and listener or reader" (45–46).
According to Nedra Reynolds, "ethos, like postmodern subjectivity, shifts and changes over time, across texts, and around competing spaces" (336). However, Reynolds additionally discusses how one might clarify the meaning of ethos within rhetoric as expressing inherently communal roots. This stands in direct opposition to what she describes as the claim "that ethos can be faked or 'manipulated'" because individuals would be formed by the values of their culture and not the other way around (336). Rhetorical scholar John Oddo also suggests that ethos is negotiated across a community and not simply a manifestation of the self (47). In the era of mass-mediated communication, Oddo contends, one's ethos is often created by journalists and dispersed over multiple news texts. With this in mind, Oddo coins the term intertextual ethos, the notion that a public figure's "ethos is constituted within and across a range of mass media voices" (48).
In "Black Women Writers and the Trouble with Ethos", scholar Coretta Pittman notes that race has been generally absent from theories of ethos construction and that this concept is troubling for black women. Pittman writes, "Unfortunately, in the history of race relations in America, black Americans' ethos ranks low among other racial and ethnic groups in the United States. More often than not, their moral characters have been associated with a criminalized and sexualized ethos in visual and print culture" (43).
In Greek tragedy
The ways in which characters were constructed is important when considering ethos, or character, in Greek tragedy. Augustus Taber Murray explains that the depiction of a character was limited by the circumstances under which Greek tragedies were presented. These include the single unchanging scene, necessary use of the chorus, small number of characters limiting interaction, large outdoor theatres, and the use of masks, which all influenced characters to be more formal and simple. Murray also declares that the inherent characteristics of Greek tragedies are important in the makeup of the characters. One of these is the fact that tragedy characters were nearly always mythical characters. This limited the character, as well as the plot, to the already well-known myth from which the material of the play was taken. The other characteristic is the relatively short length of most Greek plays. This limited the scope of the play and characterization so that the characters were defined by one overriding motivation toward a certain objective from the beginning of the play.
However, Murray clarifies that strict constancy is not always the rule in Greek tragedy characters. To support this, he points out the example of Antigone who, even though she strongly defies Creon at the beginning of the play, begins to doubt her cause and plead for mercy as she is led to her execution.
Several other aspects of the character element in ancient Greek tragedy are worth noting. One of these, which C. Garton discusses, is the fact that either because of contradictory action or incomplete description, the character cannot be viewed as an individual, or the reader is left confused about the character. One method of reconciling this would be to consider these characters to be flat, or type-cast, instead of round. This would mean that most of the information about the character centers around one main quality or viewpoint. Comparable to the flat character option, the reader could also view the character as a symbol. Examples of this might be the Eumenides as vengeance, or Clytemnestra as symbolizing ancestral curse. Yet another means of looking at character, according to Tycho von Wilamowitz and Howald, is the idea that characterization is not important. This idea is maintained by the theory that the play is meant to affect the viewer or reader scene by scene, with attention being only focused on the section at hand. This point of view also holds that the different figures in a play are only characterized by the situation surrounding them, and only enough so that their actions can be understood.
Garet makes three more observations about a character in Greek tragedy. The first is an abundant variety of types of characters in Greek tragedy. His second observation is that the reader or viewer's need for characters to display a unified identity that is similar to human nature is usually fulfilled. Thirdly, characters in tragedies include incongruities and idiosyncrasies.
Another aspect stated by Garet is that tragedy plays are composed of language, character, and action, and the interactions of these three components; these are fused together throughout the play. He explains that action normally determines the major means of characterization. For example, the play Julius Caesar, is a good example for a character without credibility, Brutus. Another principle he states is the importance of these three components' effect on each other; the important repercussion of this being character's impact on action.
Augustus Taber Murray also examines the importance and degree of interaction between plot and character. He does this by discussing Aristotle's statements about plot and character in his Poetics: that plot can exist without character, but the character cannot exist without plot, and so the character is secondary to the plot. Murray maintains that Aristotle did not mean that complicated plot should hold the highest place in a tragedy play. This is because the plot was, more often than not, simple and therefore not a major point of tragic interest. Murray conjectures that people today do not accept Aristotle's statement about character and plot because to modern people, the most memorable things about tragedy plays are often the characters. However, Murray does concede that Aristotle is correct in that "[t]here can be no portrayal of character [...] without at least a skeleton outline of plot".
One other term frequently used to describe the dramatic revelation of character in writing is "persona". While the concept of ethos has traveled through the rhetorical tradition, the concept of persona has emerged from the literary tradition, and is associated with a theatrical mask. Roger Cherry explores the distinctions between ethos and pathos to mark the distance between a writer's autobiographical self and the author's discursive self as projected through the narrator. The two terms also help to refine distinctions between situated and invented ethos. Situated ethos relies on a speaker's or writer's durable position of authority in the world; invented ethos relies more on the immediate circumstances of the rhetorical situation.
In pictorial narrative
Ethos, or character, also appears in the visual art of famous or mythological ancient Greek events in murals, on pottery, and sculpture referred to generally as pictorial narrative. Aristotle even praised the ancient Greek painter Polygnotos because his paintings included characterization. The way in which the subject and his actions are portrayed in visual art can convey the subject's ethical character and through this the work's overall theme, just as effectively as poetry or drama can. This characterization portrayed men as they ought to be, which is the same as Aristotle's idea of what ethos or character should be in tragedy. (Stansbury-O'Donnell, p. 178) Mark D. Stansbury-O'Donnell states that pictorial narratives often had ethos as its focus, and was therefore concerned with showing the character's moral choices. (Stansbury-O'Donnell, p. 175) David Castriota, agreeing with Stansbury-O'Donnell's statement, says that the main way Aristotle considered poetry and visual arts to be on equal levels was in character representation and its effect on action. However, Castriota also maintains about Aristotle's opinion that "his interest has to do with the influence that such ethical representation may exert upon the public". Castriota also explains that according to Aristotle, "[t]he activity of these artists is to be judged worthy and useful above all because exposure of their work is beneficial to the polis". Accordingly, this was the reason for the representation of character, or ethos, in public paintings and sculptures. In order to portray the character's choice, the pictorial narrative often shows an earlier scene than when the action was committed. Stansbury-O'Donnell gives an example of this in the form of a picture by the ancient Greek artist Exekia which shows the Greek hero Ajax planting his sword in the ground in preparation to commit suicide, instead of the actual suicide scene (Stansbury-O'Donnell, p. 177). Additionally, Castriota explains that ancient Greek art expresses the idea that character was the major factor influencing the outcome of the Greeks' conflicts against their enemies. Because of this, "ethos was the essential variable in the equation or analogy between myth and actuality".
See also
References
Further reading
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics (transl. W. D. Ross). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. .
Aristotle. On Rhetoric (Transl. G. A. Kennedy). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. .
Barthes, Roland.L'Ancienne rhétorique. Communications, Vol. 16, Nr. 1 (1970), Seuil: pp. 172–223.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. Praeger, 1989.
Castriota, David. Myth, Ethos, and Actuality: Official Art in Fifth-Century B.C. Athens. London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
Chiron, Pierre. Aristotle: Rhétorique. Paris: Flammarion, 2007.
Fraser, Nancy. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of the Actually Existing Democracy." Social Text 25.26 (1990): 56–80.
Gandler, Stefan "The quadruple modern Ethos: Critical Theory in the Americas." APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy, Newark, DE: American Philosophical Association/University of Delaware, vol. 14, núm. 1, fall 2014, pp. 2–4. .
Garton, C. "Characteristics in Greek Tragedy." The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 77, Part 2. (1957), pp. 247–254. JSTOR.
Garver, Eugene. Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Givone, Sergio. Eros/Ethos. Turin: Einaudi, 2000. .
Grazia, Margreta. Hamlet without Hamlet. New York, NY: Cambridge, 2007. .
Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991.
Halliwell, Stephen. Aristotle's Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. .
Halloran, S. Michael. "Aristotle's Concept of Ethos, or if not His, Someone Else's." Rhetoric Review, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Sep. 1982), pp. 58–63. JSTOR. .
Jarratt, Susan, and Nedra Reynolds. "The Splitting Image: Contemporary Feminisms and the Ethics of ethos." Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Eds. James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994. 37–63.
LeFevre, K.B. Invention as a Social Act. Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
Lundberg, Christian O. and Keith, William M. "The Essential Guide to Rhetoric". 2nd Eds. Bedford/St. Martin's: Macmillan Learning, 2018.
McDonald, Marianne; Walton, J. Michael (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theater. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press, 2007. .
Meyer, Michel. La rhétorique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, coll. «Que sais-je? n° 2133», 2004. .
Müller, Jörn. Physics und Ethos: Der Naturbegriff bei Aristoteles und seine Relevanz für die Ethik. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006.
Höffe, Otfried (ed.). Aristoteles. Poetik. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009.
Hyde, Michael J.; Schrag, Calvin O. (eds.). The Ethos of Rhetoric. Columbia (SC): University of South Carolina, 2004. .
Oddo, John. (2014) "The Chief Prosecutor and the Iraqi Regime: Intertextual Ethos and Transitive Chains of Authority." In Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle: A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell's U.N. Address, pp. 45–76. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.
Paris, Bernard. Character as a Subversive Force in Shakespeare: the history and Roman plays. London: Associated University Presses Inc, 1991.
Pittman, Corretta. "Black Women Writers and the Trouble with Ethos: Harriet Jacobs, Billie Holiday, and Sister Souljah." Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 37 (2007): 43–70.
Proscurcin Jr., Pedro. Der Begriff Ethos bei Homer. Beitrag zu einer philosophischen Interpretation. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014. .
Rapp, Christof. Aristoteles: Rhetorik. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002.
Ronald, Kate. "A Reexamination of Personal and Public Discourse in Classical Rhetoric." Rhetoric Review 9.1 (1990): 36–48.
Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg (ed.). Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric. Berkeley (CA): University of California Press, 1996.
Schmertz, Johanna. "Constructing Essences: Ethos and the Postmodern Subject of Feminism." Rhetoric Review 18.1 (1999): 82–91.
Vergnières, Solange. Éthique et Politique chez Aristote: Physis, Êthos, Nomos. Paris: PUF, 1995.
Warner, Michael. "Publics and Counterpublics." Public Culture 14.1: 49–90.
Woerther, Frédérique. L'èthos aristotélicien. Paris: Librairie Philosophique Vrin, 2007. .
External links
Ancient Greek theatre
Concepts in ancient Greek ethics
Narratology
Plot (narrative)
Poetics
Rhetoric
Virtue
Social agreement
Theories in ancient Greek philosophy
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Christian existentialism | Christian existentialism is a theo-philosophical movement which takes an existentialist approach to Christian theology. The school of thought is often traced back to the work of the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) who is widely regarded as the father of existentialism.
Kierkegaardian themes
Christian existentialism relies on Kierkegaard's understanding of Christianity. Kierkegaard addressed themes such as authenticity, anxiety, love, and the irrationality and subjectivity of faith, rejecting efforts to contain God in an objective, logical system. To Kierkegaard, the focus of theology was on the individual grappling with subjective truth rather than a set of objective claims – a point he demonstrated by often writing under pseudonyms that had different points of view. He contended that each person must make independent choices, which then constitute his or her existence. Each person suffers from the anguish of indecision (whether knowingly or unknowingly) until committing to a way to live. Kierkegaard posited three stages of human existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious, the latter coming after what is often called the leap of faith. Kierkegaard argued that the universe is fundamentally paradoxical, and that its greatest paradox is the transcendent union of God and humans in the person of Jesus Christ. He also posited having a personal relationship with God that supersedes all prescribed moralities, social structures and communal norms, since he asserted that following social conventions is essentially a personal aesthetic choice made by individuals.
Major premises
One of the major premises of Kierkegaardian Christian existentialism entails calling the masses back to a more genuine form of Christianity. This form is often identified with some notion of Early Christianity, which mostly existed during the first three centuries after Christ's crucifixion. Beginning with the Edict of Milan, which was issued by Roman Emperor Constantine I in AD 313, Christianity enjoyed a level of popularity among Romans and later among other Europeans. And yet Kierkegaard asserted that by the 19th century, the ultimate meaning of New Testament Christianity (love, cf. agape, mercy and loving-kindness) had become perverted, and Christianity had deviated considerably from its original threefold message of grace, humility, and love.
Another major premise of Kierkegaardian Christian existentialism involves Kierkegaard's conception of God and Love. For the most part, Kierkegaard equates God with Love. Thus, when a person engages in the act of loving, he is in effect achieving an aspect of the divine. Kierkegaard also viewed the individual as a necessary synthesis of both finite and infinite elements. Therefore, when an individual does not come to a full realization of his infinite side, he is said to be in despair. For many contemporary Christian theologians, the notion of despair can be viewed as sin. However, to Kierkegaard, a man sinned when he was exposed to this idea of despair and chose a path other than one in accordance with God's will.
A final major premise of Kierkegaardian Christian existentialism entails the systematic undoing of evil acts. Kierkegaard asserted that once an action had been completed, it should be evaluated in the face of God, for holding oneself up to divine scrutiny was the only way to judge one's actions. Because actions constitute the manner in which something is deemed good or bad, one must be constantly conscious of the potential consequences of his actions. Kierkegaard believed that the choice for goodness ultimately came down to each individual. Yet Kierkegaard also foresaw the potential limiting of choices for individuals who fell into despair.
The Bible
Christian Existentialism often refers to what it calls the indirect style of Christ's teachings, which it considers to be a distinctive and important aspect of his ministry. Christ's point, it says, is often left unsaid in any particular parable or saying, to permit each individual to confront the truth on his own. This is particularly evident in (but is certainly not limited to) his parables; for example in the Gospel of Matthew.
A good example of indirect communication in the Old Testament is the story of David and Nathan in .
An existential reading of the Bible demands that the reader recognize that he is an existing subject, studying the words that God communicates to him personally. This is in contrast to looking at a collection of truths which are outside and unrelated to the reader. Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an external agent is forcing them upon him, but as though they are inside him and guiding him internally. This is the task Kierkegaard takes up when he asks: "Who has the more difficult task: the teacher who lectures on earnest things a meteor's distance from everyday life, or the learner who should put it to use?" Existentially speaking, the Bible doesn't become an authority in a person's life until they permit the Bible to be their personal authority.
Notable Christian existentialists
In addition to Søren Kierkegaard, Christian existentialists include German Protestant theologians Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann, American existential psychologist Rollo May (who introduced much of Tillich's thought to a general American readership), British Anglican theologian John Macquarrie, American philosopher Clifford Williams, French Catholic philosophers Maurice Blondel, Gabriel Marcel, Louis Lavelle, Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain and Pierre Boutang and French Protestant Paul Ricœur, German philosopher Karl Jaspers, Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, Russian philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov, and Greek Orthodoxy philosopher Christos Yannaras. Karl Barth added to Kierkegaard's ideas the notion that existential despair leads an individual to an awareness of God's infinite nature. Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky could be placed within the tradition of Christian existentialism. Walker Percy, an American author from the twentieth century, gave Christian existentialist critique of contemporary society. "Walker Percy: Prophetic, Existentialist, Catholic Storyteller" (New Connections) by Rev. Robert E. Lauder (Author)
The roots of existentialism have been traced back as far as Augustine of Hippo. Some of the most striking passages in Pascal's Pensées, including the famous section on the Wager, deal with existentialist themes. Jacques Maritain, in Existence and the Existent: An Essay on Christian Existentialism, finds the core of true existentialism in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
Existential theology
In the monograph, Existential Theology: An Introduction (2020), Hue Woodson provides a constructive primer to the field and, he argues, thinkers that can be considered more broadly as engaging with existential theology, defining a French school including Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, and Jean-Luc Marion, a German school including Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and a Russian school including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Berdyaev.
Radical existential Christianity
It has been claimed that radical existential Christians’ faith is based in their sensible and immediate and direct experience of God indwelling in human terms. It is suggested that individuals do not make or create their Christian existence; it does not come as a result of a decision one personally makes. The radical Protestants of the 17th century, for example Quakers may have been in some ways theo-philosophically aligned with radical existential Christianity.
See also
References
Further reading
Cobb, John B. (1967). The Structure of Christian Existence(Philadelphia: The Westminster Press)
Cochrane, Arthur (1956). The Existentialists and God (Dubuque: The University of Dubuque Press)
Davis, George W. (1957). Existentialism and Theology: An Investigation of the Contribution of Rudolf Bultmann to Theological Thought (New York: Philosophical Library)
Heinemann, F. H. (1958). Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: Harper and Row)
Jansen, G. M, A. (1966). An Existential Approach to Theology (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company)
Jenkins, David. (1987). The Scope and Limits of John Macquarrie's Existential Theology (Stockholm: Uppsala)
Kuitert, H. M. (1968). The Reality of Faith: A Way Between Protestant Orthodoxy and Existentialist Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)
Macquarrie, John (1957). An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann (New York: The Macmillian Company)
Martin, Bernard (1963). The Existentialist Theology of Paul Tillich (New Haven: College and University Press)
Michalson, Carl, ed. (1956). Christianity and the Existentialists (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons)
Slaate, Howard A. (1971). The Paradox of Existentialist Theology: The Dialectics of a Faith-Subsumed Reason-in-Existence (New York: Humanities Press)
Spier, J. M. (1953), Christianity and Existentialism (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company)
Stagg, Frank. (1973). Polarities of Man's Existence in Biblical Perspective (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press)
Williams, J. Rodman. (1965). Contemporary Existentialism and Christian Faith (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Fall)
Woodson, Hue. (2020). Existential Theology: An Introduction (Eugene: Wipf and Stock)
External links
A website that explores the existential teachings of Jesus, with references to Kierkegaard and Tillich
Christian philosophy
existentialism
Existentialism
Political theories
Religious existentialism
Søren Kierkegaard
Types of existentialism | 0.77919 | 0.993698 | 0.774279 |
Religious violence | Religious violence covers phenomena in which religion is either the subject or the object of violent behavior. All the religions of the world contain narratives, symbols, and metaphors of violence and war. Religious violence is violence that is motivated by, or in reaction to, religious precepts, texts, or the doctrines of a target or an attacker. It includes violence against religious institutions, people, objects, or events. Religious violence includes both acts which are committed by religious groups and acts which are committed against religious groups.
The term has proven difficult to define, however. Violence is a very broad concept, because it is used against both human and non-human entities. Furthermore, violence can have a wide variety of expressions, from blood shedding and physical harm to violation of personal freedoms, passionate conduct or language, or emotional outbursts like fury or passion. Adding to the difficulty, religion is a complex and modern Western concept, one whose definition still has no scholarly consensus. In general, however, religion is considered an abstraction which entails beliefs, doctrines, and sacred places.
Religious violence, like all forms of violence, is a cultural process which is context-dependent and highly complex. Thus, oversimplifications of religion and violence often lead to misguided understandings of the causes for acts of violence, as well as oversight of their rarity. Violence is perpetrated for a wide variety of ideological reasons, and religion is generally only one of many contributing social and political factors that may foment it. For example, studies of supposed cases of religious violence often conclude that the violence was driven more by ethnic animosities than by religious worldviews. Due to the complex nature of religion, violence, and the relationship between them, it is often difficult to discern whether religion is a significant cause of violence.
Indeed, the link between religious belief and behavior has proven difficult to define. Decades of anthropological, sociological, and psychological research have all concluded that behaviors do not directly follow from religious beliefs and values because people's religious ideas tend to be fragmented, loosely connected, and context-dependent, just like other domains of culture and life.
Religions, ethical systems, and societies rarely promote violence as an end in of itself. At the same time, there is often tension between a desire to avoid violence and the acceptance of justifiable uses of violence to prevent a perceived greater evil that permeates a culture.
History of the concept of religion
Religion is a modern Western concept not used before the 1500s when the compartmentalized concept of religion arose, where religious entities are considered separate from worldly ones. Furthermore, parallel concepts are not found in many cultures, and there is no equivalent term for "religion" in many languages.
Ancient sacred texts like the Bible and the Quran did not have a concept of religion in their original languages, nor did their authors or the cultures to which they belonged. Likewise, there is no precise equivalent of "religion" in Hebrew, and Judaism does not draw clear distinctions between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities.
The modern concept of religion as an abstraction which entails distinct sets of beliefs or doctrines is a recent invention in the English language. Such usage began with texts from the 17th century due to the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation, as well as more prevalent colonization and globalization in the age of exploration which involved contact with numerous foreign and indigenous cultures and non-European languages. For example, in Asia, it was Europeans who first applied the terms "Buddhism", "Hinduism", "Taoism", and "Confucianism" in the 19th century.
Thus, scholars have found it difficult to develop a consistent definition of religion, with some giving up on the possibility of a definition and others rejecting the term entirely. Still others argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply it to non-Western cultures.
Definition of violence
Violence is a complicated concept which broadly carries descriptive and evaluative components that range from harming non-human entities to human self-harm. Religious scholar Ralph Tanner cites the definition of violence in the Oxford English Dictionary as "far beyond [the infliction of] pain and the shedding of blood". He argues that, although violence clearly encompasses injury to persons or property, it also includes, "the forcible interference in personal freedom, violent or passionate conduct or language [and] finally passion or fury".
Similarly, a study of the Crusades' impacts on the Muslim world concludes:
The word "violence" can be defined to extend far beyond pain and shedding blood. It carries the meaning of physical force, violent language, fury, and, more importantly, forcible interference.
Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim expands on this, writing:
For many people, ... only physical violence truly qualifies as violence. But, certainly, violence is more than killing people, unless one includes all those words and actions that kill people slowly. The effect of limitation to a "killing fields" perspective is the widespread neglect of many other forms of violence. We must insist that violence also refers to that which is psychologically destructive, that which demeans, damages, or depersonalizes others. In view of these considerations, violence may be defined as follows: any action, verbal or nonverbal, oral or written, physical or psychical, active or passive, public or private, individual or institutional/societal, human or divine, in whatever degree of intensity, that abuses, violates, injures, or kills. Some of the most pervasive and most dangerous forms of violence are those that are often hidden from view (against women and children, especially); just beneath the surface in many of our homes, churches, and communities is abuse enough to freeze the blood. Moreover, many forms of systemic violence often slip past our attention because they are so much a part of the infrastructure of life (e.g., racism, sexism, ageism).
Non-physical abuse in religious settings is described as religious abuse. Religious abuse may also include the misuse of religion for selfish, secular, or ideological ends, such as the abuse of a clerical position.
Relationship between religion and violence
According to philosopher of religion Steve Clarke, "currently available evidence does not allow us to determine whether religion is, or is not, a significant cause of violence". He lists multiple problems that make it impossible to establish a causal relationship, such as difficulties in distinguishing motive/pretext and inability to verify if they would necessarily lead to any violent action, the lack of consensus on definitions of both violence and religion among scholars, and the inability to see if the presence of religion actually adds or subtracts from general levels of violence, since no society without religion has ever existed to compare with.
In his book Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence, religious sociologist Charles Selengut characterizes the phrase "religion and violence" as "jarring", asserting that "religion is thought to be opposed to violence and a force for peace and reconciliation". He acknowledges, however, that "the history and scriptures of the world's religions tell stories of violence and war even as they speak of peace and love". Similarly, religious scholar Ralph Tanner describes the combination of religion and violence as "uncomfortable", asserting that religious thinkers generally avoid the conjunction of the two and argue that religious violence is "only valid in certain circumstances which are invariably one-sided".
According to historian Matthew Rowley, three hundred contributing causes of religious violence have been discussed by scholars. In his study of causes of religious violence, though, he cautions that "violence in the name of God is a complex phenomenon and oversimplification further jeopardizes peace because it obscures many of the causal factors". In another article, Rowley lists 15 ways to address the complexity of violence, both secular and religious, and he also claims that secular narratives of religious violence tend to be erroneous or exaggerated due to their oversimplification of religious people and religious people's beliefs, their rationale based on false dichotomies, and their ignorance of complex secular causes of supposed "religious violence". He writes that when one is discussing religious violence, they should also note that the overwhelming majority of religious people do not get inspired to engage in violence.
In contrast, religious scholar Hector Avalos simplifies religious causes of violence to access over four scarce resources: divine will and knowledge, primarily through scripture; sacred space; group privileging; and salvation. Not all religions have or use these four resources. He believes that religious violence is particularly untenable because these resources are never verifiable, and, unlike claims to scarce physical resources like water or land, it cannot be adjudicated objectively.
Regina Schwartz, scholar of English literature, Judaism, and Christianity, argues that all monotheistic religions are inherently violent because of an exclusivism that inevitably fosters violence against those that are considered outsiders. In a review of her book Curse of Cain for The New Yorker, Lawrence Weschler asserts that Schwartz is concerned not just with the violent legacy of Abrahamic religions, but with their genocidal legacy as well.
Michael Jerryson, scholar of comparative religion and religious violence, argues that scholarship on religion and violence sometimes overlooks non-Abrahamic religions. This tendency leads to considerable problems, one of which is the support of faulty associations. For example, he finds a persistent global pattern of alignment in which religions such as Islam are viewed as causes of violence and religions such as Buddhism are viewed as causes of peace.
Another lens with which to view religious violence is through political violence, which religion can often play a central role in. This is especially true of terrorism, in which acts of violence are committed against unarmed non-combatants in order to inspire fear and achieve political goals. Terrorism expert Martha Crenshaw suggests that religion is a mask used by political movements which seek to draw attention to their causes and gain support. Crenshaw outlines two approaches when observing religious violence in order to grasp its underlying mechanisms. One approach, called the instrumental approach, sees religious violence as acting as a rational calculation to achieve some political end. Thus, she claims that increasing the costs of performing such violence will help curb it. Crenshaw's other approach sees religious violence as stemming from the organizational structure of religious communities, with the heads of these communities acting as political figureheads. Crenshaw suggests that threatening the internal stability of these organizations (perhaps by offering them a nonviolent alternative) will dissuade religious organizations from performing political violence. A third approach sees religious violence as the result of community dynamics rather than a religious duty. Systems of meanings which are developed within these communities allow religious interpretations to justify violence, so acts like terrorism occur because people are part of communities of violence. In this way, religious violence and terrorism are performances which are designed to inspire an emotional reaction from both those in the community and those outside of it.
Sectarian violence
Challenges to the view that religions are violent
Behavioral studies
Decades of research conducted by anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have established that "religious congruence", the assumption that religious beliefs and values are tightly integrated in an individual's mind or that religious practices and behaviors follow directly from religious beliefs or that religious beliefs are chronologically linear and stable across different contexts, is actually rare, despite being commonly assumed. People's religious ideas are fragmented, loosely connected, and context-dependent, as in all other domains of culture and in life. The beliefs, affiliations, and behaviors of an individual are complex activities that have many sources, including culture.
Myth of religious violence
American Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh has argued in his book The Myth of Religious Violence that "attempts to separate religious and secular violence are incoherent". He asserts that "the idea that religion has a tendency to promote violence is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies and it underlies many of our institutions and policies, from limits on the public role of churches to efforts to promote liberal democracy in the Middle East". Cavanaugh challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that there is a "myth of religious violence", by asserting that:
Religion is not a universal and transhistorical phenomenon. What counts as "religious" or "secular" in some context is a function of configurations of power both in the West and in lands colonized by the West. The distinctions of "Religious/Secular" and "Religious/Political" are modern Western inventions.
The invention of the concept of "religious violence" helps the West reinforce superiority of Western social orders to "nonsecular" social orders, namely Muslims at the time of publication.
The concept of "religious violence" can be and is used to legitimate violence against non-Western "Others".
Peace depends on a balanced view of violence and recognition that so-called secular ideologies and institutions can be just as prone to absolutism, divisiveness, and irrationality.
Historian and religious studies scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell generally concurs with Cavanaugh in his book Exposing Myths about Christianity, arguing that numerous cases of supposed religious violence, such as the Thirty Years War, the French Wars of Religion, the Protestant-Catholic conflict in Ireland, the Sri Lankan Civil War, and the Rwandan Civil War, were all primarily motivated by social, political, and economic issues rather than religion.
Religious studies scholars John Morreall and Tamara Sonn have extended Russell's claims by arguing that all cases of violence and war include social, political, and economic dimensions. They posit that since there is no consensus on definitions of "religion" among scholars and since there is no way to isolate "religion" from the rest of the more likely motivational dimensions, it is incorrect to label any violent event as "religious". Since dozens of examples exist from the European wars of religion that show that people from the same religions fought each other and that people from different religions became allies during these conflicts, the motivations for these conflicts were not about religion, they claim. Russell adds that the fact that these wars of religion ended after rulers agreed to practice their religions in their own territories means that the conflicts were more related to political control than people's religious views.
Robert Pape, a political scientist who specializes in suicide terrorism, has made this case for modern suicide attacks, which are often labeled as "religious" by media outlets. Pape compiled the first complete database of every documented suicide bombing from 1980–2003. He argues that news reports about suicide attacks are profoundly misleading, arguing, "There is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world's religions". After studying 315 suicide attacks carried out over the last two decades, he concludes that suicide bombers' actions stem fundamentally from political conflict, not religious beliefs.
Anthropologist Scott Atran conducted extensive interviews on suicide terrorism with terrorists from Al Qaeda, Hamas, Taliban, and others to see why some are willing to die and kill for and he noted that they do not die for a cause, they die for their communities, family, friends; all for the hope of a better future for their communities.
Author Karen Armstrong, of Irish Catholic descent, echoes these sentiments by arguing that so-called religious conflicts such as the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the European wars of religion were all deeply political conflicts at their cores rather than religious ones, especially since people from different faiths became allies and fought against each other in no consistent fashion. She claims that the Western concept of the separation of church and state, first advocated by Reformer Martin Luther, laid a foundation for viewing religion and society as divided, when in reality, religion and society were intermixed to the point that no one made such a distinction, nor was there a defining cut between such experiences in the past. She argues the during the Enlightenment, religion began to be seen as individualistic and private, despite the fact that modern secular ideals like the equality of all human beings and intellectual and political liberty were historically promoted in religious idioms of the past.
Anthropologist Jack David Eller has also asserted that religion is not inherently violent, arguing that "religion and violence are clearly compatible, but they are not identical"; that "violence is neither essential to nor exclusive to religion"; and that "virtually every form of religious violence has its nonreligious corollary". Moreover, he argues that religion "may be more a marker of the [conflicting] groups than an actual point of contention between them".
On the other hand, historians such as Jonathan Kirsch have likened religious persecutions like the European inquisitions to persecutions in Stalin's Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, McCarthy blacklists, and other secular events.
John Teehan, scholar of the philosophy and cognitive science of religion, takes a position that integrates the two sides of this debate. He describes the traditional response in defense of religion as "draw[ing] a distinction between the religion and what is done in the name of that religion or its faithful". Teehan argues, "this approach to religious violence may be understandable but it is ultimately untenable and prevents us from gaining any useful insight into either religion or religious violence". He takes the position that "violence done in the name of religion is not a perversion of religious belief ... but flows naturally from the moral logic inherent in many religious systems, particularly monotheistic religions ...". However, Teehan acknowledges that "religions are also powerful sources of morality". He asserts, "religious morality and religious violence both spring from the same source, and this is the evolutionary psychology underlying religious ethics".
Secularism as a response to religious violence
Byron Bland, scholar of conflict and peacemaking, asserts that one of the most prominent reasons for the "rise of the secular in Western thought" was the reaction against the religious violence of the 16th and 17th centuries. He asserts, "The secular was a way of living with the religious differences that had produced so much horror. Under secularity, political entities have a warrant to make decisions independent from the need to enforce particular versions of religious orthodoxy. Indeed, they may run counter to certain strongly held beliefs if made in the interest of common welfare. Thus, one of the important goals of the secular is to limit violence". Theologian William T. Cavanaugh writes that what he calls, "the myth of religious violence", as a reason for the rise of secular states may be traced to earlier philosophers, such as Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire. Cavanaugh delivers a detailed critique of this idea in his 2009 book The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict.
Secular violence
Gender and sexuality scholar Janet Jakobsen writes, "just as religion and secularism are relationally defined termsterms that depend on each otherso also the legitimization of violence through either religious or secular discourse is also relational". She argues that the idea that "religion kills" is used to legitimate secular violence, and that, similarly, the idea that "secularism kills" is used to legitimate religious violence. According to John Carlson, critics who are skeptical of "religious violence" contend that excessive attention is often paid to acts of religious violence compared to acts of secular violence, and that this leads to a false essentializing of both religion as being prone to violence and the secular as being prone to peace. According to Janet Jakobsen, secularism and modern secular states are much more violent than religion, and modern secular states in particular are usually the source of most of the world's violence. Carlson states that by focusing on the destructive capacity of government, Jakobsen "essentializes another category - the secular state - even as she criticizes secular governments that essentialize religion's violent propensities". Tanner states that secular regimes and leaders have used violence to promote their own agendas. Violence committed by secular governments and people, including the anti-religious, have been documented including violence or persecutions focused on religious believers and those who believe in the supernatural in multiple regions notably such as in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, China,and Mexico. In the 20th century, estimates state that over 25 million Christians died from secular antireligious violence worldwide.
Religions have been persecuted more in the past 100 years than at any other time in history. According to Geoffrey Blainey, atrocities have occurred under all ideologies, including in nations which were strongly secular such as the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. Talal Asad, an anthropologist, states that equating institutional religion with violence and fanaticism is incorrect and that devastating cruelties and atrocities done by non-religious institutions in the 20th century should not be overlooked. He also states that nationalism has been argued as being a secularized religion.
Abrahamic religions
Hector Avalos argues that, because religions claim to have divine favor for themselves, both over and against other groups, this sense of self-righteousness leads to violence because conflicting claims of superiority, based on unverifiable appeals to God, cannot be objectively adjudicated.
Similarly, Eric Hickey writes, "the history of religious violence in the West is as long as the historical record of its three major religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with their mutual antagonisms and their struggles to adapt and survive despite the secular forces that threaten their continued existence."
Regina Schwartz argues that all monotheistic religions, including Christianity, are inherently violent because of their exclusivism which inevitably fosters violence against those who are considered outsiders. Lawrence Wechsler asserts that Schwartz is not just arguing that Abrahamic religions have a violent legacy, instead, she is arguing that their legacy is actually genocidal in nature.
Christianity
Before the 11th century, Christians had not developed the doctrine of "Holy war", the belief that fighting itself might be considered a penitential and spiritually meritorious act. Throughout the Middle Ages, force could not be used to propagate religion. For the first three centuries of Christianity, the Church taught the pacifism of Jesus and notable church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian of Carthage even went as far as arguing against joining the military or using any form of violence against aggressors. In the 4th century, St. Augustine developed a "Just War" concept, whereby limited uses of war would be considered acceptable in order to preserve the peace and retain orthodoxy if it was waged: for defensive purposes, ordered by an authority, had honorable intentions, and produced minimal harm. However, the criteria he used was already developed by Roman thinkers in the past and "Augustine's perspective was not based on the New Testament." St. Augustine's "Just War" concept was widely accepted, however, warfare was not regarded as virtuous in any way. Expression of concern for the salvation of those who killed enemies in battle, regardless of the cause for which they fought, was common. In the medieval period which began after the fall of Rome, there were increases in the level of violence due to political instability. By the 11th century, the Church condemned this violence and warring by introducing: the "Peace of God" which prohibited attacks on clergy, pilgrims, townspeople, peasants and property; the "Truce of God" which banned warfare on Sundays, Fridays, Lent, and Easter; and it imposed heavy penances on soldiers for killing and injuring others because it believed that the shedding of other people's blood was the same as shedding the blood of Christ.
During the 9th and 10th centuries, multiple invasions occurred in some regions in Europe and these invasions lead them to form their own armies in order to defend themselves and by the 11th century, this slowly lead to the emergence of the Crusades, the concept of "holy war", and terminology such as "enemies of God". By the time of the Crusades, "Despite all the violence during this period, the majority of Christians were not active participants but were more often its victims" and groups which used nonviolent means to peacefully dialogue with Muslims were established, like the Franciscans.
Today, the relationship between Christianity and violence is the subject of controversy because one view advocates the belief that Christianity advocates peace, love and compassion despite the fact that in certain instances, its adherents have also resorted to violence. Peace, compassion and forgiveness of wrongs done by others are key elements of Christian teaching. However, Christians have struggled since the days of the Church fathers with the question of when the use of force is justified (e.g. the Just war theory of Saint Augustine). Such debates have led to concepts such as just war theory. Throughout history, certain teachings from the Old Testament, the New Testament and Christian theology have been used to justify the use of force against heretics, sinners and external enemies. Heitman and Hagan identify the Inquisitions, Crusades, wars of religion, and antisemitism as being "among the most notorious examples of Christian violence". To this list, Mennonite theologian J. Denny Weaver adds "warrior popes, support of capital punishment, corporal punishment under the guise of 'spare the rod spoil the child,' justifications of slavery, world-wide colonialism under the guise of converting people to Christianity, the systemic violence against women who are subjected to the rule of men." Weaver employs a broader definition of violence that extends the meaning of the word to cover "harm or damage", not just physical violence per se. Thus, under his definition, Christian violence includes "forms of systemic violence such as poverty, racism, and sexism".
Christian theologians point to a strong doctrinal and historical imperative against violence that exists within Christianity, particularly Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which taught nonviolence and "love of enemies". For example, Weaver asserts that Jesus' pacifism was "preserved in the justifiable war doctrine which declares that all war is sin even when it is occasionally declared to be a necessary evil, and in the prohibition of fighting by monastics and clergy as well as in a persistent tradition of Christian pacifism".
Many authors highlight the ironical contradiction between Christianity's claims to be centered on "love and peace" while, at the same time, harboring a "violent side". For example, Mark Juergensmeyer argues: "that despite its central tenets of love and peace, Christianity—like most traditions—has always had a violent side. The bloody history of the tradition has provided images as disturbing as those provided by Islam, and violent conflict is vividly portrayed in the Bible. This history and these biblical images have provided the raw material for theologically justifying the violence of contemporary Christian groups. For example, attacks on abortion clinics have been viewed not only as assaults on a practice that Christians regard as immoral, but also as skirmishes in a grand confrontation between forces of evil and good that has social and political implications.", sometimes referred to as spiritual warfare. The statement attributed to Jesus "I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword" has been interpreted by some as a call to arms to Christians.
Maurice Bloch also argues that the Christian faith fosters violence because the Christian faith is a religion, and religions are violent by their very nature; moreover, he argues that religion and politics are two sides of the same coin—power. Others have argued that religion and the exercise of force are deeply intertwined, but they have also stated that religion may pacify, as well as channel and heighten violent impulses
In response to the view that Christianity and violence are intertwined, Miroslav Volf and J. Denny Weaver reject charges that Christianity is a violent religion, arguing that certain aspects of Christianity might be misused to support violence but that a genuine interpretation of its core elements would not sanction human violence but would instead resist it. Among the examples that are commonly used to argue that Christianity is a violent religion, J. Denny Weaver lists "(the) Crusades, the multiple blessings of wars, warrior popes, support of capital punishment, corporal punishment under the guise of 'spare the rod and spoil the child,' justifications of slavery, world-wide colonialism in the name of converting people to Christianity, the systemic violence against women who are subjected to the rule of men." Weaver characterizes the counter-argument as focusing on "Jesus, the beginning point of Christian faith,... whose Sermon on the Mount taught nonviolence and love of enemies; who nonviolently faced his death at the hands of his accusers; whose nonviolent teaching inspired the first centuries of pacifist Christian history and was subsequently preserved in the justifiable war doctrine that declares that all war is sin even when it is occasionally declared to be a necessary evil, and in the prohibition of fighting by monastics and clergy as well as in a persistent tradition of Christian pacifism."
Miroslav Volf acknowledges the fact that "many contemporaries see religion as a pernicious social ill that needs aggressive treatment rather than medicine from which a cure is expected." However, Volf contests the claim that "(the) Christian faith, as one of the major world religions, predominantly fosters violence." Instead of this negative assessment, Volf argues that Christianity "should be seen as a contributor to more peaceful social environments." Volf examines the question of whether or not Christianity fosters violence, and he has identified four main arguments which claim that it does: that religion by its nature is violent, which occurs when people try to act as "soldiers of God"; that monotheism entails violence, because a claim of universal truth divides people into "us versus them"; that creation, as in the Book of Genesis, is an act of violence; and the argument that the intervention of a "new creation", as in the Second Coming, generates violence. Writing about the latter, Volf says: "Beginning at least with Constantine's conversion, the followers of the Crucified have perpetrated gruesome acts of violence under the sign of the cross. Over the centuries, the seasons of Lent and Holy Week were, for the Jews, times of fear and trepidation; Christians have perpetrated some of the worst pogroms as they remembered the crucifixion of Christ, for which they blamed the Jews. Muslims also associate the cross with violence; crusaders' rampages were undertaken under the sign of the cross." In each case, Volf concluded that the Christian faith was misused in order to justify violence. Volf argues that "thin" readings of Christianity might be used mischievously to support the use of violence. He counters, however, by asserting that "thick" readings of Christianity's core elements will not sanction human violence, instead, they will resist it.
Volf asserts that Christian churches suffer from a "confusion of loyalties". He asserts that "rather than the character of the Christian faith itself, a better explanation as to why Christian churches are either impotent in the face of violent conflicts or are active participants in them is derived from the proclivities of its adherents which are at odds with the character of the Christian faith." Volf observes that "(although) they are explicitly giving ultimate allegiance to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, many Christians in fact seem to have an overriding commitment to their respective cultures and ethnic groups."
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has an early history of violence. It was motivated by Anti-Mormonism and began with the religious persecution of the Church by well respected citizens, law enforcement, and government officials. Ultimately, this persecution lead to several historically well-known acts of violence. These ranged from attacks on early members, such as the Haun's Mill massacre following the Mormon Extermination Order to one of the most controversial and well-known cases of retaliation violence, the Mountain Meadows massacre. This was the result of an unprovoked response to religious persecution whereby an innocent party which was traveling through Church occupied territory was attacked on 11 September 1857.
Islam
Islam has been associated with violence in a variety of contexts, especially in the context of Jihad. In Arabic, the word jihād translates into English as "struggle". Jihad appears in the Qur'an and frequently in the idiomatic expression "striving in the way of Allah (al-jihad fi sabil Allah)". The context of the word can be seen in its usage in Arabic translations of the New Testament such as in 2 Timothy 4:7 where St. Paul expresses keeping the faith after many struggles. A person engaged in jihad is called a mujahid; the plural is mujahideen. Jihad is an important religious duty for Muslims. A minority among the Sunni scholars sometimes refer to this duty as the sixth pillar of Islam, though it occupies no such official status. In Twelver Shi'a Islam, however, Jihad is one of the ten Practices of the Religion.
For some the Quran seem to endorse unequivocally to violence. On the other hand, some scholars argue that such verses of the Quran are interpreted out of context.
According to a study from Gallup, most Muslims understand the word "Jihad" to mean individual struggle, not something violent or militaristic. Muslims use the word in a religious context to refer to three types of struggles: an internal struggle to maintain faith, the struggle to improve the Muslim society, or the struggle in a holy war. The prominent British orientalist Bernard Lewis argues that in the Qur'an and the hadith jihad implies warfare in the large majority of cases. In a commentary of the hadith Sahih Muslim, entitled al-Minhaj, the medieval Islamic scholar Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi stated that "one of the collective duties of the community as a whole is to lodge a valid protest, to solve problems of religion, to have knowledge of Divine Law, to command what is right and forbid wrong conduct".
According to Irfan Omar, Islam has a history of nonviolence and negotiation when dealing with conflicts: for instance, early Muslims experienced 83 conflicts with non-Muslims and only 4 of these ended up in armed conflict.
Terrorism in Islam
In western societies the term jihad is often translated as "holy war". Scholars of Islamic studies often stress the fact that these two terms are not synonymous. Muslim authors, in particular, tend to reject such an approach, stressing the non-militant connotations of the word.
Islamic terrorism refers to terrorism that is engaged in by Muslim groups or individuals who are motivated by either politics, religion or both. Terrorist acts have included airline hijacking, kidnapping, assassination, suicide bombing, and mass murder.
The tension reached a climax on 11 September 2001 when Islamic terrorists flew hijacked commercial airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The "War on Terror" has triggered anti-Muslim sentiments within most western countries and throughout the rest of the world. Al-Qaeda is one of the most well-known Islamic extremist groups, created by Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden. Al-Qaeda's goal is to spread the "purest" form of Islam and Islamic law. Based on his interpretation of the Quran, bin Laden needed to do "good" by inflicting terror upon millions of people. Following the terrorist attacks on 11 September, bin Laden praised the suicide bombers in his statement: "the great action you did which was first and foremost by the grace of Allah. This is the guidance of Allah and the blessed fruit of jihad." In contrast, echoing the overwhelming majority of people who interpreted these events, President Bush said on 11 September, "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. ... And freedom will be defended. Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts."
Controversies surrounding the subject include disagreements over whether terrorist acts are self-defense or aggression, national self-determination or Islamic supremacy; whether Islam can ever condone the targeting of non-combatants; whether some attacks described as Islamic terrorism are merely terrorist acts committed by Muslims or terrorist acts motivated by nationalism; whether Wahhabism are at the root of Islamic terrorism, or simply one cause of it; how much support for Islamic terrorism exists in the Muslim world and whether support of terrorism is only a temporary phenomenon, a "bubble", now fading away.
Judaism
As the religion of the Jews, who are also known as Israelites, Judaism is based on the Torah and the Tanakh, which is also referred to as the Hebrew Bible, and it guides its adherents on how to live, die, and fight via the 613 commandments which are referred to as the 613 Mitzvahs, the most famous of which are the Ten Commandments, one of which is the commandment You shall not murder.
The Torah also lists instances and circumstances which require its adherents to go to war and kill their enemies. Such a war is usually referred to as a Milkhemet Mitzvah, a "compulsory war" which is obligated by the Torah or God, or a Milkhemet Reshut a "voluntary war".
Criticism
Burggraeve and Vervenne describe the Old Testament as being full of violence and they also cite it as evidence for the existence of both a violent society and a violent god. They write that, "(i)n numerous Old Testament texts the power and glory of Israel's God is described in the language of violence." They assert that more than one thousand passages refer to Yahweh as acting violently or supporting the violence of humans and they also assert that more than one hundred passages involve divine commands to kill humans.
On the basis of these passages in the Old Testament, some Christian churches and theologians argue that Judaism is a violent religion and the god of Israel is a violent god. Reuven Firestone asserts that these assertions are usually made in the context of claims that Christianity is a religion of peace and the god of Christianity is one who only expresses love.
Other views
Some scholars such as Deborah Weissman readily acknowledge the fact that "normative Judaism is not pacifist" and "violence is condoned in the service of self-defense."However, the Talmud prohibits violence of any kind towards one's neighbour. J. Patout Burns asserts that, although Judaism condones the use of violence in certain cases, Jewish tradition clearly posits the principle of minimization of violence. This principle can be stated as "(wherever) Jewish law allows violence to keep an evil from occurring, it mandates that the minimal amount of violence must be used in order to accomplish one's goal."
The love and pursuit of peace, as well as laws which require the eradication of evil, sometimes by the use of violent means, co-exist in the Jewish tradition.
The Hebrew Bible contains instances of religiously mandated wars which often contain explicit instructions from God to the Israelites to exterminate other tribes, as in or . Examples include the story
of the Amalekites (, ), the story of the Midianites, and the battle of Jericho .
Judging biblical wars
The biblical wars of extermination have been characterized as campaigns of "genocide" by several authorities, because the Torah states that the Israelites annihilated entire ethnic groups or tribes: the Israelites killed all Amalekites, including men, women, and children (1 Samuel 15:1–20); the Israelites killed all men, women, and children in the battle of Jericho(Joshua 6:15–21), and the Israelites killed all men, women and children of several Canaanite tribes (Joshua 10:28–42). However, some scholars believe that these accounts in the Torah are exaggerated or metaphorical.
Arab-Israeli conflict
During the Palestine-Israeli conflict as well as during the broader Arab–Israeli conflict, a small number of people have used the Torah (TaNaKh|Tanakh) to justify anti-Palestinianism and the killing of Palestinians, but the IDF has stated "That we don't condone the killing of innocent Palestinians".
Portraying Palestinians as "Amalekites"
On several occasions, Jewish fundamentalists have associated Palestinians with biblical antagonists, particularly with the Amalekites. For example, Rabbi Israel Hess has recommended that Palestinians be killed, based on biblical verses such as 1 Samuel 15.
Other religions
Buddhism
Hinduism
Neo-paganism
In the United States and Europe, neo-pagan beliefs have been associated with many terrorist incidents. Although the majority of neo-pagans oppose violence and racism, folkish factions of Odinism, Wotanism, and Ásatrú emphasize their Nordic cultural heritage and idolize warriors. For these reasons, a 1999 Federal Bureau of Investigation report on domestic terrorism which was titled Project Megiddo described Odinism as "[lending] itself to violence and [having] the potential to inspire its followers to violence." As of 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center has recognized at least two active neo-pagan hate groups in the United States. Many white supremacists (especially those white supremacists who are in prison) are converting to Odinism at increasing rates, citing the impurity of Christianity and the failure of previous groups to accomplish goals as the primary reasons for their conversion. Similarities between Odinism and other extremist groups such as Christian Identity facilitate conversions. The targets of neo-pagan violence are similar to those of white supremacist terrorists and nationalist terrorists, but an added target includes Christians and churches.
Sikhism
Indigenous religions
Within Prehistoric societies, war ceremonies were one of the main parts of indigenous religions such as some Native American religions.
Notable incidents
Murder of Alan Berg — Defunct American white supremacist group the Order was founded by avid practitioners of Wotanism such as David Lane and Robert Jay Mathews. Lane was convicted of the 1984 murder of Jewish radio host Alan Berg.
Church burnings — A wave of church burnings, such as during the early Norwegian black metal scene in the 1990s, has been cited as an act of neo-pagan terrorism. The arsons coincided with a resurgence in the popularity of European black metal. This genre of music featured the imagery and ideas of neo-paganism, Satanism, and nationalism. The targets were Christian churches, and up to 28 churches were targeted during this period. Popular black metal musician Varg Vikernes, a noted neo-pagan and nationalist, was convicted of three of these arsons and charged with a fourth attempt.
Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooting — Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. shot and killed three people at a Kansas Jewish community center in 2014. Prior to becoming an Odinist, Miller Jr. was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
2012 Ramu violence
Conflicts and wars
Some authors have stated that "religious" conflicts are not exclusively based on religious beliefs but should instead be seen as clashes of communities, identities, and interests that are secular-religious or at least very secular.
Some have asserted that attacks are carried out by those with very strong religious convictions such as terrorists in the context of a global religious war. Robert Pape, a political scientist who specializes in suicide terrorism argues that much of the modern Muslim suicide terrorism is secularly based. Although the causes of terrorism are complex, it may be safe to assume that terrorists are partially reassured by their religious views that their god is on their side and that it will reward them in Heaven for punishing unbelievers.
These conflicts are among the most difficult to resolve, particularly when both sides believe that God is on their side and that He has endorsed the moral righteousness of their claims. One of the most infamous quotes which is associated with religious fanaticism was uttered in 1209 during the siege of Béziers, a Crusader asked the Papal Legate Arnaud Amalric how to tell Catholics from Cathars when the city was taken, to which Amalric replied:
"Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius", or "Kill them all; God will recognize his."
Ritual violence
Ritual violence may be directed against victims (e.g., human and nonhuman animal sacrifice and ritual slaughter) or self-inflicted (religious self-flagellation).
According to the hunting hypothesis, created by Walter Burkert in Homo Necans, carnivorous behavior is considered a form of violence. Burkett suggests that the anthropological phenomenon of religion grew out of rituals that were connected with hunting and the associated feelings of guilt over the violence that hunting required.
See also
Al-Qaeda
Antireligion
Army of God (terrorist organization)
Blood atonement
Blood libel
Boko Haram
Criticism of religion
Hundred Years' War
International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief
Islamic State
Pacifism and religion
Peace in Islamic philosophy
Religion and peacebuilding
Religions for Peace
Religious discrimination
Religious fanaticism
Religious intolerance
Religious persecution
Religious segregation
Religious terrorism
Religious war
Taiping Rebellion
Taliban
Warriors of Christ the King
Witch-hunt
References
Further reading
Academic
Appleby, R. Scott (2000) The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Avalos, Hector (2005) Fighting Words: the Origins of Religious Violence. New York: Prometheus.
Buc, Philippe (2015) Holy War, Martyrdom and Terror: Christianity, Violence and the West. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Burkert, Walter. (1983). Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press
Crocket, Clayton (ed.) (2006) Religion and Violence in a Secular World: Toward a New Political Theology. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Flood, Derek (2012) "The way of peace and grace". Sojourners. January 2012.
Girard, René. (1977) Violence et le Sacré (English Violence and the Sacred). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hamerton-Kelly, Robert G. (ed.) (1987) Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Jerryson, Michael. (2010) Buddhist Warfare. New York: Oxford University Press.
Juergensmeyer, Mark, Kitts, Margo and Jerryson, Michael (ed.) (2013) The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence. New York: Oxford University Press.
Juergensmeyer, Mark; Kitts, Margo; Jerryson, Michael (ed.) (2016) Violence and the World's Religious Traditions: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. (2000) Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kitts, Margo (2018) Elements of Ritual and Violence. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Kitts, Margo (ed.) (2013–present) Journal of Religion and Violence, Charlottesville: Philosophy Documentation Center.
Kitts, Margo (ed.) (2018) Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation: Religious Perspectives on Suicide. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pedahzur, Ami and Weinberg, Leonard (eds.) (2004) Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism. New York: Routledge.
Selengut, C. (2003) Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira
Steffen, Lloyd. (2007) Holy War, Just War: Exploring the Moral Meaning of Religious Violence. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Other
Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jack (2003) Is Religion Killing Us? Harrisburg: Trinity Press International
Stern, Jessica. (2004) Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. New York: Harper Perennial.
External links
Myth of Religious conflict in Africa
William T. Cavanaugh Resources from Jesus Radicals
Dispute resolution
Violence | 0.779475 | 0.993113 | 0.774107 |
Life stance | A person's life stance, or lifestance, is their relation with what they accept as being of ultimate importance. It involves presuppositions and commitment to exercise it in theory and practice in one's life.
It can connote an integrated perspective on reality as a whole and how to assign valuations, thus being a concept similar or equivalent to that of a worldview; with the latter word (derived from the German ) being generally a more common and comprehensive term. Like the term worldview, the term life stance is a shared label encompassing both religious perspectives (for instance: "a Buddhist life stance" or "a Christian life stance" or "a Pagan life stance"), as well as non-religious spiritual or philosophical alternatives (for instance: "a humanist life stance" or "a personist life stance" or "a Deep Ecology life stance"), without discrimination in favour of any.
Origins of the phrase
Humanists interested in educational matters apparently coined the neologism life stance in the mid-1970s; Harry Stopes-Roe of the Rationalist Press Association and British Humanist Association developed the concept originally in that context.
The term originally arose in the context of debates over the controversial content of the City of Birmingham's Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education, 1975. That document referred to "non-religious stances for living". According to Barnes:
In the late 1980s Harry Stopes-Roe initiated a successful campaign for the adoption of the term by the International Humanist and Ethical Union and by other organisations (see also his comments quoted below on its provenance).
It was not an uncontroversial proposal among humanists.
The term was introduced as part of an attempt to establish a clear identity for Humanism, in order to gain recognition and respect.
According to Stopes-Roe:
Definition
Harry Stopes-Roe, who fought for the term's acceptance by the Humanist movement, defined "life stance" as follows:
The British Humanist Association, drawing in part on jurisprudence related to the term "religion or belief" in the European Convention on Human Rights, has put forward a more analytical definition:
Orthography
A life stance may be distinguished from general support of a cause by capitalization of the first letter. For instance, the life stance of Humanism is distinguished from humanism generally. Many life stances may contain humanism to a greater or lesser extent as instrumental value in order to fulfill their own chosen intrinsic value(s). However, Humanism regards it as having intrinsic value.
Not all life stances use this orthography.
Spectrum
The term was intended to be a shared label encompassing both religions and alternatives to religion, without discrimination in favour of either.
A life stance differs from a worldview or a belief system in that the term life stance emphasizes a focus on what is of ultimate importance. Life stance differs from eupraxsophy in that the latter typically implies a strictly non-theistic outlook, whereas a life stance can be theistic or non-theistic, supernaturalistic or naturalistic.
Religious life stances
A religion is a set of beliefs and practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and/or moral claims about reality, the cosmos, and human nature, and often codified as prayer, ritual, and law. Religion also encompasses ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and mystic experience. The term "religion" refers to both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction.
In the frame of European religious thought, religions present a common quality, the "hallmark of patriarchal religious thought": the division of the world in two comprehensive domains, one sacred, the other profane. Religion is often described as a communal system for the coherence of belief focusing on a system of thought, unseen being, person, or object, that is considered to be supernatural, sacred, divine, or of the highest truth.
Moral codes, practices, values, institutions, tradition, philosophy, rituals, and scriptures are often traditionally associated with the core belief. Religion is also often described as a "way of life".
Non-religious life stances
Alternatives to religion include life stances based on atheism, agnosticism, deism, skepticism, freethought, pantheism, secular humanism, spiritual but not religious (SBNR), Objectivism, existentialism, modern incarnations of Hellenistic philosophies, or general secularism.
Humanism
Humanism is an example of life stance which may be considered to be religious (usually in a non-theistic, ethical sense) or non-religious or anti-religious. One of Stopes-Roe's reasons for advocating the adoption of "life stance" as a label for the Humanist movement, was his hope that it would end the arguments between the different sides as to how best to characterise their position (note that Stopes-Roe uses the term "god-religious" to distinguish theists from non-theists in what follows):
Bill Cooke comments:
Values and purposes
Different life stances differ in what they hold as intrinsic values and purposes in life.
See also
Intentional stance
Lifestyle (sociology)
Meaning of life
Personal life
World view
Basic belief
Belief
References
Bibliography
Barnes, L. Philip (2008). "The 2007 Birmingham Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education: a new direction for statutory religious education in England and Wales", Journal of Beliefs & Values, Vol. 29 (1), April, pp. 75–83.
British Humanist Association (1975). Objective, fair and balanced: a new law for religion in education. London: BHA.
Cooke, Bill (2003). The Blasphemy Depot: a hundred years of the Rationalist Press Association. London: RPA.
Cox, E. (1975). "Principles behind Syllabus Making", Learning for Living, Vol. 4 (4), p. 132.
Fowler, Jeaneane D (1999). Humanism: beliefs and practices, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.
Greer, J.E. (1985). "Edwin Cox and Religious Education", British Journal of Religious Education, Vol. 8 (1), pp. 13–19 .
Hull, John (1984). Studies in Religion and Education, London: Falmer.
Kurtz, Paul et al. (ed) (1989). Building a world community: humanism in the 21st century, Prometheus Books, pp. 166–
Slotte, Pamela (2008). "Waving the ‘Freedom of Religion or Belief’ Card, or Playing It Safe: Religious Instruction in the Cases of Norway and Finland", Religion and Human Rights Vol. 3 (1), March, pp. 33–69..
Stopes-Roe, H[arry].V. (1976). "The concept of a 'life stance' in education." Learning for living, Vol. 16 (1), Autumn, pp. 25–28.
Stopes-Roe, Harry (1983). "Moral Practice and Ultimate Reality", Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 12 (2), pp. 81–91.
Stopes-Roe, Harry (1987). "Humanism as a life stance", Free Inquiry, Vol. 8 (1), Winter 1987/88, pp. 7–9, 56.
Stopes-Roe, Harry (1988a), "Humanism as a life stance", New Humanist, Vol. 103, (2) October, pp. 19–21.
Stopes-Roe, Harry (1988b). "Controversy: In defence of a life stance", New Humanist, Vol. 103 (4), December, pp. 8–9.
Stopes-Roe, Harry (1996). "The Presuppositions of Dialogue: a fair vocabulary." Journal for the Critical Study of Religion, Ethics and Society, Vol. 1 (2), Summer/Fall, pp. 9–15.
Stopes-Roe, Harry (2007). "Life stance", in Flynn, Tom (ed.). The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief. Amherst, New York: Prometheus, pp. 506–507.
Walter, Nicolas (1988a). "Rationally speaking: against Humanism as a life stance." New Humanist, Vol. 103 (3), October, p. 4.
Walter, Nicolas (1988b). "Rationally speaking: what kind of humanists?", New Humanist, Vol. 103 (4), December, p. 4.
Personal life
Intention
Belief
Philosophical theories | 0.791932 | 0.977243 | 0.77391 |
World Values Survey | The World Values Survey (WVS) is a global research project that explores people's values and beliefs, how they change over time, and what social and political impact they have. Since 1981 a worldwide network of social scientists have conducted representative national surveys as part of WVS in almost 100 countries.
The WVS measures, monitors and analyzes: support for democracy, tolerance of foreigners and ethnic minorities, support for gender equality, the role of religion and changing levels of religiosity, the impact of globalization, attitudes toward the environment, work, family, politics, national identity, culture, diversity, insecurity, and subjective well-being.
Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister of Italy and the tenth President of the European Commission, said about WVS work:
The growing globalization of the world makes it increasingly important to understand ... diversity. People with varying beliefs and values can live together and work together productively, but for this to happen it is crucial to understand and appreciate their distinctive worldviews.
Insights
The WVS has over the years demonstrated that people's beliefs play a key role in economic development, the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions, the rise of gender equality, and the extent to which societies have effective government.
Inglehart–Welzel cultural map
Analysis of WVS data made by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel asserts that there are two major dimensions of cross cultural variation in the world:
Traditional values versus secular-rational values and
Survival values versus self-expression values.
The global cultural map shows how scores of societies are located on these two dimensions. Moving upward on this map reflects the shift from Traditional values to Secular-rational and moving rightward reflects the shift from Survival values to Self-expression values.
Traditional values emphasize the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values. People who embrace these values also reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.
Secular-rational values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values. These societies place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority. Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable.
Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. It is linked with a relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance.
Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, growing tolerance of foreigners, gays and lesbians and gender equality, and rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life.
Christian Welzel introduced the concepts of emancipative values and secular values. He provided measurements for those values using World Values Survey data. Emancipative values are an updated version of self-expression values. Secular values are an updated version of traditional versus secular rational values. The survival versus self-expression values and the traditional versus secular rational values were factors extracted with an orthogonal technique of factor analysis, which forbids the two scales from correlating with each other. The emancipative and secular values are measured in such a way as to represent the data as faithfully as possible even if this results in a correlation between the scales. The secular and emancipative values indices are positively correlated with each other.
Culture variations
A somewhat simplified analysis is that following an increase in standards of living, and a transit from development country via industrialization to post-industrial knowledge society, a country tends to move diagonally in the direction from lower-left corner (poor) to upper-right corner (rich), indicating a transit in both dimensions.
However, the attitudes among the population are also highly correlated with the philosophical, political and religious ideas that have been dominating in the country. Secular-rational values and materialism were formulated by philosophers and the left-wing politics side in the French Revolution, and can consequently be observed especially in countries with a long history of social democratic or socialistic policy, and in countries where a large portion of the population have studied philosophy and science at universities. Survival values are characteristic for eastern-world countries and self-expression values for western-world countries. In a liberal post-industrial economy, an increasing share of the population has grown up taking survival and freedom of thought for granted, resulting in that self-expression is highly valued.
Examples
Societies that have high scores in Traditional and Survival values: Zimbabwe, Morocco, Jordan, Bangladesh.
Societies with high scores in Traditional and Self-expression values: Most of Latin America, Ireland.
Societies with high scores in Secular-rational and Survival values: Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Estonia.
Societies with high scores in Secular-rational and Self-expression values: Japan, Nordic countries, Benelux, Germany, Switzerland, Czechia, Slovenia, France.
Gender values
Findings from the WVS indicate that support for gender equality is not just a consequence of democratization. It is part of a broader cultural change that is transforming industrialized societies with mass demands for increasingly democratic institutions. Although a majority of the world's population still believes that men make better political leaders than women, this view is fading in advanced industrialized societies, and also among young people in less prosperous countries.
World Values Survey data is used by the United Nation Development Programme in order to calculate the gender social norms index. The index measures attitudes toward gender equality worldwide and was introduced in the Human Development Report starting from 2019. The index has four components, measuring gender attitudes in politics, education and economy as well as social norms related to domestic violence.
Religion
The data from the World Values Survey cover several important aspects of people's religious orientation. One of them tracks how involved people are in religious services and how much importance they attach to their religious beliefs. In the data from 2000, 98% of the public in Indonesia said that religion was very important in their lives while in China only three percent considered religion very important. Another aspect concerns people's attitudes towards the relation between religion and politics and whether they approve of religious spokesmen who try to influence government decisions and people's voting preferences.
In a factor analysis of the latest wave (6) of World Values Survey data, Arno Tausch (Corvinus University of Budapest) found that family values in the tradition of Joseph Schumpeter and religious values in the research tradition of Robert Barro can be an important positive asset for society. Negative phenomena, like the distrust in the state of law; the shadow economy; the distance from altruistic values; a growing fatigue of democracy; and the lack of entrepreneurial spirit are all correlated with the loss of religiosity. Tausch based his results on a factor analysis with promax rotation of 78 variables from 45 countries with complete data, and also calculated performance indices for the 45 countries with complete data and the nine main global religious denominations. On this account, Judaism and also Protestantism emerge as most closely combining religion and the traditions of the Enlightenment.
Happiness and life satisfaction
The WVS has shown that from 1981 to 2007 happiness rose in 45 of the 52 countries for which long-term data are available. Since 1981, economic development, democratization, and rising social tolerance have increased the extent to which people perceive that they have free choice, which in turn has led to higher levels of happiness around the world, which supports the human development theory.
Findings
Some of the survey's basic findings are:
Much of the variation in human values between societies boils down to two broad dimensions: a first dimension of “traditional vs. secular-rational values” and a second dimension of “survival vs. self-expression values.”
On the first dimension, traditional values emphasize religiosity, national pride, respect for authority, obedience and marriage. Secular-rational values emphasize the opposite on each of these accounts.
On the second dimension, survival values involve a priority of security over liberty, non-acceptance of homosexuality, abstinence from political action, distrust in outsiders and a weak sense of happiness. Self-expression values imply the opposite on all these accounts.
Following the 'revised theory of modernization,' values change in predictable ways with certain aspects of modernity. People's priorities shift from traditional to secular-rational values as their sense of existential security increases (or backwards from secular-rational values to traditional values as their sense of existential security decreases).
The largest increase in existential security occurs with the transition from agrarian to industrial societies. Consequently, the largest shift from traditional towards secular-rational values happens in this phase.
People's priorities shift from survival to self-expression values as their sense of individual agency increases (or backwards from self-expression values to survival as the sense of individual agency decreases).
The largest increase in individual agency occurs with the transition from industrial to knowledge societies. Consequently, the largest shift from survival to self-expression values happens in this phase.
The value differences between societies around the world show a pronounced culture zone pattern. The strongest emphasis on traditional values and survival values is found in the Islamic societies of the Middle East. By contrast, the strongest emphasis on secular-rational values and self-expression values is found in the Protestant societies of Northern Europe.
These culture zone differences reflect different historical pathways of how entire groups of societies entered modernity. These pathways account for people's different senses of existential security and individual agency, which in turn account for their different emphases on secular-rational values and self-expression values.
Values also differ within societies along such cleavage lines as gender, generation, ethnicity, religious denomination, education, income and so forth.
Generally speaking, groups whose living conditions provide people with a stronger sense of existential security and individual agency nurture a stronger emphasis on secular-rational values and self-expression values.
However, the within-societal differences in people's values are dwarfed by a factor five to ten by the between-societal differences. On a global scale, basic living conditions differ still much more between than within societies, and so do the experiences of existential security and individual agency that shape people's values.
A specific subset of self-expression values—emancipative values—combines an emphasis on freedom of choice and equality of opportunities. Emancipative values, thus, involve priorities for lifestyle liberty, gender equality, personal autonomy and the voice of the people.
Emancipative values constitute the key cultural component of a broader process of human empowerment. Once set in motion, this process empowers people to exercise freedoms in their course of actions.
If set in motion, human empowerment advances on three levels. On the socio-economic level, human empowerment advances as growing action resources increase people's capabilities to exercise freedoms. On the socio-cultural level, human empowerment advances as rising emancipative values increase people's aspirations to exercise freedoms. On the legal-institutional level, human empowerment advances as widened democratic rights increase people's entitlements to exercise freedoms.
Human empowerment is an entity of empowering capabilities, aspirations, and entitlements. As an entity, human empowerment tends to advance in virtuous spirals or to recede in vicious spirals on each of its three levels.
As the cultural component of human empowerment, emancipative values are highly consequential in manifold ways. For one, emancipative values establish a civic form of modern individualism that favours out-group trust and cosmopolitan orientations towards others.
Emancipative values encourage nonviolent protest, even against the risk of repression. Thus, emancipative values provide social capital that activates societies, makes publics more self-expressive, and vitalizes civil society. Emancipative values advance entire societies' civic agency.
If emancipative values grow strong in countries that are democratic, they help to prevent movements away from democracy.
If emancipative values grow strong in countries that are undemocratic, they help to trigger movements towards democracy.
Emancipative values exert these effects because they encourage mass actions that put power holders under pressures to sustain, substantiate or establish democracy, depending on what the current challenge for democracy is.
Objective factors that have been found to favour democracy (including economic prosperity, income equality, ethnic homogeneity, world market integration, global media exposure, closeness to democratic neighbours, a Protestant heritage, social capital and so forth) exert an influence on democracy mostly insofar as these factors favour emancipative values.
Emancipative values do not strengthen people's desire for democracy, for the desire for democracy is universal at this point in history. But emancipative values do change the nature of the desire for democracy. And they do so in a double way.
For one, emancipative values make people's understanding of democracy more liberal: people with stronger emancipative values emphasize the empowering features of democracy rather than bread-and-butter and law-and-order issues.
Next, emancipative values make people assess the level of their country's democracy more critically: people with stronger emancipative values rather underrate than overrate their country's democratic performance.
Together, then, emancipative values generate a critical-liberal desire for democracy. The critical-liberal desire for democracy is a formidable force of democratic reforms. And, it is the best available predictor of a country's effective level of democracy and of other indicators of good governance. Neither democratic traditions nor cognitive mobilization account for the strong positive impact of emancipative values on the critical-liberal desire for democracy.
Emancipative values constitute the single most important factor in advancing the empowerment of women. Economic, religious, and institutional factors that have been found to advance women's empowerment, do so for the most part because they nurture emancipative values.
Emancipative values change people's life strategy from an emphasis on securing a decent subsistence level to enhancing human agency. As the shift from subsistence to agency affects entire societies, the overall level of subjective well-being rises.
The emancipative consequences of the human empowerment process are not a culture-specific peculiarity of the 'West.' The same empowerment processes that advance emancipative values and a critical-liberal desire for democracy in the 'West,' do the same in the 'East' and in other culture zones.
The social dominance of Islam and individual identification as Muslim both weaken emancipative values. But among young Muslims with high education, and especially among young Muslim women with high education, the Muslim/Non-Muslim gap over emancipative values closes.
A 2013 analysis noted the number of people in various countries responding that they would prefer not to have neighbors of the different race ranged from below 5% in many countries to 51.4% in Jordan, with wide variation in Europe.
According to the 2017-2020 world values survey, 95% of Chinese respondents have significant confidence in their government, compared with the world average of 45% government satisfaction.
History
The World Values Surveys were designed to test the hypothesis that economic and technological changes are transforming the basic values and motivations of the publics of industrialized societies. The surveys build on the European Values Study (EVS) first carried out in 1981. The EVS was conducted under the aegis of Jan Kerkhofs and Ruud de Moor and continues to be based in the Netherlands at the Tilburg University. The 1981 study was largely limited to developed societies, but interest in this project spread so widely that surveys were carried out in more than twenty countries, located on all six inhabited continents. Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan played a leading role in extending these surveys to be carried out in countries around the world. Today the network includes hundreds of social scientist from more than 100 countries.
The surveys are repeated in waves with intervals of 5 to 10 years. The waves have been carried out in the years listed in this table:
Findings from the first wave of surveys pointed to the conclusion that intergenerational changes were taking place in basic values relating to politics, economic life, religion, gender roles, family norms and sexual norms. The values of younger generations differed consistently from those prevailing among older generations, particularly in societies that had experienced rapid economic growth. To examine whether changes were actually taking place in these values and to analyze the underlying causes, a second wave of WVS surveys was carried out in 1990–91. Because these changes seem to be linked with economic and technological development, it was important to include societies across the entire range of development, from low income societies to rich societies.
A third wave of surveys was carried out in 1995–97, this time in 55 societies and with increased attention being given to analysing the cultural conditions for democracy. A fourth wave of surveys was carried out in 1999–2001 in 65 societies. A key goal was to obtain better coverage of African and Islamic societies, which had been under-represented in previous surveys. A fifth wave was carried out in 2005–07 and a sixth wave was carried out during 2011–12.
Due to the European origin of the project, the early waves of the WVS were eurocentric in emphasis, with little representation in Africa and South-East Asia. To expand, the WVS adopted a decentralised structure, in which social scientists from countries throughout the world participated in the design, execution and analysis of the data, and in publication of findings. In return for providing the data from a survey in their own society, each group obtained immediate access to the data from all participating societies enabling them to analyse social change in a broader perspective.
The WVS network has produced over 300 publications in 20 languages and secondary users have produced several thousand additional publications. The database of the WVS has been published on the internet with free access.
The official archive of the World Values Survey is located in [ASEP/JDS] Madrid, Spain.
Methodology
The World Values Survey uses the sample survey as its mode of data collection, a systematic and standardized approach to collect information through interviewing representative national samples of individuals. The basic stages of a sample survey are Questionnaire design; Sampling; Data collection and Analysis.
Questionnaire design
For each wave, suggestions for questions are solicited by social scientists from all over the world and a final master questionnaire is developed in English. Since the start in 1981 each successive wave has covered a broader range of societies than the previous one. Analysis of the data from each wave has indicated that certain questions tapped interesting and important concepts while others were of little value. This has led to the more useful questions or themes being replicated in future waves while the less useful ones have been dropped making room for new questions.
The questionnaire is translated into the various national languages and in many cases independently translated back to English to check the accuracy of the translation. In most countries, the translated questionnaire is pre-tested to help identify questions for which the translation is problematic. In some cases certain problematic questions are omitted from the national questionnaire.
Sampling
Samples are drawn from the entire population of 18 years and older. The minimum sample is 1000. In most countries, no upper age limit is imposed and some form of stratified random sampling is used to obtain representative national samples. In the first stages, a random selection of sampling points is made based on the given society statistical regions, districts, census units, election sections, electoral roll or polling place and central population registers. In most countries the population size and/or degree of urbanization of these Primary Sampling Units are taken into account. In some countries, individuals are drawn from national registers.
Data collection and field work
Following the sampling, each country is left with a representative national sample of its public. These persons are then interviewed during a limited time frame decided by the executive committee of the World Values Survey using the uniformly structured questionnaires. The survey is carried out by professional organizations using face-to-face interviews or phone interviews for remote areas. Each country has a Principal Investigator (social scientists working in academic institutions) who is responsible for conducting the survey in accordance with the fixed rules and procedures. During the field work, the agency has to report in writing according to a specific check-list. Internal consistency checks are made between the sampling design and the outcome and rigorous data cleaning procedures are followed at the WVS data archive. No country is included in a wave before full documentation has been delivered. This means a data set with the completed methodological questionnaire. and a report of country-specific information (for example important political events during the fieldwork, problems particular to the country). Once all the surveys are completed, the Principal Investigator has access to all surveys and data.
Analysis
The World Values Survey group works with leading social scientists, recruited from each society studied. They represent a wide range of cultures and perspectives which makes it possible to draw on the insights of well-informed insiders in interpreting the findings. It also helps disseminate social science techniques to new countries.
Each research team that has contributed to the survey analyses the findings according to its hypotheses. Because all researchers obtain data from all of the participating societies, they are also able to compare the values and beliefs of the people of their own society with those from scores of other societies and to test alternative hypotheses. In addition, the participants are invited to international meetings at which they can compare findings and interpretations with other members of the WVS network. The findings are then disseminated through international conferences and joint publications.
Usage
The World Values Survey data has been downloaded by over 100,000 researchers, journalists, policy-makers and others. The data is available on the WVS website which contains tools developed for online analysis.
Governance and funding
The World Values Survey is organised as a network of social scientists coordinated by a central body - the World Values Survey Association. It is established as a non-profit organization seated in Stockholm, Sweden, with a constitution and mission statement. The project is guided by an executive committee representing all regions of the world. The committee is also supported by a Scientific Advisory Committee, a Secretariat and an Archive. The WVS Executive Committee provides leadership and strategic planning for the association. It is responsible for the recruitment of new members, the organization of meetings and workshops, data processing and distribution, capacity building and the promotion of publications and dissemination of results. The WVS Executive Committee also raises funds for central functions and assists member groups in their fundraising.
Each national team is responsible for its own expenses and most surveys are financed by local sources. However, central funding has been obtained in cases where local funding is not possible. Presently, the activities of the WVS Secretariat and WVS Executive Committee are funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Other funding has been obtained from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), the Volkswagen Foundation, he German Science Foundation (DFG) and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.
Media coverage
The World Values Survey data has been used in a large number of scholarly publications and the findings have been reported in media such as BBC News, Bloomberg Businessweek, China Daily, Chinadialogue.net, CNN, Der Spiegel, Der Standard, Rzeczpospolita, Gazeta Wyborcza, Le Monde, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Newsweek, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Time, The Economist, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Washington Post, and the World Development Report.
World Values Paper Series: World Values Research
World Values Research (WVR), registered as , is the official online paper series of the World Values Survey Association. The series is edited by the executive committee of the Association. WVR publishes research papers of high scientific standards based on evidence from World Values Surveys data. Papers in WVR follow good academic practice and abide to ethical norms in line with the mission of the World Values Survey Association. Publication of submitted papers is pending on an internal review by the executive committee of the World Values Survey Association. WVR papers present original research based on data from the World Values Surveys, providing new evidence and novel insights of theoretical relevance to the theme of human values. An archive of published WVR papers is available on the project's website.
See also
Afrobarometer
Eurobarometer
Latin American Public Opinion Project
Broad measures of economic progress
Happiness economics
Post-materialism
World Social Capital Monitor
Notes
Bibliography
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External links
1981 establishments
Belief
Epistemology
Global ethics
Political science
Social statistics data
Statistical data sets
Surveys (human research)
Value (ethics) | 0.782235 | 0.989029 | 0.773653 |
Enculturation | Enculturation is the process by which people learn the dynamics of their surrounding culture and acquire values and norms appropriate or necessary to that culture and its worldviews.
Definition and history of research
The term enculturation was used first by sociologist of science Harry Collins to describe one of the models whereby scientific knowledge is communicated among scientists, and is contrasted with the 'algorithmic' mode of communication.
The ingredients discussed by Collins for enculturation are
Learning by Immersion: whereby aspiring scientists learn by engaging in the daily activities of the laboratory, interacting with other scientists, and participating in experiments and discussions.
Tacit Knowledge: highlighting the importance of tacit knowledge—knowledge that is not easily codified or written down but is acquired through experience and practice.
Socialization: where individuals learn the social norms, values, and behaviours expected within the scientific community.
Language and Discourse: Scientists must become fluent in the terminology, theoretical frameworks, and modes of argumentation specific to their discipline.
Community Membership: recognition of the individual as a legitimate member of the scientific community.
The problem tackled in the article of Harry Collins was the early experiments for the detection of gravitational waves.
Enculturation is mostly studied in sociology and anthropology. The influences that limit, direct, or shape the individual (whether deliberately or not) include parents, other adults, and peers. If successful, enculturation results in competence in the language, values, and rituals of the culture. Growing up, everyone goes through their own version of enculturation. Enculturation helps form an individual into an acceptable citizen. Culture impacts everything that an individual does, regardless of whether they know about it. Enculturation is a deep-rooted process that binds together individuals. Even as a culture undergoes changes, elements such as central convictions, values, perspectives, and young raising practices remain similar. Enculturation paves way for tolerance which is highly needed for peaceful co-habitance.
The process of enculturation, most commonly discussed in the field of anthropology, is closely related to socialization, a concept central to the field of sociology. Both roughly describe the adaptation of an individual into social groups by absorbing the ideas, beliefs and practices surrounding them. In some disciplines, socialization refers to the deliberate shaping of the individual. As such, the term may cover both deliberate and informal enculturation.
The process of learning and absorbing culture need not be social, direct or conscious. Cultural transmission can occur in various forms, though the most common social methods include observing other individuals, being taught or being instructed. Less obvious mechanisms include learning one's culture from the media, the information environment and various social technologies, which can lead to cultural transmission and adaptation across societies. A good example of this is the diffusion of hip-hop culture into states and communities beyond its American origins.
Enculturation has often been studied in the context of non-immigrant African Americans.
Conrad Phillip Kottak (in Window on Humanity) writes:
Enculturation is referred to as acculturation in some academic literature. However, more recent literature has signalled a difference in meaning between the two. Whereas enculturation describes the process of learning one's own culture, acculturation denotes learning a different culture, for example, that of a host. The latter can be linked to ideas of a culture shock, which describes an emotionally-jarring disconnect between one's old and new culture cues.
Famously, the sociologist Talcott Parsons once described children as "barbarians" of a sort, since they are fundamentally uncultured.
How enculturation occurs
When minorities come into the U.S., these people might fully associate with their racial legacy prior to taking part in processing enculturation. Enculturation can happen in several ways. Direct education implies that your family, instructors, or different individuals from the general public unequivocally show you certain convictions, esteems, or anticipated standards of conduct. Parents may play a vital role in teaching their children standard behavior for their culture, including table manners and some aspects of polite social interactions. Strict familial and societal teaching, which often uses different forms of positive and negative reinforcement to shape behavior, can lead a person to adhere closely to their religious convictions and customs. Schools also provide a formal setting to learn national values, such as honoring a country's flag, national anthem, and other significant patriotic symbols.
Participatory learning occurs as individuals take an active role of interacting with their environment and culture. Through their own engagement in meaningful activities, they learn socio-cultural norms for their area and may adopt related qualities and values. For example, if your school organizes an outing to gather trash at a public park, this action assists with ingraining the upsides of regard for nature and ecological protection. Strict customs frequently stress participatory learning - for example, kids who take part in the singing of psalms during Christmas will assimilate the qualities and practices of the occasion.
Observational learning is when knowledge is gained essentially by noticing and emulating others. As much as an individual related to a model accepts that emulating the model will prompt good results and feels that one is fit for mimicking the way of behaving, learning can happen with no unequivocal instruction. For example, a youngster who is sufficiently fortunate to be brought into the world by guardians in a caring relationship will figure out how to be tender and mindful in their future connections.
See also
Civil society
Dual inheritance theory
Education
Educational anthropology
Ethnocentrism
Indoctrination
Intercultural competence
Mores
Norm (philosophy)
Norm (sociology)
Peer pressure
Transculturation
References
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
Enculturation and Acculturation
Community empowerment
Concepts of moral character, historical and contemporary (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Cultural concepts
Cultural studies
Interculturalism | 0.781151 | 0.990046 | 0.773375 |
Sociocultural anthropology | Sociocultural anthropology is a term used to refer to social anthropology and cultural anthropology together. It is one of the four main branches of anthropology. Sociocultural anthropologists focus on the study of society and culture, while often interested in cultural diversity and universalism.
Sociocultural anthropologists recognise a change in the nature of the field and that a previous focus on traditional tribal perspectives has shifted to a contemporary understanding. Methodologies have altered accordingly, and the discipline continues to evolve with that of society. Globalisation has contributed to the changing influence of the state on individuals and their interactions.
Overview
The rubric cultural anthropology is generally applied to ethnographic works that are holistic in approach, are oriented to the ways in which culture affects individual experience, or aim to provide a rounded view of the knowledge, customs, and institutions of a people. Cultural anthropology focuses on how individuals make sense of the world around them using knowledge, beliefs, morals, arts, laws and customs of groups.
Social anthropology is a term applied to ethnographic works that attempt to isolate a particular system of social relations such as those that comprise domestic life, economy, law, politics, or religion, give analytical priority to the organizational bases of social life, and attend to cultural phenomena as somewhat secondary to the main issues of social scientific inquiry.
Sociocultural anthropology, which is understood to include linguistic anthropology, is concerned with the problem of difference and similarity within and between human populations. The discipline arose through the expansion of European colonial empires, and its practices and theories have been questioned and reformulated along with processes of decolonization. Such issues have re-emerged as transnational processes have challenged the centrality of the nation-state to theorizations about culture and power. New challenges have emerged as public debates about multiculturalism and the increasing use of the culture concept outside of the academy and among peoples studied by anthropology.
History
The synergy of sociology and anthropology was initially developed during the early 1920s by European scholars. Both disciplines shared a common search for a science of society. During the 20th century, the disciplines diverged further to as cultural studies were integrated, centralising geographical and methodological features.
1920s-50s
'Social' and 'cultural' anthropology was developed in the 1920s. It was associated with the social sciences and linguistics rather than the human biology and archaeology studied in anthropology. Specialists in the respective fields of social and cultural anthropology were elemental in the foundations of the later developed synergy. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski marked the point of differentiation between social and cultural anthropology in 1930, evident in texts from this period. In the 1930s and 40s, an influx of monographs and comparative studies of 'tribal societies' emerged. Meyer Fortes and Edward Evans Pritchard described and classified African societies in African Political Systems (1940). Their comparative anthology aimed to provide a basis for sociological knowledge by classifying kin-based bans instead of relying on empirical observation.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, used structuralism as a way to analyse cultural systems in terms of their structural relations, including that of kinship. In 1949, he attempted to classify marriage systems from diverse locations. Structuralism was applied to anthropology by Lévi-Strauss to reaffirms the coexistence between the individual and society and categorise information about cultural systems by the formal relationships among their elements. Structuralism remains a central concept involved in the study of sociocultural anthropology.
1960s–90s
Before WWII, 'social' anthropology and 'cultural' anthropology were still separate entities in the field. The war called upon anthropologists from all countries to assist in the war effort. Anthropologists were extensively involved in resettlements in Europe and consulting issues of racial status in occupied areas. Ethical issues surrounding the allies involvement were topical among anthropologists and institutional development and practiced methodologies were altered by programs in 'developing countries'. As developing countries grew independence, they grew a dislike for an apparent imperialistic nature of anthropological studies, declining work in the field. After the war, anthropologists collaborated ideas and methodologies to form the collective 'sociocultural anthropology'. Topical interests included that of religion, kingship, acculturation, function, and community studies.
During the 1970s, public spending was increased in most industrialised counties which expanded social rights, produced dramatic rises in wealth, living standards and overall equity. This neoliberal globalisation movement followed through until the 1990s. Increased spending assisted to provide academic opportunity in anthropology during 1974–1990. After this period, a steady decline in anthropology opportunity is the continued trend. The drastic growth of students in Ph.D. and M.A. programs, decline in university funding, downward shift in birth rates and decreased government funding are contributors to anthropologies current state.
2000s–present
Traditional methodologies used to study sociocultural anthropology have changed with the shift in culture in modernised society. Individuals undergo daily routines differing to that of previous decades. Individuals participate in minority groups within which only certain aspects relate to the broader national culture. Anthropologists are unable to receive a holistic ethnography, as individuals return to the private sphere after interacting within their minority groups. Impacts of globalisation, neoliberalism, and capitalism have contributed to the decline in anthropology field work.
The job market of the 2000s is centralised around those occupations that are income generating, reducing the number of university students in the social science fields. In accordance, universities have reduced funding for many anthropological programs. The 2008 global financial crisis enhanced this effect as universities had to decline spending as income generation was lesser. Decreased spending in the anthropological sector in combination with an increasing trend of anthropology university students has results in decreasing job opportunities.
Sociocultural anthropological study of the 21st century, produces facts created by an intersection of cultural classification systems and heterogenous and dynamic societies. A contributor to this dynamic societal environment is the media. The influence of the media produces accessibility for all to gather experience and evidence, however charged political conditions sway social discourse. Anthropologists use theory such as structuralism to decipher epistemological obstacles. Considering that systems are defined by the laws of their constitutive elements rather than the content alone is a lens through which modern society is studied.
Theoretical foundations
Concepts
Sociocultural anthropology divides into a broader national level and minority of subcultural groups to ethnographically study societies and cultures. The national culture is emitted through formally organised institutions including those of government forms and legal systems, economic institution, religious organisation, educational systems, law enforcement and military organisations. National achievements are influential on sociocultural integration however can be limited to upper class relevance only. Subcultural segments are groups of individuals behaving within the national culture. Subcultural groups are observed through vertical lens, differentiation because of national development, and horizontal lens, class and occupational divisions structured by societal hierarchy.
Human Migration
Human migration is a topic of anthropology which produced a macro and micro impact on society and its culture. Human migration is ‘the movement of persons away from their place of usual residence, either across an international border or within a state’. An interplay of social, political, economic, demographic, cultural and geographical factors remain central to the movement of individuals. Boas (1920) in his article The Methods of Ethnology (1920) states that it is the migration and dissemination of peoples rather than evolution that provides the basis for ethological research. Migration is accepted as the cause for the similarities of languages the dissemination of ideas and inventions across continents. The process of migration is responsible for the carrying of culture whilst the adaptation of culture to societies in different environments.
Linguistics
The discipline of linguistics is interrelated with the study of society and culture. Both fields share a common intellectual origin in 19th Century scholarship as archaeologists and early folklorists looked for origins of culture in folktales and shared memory. These early anthropologists narrowly focused on the influence structural codes had on the distinction between communities. The comparison of societies prompted early linguistic enquiries. In the 20th century, there became a distinction between linguistic anthropology and formal linguistics, with greater focus placed on the cultural and behaviour lens of language. Formal linguistics remains to be studied through a cognitive viewpoint. Linguistic anthropology looks at how language is used in the social and cultural life of people in different societies.Speech is used in societies as a system to indicate the series of certain events and how role relations effect such events.
Sociology
Sociocultural integration studies the interaction of the spheres and draws comparisons with alternate societies and cultures. Sociocultural anthropology is closely aligned with sociology sharing theoretical generalisation for social science and reflection of human lives. The 20th Century saw the separation of the two as differences in research topics, geographic focus and methodological emphasis diverged. Commonly, sociocultural anthropology centralises study of broader political, ethical, and economic subjects within small-scale societies whereas sociology looks at societies as a whole. Sociologically trained ethnographers have less regard for anthropological theory and place greater emphasis on empirical data. Recently, the two have reconverged as globalisation has aligned subject ideas and methodologies.
Methodologies
The traditional anthropological research method is to gather what people say and do through initial observations. Participant observation hinges on a synthesis of subjective insider and outsider elements. Insider elements rely on the fieldworker to learn what behaviour means to the people. Outsider elements are gathered through observations and experiences drawing comparisons with internal cultural customs and behaviours with alternate cultures. These observations are transferred into a monograph of elements sorted by importance and studied in relation to anthropological theories or questions. The process is controlled, and a hypothesis is tested reporting results after every return. Alternatively, the process may be more fortuitous if unique or unexpected events occur, and the writing processes is extended to make sense of elements.
Since the 1960s, anthropologists have recognised the importance of collaboration through reflections of experiences in the field, relationships with informants and contexts used to gather material. The reflections provide a better understanding for readers of ethnographic texts and anthropologists in practicing with awareness of their own biases and emotions when writing. This has led to advancements in the field of sociocultural anthropology.
The Marxist and Structuralist theories are methods for gathering anthropological information are being challenged. Marxism validifies the necessity for conventional field work, exploring the intersection between empirical observation and theoretical frameworks with the aim of improving each. Lévi-Straussian structuralists (Lévi-Strauss 1969) are more concerned with theoretical structures.
See also
Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck's values orientation theory
Claude Lévi-Strauss's Structuralism
Human Migration
Linguistics
Sociology
References
Further reading
Social anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Ethnography
Linguistics | 0.784722 | 0.985499 | 0.773343 |
Misanthropy | Misanthropy is the general hatred, dislike, or distrust of the human species, human behavior, or human nature. A misanthrope or misanthropist is someone who holds such views or feelings. Misanthropy involves a negative evaluative attitude toward humanity that is based on humankind's flaws. Misanthropes hold that these flaws characterize all or at least the greater majority of human beings. They claim that there is no easy way to rectify them short of a complete transformation of the dominant way of life. Various types of misanthropy are distinguished in the academic literature based on what attitude is involved, at whom it is directed, and how it is expressed. Either emotions or theoretical judgments can serve as the foundation of the attitude. It can be directed toward all humans without exception or exclude a few idealized people. In this regard, some misanthropes condemn themselves while others consider themselves superior to everyone else. Misanthropy is sometimes associated with a destructive outlook aiming to hurt other people or an attempt to flee society. Other types of misanthropic stances include activism by trying to improve humanity, quietism in the form of resignation, and humor mocking the absurdity of the human condition.
The negative misanthropic outlook is based on different types of human flaws. Moral flaws and unethical decisions are often seen as the foundational factor. They include cruelty, selfishness, injustice, greed, and indifference to the suffering of others. They may result in harm to humans and animals, such as genocides and factory farming of livestock. Other flaws include intellectual flaws, like dogmatism and cognitive biases, as well as aesthetic flaws concerning ugliness and lack of sensitivity to beauty. Many debates in the academic literature discuss whether misanthropy is a valid viewpoint and what its implications are. Proponents of misanthropy usually point to human flaws and the harm they have caused as a sufficient reason for condemning humanity. Critics have responded to this line of thought by claiming that severe flaws concern only a few extreme cases, like mentally ill perpetrators, but not humanity at large. Another objection is based on the claim that humans also have virtues besides their flaws and that a balanced evaluation might be overall positive. A further criticism rejects misanthropy because of its association with hatred, which may lead to violence, and because it may make people friendless and unhappy. Defenders of misanthropy have responded by claiming that this applies only to some forms of misanthropy but not to misanthropy in general.
A related issue concerns the question of the psychological and social factors that cause people to become misanthropes. They include socio-economic inequality, living under an authoritarian regime, and undergoing personal disappointments in life. Misanthropy is relevant in various disciplines. It has been discussed and exemplified by philosophers throughout history, like Heraclitus, Diogenes, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Misanthropic outlooks form part of some religious teachings discussing the deep flaws of human beings, like the Christian doctrine of original sin. Misanthropic perspectives and characters are also found in literature and popular culture. They include William Shakespeare's portrayal of Timon of Athens, Molière's play The Misanthrope, and Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Misanthropy is closely related to but not identical to philosophical pessimism. Some misanthropes promote antinatalism, the view that humans should abstain from procreation.
Definition
Misanthropy is traditionally defined as hatred or dislike of humankind. The word originated in the 17th century and has its roots in the Greek words μῖσος mīsos 'hatred' and ἄνθρωπος ānthropos 'man, human'. In contemporary philosophy, the term is usually understood in a wider sense as a negative evaluation of humanity as a whole based on humanity's vices and flaws. This negative evaluation can express itself in various forms, hatred being only one of them. In this sense, misanthropy has a cognitive component based on a negative assessment of humanity and is not just a blind rejection. Misanthropy is usually contrasted with philanthropy, which refers to the love of humankind and is linked to efforts to increase human well-being, for example, through good will, charitable aid, and donations. Both terms have a range of meanings and do not necessarily contradict each other. In this regard, the same person may be a misanthrope in one sense and a philanthrope in another sense.
One central aspect of all forms of misanthropy is that their target is not local but ubiquitous. This means that the negative attitude is not just directed at some individual persons or groups but at humanity as a whole. In this regard, misanthropy is different from other forms of negative discriminatory attitudes directed at a particular group of people. This distinguishes it from the intolerance exemplified by misogynists, misandrists, and racists, which hold a negative attitude toward women, men, or certain races. According to literature theorist Andrew Gibson, misanthropy does not need to be universal in the sense that a person literally dislikes every human being. Instead, it depends on the person's horizon. For instance, a villager who loathes every other villager without exception is a misanthrope if their horizon is limited to only this village.
Both misanthropes and their critics agree that negative features and failings are not equally distributed, i.e. that the vices and bad traits are exemplified much more strongly in some than in others. But for misanthropy, the negative assessment of humanity is not based on a few extreme and outstanding cases: it is a condemnation of humanity as a whole that is not just directed at exceptionally bad individuals but includes regular people as well. Because of this focus on the ordinary, it is sometimes held that these flaws are obvious and trivial but people may ignore them due to intellectual flaws. Some see the flaws as part of human nature as such. Others also base their view on non-essential flaws, i.e. what humanity has come to be. This includes flaws seen as symptoms of modern civilization in general. Nevertheless, both groups agree that the relevant flaws are "entrenched". This means that there is either no or no easy way to rectify them and nothing short of a complete transformation of the dominant way of life would be required if that is possible at all.
Types
Various types of misanthropy are distinguished in the academic literature. They are based on what attitude is involved, how it is expressed, and whether the misanthropes include themselves in their negative assessment. The differences between them often matter for assessing the arguments for and against misanthropy. An early categorization suggested by Immanuel Kant distinguishes between positive and negative misanthropes. Positive misanthropes are active enemies of humanity. They wish harm to other people and undertake attempts to hurt them in one form or another. Negative misanthropy, by contrast, is a form of peaceful anthropophobia that leads people to isolate themselves. They may wish others well despite seeing serious flaws in them and prefer to not involve themselves in the social context of humanity. Kant associates negative misanthropy with moral disappointment due to previous negative experiences with others.
Another distinction focuses on whether the misanthropic condemnation of humanity is only directed at other people or at everyone including oneself. In this regard, self-inclusive misanthropes are consistent in their attitude by including themselves in their negative assessment. This type is contrasted with self-aggrandizing misanthropes, who either implicitly or explicitly exclude themselves from the general condemnation and see themselves instead as superior to everyone else. In this regard, it may be accompanied by an exaggerated sense of self-worth and self-importance. According to literature theorist Joseph Harris, the self-aggrandizing type is more common. He states that this outlook seems to undermine its own position by constituting a form of hypocrisy. A closely related categorization developed by Irving Babbitt distinguishes misanthropes based on whether they allow exceptions in their negative assessment. In this regard, misanthropes of the naked intellect regard humanity as a whole as hopeless. Tender misanthropes exclude a few idealized people from their negative evaluation. Babbitt cites Rousseau and his fondness for natural uncivilized man as an example of tender misanthropy and contrasts it with Jonathan Swift's thorough dismissal of all of humanity.
A further way to categorize forms of misanthropy is in relation to the type of attitude involved toward humanity. In this regard, philosopher Toby Svoboda distinguishes the attitudes of dislike, hate, contempt, and judgment. A misanthrope based on dislike harbors a distaste in the form of negative feelings toward other people. Misanthropy focusing on hatred involves an intense form of dislike. It includes the additional component of wishing ill upon others and at times trying to realize this wish. In the case of contempt, the attitude is not based on feelings and emotions but on a more theoretical outlook. It leads misanthropes to see other people as worthless and look down on them while excluding themselves from this assessment. If the misanthropic attitude has its foundation in judgment, it is also theoretical but does not distinguish between self and others. It is the view that humanity is in general bad without implying that the misanthrope is in any way better than the rest. According to Svoboda, only misanthropy based on judgment constitutes a serious philosophical position. He holds that misanthropy focusing on contempt is biased against other people while misanthropy in the form of dislike and hate is difficult to assess since these emotional attitudes often do not respond to objective evidence.
Misanthropic forms of life
Misanthropy is usually not restricted to a theoretical opinion but involves an evaluative attitude that calls for a practical response. It can express itself in different forms of life. They come with different dominant emotions and practical consequences for how to lead one's life. These responses to misanthropy are sometimes presented through simplified archetypes that may be too crude to accurately capture the mental life of any single person. Instead, they aim to portray common attitudes among groups of misanthropes. The two responses most commonly linked to misanthropy involve either destruction or fleeing from society. The destructive misanthrope is said to be driven by a hatred of humankind and aims at tearing it down, with violence if necessary. For the fugitive misanthrope, fear is the dominant emotion and leads the misanthrope to seek a secluded place in order to avoid the corrupting contact with civilization and humanity as much as possible.
The contemporary misanthropic literature has also identified further less-known types of misanthropic lifestyles. The activist misanthrope is driven by hope despite their negative appraisal of humanity. This hope is a form of meliorism based on the idea that it is possible and feasible for humanity to transform itself and the activist tries to realize this ideal. A weaker version of this approach is to try to improve the world incrementally to avoid some of the worst outcomes without the hope of fully solving the basic problem. Activist misanthropes differ from quietist misanthropes, who take a pessimistic approach toward what the person can do for bringing about a transformation or significant improvements. In contrast to the more drastic reactions of the other responses mentioned, they resign themselves to quiet acceptance and small-scale avoidance. A further approach is focused on humor based on mockery and ridicule at the absurdity of the human condition. An example is that humans hurt each other and risk future self-destruction for trivial concerns like a marginal increase in profit. This way, humor can act both as a mirror to portray the terrible truth of the situation and as its palliative at the same time.
Forms of human flaws
A core aspect of misanthropy is that its negative attitude toward humanity is based on human flaws. Various misanthropes have provided extensive lists of flaws, including cruelty, greed, selfishness, wastefulness, dogmatism, self-deception, and insensitivity to beauty. These flaws can be categorized in many ways. It is often held that moral flaws constitute the most serious case. Other flaws discussed in the contemporary literature include intellectual flaws, aesthetic flaws, and spiritual flaws.
Moral flaws are usually understood as tendencies to violate moral norms or as mistaken attitudes toward what is the good. They include cruelty, indifference to the suffering of others, selfishness, moral laziness, cowardice, injustice, greed, and ingratitude. The harm done because of these flaws can be divided into three categories: harm done directly to humans, harm done directly to other animals, and harm done indirectly to both humans and other animals by harming the environment. Examples of these categories include the Holocaust, factory farming of livestock, and pollution causing climate change. In this regard, it is not just relevant that human beings cause these forms of harm but also that they are morally responsible for them. This is based on the idea that they can understand the consequences of their actions and could act differently. However, they decide not to, for example, because they ignore the long-term well-being of others in order to get short-term personal benefits.
Intellectual flaws concern cognitive capacities. They can be defined as what leads to false beliefs, what obstructs knowledge, or what violates the demands of rationality. They include intellectual vices, like arrogance, wishful thinking, and dogmatism. Further examples are stupidity, gullibility, and cognitive biases, like the confirmation bias, the self-serving bias, the hindsight bias, and the anchoring bias. Intellectual flaws can work in tandem with all kinds of vices: they may deceive someone about having a vice. This prevents the affected person from addressing it and improving themselves, for instance, by being mindless and failing to recognize it. They also include forms of self-deceit, wilful ignorance, and being in denial about something. Similar considerations have prompted some traditions to see intellectual failings, like ignorance, as the root of all evil.
Aesthetic flaws are usually not given the same importance as moral and intellectual flaws, but they also carry some weight for misanthropic considerations. These flaws relate to beauty and ugliness. They concern ugly aspects of human life itself, like defecation and aging. Other examples are ugliness caused by human activities, like pollution and litter, and inappropriate attitudes toward aesthetic aspects, like being insensitive to beauty.
Causes
Various psychological and social factors have been identified in the academic literature as possible causes of misanthropic sentiments. The individual factors by themselves may not be able to fully explain misanthropy but can show instead how it becomes more likely. For example, disappointments and disillusionments in life can cause a person to adopt a misanthropic outlook. In this regard, the more idealistic and optimistic the person initially was, the stronger this reversal and the following negative outlook tend to be. This type of psychological explanation is found as early as Plato's Phaedo. In it, Socrates considers a person who trusts and admires someone without knowing them sufficiently well. He argues that misanthropy may arise if it is discovered later that the admired person has serious flaws. In this case, the initial attitude is reversed and universalized to apply to all others, leading to general distrust and contempt toward other humans. Socrates argues that this becomes more likely if the admired person is a close friend and if it happens more than once. This form of misanthropy may be accompanied by a feeling of moral superiority in which the misanthrope considers themselves to be better than everyone else.
Other types of negative personal experiences in life may have a similar effect. Andrew Gibson uses this line of thought to explain why some philosophers became misanthropes. He uses the example of Thomas Hobbes to explain how a politically unstable environment and the frequent wars can foster a misanthropic attitude. Regarding Arthur Schopenhauer, he states that being forced to flee one's home at an early age and never finding a place to call home afterward can have a similar effect. Another psychological factor concerns negative attitudes toward the human body, especially in the form of general revulsion from sexuality.
Besides the psychological causes, some wider social circumstances may also play a role. Generally speaking, the more negative the circumstances are, the more likely misanthropy becomes. For instance, according to political scientist Eric M. Uslaner, socio-economic inequality in the form of unfair distribution of wealth increases the tendency to adopt a misanthropic perspective. This has to do with the fact that inequality tends to undermine trust in the government and others. Uslaner suggests that it may be possible to overcome or reduce this source of misanthropy by implementing policies that build trust and promote a more equal distribution of wealth. The political regime is another relevant factor. This specifically concerns authoritarian regimes using all means available to repress their population and stay in power. For example, it has been argued that the severe forms of repression of the Ancien Régime in the late 17th century made it more likely for people to adopt a misanthropic outlook because their freedom was denied. Democracy may have the opposite effect since it allows more personal freedom due to its more optimistic outlook on human nature.
Empirical studies often use questions related to trust in other people to measure misanthropy. This concerns specifically whether the person believes that others would be fair and helpful. In an empirical study on misanthropy in American society, Tom W. Smith concludes that factors responsible for an increased misanthropic outlook are low socioeconomic status, being from racial and ethnic minorities, and having experienced recent negative events in one's life. In regard to religion, misanthropy is higher for people who do not attend church and for fundamentalists. Some factors seem to play no significant role, like gender, having undergone a divorce, and never having been married. Another study by Morris Rosenberg finds that misanthropy is linked to certain political outlooks. They include being skeptical about free speech and a tendency to support authoritarian policies. This concerns, for example, tendencies to suppress political and religious liberties.
Arguments
Various discussions in the academic literature concern the question of whether misanthropy is an accurate assessment of humanity and what the consequences of adopting it are. Many proponents of misanthropy focus on human flaws together with examples of when they exercise their negative influences. They argue that these flaws are so severe that misanthropy is an appropriate response.
Special importance in this regard is usually given to moral faults. This is based on the idea that humans do not merely cause a great deal of suffering and destruction but are also morally responsible for them. The reason is that they are intelligent enough to understand the consequences of their actions and could potentially make balanced long-term decisions instead of focusing on personal short-term gains.
Proponents of misanthropy sometimes focus on extreme individual manifestations of human flaws, like mass killings ordered by dictators. Others emphasize that the problem is not limited to a few cases, for example, that many ordinary people are complicit in their manifestation by supporting the political leaders committing them. A closely related argument is to claim that the underlying flaws are there in everyone, even if they reach their most extreme manifestation only in a few. Another approach is to focus not on the grand extreme cases but on the ordinary small-scale manifestations of human flaws in everyday life, such as lying, cheating, breaking promises, and being ungrateful.
Some arguments for misanthropy focus not only on general tendencies but on actual damage caused by humans in the past. This concerns, for instance, damages done to the ecosystem, like ecological catastrophes resulting in mass extinctions.
Criticism
Various theorists have criticized misanthropy. Some opponents acknowledge that there are extreme individual manifestations of human flaws, like mentally ill perpetrators, but claim that these cases do not reflect humanity at large and cannot justify the misanthropic attitude. For instance, while there are cases of extreme human brutality, like the mass killings committed by dictators and their forces, listing such cases is not sufficient for condemning humanity at large.
Some critics of misanthropy acknowledge that humans have various flaws but state that they present just one side of humanity while evaluative attitudes should take all sides into account. This line of thought is based on the idea that humans possess equally important virtues that make up for their shortcomings. For example, accounts that focus only on the great wars, cruelties, and tragedies in human history ignore its positive achievements in the sciences, arts, and humanities.
Another explanation given by critics is that the negative assessment should not be directed at humanity but at some social forces. These forces can include capitalism, racism, religious fundamentalism, or imperialism. Supporters of this argument would adopt an opposition to one of these social forces rather than a misanthropic opposition to humanity.
Some objections to misanthropy are based not on whether this attitude appropriately reflects the negative value of humanity but on the costs of accepting such a position. The costs can affect both the individual misanthrope and the society at large. This is especially relevant if misanthropy is linked to hatred, which may turn easily into violence against social institutions and other humans and may result in harm. Misanthropy may also deprive the person of most pleasures by making them miserable and friendless.
Another form of criticism focuses more on the theoretical level and claims that misanthropy is an inconsistent and self-contradictory position. An example of this inconsistency is the misanthrope's tendency to denounce the social world while still being engaged in it and being unable to fully leave it behind. This criticism applies specifically to misanthropes who exclude themselves from the negative evaluation and look down on others with contempt from an arrogant position of inflated ego but it may not apply to all types of misanthropy. A closely related objection is based on the claim that misanthropy is an unnatural attitude and should therefore be seen as an aberration or a pathological case.
In various disciplines
History of philosophy
Misanthropy has been discussed and exemplified by philosophers throughout history. One of the earliest cases was the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. He is often characterized as a solitary person who is not fond of social interactions with others. A central factor to his negative outlook on human beings was their lack of comprehension of the true nature of reality. This concerns especially cases in which they remain in a state of ignorance despite having received a thorough explanation of the issue in question. Another early discussion is found in Plato's Phaedo, where misanthropy is characterized as the result of frustrated expectations and excessively naïve optimism.
Various reflections on misanthropy are also found in the cynic school of philosophy. There it is argued, for instance, that humans keep on reproducing and multiplying the evils they are attempting to flee. An example given by the first-century philosopher Dio Chrysostom is that humans move to cities to defend themselves against outsiders but this process thwarts their initial goal by leading to even more violence due to high crime rates within the city. Diogenes is a well-known cynic misanthrope. He saw other people as hypocritical and superficial. He openly rejected all kinds of societal norms and values, often provoking others by consciously breaking conventions and behaving rudely.
Thomas Hobbes is an example of misanthropy in early modern philosophy. His negative outlook on humanity is reflected in many of his works. For him, humans are egoistic and violent: they act according to their self-interest and are willing to pursue their goals at the expense of others. In their natural state, this leads to a never-ending war in which "every man to every man ... is an enemy". He saw the establishment of an authoritative state characterized by the strict enforcement of laws to maintain order as the only way to tame the violent human nature and avoid perpetual war.
A further type of misanthropy is found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He idealizes the harmony and simplicity found in nature and contrasts them with the confusion and disorder found in humanity, especially in the form of society and institutions. For instance, he claims that "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains". This negative outlook was also reflected in his lifestyle: he lived solitary and preferred to be with plants rather than humans.
Arthur Schopenhauer is often mentioned as a prime example of misanthropy. According to him, everything in the world, including humans and their activities, is an expression of one underlying will. This will is blind, which causes it to continuously engage in futile struggles. On the level of human life, this "presents itself as a continual deception" since it is driven by pointless desires. They are mostly egoistic and often result in injustice and suffering to others. Once they are satisfied, they only give rise to new pointless desires and more suffering. In this regard, Schopenhauer dismisses most things that are typically considered precious or meaningful in human life, like romantic love, individuality, and liberty. He holds that the best response to the human condition is a form of asceticism by denying the expression of the will. This is only found in rare humans and "the dull majority of men" does not live up to this ideal.
Friedrich Nietzsche, who was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer, is also often cited as an example of misanthropy. He saw man as a decadent and "sick animal" that shows no progress over other animals. He even expressed a negative attitude toward apes since they are more similar to human beings than other animals, for example, with regard to cruelty. For Nietzsche, a noteworthy flaw of human beings is their tendency to create and enforce systems of moral rules that favor weak people and suppress true greatness. He held that the human being is something to be overcome and used the term Übermensch to describe an ideal individual who has transcended traditional moral and societal norms.
Religion
Some misanthropic views are also found in religious teachings. In Christianity, for instance, this is linked to the sinful nature of humans and the widespread manifestation of sin in everyday life. Common forms of sin are discussed in terms of the seven deadly sins. Examples are an excessive sense of self-importance in the form of pride and strong sexual cravings constituting lust. They also include the tendency to follow greed for material possessions as well as being envious of the possessions of others. According to the doctrine of original sin, this flaw is found in every human being since the doctrine states that human nature is already tainted by sin from birth by inheriting it from Adam and Eve's rebellion against God's authority. John Calvin's theology of Total depravity has been described by some theologians as misanthropic.
Misanthropic perspectives can also be discerned in various Buddhist teachings. For example, Buddha had a negative outlook on the widespread flaws of human beings, including lust, hatred, delusion, sorrow, and despair. These flaws are identified with some form of craving or attachment (taṇhā) and cause suffering (dukkha). Buddhists hold that it is possible to overcome these failings in the process of achieving Buddhahood or enlightenment due to an innate Buddha nature. However, this is seen as a rare achievement in one lifetime in some of the Indian traditions whereas within East Asian Mahayana Chan, Zen and Pureland practice's it is achievable to become suddenly enlightened in one life time , In contrast to Indian Buddhist's doctrine regard that most human beings carry these deep flaws with them throughout their lives and to the next through the law of karma.
However, there are also many religious teachings opposed to misanthropy, such as the emphasis on kindness and helping others. In Christianity, this is found in the concept of agape, which involves selfless and unconditional love in the form of compassion and a willingness to help others. Buddhists see the practice of loving kindness (metta) as a central aspect that implies a positive intention of compassion and the expression of kindness toward all sentient beings.
Literature and popular culture
Many examples of misanthropy are also found in literature and popular culture. Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare is a famous portrayal of the life of the Ancient Greek Timon, who is widely known for his extreme misanthropic attitude. Shakespeare depicts him as a wealthy and generous gentleman. However, he becomes disillusioned with his ungrateful friends and humanity at large. This way, his initial philanthropy turns into an unrestrained hatred of humanity, which prompts him to leave society in order to live in a forest. Molière's play The Misanthrope is another famous example. Its protagonist, Alceste, has a low opinion of the people around him. He tends to focus on their flaws and openly criticizes them for their superficiality, insincerity, and hypocrisy. He rejects most social conventions and thereby often offends others, for example, by refusing to engage in social niceties like polite small talk.
The author Jonathan Swift had a reputation for being misanthropic. In some statements, he openly declares that he hates and detests "that animal called man". Misanthropy is also found in many of his works. An example is Gulliver's Travels, which tells the adventures of the protagonist Gulliver, who journeys to various places, like an island inhabited by tiny people and a land ruled by intelligent horses. Through these experiences of the contrast between humans and other species, he comes to see more and more the deep flaws of humanity, leading him to develop a revulsion toward other human beings. Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol is an often-cited example of misanthropy. He is described as a cold-hearted, solitary miser who detests Christmas. He is greedy, selfish, and has no regard for the well-being of others. Other writers associated with misanthropy include Gustave Flaubert and Philip Larkin.
The Joker from the DC Universe is an example of misanthropy in popular culture. He is one of the main antagonists of Batman and acts as an agent of chaos. He believes that people are selfish, cruel, irrational, and hypocritical. He is usually portrayed as a sociopath with a twisted sense of humor who uses violent means to expose and bring down organized society.
Related concepts
Philosophical pessimism
Misanthropy is closely related but not identical to philosophical pessimism. Philosophical pessimism is the view that life is not worth living or that the world is a bad place, for example, because it is meaningless and full of suffering. This view is exemplified by Arthur Schopenhauer and Philipp Mainländer. Philosophical pessimism is often accompanied by misanthropy if the proponent holds that humanity is also bad and partially responsible for the negative value of the world. However, the two views do not require each other and can be held separately. A non-misanthropic pessimist may hold, for instance, that humans are just victims of a terrible world but not to blame for it. Eco-misanthropists, by contrast, may claim that the world and its nature are valuable but that humanity exerts a negative and destructive influence.
Antinatalism and human extinction
Antinatalism is the view that coming into existence is bad and that humans have a duty to abstain from procreation. A central argument for antinatalism is called the misanthropic argument. It sees the deep flaws of humans and their tendency to cause harm as a reason for avoiding the creation of more humans. These harms include wars, genocides, factory farming, and damages done to the environment. This argument contrasts with philanthropic arguments, which focus on the future suffering of the human about to come into existence. They argue that the only way to avoid their future suffering is to prevent them from being born. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and the Church of Euthanasia are well-known examples of social movements in favor of antinatalism and human extinction.
Antinatalism is commonly endorsed by misanthropic thinkers but there are also many other ways that could lead to the extinction of the human species. This field is still relatively speculative but various suggestions have been made about threats to the long-term survival of the human species, like nuclear wars, self-replicating nanorobots, or super-pathogens. Such cases are usually seen as terrible scenarios and dangerous threats but misanthropes may instead interpret them as reasons for hope because the abhorrent age of humanity in history may soon come to an end. A similar sentiment is expressed by Bertrand Russell. He states in relation to the existence of human life on earth and its misdeeds that they are "a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return."
Human exceptionalism and deep ecology
Human exceptionalism is the claim that human beings have unique importance and are exceptional compared to all other species. It is often based on the claim that they stand out because of their special capacities, like intelligence, rationality, and autonomy. In religious contexts, it is frequently explained in relation to a unique role that God foresaw for them or that they were created in God's image. Human exceptionalism is usually combined with the claim that human well-being matters more than the well-being of other species. This line of thought can be used to draw various ethical conclusions. One is the claim that humans have the right to rule the planet and impose their will on other species. Another is that inflicting harm on other species may be morally acceptable if it is done with the purpose of promoting human well-being and excellence.
Generally speaking, the position of human exceptionalism is at odds with misanthropy in relation to the value of humanity. But this is not necessarily the case and it may be possible to hold both positions at the same time. One way to do this is to claim that humanity is exceptional because of a few rare individuals but that the average person is bad. Another approach is to hold that human beings are exceptional in a negative sense: given their destructive and harmful history, they are much worse than any other species.
Theorists in the field of deep ecology are also often critical of human exceptionalism and tend to favor a misanthropic perspective. Deep ecology is a philosophical and social movement that stresses the inherent value of nature and advocates a radical change in human behavior toward nature. Various theorists have criticized deep ecology based on the claim that it is misanthropic by privileging other species over humans. For example, the deep ecology movement Earth First! faced severe criticism when they praised the AIDS epidemic in Africa as a solution to the problem of human overpopulation in their newsletter.
See also
Asociality – lack of motivation to engage in social interaction
Antihumanism – rejection of humanism
Antisocial personality disorder
Cosmicism
Emotional isolation
Hatred (video game)
Nihilism
Social alienation
References
Citations
Sources
External links
Anti-social behaviour
Concepts in social philosophy
Human behavior
Philosophical pessimism
Philosophy of life
Psychological attitude
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Pluralism | Pluralism in general denotes a diversity of views or stands, rather than a single approach or method.
Pluralism or pluralist may refer more specifically to:
Politics and law
Pluralism (political philosophy), the acknowledgement of a diversity of political systems
Pluralism (political theory), belief that there should be diverse and competing centres of power in society
Legal pluralism, the existence of differing legal systems in a population or area
Pluralist democracy, a political system with more than one center of power
Philosophy
Pluralism (philosophy), a doctrine according to which many basic substances make up reality
Pluralist school, a Greek school of pre-Socratic philosophers
Epistemological pluralism or methodological pluralism, the view that some phenomena require multiple methods to account for their nature
Value pluralism, the idea that several values may be equally correct and yet in conflict with each other
Religion
Religious pluralism, the acceptance of all religious paths as equally valid, promoting coexistence
Holding multiple ecclesiastical offices; see "Pluralism" at Benefice
Pluralism Project, a Harvard-affiliated project on religious diversity in the United States
Other uses
Cosmic pluralism, the belief in numerous other worlds beyond the Earth, which may possess the conditions suitable for life
Cultural pluralism, when small groups within a larger society maintain their unique cultural identities
Media pluralism, the representation of different cultural groups and political opinions in the media
Pluralist commonwealth, a systemic model of wealth democratization
Pluralism in economics, a campaign to enrich the academic discipline of economics
See also
Plurality (disambiguation)
Journal of Legal Pluralism, a peer-reviewed academic journal that focuses on legal pluralism
Global Centre for Pluralism, an international centre for research of pluralist societies
Multiculturalism, the existence of multiple cultural traditions within a single country
Postmodernism, a broad movement in the late-20th century that is skeptical toward grand narratives or ideologies | 0.785275 | 0.984738 | 0.77329 |
Zoomorphism | The word zoomorphism derives from and . In the context of art, zoomorphism could describe art that imagines humans as non-human animals. It can also be defined as art that portrays one species of animal like another species of animal or art that uses animals as a visual motif, sometimes referred to as "animal style." Depicting deities in animal form (theriomorphism) is an example of zoomorphism in a religious context. It is also similar to the term therianthropy; which is the ability to shape shift into animal form, except that with zoomorphism the animal form is applied to a physical object. It means to attribute animal forms or animal characteristics to other animals, or things other than an animal; similar to but broader than anthropomorphism. Contrary to anthropomorphism, which views animal or non-animal behavior in human terms, zoomorphism is the tendency of viewing human behavior in terms of the behavior of animals. It is also used in literature to portray the act of humans or objects with animalistic behavior or features. The use of zoomorphism served as a decorative element to objects that are typically quite simple in shape and design.
Examples
Zoomorphic representation in religion
The appearance of the Holy Spirit like a dove in the New Testament (The Gospel According to Luke 3: 22), "and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove..."
Mark the Evangelist as a lion in later Christian iconography.
In Hinduism Vishnu's vahana Garuda is depicted as an eagle or kite or with half kite and half human body.
The Egyptian gods were often depicted as zoomorphic or as hybrid.
The names of the two most prominent Hebrew Bible female prophets – Deborah and Huldah – were in the Babylonian Talmud interpreted in zoomorphic terms as "wasp" and "weasel".
Zoomorphic and anthropomorphic letters were used in some religious manuscripts, such as the Kennicott Bible.
Zoomorphic language for things, ideas
A literary phrase such as "The roar of the ocean".
Waterwolf, a Dutch terminology for the tendency of bodies of water in low-lying land to grow larger over time, causing death, loss of livestock and loss of land.
Sin lurking like a beast waiting to devour Cain in Genesis.<ref>Synthesis: bulletin du Comité national de littérature comparée / Comitetul Național pentru Literatură Comparată, Institutul de Istorie și Teorie Literară "G. Călinescu." - 2002 "Sin is personified as (an animal?) which "crouches" at the door of Cain (Gen 4:7). As Gerhard von Rad (Genesis, 105) remarks, 'The comparison of sin with a beast of prey lying before the door is strange, as is the purely decorative use "</ref>
Humanity portrayed in evolutionary context
Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo, Robert Ardrey in African Genesis and Konrad Lorenz in On Aggression all wrote from a sociobiological perspective. They viewed the human species as an animal, subject to the evolutionary law of Survival of the fittest through adaptation to the biophysical environment.
Zoomorphic representation in Islamic art
One example of a zoomorphic object is the incense burner of Amir Saif al-Dunya wa’l-Din ibn Muhammad al-Mawardi, today located at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Incense burners were common objects for zoomorphic forms that served as a container for aromatic material to be burned. This particular object comes from the Seljuq period in Iran. It is made of bronze, meaning it was a more expensive object as metalwork incense burners cost more to produce and were less common than other productions made of clay or soft stones. The work is meant to depict a lion or large cat. The artist plays with the anatomical elements of the body to fit the use for burning incense. Around the base of neck shows the area where the head is designed to be removed for the insertion of coal and incense. Throughout the body small holes were punctured for the release of the smoke. This object would have been found in a domestic space due to the animal-like imagery.
Another example of zoomorphism in Islamic art is the bird-shaped oil lamp, located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The oil lamp would have been used as an everyday object in a domestic space as well. The handle of the lamp is depicted by the head and neck of the bird. The body takes the form of the base of the lamp where oil can be poured in the small opening. The artist uses the form of the bird to utilize the lamp either hanging or resting. There are keyholes on either side of the body for the lamp to be hung by a chain and the flat base allows for the lamp to be placed on any smooth surface. The similarities between the incense burner and the lamp demonstrate how zoomorphism was used throughout Islamic culture.
Zoomorphism appears on objects beyond household items. An example of this is the Dagger with Zoomorphic Hilt also located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The hilt or handle of the dagger merges into the shape of a dragon attacking a lion who is performing the same act onto a deer. Each attacking animal is connected by its claws and teeth to form the handle. The inclusion of Persian and Indian symbols of power was common in zoomorphic imagery on hilts of daggers. In this dagger there is a figure of a bird in front of the deer who is meant to represent the Indian deity Garuda. Due to the intricate design and craftsmanship of this dagger, it would most likely not have been used for the purposes of a weapon, but rather as a ceremonial object. Many of the weapons included in Islamic art served as symbols for power and wealth.
Other
Fenrisulfr, a wolf in Norse mythology
Airavata, the king god of elephants in Indian mythology.
Paw feet bathtub, with feet in the shape of a lion's paws
The sphinx from Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex"
Elephantine Colossus, a hotel
Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'' is a lion that is the king of Narnia
Robotic pets, like AIBO, modeled on dogs or other animals
In 2010 city planners from Southern Sudan, which would become independent a year later, unveiled plans for the city center of its capital, Juba, to be built in the shape of a rhinoceros. The city of Wau was to be transformed in the shape of a giraffe.
See also
Amity-enmity complex
Anthropocentrism
Dehumanization
References
Animal worship
Animals in religion
Anthropology of religion
Symbolism
Visual arts genres
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Epistemology | Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called theory of knowledge, it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of justification, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony.
The school of skepticism questions the human ability to attain knowledge while fallibilism says that knowledge is never certain. Empiricists hold that all knowledge comes from sense experience, whereas rationalists believe that some knowledge does not depend on it. Coherentists argue that a belief is justified if it coheres with other beliefs. Foundationalists, by contrast, maintain that the justification of basic beliefs does not depend on other beliefs. Internalism and externalism disagree about whether justification is determined solely by mental states or also by external circumstances.
Separate branches of epistemology are dedicated to knowledge found in specific fields, like scientific, mathematical, moral, and religious knowledge. Naturalized epistemology relies on empirical methods and discoveries, whereas formal epistemology uses formal tools from logic. Social epistemology investigates the communal aspect of knowledge and historical epistemology examines its historical conditions. Epistemology is closely related to psychology, which describes the beliefs people hold, while epistemology studies the norms governing the evaluation of beliefs. It also intersects with fields such as decision theory, education, and anthropology.
Early reflections on the nature, sources, and scope of knowledge are found in ancient Greek, Indian, and Chinese philosophy. The relation between reason and faith was a central topic in the medieval period. The modern era was characterized by the contrasting perspectives of empiricism and rationalism. Epistemologists in the 20th century examined the components, structure, and value of knowledge while integrating insights from the natural sciences and linguistics.
Definition
Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge. Also called theory of knowledge, it examines what knowledge is and what types of knowledge there are. It further investigates the sources of knowledge, like perception, inference, and testimony, to determine how knowledge is created. Another topic is the extent and limits of knowledge, confronting questions about what people can and cannot know. Other central concepts include belief, truth, justification, evidence, and reason. Epistemology is one of the main branches of philosophy besides fields like ethics, logic, and metaphysics. The term is also used in a slightly different sense to refer not to the branch of philosophy but to a particular position within that branch, as in Plato's epistemology and Immanuel Kant's epistemology.
As a normative field of inquiry, epistemology explores how people should acquire beliefs. This way, it determines which beliefs fulfill the standards or epistemic goals of knowledge and which ones fail, thereby providing an evaluation of beliefs. Descriptive fields of inquiry, like psychology and cognitive sociology, are also interested in beliefs and related cognitive processes. Unlike epistemology, they study the beliefs people have and how people acquire them instead of examining the evaluative norms of these processes. Epistemology is relevant to many descriptive and normative disciplines, such as the other branches of philosophy and the sciences, by exploring the principles of how they may arrive at knowledge.
The word epistemology comes from the ancient Greek terms (episteme, meaning knowledge or understanding) and (logos, meaning study of or reason), literally, the study of knowledge. The word was only coined in the 19th century to label this field and conceive it as a distinct branch of philosophy.
Central concepts
Knowledge
Knowledge is an awareness, familiarity, understanding, or skill. Its various forms all involve a cognitive success through which a person establishes epistemic contact with reality. Knowledge is typically understood as an aspect of individuals, generally as a cognitive mental state that helps them understand, interpret, and interact with the world. While this core sense is of particular interest to epistemologists, the term also has other meanings. Understood on a social level, knowledge is a characteristic of a group of people that share ideas, understanding, or culture in general. The term can also refer to information stored in documents, such as "knowledge housed in the library" or knowledge stored in computers in the form of the knowledge base of an expert system.
Knowledge contrasts with ignorance, which is often simply defined as the absence of knowledge. Knowledge is usually accompanied by ignorance since people rarely have complete knowledge of a field, forcing them to rely on incomplete or uncertain information when making decisions. Even though many forms of ignorance can be mitigated through education and research, there are certain limits to human understanding that are responsible for inevitable ignorance. Some limitations are inherent in the human cognitive faculties themselves, such as the inability to know facts too complex for the human mind to conceive. Others depend on external circumstances when no access to the relevant information exists.
Epistemologists disagree on how much people know, for example, whether fallible beliefs about everyday affairs can amount to knowledge or whether absolute certainty is required. The most stringent position is taken by radical skeptics, who argue that there is no knowledge at all.
Types
Epistemologists distinguish between different types of knowledge. Their primary interest is in knowledge of facts, called propositional knowledge. It is a theoretical knowledge that can be expressed in declarative sentences using a that-clause, like "Ravi knows that kangaroos hop". For this reason, it is also called knowledge-that. Epistemologists often understand it as a relation between a knower and a known proposition, in the case above between the person Ravi and the proposition "kangaroos hop". It is use-independent since it is not tied to one specific purpose. It is a mental representation that relies on concepts and ideas to depict reality. Because of its theoretical nature, it is often held that only relatively sophisticated creatures, such as humans, possess propositional knowledge.
Propositional knowledge contrasts with non-propositional knowledge in the form of knowledge-how and knowledge by acquaintance. Knowledge-how is a practical ability or skill, like knowing how to read or how to prepare lasagna. It is usually tied to a specific goal and not mastered in the abstract without concrete practice. To know something by acquaintance means to be familiar with it as a result of experiental contact. Examples are knowing the city of Perth, knowing the taste of tsampa, and knowing Marta Vieira da Silva personally.
Another influential distinction is between a posteriori and a priori knowledge. A posteriori knowledge is knowledge of empirical facts based on sensory experience, like seeing that the sun is shining and smelling that a piece of meat has gone bad. Knowledge belonging to the empirical science and knowledge of everyday affairs belongs to a posteriori knowledge. A priori knowledge is knowledge of non-empirical facts and does not depend on evidence from sensory experience. It belongs to fields such as mathematics and logic, like knowing that . The contrast between a posteriori and a priori knowledge plays a central role in the debate between empiricists and rationalists on whether all knowledge depends on sensory experience.
A closely related contrast is between analytic and synthetic truths. A sentence is analytically true if its truth depends only on the meaning of the words it uses. For instance, the sentence "all bachelors are unmarried" is analytically true because the word "bachelor" already includes the meaning "unmarried". A sentence is synthetically true if its truth depends on additional facts. For example, the sentence "snow is white" is synthetically true because its truth depends on the color of snow in addition to the meanings of the words snow and white. A priori knowledge is primarily associated with analytic sentences while a posteriori knowledge is primarily associated with synthetic sentences. However, it is controversial whether this is true for all cases. Some philosophers, such as Willard Van Orman Quine, reject the distinction, saying that there are no analytic truths.
Analysis
The analysis of knowledge is the attempt to identify the essential components or conditions of all and only propositional knowledge states. According to the so-called traditional analysis, knowledge has three components: it is a belief that is justified and true. In the second half of the 20th century, this view was put into doubt by a series of thought experiments that aimed to show that some justified true beliefs do not amount to knowledge. In one of them, a person is unaware of all the fake barns in their area. By coincidence, they stop in front of the only real barn and form a justified true belief that it is a real barn. Many epistemologists agree that this is not knowledge because the justification is not directly relevant to the truth. More specifically, this and similar counterexamples involve some form of epistemic luck, that is, a cognitive success that results from fortuitous circumstances rather than competence.
Following these thought experiments, philosophers proposed various alternative definitions of knowledge by modifying or expanding the traditional analysis. According to one view, the known fact has to cause the belief in the right way. Another theory states that the belief is the product of a reliable belief formation process. Further approaches require that the person would not have the belief if it was false, that the belief is not inferred from a falsehood, that the justification cannot be undermined, or that the belief is infallible. There is no consensus on which of the proposed modifications and reconceptualizations is correct. Some philosophers, such as Timothy Williamson, reject the basic assumption underlying the analysis of knowledge by arguing that propositional knowledge is a unique state that cannot be dissected into simpler components.
Value
The value of knowledge is the worth it holds by expanding understanding and guiding action. Knowledge can have instrumental value by helping a person achieve their goals. For example, knowledge of a disease helps a doctor cure their patient, and knowledge of when a job interview starts helps a candidate arrive on time. The usefulness of a known fact depends on the circumstances. Knowledge of some facts may have little to no uses, like memorizing random phone numbers from an outdated phone book. Being able to assess the value of knowledge matters in choosing what information to acquire and transmit to others. It affects decisions like which subjects to teach at school and how to allocate funds to research projects.
Of particular interest to epistemologists is the question of whether knowledge is more valuable than a mere opinion that is true. Knowledge and true opinion often have a similar usefulness since both are accurate representations of reality. For example, if a person wants to go to Larissa, a true opinion about how to get there may help them in the same way as knowledge does. Plato already considered this problem and suggested that knowledge is better because it is more stable. Another suggestion focuses on practical reasoning. It proposes that people put more trust in knowledge than in mere true beliefs when drawing conclusions and deciding what to do. A different response says that knowledge has intrinsic value, meaning that it is good in itself independent of its usefulness.
Belief and truth
Beliefs are mental states about what is the case, like believing that snow is white or that God exists. In epistemology, they are often understood as subjective attitudes that affirm or deny a proposition, which can be expressed in a declarative sentence. For instance, to believe that snow is white is to affirm the proposition "snow is white". According to this view, beliefs are representations of what the world is like. They are kept in memory and can be retrieved when actively thinking about reality or when deciding how to act. A different view understands beliefs as behavioral patterns or dispositions to act rather than as representational items stored in the mind. This view says that to believe that there is mineral water in the fridge is nothing more than a group of dispositions related to mineral water and the fridge. Examples are the dispositions to answer questions about the presence of mineral water affirmatively and to go to the fridge when thirsty. Some theorists deny the existence of beliefs, saying that this concept borrowed from folk psychology is an oversimplification of much more complex psychological processes. Beliefs play a central role in various epistemological debates, which cover their status as a component of propositional knowledge, the question of whether people have control over and are responsible for their beliefs, and the issue of whether there are degrees of beliefs, called credences.
As propositional attitudes, beliefs are true or false depending on whether they affirm a true or a false proposition. According to the correspondence theory of truth, to be true means to stand in the right relation to the world by accurately describing what it is like. This means that truth is objective: a belief is true if it corresponds to a fact. The coherence theory of truth says that a belief is true if it belongs to a coherent system of beliefs. A result of this view is that truth is relative since it depends on other beliefs. Further theories of truth include pragmatist, semantic, pluralist, and deflationary theories. Truth plays a central role in epistemology as a goal of cognitive processes and a component of propositional knowledge.
Justification
In epistemology, justification is a property of beliefs that fulfill certain norms about what a person should believe. According to a common view, this means that the person has sufficient reasons for holding this belief because they have information that supports it. Another view states that a belief is justified if it is formed by a reliable belief formation process, such as perception. The terms reasonable, warranted, and supported are closely related to the idea of justification and are sometimes used as synonyms. Justification is what distinguishes justified beliefs from superstition and lucky guesses. However, justification does not guarantee truth. For example, if a person has strong but misleading evidence, they may form a justified belief that is false.
Epistemologists often identify justification as one component of knowledge. Usually, they are not only interested in whether a person has a sufficient reason to hold a belief, known as propositional justification, but also in whether the person holds the belief because or based on this reason, known as doxastic justification. For example, if a person has sufficient reason to believe that a neighborhood is dangerous but forms this belief based on superstition then they have propositional justification but lack doxastic justification.
Sources
Sources of justification are ways or cognitive capacities through which people acquire justification. Often-discussed sources include perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony, but there is no universal agreement to what extent they all provide valid justification. Perception relies on sensory organs to gain empirical information. There are various forms of perception corresponding to different physical stimuli, such as visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory, and gustatory perception. Perception is not merely the reception of sense impressions but an active process that selects, organizes, and interprets sensory signals. Introspection is a closely related process focused not on external physical objects but on internal mental states. For example, seeing a bus at a bus station belongs to perception while feeling tired belongs to introspection.
Rationalists understand reason as a source of justification for non-empirical facts. It is often used to explain how people can know about mathematical, logical, and conceptual truths. Reason is also responsible for inferential knowledge, in which one or several beliefs are used as premises to support another belief. Memory depends on information provided by other sources, which it retains and recalls, like remembering a phone number perceived earlier. Justification by testimony relies on information one person communicates to another person. This can happen by talking to each other but can also occur in other forms, like a letter, a newspaper, and a blog.
Other concepts
Rationality is closely related to justification and the terms rational belief and justified belief are sometimes used as synonyms. However, rationality has a wider scope that encompasses both a theoretical side, covering beliefs, and a practical side, covering decisions, intentions, and actions. There are different conceptions about what it means for something to be rational. According to one view, a mental state is rational if it is based on or responsive to good reasons. Another view emphasizes the role of coherence, stating that rationality requires that the different mental states of a person are consistent and support each other. A slightly different approach holds that rationality is about achieving certain goals. Two goals of theoretical rationality are accuracy and comprehensiveness, meaning that a person has as few false beliefs and as many true beliefs as possible.
Epistemic norms are criteria to assess the cognitive quality of beliefs, like their justification and rationality. Epistemologists distinguish between deontic norms, which are prescriptions about what people should believe or which beliefs are correct, and axiological norms, which identify the goals and values of beliefs. Epistemic norms are closely related to intellectual or epistemic virtues, which are character traits like open-mindedness and conscientiousness. Epistemic virtues help individuals form true beliefs and acquire knowledge. They contrast with epistemic vices and act as foundational concepts of virtue epistemology.
Evidence for a belief is information that favors or supports it. Epistemologists understand evidence primarily in terms of mental states, for example, as sensory impressions or as other propositions that a person knows. But in a wider sense, it can also include physical objects, like bloodstains examined by forensic analysts or financial records studied by investigative journalists. Evidence is often understood in terms of probability: evidence for a belief makes it more likely that the belief is true. A defeater is evidence against a belief or evidence that undermines another piece of evidence. For instance, witness testimony connecting a suspect to a crime is evidence for their guilt while an alibi is a defeater. Evidentialists analyze justification in terms of evidence by saying that to be justified, a belief needs to rest on adequate evidence.
The presence of evidence usually affects doubt and certainty, which are subjective attitudes toward propositions that differ regarding their level of confidence. Doubt involves questioning the validity or truth of a proposition. Certainty, by contrast, is a strong affirmative conviction, meaning that the person is free of doubt that the proposition is true. In epistemology, doubt and certainty play central roles in attempts to find a secure foundation of all knowledge and in skeptical projects aiming to establish that no belief is immune to doubt.
While propositional knowledge is the main topic in epistemology, some theorists focus on understanding rather than knowledge. Understanding is a more holistic notion that involves a wider grasp of a subject. To understand something, a person requires awareness of how different things are connected and why they are the way they are. For example, knowledge of isolated facts memorized from a textbook does not amount to understanding. According to one view, understanding is a special epistemic good that, unlike knowledge, is always intrinsically valuable. Wisdom is similar in this regard and is sometimes considered the highest epistemic good. It encompasses a reflective understanding with practical applications. It helps people grasp and evaluate complex situations and lead a good life.
Schools of thought
Skepticism, fallibilism, and relativism
Philosophical skepticism questions the human ability to arrive at knowledge. Some skeptics limit their criticism to certain domains of knowledge. For example, religious skeptics say that it is impossible to have certain knowledge about the existence of deities or other religious doctrines. Similarly, moral skeptics challenge the existence of moral knowledge and metaphysical skeptics say that humans cannot know ultimate reality.
Global skepticism is the widest form of skepticism, asserting that there is no knowledge in any domain. In ancient philosophy, this view was accepted by academic skeptics while Pyrrhonian skeptics recommended the suspension of belief to achieve a state of tranquility. Overall, not many epistemologists have explicitly defended global skepticism. The influence of this position derives mainly from attempts by other philosophers to show that their theory overcomes the challenge of skepticism. For example, René Descartes used methodological doubt to find facts that cannot be doubted.
One consideration in favor of global skepticism is the dream argument. It starts from the observation that, while people are dreaming, they are usually unaware of this. This inability to distinguish between dream and regular experience is used to argue that there is no certain knowledge since a person can never be sure that they are not dreaming. Some critics assert that global skepticism is a self-refuting idea because denying the existence of knowledge is itself a knowledge claim. Another objection says that the abstract reasoning leading to skepticism is not convincing enough to overrule common sense.
Fallibilism is another response to skepticism. Fallibilists agree with skeptics that absolute certainty is impossible. Most fallibilists disagree with skeptics about the existence of knowledge, saying that there is knowledge since it does not require absolute certainty. They emphasize the need to keep an open and inquisitive mind since doubt can never be fully excluded, even for well-established knowledge claims like thoroughly tested scientific theories.
Epistemic relativism is a related view. It does not question the existence of knowledge in general but rejects the idea that there are universal epistemic standards or absolute principles that apply equally to everyone. This means that what a person knows depends on the subjective criteria or social conventions used to assess epistemic status.
Empiricism and rationalism
The debate between empiricism and rationalism centers on the origins of human knowledge. Empiricism emphasizes that sense experience is the primary source of all knowledge. Some empiricists express this view by stating that the mind is a blank slate that only develops ideas about the external world through the sense data it receives from the sensory organs. According to them, the mind can arrive at various additional insights by comparing impressions, combining them, generalizing to arrive at more abstract ideas, and deducing new conclusions from them. Empiricists say that all these mental operations depend on material from the senses and do not function on their own.
Even though rationalists usually accept sense experience as one source of knowledge, they also say that important forms of knowledge come directly from reason without sense experience, like knowledge of mathematical and logical truths. According to some rationalists, the mind possesses inborn ideas which it can access without the help of the senses. Others hold that there is an additional cognitive faculty, sometimes called rational intuition, through which people acquire nonempirical knowledge. Some rationalists limit their discussion to the origin of concepts, saying that the mind relies on inborn categories to understand the world and organize experience.
Foundationalism and coherentism
Foundationalists and coherentists disagree about the structure of knowledge. Foundationalism distinguishes between basic and non-basic beliefs. A belief is basic if it is justified directly, meaning that its validity does not depend on the support of other beliefs. A belief is non-basic if it is justified by another belief. For example, the belief that it rained last night is a non-basic belief if it is inferred from the observation that the street is wet. According to foundationalism, basic beliefs are the foundation on which all other knowledge is built while non-basic beliefs constitute the superstructure resting on this foundation.
Coherentists reject the distinction between basic and non-basic beliefs, saying that the justification of any belief depends on other beliefs. They assert that a belief must be in tune with other beliefs to amount to knowledge. This is the case if the beliefs are consistent and support each other. According to coherentism, justification is a holistic aspect determined by the whole system of beliefs, which resembles an interconnected web.
The view of foundherentism is an intermediary position combining elements of both foundationalism and coherentism. It accepts the distinction between basic and non-basic beliefs while asserting that the justification of non-basic beliefs depends on coherence with other beliefs.
Infinitism presents another approach to the structure of knowledge. It agrees with coherentism that there are no basic beliefs while rejecting the view that beliefs can support each other in a circular manner. Instead, it argues that beliefs form infinite justification chains, in which each link of the chain supports the belief following it and is supported by the belief preceding it.
Internalism and externalism
The disagreement between internalism and externalism is about the sources of justification. Internalists say that justification depends only on factors within the individual. Examples of such factors include perceptual experience, memories, and the possession of other beliefs. This view emphasizes the importance of the cognitive perspective of the individual in the form of their mental states. It is commonly associated with the idea that the relevant factors are accessible, meaning that the individual can become aware of their reasons for holding a justified belief through introspection and reflection.
Externalism rejects this view, saying that at least some relevant factors are external to the individual. This means that the cognitive perspective of the individual is less central while other factors, specifically the relation to truth, become more important. For instance, when considering the belief that a cup of coffee stands on the table, externalists are not only interested in the perceptual experience that led to this belief but also consider the quality of the person's eyesight, their ability to differentiate coffee from other beverages, and the circumstances under which they observed the cup.
Evidentialism is an influential internalist view. It says that justification depends on the possession of evidence. In this context, evidence for a belief is any information in the individual's mind that supports the belief. For example, the perceptual experience of rain is evidence for the belief that it is raining. Evidentialists have suggested various other forms of evidence, including memories, intuitions, and other beliefs. According to evidentialism, a belief is justified if the individual's evidence supports the belief and they hold the belief on the basis of this evidence.
Reliabilism is an externalist theory asserting that a reliable connection between belief and truth is required for justification. Some reliabilists explain this in terms of reliable processes. According to this view, a belief is justified if it is produced by a reliable belief-formation process, like perception. A belief-formation process is reliable if most of the beliefs it causes are true. A slightly different view focuses on beliefs rather than belief-formation processes, saying that a belief is justified if it is a reliable indicator of the fact it presents. This means that the belief tracks the fact: the person believes it because it is a fact but would not believe it otherwise.
Virtue epistemology is another type of externalism and is sometimes understood as a form of reliabilism. It says that a belief is justified if it manifests intellectual virtues. Intellectual virtues are capacities or traits that perform cognitive functions and help people form true beliefs. Suggested examples include faculties like vision, memory, and introspection.
Others
In the epistemology of perception, direct and indirect realists disagree about the connection between the perceiver and the perceived object. Direct realists say that this connection is direct, meaning that there is no difference between the object present in perceptual experience and the physical object causing this experience. According to indirect realism, the connection is indirect since there are mental entities, like ideas or sense data, that mediate between the perceiver and the external world. The contrast between direct and indirect realism is important for explaining the nature of illusions.
Constructivism in epistemology is the theory that how people view the world is not a simple reflection of external reality but an invention or a social construction. This view emphasizes the creative role of interpretation while undermining objectivity since social constructions may differ from society to society.
According to contrastivism, knowledge is a comparative term, meaning that to know something involves distinguishing it from relevant alternatives. For example, if a person spots a bird in the garden, they may know that it is a sparrow rather than an eagle but they may not know that it is a sparrow rather than an indistinguishable sparrow hologram.
Epistemic conservatism is a view about belief revision. It gives preference to the beliefs a person already has, asserting that a person should only change their beliefs if they have a good reason to. One motivation for adopting epistemic conservatism is that the cognitive resources of humans are limited, meaning that it is not feasible to constantly reexamine every belief.
Pragmatist epistemology is a form of fallibilism that emphasizes the close relation between knowing and acting. It sees the pursuit of knowledge as an ongoing process guided by common sense and experience while always open to revision.
Bayesian epistemology is a formal approach based on the idea that people have degrees of belief representing how certain they are. It uses probability theory to define norms of rationality that govern how certain people should be about their beliefs.
Phenomenological epistemology emphasizes the importance of first-person experience. It distinguishes between the natural and the phenomenological attitudes. The natural attitude focuses on objects belonging to common sense and natural science. The phenomenological attitude focuses on the experience of objects and aims to provide a presuppositionless description of how objects appear to the observer.
Particularism and generalism disagree about the right method of conducting epistemological research. Particularists start their inquiry by looking at specific cases. For example, to find a definition of knowledge, they rely on their intuitions about concrete instances of knowledge and particular thought experiments. They use these observations as methodological constraints that any theory of more general principles needs to follow. Generalists proceed in the opposite direction. They give preference to general epistemic principles, saying that it is not possible to accurately identify and describe specific cases without a grasp of these principles. Other methods in contemporary epistemology aim to extract philosophical insights from ordinary language or look at the role of knowledge in making assertions and guiding actions.
Postmodern epistemology criticizes the conditions of knowledge in advanced societies. This concerns in particular the metanarrative of a constant progress of scientific knowledge leading to a universal and foundational understanding of reality. Feminist epistemology critiques the effect of gender on knowledge. Among other topics, it explores how preconceptions about gender influence who has access to knowledge, how knowledge is produced, and which types of knowledge are valued in society. Decolonial scholarship criticizes the global influence of Western knowledge systems, often with the aim of decolonizing knowledge to undermine Western hegemony.
Various schools of epistemology are found in traditional Indian philosophy. Many of them focus on the different sources of knowledge, called . Perception, inference, and testimony are sources discussed by most schools. Other sources only considered by some schools are non-perception, which leads to knowledge of absences, and presumption. Buddhist epistemology tends to focus on immediate experience, understood as the presentation of unique particulars without the involvement of secondary cognitive processes, like thought and desire. Nyāya epistemology discusses the causal relation between the knower and the object of knowledge, which happens through reliable knowledge-formation processes. It sees perception as the primary source of knowledge, drawing a close connection between it and successful action. Mīmāṃsā epistemology understands the holy scriptures known as the Vedas as a key source of knowledge while discussing the problem of their right interpretation. Jain epistemology states that reality is many-sided, meaning that no single viewpoint can capture the entirety of truth.
Branches
Some branches of epistemology focus on the problems of knowledge within specific academic disciplines. The epistemology of science examines how scientific knowledge is generated and what problems arise in the process of validating, justifying, and interpreting scientific claims. A key issue concerns the problem of how individual observations can support universal scientific laws. Further topics include the nature of scientific evidence and the aims of science. The epistemology of mathematics studies the origin of mathematical knowledge. In exploring how mathematical theories are justified, it investigates the role of proofs and whether there are empirical sources of mathematical knowledge.
Epistemological problems are found in most areas of philosophy. The epistemology of logic examines how people know that an argument is valid. For example, it explores how logicians justify that modus ponens is a correct rule of inference or that all contradictions are false. Epistemologists of metaphysics investigate whether knowledge of ultimate reality is possible and what sources this knowledge could have. Knowledge of moral statements, like the claim that lying is wrong, belongs to the epistemology of ethics. It studies the role of ethical intuitions, coherence among moral beliefs, and the problem of moral disagreement. The ethics of belief is a closely related field covering the interrelation between epistemology and ethics. It examines the norms governing belief formation and asks whether violating them is morally wrong.
Religious epistemology studies the role of knowledge and justification for religious doctrines and practices. It evaluates the weight and reliability of evidence from religious experience and holy scriptures while also asking whether the norms of reason should be applied to religious faith. Social epistemology focuses on the social dimension of knowledge. While traditional epistemology is mainly interested in knowledge possessed by individuals, social epistemology covers knowledge acquisition, transmission, and evaluation within groups, with specific emphasis on how people rely on each other when seeking knowledge. Historical epistemology examines how the understanding of knowledge and related concepts has changed over time. It asks whether the main issues in epistemology are perennial and to what extent past epistemological theories are relevant to contemporary debates. It is particularly concerned with scientific knowledge and practices associated with it. It contrasts with the history of epistemology, which presents, reconstructs, and evaluates epistemological theories of philosophers in the past.
Naturalized epistemology is closely associated with the natural sciences, relying on their methods and theories to examine knowledge. Naturalistic epistemologists focus on empirical observation to formulate their theories and are often critical of approaches to epistemology that proceed by a priori reasoning. Evolutionary epistemology is a naturalistic approach that understands cognition as a product of evolution, examining knowledge and the cognitive faculties responsible for it from the perspective of natural selection. Epistemologists of language explore the nature of linguistic knowledge. One of their topics is the role of tacit knowledge, for example, when native speakers have mastered the rules of grammar but are unable to explicitly articulate those rules. Epistemologists of modality examine knowledge about what is possible and necessary. Epistemic problems that arise when two people have diverging opinions on a topic are covered by the epistemology of disagreement. Epistemologists of ignorance are interested in epistemic faults and gaps in knowledge.
There are distinct areas of epistemology dedicated to specific sources of knowledge. Examples are the epistemology of perception, the epistemology of memory, and the epistemology of testimony.
Some branches of epistemology are characterized by their research method. Formal epistemology employs formal tools found in logic and mathematics to investigate the nature of knowledge. Experimental epistemologists rely in their research on empirical evidence about common knowledge practices. Applied epistemology focuses on the practical application of epistemological principles to diverse real-world problems, like the reliability of knowledge claims on the internet, how to assess sexual assault allegations, and how racism may lead to epistemic injustice.
Metaepistemologists examine the nature, goals, and research methods of epistemology. As a metatheory, it does not directly defend a position about which epistemological theories are correct but examines their fundamental concepts and background assumptions.
Related fields
Epistemology and psychology were not defined as distinct fields until the 19th century; earlier investigations about knowledge often do not fit neatly into today's academic categories. Both contemporary disciplines study beliefs and the mental processes responsible for their formation and change. One important contrast is that psychology describes what beliefs people have and how they acquire them, thereby explaining why someone has a specific belief. The focus of epistemology is on evaluating beliefs, leading to a judgment about whether a belief is justified and rational in a particular case. Epistemology has a similar intimate connection to cognitive science, which understands mental events as processes that transform information. Artificial intelligence relies on the insights of epistemology and cognitive science to implement concrete solutions to problems associated with knowledge representation and automatic reasoning.
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. For epistemology, it is relevant to inferential knowledge, which arises when a person reasons from one known fact to another. This is the case, for example, if a person does not know directly that but comes to infer it based on their knowledge that , , and . Whether an inferential belief amounts to knowledge depends on the form of reasoning used, in particular, that the process does not violate the laws of logic. Another overlap between the two fields is found in the epistemic approach to fallacy theory. Fallacies are faulty arguments based on incorrect reasoning. The epistemic approach to fallacies explains why they are faulty, stating that arguments aim to expand knowledge. According to this view, an argument is a fallacy if it fails to do so. A further intersection is found in epistemic logic, which uses formal logical devices to study epistemological concepts like knowledge and belief.
Both decision theory and epistemology are interested in the foundations of rational thought and the role of beliefs. Unlike many approaches in epistemology, the main focus of decision theory lies less in the theoretical and more in the practical side, exploring how beliefs are translated into action. Decision theorists examine the reasoning involved in decision-making and the standards of good decisions. They identify beliefs as a central aspect of decision-making. One of their innovations is to distinguish between weaker and stronger beliefs. This helps them take the effect of uncertainty on decisions into consideration.
Epistemology and education have a shared interest in knowledge, with one difference being that education focuses on the transmission of knowledge, exploring the roles of both learner and teacher. Learning theory examines how people acquire knowledge. Behavioral learning theories explain the process in terms of behavior changes, for example, by associating a certain response with a particular stimulus. Cognitive learning theories study how the cognitive processes that affect knowledge acquisition transform information. Pedagogy looks at the transmission of knowledge from the teacher's side, exploring the teaching methods they may employ. In teacher-centered methods, the teacher takes the role of the main authority delivering knowledge and guiding the learning process. In student-centered methods, the teacher mainly supports and facilitates the learning process while the students take a more active role. The beliefs students have about knowledge, called personal epistemology, affect their intellectual development and learning success.
The anthropology of knowledge examines how knowledge is acquired, stored, retrieved, and communicated. It studies the social and cultural circumstances that affect how knowledge is reproduced and changes, covering the role of institutions like university departments and scientific journals as well as face-to-face discussions and online communications. It understands knowledge in a wide sense that encompasses various forms of understanding and culture, including practical skills. Unlike epistemology, it is not interested in whether a belief is true or justified but in how understanding is reproduced in society. The sociology of knowledge is a closely related field with a similar conception of knowledge. It explores how physical, demographic, economic, and sociocultural factors impact knowledge. It examines in what sociohistorical contexts knowledge emerges and the effects it has on people, for example, how socioeconomic conditions are related to the dominant ideology in a society.
History
Early reflections on the nature and sources of knowledge are found in ancient history. In ancient Greek philosophy, Plato (427–347 BCE) studied what knowledge is, examining how it differs from true opinion by being based on good reasons. According to him, the process of learning something is a form of recollection in which the soul remembers what it already knew before. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was particularly interested in scientific knowledge, exploring the role of sensory experience and how to make inferences from general principles. The Hellenistic schools began to arise in the 4th century BCE. The Epicureans had an empiricist outlook, stating that sensations are always accurate and act as the supreme standard of judgments. The Stoics defended a similar position but limited themselves to lucid and specific sensations, which they regarded as true. The skepticists questioned that knowledge is possible, recommending instead suspension of judgment to arrive at a state of tranquility.
The Upanishads, philosophical scriptures composed in ancient India between 700 and 300 BCE, examined how people acquire knowledge, including the role of introspection, comparison, and deduction. In the 6th century BCE, the school of Ajñana developed a radical skepticism questioning the possibility and usefulness of knowledge. The school of Nyaya emerged in the 2nd century BCE and provided a systematic treatment of how people acquire knowledge, distinguishing between valid and invalid sources. When Buddhist philosophers later became interested in epistemology, they relied on concepts developed in Nyaya and other traditions. Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti (6th or 7th century CE) analyzed the process of knowing as a series of causally related events.
Ancient Chinese philosophers understood knowledge as an interconnected phenomenon fundamentally linked to ethical behavior and social involvement. Many saw wisdom as the goal of attaining knowledge. Mozi (470–391 BCE) proposed a pragmatic approach to knowledge using historical records, sensory evidence, and practical outcomes to validate beliefs. Mencius explored analogical reasoning as another source of knowledge. Xunzi aimed to combine empirical observation and rational inquiry. He emphasized the importance of clarity and standards of reasoning without excluding the role of feeling and emotion.
The relation between reason and faith was a central topic in the medieval period. In Arabic–Persian philosophy, al-Farabi and Averroes (1126–1198) discussed how philosophy and theology interact and which is the better vehicle to truth. Al-Ghazali criticized many of the core teachings of previous Islamic philosophers, saying that they rely on unproven assumptions that do not amount to knowledge. In Western philosophy, Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) proposed that theological teaching and philosophical inquiry are in harmony and complement each other. Peter Abelard (1079–1142) argued against unquestioned theological authorities and said that all things are open to rational doubt. Influenced by Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) developed an empiricist theory, stating that "nothing is in the intellect unless it first appeared in the senses". According to an early form of direct realism proposed by William of Ockham, perception of mind-independent objects happens directly without intermediaries. Meanwhile, in 14th-century India, Gaṅgeśa developed a reliabilist theory of knowledge and considered the problems of testimony and fallacies. In China, Wang Yangming (1472–1529) explored the unity of knowledge and action, holding that moral knowledge is inborn and can be attained by overcoming self-interest.
The course of modern philosophy was shaped by René Descartes (1596–1650), who claimed that philosophy must begin from a position of indubitable knowledge of first principles. Inspired by skepticism, he aimed to find absolutely certain knowledge by encountering truths that cannot be doubted. He thought that this is the case for the assertion "I think, therefore I am", from which he constructed the rest of his philosophical system. Descartes, together with Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), belonged to the school of rationalism, which asserts that the mind possesses innate ideas independent of experience. John Locke (1632–1704) rejected this view in favor of an empiricism according to which the mind is a blank slate. This means that all ideas depend on sense experience, either as "ideas of sense", which are directly presented through the senses, or as "ideas of reflection", which the mind creates by reflecting on ideas of sense. David Hume (1711–1776) used this idea to explore the limits of what people can know. He said that knowledge of facts is never certain, adding that knowledge of relations between ideas, like mathematical truths, can be certain but contains no information about the world. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) tried to find a middle position between rationalism and empiricism by identifying a type of knowledge that Hume had missed. For Kant, this is knowledge about principles that underlie all experience and structure it, such as spatial and temporal relations and fundamental categories of understanding.
In the 19th-century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) argued against empiricism, saying that sensory impressions on their own cannot amount to knowledge since all knowledge is actively structured by the knowing subject. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) defended a wide-sweeping form of empiricism and explained knowledge of general truths through inductive reasoning. Charles Peirce (1839–1914) thought that all knowledge is fallible, emphasizing that knowledge seekers should always be ready to revise their beliefs if new evidence is encountered. He used this idea to argue against Cartesian foundationalism seeking absolutely certain truths.
In the 20th century, fallibilism was further explored by J. L. Austin (1911–1960) and Karl Popper (1902–1994). In continental philosophy, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) applied the skeptic idea of suspending judgment to the study of experience. By not judging whether an experience is accurate or not, he tried to describe the internal structure of experience instead. Logical positivists, like A. J. Ayer (1910–1989), said that all knowledge is either empirical or analytic. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) developed an empiricist sense-datum theory, distinguishing between direct knowledge by acquaintance of sense data and indirect knowledge by description, which is inferred from knowledge by acquaintance. Common sense had a central place in G. E. Moore's (1873–1958) epistemology. He used trivial observations, like the fact that he has two hands, to argue against abstract philosophical theories that deviate from common sense. Ordinary language philosophy, as practiced by the late Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), is a similar approach that tries to extract epistemological insights from how ordinary language is used.
Edmund Gettier (1927–2021) conceived counterexamples against the idea that knowledge is the same as justified true belief. These counterexamples prompted many philosophers to suggest alternative definitions of knowledge. One of the alternatives considered was reliabilism, which says that knowledge requires reliable sources, shifting the focus away from justification. Virtue epistemology, a closely related response, analyses belief formation in terms of the intellectual virtues or cognitive competencies involved in the process. Naturalized epistemology, as conceived by Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), employs concepts and ideas from the natural sciences to formulate its theories. Other developments in late 20th-century epistemology were the emergence of social, feminist, and historical epistemology.
See also
Logology (science)
References
Notes
Citations
Bibliography
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Environmentalism | Environmentalism or environmental rights is a broad philosophy, ideology, and social movement about supporting life, habitats, and surroundings. While environmentalism focuses more on the environmental and nature-related aspects of green ideology and politics, ecologism combines the ideology of social ecology and environmentalism. Ecologism is more commonly used in continental European languages, while environmentalism is more commonly used in English but the words have slightly different connotations.
Environmentalism advocates the preservation, restoration and improvement of the natural environment and critical earth system elements or processes such as the climate, and may be referred to as a movement to control pollution or protect plant and animal diversity. For this reason, concepts such as a land ethics, environmental ethics, biodiversity, ecology, and the biophilia hypothesis figure predominantly. The environmentalist movement encompasses various approaches to addressing environmental issues, including free market environmentalism, evangelical environmentalism, and the environmental conservation movement.
At its crux, environmentalism is an attempt to balance relations between humans and the various natural systems on which they depend in such a way that all the components are accorded a proper degree of sustainability. The exact measures and outcomes of this balance is controversial and there are many different ways for environmental concerns to be expressed in practice. Environmentalism and environmental concerns are often represented by the colour green, but this association has been appropriated by the marketing industries for the tactic known as greenwashing.
Environmentalism is opposed by anti-environmentalism, which says that the Earth is less fragile than some environmentalists maintain, and portrays environmentalism as overreacting to the human contribution to climate change or opposing human advancement.
Definitions
Environmentalism denotes a social movement that seeks to influence the political process by lobbying, activism, and education in order to protect natural resources and ecosystems.
An environmentalist is a person who may speak out about our natural environment and the sustainable management of its resources through changes in public policy or individual behaviour. This may include supporting practices such as informed consumption, conservation initiatives, investment in renewable resources, improved efficiencies in the materials economy, transitioning to new accounting paradigms such as ecological economics, renewing and revitalizing our connections with non-human life or even opting to have one less child to reduce consumption and pressure on resources.
In various ways (for example, grassroots activism and protests), environmentalists and environmental organisations seek to give the natural world a stronger voice in human affairs.
In general terms, environmentalists advocate the sustainable management of resources, and the protection (and restoration, when necessary) of the natural environment through changes in public policy and individual behaviour. In its recognition of humanity as a participant in ecosystems, the movement is centered around ecology, health, and human rights.
History
A concern for environmental protection has recurred in diverse forms, in different parts of the world, throughout history.
The earliest ideas of environmental protectionism can be found in Jainism, a religion from ancient India revived by Mahavira in the 6th century BC. Jainism offers a view that is in many ways compatible with core values associated with environmental activism, such as the protection of life by nonviolence, which could form a strong ecological ethos for global protection of the environment. Mahavira's teachings on the symbiosis between all living beings—as well as the five elements of earth, water, air, fire, and space—are core to environmental thought today.
In West Asia, the Caliph Abu Bakr in the 630s AD commanded his army to "Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire," and to "Slay not any of the enemy's flock, save for your food." Various Islamic medical treatises during the 9th to 13th centuries dealt with environmentalism and environmental science, including the issue of pollution. The authors of such treatises included Al-Kindi, Qusta ibn Luqa, Al-Razi, Ibn Al-Jazzar, al-Tamimi, al-Masihi, Avicenna, Ali ibn Ridwan, Ibn Jumay, Isaac Israeli ben Solomon, Abd-el-latif, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn al-Nafis. Their works covered a number of subjects related to pollution, such as air pollution, water pollution, soil contamination, and the mishandling of municipal solid waste. They also included assessments of certain localities' environmental impact.
In Europe, King Edward I of England banned the burning and sale of "sea-coal" in 1272 by proclamation in London, after its smoke had become a prevalent annoyance throughout the city. This fuel, common in London due to the local scarcity of wood, was given this early name because it could be found washed up on some shores, from where it was carted away on a wheelbarrow.
Early environmental legislation
The origins of the environmental movement lay in the response to increasing levels of smoke pollution in the atmosphere during the Industrial Revolution. The emergence of great factories and the concomitant immense growth in coal consumption gave rise to an unprecedented level of air pollution in industrial centers; after 1900 the large volume of industrial chemical discharges added to the growing load of untreated human waste. The first large-scale, modern environmental laws came in the form of Britain's Alkali Acts, passed in 1863, to regulate the deleterious air pollution (gaseous hydrochloric acid) given off by the Leblanc process, used to produce soda ash. An Alkali inspector and four sub-inspectors were appointed to curb this pollution. The inspectorate's responsibilities were gradually expanded, culminating in the Alkali Order 1958 which placed all major heavy industries that emitted smoke, grit, dust and fumes under supervision.
In industrial cities, local experts and reformers, especially after 1890, took the lead in identifying environmental degradation and pollution, and initiating grass-roots movements to demand and achieve reforms. Typically the highest priority went to water and air pollution. The Coal Smoke Abatement Society was formed in 1898 making it one of the oldest environmental NGOs. It was founded by artist Sir William Blake Richmond, frustrated with the pall cast by coal smoke. Although there were earlier pieces of legislation, the Public Health Act 1875 required all furnaces and fireplaces to consume their own smoke. It also provided for sanctions against factories that emitted large amounts of black smoke. This law's provisions were extended in 1926 with the Smoke Abatement Act to include other emissions, such as soot, ash, and gritty particles, and to empower local authorities to impose their own regulations.
It was only under the impetus of the Great Smog of 1952 in London, which almost brought the city to a standstill and may have caused upward of 6,000 deaths, that the Clean Air Act 1956 was passed and airborne pollution in the city was first tackled. Financial incentives were offered to householders to replace open coal fires with alternatives (such as installing gas fires) or those who preferred, to burn coke instead (a byproduct of town gas production) which produces minimal smoke. 'Smoke control areas' were introduced in some towns and cities where only smokeless fuels could be burnt and power stations were relocated away from cities. The act formed an important impetus to modern environmentalism and caused a rethinking of the dangers of environmental degradation to people's quality of life.
The late 19th century also saw the passage of the first wildlife conservation laws.
The zoologist Alfred Newton published a series of investigations into the Desirability of establishing a 'Close-time' for the preservation of indigenous animals between 1872 and 1903. His advocacy for legislation to protect animals from hunting during the mating season led to the formation of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and influenced the passage of the Sea Birds Preservation Act in 1869 as the first nature protection law in the world.
During the Spanish Revolution, anarchist-controlled territories undertook several environmental reforms, which were possibly the largest in the world at the time. Daniel Guerin notes that anarchist territories would diversify crops, extend irrigation, initiate reforestation, start tree nurseries and help to establish naturist communities. Once there was a link discovered between air pollution and tuberculosis, the CNT shut down several metal factories.
First environmental movements
Early interest in the environment was a feature of the Romantic movement in the early 19th century. One of the earliest modern pronouncements on thinking about human industrial advancement and its influence on the environment was written by Japanese geographer, educator, philosopher and author Tsunesaburo Makiguchi in his 1903 publication Jinsei Chirigaku (A Geography of Human Life). In Britain the poet William Wordsworth travelled extensively in the Lake District and wrote that it is a "sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy".
Systematic efforts on behalf of the environment only began in the late 19th century; it grew out of the amenity movement in Britain in the 1870s, which was a reaction to industrialisation, the growth of cities, and worsening air and water pollution. Starting with the formation of the Commons Preservation Society in 1865, the movement championed rural preservation against the encroachments of industrialisation. Robert Hunter, solicitor for the society, worked with Hardwicke Rawnsley, Octavia Hill, and John Ruskin to lead a successful campaign to prevent the construction of railways to carry slate from the quarries, which would have ruined the unspoiled valleys of Newlands and Ennerdale. This success led to the formation of the Lake District Defence Society (later to become The Friends of the Lake District).
Peter Kropotkin wrote about ecology in economics, agricultural science, conservation, ethology, criminology, urban planning, geography, geology and biology. He observed in Swiss and Siberian glaciers that they had been slowly melting since the dawn of the industrial revolution, possibly making him one of the first predictors for climate change. He also observed the damage done from deforestation and hunting. Kropotkin's writings would become influential in the 1970s and became a major inspiration for the intentional community movement as well as his ideas becoming the basis for the theory of social ecology.
In 1893 Hill, Hunter and Rawnsley agreed to set up a national body to coordinate environmental conservation efforts across the country; the "National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty" was formally inaugurated in 1894. The organisation obtained secure footing through the 1907 National Trust Bill, which gave the trust the status of a statutory corporation. and the bill was passed in August 1907.
An early "Back-to-Nature" movement, which anticipated the romantic ideal of modern environmentalism, was advocated by intellectuals such as John Ruskin, William Morris, George Bernard Shaw and Edward Carpenter, who were all against consumerism, pollution and other activities that were harmful to the natural world. The movement was a reaction to the urban conditions of the industrial towns, where sanitation was awful, pollution levels intolerable and housing terribly cramped. Idealists championed the rural life as a mythical utopia and advocated a return to it. John Ruskin argued that people should return to a "small piece of English ground, beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no steam engines upon it ... we will have plenty of flowers and vegetables ... we will have some music and poetry; the children will learn to dance to it and sing it."
Practical ventures in the establishment of small cooperative farms were even attempted and old rural traditions, without the "taint of manufacture or the canker of artificiality", were enthusiastically revived, including the Morris dance and the maypole.
These ideas also inspired various environmental groups in the UK, such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, established in 1889 by Emily Williamson as a protest group to campaign for greater protection for the indigenous birds of the island. The Society attracted growing support from the suburban middle-classes as well as support from many other influential figures, such as the ornithologist Professor Alfred Newton. By 1900, public support for the organisation had grown, and it had over 25,000 members. The garden city movement incorporated many environmental concerns into its urban planning manifesto; the Socialist League and The Clarion movement also began to advocate measures of nature conservation.
The movement in the United States began in the late 19th century, out of concerns for protecting the natural resources of the West, with individuals such as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau making key philosophical contributions. Thoreau was interested in peoples' relationship with nature and studied this by living close to nature in a simple life. He published his experiences in the book Walden, which argues that people should become intimately close with nature. Muir came to believe in nature's inherent right, especially after spending time hiking in Yosemite Valley and studying both the ecology and geology. He successfully lobbied congress to form Yosemite National Park and went on to set up the Sierra Club in 1892. The conservationist principles as well as the belief in an inherent right of nature were to become the bedrock of modern environmentalism.
In the 20th century, environmental ideas continued to grow in popularity and recognition. Efforts were starting to be made to save some wildlife, particularly the American bison. The death of the last passenger pigeon as well as the endangerment of the American bison helped to focus the minds of conservationists and to popularise their concerns. In 1916, the National Park Service was founded by US President Woodrow Wilson.
The Forestry Commission was set up in 1919 in Britain to increase the amount of woodland in Britain by buying land for afforestation and reforestation. The commission was also tasked with promoting forestry and the production of timber for trade. During the 1920s the Commission focused on acquiring land to begin planting out new forests; much of the land was previously used for agricultural purposes. By 1939 the Forestry Commission was the largest landowner in Britain.
During the 1930s the Nazis had elements that were supportive of animal rights, zoos and wildlife, and took several measures to ensure their protection. In 1933 the government created a stringent animal-protection law and in 1934, (The Reich Hunting Law) was enacted which limited hunting. Several Nazis were environmentalists (notably Rudolf Hess), and species protection and animal welfare were significant issues in the regime. In 1935, the regime enacted the "Reich Nature Protection Act". The concept of the (best translated as the "perpetual forest") which included concepts such as forest management and protection was promoted and efforts were also made to curb air pollution.
In 1949, A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold was published. It explained Leopold's belief that humankind should have moral respect for the environment and that it is unethical to harm it. The book is sometimes called the most influential book on conservation.
Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and beyond, photography was used to enhance public awareness of the need for protecting land and recruiting members to environmental organisations. David Brower, Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall created the Sierra Club Exhibit Format Series, which helped raise public environmental awareness and brought a rapidly increasing flood of new members to the Sierra Club and to the environmental movement in general. This Is Dinosaur, edited by Wallace Stegner with photographs by Martin Litton and Philip Hyde, prevented the building of dams within Dinosaur National Monument by becoming part of a new kind of activism called environmentalism that combined the conservationist ideals of Thoreau, Leopold and Muir with hard-hitting advertising, lobbying, book distribution, letter writing campaigns, and more. The powerful use of photography in addition to the written word for conservation dated back to the creation of Yosemite National Park, when photographs persuaded Abraham Lincoln to preserve the beautiful glacier carved landscape for all time. The Sierra Club Exhibit Format Series galvanised public opposition to building dams in the Grand Canyon and protected many other national treasures. The Sierra Club often led a coalition of many environmental groups including the Wilderness Society and many others.
After a focus on preserving wilderness in the 1950s and 1960s, the Sierra Club and other groups broadened their focus to include such issues as air and water pollution, population concern, and curbing the exploitation of natural resources.
The prevailing belief regarding the origins of early environmentalism suggests that it emerged as a local response to the adverse impacts of industrialization in Western nations and communities. In terms of conservation efforts, there is a widespread view that the conservation movement began as a predominantly elite concern in North America, focusing on the preservation of local natural areas. A less prevailing view, however, attributes the roots of early environmentalism to a growing public concern about the influence of Western economic forces, particularly in connection with colonization, on tropical environments. Richard Grove, in a 1990 report, points out that little attention has been given to the significance of the colonial experience, particularly the European colonial experience, in shaping early European environmentalism.
Grove argues that as European colonization expanded, so did the European interaction with land and indigenous people, providing Europeans with an awareness of the destructive consequences of their economic and colonial activities on the newly "discovered" lands. As global trade expanded through colonization, the European concept of nature underwent a transformation, with the foreign tropical environments of their conquests evolving into romantic symbols of idyllic landscapes that required care and protection by Europeans. Examples of this impact of colonization on the Western mindset can be found in prominent cultural references, such as William Shakespeare's play "The Tempest" and Andrew Marvell's poem "Bermoothes."
Although this newfound self-awareness among Europeans about the destructive impacts of colonization on the environment did not halt the expansion of colonization itself, it did pave the way for a different approach to colonization – one focused on the preservation and protection of foreign natural resources. This phenomenon can be linked to the emergence of Edenic thinking, or the quest for Eden on Earth. This quest to locate Eden gained prominence in the 15th century, coinciding with colonization, and fostered the belief that newly "discovered" lands, especially tropical ones, had the potential to be heavenly paradises.
Post-war expansion
In 1962, Silent Spring by American biologist Rachel Carson was published. The book cataloged the environmental impacts of the indiscriminate spraying of DDT in the US and questioned the logic of releasing large amounts of chemicals into the environment without fully understanding their effects on human health and ecology. The book suggested that DDT and other pesticides may cause cancer and that their agricultural use was a threat to wildlife, particularly birds. The resulting public concern led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 which subsequently banned the agricultural use of DDT in the US in 1972. The limited use of DDT in disease vector control continues to this day in certain parts of the world and remains controversial. The book's legacy was to produce a far greater awareness of environmental issues and interest into how people affect the environment. With this new interest in environment came interest in problems such as air pollution and petroleum spills, and environmental interest grew. New pressure groups formed, notably Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (US), as well as notable local organisations such as the Wyoming Outdoor Council, which was founded in 1967. From 1962 to 1998, the environmental movement founded 772 national organizations in the United States.
In the 1970s, the environmental movement gained rapid speed around the world as a productive outgrowth of the counterculture movement.
The world's first political parties to campaign on a predominantly environmental platform were the United Tasmania Group of Tasmania, Australia, and the Values Party of New Zealand. The first green party in Europe was the Popular Movement for the Environment, founded in 1972 in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel. The first national green party in Europe was PEOPLE, founded in Britain in February 1973, which eventually turned into the Ecology Party, and then the Green Party.
Protection of the environment also became important in the developing world; the Chipko movement was formed in India under the influence of Mhatmas Gandhi and they set up peaceful resistance to deforestation by literally hugging trees (leading to the term "tree huggers"). Their peaceful methods of protest and slogan "ecology is permanent economy" were very influential.
Another milestone in the movement was the creation of Earth Day. Earth Day was first observed in San Francisco and other cities on 21 March 1970, the first day of spring. It was created to give awareness to environmental issues. On 21 March 1971, United Nations Secretary-General U Thant spoke of a spaceship Earth on Earth Day, hereby referring to the ecosystem services the earth supplies to us, and hence our obligation to protect it (and with it, ourselves). Earth Day is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network, and is celebrated in more than 192 countries every year.
The UN's first major conference on international environmental issues, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (also known as the Stockholm Conference), was held on 5–16 June 1972. It marked a turning point in the development of international environmental politics.
By the mid-1970s, many felt that people were on the edge of environmental catastrophe. The back-to-the-land movement started to form and ideas of environmental ethics joined with anti-Vietnam War sentiments and other political issues. These individuals lived outside normal society and started to take on some of the more radical environmental theories such as deep ecology. Around this time more mainstream environmentalism was starting to show force with the signing of the Endangered Species Act in 1973 and the formation of CITES in 1975. Significant amendments were also enacted to the United States Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.
In 1979, James Lovelock, a British scientist, published Gaia: A new look at life on Earth, which put forth the Gaia hypothesis; it proposes that life on earth can be understood as a single organism. This became an important part of the Deep Green ideology. Throughout the rest of the history of environmentalism there has been debate and argument between more radical followers of this Deep Green ideology and more mainstream environmentalists.
21st century and beyond
Environmentalism continues to evolve to face up to new issues such as global warming, overpopulation, genetic engineering, and plastic pollution.
Research demonstrates a precipitous decline in the US public's interest in 19 different areas of environmental concern. Americans are less likely to be actively participating in an environmental movement or organisation and more likely to identify as "unsympathetic" to an environmental movement than in 2000. This is likely a lingering factor of the Great Recession in 2008. Since 2005, the percentage of Americans agreeing that the environment should be given priority over economic growth has dropped 10 points; in contrast, those feeling that growth should be given priority "even if the environment suffers to some extent" has risen 12 percent. Nevertheless, a recent National Geographic survey indicated strong desire for commitment across a dozen countries, indicating a majority were in favour of more than half of the Earth's land surface being protected.
New forms of ecoactivism
Tree sitting is a form of activism in which the protester sits in a tree in an attempt to stop the removal of a tree or to impede the demolition of an area with the longest and most famous tree-sitter being Julia Butterfly Hill, who spent 738 days in a California Redwood, saving a three-acre tract of forest. Also notable is the Yellow Finch tree sit, which was a 932-day blockade of the Mountain Valley Pipeline from 2018 to 2021.
Sit-ins can be used to encourage social change, such as the Greensboro sit-ins, a series of protests in 1960 to stop racial segregation, but can also be used in ecoactivism, as in the Dakota Access Pipeline Protest.
Before the Syrian civil war, Rojava had been ecologically damaged by monoculture, oil extraction, damming of rivers, deforestation, drought, topsoil loss and general pollution. The DFNS launched a campaign titled 'Make Rojava Green Again' (a parody of Make America Great Again) which is attempting to provide renewable energy to communities (especially solar energy), reforestation, protecting water sources, planting gardens, promoting urban agriculture, creating wildlife reserves, water recycling, beekeeping, expanding public transportation and promoting environmental awareness within their communities.
The Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities are firmly environmentalist and have stopped the extraction of oil, uranium, timber and metal from the Lacandon Jungle and stopped the use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers in farming.
The CIPO-RFM has engaged in sabotage and direct action against wind farms, shrimp farms, eucalyptus plantations and the timber industry. They have also set up corn and coffee worker cooperatives and built schools and hospitals to help the local populations. They have also created a network of autonomous community radio stations to educate people about dangers to the environment and inform the surrounding communities about new industrial projects that would destroy more land. In 2001, the CIPO-RFM defeated the construction of a highway that was part of Plan Puebla Panama.
Environmental movement
The environmental movement (a term that sometimes includes the conservation and green movements) is a diverse scientific, social, and political movement. Though the movement is represented by a range of organisations, because of the inclusion of environmentalism in the classroom curriculum, the environmental movement has a younger demographic than is common in other social movements (see green seniors).
Environmentalism as a movement covers broad areas of institutional oppression, including for example: consumption of ecosystems and natural resources into waste, dumping waste into disadvantaged communities, air pollution, water pollution, weak infrastructure, exposure of organic life to toxins, mono-culture, anti-polythene drive (jhola movement) and various other focuses. Because of these divisions, the environmental movement can be categorized into these primary focuses: environmental science, environmental activism, environmental advocacy, and environmental justice.
Free market environmentalism
Free market environmentalism is a theory that argues that the free market, property rights, and tort law provide the best tools to preserve the health and sustainability of the environment. It considers environmental stewardship to be natural, as well as the expulsion of polluters and other aggressors through individual and class action.
Evangelical environmentalism
Evangelical environmentalism is an environmental movement in the United States in which some Evangelicals have emphasized biblical mandates concerning humanity's role as steward and subsequent responsibility for the care taking of Creation. While the movement has focused on different environmental issues, it is best known for its focus of addressing climate action from a biblically grounded theological perspective. This movement is controversial among some non-Christian environmentalists due to its rooting in a specific religion.
Preservation and conservation
Environmental preservation in the United States and other parts of the world, including Australia, is viewed as the setting aside of natural resources to prevent damage caused by contact with humans or by certain human activities, such as logging, mining, hunting, and fishing, often to replace them with new human activities such as tourism and recreation. Regulations and laws may be enacted for the preservation of natural resources.
Exergy and availability of resources
Thermodynamic derived environmentalism is based on the second law of thermodynamics, minimization of exergy disruption (or entropy generation)and the concept of availability. It moves from he milestone work of Jan Szargut who emphasized the relation between exergy and availability,
it is necessary to remember "Exergy Ecology and Democracy".
by Goran Wall, a short essay, which evidences the strict relation that relates exergy disruption with environmental and social disruption. More recently it has verified that governmental emissions and impacts balances underestimate the effective GHG production by means of human processes. In fact, they often neglects the impacts of import/export related emissions. In addition they have analyzed the UN SDGs and the methods which are suggested for verifying the advances of the countries. This activity has evidenced that objective and coherent parameters are missing. Therefore, they suggest the introduction of exergy analysis as the most effective method for estimating the environmental degradation.
Therefore, a novel fiscal model based on Exergy and availability disruption has been defined as the only possible way for overcoming the problems induced by the globalized markets.
Organisations and conferences
Environmental organisations can be global, regional, national or local; they can be government-run or private (NGO). Environmentalist activity exists in almost every country. Moreover, groups dedicated to community development and social justice also focus on environmental concerns.
Some US environmental organisations, among them the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund, specialise in bringing lawsuits (a tactic seen as particularly useful in that country). Other groups, such as the US-based National Wildlife Federation, Earth Day, National Cleanup Day, the Nature Conservancy, and The Wilderness Society, and global groups like the World Wide Fund for Nature and Friends of the Earth, disseminate information, participate in public hearings, lobby, stage demonstrations, and may purchase land for preservation. Statewide nonprofit organisations such as the Wyoming Outdoor Council often collaborate with these national organisations and employ similar strategies. Smaller groups, including Wildlife Conservation International, conduct research on endangered species and ecosystems. More radical organisations, such as Greenpeace, Earth First!, and the Earth Liberation Front, have more directly opposed actions they regard as environmentally harmful. While Greenpeace is devoted to nonviolent confrontation as a means of bearing witness to environmental wrongs and bringing issues into the public realm for debate, the underground Earth Liberation Front engages in the clandestine destruction of property, the release of caged or penned animals, and other criminal acts. Such tactics are regarded as unusual within the movement, however.
On an international level, concern for the environment was the subject of a United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, attended by 114 nations. Out of this meeting developed the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the follow-up United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. Other international organisations in support of environmental policies development include the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (as part of NAFTA), the European Environment Agency (EEA), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Environmental protests
Notable environmental protests and campaigns include:
2010 Xinfa aluminum plant protest
Anti-WAAhnsinns Festival
Car-Free Days
Camp for Climate Action
Campaign against Climate Change
Climate Rush
Cofán people oil drilling protest (Ecuador)
Earth Day
Earth First!
Earthlife Africa
Extinction Rebellion
Global Climate Strikes
Global Day of Action
Gurindji Strike
Hands off our Forest
Homes before Roads
Water Protectors
Just Stop Oil
Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta
Love Canal protests
March Against Monsanto
Nevada Desert Experience
Plane Mad
Plane Stupid
Qidong protest
Save Manapouri Campaign
Say Yes demonstrations
Shifang protest
Stop Climate Chaos
Environmentalists
Notable advocates for environmental protection and sustainability include:
Edward Abbey (author)
David Attenborough (broadcaster, naturalist)
John James Audubon (naturalist)
Judi Bari (environmentalist)
Frances Beinecke (environmentalist and former president of the Natural Resources Defense Council)
David Bellamy (botanist)
Wendell Berry (farmer, philosopher)
Murray Bookchin (anarchist, philosopher, social ecologist)
Erin Brockovich (environmental lawyer and activist)
David Brower (writer, activist)
Bob Brown (activist and politician)
Lester Brown (environmental analyst, author)
Carol Browner (lawyer and activist)
Kevin Buzzacott (Aboriginal activist)
Berta Caceres (environmental and indigenous rights activist)
Helen Caldicott (medical doctor)
Rachel Carson (biologist, writer)
Majora Carter (urban revitalization strategist)
Charles III (British Royal Family member)
Barry Commoner (biologist, politician)
Jacques-Yves Cousteau (explorer, ecologist)
Herman Daly (ecological economist and steady-state theorist)
Peter Dauvergne (political scientist)
Laurie David (activist and producer)
Marina DeBris (environmental artist)
Leonardo DiCaprio (actor and environmentalist)
Sylvia Earle (marine biologist)
Paul R. Ehrlich (population biologist)
Hans-Josef Fell (German Green Party member)
Jane Fonda (actor)
Josh Fox (filmmaker, environmental activist)
Mizuho Fukushima (politician, activist)
Peter Garrett (musician, politician)
Jane Goodall (primatologist, anthropologist, and UN Messenger of Peace)
Lois Gibbs (Founder of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice)
Al Gore (former Vice President of the United States)
Daryl Hannah (activist)
James Hansen (scientist)
Garrett Hardin (ecologist, ecophilosopher)
Denis Hayes (environmentalist and solar power advocate)
Julia Butterfly Hill (activist)
Robert Hunter (journalist, co-founder and first president of Greenpeace)
Tetsunari Iida (sustainable energy advocate)
Lisa P. Jackson (chemical engineer and former administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency)
Naomi Klein (writer, activist)
Winona LaDuke (environmentalist)
Aldo Leopold (ecologist)
A. Carl Leopold (plant physiologist)
James Lovelock (scientist)
Amory Lovins (energy policy analyst)
Hunter Lovins (environmentalist)
Caroline Lucas (politician)
Wangari Maathai (activist and Nobel laureate)
Jarid Manos (CEO of the Great Plains Restoration Council)
Xiuhtezcatl Martinez (environmental activist, hip-hop artist)
Bill McKibben (writer, activist)
David McTaggart (activist)
Chico Mendes (activist)
Joni Mitchell (musician, environmental activist)
George Monbiot (journalist)
John Muir (naturalist, activist)
Ralph Nader (activist)
Gaylord Nelson (politician)
Alan Pears (environmental consultant and energy efficiency pioneer)
Gifford Pinchot (first chief of the USFS)
Jonathon Porritt (politician)
John Wesley Powell (second director of the USGS)
Barbara Pyle (documentarian and executive producer of Captain Planet and the Planeteers)
Phil Radford (environmental, clean energy and democracy advocate, Greenpeace Executive Director)
Bonnie Raitt (musician)
Theodore Roosevelt (former President of the United States)
Habiba Sarobi (politician and activist)
E. F. Schumacher (author of Small Is Beautiful)
Vandana Shiva (ecofeminist and activist)
Marina Silva (politician and activist)
Alicia Silverstone (activist and author of The Kind Diet)
Lauren Singer (activist and entrepreneur)
Swami Sundaranand (Yogi, photographer, and mountaineer)
Cass Sunstein (environmental lawyer)
David Suzuki (scientist, broadcaster)
Henry David Thoreau (writer, philosopher)
Greta Thunberg (environmentalist)
Stewart Udall (former United States Secretary of the Interior)
Jo Valentine (politician and activist)
Dominique Voynet (politician and environmentalist)
Christopher O. Ward (water infrastructure expert)
Alice Waters (activist and restaurateur)
Gabriel Willow (environmental educator, naturalist)
Howard Zahniser (author of the 1964 Wilderness Act)
Assassinations
Every year, more than 100 environmental activists are murdered throughout the world. Most recent deaths are in Brazil, where activists combat logging in the Amazon rainforest.
116 environmental activists were assassinated in 2014, and 185 in 2015. This represents more than two environmentalists assassinated every week in 2014 and three every week in 2015. More than 200 environmental activists were assassinated worldwide between 2016 and early 2018. A 2020 incident saw several rangers murdered in the Congo Rainforest by poaching squads. Occurrences like this are relatively common, and account for a large number of deaths.
In popular culture
The U.S. Forest Service created Smokey the Bear in 1944; he appeared in countless posters, radio and television programs, movies, press releases, and other guises to warn about forest fires.
The comic strip Mark Trail, by environmentalist Ed Dodd, began in 1946; it still appears weekly in 175 newspapers.
The children's animated show Captain Planet and the Planeteers, created by Ted Turner and Barbara Pyle in 1989 to inform children about environmental issues. The show aired for six seasons and 113 episodes, in 100 countries worldwide from 1990 to 1996.
In 1974, Spokane, Washington, became one of the smallest cities ever to host a World's Fair. From Saturday, 4 May, to Sunday, 3 November 1974, Spokane hosted Expo 74, the first world's fair to focus on the environment. The theme of Expo 74 was "Celebrating Tomorrow's Fresh New Environment." (In 1982, Knoxville, Tennessee, was another small city to host a world's fair: Expo '82, with the theme, "Energy Turns the World.")
FernGully: The Last Rainforest is an animated motion picture released in 1992, which focuses exclusively on the environment. The movie is based on a book under the same title by Diana Young. In 1998, a sequel, FernGully 2: The Magical Rescue, was introduced.
Miss Earth is one of the Big Four international beauty pageants. (The other three are Miss Universe, Miss International, and Miss World.) Out of these four beauty pageants, Miss Earth is the only international beauty pageant that promotes "environmental awareness." The reigning titleholders dedicate their year to promote specific projects and often address issues concerning the environment and other global issues through school tours, tree planting activities, street campaigns, coastal clean ups, speaking engagements, shopping mall tours, media guesting, environmental fair, storytelling programs, eco-fashion shows, and other environmental activities. The Miss Earth winner is the spokesperson for the Miss Earth Foundation, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and other environmental organizations. The Miss Earth Foundation also works with the environmental departments and ministries of participating countries, various private sectors and corporations, as well as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF).
Another area of environmentalism is to use art to raise awareness about misuse of the environment. One example is trashion, using trash to create clothes, jewelry, and other objects for the home. Marina DeBris is one trashion artist, who focuses on ocean and beach trash to design clothes and for fund raising, education.
Criticism and alternative views
When environmentalism first became popular during the early 20th century, the focus was wilderness protection and wildlife preservation. These goals reflected the interests of the movement's initial, primarily white middle and upper class supporters, including through viewing preservation and protection via a lens that failed to appreciate the centuries-long work of indigenous communities who had lived without ushering in the types of environmental devastation these settler colonial "environmentalists" now sought to mitigate. The actions of many mainstream environmental organizations still reflect these early principles. Numerous low-income minorities felt isolated or negatively impacted by the movement, exemplified by the Southwest Organizing Project's (SWOP) Letter to the Group of 10, a letter sent to major environmental organizations by several local environmental justice activists. The letter argued that the environmental movement was so concerned about cleaning up and preserving nature that it ignored the negative side-effects that doing so caused communities nearby, namely less job growth. In addition, the NIMBY movement has transferred locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) from middle-class neighborhoods to poor communities with large minority populations. Therefore, vulnerable communities with fewer political opportunities are more often exposed to hazardous waste and toxins. This has resulted in the PIBBY principle, or at least the PIMBY (Place-in-minorities'-backyard), as supported by the United Church of Christ's study in 1987.
As a result, some minorities have viewed the environmental movement as elitist. Environmental elitism manifested itself in three different forms:
Compositional – Environmentalists are from the middle and upper class.
Ideological – The reforms benefit the movement's supporters but impose costs on nonparticipants.
Impact – The reforms have "regressive social impacts". They disproportionately benefit environmentalists and harm underrepresented populations.
Many environmentalists believe that human interference with 'nature' should be restricted or minimised as a matter of urgency (for the sake of life, or the planet, or just for the benefit of the human species), whereas environmental skeptics and anti-environmentalists do not believe that there is such a need. One can also regard oneself as an environmentalist and believe that human 'interference' with 'nature' should be increased. Nevertheless, there is a risk that the shift from emotional environmentalism into the technical management of natural resources and hazards could decrease the touch of humans with nature, leading to less concern with environment preservation. Increasingly, typical conservation rhetoric is being replaced with restoration approaches and larger landscape initiatives that seek to create more holistic impacts.
In the 2000s, American author, film director, medical graduate and intellect Michael Crichton criticized environmentalism as being religiously motivated rather than grounded in empirical evidence, arguing that climate change was a natural part of Earth's history and had been occurring long before humans dominated the planet. Also claiming to argue from his minor education in anthropology, he stated that religion was a part of human social make-up and that if it was suppressed, it would simply re-emerge in another form. With the decline of Christianity and Church attendance in the Western world, environmentalism has become more popular according to him, which he termed as "the religion of urban atheists".
Others seek a balance that involves both caring deeply for the environment while letting science guide human actions affecting it. Such an approach would avoid the emotionalism which, for example, anti-GMO activism has been criticized for, and protect the integrity of science. Planting trees, for another example, can be emotionally satisfying but should also involve being conscious of ecological concerns such as the effect on water cycles and the use of nonnative, potentially invasive species.
See also
Anti-environmentalism
Bright green environmentalism
Climate movement
Conservation movement
Ecomodernism
Ecosia
Ecotage
Ecotechnology
Environmental history of the United States
Environmental planning
Environmental, social, and governance
Environmental studies
Environmental technology
Greening
Green building
Human ecology
Human impact on the environment
List of climate scientists
List of women climate scientists and activists
Nature conservation
Outline of environmentalism
Radical environmentalism
Religion and environmentalism
Sustainability
Tree planting
References
Further reading
Borowy, Iris. "Before UNEP: who was in charge of the global environment? The struggle for institutional responsibility 1968–72." Journal of Global History 14.1 (2019): 87–106.
Daynes, Byron W., and Glen Sussman, eds. White House Politics and the Environment: Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (Texas A&M University Press; 2010) 300 pages; evaluates how 12 presidents helped or hindered the cause of environmental protection.
Johnson, Erik W., and Scott Frickel, (2011). "Ecological Threat and the Founding of U.S. National Environmental Movement Organizations, 1962–1998," Social Problems 58 (Aug. 2011), 305–29.
McCormick, John. 1995. The Global Environmental Movement. John Wiley. London. 312 pp.
Palmer, Joy. Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment (Routledge, 2001)
de Steiguer, J. Edward. 2006. The Origins of Modern Environmental Thought. University of Arizona Press. Tucson. 246 pp.
Tooze, Adam, "Democracy and Its Discontents", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 10 (6 June 2019), pp. 52–53, 56–57. "Democracy has no clear answer for the mindless operation of bureaucratic and [technological power. We may indeed be witnessing its extension in the form of artificial intelligence and robotics. Likewise, after decades of dire warning, the environmental problem remains fundamentally unaddressed.... Bureaucratic overreach and environmental catastrophe are precisely the kinds of slow-moving existential challenges that democracies deal with very badly.... Finally, there is the threat du jour: corporations and the technologies they promote." (pp. 56–57.)
Verweij, Marco; Thompson, Michael (eds), 2006, Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World: Governance, Politics and Plural Perceptions, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
Vogel, David. California Greenin': How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader (2018) 280 pp online review
Woodhouse, Keith M. "The Politics of Ecology: Environmentalism and Liberalism in the 1960s," Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Volume 2, Number 2, 2009, pp. 53–84
World Bank, 2003, "Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World: Transforming Institutions, Growth, and Quality of Life" , World Development Report 2003, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Oxford University Press.
External links
Westland – A Canadian television series (1984–2007) on a broad range of environmental issues, from the UBC Library Digital Collections
The Directory of Environmental Websites
Green politics
Habitat
Environmental social science concepts
1920s neologisms | 0.775366 | 0.996952 | 0.773003 |
Religion and video games | The study of religion and video games is a subfield of digital religion, which the American scholar of communication, Heidi Campbell, defines as "Religion that is constituted in new ways through digital media and cultures." (Campbell, 2012, p. 3). Video games once struggled for legitimacy as a cultural product, today, however, they are both business and art. Video games increasingly turn to religion not just as ornament but as core elements of their video game design and play.
Games involve moral decision, rely on invented religions, and allow users to create and experience virtual religious spaces. As one of the newest forms of entertainment, however, there is often controversy and moral panic when video games engage religion, for instance, in Insomniac Games' use of the Manchester Cathedral in Resistance: Fall of Man. Concepts and elements of contemporary and ancient religions appear in video games in various ways: places of worship are a part of the gameplay of real-time strategy games like Age of Empires; narratively, games sometimes borrow themes from religious traditions like in Mass Effect 2.
Defining religion and religious elements
Religion has several definitions. Religious groups that are organized can be seen as cultural systems, with corresponding behavior and practice. They often have sacred texts and holy places. A religious experience, however, does not necessarily have to be understood through an established religious framework.
Themes and questions about life and death, innocence and guilt and violence are existential in nature; while they are not immediately understood as "religious", they are about the meaning of life.
Use of religious elements
Video game developers use religious and spiritual themes to involve the player more deeply in the game. Video game developer Shigeru Miyamoto, who used to play outside as a child, used his experiences and memories of exploring the forest and discovering a Buddhist temple in the design of his video games. Canadian developer BioWare (Mass Effect, Dragon Age) has in its offices several encyclopedias on religion, as well as the Book of the Dead.
The negative portrayal of religions has been criticized.
Religious elements are used in two ways: explicit and implicit. They are seen side by side in video games and do not exclude each other. Religion in Mass Effect, for instance, can be understood as an "unseen character".
Explicit narrative references
An explicit reference to a religious or spiritual concept is one that is clear to what it is referring. These can be based upon real-world religions, but also on fictional ones. Stories, motifs and names of characters from religious texts are used as reference points.
Ancient religions
Ancient religions and their deities are used in various ways. The religions portrayed are often no longer practiced, like ancient Greek religion. In the real-time strategy game Age of Mythology the player has to choose a "major god", which gives certain gameplay benefits. In Prince of Persia, the nameless Prince has to fight Ahriman, an evil deity from Zoroastrianism.
Events and places
Real world historical religions and events are used as inspiration for video games. For instance, while Assassin's Creed is fictional, it is set during the Third Crusade in the Holy Land; the player takes on the role of the Assassin Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad and is involved in the conflict between Catholic Christians, Orthodox Christians, Sunni Muslims and Shi'ite Muslims. While these religions appear, they are portrayed in a "sanitized manner".
Organizations
Religion is often institutionalized, having a certain organisational structure. Most games in the Megami Tensei series involve a religion, or a cult.
Religious violence
In the action role-playing game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim a civil war is about to erupt between the Empire and the Stormcloaks. The Stormcloaks wish to worship Talos, a human ascended to godhood. The Empire suffered a defeat against the powerful Aldmeri Dominion, an alliance of Elves who have made the worship of Talos illegal. It is up to the player to help in the conflict.
Implicit narrative references
The stories of action-adventure and role-playing games often involve world-saving quests. The player, as the protagonist, takes on the role of the hero. The player character is often destined to save the world, which in itself is a prophecy.<ref>Slater, A. Prophecy, Pre-destination, and Free-from Gameplay The Nerevarine Prophecy in Bethesda's 'Morrowind'". In Heidbrink, S., Knoll, T. and Wysocki, J. (ed.) Religion in Digital Games Reloaded. Immersion into the Field. Volume 07 (2015)</ref>The Legend of Zelda uses religious elements and motifs like the Triforce.Cuddy, L. (ed.) The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy (2008). Open Court, Chicago. Page 196
Video games as a religious medium
Players and developers use games to express their existential and spiritual feelings. Video games as cultural objects can also provide religious and spiritual experiences, like Journey. Developer Jenova Chen said that "I feel that Journey is a very spiritual game. People from around the world ask me if the game has a religious connection. Many religions share an affinity with Journey—this is because many religions partly share a common structure". Chen said Journey is based upon Joseph Campbell's book on comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the "Hero's Journey" narrative structure.
After the death of Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek Online added two statues in his honor, and World of Warcraft added a non-player character (NPC) based upon Robin Williams after his death. Developer Gearbox Software honored a late fan of Borderlands, cancer victim Michael John Mamaril, by adding a NPC named after him in the sequel. Additionally, Gearbox posted a eulogy to Mamaril in the voice of the game character Claptrap. For their game MechWarrior Online, developer Piranha Games sold a custom in-game unit called a Jenner, honoring the daughter of a player of the game. CAD122,210 was donated to the Canadian Cancer Society. Losing his wife Pauline to ovarian cancer, Minecraft player "GasBandit" built a memorial for her. When players of the online game Final Fantasy XIV heard that fellow gamer "Codex Vahla" was in the hospital on life support, they held a digital wake.
Religious video games
Some religious groups use video games for education. An example is the Christian game Left Behind: Eternal Forces.
Use of video games in a religious setting
In May 2012, the Exeter Cathedral used Flower during its Sunday service.
Controversies
Opinions on video games differ from religion and denomination; there are religious groups that use games actively to convert people, while some games are banned for religious reasons. Scholars of religious studies are also studying video games, by looking at the game and to the players and their experiences, with games like Journey. Religion is considered a serious real world topic, while video games are an art and entertainment. As such, developers and publishers sometimes take precaution not to offend people's religious beliefs. Religious references in the Japanese role-playing video game series Final Fantasy were originally censored for the U.S. release of the games. It was after the franchise switched to Sony's PlayStation with Final Fantasy VII that the religious references were left largely intact. Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series show a disclaimer:
Despite efforts from some companies, there have been incidents with religious groups and video games. The German video game rating board USK gave The Binding of Isaac a 16+ rating, considering it "blasphemous".
Christianity Assassin's Creed Valhalla has been considered by many as anti-Christian due to its inclusion of burning churches and monasteries. It also forces the players to steal and attack churches in order to progress in main story. It also includes blasphemous wording used by NPCs against Christians that directly targets Jesus Christ. The game BioShock Infinite is heavily based on the notion of American exceptionalism at the turn of the 20th century, and incorporates notions taken from Christianity to support the game's dystopian themes. One aspect of this was the use of baptism. One developer on Irrational Games staff expressed strong concern to the lead developer, Ken Levine, that the game's presentation of baptism was highly controversial, leading Levine to consider baptism in relation to forgiveness rather than merely as a religious tenet. At least one player objected to the final changes, prompting them to request a refund from Steam. The scene was otherwise well received by critics as less a commentary on Christianity but on as a representation of themes such as free will, evil, rebirth and redemption that were central to the game.
Hinduism
On October 22, 2008, Microsoft announced that Fallout 3 would not be released in India on the Xbox 360 platform. Religious and cultural sentiments were cited as the reason. Although the specific reason was not revealed in public, it is possible that it is because the game contains two-headed mutated cows called Brahmin, or that Brahmin is also the name of an ancient, powerful hereditary caste of Hindu priests and religious scholars in India, or its similarity to the spelling of brahman, a type of cow that originated in India. Brahman, a breed of Zebu, are revered by Hindus.
The action game Hanuman: Boy Warrior was criticized by Rajan Zed, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, for portray the Hindu deity Hanuman. Developed and published in India by Aurona Technologies, the player controls Hanuman. "Controlling and manipulating Lord Hanuman with a joystick/button/keyboard/mouse [is] denigration", said Zed. "Lord Hanuman was not meant to be reduced to just a 'character' in a video game to solidify [a] company/product's base in the growing economy of India." He urged Sony, the publisher of the game, to pull the game. Sony's regional manager however said that Hanuman: Boy Warrior sold beyond their expectations.
Zed was also critical of the use of Hindu deities in the MOBA game Smite. In response, developer Hi-Rez Studios COO Todd Harris said that Smite would still be featuring Hindu deities, possibly adding more. GameSpot asked if characters based upon Abrahamic religions would be added as well, but Harris said that "the key Abrahimic figures—Adam, Noah, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, are not that interesting in character design or gameplay".
The Japanese role-playing game Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse was criticized by Rajan Zed for portraying the Hindu god Krishna.
Islam
In the original release version of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, an Islamic prayer chant was included in the music of the Fire Temple. The developers at Nintendo were initially unaware of the chant's significance as it was taken from a commercially available sound library, but removed it in later versions to prevent offending any Muslim players.LittleBigPlanet had a last-minute delay involving a licensed song in the game's soundtrack, after a PlayStation Community member reported that the lyrics to one of the licensed songs in the game included passages from the Qur'an and could therefore be offensive to Muslims. However, no actual complaints regarding the music were made. The song, entitled "Tapha Niang", was by Malian artist Toumani Diabaté, himself a devout Muslim. The game was patched twice, the day before its release for players who had received the game early, before its intended release date. The first update did not affect the song, whilst the second updated the game to remove the vocals from the track, leaving only an instrumental. Some American Muslims responded to the recall and stated that they were offended by the restriction of freedom of speech. M. Zuhdi Jasser M.D., head of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, was quoted as saying, "Muslims cannot benefit from freedom of expression and religion and then turn around and ask that anytime their sensibilities are offended that the freedom of others be restricted."
The fighting game Injustice: Gods Among Us was temporarily banned in the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Originally, the title of the game was rebranded as Injustice: The Mighty Among Us for promotional uses in those areas. It is speculated that Injustice was banned because of the inclusion of the word 'Gods' in the title, the cleavage exposed in the outfits of some female characters, and overall bloodiness. Eventually, the ban in the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait was lifted.
SikhismHitman 2: Silent Assassin sparked controversy due to a level featuring the killing of Sikhs within a depiction of their most holy site, the Harmandir Sahib, where hundreds of Sikhs were massacred in 1984. An altered version of Silent Assassin was eventually released with the related material removed from the game.
Religion and violence
A study released by the University of Missouri stated that video games often emphasize the violent aspects of religion. Researcher Greg Perreault said "It doesn't appear that game developers are trying to purposefully bash organized religion in these games, I believe they are only using religion to create stimulating plot points in their story lines".
Games as focus of religious studies
For many years video games were seen as mere entertainment, a form of "low culture". Playing video games was seen as a form of escapism and the medium was not regarded as a valid object of scientific research. To "play" games as a scholarly pursuit was thought of as "ludicrous". It has only been in recent years that video games have become the object of scientific study. Looking at the game as an object, researchers can explore religious and spiritual references. Video game research is done in two ways; the game can be studied as an object, while actor-focused research looks at the player.
Game-immanent approach
Video games, as products of human culture, can be seen and read as "texts". They carry myths, stories and symbols of the time in which they were created. By "reading" video games, philosophers, sociologists and theologians have the opportunity to study the religious and spiritual themes in video games. This can be done in several ways.
by studying the design, rules and mechanics or by talking to the developers
by watching others play (e.g. Let's Play videos)
by playing the game themselves
Player-focused approach
Video games are interactive; it requires input from the player to happen. While a video game developer designs the game, including its rules and story, it is up to the player to make the game "happen". As such, it is up to individual player to give meaning to their experience.
Video games allow the player to think, form and possibly change their own opinion about religious and spiritual matters. Players often discuss these elements on online platforms. For instance, some players made their own version of the player character Commander Shepard of the Mass Effect'' series an atheist, while others thought of him/her as a Christian. As such, video games also give new meaning to the concept of religion.
See also
God game
List of Christian video games
References
Notes
Footnotes
Christianity in popular culture
Hinduism in popular culture
Video games
Religion and society
Religion in popular culture
Video game studies | 0.791946 | 0.975919 | 0.772875 |
A Secular Age | A Secular Age is a book written by the philosopher Charles Taylor which was published in 2007 by Harvard University Press on the basis of Taylor's earlier Gifford Lectures (Edinburgh 1998–99). The noted sociologist Robert Bellah has referred to A Secular Age as "one of the most important books to be written in my lifetime."
Background and overview
In recent years, secularity has become an important topic in the humanities and social sciences. Although there continue to be important disagreements among scholars, many begin with the premise that secularism is not simply the absence of religion, but rather an intellectual and political category that itself needs to be understood as a historical construction. In this book, Taylor looks at the change in Western society from a condition in which it was almost impossible not to believe in God, to one in which believing in God is simply one option of many. He argues against the view that secularity in society is caused by the rise of science and reason. He argues that this view is far too simplistic and does not explain why people would abandon their faith. Taylor starts with a description of the Middle Ages and presents the changes to bring about the modern secular age. The Middle Ages were a time of enchantment. People believed in God, angels, demons, witches, the Church's sacraments, relics, and sacred places. Each of these types of things had mysterious, real effects on individuals and society. The early Middle Ages were content to have two speeds for people's spiritual development. The clergy and a few others were at the faster, more intense speed. Everyone else was only expected to plod along at a slower spiritual speed. The High Middle Ages had a strong focus on bringing everyone along to a higher realm of spirituality and life.
Up until a few hundred years ago, the common viewpoint of the North Atlantic world was basically Christian. Most people could not even consider a viewpoint without God. The culture has changed so that multiple viewpoints are now conceivable to most people. This change is accomplished through three major facets of Deism: one, an anthropocentric shift in now conceiving of Nature as primarily for people; two, the idea that God relates to us primarily through an impersonal order that He established; and three, the idea that religion is to be understood from Nature by reason alone. Deism is considered the major intermediate step between the previous age of belief in God and the modern secular age. Three modes of secularity are distinguished: one, secularized public spaces; two, the decline of belief and practice; and three, cultural conditions where unbelief in religion is a viable option. This text focuses on secularity three.
In his previous work, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Taylor focused on the developments which led to the identity of modern individuals in the West. This work focuses on the developments which led to modern social structures. The content of Sources of the Self is complementary to A Secular Age. Taylor discussed the political implications of A Secular Age in an interview with The Utopian.
Outline
Preface/Introduction
In his book, Taylor explores the concept of 'secularization' in the modern West and its relationship to religion, examining the different kinds of lived experiences involved in understanding one's life as a believer or unbeliever. He emphasizes that belief and unbelief are not rival theories, but different ways of experiencing life, and that both are reflective and contextualized. For believers, fullness is found in God, while for unbelievers, it is found in reason, nature, or inner depths. In the middle condition, daily activities between these extremes, meaning is created.
Part I: The Work of Reform
Taylor rejects the "subtraction" theory of secularization: that religion has been 'subtracted' (ie removed) from society. Rather, he argues that a movement of Reform in Christianity, which aimed to raise everyone up to the highest levels of religious devotion and practice, caused the move to secularization. This led to a disciplinary society that started to take action against rowdiness and indiscipline. The success of the project encouraged an anthropocentrism that opened the gates for a godless humanism. Taylor sees "three important forms of social self-understanding": the economy, the public sphere, and the practices and outlooks of democratic self-rule. Both the economy and the public sphere are conceived as existing independent of the political power.
Part II: The Turning Point
The program of Reform created a distance between humans and God, leading to the rise of exclusive humanism and a move away from traditional religion. The changing understanding of God in recent centuries is more complicated than just a move to an indifferent universe, and the motive force behind the Enlightenment's use of reason and science was reformed Christianity. The new epistemic predicament led to a shift towards exploring impersonal orders with disengaged reason and forming societies under the normative provisions of the Modern Moral Order, which represents a significant change in horizon.
Part III: The Nova Effect
Taylor outlines three stages of this shift: first, a move away from Christianity; second, a period of diversification that resulted in the rejection of humanism; and third, a move toward a culture of "authenticity" and "expressive individualism." Taylor notes that the secular age creates cross pressures, leading to the loss of heroism and a feeling of malaise. The belief in an impersonal universe arose from the advances in science and the new cosmic concept that promoted a materialist view of the world. Taylor also examines the impact of art and the emergence of a creative art that needs to establish its own reference points. He argues that this art creates a space for the spiritual and the deep for the unbeliever. Finally, Taylor notes the emergence of a new secular morality that places an emphasis on humanism, altruism, and duty, which created a rebellion among the younger generation at the end of the 19th century. This movement was shattered in World War I. Many went into the war celebrating the opportunity for "heroism and dedication" only to be "sent wholesale to death in a long, mechanized slaughter." (p. 417)
Part IV: Narratives of Secularization
The Age of Mobilization
Taylor challenges the notion of secularization by proposing an age of mobilization from 1800 to 1960 where religion evolved and recruited people on a large scale. The new forms of religion organized and inspired intense loyalty among people, and churches played a central role in people's lives. In France, the Church organized lay people in new bodies (e.g. Catholic Action), while in the Anglophone world, denominations like Methodists helped people cope with the market economy.
The Age of Authenticity
The modern West underwent a cultural revolution in the 1960s, ending the age of mobilization and replacing it with a culture of "authenticity" and "expressive" individualism.
This affects the social imaginary. To the "horizontal" notion of "the economy, the public sphere, and the sovereign people" (p. 481) is added a space of fashion, a culture of mutual display. The modern moral order of mutual benefit has been strengthened, mutual respect requires that "we shouldn't criticize each other's 'values'" (p. 484), in particular on sexual matters. Since "my" religious life or practice is my personal choice, my "link to the sacred" may not be embedded in "nation" or "church". This is a continuation of the Romantic move away from reason towards a "subtler language" (Shelley) to understand individual "spiritual insight/feeling." "Only accept what rings true to your own inner Self." (p. 489) This has "undermined the link between Christian faith and civilizational order." (p. 492)
The revolution in sexual behavior has broken the culture of moralism that dominated the last half millennium. Despite this, churches' codes and values are still out of touch with modern society's acceptance of sexuality, fluid gender roles, and identity issues.
Religion Today
Today, the "neo-Durkheimian embedding of religion in a state" (p. 505) and a "close interweaving of religion, life-style and patriotism" (p. 506) has been called into question. People are asking, like Peggy Lee, "Is that all there is?" They are heirs of the expressive revolution, "seeking a kind of unity and wholeness of the self... of the body and its pleasures... The stress is on unity, integrity, holism, individuality." (p. 507) This is often termed "spirituality" as opposed to "organized religion."
This has caused a breaking down of barriers between religious groups but also a decline in active practice and a loosening of commitment to orthodox dogmas. A move from an Age of Mobilization to an Age of Authenticity, it is a "retreat of Christendom". Fewer people will be "kept within a faith by some strong political or group identity," (p. 514) although a core (vast in the United States) will remain in neo-Durkheimian identities, with its potential for manipulation by such as "Milosevic, and the BJP." (p. 515)
Assuming that "the human aspiration to religion will [not] flag" (p. 515), spiritual practice will extend beyond ordinary church practice to involve meditation, charitable work, study groups, pilgrimage, special prayer, etc. It will be "unhooked" from the paleo-Durkheimian sacralized society, the neo-Durkheimian national identity, or center of "civilizational order", but still collective. "One develops a religious life." (p. 518)
While religious life continues, many people retain a nominal tie with the church, particularly in Western Europe. This "penumbra" seems to have diminished since 1960. More people stand outside belief, and no longer participate in rites of passage like church baptism and marriage. Yet people respond to, e.g. in France the 1500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, or in Sweden the loss of a trans-Baltic ferry. Religion "remains powerful in memory; but also as a kind of reserve fund of spiritual force or consolation." (p. 522)
This distancing is not experienced in the United States. This may be (1) because immigrants used church membership as a way to establish themselves: "Go to the church of your choice, but go." (p. 524) Or (2) it may be the difficulty that the secular elite has in imposing its "social imaginary" on the rest of society vis-a-vis hierarchical Europe. Also (3) the U.S. never had an ancien régime, so there has never been a reaction against the state church. Next (4) the groups in the U.S. have reacted strongly against the post-1960s culture, unlike Europe. A majority of Americans remain happy in "one Nation under God". There are fewer skeletons in the family closet, and "it is easier to be unreservedly confident in your own rightness when you are the hegemonic power." (p. 528) Finally (5) the U.S. has provided experimental models of post-Durkheimian religion at least for a century.
After summarizing his argument, Taylor looks to the future, which might follow the slow reemergence of religion in Russia in people raised in the "wasteland" of militant atheism, but suddenly grabbed by God, or it might follow the "spiritual but not religious" phenomenon in the West. "In any case, we are just at the beginning of a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee."
Part V: Conditions of Belief
We live in an immanent frame. That is the consequence of the story Taylor has told, in disenchantment and the creation of the buffered self and the inner self, the invention of privacy and intimacy, the disciplined self, individualism. Then Reform, the breakup of the cosmic order and higher time in secular, making the best of clock time as a limited resource. The immanent frame can be open, allowing for the possibility of the transcendent, or closed. Taylor argues that both arguments are "spin" and "involve a step beyond available reasons into the realm of anticipatory confidence" (p. 551) or faith.
There are several Closed World Structures that assume the immanent frame. One is the idea of the rational agent of modern epistemology. Another is the idea that religion is childish, so "An unbeliever has the courage to take up an adult stance and face reality." (p. 562) Taylor argues that the Closed World Structures do not really argue their worldviews, they "function as unchallenged axioms" (p. 590) and it just becomes very hard to understand why anyone would believe in God.
Living in the immanent frame, "The whole culture experiences cross pressures, between the draw of the narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other." (p. 595) Materialists respond to the aesthetic experience of poetry. Theists agree with the Modern Moral Order and its agenda of universal human rights and welfare. Romantics "react against the disciplined, buffered self" (p. 609) that seems to sacrifice something essential with regard to feelings and bodily existence.
To resolve the modern cross pressures and dilemmas, Taylor proposes a "maximal demand" that we define our moral aspirations in terms that do not "crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity". (p. 640) It aspires to wholeness and transcendence yet also tries to "fully respect ordinary human flourishing." (p. 641)
Taylor imagines a two-dimensional moral space. The horizontal gives you a "point of resolution, the fair award." (p. 706) The vertical hopes to rise higher, to reestablish trust, "to overcome fear by offering oneself to it; responding with love and forgiveness, thereby tapping a source of goodness, and healing" (p. 708) and forgoing the satisfaction of moral victory over evil in sacred violence, religious or secular.
Taylor examines the Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity, how we follow the Romantic search for fullness, yet seem to respond still to our religious heritage. We replace the old "higher time" with autobiography, history, and commemoration. Many moderns are uncomfortable with death, "the giving up of everything." (p. 725)
"Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief." (p. 727) "The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured." (p. 727) Against unbelief, Taylor presents a selection of recent spiritual conversions or "epiphanic" experiences in Catholic artists and writers, including Václav Havel, Ivan Illich, Charles Péguy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The path to the future is a rich variety of paths to God in a unity of the church and a new approach to the question of the sexual/sensual. The disciplined, disengaged secular world is challenged by a return to the body in Pentecostalism. There is a "profound interpenetration of eros and the spiritual life." (p. 767) "[I]n our religious lives we are responding to a transcendent reality." (p. 768) Our seeking for "fullness" is our response to it.
Secular belief is a shutting out. "The door is barred against further discovery." (p. 769) But in the secular "'waste land'... young people will begin again to explore beyond the boundaries." (p. 770) It will, Taylor believes, involve a move away from "excarnation", the disembodying of spiritual life, and from homogenization in a single principle, to celebrate the "integrity of different ways of life." (p. 772)
Epilogue: The Many Stories
In a brief afterword, Taylor links his narrative to similar efforts by e.g., John Milbank and the radical orthodoxy movement, while also elucidating the distinctiveness of his own approach. He calls the tale told by radical orthodoxy thinkers the "Intellectual Deviation" story, which focuses on "changes in theoretical understanding, mainly among learned and related élites," (p. 774) whereas the story he relates, which he names the "Reform Master Narrative," is more concerned with how secularity "emerges as a mass phenomenon." (p. 775) Both these stories are complementary, "exploring different sides of the same mountain." (p. 775) In his review of the book, Milbank agreed that Taylor's thesis "...is more fundamental... because the most determining processes are fusions of ideas and practices, not ideas in isolation.
Criticism
Charles Larmore was critical of A Secular Age in its approach, especially with it having too many references to Catholic theologians and a noticeable absence of Protestant figures (see section I paragraph 7 within the cited article). Larmore also sees A Secular Age offering nothing new and is simply an extension of Max Weber's work on secularization theory (Section II, paragraph 1) with Weber and Taylor having differences that may be attributable to Weber being "a lapsed Protestant" and Taylor being "an ardent Catholic" (section II, paragraph 2). Larmore feels Taylor, in his book, may have "an adequate basis for jumping to metaphysical or religious conclusions" concerning the understanding of a secular view of the world, but to do so is "precisely what we ought not to do" (Section II, paragraph 5). Larmore disagrees with Taylor's insistence that people, having adequate information, should take a stance on God's presence throughout the world (Section II, paragraph 7). In Larmore's opinion, Taylor is wrong in not recognizing that "We have never been, and we will never be, at one with ourselves" and, therefore, should not jump to conclusions that are based on faith - which Larmore believes Taylor did in his book (Section II, paragraph 12).
Reviews
A Secular Age has been reviewed in newspapers such as The New York Times and The Guardian, magazines such as The New Republic and The American Prospect, and professional journals such as Intellectual History Review, Political Theory, Implicit Religion, and European Journal of Sociology.
References
2007 non-fiction books
Books by Charles Taylor (philosopher)
Religious studies books
Secularization
Gifford Lectures books | 0.783661 | 0.986105 | 0.772772 |
LGBT themes in mythology | LGBT themes in mythology occur in mythologies and religious narratives that include stories of romantic affection or sexuality between figures of the same sex or that feature divine actions that result in changes in gender. These myths are considered by some modern queer scholars to be forms of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) expression, and modern conceptions of sexuality and gender have been retroactively applied to them. Many mythologies ascribe homosexuality and gender fluidity in humans to the action of gods or of other supernatural interventions.
The presence of LGBT themes in mythologies has become the subject of intense study. The application of gender studies and queer theory to non-Western mythic tradition is less developed, but has grown since the end of the twentieth century.
Myths often include being gay, bisexual, or transgender as symbols for sacred or mythic experiences. Devdutt Pattanaik argues that myths "capture the collective unconsciousness of a people", and that this means they reflect deep-rooted beliefs
about variant sexualities that may be at odds with repressive social mores.
Critical perspective
The status of mythology varies by culture. Cultures may regard myths as containing psychological or archetypal truths. Myths may explain and validate the social institutions of a particular culture, as well as educate the members of that culture. This societal role has been posited for stories that included same-sex love, which educate people as to the correct attitude to adopt toward same-sex sexual activity and gender constructions.
Since the beginning of recorded history and in a multitude of cultures, myths, folklore and sacred texts have incorporated themes of same-sex eroticism and gender identity. Myths often include homosexuality, bisexuality or transgender themes as a symbol for sacred or mythic experiences. Homoeroticism or gender variance in myths have been analysed according to modern conceptions of LGBT identities and behaviours, for example, deities that disguise themselves as, or adopt behaviors traditional to, the opposite gender for a given culture may be called transgender, and beings with no reproductive organs or with both male and female organs may be called androgynous or intersex. Individual myths have been denoted "queer" for rejecting a heteronormative and binary view of gender. The queer interpretations may be based on only indirect evidence, such as an unusually close same-sex friendship or dedication to chastity. Such readings have been criticised for ignoring cultural context or mis-applying modern or Western preconceptions, for example in assuming that celibacy means only avoiding penetration or reproductive sex (hence allowing homoerotic sex), while ignoring the widespread beliefs in the spiritual potency of semen that mandate an avoidance of all sex.
Researchers have long recognised the presence of LGBT themes in Western mythologies, and have studied the subject intensely. The application of gender studies and queer theory to non-Western mythic tradition is less developed, but has grown since the end of the twentieth century. Devdutt Pattanaik writes that myths "capture the collective unconsciousness of a people", and that this means they reflect deep-rooted beliefs about variant sexualities that may be at odds with repressive social mores.
Many mythologies ascribe homosexuality and gender variance in humans to the action of gods or other supernatural interventions. This includes myths in which gods teach people about same-sex sexual practices by example, as in Aztec religion or Hawaiian religion or myths that explain the cause for transgender identities or homosexuality, such as the story in which Prometheus accidentally creates some people with the wrong genitalia while drunk, or instances of reincarnation or possession by a spirit of the opposite gender in African diaspora religions.
It is common in polytheistic mythologies to find characters that can change gender, or have aspects of both male and female genders at the same time. Sexual activity with both genders is also common within such pantheons and is compared to modern bisexuality or pansexuality.
Mythologies of Africa
Egyptian
Few records of homosexuality exist in Egyptian mythology, and existing written and pictorial works are reticent in representing sexualities. The sources that do exist indicate that same-sex relations were regarded negatively, and that penetrative sex was seen as an aggressive act of dominance and power, shameful to the receiver (a common view in the Mediterranean basin area).
The most well-known example of this occurs in the power-struggle between the sky-god Horus, and his uncle Set, the destructive god of the desert. Set's attempts to prove his superiority include schemes of seduction, in which he compliments Horus on his buttocks and tries to anally penetrate him. Unknowingly failing, Set ejaculates between Horus's thighs, allowing Horus to collect his semen to use against him. Set believes that he has conquered Horus by having "performed this aggressive act against him". Horus subsequently throws the semen in the river, so that he may not be said to have been inseminated by Set. Horus then deliberately spreads his own semen on some lettuce, which was Set's favorite food (the Egyptians regarded lettuce as phallic). After Set has eaten the lettuce, they go to the gods to try to settle the argument over the rule of Egypt. The gods first listen to Set's claim of dominance over Horus, and call his semen forth, but it answers from the river, invalidating his claim. Then, the gods listen to Horus' claim of having dominated Set, and call his semen forth, and it answers from inside Set. The association with an evil god such as Set reinforces the negativity towards all participants in homosexual relationships.
Some authors, however, have interpreted an at least more neutral message. In some versions, the act between Horus and Set was consensual, if improper, and Set's consumption of Horus' seed produced Thoth's lunar disc, thus being somewhat positive in outcome. Likewise, Set was not demonised until very late in Egyptian history, and the sexual act has been recorded since the first versions.
Human fertility, a major aspect of Egyptian mythology, often became intertwined with the crop fertility provided by the annual flooding of the river Nile. This connection appeared in the iconography of Nile-gods, such as Hapy, god of the Nile River, and Wadj-wer, god of the Nile Delta, who – although male – were depicted with female attributes such as pendulous breasts, symbolizing the fertility the river provides.
West African, Yoruba and Dahomean (Vodun)
The celestial creator deity of Dahomean religion is Mawu-Lisa, formed by a merger of the twin brother and sister gods Lisa (the moon) and Mawa (the sun). In combined form, they presented as intersex or transgender (with changing gender). Other androgynous gods include Nana Buluku, the "Great mother" that gave birth to Lisa and Mawa and created the universe, and contains both male and female essences.
The Akan people of Ghana have a pantheon of gods that includes personifications of the planets. These personifications manifest as androgynous or transgender deities, and include Abrao (Jupiter), Aku (Mercury), and Awo (Moon).
Possession by spirits is an integral part of Yoruba and other African religions. The possessed are usually women, but can also be men, and both genders are regarded as the "bride" of the deity while possessed. The language used to describe possession has a sexual and violent connotation but unlike in Yoruba-derived American religions, there is no link assumed between possession and homosexual or gender-variant activity in everyday life.
Zimbabwean
The mythology of the Shona people of Zimbabwe is ruled over by an androgynous creator god called Mwari, who occasionally splits into separate male and female aspects.
Mythologies of Americas
Maya and Aztec
The Maya god Chin, reported from the sixteenth century, is said to have introduced homoeroticism into the Mayan culture and subsequently became associated with same-sex love. His example inspired noble families to purchase young men as lovers for their sons, creating legal relationships akin to marriage.
An important Mayan deity best known from the Classical period (200–900), the so-called Tonsured Maize God. The Classical Maya classified maize as masculine, but the Tonsured version of the Maize God is depicted in ancient Maya art as an effeminate young man associated with art and dance, was represented by queens on Maya stelae, and is thought to have constituted a third gender.
In the Codex Chimalpopoca, the male deity Tezcatlipoca and his alter ego sorcerer [necoc] Yāōtl "Enemies on Both Sides" once transformed themselves into women to copulate with Huemac.
Xōchipilli is an Aztec god seen as the patron of homosexuals and male prostitutes.
Native American and Inuit
In Inuit shamanism, the first two humans were Aakulujjuusi and Uumarnituq, both male. This same-sex couple desired company and decided to mate. This sexual encounter resulted in pregnancy for Uumarnituq. As he was physically not equipped to give birth, a spell was cast that changed his sex, giving him a vagina capable of passing the child. The now-female Uumarnituq was also responsible for introducing war into the world via magic, in order to curb overpopulation. The goddess Sedna is an Inuit creator deity, with dominion of marine animals. She is depicted as gynandrous or hermaphroditic in some myths, and is served by two-spirit shamans. Other myths show Sedna as a bisexual or lesbian, living with her female partner at the bottom of the ocean.
Many stories of Native Americans include Coyote seducing apparently lesbian couples, usually much to his detriment in the end. Other great spirits will sometimes take over a female body if no other presents itself when they wish to seduce a beautiful young woman.
Santería and Candomblé
Santería and Candomblé are syncretic religions derived from Yoruba diasporic beliefs and Catholicism, most prevalent in South Americas, including Cuba and Brazil. Their mythologies have many similarities to that of Yoruba, and contains a pantheon of Oríshas (spirits), comparable to (and often identified with) the lwa of Voodoo.
In one Cuban Santería "pataki", or mythological story, the sea goddess Yemaha is tricked into incestuous sex with her son Shango. To hide her shame at this event, she banished her other two sons, Inle and Abbata, to live at the bottom of the ocean, additionally cutting out Inle's tongue and making Abbata deaf. As a result of their isolation and loneliness, Inle and Abbata become passionate friends and then lovers, able to communicate empathically. This pataki is used to explain the origin of incest, muteness, and deafness in addition to homosexuality.
In Brasil Candomblé, there's Oxumaré.
Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo
A large number of lwa (spirits or deities) exist in Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo. These lwa may be regarded as families of individuals or as a singular entity with distinct aspects, with links to particular areas of life.
Some lwa have particular links with magic, veneration of the dead or death such as the Gede and Bawon. A number of these are further particularly associated with transgender identities or same-sex interactions. These include Guede Nibo, a spirit caring for those who die young. He is sometimes depicted as an effeminate drag queen and inspires those he inhabits to lascivious sexuality of all kinds, especially transgender or lesbian behaviour in women. Gede Nibo's parents are Baron Samedi and Maman Brigitte; Baron Samedi is the leader of the Gede and Bawon and is depicted as bisexual dandy or occasionally transgender, wearing a top-hat and frock coat along with a woman's skirt and shoes. Samedi tends towards "lascivious movements" that cross gender boundaries and also imply a lust for anal sex.
Other bawon displaying gay behaviour are Baron Lundy and Baron Limba, who are lovers and teach a type of homoerotic nude wrestling at their school, believed to increase magical potency. Baron Oua Oua, who often manifests with a childlike aspect, has been called the baron "most closely linked to homosexuality" by Voodoo practitioners.
Another lwa, Erzulie, is associated with love, sensuality and beauty. Erzulie can manifest aspects that are LGBT-related, including transgender or Amazonian traits, in addition to traditionally feminine guises. When inhabiting men, these aspects can result in transgender or homoerotic behaviour, whereas they may result in lesbianism or anti-male sentiment in women. Erzulie Freda is seen as the protector of gay men, and Erzulie Dantor is associated with lesbians.
Mexican folk religion
Santa Muerte is revered and seen as a saint and protector of the LGBT community in Mexico, since LGBTQ+ people are considered and treated as outcasts by the Catholic Church, evangelical churches, and Mexican society at large. Many LGBTQ+ people ask her for protection from violence, hatred, disease, and to help them in their search for love. Her intercession is commonly invoked in same-sex marriage ceremonies performed in Mexico. The now defunct Iglesia Católica Tradicional México-Estados Unidos, also known as the Church of Santa Muerte, recognized gay marriage and performed religious wedding ceremonies for homosexual couples.
Mythologies of Asia
Chinese
Chinese mythology has been described as "rich in stories about homosexuality". The mythological stories and folklore of China reflect ancient Chinese perspectives toward homosexuality, rather than modern views. These myths are greatly influenced by religious beliefs, particularly Daoist and Confucian, and later incorporated Buddhist teachings.
The religion of the Shang and Predynastic Zhou were predominately shamanistic. Male same-sex love was believed to have originated in the mythical South, thus homosexuality is sometimes still called the "Southern wind". From this period, numerous spirits or deities were associated with homosexuality, bisexuality and transgender identities. These include Chou Wang, Lan Caihe, Shan Gu, and Yu the Great, and Gun.
Homosexual encounters are common in Chinese folk stories. The animal spirits or fairies often choose same-sex partners, usually young men or boys. According to the Xiaomingxiong, one exception to this age preference is the dragon, a powerful mythological beast. Chinese dragons "consistently enjoy sexual relationships with older men", one example being in the tale of "Old Farmer and a Dragon", in which a sixty-year-old farmer is forcibly sodomised by a passing dragon, resulting in wounds from penetration and bites that require medical attention.
Despite the later literature of some Daoist schools disapproval of homosexuality, Tu'er Shen is a deity in Chinese folklore who manages the love and sex between homosexual men. His name means "leveret deity". According to "The Tale of the Rabbit God" in the What the Master Would Not Discuss, Tu Er Shen was originally a man called Hu Tianbao, who fell in love with a handsome young imperial inspector of Fujian. One day Hu Tianbao was caught peeping on the inspector, at which point he confessed his reluctant affections for the other man. The imperial inspector had Hu Tianbao sentenced to death by beating. Since his crime was one of love, underworld officials decided to right the injustice by delegating Hu Tianbao as the god and safeguarder of homosexual affections.
In modern times, the priest Lu Weiming founded a temple in Yonghe City, Taiwan that worships Tu'er Shen and provides spiritual comfort for homosexual Daoists.
For thousands of years, male homosexuality was referred to in literature by alluding to two semi-legendary figures from the early Zhou dynasty. The first was Mizi Xia and the half-eaten peach which he shared with his lover, the actual historical figure, Duke Ling of Wey. The second was Lord Long Yang, who convinced an unnamed King of Wey to remain faithful to him by comparing himself to a small fish which the King might throw back if a larger fish came along. While both Mizi Xia and Lord Long Yang may have existed, nothing is known about them beyond their defining stories, and their presence in Chinese literature was very much that of legendary characters who served as archetypes of homosexual love.
Japanese
Shinto gods are involved in all aspects of life, including the practice of shudo (traditional pederasty). An overarching patron deity of male-male love and sex, "Shudō Daimyōjin", exists in some folk Shinto sects, but is not a part of the standard Shinto pantheon.
Other kami associated with same-sex love or gender variance include: Oyamakui, a transgender mountain spirit that protects industry and childbearing; and Inari Ōkami, the kami of agriculture and rice, who is depicted as various genders, the most common representations being a young female food goddess, an old man carrying rice, and an androgynous bodhisattva. Inari is further associated with foxes and kitsune, shapeshifting fox trickster spirits. Kitsune sometimes disguise themselves as women, hiding their true gender, to trick human men into sexual relations with them. A common belief in medieval Japan was that any woman encountered alone, especially at dusk or night, could be a fox.
Cross-dressing in Japanese Mythology
There is widespread agreement that cross-dressing of heroes and gods is widely observed in Japanese mythology. Through a woman dressed as a man or a man dressed as a woman, a double gender condition is created, gaining powerful power and divinity. Such beliefs existed in Japan before Westernization, according to . Mitsuhashi calls this belief, Sōsei Genri (; no standard translation. lit. “the Double Gender Principle”). Yamato Takeru, the prince of Emperor Keikō, the hero of Japan's founding mythology, is cross-dressed and infiltrates the Kumaso’s castle. He succeeded in killing the brave . In , the mythical Japanese invasion of Korea, Empress Jingū dressed in a man and achieved stunning results. According to Mitsuhashi, these are examples of Sōsei Genri. Sōsei Genri can also be seen in the early modern fiction. For example, Inusaka Keno and Inuzuka Shino, swordsmen in the Edo-period novel Nansō Satomi Hakkenden by Takizawa Bakin, are young men raised as a girl, but played superhuman activities to kill the enemy. Mitsuhashi considers that the cross-dressing of men seen at modern Japanese festivals originated from the ancient Sōsei Genri.
Yamato Takeru
Regarding Yamato Takeru’s cross-dressing, it has had various views. Kojiki-den by Motoori Norinaga emphasized that it was a way to obtain the protection of Yamatohime-no-mikoto and more specifically Amaterasu, and most commentaries of Kojiki and historians such as supported Kojikiden’s view. While acknowledged the spiritual power of the unmarried princess Yamatohime but argued that Amaterasu need not be taken into consideration, emphasized the spiritual dignity of Amaterasu and claimed that Yamatotakeru visited Ise Shrine. Toshihiko Moriya appealed to “common sense” and made the case for visiting Ise Shrine, but Mariko Hoshiyama was skeptical and saw the cross-dressing by Yamatotakeru as a part of the rites of coming-of-age. However, Sanae Fukutō points out that “a reexamination is now required” since the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki are entirely separate mythologies that should not be uncritically contrasted or compared.
Reincarnation into Yang Guifei
As a part of , Yamato Takeru’s cross-dressing attracted attention in the Middle Ages. In Bai Juyi's Song of Everlasting Regret, there is a passage in which Emperor Xuanzong sees Yang Guifei’s soul floating in Mount Penglai after her death. Japanese intellectuals identified Mount Penglai with Japan, and so they turned their attention to Bai Juyi’s poetry. A setsuwa in the Keiranshūyōshū by Kōshu identifies Yang Guifei’s palace at Penglei with Atsuta Shrine in Japan. The Soga Monogatari states that Emperor Xuanzong also came to Japan after his death and became the god Hakkengū. In a Shinto theological book in 1523, Unshū Hinokawa Ame ga Uchi no Ki, Emperor Xuanzong planned to invade Japan in search of Yang Guifei, and it is said that the Japanese gods held a conference and had a god from Atsuta Shrine dress up as a woman and become Yang Guifei to calm Emperor Xuanzong’s mind. Tōgoku Kikō by and also held this story in the Sengoku period. Edo period scholars such as Hayashi Razan (in Honchō Jinja-kō , Tōkō Nichiroku , Heishin Kikō ), (in ) and Izawa Banryō criticized this as an ignorant theory, and it gradually fell out. A stupa dedicated to Yang Guifei was erected at Atsuta Shrine, but was removed during renovations during the Jōkyō era (1684-1688) but the stones, believed to have been fragments, can still be seen today.
Empress Jingū
Regarding Empress Jingū’s cross-dressing, Shinobu Orikuchi understood it as a shamanic act, since warfare in ancient times was a divine ritual. He also pointed out that a similar example was the wife of the Asuka period warrior , who had dressed as a man and fought in the invasion against the Emishi. Hisashi Yamada shares a similar view, and believes that the example of armed Kikoe-ōgimi in Omoro Sōshi pointed out by Ifa Fuyū is also related to this cross-dressing.
Susanoo
When Susanoo slays the dragon Yamata no Orochi, he wears the comb that Kushinadahime transformed into. Since combs symbolize women in ancient Japan, some have interpreted this as Susanoo cross-dressing. An early example is in The Tale of the Heike, written in the Middle Ages, which interprets Susanoo as cross-dressing. , , and Hayao Kawai have linked this attire of Susanoo to the cross-dressing Yamatotakeru. However, claims that cross-dressing cannot be inferred from the act of wearing a comb.
Amaterasu's queerness
Amaterasu, the supreme deity in Japanese mythology and the imperial ancestor, is also called Ōhirume (ō-hiru-me; lit. “great-daylight-woman”) and is generally known as a goddess. However, a lot of third gender interpretations have been performed since ancient times, so the pronoun here is they.
In ancient Japanese mythology, Amaterasu was surprised to see Susanoo ascending to Takamagahara, so they dressed as a man and armed themself. This is often thought to stem from Amaterasu's third gender shamanic nature.
Amaterasu retreats from conflict with their brother Susanoo into the cave of Amano-Iwato, depriving the Earth of sunlight and life. To coax Amaterasu from the cave, the deity of humour and dance, Ame-no-Uzume, performs a bawdy sexual dance that involved exposing her breasts and vulva. On Amaterasu's stepping out of the cave, Ishikori-dome no Mikoto held up a magical mirror, and the combination of the dance and their reflection distracted Amaterasu so much that they did not notice other deities closing the cave entrance behind them. In Japanese academia, Ame-no-Uzume's sexual dance has generally been understood to have a magical significance: an Edo period scholar Hirata Atsutane, for example, linked Ame-no-Uzume's genital exposure to genital folklore of the time. In the scene where the male god Ninigi-no-Mikoto descends to earth, Ame-no-Uzume similarly exposes her genitals and breasts. On the other hand, Conner, Sparks & Sparks (1998) is reading lesbianism in this story.
As seen above, Amaterasu is often noted for their gender variance or queerness. Already in the Heian period, Amaterasu was associated with cross-dressing or gender variance. Nakayama Tadachika’s diary and ’s diary , written at the end of the Heian period, contain records of men's clothing being presented to Amaterasu at the of Ise Grand Shrine.
Medieval Shintoism offered esoteric interpretations of the ancient Japanese mythology. In many medieval sources, Amaterasu’s gender is ambiguous and “confused.” Nihongi ichi Jindaikan Shuibun in the early 15th century states that Amaterasu first appears as a man and is a god of yang, and sometimes as a woman and is a goddess of yin for the sake of enlightenment of the sentient beings. Tenchi Kanjōki in 1568 states that Amaterasu at the of Ise Grand Shrine is female but resides in a male body, and that at is male but resides in a female body. Nichiiki Hongi in the Nanboku-chō period saw Amaterasu as physically androgynous, and of a gender variance, probably, “one that could not be determined as either a god or a goddess”.:9 Furthermore, some medieval esoteric commentaries identify Kuni-no-Tokotachi with Konrin’ō (; a Chakravarti) and Rāgarāja. Nichiiki Hongi, Daijingū Hon’en, and Nihongi Sanrin-ryū consider Kuni-no-Tokotachi's spiritual essence to be an androgynous third gender.: 10―14 The third gender deities mentioned here, Amaterasu and Kuni-no-Tokotachi, are both regarded as supreme deities in Japanese panthea. According to Yui Yoshida, medieval esotericists considered Amaterasu, a third gender deity born from the marriage of the primordial brother and sister Izanagi and Izanami, to be more “complete” than Kuni-no-Tokotachi, a spontaneously generated third gender deity.: 22 In both and , Amaterasu was associated with gender variance.: 125(20) For example, Amaterasu is believed to have appeared in Hyūga as the boy deity in Ryōbu Shintō.
In the Edo period, wrote in his Naikū Dantai Kōshō that Amaterasu was female as a sun goddess and male as an imperial ancestor. , who advocated egalitarianism, used Amaterasu's androgynous nature as a basis for his argument on equality between men and women.
Amaterasu's gender variance or queer nature was retained in the early Meiji era. For instance, during the first years of the Meiji era, Emperor Meiji was the only male permitted to wear ohaguro. This was also recognized as cross-dressing by people at the time. Kei Chiba points out that in early modern Japan, ohaguro was a feminine grooming habit and may have signified a certain third gender nature of the emperor, the human deity and a descendant of Amaterasu.: 8 However, through the Meiji Restoration, Amaterasu's queer symbolization was eventually removed from the legitimacy and regarded as heresy. This elimination is also related to the fact that Amaterasu was sometimes used as a symbol of anti-government movements from the Edo period to the early Meiji era. For example, an that occurred in Hokuetsu in 1874 used Amaterasu as a symbol and called for the restoration of the Tokugawa shogunate. Around 1885, Yohei Kobayashi started a social movement called Jindai Hukko Seigan Undō, which called for a return to the pre-imperial era of myth, videlicet of Amaterasu. Kei Chiba argues that Amaterasu's queerness and dissident traits were an obstacle to the Meiji government's aims of Westernization and the emperor-centered family system of heteronormativity and patriarchy. The symbology of Amaterasu in ancient mythology was sometimes interpreted as cross-dressing, but ultimately their gender variance feature was “castrated” and they were “domesticated” under fascism as the supreme mother.
Even after the Meiji period, Amaterasu's gender variance continued to be believed in unorthodox new sects that was sometimes deemed heretical by the imperial government.: 12―13 Nao Deguchi, the originator of Oomoto-kyō, in their later years claimed that their soul is the same as that of Amaterasu's sister, and therefore that although their body is female (i.e. ; ), they are spiritually male. The shintai worshipped by the Jikōson’s sect, which arose after the war and was banned by Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, is considered as an androgynous deity that was a fusion of Emperor Jimmu and Amaterasu. Sayo Kitamura, the founder of Tenshō Kōtai Jingū-kyō, claimed that the god residing in her was a single deity embodied by the male deity Kōtaijin and the female deity Amaterasu.: 15―16
Michiomi no Mikoto
was the vanguard of the Jinmu's Eastern Expedition and also served as guards at the enthronement ceremony of Emperor Jimmu. He was appointed as a priest to worship Takamimusubi and given a woman's name Itsuhime. Ryūzō Torii understood this as a change of sex, in other words, a kind of transgender shaman.
Shino no Hafuri and Amano no Hafuri
It has been suggested since the Edo period that the oldest recorded homosexual relationship in Japan was between Shino no Hōri/Hafuri and Amano no Hōri/Hafuri. These were priests of different shrine, speculatively the sun goddess Amaterasu. When Shino died of illness, Amano committed suicide from grief, and the couple were buried together in the same grave.
According to Nihon Shoki, when Empress Jingū defeated the rebellion of Emperor Chūai’s and Ōnakatsu Hime's son, , it became dark as night even though it was day. It was discovered that the cause of this strange phenomenon was the sin of azunai committed by Shino and Amano. Although Nihon Shoki states that the sin of azunai was the sin of burying priests from two shrines in the same grave, homophobic Edo period researchers argued that the sin of azunai was a sin related to homosexuality.
Indian
Buddhist
In traditional Thai Buddhism, accounts propose that "homosexuality arises as a karmic consequence of violating Buddhist proscriptions against heterosexual misconduct" in a previous incarnation. Thai Buddhists also believe the disciple Ānanda to have been reincarnated several times as a woman, and in one previous life to have been transgender. Ānanda is popular and charismatic, and known for his emotionality. In one story of one of his previous lives, Ānanda was a solitary yogi who fell in love with a nāga, a serpent king of Indian folklore, who took the form of a handsome youth. The relationship became sexual, causing Ānanda to regretfully break off contact, to avoid distraction from spiritual matters.
According to one legend, male same-sex love was introduced into Japan by the founder of Shingon Buddhism, Kūkai. Historians point that this is probably not true, since Kūkai was an enthusiastic follower of monastic regulations.
Some bodhisattvas change sexes in different incarnations, which causes some to associate this with homosexuality and transgender identities. Guanyin, Avalokiteśvara, and Tara are known to have different gender representations.
Hindu
Hindu mythology has many examples of deities changing gender, manifesting as different genders at different times, or combining to form androgynous or hermaphroditic beings. Gods change sex or manifest as an Avatar of the opposite sex in order to facilitate sexual congress. Non-divine beings also undergo sex-changes through the actions of the gods, as the result of curses or blessings, or as the natural outcome of reincarnation.
Hindu mythology contains numerous incidents where sexual interactions serve a non-sexual, sacred purpose; in some cases, these are same-sex interactions. Sometimes the gods condemn these interactions but at other times they occur with their blessing.
In addition to stories of gender and sexual variance that are generally accepted by mainstream Hinduism, modern scholars and queer activists have highlighted LGBT themes in lesser known texts, or inferred them from stories that traditionally are considered to have no homoerotic subtext. Such analyses have caused disagreements about the true meaning of the ancient stories.
Philippines
In Tagalog mythology, the hermaphrodite Lakapati is identified as the most important fertility deity in the Tagalog pantheon. A prayer dedicated to Lakapati was recited by children when sowing seeds: "Lakapati, pakanin mo yaring alipin mo; huwag mong gutumin (Lakapati, feed this thy slave; let him not hunger)".
In Suludnon mythology, there are accounts of female binukots (well-kept maidens) who had powers to transition into male warriors. The most famous of which are Nagmalitong Yawa and Matan-ayon. In one epic, after Buyong Humadapnon was captured by the magical binukot Sinangkating Bulawan, the also powerful female binukot, Nagmalitong Yawa, cast her magic and transitioned into a male warrior named Buyong Sumasakay. He afterwards successfully rescued the warrior Buyong Humadapnon. In a similar epic, the female binukot Matan-ayon, in search of her husband Labaw Donggon, sailed the stormy seas using the golden ship Hulinday together with her less powerful brother-in-law Paubari. Once when she was bathing after sailing far, Buyong Pahagunong spotted her and tried to make her his bride. The event was followed by a series of combat, where in one instance, Matan-ayon transitioned into the male warrior Buyong Makalimpong. After a series of battles, Labaw Donggon arrives and attacks Buyong Pahagunong, while Buyong Makalimpong once again transitioned into Matan-ayon. Matan-ayon then has a conversation with the supreme goddess Laonsina about why the men are fighting and agree to sit back and watch them if they truly are seeking death.
In Waray mythology, the supreme creator deity has both female and male aspects. Usually spoken of in her female aspect, Malaon ("the ancient one"), she was regarded as a more sympathetic deity of justice and equality. However, her male aspect, Makapatag (literally "the leveler"), is regarded as a destructive deity of punishment and vengeance.
Abrahamic
Christian
The saints Sergius and Bacchus' close relationship has led many modern commentators to believe they were lovers. The most popular evidence for this view is that the oldest text of their martyrology, in the Greek language, describes them as erastai (. Historian John Boswell considered their relationship to be an example of an early Christian same-sex union, reflecting his contested view of tolerant early Christian attitudes toward homosexuality.
The official stance of the Eastern Orthodox Church is that the ancient Eastern tradition of adelphopoiesis, which was done to form a "brotherhood" in the name of God and is traditionally associated with these two saints, had no sexual implications.
In a similar matter regarding paired male saints, Saints Cosmas and Damian have been referred to as potentially originally having homoerotic overtones, and later Christian traditions added them being brothers to conceal that.
Saint Sebastian is a long-standing gay icon. The combination of his strong, shirtless physique, the symbolism of the arrows penetrating his body, and the look on his face of rapturous pain have intrigued artists (gay or otherwise) for centuries, and began the first explicitly gay cult in the 19th century. Richard A. Kaye wrote, "contemporary gay men have seen in Sebastian at once a stunning advertisement for homosexual desire (indeed, a homoerotic ideal), and a prototypical portrait of tortured closet case."
Islamic and Pre-Islamic Arabian
Islamic folk beliefs remain common, such as the myths surrounding the jinn, long-lived shape-shifting spirits created from "smokeless fire" (Quran 15:27) and which correspond to the second group of angels who were created on the fifth day of Creation in the text of Jewish Kabbalah called the Bahir "Illumination", which were created from "flameless fire". Some believe their shape-shifting abilities allow them to change gender at will but this is not consistent throughout the Islamic world although their ability to fly and travel exceedingly fast are consistent traits of the Jinn. The word Jinn means "hidden from sight" and they are sometimes considered to be led by Iblis, representing powers of magic and rebellion, and posing as bringers of wealth as the devil acclaim.
These traits are associated with the Jinn on account of Iblis' rebellion against the order of God to acknowledge Adam's ability to be superior to the Jinn and his refusal to bow down stating that "he was created from fire and Adam was created from clay" (Quran 7:11-12). The ability of the Jinn to travel to the heavens and listen to the discussion of angels and bring back what they overhear and relay it to seers and oracles has linked them with magic (Quran 72:8-10).
Jinn are served by the al-Jink and mukhannathun, transgender and homoerotically inclined wanderers with entertainment and spiritual functions. In pre-Islamic Arabic and Oikoumene cultures, third-gender individuals such as mukhannathun were worshippers in widespread goddess cults. These cults revered a trio of goddesses: al-lāt, al-Uzza, and Manāt. which in pre-Islamic Arabia were believed to be daughters of God but were denounced as false idols in Quran 53:19-23.
Arabian mythology also contains magical sex-changing springs or fountains, such as al-Zahra. Upon bathing in or drinking from al-Zahra, a person will change sex. The folklore of Swat in northern Pakistan often includes same-sex relationships in which the "beloved" is a handsome younger man or boy.
Judaism
The story of David and Jonathan has been described as "biblical Judeo-Christianity's most influential justification of homoerotic love". The relationship between David and Jonathan is mainly covered in the Hebrew Bible in the 1st Book of Samuel as part of the story of David's ascent to power. The mainstream view found in modern biblical exegesis argues that the relationship between the two is merely a close platonic friendship. However, there has recently been a tradition of interpreting the love between David and Jonathan as romantic or sexual.
Another biblical hero, Noah, best known for his building an ark to save animals and worthy people from a divinely-caused flood, later became a wine-maker. One day he drank too much wine and fell asleep naked in his tent. When his son Ham enters the tent, he sees his father naked, and Canaan, one of Ham's sons is cursed with banishment. In Jewish tradition, it is also suggested that Ham had anal sex with Noah or castrated him.
Mesopotamian: Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Phoenician, and Canaanite
The ancient regions of Mesopotamia and Canaan were inhabited by a succession of overlapping civilisations: Sumer, Phoenicia, Agade, Babylonia, and Assyria. The mythologies of these people were interlinked, often containing the same stories and mythological gods and heroes under different names.
The Eridu Genesis, "The Creation of Man", from circa the 20th century BC, lists physically differing people created by the goddess Ninmah. These included "the woman who cannot give birth" and "the one who has no male organ or female organ", which have been regarded as being third gender or androgynous. Enki, the supreme god, is accepting of these people and assigns them roles in society as naditu (priestesses) and girsequ (servants to the king).
The Akkadian mythical epic Atrahasis contains another iteration of this story in which Enki specifically requests that Nintu create a "third-category" of people that includes third-gender people, barren women, and an "infant-stealing demon".
In ancient Mesopotamia, worship of the goddess Inanna included "soothing laments" sung by third-gender priests called "gala". According to First Babylonian dynastic texts, these priests were created specifically for this purpose by the god Enki. Some gala took female names, and the word itself means "penis+anus", hinting at their androgynous status. The cultural practice, or "me", of androgynous, third-gender or homoerotically inclined priests were part of those said to have been stolen by Innana from Enki in "The Descent of Innana" myth. In the Babylonian Erra myth, the gender of the "kurgaru" and "assinnu" priests was supernaturally changed by the goddess Ishtar, making them feminine. The changes may also facilitate possession by the goddess, causing a psychological change or prompting physical castration.
The relationship between the semi-divine hero Gilgamesh and his "intimate companion" Enkidu in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh has been interpreted as a sexual one by some modern scholars. Enkidu was created as a companion to Gilgamesh by the goddess Aruru, and civilised by a priestess. As Gilgamesh and Enkidu were of similar ages and status, their relationship has been seen as relatively egalitarian, in contrast with the typically pederastic mode of ancient Greece.
Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrianism has been said to have a "hatred of male anal intercourse". This is reflected in its mythology: When Ahriman, the "Spirit of Aridity and Death" and "Lord of Lies", seeks to destroy the world, he engages in self-sodomy. This homosexual self-intercourse causes an "explosion of evil power" and results in the birth of a host of evil minions and demons. Ahriman has also been regarded as the patron of men who partake of homosexual sex. However, this negative portrayal of homosexuality in Zoroastrianism is not found in the Gathas, their original holy book which is said to be the direct sayings of the prophet Zoroaster.
Mythologies of Europe
Celtic
Celtic mythology has no known stories of gay or lesbian relationships nor LGBT characters. Peter Chicheri argues that non-procreative sexual experiences were removed from myths by Christians.
suggest that the heroes and foster-brothers Cúchulainn and Ferdiadh may have had a sexual relationship. The tale has led to comparisons to Greek "warrior-lovers", and Cúchulainn's reaction to the death of Ferdiadh in particular compared to Achilles' lament for Patroclus.
In the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion of Welsh mythology, Gwydion helps his brother Gilfaethwy rape Goewin, Math's female servant. When Math hears of this, he turns his nephews into a series of mated pairs of animals; Gwydion becomes a stag for a year, then a sow, and finally a wolf. Gilfaethwy becomes a hind, a wild boar, and a she-wolf. Each year they must mate and produce an offspring which is sent to Math: Hyddwn, Hychddwn and Bleiddwn; after three years Math releases his nephews from their punishment.
In the Matter of Britain, originating in Welsh mythology, the Knights of the Round Table, Lancelot and Galehaut, share intimacy as recounted in the 13th century Lancelot-Grail. The nature of their relationship is a subject of debate among modern scholars, with some interpreting it as intimate friendship and others as love similar to that between Lancelot and Guinevere.
The 14th-century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is considered by some modern scholars to blur the line between male homosociality common at the time and male homosexuality. The Green Knight's attractiveness defies the homosocial rules of King Arthur's court and poses a threat to their way of life, with the friendship between him and Gawain being seen with homoerotic overtones.
Greek and Roman
Greek mythology features male same-sex love in many of the constituent myths. These myths have been described as being crucially influential on Western LGBT literature, with the original myths being constantly re-published and re-written, and the relationships and characters serving as icons. In comparison, lesbianism is rarely found in classical myths.
Achilles and Patroclus
Achilles and Troilus
Agamemnon and Argynnus
Ameinias and Narcissus
Apollo and Admetus
Apollo and Adonis
Apollo and Boreas
Apollo and Branchus
Apollo and Carnus
Apollo and Cyparissus
Apollo and Helenus
Apollo and Hyacinthus
Apollo and Hymenaios
Apollo and Iapis
Ares and Alectryon
Artemis and Callisto
Asclepius and Hippolytus
Athena and Myrmex
Athis and Lycabas
Boreas and Hyacinthus
Chiron and Dionysus
Cleostratus and Menestratus
Cycnus and Phaethon
Cycnus and Phylius
Cydon and Clytius
Deiphobus and Antheus
Dionysus and Ampelus
Dionysus and Prosymnus
Eurybarus and Alcyoneus
Helios and Nerites
Hephaestus and Peleus
Heracles and Abderus
Heracles and Eurystheus
Heracles and Hylas
Heracles and Iolaus
Hermes and Amphion
Hermes and Crocus
Hermes and Perseus
Hermes and Pollux
Hesperus and Hymenaeus
Hymenaeus and Argynnus
Hypnos and Endymion
Ianthe and Iphis
Kalamos and Karpos
Laius and Chrysippus
Marsyas and Olympus
Minos and Atymnius
Minos and Ganymede
Minos and Miletus
Minos and Theseus
Nisus and Euryalus
Orestes and Pylades
Orpheus and the Thracians
Orpheus and Kalais
Pan and Daphnis
Paris and Antheus
Polyphemus and Silenus
Poseidon and Nerites
Poseidon and Pelops
Polyeidos and Glaucus
Rhadamanthus and Talos
Sarpedon and Atymnius
Sarpedon and Miletus
Silvanus and Cyparissus
Tantalus and Ganymede
Thamyris and Hyacinthus
Theseus and Pirithous
Zephyrus and Cyparissus
Zephyrus and Hyacinthus
Zeus and Aëtos
Zeus (Artemis) and Callisto
Zeus and Euphorion
Zeus and Ganymede
Apollo, an eternal beardless youth himself, had the most male lovers of all the Greek gods, as could be expected from a god who presided over the palaestra. In spite of having no male lovers himself, the love god Eros was sometimes considered patron of pederastic love between males. Aphroditus was an androgynous Aphrodite from Cyprus, in later mythology became known as Hermaphroditus the son of Hermes and Aphrodite.
Thamyris, the Thracian singer who developed love for Hyacinthus, is said to have been the first man to fall in love with another man. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the characters Iphis and Caeneus change sex.
Antinous was a Greek youth from Bithynia and a favourite and lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian. Following his premature death before his 20th birthday, Antinous was deified on Hadrian's orders, being worshipped in both the Greek East and Latin West, sometimes as a god and sometimes merely as a hero.
Norse
Georges Dumézil suggested that Freyr, a Norse god of fertility, may have been worshiped by a group of homosexual or effeminate priests, as suggested by Saxo Grammaticus in his .
Some Old Norse deities are attested as changing their shape at will, turning into animals or otherwise disguising themselves. For example, the god Loki is attested as disgusing himself as a woman. In Gylfaginning, he transforms himself into a mare and, after being chased all night by a stallion Svaðilfari, he gives birth to Sleipnir, an eight-legged foal.
Norwegian archaeologist Brit Solli suggests that Odin may have been connected to a shamanistic cult that viewed gender transgression as a source of power.
According to socialist David F. Greenberg:
Mythologies of Oceania
Australian Aboriginal
The indigenous population of Australia have a shamanistic religion, which includes a pantheon of gods. The Rainbow Serpent of the Wunambal known as Ungud has been described as androgynous or transgender. Clever men identify their erect penises with Ungud and his androgyny inspires some to undergo ceremonial subincision of the penis. Angamunggi is another transgender rainbow-serpent god, worshipped as a "giver of life".
Other Australian mythological beings include Labarindja, blue-skinned wild women or "demon women" with hair the colour of smoke. Stories about them show them to be completely uninterested in romance or sex with men, and any man forcing his attention upon them could die, due to the "evil magic in their vaginas". They are sometimes depicted as gynandrous or intersex, having both a penis and a vagina. This is represented in ritual by having their part played by men in women's clothes.
Pacific Island: Celebes, Vanuatu, Borneo and the Philippines
Third gender, or gender variant, spiritual intermediaries are found in many Pacific island cultures, including religion in pre-colonial Philippines, such as the bajasa of the Torajan people of Sulawesi, the bantut of the Tausūg people of the south Philippines, and the bayogin. These shamans are typically biologically male but display feminine behaviours and appearance. The pre-Christian Philippines had a polytheistic religion, which included the transgender or hermaphroditic gods Bathala and Malyari, whose names means "Man and Woman in One" and "Powerful One" respectively; these gods are worshipped by the Bayagoin.
The Big Nambas of Vanuatu have the concept of divinely approved homoerotic relationships between men, with the older partner called the dubut. This name is derived from the word for shark, referring to the patronage of the shark-human hydrid creator god Qat.
Among their pantheon of deities, the Ngaju of Borneo worship Mahatala-Jata, an androgynous or transgender god. The male part of this god is Mahatala, who rules the Upperworld, and is depicted as a hornbill living above the clouds on a mountain-top; the female part is Jata, who rules the Underworld from under the sea in the form of a katuali. These two manifestations are linked via a jewel-encrusted bridge that is seen in the physical world as a rainbow. Mahatala-Jata is served by balian, female hierodules, and basir, transgender shamans metaphorically described as "water snakes which are at the same time hornbills".
Similar transgender shamans, the "manang bali", are found in the Iban. Girls fated to become manang bali may first dream of becoming a woman and also of being summoned by the deities Menjaya Raja Manang or Ini. Menjaya Raja Manang began existence as a male god until the wife of her brother Sengalang Burong became sick. This prompted Menjara to become the world's first healer, allowing her to cure her sister-in-law, but this treatment also resulted in Menjara changing into a woman or androgynous being.
Polynesian: Hawaiian and Māori
Polynesian religions feature a complex pantheon of deities. Many of these gods refer to their companions of either sex as "aikane", a term encompassing passionate friendship and sexual-love, often in bisexual contexts.
Wahine-ʻŌmaʻo, a goddess of Hawaiian religion whose name means "ʻŌmaʻo woman", is depicted in relationships with other goddesses Hiʻiaka and Hopoe. When Hi'iaka was suspected of infidelity with her sister Pele's husband, the volcano goddess Pele killed Hi'iaka's beloved Hopoe by covering her in lava. In addition to Wahineomo and Hopoe, Hi'iaka had lesbian relationships with the fern goddess Pauopalae and Pele-devotee Omeo. Omeo was part of the retinue that brought the bisexual Prince Lohiau to Pele after his death. During his life Lohiau was the lover of both the female Pele and male Paoa.
Other Polynesian LGBT figures include the Hawaiian Haakauilanani, a male servant and lover to the "Earth mother" creator goddess Papahānaumoku and her husband Wākea. Non-divine LGBT characters also exist in Polynesian mythology, such as the male priest Pakaʻa and his chief and lover Keawe-nui-a-ʻUmi, and the famed fisherman Nihooleki, who was married to a woman but also had a relationship with the pig god Kamapuaʻa. Kamapua'a was also responsible for sending the love-god Lonoikiaweawealoha to seduce Pele's brother gods Hiiakaluna and Hiiakalalo, hence distracting them from attacking him. Kamapuaʻa's other male lovers included Limaloa, the bisexual god of the sea and mirages.
Hiʻiaka, a daughter or sister of Pele, had aikane (from: "ai", meaning: [intimate sexual relationship]; kane, [man, husband, consort]) relationships with several female lovers including Hopoe, Omeo, Wahineʻomaʻo, and Pauo-Palae.
The Healing Stones of Kapaemahu tells the story of four māhū - individuals of dual male and female mind, heart, and spirit - who long ago brought healing arts from Tahiti to Hawai'i. Before they left, they used special dual male-female kiʻi to transfer their powers to four large boulders that the people brought to Waikiki. These stones still exist on Waikiki Beach and may be the only monument in the world to honor and uplift gender fluidity.
See also
Religion and homosexuality
Queer theology
LGBT literature
LGBT history
LGBT themes in speculative fiction
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
Mythology
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Fundamental rights | Fundamental rights are a group of rights that have been recognized by a high degree of protection from encroachment. These rights are specifically identified in a constitution, or have been found under due process of law. The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 17, established in 2015, underscores the link between promoting human rights and sustaining peace.
List of important rights
Some universally recognised rights that are seen as fundamental, i.e., contained in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, or the U.N. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, include the following:
Self-determination
Liberty
Due process of law
Freedom of movement
Right to privacy
Freedom of thought
Freedom of conscience
Freedom of religion
Freedom of expression
Freedom of assembly
Freedom of association
Specific jurisdictions
Canada
In Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms outlines four Fundamental Freedoms. These are freedom of:
Conscience and religion
Thought, belief, opinion, and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication
Peaceful assembly
Association.
Europe
On a European level, fundamental rights are protected in three laws:
The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union
The Fundamental Freedoms of the European Union
The European Convention on Human Rights
Japan
In Japan, fundamental rights protected by the Constitution of Japan include:
Civil liberties, including the right to liberty and the right to freedom of expression, thought, conscience and religion
Social rights, including the right to receive education and the right to maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living
India
There are six fundamental rights recognized in the Constitution of India:
the right to equality (Articles 14-18):
Article 14: Equality before law
Article 15: Prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth
Article 16: Equality of opportunity in matters of public employment
Article 17: Abolition of untouchability
Article 18: Abolition of titles
the right to freedom (Article 19, 22):
Article 19: Protection of certain rights regarding freedom of speech, expression, assembly, association, movement, and residence
Article 20: Protection in respect of conviction for offenses
Article 21: Protection of life and personal liberty
Article 21A: Right to education
the right against exploitation (Articles 23-24):
Article 23: Prohibition of trafficking in human beings and forced labor
Article 24: Prohibition of child labor
the right to freedom of religion (Articles 25-28):
Article 25: Freedom of conscience and free profession, practice, and propagation of religion
Article 26: Freedom to manage religious affairs
Article 27: Freedom from payment of taxes for promotion of any particular religion
Article 28: Freedom from attending religious instruction or worship in certain educational institutions
cultural and educational rights (Articles 29-30):
Article 29: Protection of interests of minorities
Article 30: Right of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions
the right to constitutional remedies (Article 32 and 226):
Article 32: Right to move the Supreme Court for the enforcement of Fundamental Rights
Article 226: Power of High Courts to issue certain writs for the enforcement of Fundamental Rights
United States
Though many fundamental rights are also widely considered human rights, the classification of a right as "fundamental" invokes specific legal tests courts use to determine the constrained conditions under which the United States government and various state governments may limit these rights. In such legal contexts, courts determine whether rights are fundamental by examining the historical foundations of those rights and by determining whether their protection is part of a longstanding tradition. In particular, courts look to whether the right is "so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental." Individual states may guarantee other rights as fundamental. That is, States may add to fundamental rights but can never diminish and rarely infringe upon fundamental rights by legislative processes. Any such attempt, if challenged, may involve a "strict scrutiny" review in court.
In American constitutional law, fundamental rights have special significance under the U.S. Constitution. Those rights enumerated in the U.S. Constitution are recognized as "fundamental" by the U.S. Supreme Court. According to the Supreme Court, enumerated rights that are incorporated are so fundamental that any law restricting such a right must both serve a compelling state purpose and be narrowly tailored to that compelling purpose.
The original interpretation of the United States Bill of Rights was that only the Federal Government was bound by it. In 1835, the U.S. Supreme Court in Barron v. Baltimore unanimously ruled that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. During post-Civil War Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868 to rectify this condition, and to specifically apply the whole of the Constitution to all U.S. states. In 1873, the Supreme Court essentially nullified the key language of the Fourteenth Amendment that guaranteed all "privileges or immunities" to all U.S. citizens, in a series of cases called the Slaughterhouse cases. This decision and others allowed post-emancipation racial discrimination to continue largely unabated.
Later Supreme Court justices found a way around these limitations without overturning the Slaughterhouse precedent: they created a concept called Selective Incorporation. Under this legal theory, the court used the remaining Fourteenth Amendment protections for equal protection and due process to "incorporate" individual elements of the Bill of Rights against the states. "The test usually articulated for determining fundamentality under the Due Process Clause is that the putative right must be 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty', or 'deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition.'" Compare page 267 Lutz v. City of York, Pa., 899 F. 2d 255 - United States Court of Appeals, 3rd Circuit, 1990.
This set in motion a continuous process under which each individual right under the Bill of Rights was incorporated, one by one. That process has extended more than a century, with the free speech clause of the First Amendment first incorporated in 1925 in Gitlow v New York. The most recent amendment completely incorporated as fundamental was the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for personal self-defense, in McDonald v Chicago, handed down in 2010 and the Eighth Amendment's restrictions on excessive fines in Timbs v. Indiana in 2019.
Not all clauses of all amendments have been incorporated. For example, states are not required to obey the Fifth Amendment's requirement of indictment by grand jury. Many states choose to use preliminary hearings instead of grand juries. It is possible that future cases may incorporate additional clauses of the Bill of Rights against the states.
The Bill of Rights lists specifically enumerated rights. The Supreme Court has extended fundamental rights by recognizing several fundamental rights not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, including but not limited to:
The right to interstate travel
The right to parent one's children
The right to privacy
The right to marriage
Any restrictions a government statute or policy places on these rights are evaluated with strict scrutiny. If a right is denied to everyone, it is an issue of substantive due process. If a right is denied to some individuals but not others, it is also an issue of equal protection. However, any action that abridges a right deemed fundamental, when also violating equal protection, is still held to the more exacting standard of strict scrutiny, instead of the less demanding rational basis test.
During the Lochner era, the right to freedom of contract was considered fundamental, and thus restrictions on that right were subject to strict scrutiny. Following the 1937 Supreme Court decision in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, though, the right to contract became considerably less important in the context of substantive due process and restrictions on it were evaluated under the rational basis standard.
See also
Fundamental Rights Agency of the European Union
Inalienable rights
Universal human rights
References
Fundamental rights
Constitutional law
Rights
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Humanities | Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture, including certain fundamental questions asked by humans. During the Renaissance, the term 'humanities' referred to the study of classical literature and language, as opposed to the study of religion or 'divinity.' The study of the humanities was a key part of the secular curriculum in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently defined as any fields of study outside of natural sciences, social sciences, formal sciences (like mathematics), and applied sciences (or professional training). They use methods that are primarily critical, speculative, or interpretative and have a significant historical element—as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of science.
The humanities include the studies of philosophy, religion, history, language arts (literature, writing, oratory, rhetoric, poetry, etc.), performing arts (theater, music, dance, etc.), and visual arts (painting, sculpture, photography, filmmaking, etc.).
Some definitions of the humanities encompass law and religion due to their shared characteristics, such as the study of language and culture. However, these definitions are not universally accepted, as law and religion are often considered professional subjects rather than humanities subjects. Professional subjects, like some social sciences, are sometimes classified as being part of both the liberal arts and professional development education, whereas humanities subjects are generally confined to the traditional liberal arts education. Although sociology, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and psychology share some similarities with the humanities, these are often considered social sciences. Similarly, disciplines such as finance, business administration, political science, economics, and global studies have closer ties to the social sciences rather than the humanities.
Scholars in the humanities are called humanities scholars or sometimes humanists. The term humanist also describes the philosophical position of humanism, which antihumanist scholars in the humanities reject. Renaissance scholars and artists are also known as humanists. Some secondary schools offer humanities classes usually consisting of literature, history, foreign language, and art.
Human disciplines like history and language mainly use the comparative method and comparative research. Other methods used in the humanities include hermeneutics, source criticism, esthetic interpretation, and speculative reason.
Etymology
The word humanities comes from the Renaissance Latin phrase studia humanitatis, which translates to study of humanity. This phrase was used to refer to the study of classical literature and language, which was seen as an important aspect of a refined education in the Renaissance. In its usage in the early 15th century, the studia humanitatis was a course of studies that consisted of grammar, poetry, rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy, primarily derived from the study of Latin and Greek classics. The word humanitas also gave rise to the Renaissance Italian neologism umanisti, whence "humanist", "Renaissance humanism".
Fields
Classics
Classics, in the Western academic tradition, refers to the studies of the cultures of classical antiquity, namely Ancient Greek and Latin and the Ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Classical studies is considered one of the cornerstones of the humanities; however, its popularity declined during the 20th century. Nevertheless, the influence of classical ideas on many humanities disciplines, such as philosophy and literature, remains strong.
History
History is systematically collected information about the past. When used as the name of a field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of humans, societies, institutions, and any topic that has changed over time.
Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the humanities. In modern academia, history can occasionally be classified as a social science, though this definition is contested.
Language
While the scientific study of language is known as linguistics and is generally considered a social science, a natural science or a cognitive science, the study of languages is also central to the humanities. A good deal of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy has been devoted to the analysis of language and to the question of whether, as Wittgenstein claimed, many of our philosophical confusions derive from the vocabulary we use; literary theory has explored the rhetorical, associative, and ordering features of language; and historical linguists have studied the development of languages across time. Literature, covering a variety of uses of language including prose forms (such as the novel), poetry and drama, also lies at the heart of the modern humanities curriculum. College-level programs in a foreign language usually include study of important works of the literature in that language, as well as the language itself.
Law
In everyday language, law refers to a rule that is enforced by a governing institution, as opposed to a moral or ethical rule that is not subject to formal enforcement. The study of law can be seen as either a social science or a humanities discipline, depending on one's perspective. Some see it as a social science because of its objective and measurable nature, while others view it as a humanities discipline because of its focus on values and interpretation. Law is not always enforceable, especially in the international relations context. Law has been defined in various ways, such as "a system of rules", "an interpretive concept" for achieving justice, "an authority" to mediate between people's interests, or "the command of a sovereign" backed by the threat of punishment.
However one likes to think of law, it is a completely central social institution. Legal policy is shaped by the practical application of ideas from many social science and humanities disciplines, including philosophy, history, political science, economics, anthropology, and sociology. Law is politics, because politicians create them. Law is philosophy, because moral and ethical persuasions shape their ideas. Law tells many of history's stories, because statutes, case law and codifications build up over time. Law is also economics, because any rule about contract, tort, property law, labour law, company law and many more can have long-lasting effects on how productivity is organised and the distribution of wealth. The noun law derives from the Old English word lagu, meaning something laid down or fixed, and the adjective legal comes from the Latin word LEX.
Literature
Literature is a term that does not have a universally accepted definition, but which has variably included all written work; writing that possesses literary merit; and language that emphasizes its own literary features, as opposed to ordinary language. Etymologically the term derives from the Latin word literatura/litteratura which means "writing formed with letters", although some definitions include spoken or sung texts. Literature can be classified as fiction or non-fiction; poetry or prose. It can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short story or drama; and works are often categorised according to historical periods, or according to their adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations (genre).
Philosophy
Philosophy—etymologically, the "love of wisdom"—is generally the study of problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, justification, truth, justice, right and wrong, beauty, validity, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these issues by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned argument, rather than experiments (experimental philosophy being an exception).
Philosophy used to be a very comprehensive term, including what have subsequently become separate disciplines, such as physics. (As Immanuel Kant noted, "Ancient Greek philosophy was divided into three sciences: physics, ethics, and logic.") Today, the main fields of philosophy are logic, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Still, it continues to overlap with other disciplines. The field of semantics, for example, brings philosophy into contact with linguistics.
Since the early twentieth century, philosophy in English-speaking universities has moved away from the humanities and closer to the formal sciences, becoming much more analytic. Analytic philosophy is marked by emphasis on the use of logic and formal methods of reasoning, conceptual analysis, and the use of symbolic and/or mathematical logic, as contrasted with the Continental style of philosophy. This method of inquiry is largely indebted to the work of philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Religion
Religious Studies is commonly regarded as a social science. Based on current knowledge, it seems that all known cultures, both in the past and present, have some form of belief system or religious practice. While there may be isolated individuals or groups who do not practice any form of religion, it is not known if there has ever been a society that was entirely devoid of religious belief. The definition of religion is not universal, and different cultures may have different ideas about what constitutes religion. Religion may be characterized with a community since humans are social animals. Rituals are used to bound the community together. Social animals require rules. Ethics is a requirement of society, but not a requirement of religion. Shinto, Daoism, and other folk or natural religions do not have ethical codes. While some religions do include the concept of deities, others do not. Therefore, the supernatural does not necessarily require the existence of deities. Rather, it can be broadly defined as any phenomena that cannot be explained by science or reason. Magical thinking creates explanations not available for empirical verification. Stories or myths are narratives being both didactic and entertaining. They are necessary for understanding the human predicament. Some other possible characteristics of religion are pollutions and purification, the sacred and the profane, sacred texts, religious institutions and organizations, and sacrifice and prayer. Some of the major problems that religions confront, and attempts to answer are chaos, suffering, evil, and death.
The non-founder religions are Hinduism, Shinto, and native or folk religions. Founder religions are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Daoism, Mormonism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and the Baháʼí Faith. Religions must adapt and change through the generations because they must remain relevant to the adherents. When traditional religions fail to address new concerns, then new religions will emerge.
Performing arts
The performing arts differ from the visual arts in that the former uses the artist's own body, face, and presence as a medium, and the latter uses materials such as clay, metal, or paint, which can be molded or transformed to create some art object. Performing arts include acrobatics, busking, comedy, dance, film, magic, music, opera, juggling, marching arts, such as brass bands, and theatre.
Artists who participate in these arts in front of an audience are called performers, including actors, comedians, dancers, musicians, and singers. Performing arts are also supported by workers in related fields, such as songwriting and stagecraft. Performers often adapt their appearance, such as with costumes and stage makeup, etc. There is also a specialized form of fine art in which the artists perform their work live to an audience. This is called Performance art. Most performance art also involves some form of plastic art, perhaps in the creation of props. Dance was often referred to as a plastic art during the Modern dance era.
Musicology
Musicology as an academic discipline can take a number of different paths, including historical musicology, music literature, ethnomusicology and music theory. Undergraduate music majors generally take courses in all of these areas, while graduate students focus on a particular path. In the liberal arts tradition, musicology is also used to broaden skills of non-musicians by teaching skills, including concentration and listening.
Theatre
Theatre (or theater) (Greek "theatron", θέατρον) is the branch of the performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an audience using combinations of speech, gesture, music, dance, sound and spectacle — indeed any one or more elements of the other performing arts. In addition to the standard narrative dialogue style, theatre takes such forms as opera, ballet, mime, kabuki, classical Indian dance, Chinese opera, mummers' plays, and pantomime.
Dance
Dance (from Old French dancier, perhaps from Frankish) generally refers to human movement either used as a form of expression or presented in a social, spiritual or performance setting. Dance is also used to describe methods of non-verbal communication (see body language) between humans or animals (bee dance, mating dance), and motion in inanimate objects (the leaves danced in the wind). Choreography is the process of creating dances, and the people who create choreography are known as choreographers. Choreographers use movement, music, and other elements to create expressive and artistic dances. They may work alone or with other artists to create new works, and their work can be presented in a variety of settings, from small dance studios to large theaters.
Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic, artistic, and moral constraints and range from functional movement (such as Folk dance) to codified, virtuoso techniques such as ballet.
Visual art
History of visual arts
The great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the ancient civilizations, such as Ancient Japan, Greece and Rome, China, India, Greater Nepal, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica.
Ancient Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features (e.g., Zeus' thunderbolt).
The emphasis on spiritual and religious themes in Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages reflected the dominance of the church. However, in the Renaissance, a renewed focus on the physical world was reflected in art forms that depicted the human body and landscape in a more naturalistic and three-dimensional way.
Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour (meaning the plain colour of an object, such as basic red for a red robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about by light, shade and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that the local colour is often defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the cartoon). This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan.
Religious Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead. The physical and rational certainties depicted by the 19th-century Enlightenment were shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity by Einstein and of unseen psychology by Freud, but also by unprecedented technological development. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art.
Media types
Drawing
Drawing is a means of making a picture, using a wide variety of tools and techniques. It generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or moving a tool across a surface. Common tools are graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers. Digital tools that simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are: line drawing, hatching, crosshatching, random hatching, scribbling, stippling, and blending. A computer aided designer who excels in technical drawing is referred to as a draftsman or draughtsman.
Painting
Literally, painting is the practice of applying pigment suspended in a carrier (or medium) and a binding agent (a glue) to a surface (support) such as paper, canvas or a wall. However, when used in an artistic sense, it means the use of this activity in combination with drawing, composition and other aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Painting has been used throughout history to express spiritual and religious ideas, from mythological scenes on pottery to the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, to body art.
Colour is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but elsewhere white may be. Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, Isaac Newton, have written their own colour theories. Moreover, the use of language is only a generalization for a colour equivalent. The word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations on the pure red of the spectrum. Unlike music, where notes such as C or C# are universally accepted, there is no formalized register of colors. However, the Pantone system is widely used in the printing and design industry to standardize color reproduction.
Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, for example, collage. This began with cubism and is not painting in strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of these are the works of Jean Dubuffet or Anselm Kiefer. Modern and contemporary art has moved away from the historic value of craft in favour of concept (conceptual art); this has led some e.g. Joseph Kosuth to say that painting, as a serious art form, is dead, although this has not deterred the majority of artists from continuing to practise it either as whole or part of their work.
Sculpture involves creating three-dimensional forms out of various materials. These typically include malleable substances like clay and metal but may also extend to material that is cut or shaved down to the desired form, like stone and wood.
History
In the West, the history of the humanities can be traced to ancient Greece, as the basis of a broad education for citizens. During Roman times, the concept of the seven liberal arts evolved, involving grammar, rhetoric and logic (the trivium), along with arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (the quadrivium). These subjects formed the bulk of medieval education, with the emphasis being on the humanities as skills or "ways of doing".
A major shift occurred with the Renaissance humanism of the fifteenth century, when the humanities began to be regarded as subjects to study rather than practice, with a corresponding shift away from traditional fields into areas such as literature and history (studia humaniora). In the 20th century, this view was in turn challenged by the postmodernist movement, which sought to redefine the humanities in more egalitarian terms suitable for a democratic society since the Greek and Roman societies in which the humanities originated were elitist and aristocratic.
A distinction is usually drawn between the social sciences and the humanities. Classicist Allan Bloom writes in The Closing of the American Mind (1987):
Today
Education and employment
For many decades, there has been a growing public perception that a humanities education inadequately prepares graduates for employment. The common belief is that graduates from such programs face underemployment and incomes too low for a humanities education to be worth the investment.
Humanities graduates find employment in a wide variety of management and professional occupations. In Britain, for example, over 11,000 humanities majors found employment in the following occupations:
Education (25.8%)
Management (19.8%)
Media/Literature/Arts (11.4%)
Law (11.3%)
Finance (10.4%)
Civil service (5.8%)
Not-for-profit (5.2%)
Marketing (2.3%)
Medicine (1.7%)
Other (6.4%)
Many humanities graduates may find themselves with no specific career goals upon graduation, which can lead to lower incomes in the early stages of their career. On the other hand, graduates from more career-oriented programs often find jobs more quickly. However, the long-term career prospects of humanities graduates may be similar to those of other graduates, as research shows that by five years after graduation, they generally find a career path that appeals to them.
There is empirical evidence that graduates from humanities programs earn less than graduates from other university programs. However, the empirical evidence also shows that humanities graduates still earn notably higher incomes than workers with no postsecondary education, and have job satisfaction levels comparable to their peers from other fields. Humanities graduates also earn more as their careers progress; ten years after graduation, the income difference between humanities graduates and graduates from other university programs is no longer statistically significant. Humanities graduates can boost their incomes if they obtain advanced or professional degrees.
Humanities majors are sought after in many areas of business, specifically for their critical thinking and problem solving skills. While often considered "soft skills", Humanities majors gain skills such as, "include persuasive written and oral communication, creative problem-solving, teamwork, decision-making, self-management, and critical analysis".
In the United States
The Humanities Indicators
The Humanities Indicators, unveiled in 2009 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, are the first comprehensive compilation of data about the humanities in the United States, providing scholars, policymakers and the public with detailed information on humanities education from primary to higher education, the humanities workforce, humanities funding and research, and public humanities activities. Modeled after the National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators, Humanities Indicators are a source of reliable benchmarks to guide analysis of the state of the humanities in the United States.
The Humanities in American Life
The 1980 United States Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities described the humanities in its report, The Humanities in American Life:
Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world where irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason.
In liberal arts education
The Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences 2013 report, The Heart of the Matter, supports the notion of a broad "liberal arts education", which includes study in disciplines from the natural sciences to the arts as well as the humanities.
Many colleges provide such an education; some require it. The University of Chicago and Columbia University were among the first schools to require an extensive core curriculum in philosophy, literature, and the arts for all students. Other colleges with nationally recognized, mandatory programs in the liberal arts are Fordham University, St. John's College, Saint Anselm College and Providence College. Prominent proponents of liberal arts in the United States have included Mortimer J. Adler and E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
As a major
In 1950, 1.2% of Americans aged 22 had earned a degree in the humanities. By 2010, this figure had risen to 2.6%. This represents a doubling of the number of Americans with degrees in the humanities over a 60-year period. The increase in the number of Americans with humanities degrees is in part due to the overall rise in college enrollment in the United States. In 1940, 4.6% of Americans had a four-year degree, but by 2016, this figure had risen to 33.4%. This means that the total number of Americans with college degrees has increased significantly, resulting in a greater number of people with degrees in the humanities as well. The proportion of degrees awarded in the humanities has declined in recent decades, even as the overall number of people with humanities degrees has increased. In 1954, 36 percent of Harvard undergraduates majored in the humanities, but in 2012, only 20 percent took that course of study. As recently as 1993, the humanities accounted for 15% of the bachelor's degrees awarded by colleges and universities in the United States. As of 2022, they accounted for less than 9%.
In the digital age
Researchers in the humanities have developed numerous large- and small-scale digital corporations, such as digitized collections of historical texts, along with the digital tools and methods to analyze them. Their aim is both to uncover new knowledge about corpora and to visualize research data in new and revealing ways. Much of this activity occurs in a field called the digital humanities.
STEM
Politicians in the United States currently espouse a need for increased funding of the STEM fields, science, technology, engineering, mathematics. Federal funding represents a much smaller fraction of funding for humanities than other fields such as STEM or medicine. The result was a decline of quality in both college and pre-college education in the humanities field.
Three-term Louisiana Governor, Edwin Edwards acknowledged the importance of the humanities in a 2014 video address to the academic conference, Revolutions in Eighteenth-Century Sociability. Edwards said:
Without the humanities to teach us how history has succeeded or failed in directing the fruits of technology and science to the betterment of our tribe of homo sapiens, without the humanities to teach us how to frame the discussion and to properly debate the uses-and the costs-of technology, without the humanities to teach us how to safely debate how to create a more just society with our fellow man and woman, technology and science would eventually default to the ownership of—and misuse by—the most influential, the most powerful, the most feared among us.
In Europe
The value of the humanities debate
The contemporary debate in the field of critical university studies centers around the declining value of the humanities. As in America, there is a perceived decline in interest within higher education policy in research that is qualitative and does not produce marketable products. This threat can be seen in a variety of forms across Europe, but much critical attention has been given to the field of research assessment in particular. For example, the UK [Research Excellence Framework] has been subject to criticism due to its assessment criteria from across the humanities, and indeed, the social sciences. In particular, the notion of "impact" has generated significant debate.
Philosophical history
Citizenship and self-reflection
Since the late 19th century, a central justification for the humanities has been that it aids and encourages self-reflection—a self-reflection that, in turn, helps develop personal consciousness or an active sense of civic duty.
Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer centered the humanities' attempt to distinguish itself from the natural sciences in humankind's urge to understand its own experiences. This understanding, they claimed, ties like-minded people from similar cultural backgrounds together and provides a sense of cultural continuity with the philosophical past.
Scholars in the late 20th and early 21st centuries extended that "narrative imagination" to the ability to understand the records of lived experiences outside of one's own individual social and cultural context. Through that narrative imagination, it is claimed, humanities scholars and students develop a conscience more suited to the multicultural world we live in. That conscience might take the form of a passive one that allows more effective self-reflection or extend into active empathy that facilitates the dispensation of civic duties a responsible world citizen must engage in. There is disagreement, however, on the level of influence humanities study can have on an individual and whether or not the understanding produced in humanistic enterprise can guarantee an "identifiable positive effect on people".
Humanistic theories and practices
There are three major branches of knowledge: natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Technology is the practical extension of the natural sciences, as politics is the extension of the social sciences. Similarly, the humanities have their own practical extension, sometimes called "transformative humanities" (transhumanities) or "culturonics" (Mikhail Epstein's term):
Nature – natural sciences – technology – transformation of nature
Society – social sciences – politics – transformation of society
Culture – human sciences – culturonics – transformation of culture
Technology, politics and culturonics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study: nature, society, and culture. The field of transformative humanities includes various practicies and technologies, for example, language planning, the construction of new languages, like Esperanto, and invention of new artistic and literary genres and movements in the genre of manifesto, like Romanticism, Symbolism, or Surrealism.
Truth and meaning
The divide between humanistic study and natural sciences informs arguments of meaning in humanities as well. What distinguishes the humanities from the natural sciences is not a certain subject matter, but rather the mode of approach to any question. Humanities focuses on understanding meaning, purpose, and goals and furthers the appreciation of singular historical and social phenomena—an interpretive method of finding "truth"—rather than explaining the causality of events or uncovering the truth of the natural world. Apart from its societal application, narrative imagination is an important tool in the (re)production of understood meaning in history, culture and literature.
Imagination, as part of the tool kit of artists or scholars, helps create meaning that invokes a response from an audience. Since a humanities scholar is always within the nexus of lived experiences, no "absolute" knowledge is theoretically possible; knowledge is instead a ceaseless procedure of inventing and reinventing the context a text is read in. Poststructuralism has problematized an approach to the humanistic study based on questions of meaning, intentionality, and authorship. In the wake of the death of the author proclaimed by Roland Barthes, various theoretical currents such as deconstruction and discourse analysis seek to expose the ideologies and rhetoric operative in producing both the purportedly meaningful objects and the hermeneutic subjects of humanistic study. This exposure has opened up the interpretive structures of the humanities to criticism that humanities scholarship is "unscientific" and therefore unfit for inclusion in modern university curricula because of the very nature of its changing contextual meaning.
Pleasure, the pursuit of knowledge and scholarship
Some, like Stanley Fish, have claimed that the humanities can defend themselves best by refusing to make any claims of utility. (Fish may well be thinking primarily of literary study, rather than history and philosophy.) Any attempt to justify the humanities in terms of outside benefits such as social usefulness (say increased productivity) or in terms of ennobling effects on the individual (such as greater wisdom or diminished prejudice) is ungrounded, according to Fish, and simply places impossible demands on the relevant academic departments. Furthermore, critical thinking, while arguably a result of humanistic training, can be acquired in other contexts. And the humanities do not even provide any more the kind of social cachet (what sociologists sometimes call "cultural capital") that was helpful to succeed in Western society before the age of mass education following World War II.
Instead, scholars like Fish suggest that the humanities offer a unique kind of pleasure, a pleasure based on the common pursuit of knowledge (even if it is only disciplinary knowledge). Such pleasure contrasts with the increasing privatization of leisure and instant gratification characteristic of Western culture; it thus meets Jürgen Habermas' requirements for the disregard of social status and rational problematization of previously unquestioned areas necessary for an endeavor which takes place in the bourgeois public sphere. In this argument, then, only the academic pursuit of pleasure can provide a link between the private and the public realm in modern Western consumer society and strengthen that public sphere that, according to many theorists, is the foundation for modern democracy.
Others, like Mark Bauerlein, argue that professors in the humanities have increasingly abandoned proven methods of epistemology (I care only about the quality of your arguments, not your conclusions.) in favor of indoctrination (I care only about your conclusions, not the quality of your arguments.). The result is that professors and their students adhere rigidly to a limited set of viewpoints, and have little interest in, or understanding of, opposing viewpoints. Once they obtain this intellectual self-satisfaction, persistent lapses in learning, research, and evaluation are common.
Romanticization and rejection
Implicit in many of these arguments supporting the humanities are the makings of arguments against public support of the humanities. Joseph Carroll asserts that we live in a changing world, a world where "cultural capital" is replaced with scientific literacy, and in which the romantic notion of a Renaissance humanities scholar is obsolete. Such arguments appeal to judgments and anxieties about the essential uselessness of the humanities, especially in an age when it is seemingly vitally important for scholars of literature, history and the arts to engage in "collaborative work with experimental scientists or even simply to make "intelligent use of the findings from empirical science."
Despite many humanities based arguments against the humanities some within the exact sciences have called for their return. In 2017, Science popularizer Bill Nye retracted previous claims about the supposed 'uselessness' of philosophy. As Bill Nye states, "People allude to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle all the time, and I think many of us who make those references don't have a solid grounding," he said. "It's good to know the history of philosophy." Scholars, such as biologist Scott F. Gilbert, make the claim that it is in fact the increasing predominance, leading to exclusivity, of scientific ways of thinking that need to be tempered by historical and social context. Gilbert worries that the commercialization that may be inherent in some ways of conceiving science (pursuit of funding, academic prestige etc.) need to be examined externally. Gilbert argues:
See also
Art school
Discourse analysis
Outline of the humanities (humanities topics)
Great Books
Great Books programs in Canada
Liberal arts
Social sciences
Humanities, arts, and social sciences
Human science
The Two Cultures
List of academic disciplines
Public humanities
STEAM fields
Tinbergen's four questions
Environmental humanities
References
External links
Society for the History of the Humanities
Institute for Comparative Research in Human and Social Sciences (ICR) – Japan (archived 15 April 2016)
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences – US
Humanities Indicators – US
National Humanities Center – US (archived 7 July 2007)
The Humanities Association – UK
National Humanities Alliance
National Endowment for the Humanities – US
Australian Academy of the Humanities
National
American Academy Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences
"Games and Historical Narratives" by Jeremy Antley – Journal of Digital Humanities
Film about the Value of the Humanities
Humans
Main topic articles
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Gaianism | Gaianism is an earth-centered philosophical, holistic, and spiritual belief that shares expressions with earth religions and paganism while not identifying exclusively with any specific one. The term describes a philosophy and ethical worldview which, though not necessarily religious, implies a transpersonal devotion to earth as a superorganism. Practitioners of Gaianism are called Gaians (or Gaianists).
Marcel Wissenburg has described Gaianism as a "modern variant of philosophical determinism". Gaianism has been associated with the New Age movement due to sharing similar viewpoints, but is not typically identified as strictly part of the New Age movement as a whole.
Gaianism's philosophy stems from James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which proposes that organisms interact with their surroundings on Earth to form a more complex and self-regulating system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. Gaia can be understood as a superorganism made of organisms, as multicellular life can be understood as a superorganism at a smaller level of scale.
Practitioners of Gaianism are termed "Gaians", or sometimes "Gaianists". Followers typically approach the philosophy with the perspective that people should honor the Earth, reduce or soften their human impact on the earth, and respect all life on earth. The latter perspective is extended to all forms of life such as plant, animal, or human, and followers will often try to maintain a close relationship with the planet in order to strive toward world peace, maintain global homeostasis and find inner fulfillment. Gaians will occasionally follow Gaianism along with other religions, but for many Gaianism is not necessarily religious.
An example of Gaian philosophy is the Gaian Oath, envisioned by Lucian Tarnowski, founder of the United Planet:
We are a United Planet
I am Gaian
On my honour, I commit to a thriving civilisation in harmony with all life.Although Gaianism is an Earth-centered belief system, it does not always align with environmental goals. For instance, the chief scientific originator of Gaianism, James Lovelock, advocated a vast expansion of nuclear energy power plants on Earth, the colonization of other planets, and a tolerance of various earthly chemical pollutants.
See also
Anima Mundi
Gaia philosophy
References
Gaia
New Age
New religious movements
Words and phrases derived from Greek mythology | 0.787137 | 0.981146 | 0.772296 |
Theory of basic human values | The theory of basic human values is a theory of cross-cultural psychology and universal values that was developed by Shalom H. Schwartz. The theory extends previous cross-cultural communication frameworks such as Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory. Schwartz identifies ten basic human values, each distinguished by their underlying motivation or goal, and he explains how people in all cultures recognize them. There are two major methods for measuring these ten basic values: the Schwartz Value Survey and the Portrait Values Questionnaire.
A particular value can conflict or align with other values, and these dynamic relationships are typically illustrated using a circular graphic in which opposite poles indicate conflicting values.
In a 2012 article, Schwartz and colleagues refined the theory of basic values with an extended set of 19 individual values that serve as "guiding principles in the life of a person or group".
Motivational types of values
The theory of basic human values recognizes eleven universal values, which can be organized in four higher-order groups. Each of the eleven universal values has a central goal that is the underlying motivator.
Openness to change
Self-directionindependent thought and action—choosing, creating, exploring
Stimulationexcitement, novelty and challenge in life
Self-enhancement
Hedonismpleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself
Achievementpersonal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards
Powersocial status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources
Conservation
Securitysafety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self
Conformityrestraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms
Traditionrespect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that one's culture or religion provides
Self-transcendence
Benevolencepreserving and enhancing the welfare of those with whom one is in frequent personal contact (the 'in-group')
Universalismunderstanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature
Other
Spirituality was considered as an additional eleventh value, however, it was found that it did not exist in all cultures.
The structure of value relations
In addition to identifying the ten basic values, the theory also explains how these ten values are interconnected and influence each other, since the pursuit of any of the values results in either an accordance with one another (conformity and security) or a conflict with at least one other value (benevolence and power). Tradition and conformity share particularly similar motivational goals and consequently are consolidated in the same wedge. Values can lightly or more strongly oppose each other, which has led to the organization of the values in a circular structure along two bipolar dimensions. The first dimension is openness to change versus conservation, which contrasts independence and obedience. The second bipolar dimension is self-enhancement versus self-transcendence and is concerned on the one side with the interests of one-self and on the other side of the welfare of others.
Although the theory distinguishes ten values, the borders between the motivators are artificial and one value flows into the next, which can be seen by the following shared motivational emphases:
Power and Achievementsocial superiority and esteem
Achievement and Hedonismself-centered satisfaction
Hedonism and Stimulationa desire for affectively pleasant arousal
Stimulation and Self-directionintrinsic interest in novelty and mastery
Self-direction and Universalismreliance upon one's own judgement and comfort with the diversity of existence
Universalism and Benevolenceenhancement of others and transcendence of selfish interests
Benevolence and Traditiondevotion to one's in-group
Benevolence and Conformitynormative behaviour that promotes close relationships
Conformity and Traditionsubordination of self in favour of socially imposed expectations
Tradition and Securitypreserving existing social arrangements that give certainty to life
Conformity and Securityprotection of order and harmony in relations
Security and Poweravoiding or overcoming threats by controlling relationships and resources
Furthermore, people are still able to follow opposing values through acting differently in different settings or at different times. The structure of Schwartz's 10-value type model (see graph above) has been supported across over 80 countries, gender, various methods such as importance ratings of values (using the surveys listed below), direct similarity judgment tasks, pile sorting, and spatial arrangement, and even for how the values of other people, such as family members, are perceived.
Measurement methods
Several models have been developed to measure the basic values to ensure that the values theory is valid independent of the methodology employed. The main differentiator between the Schwartz Value Survey and the Portrait Values Questionnaire is that the former is explicit, while the latter is implicit.
Schwartz Value Survey
The Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) reports values of participants explicitly, by asking them to conduct a self-assessment. The survey entails 57 questions with two lists of value items. The first list consist of 30 nouns, while the second list contains 26 or 27 items in an adjective form. Each item is followed by a brief description for clarification. Out of the 57 questions 45 are used to compute the 10 different value types, of which the number of items to measure a certain value varies according to the conceptual breath. The remaining 12 items are used to allow better standardisation in calculation of an individual's value. The importance of each of value item is measured on a non-symmetrical scale in order to encourage the respondents to think about each of the questions.
7 (supreme importance)
6 (very important)
5, 4 (unlabelled)
3 (important)
2, 1 (unlabelled)
0 (not important)
−1 (opposed to my values)
The survey has been conducted so far on more than 60,000 individuals in 64 nations.
Portrait Values Questionnaire
The Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ) has been developed as an alternative to the SVS. The PVQ has been created primarily for children from 11–14, however, it has also shown to produce coherent results when given to adults. In comparison to the SVS the PVQ relies on indirect reporting. Hereby, the respondent is asked to compare himself/herself (gender-matched) with short verbal portraits of 40 different people. After each portrait the responded has to state how similar he or she is to the portrait person ranging from "very much like me" to "not like me at all". This way of research allows to how the individual actually acts rather than research what values are important to an individual. Similar to the SVS the portraits for each value varies according to the conceptual breath.
Ordering and group differences
The order of Schwartz's traits are substantially stable amongst adults over time. Migrants values change when they move to a new country, but the order of preferences is still quite stable. Motherhood causes women to shift their values towards stability and away from openness-to-change, but not fathers.
Men are found to value achievement, self-direction, hedonism, and stimulation more than women, while women value benevolence, universality and tradition higher.
Relationship to personality
Personality traits using the big 5 measure correlate with Schwartz's value construct. Openness and extraversion correlates with the values related to openness-to-change (openness especially with self-direction, extraversion especially with stimulation); agreeableness correlates with self-transcendence values (especially benevolence); extraversion is correlated with self-enhancement and negatively with traditional values. Conscientiousness correlates with achievement, conformity and security.
Limitations
One of the main limitations of this theory lies in the methodology of the research. The SVS is quite difficult to answer, because respondents have to first read the set of 30 value items and give one value the highest as well as the lowest ranking (0 or −1, depending on whether an item is opposed to their values). Hence, completing one questionnaire takes approximately 12 minutes resulting in a significant amount of only half-filled in forms.
Furthermore, many respondents have a tendency to give the majority of the values a high score, resulting in a skewed responses to the upper end. However, this issue can be mitigated by providing respondents with an additional filter to evaluate the items they marked with high scores. When administering the Schwartz Value Survey in a coaching setting, respondents are coached to distinguish between a "must-have" value and a "meaningful" value. A "must-have" value is a value you have acted on or thought about in the previous 24 hours (this value item would receive a score of 6 or 7 on the Schwartz scale). A "meaningful" value is something you have acted on or thought about recently, but not in the previous 24 hours (this value item would receive a score of 5 or less).
Another methodological limitations are the resulting ordinal, ipsatised scores that limit the type of useful analyses researchers can perform.
Practical applications
Recent studies advocate that values can influence the audience's reaction to advertising appeals. Moreover, in the case that a choice and a value are intervened, people tend to pick the choice that aligns more with their own values. Therefore, models such as the theory of basic human values could be seen as increasingly important for international marketing campaigns, as they can help to understand values and how values vary between cultures. This becomes especially true as it has been shown that values are one of the most powerful explanations of consumer behaviour. Understanding the different values and underlying defining goals can also help organisations to better motivate staff in an increasingly international workforce and create an according organizational structure.
Schwartz's work—and that of Geert Hofstede—has been applied to economics research. Specifically, the performance of the economies as it relates to entrepreneurship and business (firm) creation. This has significant implications to economic growth and might help explain why some countries are lagging behind others when labor, natural resources, and governing institutions are equal. This is a relatively new field of study in economics, however the recent empirical results suggest that culture plays a significant role in the success of entrepreneurial efforts across countries—even ones with largely similar governmental structures. Francisco Liñán and José Fernandez-Serrano found that these cultural attributes accounted for 60% of the difference in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) variance per capita in countries within the European Union (EU).
See also
Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world
Moral foundations theory
Rokeach Value Survey
Self-expression values
World Values Survey
References
Axiological theories
Cross-cultural psychology
Interculturalism | 0.777676 | 0.992998 | 0.772231 |
Religion in Europe | Religion has been a major influence on the societies, cultures, traditions, philosophies, artistic expressions and laws within present-day Europe. The largest religion in Europe is Christianity. However, irreligion and practical secularisation are also prominent in some countries. In Southeastern Europe, three countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Albania) have Muslim majorities, with Christianity being the second-largest religion in those countries. Ancient European religions included veneration for deities such as Zeus. Modern revival movements of these religions include Heathenism, Rodnovery, Romuva, Druidry, Wicca, and others. Smaller religions include Indian religions, Judaism, and some East Asian religions, which are found in their largest groups in Britain, France, and Kalmykia.
Little is known about the prehistoric religion of Neolithic Europe. Bronze and Iron Age religion in Europe as elsewhere was predominantly polytheistic (Ancient Greek religion, Ancient Roman religion, Basque mythology, Finnish paganism, Celtic polytheism, Germanic paganism, etc.).
The Roman Empire officially adopted Christianity in AD 380. During the Early Middle Ages, most of Europe underwent Christianization, a process essentially complete with the Christianization of Scandinavia in the High Middle Ages. The notion of "Europe" and the "Western World" has been intimately connected with the concept of "Christendom", and many even consider Christianity as the unifying belief that created a European identity, especially since Christianity in the Middle East was marginalized by the rise of Islam from the 8th century. This confrontation led to the Crusades, which ultimately failed militarily, but were an important step in the emergence of a European identity based on religion. Despite this, traditions of folk religion continued at all times, largely independent from institutional religion or dogmatic theology.
The Great Schism of the 11th century and Reformation of the 16th century tore apart Christendom into hostile factions, and following the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, atheism and agnosticism have spread across Europe. Nineteenth-century Orientalism contributed to a certain popularity of Hinduism and Buddhism, and the 20th century brought increasing syncretism, New Age, and various new religious movements divorcing spirituality from inherited traditions for many Europeans. Recent times have seen increased secularisation and religious pluralism.
Religiosity
Some European countries have experienced a decline in church membership and church attendance. A relevant example of this trend is Sweden where the Church of Sweden, previously the state-church until 2000, claimed to have 82.9% of the Swedish population as its flock in 2000. Surveys showed this had dropped to 72.9% by 2008 and to 56.4% by 2019. Moreover, in the 2005 Eurobarometer survey 23% of the Swedish population said that they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force and in the 2010 Eurobarometer survey 34% said the same.
Gallup survey 2008–2009
During 2008–2009, a Gallup survey asked in several countries the question "Is religion important in your daily life?" The table and map below shows percentage of people who answered "Yes" to the question.
During 2007–2008, a Gallup poll asked in several countries the question "Does religion occupy an important place in your life?" The table on right shows percentage of people who answered "No".
Eurobarometer survey 2010
The 2010 Eurobarometer survey found that, on average, 51% of the citizens of the EU member states state that they "believe there is a God", 26% "believe there is some sort of spirit or life force" while 20% "don't believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force". 3% declined to answer.
According to a recent study (Dogan, Mattei, Religious Beliefs in Europe: Factors of Accelerated Decline), 47% of French people declared themselves as agnostics in 2003. This situation is often called "Post-Christian Europe". A decrease in religiousness and church attendance in Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, and Sweden has been noted, despite a concurrent increase in some countries like Greece (2% in 1 year). The Eurobarometer survey must be taken with caution, however, as there are discrepancies between it and national census results. For example, in the United Kingdom, the 2001 census revealed over 70% of the population regarded themselves as "Christian" with only 15% professing to have "no religion", though the wording of the question has been criticized as "leading" by the British Humanist Association. Romania, one of the most religious countries in Europe, witnessed a threefold increase in the number of atheists between 2002 and 2011, as revealed by the most recent national census.
The following is a list of European countries ranked by religiosity, based on the rate of belief, according to the Eurobarometer survey 2010. The 2010 Eurobarometer survey asked whether the person "believes there is a God", "believes there is some sort of spirit or life force", or "doesn't believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force".
The decrease in theism is illustrated in the 1981 and 1999 according to the World Values Survey, both for traditionally strongly theist countries (Spain: 86.8%:81.1%; Ireland 94.8%:93.7%) and for traditionally secular countries (Sweden: 51.9%:46.6%; France 61.8%:56.1%; Netherlands 65.3%:58.0%). Some countries nevertheless show increase of theism over the period, Italy 84.1%:87.8%, Denmark 57.8%:62.1%. For a comprehensive study on Europe, see Mattei Dogan's "Religious Beliefs in Europe: Factors of Accelerated Decline" in Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion.
Eurobarometer survey 2019
According to the 2019 Eurobarometer survey about Religiosity in the European Union Christianity is the largest religion in the European Union accounting 64% of the EU population, down from 72% in 2012. Catholics are the largest Christian group in EU, accounting for 41% of EU population, while Eastern Orthodox make up 10%, and Protestants make up 9%, and other Christians account for 4% of the EU population. Non believer/Agnostic account 17%, Atheist 10%, and Muslim 2% of the EU population. 3% refuse to answer or didn't know.
Maps
Pew Research Poll
According to the 2012 Global Religious Landscape survey by the Pew Research Center, 75.2% of the Europe residents are Christians, 18.2% are irreligious, atheist or agnostic, 5.9% are Muslims and 0.2% are Jews, 0.2% are Hindus, 0.2% are Buddhist, and 0.1% adhere to other religions. According to the 2015 Religious Belief and National Belonging in Central and Eastern Europe survey by the Pew Research Center, 57.9% of the Central and Eastern Europeans identified as Orthodox Christians, and according to a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center, 71.0% of Western Europeans identified as Christians, 24.0% identified as religiously unaffiliated and 5% identified as adhere to other religions. According to the same study a large majority (83%) of those who were raised as Christians in Western Europe still identify as such, and the remainder mostly self-identify as religiously unaffiliated.
Pew Research Poll
(*) 13% of respondents in Hungary identify as Presbyterian. In Estonia and Latvia, 20%
and 19%, respectively, identify as Lutherans. And in Lithuania, 14% say they are "just a
Christian" and do not specify a particular denomination. They are included in the "other"
category.
(**) Identified as "don't know/refused" from the "other/idk/ref" column are excluded from this statistic.
(***) Figures may not add to subtotals due to rounding.
(**) Identified with answers "don't know/refused" are not shown.
Abrahamic religions
Bahá'í Faith
The first newspaper reference to the religious movement began with coverage of the Báb, whom Bahá'ís consider the forerunner of the Bahá'í Faith, which occurred in The Times on 1 November 1845, only a little over a year after the Báb first started his mission. British, Russian, and other diplomats, businessmen, scholars, and world travelers also took note of the precursor Bábí religion most notably in 1865 by Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau who wrote the first and most influential account. In April 1890 Edward G. Browne of Cambridge University met Bahá'u'lláh, the prophet-founder of the Bahá'í Faith, and left the only detailed description by a Westerner.
Starting in the 1890s Europeans began to convert to the religion. In 1910 Bahá'u'lláh's son and appointed successor, 'Abdu'l-Bahá embarked on a three-year journey to including Europe and North America and then wrote a series of letters that were compiled together in the book titled Tablets of the Divine Plan which included mention of the need to spread the religion in Europe following the war.
A 1925 list of "leading local Bahá'í Centres" of Europe listed organized communities of many countries – the largest being in Germany. However the religion was soon banned in a couple of countries: in 1937 Heinrich Himmler disbanded the Bahá'í Faith's institutions in Germany because of its 'international and pacifist tendencies' and in Russia in 1938 "monstrous accusations" against Bahá'ís and a Soviet government policy of oppression of religion resulted in Bahá'í communities in 38 cities across Soviet territories ceasing to exist. However the religion recovered in both countries. The religion has generally spread such that in recent years the Association of Religion Data Archives estimated the Bahá'ís in European countries to number in hundreds to tens of thousands.
Christianity
The majority of Europeans describe themselves as Christians, divided into a large number of denominations. Christian denominations are usually classed in three categories: Catholicism (consider only two groups, the Roman-Latin Catholic and the Eastern Greek and Armenian Catholics), Orthodoxy (consider only two groups, the Eastern Byzantine Orthodox and the Armenian Apostolic which is within the Oriental Orthodox Church) and Protestantism (a diverse group including Lutheranism, Calvinism and Anglicanism as well as numerous minor denominations, including Baptists, Methodism, Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, etc.).
Christianity, more specifically the Catholic Church, which played an important part in the shaping of Western civilization since at least the 4th century. Historically, Europe has been the center and "cradle of Christian civilization".
European culture, throughout most of its recent history, has been heavily influenced by Christian belief and has been nearly equivalent to Christian culture. The Christian culture was one of the more dominant forces to influence Western civilization, concerning the course of philosophy, art, music, science, social structure and architecture. The civilizing influence of Christianity includes social welfare, founding hospitals, economics (as the Protestant work ethic), politics, architecture, literature and family life.
Christianity is still the largest religion in Europe. According to a survey about Religiosity in the European Union in 2019 by Eurobarometer, Christianity was the largest religion in the European Union accounting 64% of EU population, down from 72% in 2012. Catholics were the largest Christian group in EU, and accounted for 41% of the EU population, while Eastern Orthodox made up 10%, Protestants made up 9%, and other Christians 4%. According to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center, 76.2% of the European population identified themselves as Christians, constitute in absolute terms the world's largest Christian population.
According to Scholars, in 2017, Europe's population was 77.8% Christian (up from 74.9% 1970), these changes were largely result of the collapse of Communism and switching to Christianity in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries.
Christian denominations
Catholicism (majorly followed to the Roman–Latin Catholic Church with various minorities of the few Greek Catholic Churches in the Eastern European regions, and the Armenian Catholic Church in Armenia and its diaspora) is the largest denomination with adherents mostly existing in Latin Europe (which includes France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Malta, San Marino, Monaco, Vatican City,); southern [Wallon] Belgium, Czech Republic, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, western Ukraine, parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Mostly in predominantly Croat areas), but also the southern parts of Germanic Europe (which includes Austria, Luxembourg, northern Flemish Belgium, southern and western Germany, parts of the Netherlands, parts of Switzerland, and Liechtenstein).
Orthodox Christianity (the churches are in full communion, i.e. the national churches are united in theological concept and part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Eastern Orthodox Church)
Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople
Russian Orthodox Church
Serbian Orthodox Church
Romanian Orthodox Church
Church of Greece
Bulgarian Orthodox Church
Georgian Orthodox Church
Finnish Orthodox Church
Cypriot Orthodox Church
Albanian Orthodox Church
Polish Orthodox Church
Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia
Ukrainian Orthodox Church
Turkish Orthodox Church
Macedonian Orthodox Church – Ohrid Archbishopric
Montenegrin Orthodox Church
Oriental Orthodoxy
Armenian Apostolic Church
Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople
Protestantism
Lutheranism
Independent Evangelical-Lutheran Church
Danish National Church
Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church
Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland
United Protestant Church of France
Protestant Church in Germany
Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Hungary
Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia
Church of Norway
Church of Sweden
Anglicanism
Church of England
Church of Ireland
Scottish Episcopal Church
Church in Wales
Lusitanian Catholic Apostolic Evangelical Church
Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church
Calvinism
United Reformed Church
Evangelical Presbyterian Church in England and Wales
Reformed Church in Hungary
Church of Scotland
Presbyterian Church in Ireland
Methodist Church of Great Britain
Protestant Church in the Netherlands (Neo-Calvinism)
United Protestant Church of France
Swiss Reformed Church
Restorationism
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Jehovah's Witnesses
Other
Baptist Union of Great Britain
Baptist Union of Sweden
Bruderhof Communities
Seventh-day Adventist Church
There are numerous minor Protestant movements, including various Evangelical congregations.
Islam
Islam came to parts of European islands and coasts on the Mediterranean Sea during the 8th-century Muslim conquests. In the Iberian Peninsula and parts of southern France, various Muslim states existed before the Reconquista; Islam spread in southern Italy briefly through the Emirate of Sicily and Emirate of Bari. During the Ottoman expansion, Islam was spread from into the Balkans and even part of Central Europe. Muslims have also been historically present in Ukraine (Crimea and vicinity, with the Crimean Tatars), as well as modern-day Russia, beginning with Volga Bulgaria in the 10th century and the conversion of the Golden Horde to Islam. In recent years, Muslims have migrated to Europe as residents and temporary workers.
According to the Pew Forum, the total number of Muslims in Europe in 2010 was about 44 million (6%). While the total number of Muslims in the European Union in 2007 was about 16 million (3.2%). Data from the 2000s for the rates of growth of Islam in Europe showed that the growing number of Muslims was due primarily to immigration and higher birth rates.
Muslims make up 99% of the population in Turkey, Northern Cyprus, 96% in Kosovo, 56% in Albania, 51% in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 32.17% in North Macedonia, 20% in Montenegro, between 10 and 15% in Russia, 7–9% in France, 8% in Bulgaria, 6% in the Netherlands, 5% in Denmark, United Kingdom and Germany, just over 4% in Switzerland and Austria, and between 3 and 4% in Greece.
A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2016 found that Muslims make up 4.9% of all of Europe's population. According to a same study conversion does not add significantly to the growth of the Muslim population in Europe, with roughly 160,000 more people leaving Islam than converting into Islam between 2010 and 2016.
Judaism
The Jews were dispersed within the Roman Empire from the 2nd century. At one time Judaism was practiced widely throughout the European continent; throughout the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of ritual murder and faced pogroms and legal discrimination. The Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany decimated the Jewish population, and today, France is home to the largest Jewish community in Europe with 1% of the total population (between 483,000 and 500,000 Jews). Other European countries with notable Jewish populations include the United Kingdom (291,000 Jews), Germany (119,000), and Russia (194,000) which is home to Eastern Europe's largest Jewish community. The Jewish population of Europe in 2010 was estimated to be approximately 1.4 million (0.2% of European population) or 10% of the world's Jewish population.
Deism
During the Enlightenment, Deism became influential especially in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Interpretations of the Bible then common were challenged by concepts such as a heliocentric universe and other scientific concepts posited to be challenges to the Bible. Notable early deists include Voltaire, Kant, and Mendeleev.
Irreligion
The trend towards secularism during the 20th and 21st centuries has a number of reasons, depending on the individual country:
France has been traditionally laicist since the French Revolution. Today the country is 25% to 32% irreligious. The remaining population is made up evenly of both Christians and people who believe in a god or some form of spiritual life force, but are not involved in organized religion. French society is still secular overall.
Some parts of Eastern Europe were secularized as a matter of state doctrine under communist rule in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Albania was an officially (and constitutionally binding) atheist state from 1967 to 1991. The countries where the most people reported no religious belief were France (33%), the Czech Republic (30%), Belgium (27%), Netherlands (27%), Estonia (26%), Germany (25%), Sweden (23%) and Luxembourg (22%). The region of Eastern Germany, which was also under communist rule, is by far the least religious region in Europe. Other post-communist countries, however, have seen the opposite effect, with religion being very important in countries such as Romania, Lithuania and Poland.
The trend towards secularism has been less pronounced in the traditionally Catholic countries of Mediterranean Europe. Greece as the only traditionally Eastern Orthodox country in Europe which has not been part of the communist Eastern Bloc also retains a very high religiosity, with in excess of 95% of Greeks adhering to the Greek Orthodox Church.
According to a Pew Research Center Survey in 2012 the religiously unaffiliated (atheists and agnostics) make up about 18.2% of the European population in 2010. According to the same survey the religiously unaffiliated make up the majority of the population in only two European countries: Czech Republic (76%) and Estonia (60%). A newer study (released in 2015) found that in the Netherlands there is also an irreligious majority of 68%.
Atheism and agnosticism
During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, atheism and agnosticism have increased, with falling church attendance and membership in various European countries. The 2010 Eurobarometer survey found that on total average, of the EU28 population, 51% "believe there is a God", 26% "believe there is some sort of spirit or life force", and 20% "don't believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force".
Across the EU, belief was higher among women, increased with age, those with a strict upbringing, those with the lowest level of formal education and those leaning towards right-wing politics. Results were varied widely between different countries.
According to a survey measuring religious identification in the European Union in 2019 by Eurobarometer, 10% of EU citizens identify themselves as atheists. , the top seven European countries with the most people who viewed themselves as atheists were Czech Republic (22%), France (21%), Sweden (16%), Estonia (15%), Slovenia (14%), Spain (12%) and Netherlands (11%). 17% of EU citizens called themselves non-believers or agnostics and this percentage was the highest in Netherlands (41%), Czech Republic (34%), Sweden (34%), United Kingdom (28%), Estonia (23%), Germany (21%) and Spain (20%).
Modern Paganism
Germanic
Heathenism or Esetroth (Icelandic: Ásatrú), and the organised form Odinism, are names for the modern folk religion of the Germanic nations.
In the United Kingdom Census 2001, 300 people registered as Heathen in England and Wales. However, many Heathens followed the advice of the Pagan Federation (PF) and simply described themselves as "Pagan", while other Heathens did not specify their religious beliefs. In the 2011 census, 1,958 people self-identified as Heathen in England and Wales. A further 251 described themselves as Reconstructionist and may include some people reconstructing Germanic paganism.
Ásatrúarfélagið (Esetroth Fellowship) was recognized as an official religion by the Icelandic government in 1973. For its first 20 years it was led by farmer and poet Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson. By 2003, it had 777 members, and by 2014, it had 2,382 members, corresponding to 0.8% of Iceland's population. In Iceland, Germanic religion has an impact larger than the number of its adherents.
In Sweden, the Swedish Forn Sed Assembly (Forn Sed, or the archaic Forn Siðr, means "Old Custom") was formed in 1994 and is since 2007 recognized as a religious organization by the Swedish government. In Denmark Forn Siðr was formed in 1999, and was officially recognized in 2003 The Norwegian Åsatrufellesskapet Bifrost (Esetroth Fellowship Bifrost) was formed in 1996; as of 2011, the fellowship has some 300 members. Foreningen Forn Sed was formed in 1999, and has been recognized by the Norwegian government as a religious organization. In Spain there is the Odinist Community of Spain – Ásatrú.
Roman
The Roman polytheism also known as Religio Romana (Roman religion) in Latin or the Roman Way to the Gods (in Italian 'Via romana agli Déi') is alive in small communities and loosely related organizations, mainly in Italy.
Druidry
The religious development of Druidry was largely influenced by Iolo Morganwg. Modern practises aim to imitate the practises of the Celtic peoples of the Iron Age.
Official religions
A number of countries in Europe have official religions, including Greece (Orthodox), Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, the Vatican City (Catholic); Armenia (Apostolic Orthodoxy); Denmark, Iceland (Lutheran); and the United Kingdom (England alone) (Anglican). In Switzerland, some cantons are officially Catholic, others Reformed Protestant. Some Swiss villages even have their religion as well as the village name written on the signs at their entrances.
Georgia, while technically has no official church per se, has special constitutional agreement with Georgian Orthodox Church, which enjoys de facto privileged status. Much the same applies in Germany with the Evangelical Church and the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jewish community. In Finland, both the Finnish Orthodox Church and the Lutheran Church are official. England, a part of the United Kingdom, has Anglicanism as its official religion. Scotland, another part of the UK, has Presbyterianism as its national church, but it is no longer "official". In Sweden, the national church used to be Lutheranism, but it is no longer "official" since 2000. Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Serbia, Romania, Russia, Spain and Turkey are officially secular.
Indian religions
Buddhism
Buddhism is thinly spread throughout Europe, and the fastest growing religion in recent years with about 3 million adherents. In Kalmykia, Tibetan Buddhism is prevalent.
Hinduism
Hinduism is mainly practised among Indian immigrants. It has been growing rapidly in recent years, notably in the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Italy. In 2010, there were an estimated 1.4 million Hindu adherents in Europe.
Jainism
Jainism, small membership rolls, mainly among Indian immigrants in Belgium and the United Kingdom, as well as several converts from western and northern Europe.
Sikhism
Sikhism has nearly 700,000 adherents in Europe. Most of the community live in United Kingdom (450,000) and Italy (100,000). Around 10,000 Sikhs live in Belgium and France. Netherlands and Germany have a Sikh population of 22,000. All other countries, such as Greece, have 5,000 or fewer Sikhs.
Other religions
Other religions represented in Europe include:
Animism
Confucianism
Eckankar
Ietsism
Raëlism
Beliefs of the Romani people
Romuva
Satanism
Shinto
Spiritualism
Taoism
Thelema
Unitarian Universalism
Yazidism
Zoroastrianism
Rastafari communities in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and elsewhere.
Traditional African Religions (including Muti), mainly in the United Kingdom and France, including
West African Vodun and Haitian Vodou (Voodoo), mainly among West African and black Caribbean immigrants in the UK and France.
Religious distribution
Central Europe
Eastern Europe
Northern Europe
Southeastern Europe (Balkans)
Southern Europe
Western Europe
See also
Buddhism by country
Christianity in Europe
Europeanism
Hinduism by country
Irreligion (no faith) by country
Islam by country
Judaism by country
List of religious populations
Major world religions
Protestantism by country
Post Christianity
Religion in the European Union
Roman Catholicism by country
References
External links
Eurel: sociological and legal data on religions in Europe and beyond | 0.774717 | 0.996311 | 0.771859 |
Religious symbol | A religious symbol is an iconic representation intended to represent a specific religion, or a specific concept within a given religion.
Religious symbols have been used in the military in many countries, such as the United States military chaplain symbols. Similarly, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs emblems for headstones and markers recognize 57,000 symbols (including a number of symbols expressing body counts).
Symbols representing a specific religion
Symbolic representation of a specific religious tradition is useful in a society with religious pluralism, as was the case in the Roman Empire, and again in modern multiculturalism.
Religious symbolism
African Indigenous religions
In some African Indigenous religions, there are graphical and pictorial symbols representing the actual religion or faith just like the Abrahamic faith. Each indigenous religion however, has symbolisms which are religious or spiritual in nature. Some of these may be graphical, numerological (as in Serer numerology - see Serer creation myth) or a combination of both. However, these graphical images represent the actual religion practice and elements within the faith.
The Ìṣẹ̀ṣe religion of the yoruba people indigenous religion as an example has it graphical and pictorial symbol representing the religion, the symbol explained the philosophical concept of the four cardinal point of the earth.
The very nature of African art stem from "their themes of symbolism, functionalism and utilitarianism" hence why African art is multi-functional. In the African Indigenous belief system, Africans draw from their various artistic traditions as sources of inspiration.
Other examples of religious symbolism
Ayyavazhi symbolism
Baháʼí symbols
Buddhist symbolism
Christian symbolism
Jewish symbolism
Symbolism in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Symbols of Islam
See also
Allegory
Religious and political symbols in Unicode
French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools
Religion in national symbols
Sigil
Religious symbolism in the United States military
References
Bibliography
External links
Religious symbols and their meanings
United States Veteran's Administration approved religious symbols for graves
Religious | 0.775207 | 0.995605 | 0.7718 |
Forbidden knowledge | Forbidden knowledge, which is different from secret knowledge, is used to describe forbidden books or other information to which access is restricted or deprecated for political or religious reasons. Forbidden knowledge is commonly not secret, rather a society or various institutions will use repressive mechanisms to either completely prevent the publication of information they find objectionable or dangerous (censorship), or failing that, to try to reduce the public's trust in such information (propaganda). Public repression can create paradoxical situations where the proscribed information is generally common knowledge but publicly citing it is disallowed.
A rich set of examples exist through history.
The Roman Catholic church forbids publication of books to which it has not granted Imprimatur.
Throughout the years of isolation in Japan and China all Western literature was forbidden.
Certain 20th century governments (e.g. communist nations in Eastern Europe and China) placed strong restrictions on foreign publications.
In the United States, conservative groups including Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority made several attempts to censor pro civil-rights and feminist works such as Our Bodies, Ourselves.
In many cases this resulted in people defending themselves by creating political jokes. Jokes throughout history have been a powerful instrument to undermine state authority and the public truth associated with it.
Sociological and political relevance
Some form of public repression of facts or speculation not desirable to some people or even a majority of the population seems inevitable as societies need to create some common basis of facts to create a unified identity. Critical to political and personal freedom is the level to which this repression is organized through the state or powerful private organizations. Western secular societies have reached the consensus through the late 19th and early 20th centuries that private organizations should not be allowed to engage in compulsory censorship, forcing people to obey their dictates. For example, the separation of church and state in most Western societies mostly prevents religious organizations from repressing individuals based on their personal opinions and beliefs. As well, people are generally allowed to leave employment with a company which may regulate such personal expressions for whatever reason and find employment in less restrictive circumstances.
References
Further reading
Beckett, C (1989) Forbidden Knowledge, New Scientist 121(1649), 76.
Blatt, IB (1998) Freud and Forbidden Knowledge, Journal of Religion and Health 37(3), 290.
Johnson, DG (1999) Reframing the Question of Forbidden Knowledge for Modern Science, Science and Engineering Ethics 5(4), 445.
Hagendorff, T (2021) Forbidden knowledge in machine learning. Reflections on the limits of research and publication, AI & Society 3(36), 767.
Schrag, B et al. (2003) Forbidden Knowledge – A Case Study with Commentaries Exploring Ethical Issues and Genetic Research, Science and Engineering Ethics 9(3), 409.
Wendl, MC (2005) The Question of Forbidden Knowledge, Science 308(5728), 1549.
Kempner, J., Merz, J. F. and Bosk, C. L. (2011), Forbidden Knowledge: Public Controversy and the Production of Nonknowledge. Sociological Forum, 26: 475–500.
Knowledge | 0.783583 | 0.98478 | 0.771657 |
Ethnic religion | In religious studies, an ethnic religion is a religion or belief associated with notions of heredity and a particular ethnicity. Ethnic religions are often distinguished from universal religions, such as Christianity or Islam, which are not limited in ethnic, national or racial scope.
Terminology
A number of alternative terms have been used instead of ethnic religion. Another term that is often used is folk religion. While ethnic religion and folk religion have overlapping uses, the latter term implies "the appropriation of religious beliefs and practices at a popular level." The term folk religion can therefore be used to speak of certain Chinese and African religions, but can also refer to popular expressions of more multi-national and institutionalized religions such as Folk Christianity or Folk Islam.
In Western contexts, a variety of terms are also employed. In the United States and Canada, a popular alternative term has been nature religion. Some neopagan movements, especially in Europe, have adopted ethnic religion as their preferred term, aligning themselves with ethnology. This notably includes the European Congress of Ethnic Religions, which chose its name after a day-long discussion in 1998, where the majority of the participants expressed that pagan contained too many negative connotations and ethnic better described the root of their traditions in particular nations. In the English-language popular and scholarly discourse Paganism, with a capital P, has become an accepted term.
Usage
Ethnic religions are defined as religions which are related to a particular ethnic group, and often seen as a defining part of that ethnicity's culture, language, and customs. Diasporic groups often maintain ethnic religions as a means of maintaining a distinct ethnic identity such as the role of African traditional religion and African diaspora religions among the African diaspora in the Americas.
Some ancient ethnic religions, such as those historically found in pre-modern Europe, have found new vitality in neopaganism. Moreover, non-ethnic religions, such as Christianity, have been known to assume ethnic traits to an extent that they serve a role as an important ethnic identity marker, a notable example of this is the Serbian "Saint-Savianism" of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and the religious and cultural heritage of Syriac Christianity branch of the Assyrian people.
List of ethnic religions
See also
Animism
Ancestor worship
Chinese ancestral worship
Endogamy
Ethnoreligious group
Gavari
Judaism
National god
Phyletism
Shamanism
Slava (tradition)
Totemism
References
Ethnology | 0.773928 | 0.996757 | 0.771418 |
Proselytism | Proselytism is the policy of attempting to convert people's religious or political beliefs. Carrying out attempts to instill beliefs can be called proselytization.
Sally Sledge discusses religious proselytization as the marketing of religious messages. Proselytism is illegal in some countries. Some draw distinctions between evangelism (or da'wah in Islamic terminology) and proselytism, regarding proselytism as involuntary or coerced; the two terms can also be understood to merely be synonyms.
Etymology
The English-language word proselytize derives from the Greek language prefix (, "toward") and the verb (, "I come") in the form of (, "newcomer"). Historically, in the Koine Greek Septuagint and New Testament, the word proselyte denoted a Gentile who was considering conversion to Judaism. Although the word proselytism originally referred to converting to Judaism (and earlier related to Gentiles such as God-fearers), it now implies an attempt of any religion or religious individuals to convert people to their belief.
Arthur J. Serratelli, the Catholic Bishop of Paterson, New Jersey, observed that the meaning of the word proselytism has changed over time.
[O]riginally, the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament passed the word 'proselyte' into modern languages with a neutral meaning. It simply meant a convert, someone who changed his or her opinion or religion. And, proselytism meant the attempt to persuade someone to make such a change. But, today proselytism is almost universally seen as a sinister activity when it comes to religious beliefs.
The World Council of Churches has indicated that, when used pejoratively, proselytism refers to attempts at conversion by "unjust means that violate the conscience of the human person", such as by coercion or bribery.
Limits
The right to change religion and to manifest religion is protected under Article 18 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Limitations and regulations on proselytism are considered by some as infringements on freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
Some countries such as Greece prohibited all proselytism until 1994 when Jehovah's Witnesses were legally recognized as a religion and allowed to preach. Some countries such as Morocco prohibit it except for Islam. Some restrict it in various ways such as prohibiting attempts to convert children or prohibit offering physical benefits to new converts.
Religious groups also draw lines between what they are willing to do or not do to convert people. For instance the Catholic Church in Ad gentes states that "The Church strictly forbids forcing anyone to embrace the Faith, or alluring or enticing people by worrisome wiles."
The World Council of Churches in The Challenge of Proselytism and the Calling to Common Witness states the following:
19. Proselytism as described in this document stands in opposition to all ecumenical effort. It includes certain activities which often aim at having people change their church affiliation and which we believe must be avoided, such as the following:
making unjust or uncharitable references to other churches' beliefs and practices and even ridiculing them;
comparing two Christian communities by emphasizing the achievements and ideals of one, and the weaknesses and practical problems of the other;
employing any kind of physical violence, moral compulsion and psychological pressure e.g. the use of certain advertising techniques in mass media that might bring undue pressure on readers/viewers;
using political, social and economic power as a means of winning new members for one's own church;
extending explicit or implicit offers of education, health care or material inducements or using financial resources with the intent of making converts;
manipulative attitudes and practices that exploit people's needs, weaknesses or lack of education especially in situations of distress, and fail to respect their freedom and human dignity.
By faith
The religions of the world are divided into two groups: those that actively seek new followers (missionary religions like Christianity) and those that do not (non-missionary religions). This classification dates back to a lecture given by Max Müller in 1873, and is based on whether or not a religion seeks to gain new converts. The three main religions classified as missionary religions are Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, while the non-missionary religions include Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism. Other religions, such as Primal Religions, Confucianism, and Taoism, may also be considered non-missionary religions.
Baháʼí Faith
In the writings of the Baháʼí Faith, the endeavour to attract people to the religion is strongly emphasized. The process of attracting people to the religion is referred to as teaching. The term proselytism is given the connotation of aggressively teaching the religion to others – as such, Bahaʼi proselytism is prohibited.
Every Bahaʼi has the obligation of teaching their religion, as it is seen as the path toward bringing peace and justice to the world. Some Bahaʼis become pioneers, moving to countries or cities where there are a small number of Bahaʼis, with the aim of helping to spread the religion. Some other Bahaʼis move from place to place in a process called travel teaching. When moving or travelling to other countries, Bahaʼis are encouraged to integrate into their new society and apply Bahaʼis principles in living and working with their neighbours. In total, however, only a small minority of Bahaʼis are directly teaching their religion to others. Despite this, as of 2010, the religion had grown "at least twice as fast as the population of almost every UN region" over the previous 100 years.
Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahaʼi Faith, wrote that those who would be teaching his religion should emphasize the importance of ethics and wisdom, and he counselled Bahaʼis to be unrestrained and put their trust in God. At the same time he stated that Bahaʼis should exercise moderation, tact and wisdom and not be too aggressive in their teaching. In sharing their faith with others, Bahaʼis are cautioned to make sure the person they are proposing to teach is open to hearing what they have to say. In most countries becoming a Bahaʼi is a simple matter of filling out a card stating a declaration of belief. This includes acknowledgement of Bahá'u'llah as the messenger of God for this age, awareness and acceptance of his teachings, and intention to be obedient to the institutions and laws he established. It does not involve negating one's previous beliefs, due to the Bahaʼi belief in progressive revelation.
Christianity
Many Christians consider it their obligation to follow what is often termed the Great Commission in the final verses of the Gospel of Matthew: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen." The Acts of the Apostles and other sources contain several accounts of early Christians following this directive by engaging in individual conversations and mass sermons to spread the Good News.
Most self-described Christian groups have organizations devoted to missionary work which in whole or in part includes proselytism of the non-religious and people of other faiths (including sometimes other variants of Christianity). Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are known in particular for their doctrinal emphasis on proselytizing.
The Moscow Patriarchate has repeatedly strongly condemned what it describes as Catholic proselytism of Orthodox Christians within Russia and has therefore opposed a Catholic construction project in an area of Russia where the Catholic community is small. The Catholic Church claims that it is supporting the existing Catholic community within Russia and is not proselytizing. In 1993 the Balamand declaration on proselytism was released between the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Churches.
Muggletonians
The Muggletonians, founded by John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton in mid-17th century London, believed that if a person were exposed to the full tenets of their faith and rejected it they would be irretrievably damned. This risk tempered proselytization: they hesitated to expose people to loss of salvation which may explain their low numbers. In the mid-19th century two wealthy Muggletonians, Joseph and Isaac Frost, broke with this cautious approach and published several books about the faith.
Indian religions
Proselytization is uncommon in Indian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, especially because they are pluralistic. Instead of the choice of religion, justice is viewed as being determined by concepts such as karma and rebirth. Thus, proselytism is seen as unhelpful towards the pursuit of sādhanā (spiritual practice) and samskaras (intrinsic qualities).
Buddhism
Buddhism does not have an accepted or strong proselytism tradition, with the Buddha having taught his followers to respect other religions and the clergy. Emperor Ashoka, however, sent imperial missionaries to various kingdoms and sent his son and daughter as missionaries to Sri Lanka following his conversion to Buddhism. Aggressive proselytizing is discouraged in the major Buddhist schools and Buddhists do not engage in the practice of proselytization.
Some adherents of Nichiren Buddhism proselytise in a process called shakubuku.
The Dalai Lama has critiqued proselytization and certain types of conversion, believing the practices to be contrary to the fundamental ideas of religious harmony and spiritual practice. He has stated that "It's very important that our religious traditions live in harmony with one another and I don't think proselytizing contributes to this. Just as fighting and killing in the name of religion are very sad, it's not appropriate to use religion as a ground or a means for defeating others." In particular, he has critiqued Christian approaches to conversion in Asia, stating that he has "come across situations where serving the people is a cover for proselytization." The Dalai Lama has labeled such practices counter to the "message of Christ" and has emphasized that such individuals "practice conversion like a kind of war against peoples and cultures." In a statement with Hindu religious leaders, he expressed that he opposes "conversions by any religious tradition using various methods of enticement."
Hinduism
Hinduism has a proselytism tradition. Classical Hinduism represents a diversity of views and theology. Its followers are free to follow any among the theistic, non-theistic or other traditions within Hinduism. Followers can pick or change to any philosophy or belief they fancy and worship any personal god or goddess in a manner they deem fit, given an unspoken but loud understanding that all paths are equally valid in their purest form. In the modern era, religious conversion from and to Hinduism has been a controversial subject. Many state the concept of missionary activity and proselytism is anathema to the precepts of Hinduism.
While proselytism was not a part of the Hindu tradition, religious conversion to and between various traditions within Hinduism such as Vaishnavism, Shaivism and Shaktism has a long history. However, these traditions of conversion did not have to do with an idea which was more objectively valid, or the potential consequences of false ideas in the afterlife, but which was more conducive in understanding the unknowable Brahman as well as promoting righteousness throughout society.
The debate on proselytization and religious conversion between Christianity, Islam and Hinduism is more recent, and started in the 19th century. Religious leaders of some Hindu reform movements such as the Arya Samaj launched the Shuddhi movement to proselytize and reconvert Muslims and Christians back to Hinduism, while those such as the Brahmo Samaj suggested Hinduism to be a non-missionary religion. All these sects of Hinduism have welcomed new members to their group, while other leaders of Hinduism's diverse schools have stated that given the intensive proselytization activities from missionary Islam and Christianity, this "there is no such thing as proselytism in Hinduism" view must be re-examined.
Hare Krishna Movement
One group that takes in willing converts in Hinduism is the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), also known as Hare Krishnas. Devotees have no codified rituals of conversion, but promote recitation of the Hare Krishna mantra as a means to achieve a mature stage of love of God. ISKCON adherents view Krishna as the supreme deity that those of other faith traditions worship. A commonly accepted notion among devotees is that ISKCON allows one to recognize the primacy of the supreme deity, Krishna, in the practices and traditions of other faiths. ISKCON promotes the concept of Sanatana-Dharma (Hinduism), the 'eternal law' that other faiths can uncover.
Jainism
Mahavira (599–527 BC), the 24th Tirthankara of Jainism, developed an early philosophy regarding relativism and subjectivism known as Anekantavada. As a result of this acceptance of alternative religious practices, the phenomenon of proselytization is largely absent in these religions but not unknown. Converts are welcome to the Jain faith.
Sikhism
Sikhism is not a proselytizing religion and proselytism is largely discouraged "through force or inducement" out of the belief that each person has a fundamental right to practice their religion freely.
Islam
In Islam, inviting people to the religion is a meritorious activity. The Quran states,
The operative phrase /lā ikrāha fī d-dīni/ literally translates as "within the religion there is no hate-mongering", which makes more difficult to relate this ayah to the topic of proselytism. Muslim scholars consider this passage to mean that force is not to be used to convert someone to Islam. Muslims consider inviting others to Islam to be the mission originally carried out by the prophets of Allah and is now a collective duty of Muslims. The Quran states,
Here the operative phrase /udʿu ilà sabīli rabbika/ "Invite (command to a single male subject) to the way of your Lord" expresses the element direction /ilà/ "to" that is missing in 'The Cow', 2:256.
Judaism
An important tenet of Judaism is that God's will is for people to exercise free will. As such, proselytizing is generally regarded as offensive in Judaism. Consequently, Judaism generally does not proselytize non-Jews. Instead, non-Jews are encouraged to follow Noahide Law, assuring a place in the world to come. In ancient times, these observant non-Jews could become geirim toshvim, a term still sometimes used informally to refer to those who strive to follow these laws and who will join the Jewish people in the world to come. A non-Jew who follows Noahide law is considered to believe in Noahidism; for this end, there is some minor outreach by Orthodox Jewish organizations.
Generally, Jews expect any convert to Judaism to come through their own accord. A common source of converts are those who have married a Jew, although there are also many people who join for spiritual or other personal reasons; these people are called "Jews by choice". Rabbis will often discourage new members from joining, although they may provide guidance through seminars or personal meetings for those who are truly interested. Orthodox Judaism in theory neither encourages nor discourages conversion. Standards for conversion can be very challenging, but rabbis will acquiesce to persistent and sincere requests for conversion. Much emphasis is placed on gaining a Jewish identity.
Although most Jewish organizations do not proselytize, Chabad practices Orthodox Judaism outreach to halachic Jews who are not observant.
Inherited membership
Sects of some religions, such as the Druze, Yazidis, and Yarsans, do not accept converts at all.
See also
Apostasy
Fate of the unlearned
Freedom of religion
List of proselytes
Religious conversion
References and sources
References
Sources
Yahiya Emerick. "The Holy Qur'an in Today's English",
External links
Proselytism, Change of Religion, and International Human Rights, by Natan Lerner, PhD
Religious conversion
Persuasion | 0.77292 | 0.998019 | 0.771388 |
Religious nationalism | Religious nationalism can be understood in a number of ways, such as nationalism as a religion itself, a position articulated by Carlton Hayes in his text Nationalism: A Religion, or as the relationship of nationalism to a particular religious belief, dogma, ideology, or affiliation. This relationship can be broken down into two aspects: the politicisation of religion and the influence of religion on politics.
In the former aspect, a shared religion can be seen to contribute to a sense of national unity, a common bond among the citizens of the nation. Another political aspect of religion is the support of a national identity, similar to a shared ethnicity, language, or culture. The influence of religion on politics is more ideological, where current interpretations of religious ideas inspire political activism and action; for example, laws are passed to foster stricter religious adherence.
Ideologically-driven religious nationalism may not necessarily be targeted against other religions per se, but can be articulated in response to modernity and, in particular, secular nationalism. Indeed, religious nationalism may articulate itself as the binary of secular nationalism. Nation-states whose borders are relatively recent or that have experienced colonialism may be more prone to religious nationalism, which may stand as a more authentic or "traditional" rendering of identity. Thus, there was a global rise of religious nationalism in the wake of the end of the Cold War, but also as postcolonial politics (facing considerable developmental challenges, but also dealing with the reality of colonially-defined, and therefore somewhat artificial, borders) became challenged. In such a scenario, appealing to a national sense of Islamic identity, as in the case of Pakistan (see two-nation theory), may serve to override regional tensions.
The danger is that when the state derives political legitimacy from adherence to religious doctrines, this may leave an opening to overtly religious elements, institutions, and leaders, making the appeals to religion more 'authentic' by bringing more explicitly theological interpretations to political life. Thus, appeals to religion as a marker of ethnicity create an opening for more strident and ideological interpretations of religious nationalism. Many ethnic and cultural nationalisms include religious aspects, but as a marker of group identity, rather than the intrinsic motivation for nationalist claims.
Buddhist nationalism
Buddhist Nationalism is mainly prevalent and influential in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and is also present in Cambodia and Thailand.
Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism is a political ideology that combines a focus on Sinhalese culture and ethnicity with an emphasis on Theravada Buddhism, which is the majority belief system of the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka.
The Patriotic Association of Myanmar and 969 movement have the goal to "organise and protect" the Burman people and their Buddhist religion, which is influenced by Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar.
Christian nationalism
Christian nationalists focus more on internal politics, such as passing laws that reflect their view of Christianity. In countries with a state Church, Christian nationalists, in seeking to preserve the status of a Christian state, uphold an antidisestablishmentarian position. They actively promote religious (Christian) discourses in various fields of social life, from politics and history to culture and science; with respect to legislation for example, Christian nationalists advocate Sunday blue laws. Distinctive radicalized forms of religious nationalism or clerical nationalism (clero-nationalism or clerico-nationalism) were emerging on the far-right of the political spectrum in various European countries especially during the interwar period in the first half of the 20th century.
In the Middle Ages, efforts were made to establish a Pan-Christian state by uniting the countries within Christendom. Christian nationalism played a role in this era in which Christians felt the impulse to recover lands in which Christianity flourished. After the rise of Islam, certain parts of North Africa, East Asia, Southern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East lost Christian control.
In Poland, nationalism was always characterized by loyalty to the Catholic Church. Groups like the National Revival of Poland use slogans like Wielka Polska Katolicka (Great Catholic Poland) and protest vigorously against legalization of gay marriage and abortion. Conservative religious groups connected with Radio Maryja are often accused of harboring nationalist and antisemitic attitudes.
Religious nationalism which is characterized by communal adherence to Eastern Orthodoxy and national Orthodox Churches is found in many states of Eastern Europe as well as in the Russian Federation.
Hindu nationalism
Given the extensive linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity of the Indian population, nationalism in India in general does not fall within the purview of a solitary variant of nationalism. Indians may identify with their nation on account of civic, cultural, or third-world nationalism. Commentators have noted that in modern India, a contemporary form of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, has been endorsed by the Bharatiya Janata Party and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Hindutva (meaning "Hinduness"), a term popularised by Hindu nationalist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923, is the predominant form of Hindu nationalism in India. Hindutva is championed by right-wing Hindu nationalist volunteer organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), widely regarded as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's parent organisation, along with its affiliate organisations, notably the Vishva Hindu Parishad.
Islamic nationalism
Pakistan
Unlike the secular form of nationalism which is espoused in most other countries, Pakistani nationalism is religious in nature, consisting of Islamic nationalism. Religion was the basis of the Pakistani nationalist narrative. (see Secularism in Pakistan) Pakistani nationalism is closely associated with Muslim heritage, the religion of Islam, and it is also associated with Pan-Islamism, as it is described in the Two-nation theory. It also refers to the consciousness and the expression of religious and ethnic influences that help mould the national consciousness. Pakistan has been called a "global center for political Islam".
Turkish
Kurdish
Others
Hamas is a party which mixes Palestinian nationalism with Islamism.
Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and Other Rebel Groups mix Syrian nationalism with Islamism
Jaish ul-Adl mixes Baloch nationalism with Islamism.
The Taliban's ideology combines Islamism with Pashtunwali and Afghan nationalism
Somali Islamist movement Al-Shabaab incorporates Somali religious nationalism and anti-imperialism into its Salafi Jihadist ideology.
Jewish nationalism
Religious Zionism is an ideology that combines Zionism and Orthodox Judaism. Before the establishment of the State of Israel, most Religious Zionists were observant Jews who supported Zionist efforts to rebuild a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. After the Six-Day War, and the capture of the West Bank, right-wing supporters of the Religious Zionist movement integrated themselves into Israeli nationalism and they eventually founded a new movement which evolved into Neo-Zionism, the ideology of Neo-Zionism revolves around three pillars: the Land of Israel, the People of Israel, and the Torah of Israel.
Nationalism in modern paganism
Paganism resurfaces as a topic of fascination in 18th to 19th-century Romanticism, in particular in the context of the literary Viking revivals, which portrayed historical Celtic, Slavic and Germanic polytheists as noble savages.
Romanticist interest in non-classical antiquity coincided with the rise of Romantic nationalism and the rise of the nation state in the context of the 1848 revolutions, leading to the creation of national epics and national myths for the various newly formed states. Pagan or folkloric topics were also common in the musical nationalism of the period.
Organisations such as the Armanen-Orden represent significant developments in neo-pagan esotericism and Ariosophy after World War II, but they do not all constitute forms of Nazi esotericism. Some northern European neopagan groups, such as Theods, Ásatrúarfélagið, and Viðartrúar, have explicitly stated that neo-Nazism is not common among their members.
Shinto
The "State Shinto" term was used to categorize, and promote, Imperial Japanese practices that relied on Shinto to support Japan's nationalistic ideology. By refusing to ban Shinto practices outright, Japan's post-war constitution was thus able to preserve full freedom of religion.
Sikh
The Khalistan movement is a Sikh separatist movement seeking to create a homeland for Sikhs by establishing a sovereign state, called Khālistān ('Land of the Khalsa'), in the Punjab region. The proposed state would consist of land that currently forms Punjab, India, and Punjab, Pakistan.
Other religious movements and nationalism
In the Korean peninsula, the Donghak movement and its leader, Choe Je-u, were inspired by Korean Catholic missionaries. However, they condemned the 'Western learning' preached by missionaries and contrasted it with the indigenous 'Eastern learning'. They started a rebellion in 1894 in Jeolla province in southwestern Korea. The Donghak movement served as a template for the later Daejonggyo and Jeungsan-gyo movements, as well as for other religious nationalist movements. The Buddhist-influenced Daejonggyo movement financed guerillas in Manchuria during Japanese colonial rule of both Korea and Manchuria. The North Korean state ideology, Juche, is sometimes classified as a religion in the United States Department of State's human rights reports.
See also
Christian Identity
Christianity and politics
Clerical fascism
Fundamentalism
Judaism and politics
National Catholicism
Philippine Independent Church
Political aspects of Islam
Political religion
Religion in politics
Sectarianism
State religion
Theocracy
References
Sources
Further reading
Madhu Kishwar, Religion at the service of nationalism and other essays (Oxford University Press, 1998). .
Von der Mehden, Fred R. "Marxism and Early Indonesian Islamic Nationalism". Political Science Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3, 1958, pp. 335–351. JSTOR
Soner Cagaptay, "Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey", 2006.
Endy Bayuni, "Jokowi turns to Islam-nationalism to preserve Indonesia's diversity", The Staits Times, APR 15, 2017
Jenny White, "Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks", Princeton University Press, 2014
Juergensmeyer, Mark (1996). "The Worldwide Rise of Religious Nationalism". Journal of International Affairs. 50 (1): 1–20. ISSN 0022-197X.
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Political socialization | Political socialization is the process by which individuals internalize and develop their political values, ideas, attitudes, and perceptions via the agents of socialization. Political socialization occurs through processes of socialization, that can be structured as primary and secondary socialization. Primary socialization agents include the family, whereas secondary socialization refers to agents outside the family. Agents such as family, education, media, and peers influence the most in establishing varying political lenses that frame one's perception of political values, ideas, and attitudes. These perceptions, in turn, shape and define individuals' definitions of who they are and how they should behave in the political and economic institutions in which they live. This learning process shapes perceptions that influence which norms, behaviors, values, opinions, morals, and priorities will ultimately shape their political ideology: it is a "study of the developmental processes by which people of all ages and adolescents acquire political cognition, attitudes, and behaviors." These agents expose individuals through varying degrees of influence, inducing them into the political culture and their orientations towards political objects. Throughout a lifetime, these experiences influence your political identity and shape your political outlook.
Agents of socialization
Agents of socialization, sometimes called institutions, work together to influence and shape people's political norms and values. In the case of political socialization, the most significant agents include, but are not limited to, families, media, education, and peers. Other agents include religion, the state, and community. These agents shape your understanding of politics by exposing you to political ideas, values, and behaviors.
Family
Across the decades, literature has heavily emphasized that the agent of the family is the most influential, with literature suggesting that family and the transmission of attitudes from parent to child are the most prominent agents of socialization. This claim has found especially strong support for the transmission of voting behaviour, partisanship and religious attitudes. Especially in contexts of high politization and homogeneity in political views, transmissions are argued to be higher. Literature examines how aspects of family structures and dynamics change the varying influence of the offspring's values as a function of the distribution of their parent's attitudes. Families perpetuate values that support political authorities and can heavily contribute to children's initial political ideological views, or party affiliations. Literature suggest that the transmission of intergenerational political attitudes shows a strong lineage concerning their parents and siblings. Families have an effect on "political knowledge, identification, efficacy, and participation", depending on variables such as "family demographics, life cycle, parenting style, parental level of political cynicism", interest and politization, and "frequency of political discussions", as well as the saliency of the issues that are being discussed.
Parents: Earliest literature of the influence of parents suggests that the varying ways parents raise their children become a significant catalyst in influencing their political attitudes, and behaviour. However, the initial view of parent-youth political socialisations studies of the simple inheritance of partisan views from parents to their children has been challenged by various studies, arguing that while the family still plays an important role in the political orientation of their offspring, the intensity is reduced over time and also taking other influential aspects into account. The most frequently found correlation of intergenerational transmission between parents and their children is partisanship and religious beliefs. What has been found is that especially salient and frequently discussed topics are more likely to transmit, and stronger transmissions occur in highly politicised households with homogenous views on political issues. It is further argued that the different methods of raising a child result in the child establishing formative values about all aspects of one's social life, such as religion and cultural traditions. . Especially the parenting style has been argued to be influential, with nurturant parenting resulting in more liberal views, and strict parenting promoting conservatism. This is argued to be due to a state-family heuristic, which assumes that complex phenomena such as politics and the state- society-relationship are understood from what we know from parent-child dynamics. In turn, suggesting that approaching social institutions in this context is vital as they bring a primary influence as opposed to economic or more formative organizations. Literature also suggest that predjudice influence from parents was found to be more influential towards political attitudes rather than economic and social stratification. Ultimately, literature has found it significant in studying the transmission of attitudes from parent to child as parents are generally more conservative, commonly associated with traditional attitudes and pushing towards continuity, opposite of their offspring.
Siblings: The composition of the household in terms of the sex of the siblings has been argued to influence boys in becoming more or less conservative. What has been suggested is that for boys, having sisters influences them to develop more conservative views on gender roles and partisanship. This has been argued to be caused by a different approach to child raising and the division of household chores that varies in families depending if there are sons and daughters, or just sons. Therefore, if brothers do have sisters, they are less likely to be exposed to traditionally feminized household chores, wherefore they might adopt this view on gender roles and in turn also hold more traditional views in politics. Furthermore, literature suggests that children and adolescents are far more successfully socialized with cohort-centric attitudes with siblings close in age. Thus, this cohort-centric difference of multiple generations within the family with parents and siblings supports the idea that siblings who share the core agents of familial socialization develop coherent political attitudes. Linkage to the transmission of political attitudes via siblings include social trust and civic engagement.
Media
Mass media is not only a source of political information; it is an influence on political values and beliefs. The culmination of information gained from entertainment becomes the values and standards by which people judge. Most people choose what media they are exposed to based on their already existing values, and they use information from the media to reaffirm what they already believe. From news coverage and late-night programs, to exposure to social media apps, present varying political stances that are often associated with increasing political participation. However literature suggests that media coverage increasingly motivates users to delve into politics, as media outlets are leaning toward what stories will get them more views and engagement. In turn, suggesting that having more political motives and financial motives presents more partisanship polarization if it means they will have an increase in viewership. These reinforced segments that bring more viewership have been proven to be more likely for individuals to rewatch or pay for reinforcing congruent evidence. Suggesting that reinforced media segments become confirmatory evidence that continuously polarizes biased political information. This has become the perfect environment to enhance partisan polarization among voters through national outlets that reinforce extremist positions. These extremist positions have consistently found their way into partisan positions that have moved both parties towards supporting more extremist values, increasing mass partisan polarization. Ultimately, however, the common core of information, and the interpretation the media applies to it, leads to a shared knowledge and basic values throughout a given entity. Most media entertainment and information does not vary much throughout the country, and it is consumed by all types of audiences. Although there are still disagreements and different political beliefs and party affiliations, generally there are not huge ideological disparities among the population because the media helps create a broad consensus on basic US democratic principles.Overall, the increase in the media market demand for viewership has encouraged more polarized political discourse, and with advancing technologies, our dependency on the Internet and the media's vulnerability will only continue increasing. In turn, making it more vital in addressing the threat misinformation holds to the integrity of democracy.
Print Media: In the case of print media, it is the oldest form of political socialization of media, as this includes books and poems. and newspapers. Until 1900, after the invention of radio, print media was the primary way individuals received information that shaped their political attitudes and beliefs. Studies show two-thirds of newspaper readers do not know their newspaper's position on specific issues- and most media stories are quickly forgotten. Older people read more newspapers than younger people, and people from the ages of twelve to seventeen (although they consume the most media) consume the least amount of news.
Broadcast Media: Media influence in political socialization continues with both fictional and factual media sources. Adults have increased exposure to news and political information embedded in entertainment; fictional entertainment (mostly television) is the most common source of political information. The most common form of broadcast media is television and radio, increasing attention to politics as people become more informed with information and beliefs shaping political attitudes. Studies on public opinion of the Bush administration's energy policies show that the public pays more attention to issues that receive a lot of media coverage and form collective opinions about these issues. This demonstrates that the mass media's attention to an issue affects public opinion. More so, extensive exposure to television has led to "mainstreaming," aligning people's perception of political life and society with television's portrayal of it.
Digital Media: Digital media, such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitch, accounted for viewership rates of 27.9 billion hours in 2020. examples of digital media include content created, distributed, and viewed on a given platform that one views from a digital electronic device. In turn, increases political polarization, with the recommended algorithms that confine users to echo chambers and content they agree with and enjoy while also increasing their political polarization.
Social Media: The role of social media in political socialization, from scrolling on TikTok to checking the trending page on Twitter, has increasingly become powerful in presenting news and varying political perspectives. This shows political socialization at the palm of your hand with the constant production of new content, bringing a new variable in its infancy and shaping how people establish their political beliefs. The media has significantly increased the number of users who cover relevant political information, increasing exposure to political discourse. These platforms have created the perfect environment for individuals to be presented with and reinforce their beliefs through the advancing programming of echo chambers. Algorithms are increasingly confining users in a cycle of content-related videos. This gives media outlets an increasing power to manipulate biased presented news as supporting evidence to a partisan issue, reinforcing confirmatory information to potential false realities shaped by misinformation. Exposure to political accountability through the media motivates increasing polarization as it exposes how potential candidates stand on a given issue.
Education
In the numerous years in school, through primary, secondary, and high schools, students are taught vital political principles such as voting, elected representatives, individual rights, personal responsibility, and the political history of their state and country. There is also evidence that education is a significant factor in establishing political attitudes during the crucial period of adolescence, with three central themes examining how civic courses, teachers, and peer groups often provide alternative perspectives to their parent's political attitudes. In turn, identifying that civic influences towards change in an educational setting are vital in establishing generational political differences during socialization during adolescence. Other literature has found that involvement with high school activities provides adolescents with direct experience with political and civic engagement and implementing activist orientations toward one's attitudes with increased political discourse.
Religion
Religious beliefs and practices influence political opinions, priorities, and political participation. The theological and moral perspectives offered by religious institutions shape judgment regarding political attitudes and, ultimately, translate to direct influence on political matters such as "the redistribution of wealth, equality, tolerance for deviance, individual freedom, the severity of criminal punishment, policies relating to family structure, gender roles, abortion, anti-gay rhetoric, and the value of human life."
The State
State governments can control mass media to "inform, misinform, or misinform the press and thus the public '', a strategy referred to as propaganda. The ability to control agents of socialization, such as the media, brings control to the state to serve a political, economic, or personal agenda that benefits the state.
Community
Community mobilization brings significant experiences of political socialization events that could influence one's political attitudes with a collective community goal. An example is how Prop 187 was specifically targeting illegal immigrants in LA County within the state of California. Given the severity of the policy targeting a specific community, this created a mass mobilization of the Latino and immigrant community, creating a voting bloc that prevented the initiative of Prop 187. Harvey Milk was a significant political mobilizing the queer community during the 1978 race for California governor with increasing support for Prop 6, a law that would mandate firing any queer teacher or employee in any California public school. As this threatened the queer community and increased immigration of gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals, specifically in the San Francisco area, Milk was able to mobilize the queer community to gain enough momentum to vote against Prop 6 successfully. This could have been a pivotal introduction to political participation for those in these areas, motivating many to continue voting in future elections. In many cases, the experience of community mobilization is the first introduction to political policies and political participation, starting their political journey connected with their home.
Region
Geographical location also plays a role in one's political media socialization. For example, news outlets on the East Coast tend to cover international affairs in Europe and the Middle East the most, while West Coast news outlets are more likely to cover Asian affairs; this demonstrates that community region affects patterns in political socialization. The region is also significant for specific political attitudes. Living near the Pakistan-India border, an individual will likely have solid political attitudes toward the Pakistan-India tension. Given the socialization of their parents, cousins, grandparents, peers, and education, all have a significant role in teaching their youth about the relationship one has with the other state. Suppose one immigrated from Cuba to the United States. In that case, they will be the political socialization inclination to obtain conservative attitudes in the United States because of the regional movements from a leftist government in Cuba.
Life Stages of Political Socialization
Childhood
Political socialization begins in childhood. It has been found that family is the first main influence, and following social circles are often chosen based on these initial views. Therefore, views are assumed to persist. Research suggest that family and educational environment are the most influential factors in socializing children. In terms of family, in early childhood, indirect exposure, such as parenting styles, or sibling composition might be more relevant, than direct political discussions. However recent literature suggest that increasing influence is coming from mass media such as digital and social media. On average, both young children and teenagers in the United States spend more time a week consuming television and digital media than they spend in school. Young children consume an average of thirty-one hours a week, while teenagers consume forty-eight hours of media a week. Given that childhood is when a human is the most impressionable the influential of agents of socialization is significant as children's brains are "prime for learning", thus more likely to take messages of political attitudes of the world at face value.
Adolescence
With media influence carrying into adolescence, high school students attribute the information that forms their opinions and attitudes about race, war, economics, and patriotism to mass media much more than their friends, family, or teachers. Other literature suggests that political identification and political participation often stem from values and attitudes attained during one's adolescence. The literature argues that pre-adult socialization in both childhood and adolescence has a longstanding and stable catalyzing influence from political events. This political socialization of these catalytic events establishes predispositions that are often felt by mass and collective political socialization. Literature also suggests that adult political participation shows a longitudinal influence from adolescent forces of political socialization, with three models assessing the effects of parental influence in the context of socioeconomic status, political activity, and civic orientation. A decade later, this literature observed a longitudinal impact of socialization that stems from adolescent political socialization. Literature found that parents' socioeconomic status and high school activities impact the most, although the family is an important and stable agent of socialisation, especially if views and stances are consistent, stable, clear, salient and frequently communicated, which favours higher transmission rates. Primary carriers of pre-adult political socialization play a crucial role in later political participation, with the parent political participation model contributing to an understanding of political activity. This literature suggests that political socialization during the adolescent period significantly influences political participation and voting behavior. It is argued that views persist when the initial socialisation in the family has been strong, hence views have been strongly formed when the adolescents enter adulthood.
Adulthood
While political socialization is lifelong process, after adolescence, people's basic values generally do not change. Most people choose what content they are exposed to based on their already existing values, and they use information from a favorable source to simply reaffirm what they already believe. Internal outcomes during adulthood can have far more significant development if these beliefs remain constant over time, especially if an attitude is present for the remainderdisambiguated of one's adolescence, the odds of that belief being consistent during adulthood are very likely.
See also
Agency (sociology)
Cohort effect
Groupthink
Political culture
Political cognition
Public opinion
References
Socialization
Socialization | 0.775919 | 0.993884 | 0.771173 |
Social constructionism | Social constructionism is a term used in sociology, social ontology, and communication theory. The term can serve somewhat different functions in each field; however, the foundation of this theoretical framework suggests various facets of social reality—such as concepts, beliefs, norms, and values—are formed through continuous interactions and negotiations among society's members, rather than empirical observation of physical reality. The theory of social constructionism posits that much of what individuals perceive as 'reality' is actually the outcome of a dynamic process of construction influenced by social conventions and structures.
Unlike phenomena that are innately determined or biologically predetermined, these social constructs are collectively formulated, sustained, and shaped by the social contexts in which they exist. These constructs significantly impact both the behavior and perceptions of individuals, often being internalized based on cultural narratives, whether or not these are empirically verifiable. In this two-way process of reality construction, individuals not only interpret and assimilate information through their social relations but also contribute to shaping existing societal narratives.
Examples of social constructs range widely, encompassing the assigned value of money, conceptions of concept of self/self-identity, beauty standards, gender, language, race, ethnicity, social class, social hierarchy, nationality, religion, social norms, the modern calendar and other units of time, marriage, education, citizenship, stereotypes, femininity and masculinity, social institutions, and even the idea of 'social construct' itself. These constructs are not universal truths but are flexible entities that can vary dramatically across different cultures and societies. They arise from collaborative consensus and are shaped and maintained through collective human interactions, cultural practices, and shared beliefs. This articulates the view that people in society construct ideas or concepts that may not exist without the existence of people or language to validate those concepts, meaning without a society these constructs would cease to exist.
Overview
A social construct or construction is the meaning, notion, or connotation placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by that society with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event.
The social construction of target populations refers to the cultural characterizations or popular images of the persons or groups whose behavior and well-being are affected by public policy.
Social constructionism posits that the meanings of phenomena do not have an independent foundation outside the mental and linguistic representation that people develop about them throughout their history, and which becomes their shared reality. From a linguistic viewpoint, social constructionism centres meaning as an internal reference within language (words refer to words, definitions to other definitions) rather than to an external reality.
Origins
In the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne wrote that, "We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things." In 1886 or 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche put it similarly: "Facts do not exist, only interpretations." In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann said, "The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance" between people and their environment. Each person constructs a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world, and to a degree, everyone's pseudo-environment is a fiction. People "live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones." Lippman's "environment" might be called "reality", and his "pseudo-environment" seems equivalent to what today is called "constructed reality".
Social constructionism has more recently been rooted in "symbolic interactionism" and "phenomenology". With Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality published in 1966, this concept found its hold. More than four decades later, much theory and research pledged itself to the basic tenet that people "make their social and cultural worlds at the same time these worlds make them." It is a viewpoint that uproots social processes "simultaneously playful and serious, by which reality is both revealed and concealed, created and destroyed by our activities." It provides a substitute to the "Western intellectual tradition" where the researcher "earnestly seeks certainty in a representation of reality by means of propositions."
In social constructionist terms, "taken-for-granted realities" are cultivated from "interactions between and among social agents"; furthermore, reality is not some objective truth "waiting to be uncovered through positivist scientific inquiry." Rather, there can be "multiple realities that compete for truth and legitimacy." Social constructionism understands the "fundamental role of language and communication" and this understanding has "contributed to the linguistic turn" and more recently the "turn to discourse theory". The majority of social constructionists abide by the belief that "language does not mirror reality; rather, it constitutes [creates] it."
A broad definition of social constructionism has its supporters and critics in the organizational sciences. A constructionist approach to various organizational and managerial phenomena appear to be more commonplace and on the rise.
Andy Lock and Tom Strong trace some of the fundamental tenets of social constructionism back to the work of the 18th-century Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist Giambattista Vico.
Berger and Luckmann give credit to Max Scheler as a large influence as he created the idea of sociology of knowledge which influenced social construction theory.
According to Lock and Strong, other influential thinkers whose work has affected the development of social constructionism are: Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Jürgen Habermas, Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, Valentin Volosinov, Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gregory Bateson, Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, Ken Gergen, Mary Gergen, Rom Harre, and John Shotter.
Applications
Personal construct psychology
Since its appearance in the 1950s, personal construct psychology (PCP) has mainly developed as a constructivist theory of personality and a system of transforming individual meaning-making processes, largely in therapeutic contexts. It was based around the notion of persons as scientists who form and test theories about their worlds. Therefore, it represented one of the first attempts to appreciate the constructive nature of experience and the meaning persons give to their experience. Social constructionism (SC), on the other hand, mainly developed as a form of a critique, aimed to transform the oppressing effects of the social meaning-making processes. Over the years, it has grown into a cluster of different approaches, with no single SC position. However, different approaches under the generic term of SC are loosely linked by some shared assumptions about language, knowledge, and reality.
A usual way of thinking about the relationship between PCP and SC is treating them as two separate entities that are similar in some aspects, but also very different in others. This way of conceptualizing this relationship is a logical result of the circumstantial differences of their emergence. In subsequent analyses these differences between PCP and SC were framed around several points of tension, formulated as binary oppositions: personal/social; individualist/relational; agency/structure; constructivist/constructionist. Although some of the most important issues in contemporary psychology are elaborated in these contributions, the polarized positioning also sustained the idea of a separation between PCP and SC, paving the way for only limited opportunities for dialogue between them.
Reframing the relationship between PCP and SC may be of use in both the PCP and the SC communities. On one hand, it extends and enriches SC theory and points to benefits of applying the PCP "toolkit" in constructionist therapy and research. On the other hand, the reframing contributes to PCP theory and points to new ways of addressing social construction in therapeutic conversations.
Educational psychology
Like social constructionism, social constructivism states that people work together to construct artifacts. While social constructionism focuses on the artifacts that are created through the social interactions of a group, social constructivism focuses on an individual's learning that takes place because of his or her interactions in a group.
Social constructivism has been studied by many educational psychologists, who are concerned with its implications for teaching and learning. For more on the psychological dimensions of social constructivism, see the work of Lev Vygotsky, Ernst von Glasersfeld and A. Sullivan Palincsar.
Systemic therapy
Some of the systemic models that use social constructionism include narrative therapy and solution-focused therapy.
Poverty
Max Rose and Frank R. Baumgartner (2013), in Framing the Poor: Media Coverage and U.S. Poverty Policy, 1960-2008, examine how media has framed the poor in the U.S. and how negative framing has caused a shift in government spending. Since 1960, the government has decreasingly spent money on social services such as welfare. Evidence shows the media framing the poor more negatively since 1960, with more usage of words such as lazy and fraud.
Crime
Potter and Kappeler (1996), in their introduction to Constructing Crime: Perspective on Making News And Social Problems wrote, "Public opinion and crime facts demonstrate no congruence. The reality of crime in the United States has been subverted to a constructed reality as ephemeral as swamp gas."
Criminology has long focussed on why and how society defines criminal behavior and crime in general. While looking at crime through a social constructionism lens, there is evidence to support that criminal acts are a social construct where abnormal or deviant acts become a crime based on the views of society. Another explanation of crime as it relates to social constructionism are individual identity constructs that result in deviant behavior. If someone has constructed the identity of a "madman" or "criminal" for themselves based on a society's definition, it may force them to follow that label, resulting in criminal behavior.
History and development
Berger and Luckmann
Constructionism became prominent in the U.S. with Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality. Berger and Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common-sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions. In their model, people interact on the understanding that their perceptions of everyday life are shared with others, and this common knowledge of reality is in turn reinforced by these interactions. Since this common-sense knowledge is negotiated by people, human typifications, significations and institutions come to be presented as part of an objective reality, particularly for future generations who were not involved in the original process of negotiation. For example, as parents negotiate rules for their children to follow, those rules confront the children as externally produced "givens" that they cannot change. Berger and Luckmann's social constructionism has its roots in phenomenology. It links to Heidegger and Edmund Husserl through the teaching of Alfred Schutz, who was also Berger's PhD adviser.
Narrative turn
During the 1970s and 1980s, social constructionist theory underwent a transformation as constructionist sociologists engaged with the work of Michel Foucault and others as a narrative turn in the social sciences was worked out in practice. This particularly affected the emergent sociology of science and the growing field of science and technology studies. In particular, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour, Barry Barnes, Steve Woolgar, and others used social constructionism to relate what science has typically characterized as objective facts to the processes of social construction. Their goal was to show that human subjectivity imposes itself on the facts taken as objective, not solely the other way around. A particularly provocative title in this line of thought is Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics. At the same time, social constructionism shaped studies of technologythe Sofield, especially on the social construction of technology, or SCOT, and authors as Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Maarten van Wesel, etc. Despite its common perception as objective, mathematics is not immune to social constructionist accounts. Sociologists such as Sal Restivo and Randall Collins, mathematicians including Reuben Hersh and Philip J. Davis, and philosophers including Paul Ernest have published social constructionist treatments of mathematics.
Postmodernism
Within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, the concept of socially constructed reality stresses the ongoing mass-building of worldviews by individuals in dialectical interaction with society at a time. The numerous realities so formed comprise, according to this view, the imagined worlds of human social existence and activity. These worldviews are gradually crystallized by habit into institutions propped up by language conventions; given ongoing legitimacy by mythology, religion and philosophy; maintained by therapies and socialization; and subjectively internalized by upbringing and education. Together, these become part of the identity of social citizens.
In the book The Reality of Social Construction, the British sociologist Dave Elder-Vass places the development of social constructionism as one outcome of the legacy of postmodernism. He writes "Perhaps the most widespread and influential product of this process [coming to terms with the legacy of postmodernism] is social constructionism, which has been booming [within the domain of social theory] since the 1980s."
Criticisms
Critics argue that social constructionism rejects the influences of biology on behaviour and culture, or suggests that they are unimportant to achieve an understanding of human behaviour. Scientific estimates of nature versus nurture and gene–environment interactions have shown almost always substantial influences of both genetics and social, often in an inseparable manner. Claims that genetics does not affect humans are seen as outdated by most contemporary scholars of human development.
Social constructionism has also been criticized for having an overly narrow focus on society and culture as a causal factor in human behavior, excluding the influence of innate biological tendencies. This criticism has been explored by psychologists such as Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate as well as by Asian studies scholar Edward Slingerland in What Science Offers the Humanities. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides used the term standard social science model to refer to social theories that they believe fail to take into account the evolved properties of the brain.
In 1996, to illustrate what he believed to be the intellectual weaknesses of social constructionism and postmodernism, physics professor Alan Sokal submitted an article to the academic journal Social Text deliberately written to be incomprehensible but including phrases and jargon typical of the articles published by the journal. The submission, which was published, was an experiment to see if the journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." In 1999, Sokal, with coauthor Jean Bricmont published the book Fashionable Nonsense, which criticized postmodernism and social constructionism.
Philosopher Paul Boghossian has also written against social constructionism. He follows Ian Hacking's argument that many adopt social constructionism because of its potentially liberating stance: if things are the way that they are only because of human social conventions, as opposed to being so naturally, then it should be possible to change them into how people would rather have them be. He then states that social constructionists argue that people should refrain from making absolute judgements about what is true and instead state that something is true in the light of this or that theory. Countering this, he states:
Woolgar and Pawluch argue that constructionists tend to "ontologically gerrymander" social conditions in and out of their analysis.
Alan Sokal also criticize social constructionism for contradicting itself on the knowability of the existence of societies. The argument is that if there was no knowable objective reality, there would be no way of knowing whether or not societies exist and if so, what their rules and other characteristics are. One example of the contradiction is that the claim that "phenomena must be measured by what is considered average in their respective cultures, not by an objective standard." Since there are languages that have no word for average and therefore the whole application of the concept of "average" to such cultures contradict social constructionism's own claim that cultures can only be measured by their own standards. Social constructionism is a diverse field with varying stances on these matters. Some social constructionists do acknowledge the existence of an objective reality but argue that human understanding and interpretation of that reality are socially constructed. Others might contend that while the term average may not exist in all languages, equivalent or analogous concepts might still be applied within those cultures, thereby not completely invalidating the principle of cultural relativity in measuring phenomena.
See also
References
Further reading
Books
Boghossian, P. Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Oxford University Press, 2006. Online review: Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism
Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T., The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Anchor, 1967; ).
Best, J. Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems, New York: Gruyter, 1989
Burr, V. Social Constructionism, 2nd ed. Routledge 2003.
Ellul, J. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. New York: Knopf, 1965. New York: Random House/ Vintage 1973
Ernst, P., (1998), Social Constructivism as a Philosophy of Mathematics; Albany, New York: State University of New York Press
Gergen, K., An Invitation to Social Construction. Los Angeles: Sage, 2015 (3d edition, first 1999).
Glasersfeld, E. von, Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 1995.
Hacking, I., The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999;
Hibberd, F. J., Unfolding Social Constructionism. New York: Springer, 2005.
Kukla, A., Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science, London: Routledge, 2000.
Lawrence, T. B. and Phillips, N. Constructing Organizational Life: How Social-Symbolic Work Shapes Selves, Organizations, and Institutions. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Lowenthal, P., & Muth, R. Constructivism. In E. F. Provenzo, Jr. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the social and cultural foundations of education (pp. 177–179). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008.
McNamee, S. and Gergen, K. (Eds.). Therapy as Social Construction. London: Sage, 1992 .
McNamee, S. and Gergen, K. Relational Responsibility: Resources for Sustainable Dialogue. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2005. .
Penman, R. Reconstructing communicating. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000.
Poerksen, B. The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism. Exeter: Imprint-Academic, 2004.
Restivo, S. and Croissant, J., "Social Constructionism in Science and Technology Studies" (Handbook of Constructionist Research, ed. J.A. Holstein & J.F. Gubrium) Guilford, NY 2008, 213–229;
Schmidt, S. J., Histories and Discourses: Rewriting Constructivism. Exeter: Imprint-Academic, 2007.
Searle, J., The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press, 1995; .
Shotter, J. Conversational realities: Constructing life through language. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1993.
Stewart, J., Zediker, K. E., & Witteborn, S. Together: Communicating interpersonally – A social construction approach (6th ed). Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury, 2005.
Weinberg, D. Contemporary Social Constructionism: Key Themes. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2014.
Willard, C. A., Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; .
Wilson, D. S. (2005), "Evolutionary Social Constructivism". In J. Gottshcall and D. S. Wilson, (Eds.), The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press; . Full text
Articles
Drost, Alexander. "Borders. A Narrative Turn – Reflections on Concepts, Practices and their Communication", in: Olivier Mentz and Tracey McKay (eds.), Unity in Diversity. European Perspectives on Borders and Memories, Berlin 2017, pp. 14–33.
Mallon, R, "Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
Shotter, J., & Gergen, K. J., Social construction: Knowledge, self, others, and continuing the conversation. In S. A. Deetz (Ed.), Communication Yearbook, 17 (pp. 3–33). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994.
External links
Communication theory
Consensus reality
Human behavior
Human communication
Social concepts
Social epistemology
Sociology of knowledge
Sociological theories | 0.773266 | 0.997279 | 0.771161 |
Internet culture | Internet culture is a quasi-underground culture developed and maintained among frequent and active users of the Internet (also known as netizens) who primarily communicate with one another as members of online communities; that is, a culture whose influence is "mediated by computer screens" and information communication technology, specifically the Internet.
Internet culture arises from the frequent interactions between members within various online communities and the use of these communities for communication, entertainment, business, and recreation. The earliest online communities of this kind were centered around the interests and hobbies of anonymous and pseudonymous early adopters, typically those with academic, technological, niche, criminal, or even subversive interests.
Studied aspects of Internet culture include anonymity/pseudonymity, social media, gaming and specific communities, such as fandoms, and has also raised questions about online identity and Internet privacy.
The impact of Internet culture on predominately offline societies and cultures has been extensive, and elements of Internet culture increasingly impact everyday life. Likewise, increasingly widespread Internet adoption has influenced Internet culture; frequently provoking enforcing norms via shaming, censuring and censorship while pressuring other cultural expressions underground.
Elements
While Internet subcultures differ, subcultures those emerged in the environment of the early Internet maintain noticeably similar values.
Values
Enlightenment principles are prominent in Internet culture, from which many other elements of the culture derive.. These principles can be attributed to the Internet's origins in Western, and specifically American, cultural contexts and the significant influence of academic culture, the hacker ethic and gamer culture, which to varying degrees embrace and amplify cultural values such as curious playfulness, competitiveness and collaborative self-actualization commonly pursued through community application of empirical rationalism via debate, competition and creative expression.
Concern for privacy is another discernable value. Internet culture reifies the right to privacy in order to protect freedom of expression, personal liberty and social equality, thus making anonymity or pseudonymity a valued feature of online services for netizens. This is especially the case for freethinkers, social deviants, political dissidents, journalists, hacktivists/activists and members of hacker, (cyber)punk or other underground subcultures, where an absence of privacy may put an individual in danger. Originally the result of technical limitations, the prevalence of anonymity or pseudonymity is an integral part of Internet culture.
Playful curiosity is an additional value derived from the Internet's roots in both creative hacker culture and gamer culture, where a desire to understand complex problems and systems for their own sake, or to exploit for trivial, amusing or irrelevant ends, flourishes.
Disregard of authority mostly came by way of hackers who routinely broke/ignored laws and regulations in their Internet pursuits. It may have originated with hackers who discovered how to defeat telecom dialtone-based security in the 1970s to make phone calls without paying.
The value of competence was a fundamental requirement in the Internet's early days when many tasks were less than user-friendly and technical skill was required to accomplish anything. This was reinforced by Otaku and gaming cultures, where obsessive commitment and sometimes technical/mental skills are essential in order to excel in such hobbies.
Freedom of information (i.e. sharing and unlimited information access) was declared early to be a fundamental aspect of the Internet, underlined by the phrase "Information wants to be free".
Coffee
Coffee is more common than tea in Internet culture, especially within hacking subculture and technical communities. Coffee's higher caffeine content is attracted those in technical who spend long hours on high-focus tasks. A coffee pot was the subject of the first webcam stream on the Internet and the stream was used to monitor when it was time to make more coffee for the computer science lab that hosted the stream. Automating office coffee production was the subject of an April Fool's Day Internet standard called the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.
Preoccupations
Provocative humor that is witty, dry, dark, macabre, self-deprecating, misanthropic and/or politically incorrect is arguably the most recognizable manifestation of Internet culture and its subcultures. Copypasta, Dank Memes, and Shitposting showcase this emphasis. This humor often includes heavy satire and/or parody of mainstream culture, and the "playful, irreverent attitude" which it inherits from its parent subcultures.
Trolling is another preoccupation on the Internet. Starting with the presumption that nothing online should be taken seriously, a recipient's response to trolling (and not the act) functions as a shibboleth.
Otaku (sometimes Weeaboo) sensibilities became popular via anonymous imageboards modelled after Japanese imageboards that hosted anime, manga and other Japanese popular culture materials..
Dissemination and spread
Over the years, Internet users have interacted via a host of different online and offline protocols. Earlier ones such as Usenet and bulletin boards were later superseded by others such as social media. These include:
Blog
Bulletin board systems
Chatrooms
Cybersex
E-Commerce
Games
Internet forums
Internet memes
Microblogs
Online videos
Peer-to-peer file sharing
Social networks
Usenet
Virtual worlds
Wikis
Internet subcultures
As with other cultures, the Internet quickly fragmented into numerous subcultures, which continued to spawn descendants thereafter.
Early
Academic culture
Hacker culture
Military and Intelligence culture
Anonymous culture
Hacker culture
Hacktivist/Cyberhacker culture
Meme culture
Gamer and video game culture
Otaku culture
Newer
Content creator/influencer culture
Incel culture
Manosphere
Dirtbag left
Cancel culture
Fediverse
Rationality community
Effective altruism
Battleboarders
Brogrammer
History
The cultural history of the Internet is a story of rapid change. The Internet developed in parallel with rapid and sustained technological advances in computing and data communication. Widespread access to the Internet emerged as the cost of infrastructure dropped by several orders of magnitude with consecutive technological improvements.
Though Internet culture originated during the creation and development of early online communities – such as those found on bulletin board systems before the Internet reached mainstream adoption in developed countries – many cultural elements have roots in other previously existing offline cultures and subcultures which predate the Internet. Specifically, Internet culture includes many elements of telegraphy culture (especially amateur radio culture), gaming culture and hacker culture.
Initially, digital culture tilted toward the Anglosphere. As a consequence of computer technology's early reliance on textual coding systems that were mainly adapted to the English language, Anglophone societies—followed by other societies with languages based on Latin script—enjoyed privileged access to digital culture. However, other languages have gradually increased in prominence. In specific, the proportion of content on the Internet that is in English has dropped from roughly 80% in the 1990s to around 52.9% in 2018.
As technology advances, Internet Culture continues to change. The introduction of smartphones and tablet computers and the growing computer network infrastructure around the world have increased the number of Internet users and have likewise resulted in the proliferation and expansion of online communities. While Internet culture continues to evolve among active and frequent Internet users, it remains distinct from other previously offline cultures and subcultures which now have a presence online, even those cultures and subcultures from which Internet Culture borrows many elements.
One cultural antecedent of Internet culture was amateur radio (commonly known as ham radio). By connecting over great distances, ham operators were able to form a distinct cultural community with a strong technocratic foundation, as the radio gear involved was finicky and prone to failure. The area that later became Silicon Valley, where much of modern Internet technology originates, had been an early locus of radio engineering. Alongside the original mandate for robustness and resiliency, the renegade spirit of the early ham radio community later infused the cultural value of decentralization and near-total rejection of regulation and political control that characterized the Internet's original growth era, with strong undercurrents of the Wild West spirit of the American frontier.
At its inception in the early 1970s as part of ARPANET, digital networks were small, institutional, arcane, and slow, which confined the majority of use to the exchange of textual information, such as interpersonal messages and source code. Access to these networks was largely limited to a technological elite based at a small number of prestigious universities; the original American network connected one computer in Utah with three in California.
Text on these digital networks usually encoded in the ASCII character set, which was minimalistic even for established English typography, barely suited to other European languages sharing a Latin script (but with an additional requirement to support accented characters), and entirely unsuitable to any language not based on a Latin script, such as Mandarin, Arabic, or Hindi.
Interactive use was discouraged except for high value activities. Hence a store and forward architecture was employed for many message systems, functioning more like a post office than modern instant messaging; however, by the standards of postal mail, the system (when it worked) was stunningly fast and cheap. Among the heaviest users were those actively involved in advancing the technology, most of whom implicitly shared much the same base of arcane knowledge, effectively forming a technological priesthood.
The origins of social media predate the Internet proper. The first bulletin board system was created in 1978, GEnie was created by General Electric in 1985, the mailing list Listserv appeared in 1986, and Internet Relay Chat was created in 1988. The first official social media site, SixDegrees launched in 1997.
In the 1980s, the network grew to encompass most universities and many corporations, especially those involved with technology, including heavy but segregated participation within the American military–industrial complex. Use of interactivity grew, and the user base became less dominated by programmers, computer scientists and hawkish industrialists, but it remained largely an academic culture centered around institutions of higher learning. It was observed that each September, with an intake of new students, standards of productive discourse would plummet until the established user base brought the influx up to speed on cultural etiquette.
Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia, opening the door for public participation. Soon the network was no longer dominated by academic culture, and the term eternal September, initially referring to September 1993, was coined as Internet slang for the endless intake of cultural newbies.
Commercial use became established alongside academic and professional use, beginning with a sharp rise in unsolicited commercial e-mail commonly called spam. Around this same time, the network transitioned to support the burgeoning World Wide Web. Multimedia formats such as audio, graphics, and video become commonplace and began to displace plain text, but multimedia remained painfully slow for dial-up users. Also around this time the Internet also began to internationalize, supporting most of the world's major languages, but support for many languages remained patchy and incomplete into the 2010s.
On the arrival of broadband access, file sharing services grew rapidly, especially of digital audio (with a prevalence of bootlegged commercial music) with the arrival of Napster in 1999 and similar projects which effectively catered to music enthusiasts, especially teenagers and young adults, soon becoming established as a prototype for rapid evolution into modern social media. Alongside ongoing challenges to traditional norms of intellectual property, business models of many of the largest Internet corporations evolved into what Shoshana Zuboff terms surveillance capitalism. Not only is social media a novel form of social culture, but also a novel form of economic culture where sharing is frictionless, but personal privacy has become a scarce good.
In 1998, there was Hampster Dance, the first successful Internet meme.
In 1999, Aaron Peckham created Urban Dictionary, an online, crowdsourced dictionary of slang. He had kept the server for Urban Dictionary under his bed.
In 2000, there was great demand for images of a dress that Jennifer Lopez wore. As a result, Google's co-founders created Google Images.
In 2001, Wikipedia was created.
In 2004, Encyclopedia Dramatica, a wiki archive of Internet culture, was founded.
In 2005, YouTube was created because people wanted to find videos of Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl in 2004. YouTube was later acquired by Google in 2006.
In 2009, Bitcoin was created.
Since 2020, Internet culture has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since 2021, there has been an unprecedented surge of interest in the concept of the metaverse. In particular, Facebook Inc. renamed itself to Meta Platforms in October 2021, amid the crisis of the Facebook Papers.
Criticism
One dark aspect of Internet culture is that it has allowed promoters of unhealthy behaviors such as cutting, anorexia, pedophilia, and even organized theft to gain prominence and establish online subcultures. As people spend more time on social media, this could lead to acting excessively and neglecting behaviors. This action may result in the perpetration of cyberbullying, social anxiety, depression, and exposure to inappropriate content that is not suitable for one's age. Rude comments on posts can lower an individual's self-esteem, making them feel unworthy and may lead to depression. Social interaction online may also substitute face-to-face interactions for some people instead of acting as a supplement. This can negatively impact people's social skills and cause one to have feelings of loneliness. People may also face the chance of being cyberbullied when using online applications. Cyberbullying may include harassment, video shaming, impersonating, and much more. A concept described as "cyberbullying theory" is now being used to suggest that children who use social networking more frequently are more likely to become victims of cyberbullying. Additionally, some evidence shows that too much Internet use can stunt memory and attention development in children. The ease of access to information which the Internet provides discourages information retention. However, the cognitive consequences are not yet fully known. The staggering amount of available information online can lead to feelings of information overload. Some effects of this phenomenon include reduced comprehension, decision making, and behavior control.
Identity – "architectures of credibility"
One early study, conducted from 1998 to 1999, found that the participants view information obtained online as slightly more credible than information from magazines, radio, and television, information obtained from newspapers was the most credible. Credibility online is established in much the same way that it is established in the offline world. Lawrence Lessig claimed that the architecture of a given online community may be the most important factor in establishing credibility. Factors include:, anonymity, connection to physical identity, comment rating system, feedback type (positve vs positive/negative), moderation.
Anonymity
Many sites allow anonymous commentary, where the user-id attached to the comment is something like "guest". In an architecture that allows anonymous commentary, credibility attaches only to the object of the comment. Sites that require some link to an identity may require only a nickname that is sufficient to allow comment readers to rate the commenter, either explicitly, or by informal reputation.
Connection to physical identity
Architectures can require that physical identity be associated with commentary, as in Lessig's example of Counsel Connect. However, to require linkage to a physical identity, sensitive information about a user must be collected and safeguards for that collected information must be established – users must place sufficient trust in the site. Irrespective of safeguards, as with Counsel Connect, use of physical identities links credibility across the frames of the Internet and real space, influencing the behaviors of those who contribute in those spaces. However, even purely online identities can establish credibility. Even though nothing inherently links a person or group to their Internet-based persona, credibility can be earned, because of the time required.
Comment rating system
In some architectures, commenters can, in turn, be rated by other users, potentially encouraging more responsible commentary, although the profusion of popular sh*tposters belies this.
Feedback type
Architectures can be oriented around positive feedback or allow both positive and negative feedback. While a particular user may be able to equate fewer stars with a "negative" rating, the semantic difference is potentially important. The ability to actively downrate an identify may violate laws or norms.
Moderation
Architectures can give editorial control to a group or individual not employed by the site (e.g., Reddit), termed moderators. Moderation may take be either proactive (previewing contents) or reactive (punishing violators).
The moderator's credibility can be damaged by overly aggressive behavior.
Digital culture
Memes
Internet culture is full of memes and other content that spreads rapidly. Memes (humorous images) .
Communities
Internet culture thrives on online communities. These communities can be found on specialized forums, social media, or proprietary applications (e.g., Slack, Salesforce). They cater to specific hobbies, fandoms, or professions, creating spaces where individuals with similar interests can connect. Examples of such communities include the passionate "K-pop fandom" or tech enthusiasts.
Jargon
Internet culture has a rapidly changing set of slang, acronyms, and jargon. These terms serve as recognizable ways to identify members and foster solidarity. Successful jargon often spreads beyond the initiating community. Examples of internet slang and jargon include "LOL" (laugh out loud) and "FTW" (for the win).
Gaming
Gaming is a distinct facet of internet culture, with dedicated communities and supportive platforms such as Twitch. Competitive gaming and live streaming encompasses various subcultures is the basis of this community.
Social media
Social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok have become fundamental support systems for Internet culture. These platforms support influencers, content creators, and celebrities. Influencers play a crucial role in shaping trends, promoting products, and engaging with their audiences. Other content creators cover every subject: eating, war, fitness, politics, etc.
Activism
Internet culture is an important ecosystem for activism and social movements. Hashtags, petitions, and organizing have built and exploited online communities. Movements such as BlackLivesMatter and MeToo built strong online presences that increased their impact.
See also
Anonymous
Cicada 3301
Cyber law
Cyberdelic
Cyberpunk
Digitalism
Information ethics
Infosphere
Internet trolls
Netnography
Postliterate society
Rules of the Internet
r/wallstreetbets
Technology and society
Techno-progressivism
Technocriticism
Technolibertarianism
Technorealism
References
Further reading
David Gunkel (2001) Hacking Cyberspace, Westview Press,
Clemens Apprich (2017) Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures, Rowman & Littlefield International, London
Sandrine Baranski (2010) La musique en réseau, une musique de la complexité ?, Éditions universitaires européennes La musique en réseau
David J. Bell, Brian D Loader, Nicholas Pleace, Douglas Schuler (2004) Cyberculture: The Key Concepts, Routledge: London.
Donna Haraway (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, NY
Donna Haraway (1997) Modest Witness Second Millennium FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse, Routledge, New York, NY
N. Katherine Hayles (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL
Jarzombek, Mark (2016) Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN
Sherry Turkle (1997) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon & Schuster Inc, New York, NY
Cyberspace
Computer folklore
Subcultures | 0.774837 | 0.995226 | 0.771138 |
Tribalism | Tribalism is the state of being organized by, or advocating for, tribes or tribal lifestyles. Human evolution has primarily occurred in small hunter-gatherer groups, as opposed to in larger and more recently settled agricultural societies or civilizations. With a negative connotation and in a political context, tribalism can also mean discriminatory behavior or attitudes towards out-groups, based on in-group loyalty.
Definition
The word "tribe" can be defined to mean an extended kin group or clan with a common ancestor, or can also be described as a group who share the common interest of mutual survival and preservation of a common culture. The proverb "birds of a feather flock together" describes homophily, the human tendency to form friendship networks with people of similar occupations, interests, and habits. Some tribes can be located in geographically proximate areas, like villages or bands, and although telecommunications in theory could enable groups of people to form tribe-like communities, digital tribes and social networking websites are not quite tribes in that they do not inherently provide the mutual survival of both the individual members of the tribe and for the tribe itself, as tribes do.
In terms of conformity, the word "tribalism" has been co-opted and stripped of its original meaning, and has been defined as a "subjectivity" or "way of being" social frame in which communities are bound socially beyond immediate birth ties by the dominance of various modalities of face-to-face and object integration. Ontologically, tribalism is oriented around the valences of analogy, genealogy and mythology. That means that customary tribes have their social foundations in some variation of these tribal orientations, while often taking on traditional practices (e.g. Abrahamic religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), and modern practices, including monetary exchange, mobile communications, and modern education.
Tribalism in a political sense refers to the strong political solidarity typical of post-truth politics.
Social structure
The social structure of a tribe can vary greatly from case to case. The relatively small size of customary tribes results in a social life which usually involve a relatively few significant political or economic distinctions between individuals. As a result, social hierarchy is uncommon, and deep bonds are made between individual members.
A tribe often refers to itself using its own language's word for "people", and refers to other, neighboring tribes with various words to distinguish them as other. For example, the term "Inuit" translates to "people".
Types
Tribalism implies the possession of a strong cultural or ethnic identity that separates one member of a group from the members of another group. Based on strong relations of proximity and kinship, as well as relations based on the mutual survival of both the individual members of the tribe and for the tribe itself, members of a tribe tend to possess a strong feeling of identity. Objectively, for a customary tribal society to form there needs to be ongoing customary organization, inquiry, and exchange. However, intense feelings of common identity can lead people to feel tribally connected.
The distinction between these two definitions of tribalism, objective and subjective, is an important one because while tribal societies have been pushed to the edges of the Western world, tribalism, by the second definition, is arguably undiminished. A few writers have postulated that the human brain is hard-wired towards tribalism, but that claim is usually linked to equating original questions of sociality with tribalism.
Concept evolution
Tribalism has a very adaptive effect in human evolution. Humans are social animals and ill-equipped to live on their own. Tribalism and social bonding help to keep individuals committed to the group, even when personal relations may fray. That keeps individuals from wandering off or joining other groups. It also leads to bullying when a tribal member is unwilling to conform to the politics of the collective.
Some scholars argue that inclusive fitness in humans involves kin selection and kin altruism, in which groups of an extended family with shared genes help others with similar genes, based on their coefficient of relationship (the amount of genes they have in common). Other scholars argue that fictive kinship is common in human organizations, allowing non-kin members to collaborate in groups like fraternities.
Socially, divisions between groups fosters specialized interactions with others, based on association: altruism (positive interactions with unrelated members), kin-selectivity (positive interactions with related members) and violence (negative interactions). Thus, groups with a strong sense of unity and identity can benefit from kin selection behaviour such as common property and shared resources. The tendencies of members to unite against an outside tribe and the ability to act violently and prejudicially against that outside tribe likely boosted the chances of survival in genocidal conflicts.
Modern examples of tribal genocide rarely reflect the defining characteristics of tribes existing prior to the Neolithic Revolution; for example, small population and close-relatedness.
According to a study by Robin Dunbar at the University of Liverpool, social group size is determined by primate brain size. Dunbar's conclusion was that most human brains can really understand only an average of 150 individuals as fully developed, complex people. That is known as Dunbar's number. In contrast, anthropologist H. Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth have done a variety of field studies in the United States that came up with an estimated mean number of ties, 290, roughly double Dunbar's estimate. The Bernard–Killworth median of 231 is lower because of upward straggle in the distribution, but it is still appreciably larger than Dunbar's estimate.
Malcolm Gladwell expanded on this conclusion sociologically in his book, The Tipping Point, where members of one of his types, Connectors, were successful by their larger-than-average number of close friendships and capacity for maintaining them, which tie together otherwise-unconnected social groups. According to such studies, then, "tribalism" is a hard-to-escape fact of human neurology simply because many human brains are not adapted to working with large populations. Once a person's limit for connection is reached, the human brain resorts to some combination of hierarchical schemes, stereotypes and other simplified models to understand so many people.
Negative outcomes
Anthropologists engage in ongoing debate on the phenomenon of warfare among tribes. While fighting typically and certainly occurs among horticultural tribes, an open question remains whether such warfare is a typical feature of hunter-gatherer life or is an anomaly found only in certain circumstances, such as scarce resources (as with the Inuit or Arabs) or only among food-producing societies.
Certain tribes use forms of subsistence such as horticulture and foraging that cannot yield the same number of absolute calories as agriculture. Those subsistance methods thus limit those tribal populations significantly, especially when compared to agricultural populations. Jesse Mathis writes in War Before Civilization that examples exist with low percentage rates of casualties in tribal battle, and some tribal battles were much more lethal as a percentage of population than, for example, the Battle of Gettysburg. He concludes that no evidence consistently indicates that primitive battles are proportionately less lethal than civilized ones.
The realistic conflict theory is a model of intergroup conflict, arguing that in a real or perceived zero-sum system, conflicts arise over shared interests for finite resources. The 1954 Robbers Cave experiment involved researchers putting 12-year-old boys into groups, where they formed their own ingroups, before then developing hostility and negativity towards the other group during simulated conflict over finite resources in a zero-sum game.
Criticism
Various authors, such as Aidan Southall, have attacked the notion of tribe as a tool of colonial ideology, and identified modern tribalism as a product of colonial governance in Africa. The Africa Policy Information Center describes the term, and tribalism in particular as a byword for ethnic strife, as invoking negative stereotypes of Africa as a land of primitive and territorial peoples.
An April, 2021 article published in The Journal of Hospital Medicine titled "Tribalism: The Good, The Bad, and The Future" by Zahir Kanjee and Leslie Bilello of Harvard Medical School was retracted due to protest from readers over the use of the terms tribe and tribalism. The article was then republished with the title "Leadership and Professional Development: Specialty Silos in Medicine" along with an apology from the editor-in-chief. The revised version of the article substituted the terms groups and medical specialties for tribes, and siloed and factional for tribalism.
See also
References
Further reading
External links
James, Paul; et al., Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development: Other Paths for Papua New Guinea (2012).
Sow, Adama: "Ethnozentrismus als Katalysator bestehender Konflikte in Afrika südlich der Sahara, am Beispiel der Unruhen in Côte d`Ivoire" at: European University Center for Peace Studies, Stadtschleining 2005 .
"The New Tribalism" by University of Oregon president Dave Frohnmayer, condemning a "new tribalism" in the traditional sense of "tribalism", not to be confused with "new tribalism".
Steven Pressfield, [https://web.archive.org/web/20100516030351/http://www.stevenpressfield.com/vblog/ It's the Tribes, Stupid] (five part video series)
Episode 1: "It's the Tribes, Stupid"
Episode 2: "The Citizen Vs. The Tribesman"
Episode 3: "Tribes Are Different From You and Me"
Episode 4: "Fighting a Tribal Enemy"
Episode 5: "How to Win in Afghanistan"
Forms of government
Group processes
Political science theories
Sociological terminology
Tribes | 0.774987 | 0.99497 | 0.771089 |
Eclectic paganism | Eclectic paganism, also occasionally termed universalist or non-denominational paganism, is a form of modern paganism where practitioners blend paganism with aspects of other religions or philosophies, including the blending of separate pagan traditions. In the book Handbook of New Age, Melissa Harrington states that "Eclectic Pagans do not follow any particular Paganism, but follow a Pagan religious path, that includes the overall Pagan ethos of reverence for the ancient Gods, participation in a magical world view, stewardship and caring for the Earth, and 'nature religion. The practice of eclectic paganism is particularly popular with pagans in North America and the British Isles.
Eclectic paganism contrasts with reconstructionist paganism: whereas reconstructionists strive for authenticity to historical religious traditions of specific groups or time periods, the eclectic approach borrows from several different cultures, philosophies, and time periods.
Some see benefits and drawbacks to the eclectic pagan label. It is broad and allows for various practices and beliefs and without concrete rules, practitioners can explore various religions, philosophies, practices, and cultures while remaining within the bounds of the label. Some also create their own beliefs, philosophies, and rules.
Use of social media
The use of social media within eclectic paganism is very common. Within cultures where pagan or occult beliefs and practices are a minority, social media can provide a safe haven for learning and discussion; and social media allows for the creation of pagan communities. With the advent of social media, information can be reached by nearly anyone, rather than being passed down through oral traditions and within families or covens, as was traditionally common. These communities are vast and can incorporate multiple religions, traditions, and cultures.
The use of social media and the internet by eclectic pagans is not an isolated phenomena, and reflects wider trends of religious expression and communities online.
See also
Neopaganism in the United Kingdom
Neopaganism in the United States
References
External links
Eclectic Pagans
Eclectic Traditions
Modern pagan traditions | 0.79156 | 0.973985 | 0.770968 |
Religion and mythology | Religion and mythology differ in scope but have overlapping aspects. Both are systems of concepts that are of high importance to a certain community, making statements concerning the supernatural or sacred. Generally, mythology is considered one component or aspect of religion. Religion is the broader term: besides mythological aspects, it includes aspects of ritual, morality, theology, and mystical experience. A given mythology is almost always associated with a certain religion such as Greek mythology with Ancient Greek religion. Disconnected from its religious system, a myth may lose its immediate relevance to the community and evolve—away from sacred importance—into a legend or folktale.
There is a complex relationship between recital of myths and enactment of rituals.
Introduction
The relationship between religion and myth depends on what definition of "myth" one uses. By Robert Graves's definition, a religion's traditional stories are "myths" if and only if one does not belong to the religion in question. By Segal's definition, all religious stories are myths—but simply because nearly all stories are myths. By the folklorists' definition, all myths are religious (or "sacred") stories, but not all religious stories are myths: religious stories that involve the creation of the world (e.g., the stories in the Book of Genesis) are myths; however, some religious stories that don't explain how things came to be in their present form (e.g., hagiographies of famous saints) are not myths. Generally, mythology is the main component of religion alongside ritual. For example, in the early modern period, distinguished Christian theologians developed elaborated witch mythologies which contributed to the intensification of witch trials. The Oxford Companion to World Mythology provides the following summary and examples:Religious stories are "holy scripture" to believers—narratives used to support, explain, or justify a particular system's rituals, theology, and ethics—and are myths to people of other cultures or belief systems. […] It is difficult to believe that the Buddha was conceived in a dream by a white elephant, so we call that story a myth as well. But, of course, stories such as the parting of the Sea of Reeds for the fleeing Hebrews, Muhammad's Night Journey, and the dead Jesus rising from the tomb are just as clearly irrational narratives to which a Hindu or a Buddhist might understandably apply the word "myth". All of these stories are definable as myths because they contain events that contradict both our intellectual and physical experience of reality.
Most definitions of "myth" limit myths to stories. Thus, non-narrative elements of religion, such as ritual, are not myths.
Theology and myth
The term theology for the first time appears in the writings of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Initially, theology and mythology were synonymous. With time, both terms gained distinctive qualities:
In the first place, theology is a spiritual or religious attempt of "believers" to explicate their faith. In this sense it is not neutral and is not attempted from the perspective of removed observation—in contrast to a general history of religions. The implication derived from the religious approach is that it does not provide a formal and indifferent scheme devoid of presuppositions within which all religions could be subsumed. In the second place, theology is influenced by its origins in the Greek and Christian traditions, with the implication that the transmutation of this concept to other religions is endangered by the very circumstances of origination.
According to Hege, both primitive and modern theology is inescapably constrained by its mythical backbone:
Hermeneutically, theologians must recognize that mythical thought permeates the biblical texts. Dogmatically, theologians must be aware of the mythological elements of theology and of how extensively theology relies on mythical forms and functions, especially in light of our awareness of the ubiquity of myth.
Religion
Religion is a belief concerning the supernatural, sacred, or divine, and the moral codes, practices, values, and institutions associated with such belief, although some scholars, such as Durkheim, would argue that the supernatural and the divine are not aspects of all religions. Religious beliefs and practices may include the following: a deity or higher being, eschatology, practices of worship, practices of ethics and politics. Some religions do not include all these features.
Mythology
The term mythology usually refers either to a system of myths or to the study of myths. However, the word "myth" itself has multiple (and some contradictory) definitions:
2007: According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "Myth: "1 a: a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon. b: Parable, Allegory. 2 a: a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone; especially: one embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society. 2b: an unfounded or false notion. 3: a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence. 4: the whole body of myths.
In regards to the study of culture and religion, these are some of the definitions scholars have used:
1968: The classicist Robert Graves defines myths as "whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student's experience that he cannot believe them to be true."
1973: Another classicist, GS Kirk, rejects the notion that all myths are religious or sacred. In the category of "myth", he includes many legendary accounts that are "secular" for all practical purposes.
1997: Folklorists define a myth as "a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form".
2004: In religious studies, the word "myth" is usually reserved for stories whose main characters are gods or demigods.
2004: The classicist Richard Buxton defines a myth as "a socially powerful traditional story".
2004: Robert A. Segal, professor of theories of religion at the Lancaster University, defines "myth" broadly as any story whose "main figures [are] personalities -- divine, human, or even animal. Excluded would be impersonal forces such as Plato's Good."
Similarities between different religious mythologies
Given any of the above definitions of "myth", the myths of many religions, both ancient and modern, share common elements. Widespread similarities between religious mythologies include the following:
an initial Paradise preceding ordinary historical time
the story of a god who undergoes death and resurrection (life-death-rebirth deity).
The mythical geography of many religions involves an axis mundi, or Cosmic Center.
Creation myths
Supreme deity
Hero's journey
The similarities between cultures and time periods can be useful, but it is usually not easy to combine beliefs and histories from different groups. Simplification of cultures and time periods by eliminating detailed data remain vulnerable or flimsy in this area of research.
Contrasts between different religious mythologies
Though there are similarities among most religious mythologies, there are also contrasts. Many mythologies focus on explanations of the universe, natural phenomena, or other themes of human existence, often ascribing agency to one or more deities or other supernatural forces. However, some religions have very few of this kind of story of cosmic explanation. For instance, the Buddhist parable of the arrow warns against such speculations as "[Is] the world eternal or not eternal? [Is] the soul different from the body? [Does] the enlightened exist after death or not?", viewing them as irrelevant to the goal of escaping suffering.
Academic views
In academia, the term "myth" often refers to stories whose culture regards them as true (as opposed to fictitious). Thus, many scholars will call a body of stories "mythology", leaving open the question of whether the stories are true or false. For example, in Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism, English professor Howard Schwartz writes, "the definition of 'mythology' offered here does not attempt to determine if biblical or subsequent narratives are true or false, i.e., historically accurate or not".
Since the beginning of modern philosophy and science in the 16th century, many Western intellectuals have seen myth as outdated. In fact, some argued that the Christian religion would be better off without mythology, or even that Christianity would be better off without religion:
[J. A. T.] Robinson argued in favor of "the detaching of the Christian doctrine of God from any necessary dependence on a 'supernaturalistic' worldview". He understood this as a prophetic aspect of the Church's ministry to the world. [...] At this time atheism was regarded as the Christian Gospel that should be preached to the world. J. J. Altizer, for example, maintained [this] boldly by stating, "Throughout its history Christian theology has been thwarted from reaching its intrinsic goal by its bondage to a transcendent, a sovereign, and an impassive God". [...] [Dietrich] Bonhoffer called persistently for "Religionless Christianity".
In the 20th century, many scholars have resisted this trend, defending myth from modern criticism. Mircea Eliade, a professor of the history of religions, declared that myth did not hold religion back, that myth was an essential foundation of religion, and that eliminating myth would eliminate a piece of the human psyche. Eliade approached myth sympathetically at a time when religious thinkers were trying to purge religion of its mythological elements:
Eliade wrote about "sky and sky gods" when Christian theology was shaken at its very foundations by the "death of God" theology. He spoke of "God up there" when theologians such as J. A. T. Robinson were busy with erasing the mythical language of [a] three-storied universe that underlies the early Christian thought and experience.
Similarly, Joseph Campbell believed that people could not understand their individual lives without mythology to aid them. By recalling the significance of old myths, he encouraged awareness of them. In responding to the interview question "How would you define mythology?", Joseph Campbell answered:
My favorite definition of mythology: other people's religion. My favorite definition of religion: misunderstanding of mythology.
Religious views
Most religions contain a body of traditional sacred stories that are believed to express profound truth. Some religious organizations and practitioners believe that some or all of their traditional stories are not only sacred and "true" but also historically accurate and divinely revealed and that calling such stories "myths" disrespects their special status. Other religious organizations and practitioners have no problem with categorizing their sacred stories as myths.
Opposition to categorizing all sacred stories as myths
Modern-day opposition
Some religious believers take offense when what they consider to be historical aspects of their faith are labeled as "myth". Such believers distinguish between religious fables or myths, on one hand, and those sacred narratives which are described by their tradition as being history or revelation, on the other. For instance, Catholic priest Father John A. Hardon insists that "Christianity is not mythology. What we believe in is not religious fantasies, no matter how pious." Evangelical Christian theologian Carl F. H. Henry insisted that "Judeo-Christian revelation has nothing in common with the category of myth".
The roots of the popular meaning of "myth"
Especially within Christianity, objection to the word "myth" rests on a historical basis. By the time of Christ, the Greco-Roman world had started to use the term "myth" (Greek muthos) to mean "fable, fiction, lie"; as a result, the early Christian theologians used "myth" in this sense. Thus, the derogatory meaning of the word "myth" is the traditional Christian meaning, and the expression "Christian mythology", as used in academic discourse, may offend Christians for this reason.
In addition, this early Christian use of the term "myth" passed into popular usage. Thus, when essential sacred mysteries and teachings are described as myth, in modern English, the word often still implies that it is "idle fancy, fiction, or falsehood". This description could be taken as a direct attack on religious belief, quite contrary to the meaning ostensibly intended by the academic use of the term. Further, in academic writing, though "myth" usually means a fundamental worldview story, even there it is occasionally ambiguous or clearly denotes "falsehood", as in the "Christ myth theory". The original term "mythos" (which has no pejorative connotation in English) may be a better word to distinguish the positive definition from the negative.
Non-opposition to categorizing sacred stories as myths
Modern day clergy and practitioners within some religious movements have no problem classifying the religion's sacred stories as "myths". They see the sacred texts as indeed containing religious truths, divinely inspired but delivered in the language of mankind. Some examples follow.
Christianity
J.R.R. Tolkien's love of myths and devout Catholic faith came together in his assertion that mythology is the divine echo of "the Truth". Tolkien wrote that myths held "fundamental things". He expressed these beliefs in his poem Mythopoeia circa 1931, which describes myth-making as an act of "sub-creation" within God's primary creation. The poem in part says creation is "myth-woven and elf-patterned":
Tolkien's opinion was adopted by another Christian writer, C. S. Lewis, in their conversations: "Tolkien explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was the true myth at the very heart of history and at the very root of reality." C. S. Lewis freely called the Christ story a "true myth", and he believed that even pagan myths express spiritual truths. In his opinion, the difference between the Christ story and pagan myths is that the Christ story is historically as well as spiritually true. Lewis writes,
The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the others are men's myths: i. e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call real things.
Another Christian writer, the Catholic priest Father Andrew Greeley, freely applies the term "myth" to Christianity. In his book Myths of Religion, he defends this terminology:
Many Christians have objected to my use of this word [myth] even when I define it specifically. They are terrified by a word which may even have a slight suggestion of fantasy. However, my usage is the one that is common among historians of religion, literary critics, and social scientists. It is a valuable and helpful usage; there is no other word which conveys what these scholarly traditions mean when they refer to myth. The Christian would be well advised to get over his fear of the word and appreciate how important a tool it can be for understanding the content of his faith.
At a "Consultation on the Relationship Between the Wesleyan Tradition
and the Natural Sciences" in Kansas City, Missouri, on October 19, 1991, Dennis Bratcher presented a discussion of the adaptation of Near Eastern mythical thought by the Israelites. Bratcher argued that the Old Testament absorbed Near Eastern pagan mythology (although he drew a sharp distinction between the literally-interpreted myths of the Near Eastern pagans and the "mythopoetic" use of imagery from pagan myths by the Hebrews). During this presentation, he gave the following disclaimer:
the term "myth" as used here does not mean "false" or "fiction". Even in my old and yellowed Webster's, "fiction" is the third meaning of the word. In its primary and more technical meaning "myth" refers to a story or group of stories that serve to explain how a particular society views their world.
Judaism
Some Jewish scholars, including Dov Noy, a professor of folklore at Hebrew University and founder of the Israel Folktale Archives, and Howard Schwartz, Jewish anthologist and English professor at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, have discussed traditional Jewish stories as "mythology".
Schwartz authored the book Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism. It consists of myths and belief statements excerpted from—and, in some cases, synthesized from a number of excerpts from—both Biblical and non-Biblical Jewish texts. According to Schwartz, the Jewish people continue to elaborate on, and compose additions to, their traditional mythology. In the book's introduction, Schwartz states that the word "myth", as used in the book, "is not offered to mean something that is not true, as in the current popular usage".
Neopaganism
Neopagans frequently refer to their sacred stories as "myths". Asatru, a modern-day revival of Germanic Paganism, holds "that the Eddas, Myths and Norse Sagas are the divinely inspired wisdom of [its] religion". Wicca, another Neopagan movement, also applies the term "mythology" to its stories.
Miscellaneous
The Dewey Decimal system covers religion in the 200 range, with books on "Religious mythology & social theology", a subset listed under 201.
See also
General
Comparative mythology
Creation myth
Esotericism
Magic and religion
Myth and ritual
Mythical theology
Theosophical Society
Mythology of world religions
Buddhist mythology
Christian mythology
Hindu mythology
Islamic mythology
Jewish mythology
References
Citations
Sources
"About Us". Ásatrú Utah. 30 December 2007 <http://asatruutah.org/about_us/>.
"Religion". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. File retrieved 8 June 2007 .
"Myth", Oxford English Dictionary ("OED"). File retrieved 2 June 2007. []
Bierlein, J.F. Parallel Myths. New York: Ballantine, 1994.
Bratcher, Dennis. "Speaking the Language of Canaan: The Old Testament and the Israelite Perception of the Physical World". The Voice. CRI/Voice, Institute. 30 December 2007 <http://www.cresourcei.org/langcaan.html#symbol>.
Brown, Dave. "Real Joy and True Myth". Dave Brown's C. S. Lewis Page. 31 December 2007 <https://web.archive.org/web/20091026222931/http://www.geocities.com/athens/forum/3505/LewisJoy.html>.
Buxton, Richard. The Complete World of Greek Mythology. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004.
"Myth", Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. File retrieved June 18, 2007.
Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. NY: Penguin, 1991.
Eliade, Mircea:
Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism". Trans. Philip Mairet. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.Myth and Reality. Trans. Willard R. Trask. NY: Harper & Row, 1968.Myths, Dreams and Mysteries. Trans. Philip Mairet. NY: Harper & Row, 1967.Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader. Ed. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty. Vol 2. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. NY Harper & Row, 1961.
Dundes, Alan. "Binary Opposition in Myth: The Propp/Levi-Strauss Debate in Retrospect". Western Folklore 56 (Winter, 1997): pp. 39–50.
Frazer, J. G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. NY: Macmillan, 1930.
Kirk, G. S. Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures. Berkeley: Cambridge UP, 1973.
Graves, Robert, "Introduction," New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (trans. Richard Aldington and Delano Ames), London: Hamlyn, 1968, pp. v-viii.
Menion, Michael. Tolkien Elves and Art, in J.R.R. Tolkien's Aesthetics. 2003/2004 (commentary on Mythopoeia the poem).
Mohler, Albert. "The Mythology of Star Wars: The Faith versus the Force". AlbertMohler.com. 30 December 2007 <http://www.albertmohler.com/commentary_read.php?cdate=2005-05-25>.
Muthuraj, Joseph. "The Significance of Mircea Eliade for Christian Theology". Religion Online. 15 January 2008 <https://web.archive.org/web/20080413053729/http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1901>. This article was previously published in Bangalore Theological Forum 33.2 (2001): 38-59.
Pearce, Joseph. "J.R.R. Tolkien: Truth and Myth". Catholic Education Research Center. 31 December 2007 <http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0107.html>.
Robinson, B. A. "Deism: About the God who went away". ReligiousTolerance.org. 30 December 2007 <http://www.religioustolerance.org/deism.htm>.
Segal, Robert A. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.
Schram, Peninnah. Review: Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism. University of Missouri – St. Louis. 30 December 2007 <http://www.umsl.edu/~schwartzh/bookworld.htm>.
Schwartz, Howard. Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.
"The Parable of the Arrow" (adapted from the Majjhima-nikaya). Staffordshire Learning Net. File retrieved 2 June 2007.
"The Wheel of the Year / the Sabbats". Wicca for the Rest of Us. 30 December 2007 <https://web.archive.org/web/20070701140411/http://wicca.timerift.net/sabbat.shtml>.
"What is Wicca?" Greywing's Wicca Basics. Manor House for Wiccan Studies. 30 December 2007 <https://www.webcitation.org/5knCD8Qro?url=http://www.geocities.com/athens/4177/wiccab.html#Wicca
Wood, Ralph C. "Biography of J.R.R. Tolkien". Leadership University. 31 December 2007 <http://www.leaderu.com/humanities/wood-biography.html>.
"Workshops and Talks". Deborah Lipp. Nightowls Webspace. 30 December 2007 <http://www.deborahlipp.com/workshop_talks.htm>.
Further reading
Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1949.
Girard, René, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, and Guy Lefort, "Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World". Stanford University Press, 1987
Goodwin, J., "Mystery Religions of the Ancient World". Thames & Hudson, 1981.
Heidel, Alexander, "The Epic of Gilgamesh and Old Testament parallels". University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Redford, Donald, "Similarity Between Egyptian and Biblical Texts—Indirect Influence?" Biblical Archaeology Review, 1987. (13[3]:18-32, May/June)
Wright L.M. Christianity, Astrology and Myth. USA: Oak Hill Free Press, 2002.
Robinson, B. A.,"Parallels between Christianity and ancient Pagan religions". Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, 2004.
External links
"Mythology". The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2005.
"Religion and mythology : Selected resources''". University of Wisconsin Library, 2004.
Occultopedia: The Occult and Unexplained Encyclopedia.
Internet Sacred Text Archive
Anthropology of religion
Mythography | 0.781668 | 0.986281 | 0.770944 |
Socratic method | The Socratic method (also known as method of Elenchus or Socratic debate) is a form of argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions.
In Plato's dialogue "Theaetetus", Socrates describes his method as a form of "midwifery" because it is employed to help his interlocutors develop their understanding in a way analogous to a child developing in the womb. The Socratic method begins with commonly held beliefs and scrutinizes them by way of questioning to determine their internal consistency and their coherence with other beliefs and so to bring everyone closer to the truth.
In modified forms, it is employed today in a variety of pedagogical contexts.
Development
In the second half of the 5th century BC, sophists were teachers who specialized in using the tools of philosophy and rhetoric to entertain, impress, or persuade an audience to accept the speaker's point of view. Socrates promoted an alternative method of teaching, which came to be called the Socratic method.
Socrates began to engage in such discussions with his fellow Athenians after his friend from youth, Chaerephon, visited the Oracle of Delphi, which asserted that no man in Greece was wiser than Socrates. Socrates saw this as a paradox, and began using the Socratic method to answer his conundrum. Diogenes Laërtius, however, wrote that Protagoras invented the "Socratic" method.
Plato famously formalized the Socratic elenctic style in prose—presenting Socrates as the curious questioner of some prominent Athenian interlocutor—in some of his early dialogues, such as Euthyphro and Ion, and the method is most commonly found within the so-called "Socratic dialogues", which generally portray Socrates engaging in the method and questioning his fellow citizens about moral and epistemological issues. But in his later dialogues, such as Theaetetus or Sophist, Plato had a different method to philosophical discussions, namely dialectic.
Method
Elenchus is the central technique of the Socratic method. The Latin form (plural ) is used in English as the technical philosophical term. The most common adjectival form in English is ; and are also current. This was also very important in Plato's early dialogues.
Socrates (as depicted by Plato) generally applied his method of examination to concepts such as the virtues of piety, wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice. Such an examination challenged the implicit moral beliefs of the interlocutors, bringing out inadequacies and inconsistencies in their beliefs, and usually resulting in aporia. In view of such inadequacies, Socrates himself professed ignorance. Socrates said that his awareness of his ignorance made him wiser than those who, though ignorant, still claimed knowledge. This claim was based on a reported Delphic oracular pronouncement that no man was wiser than Socrates. While this belief seems paradoxical at first glance, in fact it allowed Socrates to discover his own errors.
Socrates used this claim of wisdom as the basis of moral exhortation. He claimed that the chief goodness consists in the caring of the soul concerned with moral truth and moral understanding, that "wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state", and that "life without examination [dialogue] is not worth living".
Socrates rarely used the method to actually develop consistent theories, and he even made frequent use of creative myths and allegories. The Parmenides dialogue shows Parmenides using the Socratic method to point out the flaws in the Platonic theory of forms, as presented by Socrates; it is not the only dialogue in which theories normally expounded by Plato's Socrates are broken down through dialectic. Instead of arriving at answers, the method breaks down the theories we hold, to go "beyond" the axioms and postulates we take for granted. Therefore, myth and the Socratic method are not meant by Plato to be incompatible; they have different purposes, and are often described as the "left hand" and "right hand" paths to good and wisdom.
Scholarly debate
In Plato's early dialogues, the elenchus is the technique Socrates uses to investigate, for example, the nature or definition of ethical concepts such as justice or virtue. According to Gregory Vlastos, it has the following steps:
Socrates' interlocutor asserts a thesis, for example "Courage is endurance of the soul".
Socrates decides whether the thesis is false and targets for refutation.
Socrates secures his interlocutor's agreement to further premises, for example "Courage is a fine thing" and "Ignorant endurance is not a fine thing".
Socrates then argues, and the interlocutor agrees, these further premises imply the contrary of the original thesis; in this case, it leads to: "courage is not endurance of the soul".
Socrates then claims he has shown his interlocutor's thesis is false and its negation is true.
One elenctic examination can lead to a new, more refined, examination of the concept being considered, in this case it invites an examination of the claim: "Courage is endurance of the soul". Most Socratic inquiries consist of a series of and typically end in puzzlement known as .
Michael Frede points out Vlastos' conclusion in step No. 5 above makes nonsense of the aporetic nature of the early dialogues. Having shown a proposed thesis is false is insufficient to conclude some other competing thesis must be true. Rather, the interlocutors have reached aporia, an improved state of still not knowing what to say about the subject under discussion.
The exact nature of the elenchus is subject to a great deal of debate, in particular concerning whether it is a positive method, leading to knowledge, or a negative method used solely to refute false claims to knowledge. Some qualitative research shows that the use of the Socratic method within a traditional Yeshiva education setting helps students succeed in law school, although it remains an open question as to whether that relationship is causal or merely correlative.
Yet, W. K. C. Guthrie in The Greek Philosophers sees it as an error to regard the Socratic method as a means by which one seeks the answer to a problem, or knowledge. Guthrie claims that the Socratic method actually aims to demonstrate one's ignorance. Socrates, unlike the Sophists, did believe that knowledge was possible, but believed that the first step to knowledge was recognition of one's ignorance. Guthrie writes, "[Socrates] was accustomed to say that he did not himself know anything, and that the only way in which he was wiser than other men was that he was conscious of his own ignorance, while they were not. The essence of the Socratic method is to convince the interlocutor that whereas he thought he knew something, in fact he does not."
Modern applications
Socratic seminar
A Socratic seminar (also known as a Socratic circle) is a pedagogical approach based on the Socratic method and uses a dialogic approach to understand information in a text. Its systematic procedure is used to examine a text through questions and answers founded on the beliefs that all new knowledge is connected to prior knowledge, that all thinking comes from asking questions, and that asking one question should lead to asking further questions. A Socratic seminar is not a debate. The goal of this activity is to have participants work together to construct meaning and arrive at an answer, not for one student or one group to "win the argument".
This approach is based on the belief that participants seek and gain deeper understanding of concepts in the text through thoughtful dialogue rather than memorizing information that has been provided for them. While Socratic seminars can differ in structure, and even in name, they typically involve a passage of text that students must read beforehand and facilitate dialogue. Sometimes, a facilitator will structure two concentric circles of students: an outer circle and an inner circle. The inner circle focuses on exploring and analysing the text through the act of questioning and answering. During this phase, the outer circle remains silent. Students in the outer circle are much like scientific observers watching and listening to the conversation of the inner circle. When the text has been fully discussed and the inner circle is finished talking, the outer circle provides feedback on the dialogue that took place. This process alternates with the inner circle students going to the outer circle for the next meeting and vice versa. The length of this process varies depending on the text used for the discussion. The teacher may decide to alternate groups within one meeting, or they may alternate at each separate meeting.
The most significant difference between this activity and most typical classroom activities involves the role of the teacher. In Socratic seminar, the students lead the discussion and questioning. The teacher's role is to ensure the discussion advances regardless of the particular direction the discussion takes.
Various approaches to Socratic seminar
Teachers use Socratic seminar in different ways. The structure it takes may look different in each classroom. While this is not an exhaustive list, teachers may use one of the following structures to administer Socratic seminar:
Inner/outer circle or fishbowl: Students need to be arranged in inner and outer circles. The inner circle engages in discussion about the text. The outer circle observes the inner circle, while taking notes. The outer circle shares their observations and questions the inner circle with guidance from the teacher/facilitator. Students use constructive criticism as opposed to making judgements. The students on the outside keep track of topics they would like to discuss as part of the debrief. Participants in the outer circle can use an observation checklist or notes form to monitor the participants in the inner circle. These tools will provide structure for listening and give the outside members specific details to discuss later in the seminar. The teacher may also sit in the circle but at the same height as the students.
Triad: Students are arranged so that each participant (called a "pilot") in the inner circle has two "co-pilots" sitting behind them on either side. Pilots are the speakers because they are in the inner circle; co-pilots are in the outer circle and only speak during consultation. The seminar proceeds as any other seminar. At a point in the seminar, the facilitator pauses the discussion and instructs the triad to talk to each other. Conversation will be about topics that need more in-depth discussion or a question posed by the leader. Sometimes triads will be asked by the facilitator to come up with a new question. Any time during a triad conversation, group members can switch seats and one of the co-pilots can sit in the pilot's seat. Only during that time is the switching of seats allowed. This structure allows for students to speak, who may not yet have the confidence to speak in the large group. This type of seminar involves all students instead of just the students in the inner and outer circles.
Simultaneous seminars: Students are arranged in multiple small groups and placed as far as possible from each other. Following the guidelines of the Socratic seminar, students engage in small group discussions. Simultaneous seminars are typically done with experienced students who need little guidance and can engage in a discussion without assistance from a teacher/facilitator. According to the literature, this type of seminar is beneficial for teachers who want students to explore a variety of texts around a main issue or topic. Each small group may have a different text to read/view and discuss. A larger Socratic seminar can then occur as a discussion about how each text corresponds with one another. Simultaneous Seminars can also be used for a particularly difficult text. Students can work through different issues and key passages from the text.
No matter what structure the teacher employs, the basic premise of the seminar/circles is to turn partial control and direction of the classroom over to the students. The seminars encourage students to work together, creating meaning from the text and to stay away from trying to find a correct interpretation. The emphasis is on critical and creative thinking.
Text selection
Socratic seminar texts
A Socratic seminar text is a tangible document that creates a thought-provoking discussion.
The text ought to be appropriate for the participants' current level of intellectual and social development. It provides the anchor for dialogue whereby the facilitator can bring the participants back to the text if they begin to digress. Furthermore, the seminar text enables the participants to create a level playing field – ensuring that the dialogical tone within the classroom remains consistent and pure to the subject or topic at hand. Some practitioners argue that "texts" do not have to be confined to printed texts, but can include artifacts such as objects, physical spaces, and the like.
Pertinent elements of an effective Socratic text
Socratic seminar texts are able to challenge participants' thinking skills by having these characteristics:
Ideas and values: The text must introduce ideas and values that are complex and difficult to summarize. Powerful discussions arise from personal connections to abstract ideas and from implications to personal values.
Complexity and challenge: The text must be rich in ideas and complexity and open to interpretation. Ideally it should require multiple readings, but should be neither far above the participants' intellectual level nor very long.
Relevance to participants' curriculum: An effective text has identifiable themes that are recognizable and pertinent to the lives of the participants. Themes in the text should relate to the curriculum.
Ambiguity: The text must be approachable from a variety of different perspectives, including perspectives that seem mutually exclusive, thus provoking critical thinking and raising important questions. The absence of right and wrong answers promotes a variety of discussion and encourages individual contributions.
Two different ways to select a text
Socratic texts can be divided into two main categories:
Print texts (e.g., short stories, poems, and essays) and non-print texts (e.g. photographs, sculptures, and maps); and
Subject area, which can draw from print or non-print artifacts. As examples, language arts can be approached through poems, history through written or oral historical speeches, science through policies on environmental issues, math through mathematical proofs, health through nutrition labels, and physical education through fitness guidelines.
Questioning methods
Socratic seminars are based upon the interaction of peers. The focus is to explore multiple perspectives on a given issue or topic. Socratic questioning is used to help students apply the activity to their learning. The pedagogy of Socratic questions is open-ended, focusing on broad, general ideas rather than specific, factual information. The questioning technique emphasizes a level of questioning and thinking where there is no single right answer.
Socratic seminars generally start with an open-ended question proposed either by the leader or by another participant. There is no designated first speaker; as individuals participate in Socratic dialogue, they gain experience that enables them to be effective in this role of initial questioner.
The leader keeps the topic focused by asking a variety of questions about the text itself, as well as questions to help clarify positions when arguments become confused. The leader also seeks to coax reluctant participants into the discussion, and to limit contributions from those who tend to dominate. She or he prompts participants to elaborate on their responses and to build on what others have said. The leader guides participants to deepen, clarify, and paraphrase, and to synthesize a variety of different views.
The participants share the responsibility with the leader to maintain the quality of the Socratic circle. They listen actively to respond effectively to what others have contributed. This teaches the participants to think and speak persuasively using the discussion to support their position. Participants must demonstrate respect for different ideas, thoughts and values, and must not interrupt each other.
Questions can be created individually or in small groups. All participants are given the opportunity to take part in the discussion. Socratic circles specify three types of questions to prepare:
Opening questions generate discussion at the beginning of the seminar in order to elicit dominant themes.
Guiding questions help deepen and elaborate the discussion, keeping contributions on topic and encouraging a positive atmosphere and consideration for others.
Closing questions lead participants to summarize their thoughts and learning and personalize what they've discussed.
Challenges and disadvantages
Scholars such as Peter Boghossian suggest that although the method improves creative and critical thinking, there is a flip side to the method. He states that the teachers who use this method wait for the students to make mistakes, thus creating negative feelings in the class, exposing the student to possible ridicule and humiliation.
Some have countered this thought by stating that the humiliation and ridicule is not caused by the method, rather it is due to the lack of knowledge of the student. Boghossian mentions that even though the questions may be perplexing, they are not originally meant for it, in fact such questions provoke the students and can be countered by employing counterexamples.
Psychotherapy
The Socratic method, in the form of Socratic questioning, has been adapted for psychotherapy, most prominently in classical Adlerian psychotherapy, logotherapy, rational emotive behavior therapy, cognitive therapy and reality therapy. It can be used to clarify meaning, feeling, and consequences, as well as to gradually unfold insight, or explore alternative actions.
The Socratic method has also recently inspired a new form of applied philosophy: Socratic dialogue, also called philosophical counseling. In Europe Gerd B. Achenbach is probably the best known practitioner, and Michel Weber has also proposed another variant of the practice.
See also
Devil's advocate
Harkness tablea teaching method based on the Socratic method
Marva Collins
Pedagogy
The Paper Chase1973 film based on a 1971 novel of the same name, dramatizing the use of the Socratic method in law school classes
Socrates Cafe
Socratic questioning
Socratic irony
References
External links
Robinson, Richard, Plato's Earlier Dialectic, 2nd edition (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1953).
Ch. 2: Elenchus;
Ch. 3: Elenchus: Direct and Indirect
Philosopher.org – 'Tips on Starting your own Socrates Cafe', Christopher Phillips, Cecilia Phillips
Socraticmethod.net Socratic Method Research Portal
How to Use the Socratic Method
UChicago.edu – 'The Socratic Method' by Elizabeth Garrett (1998)
Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling, an example from Rick Garlikov
Project Gutenberg: Works by Plato
Project Gutenberg: Works by Xenophon (includes some Socratic works)
Project Gutenberg: Works by Cicero (includes some works in the "Socratic dialogue" format)
The Socratic Club
Socratic and Scientific Method
Method
Debate types
Education in ancient Greece
Educational psychology
History of education
Dialectic
Inquiry
Philosophical methodology
Group problem solving methods
Rhetoric | 0.771643 | 0.999048 | 0.770908 |
Anthropocentrism | Anthropocentrism (; ) is the belief that human beings are the central or most important entity on the planet. The term can be used interchangeably with humanocentrism, and some refer to the concept as human supremacy or human exceptionalism. From an anthropocentric perspective, humankind is seen as separate from nature and superior to it, and other entities (animals, plants, minerals, etc.) are viewed as resources for humans to use.
It is possible to distinguish between at least three types of anthropocentrism: perceptual anthropocentrism (which "characterizes paradigms informed by sense-data from human sensory organs"); descriptive anthropocentrism (which "characterizes paradigms that begin from, center upon, or are ordered around Homo sapiens / ‘the human'"); and normative anthropocentrism (which "characterizes paradigms that make assumptions or assertions about the superiority of Homo sapiens, its capacities, the primacy of its values, [or] its position in the universe").
Anthropocentrism tends to interpret the world in terms of human values and experiences. It is considered to be profoundly embedded in many modern human cultures and conscious acts. It is a major concept in the field of environmental ethics and environmental philosophy, where it is often considered to be the root cause of problems created by human action within the ecosphere.
However, many proponents of anthropocentrism state that this is not necessarily the case: they argue that a sound long-term view acknowledges that the global environment must be made continually suitable for humans and that the real issue is shallow anthropocentrism.
Environmental philosophy
Some environmental philosophers have argued that anthropocentrism is a core part of a perceived human drive to dominate or "master" the Earth. Anthropocentrism is believed by some to be the central problematic concept in environmental philosophy, where it is used to draw attention to claims of a systematic bias in traditional Western attitudes to the non-human world that shapes humans' sense of self and identities. Val Plumwood argued that anthropocentrism plays an analogous role in green theory to androcentrism in feminist theory and ethnocentrism in anti-racist theory. Plumwood called human-centredness "anthrocentrism" to emphasise this parallel.
One of the first extended philosophical essays addressing environmental ethics, John Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature has been criticised by defenders of deep ecology because of its anthropocentrism, often claimed to be constitutive of traditional Western moral thought. Indeed, defenders of anthropocentrism concerned with the ecological crisis contend that the maintenance of a healthy, sustainable environment is necessary for human well-being as opposed to for its own sake. According to William Grey, the problem with a "shallow" viewpoint is not that it is human-centred: "What's wrong with shallow views is not their concern about the well-being of humans, but that they do not really consider enough in what that well-being consists. According to this view, we need to develop an enriched, fortified anthropocentric notion of human interest to replace the dominant short-term, sectional and self-regarding conception." In turn, Plumwood in Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason argued that Grey's anthropocentrism is inadequate.
Many devoted environmentalists encompass a somewhat anthropocentric-based philosophical view supporting the fact that they will argue in favor of saving the environment for the sake of human populations. Grey writes: "We should be concerned to promote a rich, diverse, and vibrant biosphere. Human flourishing may certainly be included as a legitimate part of such a flourishing." Such a concern for human flourishing amidst the flourishing of life as a whole, however, is said to be indistinguishable from that of deep ecology and biocentrism, which has been proposed as both an antithesis of anthropocentrism and as a generalised form of anthropocentrism.
Judaeo–Christian traditions
In the 1985 CBC series "A Planet For the Taking", David Suzuki explored the Old Testament roots of anthropocentrism and how it shaped human views of non-human animals. Some Christian proponents of anthropocentrism base their belief on the Bible, such as the verse 1:26 in the Book of Genesis:
The use of the word "dominion" in the Genesis has been used to justify an anthropocentric worldview, but recently some have found it controversial, viewing it as possibly a mistranslation from the Hebrew. However an argument can be made that the Bible actually places all the importance on God as creator, and humans as merely another part of creation.
Moses Maimonides, a Torah scholar who lived in the twelfth century AD, was renowned for his staunch opposition to anthropocentrism. He referred to humans as "just a drop in the bucket" and asserted that "humans are not the axis of the world". He also claimed that anthropocentric thinking is what leads humans to believe in the existence of evil things in nature. According to Rabbi Norman Lamm, Moses Maimonides "refuted the exaggerated ideas about the importance of man and urged us to abandon these fantasies.
Catholic social teaching sees the pre-eminence of human beings over the rest of creation in terms of service rather than domination. Pope Francis, in his 2015 encyclical letter Laudato si' , notes that "an obsession with denying any pre-eminence to the human person" endangers the concern which should be shown to protecting and upholding the welfare of all people, which he argues should rank alongside the "care for our common home" which is the subject of his letter. In the same text he acknowledges that "a mistaken understanding" of Christian belief "has at times led us to justify mistreating nature, to exercise tyranny over creation": in such actions, Christian believers have "not [been] faithful to the treasures of wisdom which we have been called to protect and preserve. In his follow-up exhortation, Laudate Deum (2023) he refers to a preferable understanding of "the unique and central value of the human being amid the marvellous concert of all God's creatures" as a "situated anthropocentrism".
Human rights
Anthropocentrism is the grounding for some naturalistic concepts of human rights. Defenders of anthropocentrism argue that it is the necessary fundamental premise to defend universal human rights, since what matters morally is simply being human. For example, noted philosopher Mortimer J. Adler wrote, "Those who oppose injurious discrimination on the moral ground that all human beings, being equal in their humanity, should be treated equally in all those respects that concern their common humanity, would have no solid basis in fact to support their normative principle." Adler is stating here that denying what is now called human exceptionalism could lead to tyranny, writing that if humans ever came to believe that they do not possess a unique moral status, the intellectual foundation of their liberties collapses: "Why, then, should not groups of superior men be able to justify their enslavement, exploitation, or even genocide of inferior human groups on factual and moral grounds akin to those we now rely on to justify our treatment of the animals we harness as beasts of burden, that we butcher for food and clothing, or that we destroy as disease-bearing pests or as dangerous predators?"
Author and anthropocentrism defender Wesley J. Smith from the Discovery Institute has written that human exceptionalism is what gives rise to human duties to each other, the natural world, and to treat animals humanely. Writing in A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy, a critique of animal rights ideology, "Because we are unquestionably a unique species—the only species capable of even contemplating ethical issues and assuming responsibilities—we uniquely are capable of apprehending the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, proper and improper conduct toward animals. Or to put it more succinctly, if being human isn't what requires us to treat animals humanely, what in the world does?"
Moral status of animals
Anthropocentrism is closely related to the notion of speciecism, defined by Richard D. Ryder as a "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species". One of the earliest of these critics was J. Howard Moore, who in The Universal Kinship (1906) argued that Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) "sealed the doom" of anthropocentrism.
While humans cognition is relatively advanced, many traits traditionally used to justify humanity exceptionalism (such as rationality, emotional complexity and social bonds) are not unique to humans. Research in ethology has shown that non-human animals, such as primates, elephants, and cetaceans, also demonstrate complex social structures, emotional depth, and problem-solving abilities. This challenges the claim that humans possess qualities absent in other animals, and which would justify denying moral status to them.
Animal welfare proponents attribute moral consideration to all sentient animals, proportional to their ability to have positive or negative mental experiences. It is notably associated with the ethical theory of utilitarianism, which aims to maximize well-being. It is notably defended by Peter Singer. According to David Pearce, "other things being equal, equally strong interests should count equally." Jeremy Bentham is also known for raising early the issue of animal welfare, arguing that "the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?". Animal welfare proponents can in theory accept animal exploitation if the benefits outweigh the harms. But in practice, they generally consider that intensive animal farming causes a massive amount of suffering that outweighs the relatively minor benefit that humans get from consuming animals.
Animal rights proponents argue that all animals have inherent rights, similar to human rights, and should not be used as means to human ends. Unlike animal welfare advocates, who focus on minimizing suffering, animal rights supporters often call for the total abolition of practices that exploit animals, such as intensive animal farming, animal testing, and hunting. Prominent figures like Tom Regan argue that animals are "subjects of a life" with inherent value, deserving moral consideration regardless of the potential benefits humans may derive from using them.
Cognitive psychology
In cognitive psychology, the term anthropocentric thinking has been defined as "the tendency to reason about unfamiliar biological species or processes by analogy to humans." Reasoning by analogy is an attractive thinking strategy, and it can be tempting to apply one's own experience of being human to other biological systems. For example, because death is commonly felt to be undesirable, it may be tempting to form the misconception that death at a cellular level or elsewhere in nature is similarly undesirable (whereas in reality programmed cell death is an essential physiological phenomenon, and ecosystems also rely on death). Conversely, anthropocentric thinking can also lead people to underattribute human characteristics to other organisms. For instance, it may be tempting to wrongly assume that an animal that is very different from humans, such as an insect, will not share particular biological characteristics, such as reproduction or blood circulation.
Anthropocentric thinking has predominantly been studied in young children (mostly up to the age of 10) by developmental psychologists interested in its relevance to biology education. Children as young as 6 have been found to attribute human characteristics to species unfamiliar to them (in Japan), such as rabbits, grasshoppers or tulips. Although relatively little is known about its persistence at a later age, evidence exists that this pattern of human exceptionalist thinking can continue through young adulthood at least, even among students who have been increasingly educated in biology.
The notion that anthropocentric thinking is an innate human characteristic has been challenged by study of American children raised in urban environments, among whom it appears to emerge between the ages of 3 and 5 years as an acquired perspective. Children's recourse to anthropocentric thinking seems to vary with their experience of nature, and cultural assumptions about the place of humans in the natural world. For example, whereas young children who kept goldfish were found to think of frogs as being more goldfish-like, other children tended to think of frogs in terms of humans. More generally, children raised in rural environments appear to use anthropocentric thinking less than their urban counterparts because of their greater familiarity with different species of animals and plants. Studies involving children from some of the indigenous peoples of the Americas have found little use of anthropocentric thinking. Study of children among the Wichí people in South America showed a tendency to think of living organisms in terms of their perceived taxonomic similarities, ecological considerations, and animistic traditions, resulting in a much less anthropocentric view of the natural world than is experienced by many children in Western societies.
In popular culture
In fiction from all eras and societies, there is fiction depicting the actions of humans to ride, eat, milk, and otherwise treat (non-human) animals as inferior. There are occasional fictional exceptions, such as talking animals as aberrations to the rule distinguishing people from animals.
In science fiction, humanocentrism is the idea that humans, as both beings and as a species, are the superior sentients. Essentially the equivalent of racial supremacy on a galactic scale, it entails intolerant discrimination against sentient non-humans, much like race supremacists discriminate against those not of their race. A prime example of this concept is utilized as a story element for the Mass Effect series. After humanity's first contact results in a brief war, many humans in the series develop suspicious or even hostile attitudes towards the game's various alien races. By the time of the first game, which takes place several decades after the war, many humans still retain such sentiments in addition to forming 'pro-human' organizations.
This idea is countered by anti-humanism. At times, this ideal also includes fear of and superiority over strong AIs and cyborgs, downplaying the ideas of integration, cybernetic revolts, machine rule and Tilden's Laws of Robotics.
Mark Twain mocked the belief in human supremacy in Letters from the Earth (written c. 1909, published 1962).
The Planet of the Apes franchise focuses on the analogy of apes becoming the dominant species in society and the fall of humans (see also human extinction). In the 1968 film, Taylor, a human states "take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!". In the 2001 film, this is contrasted with Attar (a gorilla)'s quote "take your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty human!". This links in with allusions that in becoming the dominant species apes are becoming more like humans (anthropomorphism). In the film Battle for the Planet of the Apes, Virgil, an orangutan states "ape has never killed ape, let alone an ape child. Aldo has killed an ape child. The branch did not break. It was cut with a sword." in reference to planned murder; a stereotypical human concept. Additionally, in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar states "I always think...ape better than human. I see now...how much like them we are."
In George Orwell's novel Animal Farm, this theme of anthropocentrism is also present. Whereas originally the animals planned for liberation from humans and animal equality, as evident from the "seven commandments" such as "whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy", "Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend", "All animals are equal"; the pigs would later abridge the commandments with statements such as "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", and "Four legs good, two legs better."
The 2012 documentary The Superior Human? systematically analyzes anthropocentrism and concludes that value is fundamentally an opinion, and since life forms naturally value their own traits, most humans are misled to believe that they are actually more valuable than other species. This natural bias, according to the film, combined with a received sense of comfort and an excuse for exploitation of non-humans cause anthropocentrism to remain in society.
In his 2009 book Eating Animals, Jonathan Foer describes anthropocentrism as "The conviction that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, the appropriate yardstick by which to measure the lives of other animals, and the rightful owners of everything that lives."
See also
References
Further reading
Bertalanffy, Ludwig Von (1993) General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications pp. 239–48
Boddice, Rob (ed.) (2011) Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments Leiden and Boston: Brill
Mylius, Ben (2018). "Three Types of Anthropocentrism". Environmental Philosophy 15 (2):159-194.
White, Lynn Townsend, Jr, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis", Science, Vol 155 (Number 3767), 10 March 1967, pp 1203–1207
Human supremacism: why are animal rights activists still the "orphans of the left"?. New Statesman America. April 30, 2019.
Human Supremacy: The Source of All Environmental Crises? Psychology Today December 25, 2021
Animal ethics
Environmental ethics
Posthumanism
Philosophical theories | 0.773297 | 0.996817 | 0.770835 |
Christian worldview | Christian worldview (also called biblical worldview) refers to the framework of ideas and beliefs through which a Christian individual, group or culture interprets the world and interacts with it. Various denominations of Christianity have differing worldviews on some issues based on biblical interpretation, but many thematic elements are commonly agreed-upon within the Christian worldview.
Definition
According to Leo Apostel, a worldview is an ontology, or a descriptive model of the world. It should comprise these six elements:
An explanation of the world
An eschatology, answering the question "where are we heading?"
Values, answers to ethical questions: "What should we do?" In this context, "What would Jesus do?"
A praxeology, or methodology, or theory of action.: "How should we attain our goals?"
An epistemology, or theory of knowledge. "What is true and false?" (See, for example John 18:38)
An etiology. A constructed world-view should contain an account of its own "building blocks," its origins and construction.
Differing Christian worldviews
Different denominations of Christianity have varying worldviews. There are varieties of particulars within the Christian worldview, and disputes of the meaning of concepts in a Christian worldview. Certain thematic elements are common within the Christian worldview. For instance, Northrop Frye indicated as the central clusters of the system of metaphors in the Bible – mountain, garden, and cave. A similar thematic representation of Christian worldview in the Reformed tradition has been formulated as Creation, Fall, Redemption and Consummation.
The symbolic term Christian worldview has been called a "defining marker of American evangelical culture."
Worldview vs. doctrine
The U.S. use of the term worldview in Christian rhetoric can be traced to the evangelical Reformed philosopher H. Evan Runner of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Runner used the term in his evangelical Reformed community in North America, promoting the worldview concept from a philosophical concept to a synonym for doctrine.
Key people and literary works within Protestant evangelicalism
William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland. Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. IVP Academic (2003).
Gordon H. Clark. A Christian View of Men and Things: An Introduction to Philosophy. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans (1951); reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker (1981).
Herman Dooyeweerd. A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Jordan Station, Ont.: Paideia Press (1984) online summary with excerpts
Carl F. H. Henry. God, Revelation, and Authority. Waco, TX: Word (1976).
Abraham Kuyper. Lectures on Calvinism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans (1931) online version
James Orr. The Christian View of God and the World. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons (1893) online version
Francis Schaeffer. The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview. Wheaton, IL: Crossway (1982).
C. Fred Smith. "Developing a Biblical Worldview: Seeing Things God's Way." Nashville, TN: B and H Academic (2015)
See also
Christianese
Notes
Other relevant sources
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume II (1981) – sections on Worldviews and Worldpictures
Arthur F. Holmes, All Truth Is God's Truth. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans (1977).
David Naugle, Worldview: A History of the Concept. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans (2002)
Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books (2004)
Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning Broadman and Homan Publishing Group (2010),
Quine, David Answers for Difficult Days: Surviving the Storm of Secularism. Cornerstone Curriculum Project (1998, 2014)
James Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press (1997)
Ninian Smart, Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Belief (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000)
Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics For A Reformational Worldview. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans (1985).
Leslie Stevenson, David L. Haberman, "Ten Theories of Human Nature" Oxford University Press (2004) – book examines each one of four points—the nature of the universe, the nature of humanity, the diagnosis of the ills of humanity, and the proposed cure for these problems. Good introduction to where main worldviews originate and how to begin to think about them in context of human nature.
Graham Cole, "Christians have a Worldview?"
External links
McKendree R. Langley, "Abraham Kuyper: A Christian Worldview." From the Orthodox Presbyterian Church web site, retrieved September 16, 2006.
"Worldviews" Website portal dedicated to Christian Worldview and comparative worldviews.
Christian belief and doctrine
Christian terminology | 0.793369 | 0.971476 | 0.770739 |
Identity (social science) | Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, and/or expressions that characterize a person or a group.
Identity emerges during childhood as children start to comprehend their self-concept, and it remains a consistent aspect throughout different stages of life. Identity is shaped by social and cultural factors and how others perceive and acknowledge one's characteristics. The etymology of the term "identity" from the Latin noun identitas emphasizes an individual's mental image of themselves and their "sameness with others". Identity encompasses various aspects such as occupational, religious, national, ethnic or racial, gender, educational, generational, and political identities, among others.
Identity serves multiple functions, acting as a "self-regulatory structure" that provides meaning, direction, and a sense of self-control. It fosters internal harmony and serves as a behavioral compass, enabling individuals to orient themselves towards the future and establish long-term goals. As an active process, it profoundly influences an individual's capacity to adapt to life events and achieve a state of well-being. However, identity originates from traits or attributes that individuals may have little or no control over, such as their family background or ethnicity.
In sociology, emphasis is placed by sociologists on collective identity, in which an individual's identity is strongly associated with role-behavior or the collection of group memberships that define them. According to Peter Burke, "Identities tell us who we are and they announce to others who we are." Identities subsequently guide behavior, leading "fathers" to behave like "fathers" and "nurses" to act like "nurses".
In psychology, the term "identity" is most commonly used to describe personal identity, or the distinctive qualities or traits that make an individual unique. Identities are strongly associated with self-concept, self-image (one's mental model of oneself), self-esteem, and individuality. Individuals' identities are situated, but also contextual, situationally adaptive and changing. Despite their fluid character, identities often feel as if they are stable ubiquitous categories defining an individual, because of their grounding in the sense of personal identity (the sense of being a continuous and persistent self).
Usage
Mark Mazower noted in 1998: "At some point in the 1970s this term ["identity"] was borrowed from social psychology and applied with abandon to societies, nations and groups."
In psychology
Erik Erikson (1902–94) became one of the earliest psychologists to take an explicit interest in identity. An essential feature of Erikson's theory of psychosocial development was the idea of the ego identity (often referred to as the self), which is described as an individual's personal sense of continuity. He suggested that people can attain this feeling throughout their lives as they develop and is meant to be an ongoing process. The ego-identity consists of two main features: one's personal characteristics and development, and the culmination of social and cultural factors and roles that impact one's identity. In Erikson's theory, he describes eight distinct stages across the lifespan that are each characterized by a conflict between the inner, personal world and the outer, social world of an individual. Erikson identified the conflict of identity as occurring primarily during adolescence and described potential outcomes that depend on how one deals with this conflict. Those who do not manage a resynthesis of childhood identifications are seen as being in a state of 'identity diffusion' whereas those who retain their given identities unquestioned have 'foreclosed' identities. On some readings of Erikson, the development of a strong ego identity, along with the proper integration into a stable society and culture, lead to a stronger sense of identity in general. Accordingly, a deficiency in either of these factors may increase the chance of an identity crisis or confusion.
The "Neo-Eriksonian" identity status paradigm emerged in 1966, driven largely by the work of James Marcia. This model focuses on the concepts of exploration and commitment. The central idea is that an individual's sense of identity is determined in large part by the degrees to which a person has made certain explorations and the extent to which they have commitments to those explorations or a particular identity. A person may display either relative weakness or strength in terms of both exploration and commitments. When assigned categories, there were four possible results: identity diffusion, identity foreclosure, identity moratorium, and identity achievement. Diffusion is when a person avoids or refuses both exploration and making a commitment. Foreclosure occurs when a person does make a commitment to a particular identity but neglected to explore other options. Identity moratorium is when a person avoids or postpones making a commitment but is still actively exploring their options and different identities. Lastly, identity achievement is when a person has both explored many possibilities and has committed to their identity.
Although the self is distinct from identity, the literature of self-psychology can offer some insight into how identity is maintained. From the vantage point of self-psychology, there are two areas of interest: the processes by which a self is formed (the "I"), and the actual content of the schemata which compose the self-concept (the "Me"). In the latter field, theorists have shown interest in relating the self-concept to self-esteem, the differences between complex and simple ways of organizing self-knowledge, and the links between those organizing principles and the processing of information.
Weinreich's identity variant similarly includes the categories of identity diffusion, foreclosure and crisis, but with a somewhat different emphasis. Here, with respect to identity diffusion for example, an optimal level is interpreted as the norm, as it is unrealistic to expect an individual to resolve all their conflicted identifications with others; therefore we should be alert to individuals with levels which are much higher or lower than the norm – highly diffused individuals are classified as diffused, and those with low levels as foreclosed or defensive. Weinreich applies the identity variant in a framework which also allows for the transition from one to another by way of biographical experiences and resolution of conflicted identifications situated in various contexts – for example, an adolescent going through family break-up may be in one state, whereas later in a stable marriage with a secure professional role may be in another. Hence, though there is continuity, there is also development and change.
Laing's definition of identity closely follows Erikson's, in emphasising the past, present and future components of the experienced self. He also develops the concept of the "metaperspective of self", i.e. the self's perception of the other's view of self, which has been found to be extremely important in clinical contexts such as anorexia nervosa. Harré also conceptualises components of self/identity – the "person" (the unique being I am to myself and others) along with aspects of self (including a totality of attributes including beliefs about one's characteristics including life history), and the personal characteristics displayed to others.
In social psychology
At a general level, self-psychology explores the question of how the personal self relates to the social environment. Theories in "psychological" social psychology explain an individual's actions in a group in terms of mental events and states. However, some "sociological" social psychology theories go further by dealing with the issue of identity at the level of both individual cognition and collective behavior.
Collective identity
Many people gain a sense of positive self-esteem from their identity groups, which furthers a sense of community and belonging. Another issue that researchers have attempted to address is the question of why people engage in discrimination, i.e., why they tend to favour those they consider a part of their "in-group" over those considered to be outsiders. Both questions have been given extensive attention by researchers working in the social identity tradition. For example, in work relating to social identity theory, it has been shown that merely crafting cognitive distinction between in- and out-groups can lead to subtle effects on people's evaluations of others.
Different social situations also compel people to attach themselves to different self-identities which may cause some to feel marginalized, switch between different groups and self-identifications, or reinterpret certain identity components. These different selves lead to constructed images dichotomized between what people want to be (the ideal self) and how others see them (the limited self). Educational background and occupational status and roles significantly influence identity formation in this regard.
Identity formation strategies
Another issue of interest in social psychology is related to the notion that there are certain identity formation strategies which a person may use to adapt to the social world. Cote and Levine developed a typology which investigated the different manners of behavior that individuals may have. Their typology includes:
Kenneth Gergen formulated additional classifications, which include the strategic manipulator, the pastiche personality, and the relational self. The strategic manipulator is a person who begins to regard all senses of identity merely as role-playing exercises, and who gradually becomes alienated from their social self. The pastiche personality abandons all aspirations toward a true or "essential" identity, instead viewing social interactions as opportunities to play out, and hence become, the roles they play. Finally, the relational self is a perspective by which persons abandon all sense of exclusive self, and view all sense of identity in terms of social engagement with others. For Gergen, these strategies follow one another in phases, and they are linked to the increase in popularity of postmodern culture and the rise of telecommunications technology.
In social anthropology
Anthropologists have most frequently employed the term identity to refer to this idea of selfhood in a loosely Eriksonian way properties based on the uniqueness and individuality which makes a person distinct from others. Identity became of more interest to anthropologists with the emergence of modern concerns with ethnicity and social movements in the 1970s. This was reinforced by an appreciation, following the trend in sociological thought, of the manner in which the individual is affected by and contributes to the overall social context. At the same time, the Eriksonian approach to identity remained in force, with the result that identity has continued until recently to be used in a largely socio-historical way to refer to qualities of sameness in relation to a person's connection to others and to a particular group of people.
The first favours a primordialist approach which takes the sense of self and belonging to a collective group as a fixed thing, defined by objective criteria such as common ancestry and common biological characteristics. The second, rooted in social constructionist theory, takes the view that identity is formed by a predominantly political choice of certain characteristics. In so doing, it questions the idea that identity is a natural given, characterised by fixed, supposedly objective criteria. Both approaches need to be understood in their respective political and historical contexts, characterised by debate on issues of class, race and ethnicity. While they have been criticized, they continue to exert an influence on approaches to the conceptualisation of identity today.
These different explorations of 'identity' demonstrate how difficult a concept it is to pin down. Since identity is a virtual thing, it is impossible to define it empirically. Discussions of identity use the term with different meanings, from fundamental and abiding sameness, to fluidity, contingency, negotiated and so on. Brubaker and Cooper note a tendency in many scholars to confuse identity as a category of practice and as a category of analysis. Indeed, many scholars demonstrate a tendency to follow their own preconceptions of identity, following more or less the frameworks listed above, rather than taking into account the mechanisms by which the concept is crystallised as reality. In this environment, some analysts, such as Brubaker and Cooper, have suggested doing away with the concept completely. Others, by contrast, have sought to introduce alternative concepts in an attempt to capture the dynamic and fluid qualities of human social self-expression. Stuart Hall for example, suggests treating identity as a process, to take into account the reality of diverse and ever-changing social experience. Some scholars have introduced the idea of identification, whereby identity is perceived as made up of different components that are 'identified' and interpreted by individuals. The construction of an individual sense of self is achieved by personal choices regarding who and what to associate with. Such approaches are liberating in their recognition of the role of the individual in social interaction and the construction of identity.
Anthropologists have contributed to the debate by shifting the focus of research: One of the first challenges for the researcher wishing to carry out empirical research in this area is to identify an appropriate analytical tool. The concept of boundaries is useful here for demonstrating how identity works. In the same way as Barth, in his approach to ethnicity, advocated the critical focus for investigation as being "the ethnic boundary that defines the group rather than the cultural stuff that it encloses", social anthropologists such as Cohen and Bray have shifted the focus of analytical study from identity to the boundaries that are used for purposes of identification. If identity is a kind of virtual site in which the dynamic processes and markers used for identification are made apparent, boundaries provide the framework on which this virtual site is built. They concentrated on how the idea of community belonging is differently constructed by individual members and how individuals within the group conceive ethnic boundaries.
As a non-directive and flexible analytical tool, the concept of boundaries helps both to map and to define the changeability and mutability that are characteristic of people's experiences of the self in society. While identity is a volatile, flexible and abstract 'thing', its manifestations and the ways in which it is exercised are often open to view. Identity is made evident through the use of markers such as language, dress, behaviour and choice of space, whose effect depends on their recognition by other social beings. Markers help to create the boundaries that define similarities or differences between the marker wearer and the marker perceivers, their effectiveness depends on a shared understanding of their meaning. In a social context, misunderstandings can arise due to a misinterpretation of the significance of specific markers. Equally, an individual can use markers of identity to exert influence on other people without necessarily fulfilling all the criteria that an external observer might typically associate with such an abstract identity.
Boundaries can be inclusive or exclusive depending on how they are perceived by other people. An exclusive boundary arises, for example, when a person adopts a marker that imposes restrictions on the behaviour of others. An inclusive boundary is created, by contrast, by the use of a marker with which other people are ready and able to associate. At the same time, however, an inclusive boundary will also impose restrictions on the people it has included by limiting their inclusion within other boundaries. An example of this is the use of a particular language by a newcomer in a room full of people speaking various languages. Some people may understand the language used by this person while others may not. Those who do not understand it might take the newcomer's use of this particular language merely as a neutral sign of identity. But they might also perceive it as imposing an exclusive boundary that is meant to mark them off from the person. On the other hand, those who do understand the newcomer's language could take it as an inclusive boundary, through which the newcomer associates themself with them to the exclusion of the other people present. Equally, however, it is possible that people who do understand the newcomer but who also speak another language may not want to speak the newcomer's language and so see their marker as an imposition and a negative boundary. It is possible that the newcomer is either aware or unaware of this, depending on whether they themself knows other languages or is conscious of the plurilingual quality of the people there and is respectful of it or not.
In religion
A religious identity is the set of beliefs and practices generally held by an individual, involving adherence to codified beliefs and rituals and study of ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, mythology, and faith and mystical experience. Religious identity refers to the personal practices related to communal faith along with rituals and communication stemming from such conviction. This identity formation begins with an association in the parents' religious contacts, and individuation requires that the person chooses the same or different religious identity than that of their parents.
The Parable of the Lost Sheep is one of the parables of Jesus. it is about a shepherd who leaves his flock of ninety-nine sheep in order to find the one which is lost. The parable of the lost sheep is an example of the rediscovery of identity. Its aim is to lay bare the nature of the divine response to the recovery of the lost, with the lost sheep representing a lost human being.
Christian meditation is a specific form of personality formation, though often used only by certain practitioners to describe various forms of prayer and the process of knowing the contemplation of God.
In Western culture, personal and secular identity are deeply influenced by the formation of Christianity, throughout history, various Western thinkers who contributed to the development of European identity were influenced by classical cultures and incorporated elements of Greek culture as well as Jewish culture, leading to some movements such as Philhellenism and Philosemitism.
Implications
Due to the multiple functions of identity which include self regulation, self-concept, personal control, meaning and direction, its implications are woven into many aspects of life.
Identity changes
Contexts Influencing Identity Changes
Identity transformations can occur in various contexts, some of which include:
Career Change: When individuals undergo significant shifts in their career paths or occupational identities, they face the challenge of redefining themselves within a new professional context.
Gender Identity Transition: Individuals experiencing gender dysphoria may embark on a journey to align their lives with their true gender identity. This process involves profound personal and social changes to establish an authentic sense of self.
National Immigration: Relocating to a new country necessitates adaptation to unfamiliar societal norms, leading to adjustments in cultural, social, and occupational identities.
Identity Change due to Climate Migration: In the face of environmental challenges and forced displacement, individuals may experience shifts in their identity as they adapt to new geographical locations and cultural contexts.
Adoption: Adoption entails exploring alternative familial features and reconciling with the experience of being adopted, which can significantly impact an individual's self-identity.
Illness Diagnosis: The diagnosis of an illness can provoke an identity shift, altering an individual's self-perception and influencing how they navigate life. Additionally, illnesses may result in changes in abilities, which can affect occupational identity and require adaptations.
Immigration and identity
Immigration and acculturation often lead to shifts in social identity. The extent of this change depends on the disparities between the individual's heritage culture and the culture of the host country, as well as the level of adoption of the new culture versus the retention of the heritage culture. However, the effects of immigration and acculturation on identity can be moderated if the person possesses a strong personal identity. This established personal identity can serve as an "anchor" and play a "protective role" during the process of social and cultural identity transformations that occur.
Occupational identity
Identity is an ongoing and dynamic process that impacts an individual's ability to navigate life's challenges and cultivate a fulfilling existence. Within this process, occupation emerges as a significant factor that allows individuals to express and maintain their identity. Occupation encompasses not only careers or jobs but also activities such as travel, volunteering, sports, or caregiving. However, when individuals face limitations in their ability to participate or engage in meaningful activities, such as due to illness, it poses a threat to the active process and continued development of identity. Feeling socially unproductive can have detrimental effects on one's social identity. Importantly, the relationship between occupation and identity is bidirectional; occupation contributes to the formation of identity, while identity shapes decisions regarding occupational choices. Furthermore, individuals inherently seek a sense of control over their chosen occupation and strive to avoid stigmatizing labels that may undermine their occupational identity.
Navigating stigma and occupational identity
In the realm of occupational identity, individuals make choices regarding employment based on the stigma associated with certain jobs. Likewise, those already working in stigmatized occupations may employ personal rationalization to justify their career path. Factors such as workplace satisfaction and overall quality of life play significant roles in these decisions. Individuals in such jobs face the challenge of forging an identity that aligns with their values and beliefs. Crafting a positive self-concept becomes more arduous when societal standards label their work as "dirty" or undesirable. Consequently, some individuals opt not to define themselves solely by their occupation but strive for a holistic identity that encompasses all aspects of their lives, beyond their job or work. On the other hand, individuals whose identity strongly hinges on their occupation may experience a crisis if they become unable to perform their chosen work. Therefore, occupational identity necessitates an active and adaptable process that ensures both adaptation and continuity amid shifting circumstances.
Factors shaping the concept of identity
The modern notion of personal identity as a distinct and unique characteristic of individuals has evolved relatively recently in history beginning with the first passports in the early 1900s and later becoming more popular as a social science term in the 1950s. Several factors have influenced its evolution, including:
Protestant Influence: In Western societies, the Protestant tradition has underscored individuals' responsibility for their own soul or spiritual well-being, contributing to a heightened focus on personal identity.
Development of Psychology: The emergence of psychology as a separate field of knowledge and study starting in the 19th century has played a significant role in shaping our understanding of identity.
Rise of Privacy: The Renaissance era witnessed a growing sense of privacy, leading to increased attention and importance placed on individual identities.
Specialization in Work: The industrial period brought about a shift from undifferentiated roles in feudal systems to specialized worker roles. This change impacted how individuals identified themselves in relation to their occupations.
Occupation and Identity: The concept of occupation as a crucial aspect of identity was introduced by Christiansen in 1999, highlighting the influence of employment and work roles on an individual's sense of self.
Focus on Gender Identity: There has been an increased emphasis on gender identity, including issues related to gender dysphoria and transgender experiences. These discussions have contributed to a broader understanding of diverse identities.
Relevance of Identity in Personality Pathology: Understanding and assessing personality pathology has highlighted the significance of identity problems in comprehending individuals' psychological well-being.
See also
Notes
References
Bibliography
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Brockmeier, J. & Carbaugh, D. (2001). Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Calhoun, C. (1994). "Social Theory and the Politics of Identity," in C. Calhoun (Ed.), Social Theory and Identity Politics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Camilleri, C.; Kastersztein, J. & Lipiansky E.M. et al. (1990) Stratégies Identitaires. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Carey, H. C. & McLean, K. (1864). Manual of social science; being a condensation of the "Principles of social science" of H.C. Carey, LL. D.. Philadelphia: H.C. Baird.
Cohen, A. (1974). Two-Dimensional: an essay on the anthropology of power and symbolism in complex society. London: Routledge
Cohen, A. (1998). "Boundaries and Boundary-Consciousness: Politicising Cultural Identity," in M. Anderson and E. Bort (Eds.), The Frontiers of Europe. London: Printer Press.
Cohen, A. (1994). Self Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity. London: Routledge.
Hallam, E. M., et al. (1999). Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity. London: Routledge. .
Kurzwelly, J (2019). "Being German, Paraguayan and Germanino: Exploring the Relation Between Social and Personal Identity". Identity. 19 (2): 144–156. doi:10.1080/15283488.2019.1604348.
Little, D. (1991). Varieties of social explanation: an introduction to the philosophy of social science. Boulder: Westview Press. .
Meyers, D. T. (2004). Being yourself: essays on identity, action, and social life. Feminist constructions. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Modood, T. & Werbner P. (Eds.) (1997). The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity and Community. London: Zed Books.
Hasan Bülent Paksoy (2006) IDENTITIES: How Governed, Who Pays? Malaga: Entelequia. 2nd Ed.
Sökefeld, M. (1999). "Debating Self, Identity, and Culture in Anthropology." Current Anthropology 40 (4), August–October, 417–31.
Thompson, R.H. (1989). Theories of Ethnicity. New York: Greenwood Press.
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Weinreich, P. (1986). The operationalisation of identity theory in racial and ethnic relations, in J.Rex and D.Mason (eds). "Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Further reading
External links
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Identity
Sociological terminology | 0.77263 | 0.99717 | 0.770443 |
Pedagogy | Pedagogy, most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political, and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as an academic discipline, is the study of how knowledge and skills are imparted in an educational context, and it considers the interactions that take place during learning. Both the theory and practice of pedagogy vary greatly as they reflect different social, political, and cultural contexts.
Pedagogy is often described as the act of teaching. The pedagogy adopted by teachers shapes their actions, judgments, and teaching strategies by taking into consideration theories of learning, understandings of students and their needs, and the backgrounds and interests of individual students. Its aims may range from furthering liberal education (the general development of human potential) to the narrower specifics of vocational education (the imparting and acquisition of specific skills).
Instructive strategies are governed by the pupil's background knowledge and experience, situation and environment, as well as learning goals set by the student and teacher. One example would be the Socratic method.
Definition
The meaning of the term "pedagogy" is often contested and a great variety of definitions has been suggested. The most common approach is to define it as the study or science of teaching methods. In this sense, it is the methodology of education. As a methodology, it investigates the ways and practices that can be used to realize the aims of education. The main aim is often identified with the transmission of knowledge. Other aims include fostering skills and character traits. They include helping the student develop their intellectual and social abilities as well as psychomotor and affective learning, which are about developing practical skills and adequate emotional dispositions, respectively.
However, not everyone agrees with this characterization of pedagogy and some see it less as a science and more as an art or a craft. This characterization puts more emphasis on the practical aspect of pedagogy, which may involve various forms of "tacit knowledge that is hard to put into words". This approach is often based on the idea that the most central aspects of teaching are only acquired by practice and cannot be easily codified through scientific inquiry. In this regard, pedagogy is concerned with "observing and refining one's skill as a teacher". A more inclusive definition combines these two characterizations and sees pedagogy both as the practice of teaching and the discourse and study of teaching methods. Some theorists give an even wider definition by including considerations such as "the development of health and bodily fitness, social and moral welfare, ethics and aesthetics". Due to this variety of meanings, it is sometimes suggested that pedagogy is a "catch-all term" associated with various issues of teaching and learning. In this sense, it lacks a precise definition.
According to Patricia Murphy, a detailed reflection on the meaning of the term "pedagogy" is important nonetheless since different theorists often use it in very different ways. In some cases, non-trivial assumptions about the nature of learning are even included in its definition. Pedagogy is often specifically understood in relation to school education. But in a wider sense, it includes all forms of education, both inside and outside schools. In this wide sense, it is concerned with the process of teaching taking place between two parties: teachers and learners. The teacher's goal is to bring about certain experiences in the learner to foster their understanding of the subject matter to be taught. Pedagogy is interested in the forms and methods used to convey this understanding.
Pedagogy is closely related to didactics but there are some differences. Usually, didactics is seen as the more limited term that refers mainly to the teacher's role and activities, i.e how their behavior is most beneficial to the process of education. This is one central aspect of pedagogy besides other aspects that consider the learner's perspective as well. In this wider sense, pedagogy focuses on "any conscious activity by one person designed to enhance learning in another".
The word pedagogy is a derivative of the Greek (paidagōgia), from (paidagōgos), itself a synthesis of (ágō), "I lead", and (, genitive , ) "boy, child": hence, "attendance on boys, to lead a child". It is pronounced variously, as , , or . The related word pedagogue has had a negative connotation of pedantry, dating from at least the 1650s; a related expression is educational theorist. The term "pedagogy" is also found in the English discourse, but it is more broadly discussed in other European languages, such as French and German.
History
Western
In the Western world, pedagogy is associated with the Greek tradition of philosophical dialogue, particularly the Socratic method of inquiry. A more general account of its development holds that it emerged from the active concept of humanity as distinct from a fatalistic one and that history and human destiny are results of human actions. This idea germinated in ancient Greece and was further developed during the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Age of Enlightenment.
Socrates
Socrates (470 – 399 BCE) employed the Socratic method while engaging with a student or peer. This style does not impart knowledge, but rather tries to strengthen the logic of the student by revealing the conclusions of the statement of the student as erroneous or supported. The instructor in this learning environment recognizes the learners' need to think for themselves to facilitate their ability to think about problems and issues. It was first described by Plato in the Socratic Dialogues.
Plato
Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BCE) describes a system of education in The Republic (375 BCE) in which individual and family rights are sacrificed to the State. He describes three castes: one to learn a trade; one to learn literary and aesthetic ideas; and one to be trained in literary, aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical ideas. Plato saw education as a fulfillment of the soul, and by fulfilling the soul the body subsequently benefited. Plato viewed physical education for all as a necessity to a stable society.
Aristotle
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) composed a treatise, On Education, which was subsequently lost. However, he renounced Plato's view in subsequent works, advocating for a common education mandated to all citizens by the State. A small minority of people residing within Greek city-states at this time were considered citizens, and thus Aristotle still limited education to a minority within Greece. Aristotle advocates physical education should precede intellectual studies.
Quintilian
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35 – 100 CE) published his pedagogy in Institutio Oratoria (95 CE). He describes education as a gradual affair, and places certain responsibilities on the teacher. He advocates for rhetorical, grammatical, scientific, and philosophical education.
Tertullian
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (155 – 240 CE) was a Christian scholar who rejected all pagan education, insisting this was "a road to the false and arrogant wisdom of ancient philosophers".
Jerome
Saint Jerome (347 – 30 September 420 CE), or Saint Hieronymus, was a Christian scholar who detailed his pedagogy of girls in numerous letters throughout his life. He did not believe the body in need of training, and thus advocated for fasting and mortification to subdue the body. He only recommends the Bible as reading material, with limited exposure, and cautions against musical instruments. He advocates against letting girls interact with society, and of having "affections for one of her companions than for others." He does recommend teaching the alphabet by ivory blocks instead of memorization so "She will thus learn by playing." He is an advocate of positive reinforcement, stating "Do not chide her for the difficulty she may have in learning. On the contrary, encourage her by commendation..."
Jean Gerson
Jean Charlier de Gerson (13 December 1363 – 12 July 1429), the Chancellor of the University of Paris, wrote in De parvulis ad Christum trahendis "Little children are more easily managed by caresses than fear," supporting a more gentle approach than his Christian predecessors. He also states "Above all else, let the teacher make an effort to be a father to his pupils." He is considered a precursor of Fenelon.
John Amos Comenius
John Amos Comenius (28 March 1592 – 15 November 1670) is considered the father of modern education.
Johann Pestalozzi
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (January 12, 1746 – February 17, 1827), founder of several educational institutions both in German- and French-speaking regions of Switzerland and wrote many works explaining his revolutionary modern principles of education. His motto was "Learning by head, hand and heart".
Johann Herbart
The educational philosophy and pedagogy of Johann Friedrich Herbart (4 May 1776 – 14 August 1841) highlighted the correlation between personal development and the resulting benefits to society. In other words, Herbart proposed that humans become fulfilled once they establish themselves as productive citizens. Herbartianism refers to the movement underpinned by Herbart's theoretical perspectives. Referring to the teaching process, Herbart suggested five steps as crucial components. Specifically, these five steps include: preparation, presentation, association, generalization, and application. Herbart suggests that pedagogy relates to having assumptions as an educator and a specific set of abilities with a deliberate end goal in mind.
John Dewey
The pedagogy of John Dewey (20 October 1859 – 1 June 1952) is presented in several works, including My Pedagogic Creed (1897), The School and Society (1900), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Democracy and Education (1916), Schools of To-morrow (1915) with Evelyn Dewey, and Experience and Education (1938). In his eyes, the purpose of education should not revolve around the acquisition of a pre-determined set of skills, but rather the realization of one's full potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good (My Pedagogic Creed, Dewey, 1897). Dewey advocated for an educational structure that strikes a balance between delivering knowledge while also taking into account the interests and experiences of the student (The Child and the Curriculum, Dewey, 1902). Dewey not only re-imagined the way that the learning process should take place but also the role that the teacher should play within that process. He envisioned a divergence from the mastery of a pre-selected set of skills to the cultivation of autonomy and critical-thinking within the teacher and student alike.
Eastern
Confucius
Confucius (551–479 BCE) stated that authority has the responsibility to provide oral and written instruction to the people under the rule, and "should do them good in every possible way." One of the deepest teachings of Confucius may have been the superiority of personal exemplification over explicit rules of behavior. His moral teachings emphasized self-cultivation, emulation of moral exemplars, and the attainment of skilled judgement rather than knowledge of rules. Other relevant practices in the Confucian teaching tradition include the Rite and its notion of body-knowledge as well as Confucian understanding of the self, one that has a broader conceptualization than the Western individual self.
Pedagogical considerations
Teaching method
Hidden curriculum
A hidden curriculum refers to extra educational activities or side effect of an education, "[lessons] which are learned but not openly intended" such as the transmission of norms, values, and beliefs conveyed in the classroom and the social environment.
Learning space
Learning space or learning setting refers to a physical setting for a learning environment, a place in which teaching and learning occur. The term is commonly used as a more definitive alternative to "classroom", but it may also refer to an indoor or outdoor location, either actual or virtual. Learning spaces are highly diverse in use, learning styles, configuration, location, and educational institution. They support a variety of pedagogies, including quiet study, passive or active learning, kinesthetic or physical learning, vocational learning, experiential learning, and others.
Learning theories
Learning theories are conceptual frameworks describing how knowledge is absorbed, processed, and retained during learning. Cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences, as well as prior experience, all play a part in how understanding, or a world view, is acquired or changed and knowledge and skills retained.
Distance learning
Distance education or long-distance learning is the education of students who may not always be physically present at a school. Traditionally, this usually involved correspondence courses wherein the student corresponded with the school via post. Today it involves online education. Courses that are conducted (51 percent or more) are either hybrid, blended or 100% distance learning. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), offering large-scale interactive participation and open access through the World Wide Web or other network technologies, are recent developments in distance education. A number of other terms (distributed learning, e-learning, online learning, etc.) are used roughly synonymously with distance education.
Teaching resource adaptation
Adapting the teaching resource should suit appropriate teaching and learning environments, national and local cultural norms, and make it accessible to different types of learners. Key adaptations in teaching resource include:
Classroom constraints
Large class size – consider smaller groups or have discussions in pairs;
Time available – shorten or lengthen the duration of activities;
Modifying materials needed – find, make or substitute required materials;
Space requirements – reorganize classroom, use a larger space, move indoors or outdoors.
Cultural familiarity
Change references to names, food and items to make them more familiar;
Substitute local texts or art (folklore, stories, songs, games, artwork and proverbs).
Local relevance
Use the names and processes for local institutions such as courts;
Be sensitive of local behavior norms (e.g. for genders and ages);
Ensure content is sensitive to the degree of rule of law in society (trust in authorities and institutions).
Inclusivity for diverse students
Appropriate reading level(s) of texts for student use;
Activities for different learning styles;
Accommodation for students with special educational needs;
Sensitivity to cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity;
Sensitivity to students' socioeconomic status.
Pedagogical approaches
Evidence-based
Dialogic learning
Dialogic learning is learning that takes place through dialogue. It is typically the result of egalitarian dialogue; in other words, the consequence of a dialogue in which different people provide arguments based on validity claims and not on power claims.
Student-centered learning
Student-centered learning, also known as learner-centered education, broadly encompasses methods of teaching that shift the focus of instruction from the teacher to the student. In original usage, student-centered learning aims to develop learner autonomy and independence by putting responsibility for the learning path in the hands of students. Student-centered instruction focuses on skills and practices that enable lifelong learning and independent problem-solving.
Critical pedagogy
Critical pedagogy applies critical theory to pedagogy and asserts that educational practices are contested and shaped by history, that schools are not politically neutral spaces, and that teaching is political. Decisions regarding the curriculum, disciplinary practices, student testing, textbook selection, the language used by the teacher, and more can empower or disempower students. It asserts that educational practices favor some students over others and some practices harm all students. It also asserts that educational practices often favor some voices and perspectives while marginalizing or ignoring others.
Academic degrees
The academic degree Ped. D., Doctor of Pedagogy, is awarded honorarily by some US universities to distinguished teachers (in the US and UK, earned degrees within the instructive field are classified as an Ed.D., Doctor of Education, or a Ph.D., Doctor of Philosophy). The term is also used to denote an emphasis in education as a specialty in a field (for instance, a Doctor of Music degree in piano pedagogy).
Pedagogues around the world
The education of pedagogues, and their role in society, varies greatly from culture to culture.
Belgium
Important pedagogues in Belgium are Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons (Catholic University of Leuven). According to these scholars, schools nowadays are often dismissed as outdated or ineffective. Deschoolers even argue that schools rest on the false premise that schools are necessary for learning but that people learn faster or better outside the classroom. Others critique the fact that some teachers stand before a classroom with only six weeks of teacher education. Against this background, Masschelein and Simons propose to look at school from a different point of view. Their educational morphology approaches the school as a particular scholastic 'form of gathering'. What the authors mean with that, is the following: school is a particular time-space-matter arrangement. This thus includes concretes architectures, technologies, practices and figures. This arrangement "deals in a specific way with the new generation, allows for a particular relation to the world, and for a particular experience of potentiality and of commonality (of making things public)".
Masschelein and Simons' most famous work is the book "Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in Education". It takes a critical look at the main discourse of today's education. Education is seen through a socio-economic lens: education is aimed at mobilising talents and competencies (p23). This is seen in multiple texts from governing bodies, in Belgium and Europe. One of the most significant examples is quoted on page 23: "Education and training can only contribute to growth and job-creation if learning is focused on the knowledge, skills and competences to be acquired by students (learning outcomes) through the learning process, rather than on completing a specific stage or on time spent in school." (European Commission, 2012, p.7) This is, according to Masschelein and Simons a plea for learning outcomes and demonstrates a vision of education in which the institution is no longer the point of departure. The main ambition in this discourse of education is the efficient and effective realisation of learning outcomes for all. Things like the place and time of learning, didactic and pedagogic support are means to an end: the acquisition of preplanned learning outcomes. And these outcomes are a direct input for the knowledge economy. Masschelein and Simons' main critique here is that the main concern is not the educational institution (anymore). Rather, the focus lies on the learning processes and mainly on the learning outcomes of the individual learner.
Brazil
In Brazil, a pedagogue is a multidisciplinary educator. Undergraduate education in Pedagogy qualifies students to become school administrators or coordinators at all educational levels, and also to become multidisciplinary teachers, such as pre-school, elementary and special teachers.
Denmark
In Scandinavia, a pedagogue (pædagog) is broadly speaking a practitioner of pedagogy, but the term is primarily reserved for individuals who occupy jobs in pre-school education (such as kindergartens and nurseries). A pedagogue can occupy various kinds of jobs, within this restrictive definition, e.g. in retirement homes, prisons, orphanages, and human resource management. When working with at-risk families or youths they are referred to as social pedagogues (socialpædagog).
The pedagogue's job is usually distinguished from a teacher's by primarily focusing on teaching children life-preparing knowledge such as social or non-curriculum skills, and cultural norms. There is also a very big focus on the care and well-being of the child. Many pedagogical institutions also practice social inclusion. The pedagogue's work also consists of supporting the child in their mental and social development.
In Denmark all pedagogues are educated at a series of national institutes for social educators located in all major cities. The education is a 3.5-year academic course, giving the student the title of a Bachelor in Social Education (Danish: Professionsbachelor som pædagog).
It is also possible to earn a master's degree in pedagogy/educational science from the University of Copenhagen. This BA and MA program has a more theoretical focus compared to the more vocational Bachelor in Social Education.
Hungary
In Hungary, the word pedagogue (pedagógus) is synonymous with the teacher (tanár); therefore, teachers of both primary and secondary schools may be referred to as pedagogues, a word that appears also in the name of their lobbyist organizations and labor unions (e.g. Labor Union of Pedagogues, Democratic Labor Union of Pedagogues). However, undergraduate education in Pedagogy does not qualify students to become teachers in primary or secondary schools but makes them able to apply to be educational assistants. As of 2013, the six-year training period was re-installed in place of the undergraduate and postgraduate division which characterized the previous practice.
Modern pedagogy
An article from Kathmandu Post published on 3 June 2018 described the usual first day of school in an academic calendar. Teachers meet their students with distinct traits. The diversity of attributions among children or teens exceeds similarities. Educators have to teach students with different cultural, social, and religious backgrounds. This situation entails a differentiated strategy in pedagogy and not the traditional approach for teachers to accomplish goals efficiently.
American author and educator Carol Ann Tomlinson defined Differentiated Instruction as "teachers' efforts in responding to inconsistencies among students in the classroom." Differentiation refers to methods of teaching. She explained that Differentiated Instruction gives learners a variety of alternatives for acquiring information. Primary principles comprising the structure of Differentiated Instruction include formative and ongoing assessment, group collaboration, recognition of students' diverse levels of knowledge, problem-solving, and choice in reading and writing experiences.
Howard Gardner gained prominence in the education sector for his Multiple Intelligences Theory. He named seven of these intelligences in 1983: Linguistic, Logical and Mathematical, Visual and Spatial, Body and Kinesthetic, Musical and Rhythmic, Intrapersonal, and Interpersonal. Critics say the theory is based only on Gardner's intuition instead of empirical data. Another criticism is that the intelligence is too identical for types of personalities. The theory of Howard Gardner came from cognitive research and states these intelligences help people to "know the world, understand themselves, and other people." Said differences dispute an educational system that presumes students can "understand the same materials in the same manner and that a standardized, collective measure is very much impartial towards linguistic approaches in instruction and assessment as well as to some extent logical and quantitative styles."
Educational research
See also
Outline of education
References
Sources
See also
List of important publications in philosophy
List of important publications in anthropology
List of important publications in economics
Further reading
Bruner, J. S. (1960). The Process of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. S. (1971). The Relevance of Education. New York, NY: Norton
Bruner, J. S. (1966). Toward a Theory of Instruction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belkapp Press.
John Dewey, Experience and Education, 1938
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968 (English translation: 1970)
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1971
David L. Kirp, The Sandbox Investment, 2007
Montessori, M. (1910). Antropologia Pedagogica.
Montessori, M. (1921). Manuale di Pedagogia Scientifica.
Montessori, M. (1934). Psico Aritmética.
Montessori, M. (1934). Psico Geométria.
Piaget, J. (1926). The Language and Thought of the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan.
Karl Rosenkranz (1848). Pedagogics as a System. Translated 1872 by Anna C. Brackett, R.P. Studley Company
Karl Rosenkranz (1899). The philosophy of education. D. Appleton and Co.
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794
Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Didactics
Educational psychology
Teaching | 0.771106 | 0.999131 | 0.770436 |
Morality | Morality is the categorization of intentions, decisions and actions into those that are proper, or right, and those that are improper, or wrong. Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that is understood to be universal. Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness", "appropriateness" or "rightness".
Moral philosophy includes meta-ethics, which studies abstract issues such as moral ontology and moral epistemology, and normative ethics, which studies more concrete systems of moral decision-making such as deontological ethics and consequentialism. An example of normative ethical philosophy is the Golden Rule, which states: "One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself."
Immorality is the active opposition to morality (i.e. opposition to that which is good or right), while amorality is variously defined as an unawareness of, indifference toward, or disbelief in any particular set of moral standards and/or principles.
History
Ethics
Ethics (also known as moral philosophy) is the branch of philosophy which addresses questions of morality. The word "ethics" is "commonly used interchangeably with 'morality'... and sometimes it is used more narrowly to mean the moral principles of a particular tradition, group, or individual." Likewise, certain types of ethical theories, especially deontological ethics, sometimes distinguish between ethics and morality.
Philosopher Simon Blackburn writes that "Although the morality of people and their ethics amounts to the same thing, there is a usage that restricts morality to systems such as that of Immanuel Kant, based on notions such as duty, obligation, and principles of conduct, reserving ethics for the more Aristotelian approach to practical reasoning, based on the notion of a virtue, and generally avoiding the separation of 'moral' considerations from other practical considerations."
Descriptive and normative
In its descriptive sense, "morality" refers to personal or cultural values, codes of conduct or social mores from a society that provides these codes of conduct in which it applies and is accepted by an individual. It does not connote objective claims of right or wrong, but only refers to that which is considered right or wrong. Descriptive ethics is the branch of philosophy which studies morality in this sense.
In its normative sense, "morality" refers to whatever (if anything) is actually right or wrong, which may be independent of the values or mores held by any particular peoples or cultures. Normative ethics is the branch of philosophy which studies morality in this sense.
Realism and anti-realism
Philosophical theories on the nature and origins of morality (that is, theories of meta-ethics) are broadly divided into two classes:
Moral realism is the class of theories which hold that there are true moral statements that report objective moral facts. For example, while they might concede that forces of social conformity significantly shape individuals' "moral" decisions, they deny that those cultural norms and customs define morally right behavior. This may be the philosophical view propounded by ethical naturalists, but not all moral realists accept that position (e.g. ethical non-naturalists).
Moral anti-realism, on the other hand, holds that moral statements either fail or do not even attempt to report objective moral facts. Instead, they hold that moral sentences are either categorically false claims of objective moral facts (error theory); claims about subjective attitudes rather than objective facts (ethical subjectivism); or else do not attempt to describe the world at all but rather something else, like an expression of an emotion or the issuance of a command (non-cognitivism).
Some forms of non-cognitivism and ethical subjectivism, while considered anti-realist in the robust sense used here, are considered realist in the sense synonymous with moral universalism. For example, universal prescriptivism is a universalist form of non-cognitivism which claims that morality is derived from reasoning about implied imperatives, and divine command theory and ideal observer theory are universalist forms of ethical subjectivism which claim that morality is derived from the edicts of a god or the hypothetical decrees of a perfectly rational being, respectively.
Anthropology
Morality with practical reasoning
Practical reason is necessary for the moral agency but it is not a sufficient condition for moral agency. Real life issues that need solutions do need both rationality and emotion to be sufficiently moral. One uses rationality as a pathway to the ultimate decision, but the environment and emotions towards the environment at the moment must be a factor for the result to be truly moral, as morality is subject to culture. Something can only be morally acceptable if the culture as a whole has accepted this to be true. Both practical reason and relevant emotional factors are acknowledged as significant in determining the morality of a decision.
Tribal and territorial
Celia Green made a distinction between tribal and territorial morality. She characterizes the latter as predominantly negative and proscriptive: it defines a person's territory, including his or her property and dependents, which is not to be damaged or interfered with. Apart from these proscriptions, territorial morality is permissive, allowing the individual whatever behaviour does not interfere with the territory of another. By contrast, tribal morality is prescriptive, imposing the norms of the collective on the individual. These norms will be arbitrary, culturally dependent and 'flexible', whereas territorial morality aims at rules which are universal and absolute, such as Kant's 'categorical imperative' and Geisler's graded absolutism. Green relates the development of territorial morality to the rise of the concept of private property, and the ascendancy of contract over status.
In-group and out-group
Some observers hold that individuals apply distinct sets of moral rules to people depending on their membership of an "in-group" (the individual and those they believe to be of the same group) or an "out-group" (people not entitled to be treated according to the same rules). Some biologists, anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists believe this in-group/out-group discrimination has evolved because it enhances group survival. This belief has been confirmed by simple computational models of evolution. In simulations this discrimination can result in both unexpected cooperation towards the in-group and irrational hostility towards the out-group. Gary R. Johnson and V.S. Falger have argued that nationalism and patriotism are forms of this in-group/out-group boundary. Jonathan Haidt has noted that experimental observation indicating an in-group criterion provides one moral foundation substantially used by conservatives, but far less so by liberals.
In-group preference is also helpful at the individual level for the passing on of one's genes. For example, a mother who favors her own children more highly than the children of other people will give greater resources to her children than she will to strangers', thus heightening her children's chances of survival and her own gene's chances of being perpetuated. Due to this, within a population, there is substantial selection pressure exerted toward this kind of self-interest, such that eventually, all parents wind up favoring their own children (the in-group) over other children (the out-group).
Comparing cultures
Peterson and Seligman approach the anthropological view looking across cultures, geo-cultural areas and across millennia. They conclude that certain virtues have prevailed in all cultures they examined. The major virtues they identified include wisdom / knowledge; courage; humanity; justice; temperance; and transcendence. Each of these include several divisions. For instance humanity includes love, kindness, and social intelligence.
Still, others theorize that morality is not always absolute, contending that moral issues often differ along cultural lines. A 2014 PEW research study among several nations illuminates significant cultural differences among issues commonly related to morality, including divorce, extramarital affairs, homosexuality, gambling, abortion, alcohol use, contraceptive use, and premarital sex. Each of the 40 countries in this study has a range of percentages according to what percentage of each country believes the common moral issues are acceptable, unacceptable, or not moral issues at all. Each percentage regarding the significance of the moral issue varies greatly on the culture in which the moral issue is presented.
Advocates of a theory known as moral relativism subscribe to the notion that moral virtues are right or wrong only within the context of a certain standpoint (e.g., cultural community). In other words, what is morally acceptable in one culture may be taboo in another. They further contend that no moral virtue can objectively be proven right or wrong Critics of moral relativism point to historical atrocities such as infanticide, slavery, or genocide as counter arguments, noting the difficulty in accepting these actions simply through cultural lenses.
Fons Trompenaars, author of Did the Pedestrian Die?, tested members of different cultures with various moral dilemmas. One of these was whether the driver of a car would have his friend, a passenger riding in the car, lie in order to protect the driver from the consequences of driving too fast and hitting a pedestrian. Trompenaars found that different cultures had quite different expectations, from none to definite.
Anthropologists from Oxford's Institute of Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology (part of the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography) analysed ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, comprising over 600,000 words from over 600 sources and discovered what they believe to be seven universal moral rules: help your family, help your group, return favours, be brave, defer to superiors, divide resources fairly, and respect others' property.
Evolution
The development of modern morality is a process closely tied to sociocultural evolution. Some evolutionary biologists, particularly sociobiologists, believe that morality is a product of evolutionary forces acting at an individual level and also at the group level through group selection (although to what degree this actually occurs is a controversial topic in evolutionary theory). Some sociobiologists contend that the set of behaviors that constitute morality evolved largely because they provided possible survival or reproductive benefits (i.e. increased evolutionary success). Humans consequently evolved "pro-social" emotions, such as feelings of empathy or guilt, in response to these moral behaviors.
On this understanding, moralities are sets of self-perpetuating and biologically driven behaviors which encourage human cooperation. Biologists contend that all social animals, from ants to elephants, have modified their behaviors, by restraining immediate selfishness in order to improve their evolutionary fitness. Human morality, although sophisticated and complex relative to the moralities of other animals, is essentially a natural phenomenon that evolved to restrict excessive individualism that could undermine a group's cohesion and thereby reducing the individuals' fitness.
On this view, moral codes are ultimately founded on emotional instincts and intuitions that were selected for in the past because they aided survival and reproduction (inclusive fitness). Examples: the maternal bond is selected for because it improves the survival of offspring; the Westermarck effect, where close proximity during early years reduces mutual sexual attraction, underpins taboos against incest because it decreases the likelihood of genetically risky behaviour such as inbreeding.
The phenomenon of reciprocity in nature is seen by evolutionary biologists as one way to begin to understand human morality. Its function is typically to ensure a reliable supply of essential resources, especially for animals living in a habitat where food quantity or quality fluctuates unpredictably. For example, some vampire bats fail to feed on prey some nights while others manage to consume a surplus. Bats that did eat will then regurgitate part of their blood meal to save a conspecific from starvation. Since these animals live in close-knit groups over many years, an individual can count on other group members to return the favor on nights when it goes hungry (Wilkinson, 1984)
Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce (2009) have argued that morality is a suite of behavioral capacities likely shared by all mammals living in complex social groups (e.g., wolves, coyotes, elephants, dolphins, rats, chimpanzees). They define morality as "a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate complex interactions within social groups." This suite of behaviors includes empathy, reciprocity, altruism, cooperation, and a sense of fairness. In related work, it has been convincingly demonstrated that chimpanzees show empathy for each other in a wide variety of contexts. They also possess the ability to engage in deception, and a level of social politics prototypical of our own tendencies for gossip and reputation management.
Christopher Boehm (1982) has hypothesized that the incremental development of moral complexity throughout hominid evolution was due to the increasing need to avoid disputes and injuries in moving to open savanna and developing stone weapons. Other theories are that increasing complexity was simply a correlate of increasing group size and brain size, and in particular the development of theory of mind abilities.
Psychology
In modern moral psychology, morality is sometimes considered to change through personal development. Several psychologists have produced theories on the development of morals, usually going through stages of different morals. Lawrence Kohlberg, Jean Piaget, and Elliot Turiel have cognitive-developmental approaches to moral development; to these theorists morality forms in a series of constructive stages or domains. In the Ethics of care approach established by Carol Gilligan, moral development occurs in the context of caring, mutually responsive relationships which are based on interdependence, particularly in parenting but also in social relationships generally. Social psychologists such as Martin Hoffman and Jonathan Haidt emphasize social and emotional development based on biology, such as empathy. Moral identity theorists, such as William Damon and Mordechai Nisan, see moral commitment as arising from the development of a self-identity that is defined by moral purposes: this moral self-identity leads to a sense of responsibility to pursue such purposes. Of historical interest in psychology are the theories of psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud, who believe that moral development is the product of aspects of the super-ego as guilt-shame avoidance. Theories of moral development therefore tend to regard it as positive moral development: the higher stages are morally higher, though this, naturally, involves a circular argument. The higher stages are better because they are higher, but the better higher because they are better.
As an alternative to viewing morality as an individual trait, some sociologists as well as social- and discursive psychologists have taken upon themselves to study the in-vivo aspects of morality by examining how persons conduct themselves in social interaction.
A new study analyses the common perception of a decline in morality in societies worldwide and throughout history. Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel T. Gilbert present a series of studies indicating that the perception of moral decline is an illusion and easily produced, with implications for misallocation of resources, underuse of social support, and social influence. To begin with, the authors demonstrate that people in no less than 60 nations hold the belief that morality is deteriorating continuously, and this conviction has been present for the last 70 years. Subsequently, they indicate that people ascribe this decay to the declining morality of individuals as they age and the succeeding generations. Thirdly, the authors demonstrate that people's evaluations of the morality of their peers have not decreased over time, indicating that the belief in moral decline is an illusion. Lastly, the authors explain a basic psychological mechanism that uses two well-established phenomena (distorted exposure to information and distorted memory of information) to cause the illusion of moral decline. The authors present studies that validate some of the predictions about the circumstances in which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated, or reversed (e.g., when participants are asked about the morality of people closest to them or people who lived before they were born).
Moral cognition
Moral cognition refers to cognitive processes implicated in moral judgment and decision making, and moral action. It consists of several domain-general cognitive processes, ranging from perception of a morally salient stimulus to reasoning when faced with a moral dilemma. While it is important to mention that there is not a single cognitive faculty dedicated exclusively to moral cognition, characterizing the contributions of domain-general processes to moral behavior is a critical scientific endeavor to understand how morality works and how it can be improved.
Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists investigate the inputs to these cognitive processes and their interactions, as well as how these contribute to moral behavior by running controlled experiments. In these experiments putatively moral versus nonmoral stimuli are compared to each other, while controlling for other variables such as content or working memory load. Often, the differential neural response to specifically moral statements or scenes, are examined using functional neuroimaging experiments.
Critically, the specific cognitive processes that are involved depend on the prototypical situation that a person encounters. For instance, while situations that require an active decision on a moral dilemma may require active reasoning, an immediate reaction to a shocking moral violation may involve quick, affect-laden processes. Nonetheless, certain cognitive skills such as being able to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, emotions to oneself, and others is a common feature of a broad range of prototypical situations. In line with this, a meta-analysis found overlapping activity between moral emotion and moral reasoning tasks, suggesting a shared neural network for both tasks. The results of this meta-analysis, however, also demonstrated that the processing of moral input is affected by task demands.
Regarding the issues of morality in video games, some scholars believe that because players appear in video games as actors, they maintain a distance between their sense of self and the role of the game in terms of imagination. Therefore, the decision-making and moral behavior of players in the game are not representing player's Moral dogma.
It has been recently found that moral judgment consists in concurrent evaluations of three different components that align with precepts from three dominant moral theories (virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism): the character of a person (Agent-component, A); their actions (Deed-component, D); and the consequences brought about in the situation (Consequences-component, C). This, implies that various inputs of the situation a person encounters affect moral cognition.
Jonathan Haidt distinguishes between two types of moral cognition: moral intuition and moral reasoning. Moral intuition involves the fast, automatic, and affective processes that result in an evaluative feeling of good-bad or like-dislike, without awareness of going through any steps. Conversely, moral reasoning does involve conscious mental activity to reach a moral judgment. Moral reasoning is controlled and less affective than moral intuition. When making moral judgments, humans perform moral reasoning to support their initial intuitive feeling. However, there are three ways humans can override their immediate intuitive response. The first way is conscious verbal reasoning (for example, examining costs and benefits). The second way is reframing a situation to see a new perspective or consequence, which triggers a different intuition. Finally, one can talk to other people which illuminates new arguments. In fact, interacting with other people is the cause of most moral change.
Neuroscience
The brain areas that are consistently involved when humans reason about moral issues have been investigated by multiple quantitative large-scale meta-analyses of the brain activity changes reported in the moral neuroscience literature. The neural network underlying moral decisions overlaps with the network pertaining to representing others' intentions (i.e., theory of mind) and the network pertaining to representing others' (vicariously experienced) emotional states (i.e., empathy). This supports the notion that moral reasoning is related to both seeing things from other persons' points of view and to grasping others' feelings. These results provide evidence that the neural network underlying moral decisions is probably domain-global (i.e., there might be no such things as a "moral module" in the human brain) and might be dissociable into cognitive and affective sub-systems.
Cognitive neuroscientist Jean Decety thinks that the ability to recognize and vicariously experience what another individual is undergoing was a key step forward in the evolution of social behavior, and ultimately, morality. The inability to feel empathy is one of the defining characteristics of psychopathy, and this would appear to lend support to Decety's view. Recently, drawing on empirical research in evolutionary theory, developmental psychology, social neuroscience, and psychopathy, Jean Decety argued that empathy and morality are neither systematically opposed to one another, nor inevitably complementary.
Brain areas
An essential, shared component of moral judgment involves the capacity to detect morally salient content within a given social context. Recent research implicated the salience network in this initial detection of moral content. The salience network responds to behaviorally salient events and may be critical to modulate downstream default and frontal control network interactions in the service of complex moral reasoning and decision-making processes.
The explicit making of moral right and wrong judgments coincides with activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a region involved in valuation, while intuitive reactions to situations containing implicit moral issues activates the temporoparietal junction area, a region that plays a key role in understanding intentions and beliefs.
Stimulation of the VMPC by transcranial magnetic stimulation, or neurological lesion, has been shown to inhibit the ability of human subjects to take into account intent when forming a moral judgment. According to such investigations, TMS did not disrupt participants' ability to make any moral judgment. On the contrary, moral judgments of intentional harms and non-harms were unaffected by TMS to either the RTPJ or the control site; presumably, however, people typically make moral judgments of intentional harms by considering not only the action's harmful outcome but the agent's intentions and beliefs. So why were moral judgments of intentional harms not affected by TMS to the RTPJ? One possibility is that moral judgments typically reflect a weighted function of any morally relevant information that is available at the time. Based on this view, when information concerning the agent's belief is unavailable or degraded, the resulting moral judgment simply reflects a higher weighting of other morally relevant factors (e.g., outcome). Alternatively, following TMS to the RTPJ, moral judgments might be made via an abnormal processing route that does not take belief into account. On either account, when belief information is degraded or unavailable, moral judgments are shifted toward other morally relevant factors (e.g., outcome). For intentional harms and non-harms, however, the outcome suggests the same moral judgment as to the intention. Thus, the researchers suggest that TMS to the RTPJ disrupted the processing of negative beliefs for both intentional harms and attempted harms, but the current design allowed the investigators to detect this effect only in the case of attempted harms, in which the neutral outcomes did not afford harsh moral judgments on their own.
Similarly, individuals with a lesion of the VMPC judge an action purely on its outcome and are unable to take into account the intent of that action.
Genetics
Moral intuitions may have genetic bases. A 2022 study conducted by scholars Michael Zakharin and Timothy C. Bates, and published by the European Journal of Personality, found that moral foundations have significant genetic bases. Another study, conducted by Smith and Hatemi, similarly found significant evidence in support of moral heritability by looking at and comparing the answers of moral dilemmas between twins.
Genetics play a role in influencing prosocial behaviors and moral decision-making. Genetics contribute to the development and expression of certain traits and behaviors, including those related to morality. However, it is important to note that while genetics play a role in shaping certain aspects of moral behavior, morality itself is a multifaceted concept that encompasses cultural, societal, and personal influences as well.
Politics
If morality is the answer to the question 'how ought we to live' at the individual level, politics can be seen as addressing the same question at the social level, though the political sphere raises additional problems and challenges. It is therefore unsurprising that evidence has been found of a relationship between attitudes in morality and politics. Moral foundations theory, authored by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues, has been used to study the differences between liberals and conservatives, in this regard. Haidt found that Americans who identified as liberals tended to value care and fairness higher than loyalty, respect and purity. Self-identified conservative Americans valued care and fairness less and the remaining three values more. Both groups gave care the highest over-all weighting, but conservatives valued fairness the lowest, whereas liberals valued purity the lowest. Haidt also hypothesizes that the origin of this division in the United States can be traced to geo-historical factors, with conservatism strongest in closely knit, ethnically homogeneous communities, in contrast to port-cities, where the cultural mix is greater, thus requiring more liberalism.
Group morality develops from shared concepts and beliefs and is often codified to regulate behavior within a culture or community. Various defined actions come to be called moral or immoral. Individuals who choose moral action are popularly held to possess "moral fiber", whereas those who indulge in immoral behavior may be labeled as socially degenerate. The continued existence of a group may depend on widespread conformity to codes of morality; an inability to adjust moral codes in response to new challenges is sometimes credited with the demise of a community (a positive example would be the function of Cistercian reform in reviving monasticism; a negative example would be the role of the Dowager Empress in the subjugation of China to European interests). Within nationalist movements, there has been some tendency to feel that a nation will not survive or prosper without acknowledging one common morality, regardless of its content.
Political morality is also relevant to the behavior internationally of national governments, and to the support they receive from their host population. The Sentience Institute, co-founded by Jacy Reese Anthis, analyzes the trajectory of moral progress in society via the framework of an expanding moral circle. Noam Chomsky states that
... if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others—more stringent ones, in fact—plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil.
In fact, one of them, maybe the most, elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something's right for me, it's right for you; if it's wrong for you, it's wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow.
Religion
Religion and morality are not synonymous. Morality does not depend upon religion although for some this is "an almost automatic assumption". According to The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, religion and morality "are to be defined differently and have no definitional connections with each other. Conceptually and in principle, morality and a religious value system are two distinct kinds of value systems or action guides."
Positions
Within the wide range of moral traditions, religious value-systems co-exist with contemporary secular frameworks such as consequentialism, freethought, humanism, utilitarianism, and others. There are many types of religious value-systems. Modern monotheistic religions, such as Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and to a certain degree others such as Sikhism and Zoroastrianism, define right and wrong by the laws and rules as set forth by their respective scriptures and as interpreted by religious leaders within each respective faith. Other religions spanning pantheistic to nontheistic tend to be less absolute. For example, within Buddhism, the intention of the individual and the circumstances should be accounted for in the form of merit, to determine if an action is termed right or wrong. Barbara Stoler Miller points out a further disparity between the values of religious traditions, stating that in Hinduism, "practically, right and wrong are decided according to the categories of social rank, kinship, and stages of life. For modern Westerners, who have been raised on ideals of universality and egalitarianism, this relativity of values and obligations is the aspect of Hinduism most difficult to understand".
Religions provide different ways of dealing with moral dilemmas. For example, Hinduism lacks any absolute prohibition on killing, recognizing that it "may be inevitable and indeed necessary" in certain circumstances. Monotheistic traditions view certain acts—such as abortion or divorce—in more absolute terms. Religion is not always positively associated with morality. Philosopher David Hume stated that "the greatest crimes have been found, in many instances, to be compatible with a superstitious piety and devotion; Hence it is justly regarded as unsafe to draw any inference in favor of a man's morals, from the fervor or strictness of his religious exercises, even though he himself believe them sincere."
Religious value-systems can be used to justify acts that are contrary to general contemporary morality, such as massacres, misogyny and slavery. For example, Simon Blackburn states that "apologists for Hinduism defend or explain away its involvement with the caste system, and apologists for Islam defend or explain away its harsh penal code or its attitude to women and infidels". In regard to Christianity, he states that the "Bible can be read as giving us a carte blanche for harsh attitudes to children, the mentally handicapped, animals, the environment, the divorced, unbelievers, people with various sexual habits, and elderly women", and notes morally-suspect themes in the Bible's New Testament as well. Elizabeth Anderson likewise holds that "the Bible contains both good and evil teachings", and it is "morally inconsistent". Christian apologists address Blackburn's viewpoints and construe that Jewish laws in the Hebrew Bible showed the evolution of moral standards towards protecting the vulnerable, imposing a death penalty on those pursuing slavery and treating slaves as persons and not as property. Humanists like Paul Kurtz believe that we can identify moral values across cultures, even if we do not appeal to a supernatural or universalist understanding of principles – values including integrity, trustworthiness, benevolence, and fairness. These values can be resources for finding common ground between believers and nonbelievers.
Empirical analyses
Several studies have been conducted on the empirics of morality in various countries, and the overall relationship between faith and crime is unclear. A 2001 review of studies on this topic found "The existing evidence surrounding the effect of religion on crime is varied, contested, and inconclusive, and currently, no persuasive answer exists as to the empirical relationship between religion and crime." Phil Zuckerman's 2008 book, Society without God, based on studies conducted during 14 months in Scandinavia in 2005–2006, notes that Denmark and Sweden, "which are probably the least religious countries in the world, and possibly in the history of the world", enjoy "among the lowest violent crime rates in the world [and] the lowest levels of corruption in the world".
Dozens of studies have been conducted on this topic since the twentieth century. A 2005 study by Gregory S. Paul published in the Journal of Religion and Society stated that, "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies," and "In all secular developing democracies a centuries long-term trend has seen homicide rates drop to historical lows" with the exceptions being the United States (with a high religiosity level) and "theistic" Portugal. In a response, Gary Jensen builds on and refines Paul's study. he concludes that a "complex relationship" exists between religiosity and homicide "with some dimensions of religiosity encouraging homicide and other dimensions discouraging it". In April 2012, the results of a study which tested their subjects' pro-social sentiments were published in the Social Psychological and Personality Science journal in which non-religious people had higher scores showing that they were more motivated by their own compassion to perform pro-social behaviors. Religious people were found to be less motivated by compassion to be charitable than by an inner sense of moral obligation.
See also
Ethics
Integrity
Applied ethics
Appeal to tradition
Buddhist ethics
Christian ethics
De
Emotional intelligence
Ethical dilemma
Good and evil
Ideology
Index of ethics articles
Islamic ethics
Jewish ethics
Moral agency
Moral character
Moral conviction
Moral intelligence
Moral outsourcing
Moral panic
Moral skepticism
Outline of ethics
Value theory
Worldview
Notes
a. Studies on divorce in the United States done by the Barna Group suggested that atheists and agnostics have lower divorce rates than faith groups on average (though some faith groups had lower rates still). The study notes that fewer atheists and agnostics enter into marriage relative to faith-based individuals.
b. Some studies appear to show positive links in the relationship between religiosity and moral behavior Modern research in criminology also suggests an inverse relationship between religion and crime, with some studies establishing this connection. A meta-analysis of 60 studies on religion and crime concluded, "religious behaviors and beliefs exert a moderate deterrent effect on individuals' criminal behavior".
c. Zuckerman identifies that Scandinavians have "relatively high rates of petty crime and burglary", but "their overall rates of violent crime—such as murder, aggravated assault, and rape—are among the lowest on earth" (Zuckerman 2008, pp. 5–6).
d. The authors also state that "A few hundred years ago rates of homicide were astronomical in Christian Europe and the American colonies," and "the least theistic secular developing democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards." They argue for a positive correlation between the degree of public religiosity in a society and certain measures of dysfunction, an analysis published later in the same journal argues that a number of methodological problems undermine any findings or conclusions in the research.
e. Blackburn provides examples such as the phrase in Exodus 22:18 that has "helped to burn alive tens or hundreds of thousands of women in Europe and America": "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and notes that the Old Testament God apparently has "no problems with a slave-owning society", considers birth control a crime punishable by death, and "is keen on child abuse". Others interpret these passages differently, arguing for example that Jewish laws show the evolution of moral standards in society: that Jews actually threatened those who pursued forced slavery with the death penalty, held that slaves were persons instead of property, and protected them in several ways.
References
Further reading
(Reviewed in The Montreal Review)
Richard Dawkins, "The roots of morality: why are we good?", in The God Delusion, Black Swan, 2007.
Lunn, Arnold, and Garth Lean (1964). The New Morality. London: Blandford Press.
John Newton, Complete Conduct Principles for the 21st Century, 2000. .
containing articles by Paterson Brown:
"Religious Morality", (from Mind, 1963).
"Religious Morality: a Reply to Flew and Campbell", (from Mind, 1964).
"God and the Good", (from Religious Studies, 1967).
Ashley Welch, "Virtuous behaviors sanction later sins: people are quick to treat themselves after a good deed or healthy act" March 4, 2012.
Roberto Andorno, "Do our moral judgements need to be guided by principles?" Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 2012, 21(4), 457–65.
External links
The Definition of Morality, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Boston College's Morality Lab
Morality and Judaism, chabad.org
"The Moral Instinct" by Steven Pinker, The New York Times, 13 January 2008
Concepts in ethics
Social concepts | 0.771325 | 0.998788 | 0.77039 |
Quiverfull | Quiverfull is a Christian theological position that sees large families as a blessing from God. It encourages procreation, abstaining from all forms of birth control, natural family planning, and sterilization reversal. The movement derives its name from Psalm 127:3–5, where many children are metaphorically referred to as the arrows in a full quiver.
Some sources have referred to the Quiverfull position as providentialism, while other sources have simply referred to it as a manifestation of natalism.
It is most widespread in the United States but it also has adherents in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. One 2006 estimate put the number of families which subscribe to this philosophy as ranging from "the thousands to the low tens of thousands".
Historical background
As birth-control methods advanced during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many conservative Christian movements issued official statements against their use, citing their incompatibility with biblical beliefs and ideals.
In addition, there are those who contend that Quiverfull's "internal growth" model is a manifestation of a broader trend which is reflected in the lifestyles of such groups as Orthodox Jews (particularly Haredi and Hasidic Jews) and certain Christians including Orthodox Calvinists of the Netherlands, traditional Anabaptists (such as Old Order Amish, Old Colony Mennonites, and certain Conservative Mennonites), some traditional Methodists of the conservative holiness movement, and Laestadian Lutherans of Finland. The former may also be a case of a manifestation of a movement of opinion within some ethnic, linguistic, religious, regional, or other identifiable groups whose members have expressed concern about their continued existence for historical or other reasons. Such philosophies and groups are diverse amongst themselves—being found in all segments and sectors of the political spectrum—and they usually represent, to varying extents, the diversity within their group. The manifestations of such movements and opinions include everything from comparatively high rates of in-group marriage being applauded and gently suggested, to more explicit calls for endogamy such as is the case with the Druze, to concerns which were expressed by Protestants in Northern Ireland about a higher birth rate amongst Catholics, to Decree 770 which was issued by Nicolae Ceaușescu's government in Romania with regard to contraception, and other population topics as part of its local variant of the North Korean ideology of Juche.
Anglican allowance of birth control
In 1930, the Lambeth Conference issued a statement permitting birth control: "Where there is a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, complete abstinence is the primary and obvious method", but if there was morally sound reasoning for avoiding abstinence, "the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of Christian principles". Primary materials on the contemporary debate indicate a wide variety of opinion on the matter. In the decades that followed, birth control became gradually accepted among many other mainline Protestants, even among some conservative evangelicals.
Early Quiverfull authors
In the 20th century, Quiverfull as a modern Christian movement began to emerge. Nancy Campbell began publishing her magazine Above Rubies, which promotes and glorifies stay-at-home mothers who have as many children as possible, in 1977. While Campbell is in measure responsible for formulating Quiverfull ideas, the movement sparked most fully after the 1985 publication of Mary Pride's book The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality.
In her book, Pride chronicled her metaphorical journey away from what she labeled feminist and anti-natal ideas of happiness (within which she had lived as an activist before her conversion to conservative evangelical Christianity in 1977) toward her discovery of happiness surrounding what she portrayed as the biblically mandated role of wives and mothers as bearers of children and workers in the home under the authority of a husband. Pride wrote that such a lifestyle was generally biblically required of all married Christian women, but feminism had duped most Christian women without their awareness, especially in their acceptance of birth control.
As the basis for her arguments, Pride selected numerous Bible verses in order to lay out what she saw as the biblical role of women. These included verses which she interpreted as perpetuating her advocacy of compulsory childbearing and her opposition to the use of birth control which (in her view) was promoted by "the feminist agenda" by which she had formerly lived. Pride's explanations then became a spearheading basis of Quiverfull.
The name of the Quiverfull movement comes from , which Pride cited in The Way Home:
Pride stated in her book: "The church's sin which has caused us to become unsavory salt incapable of uplifting the society around us is selfishness, lack of love, refusing to consider children an unmitigated blessing. In a word, family planning."
Consolidation and growth of the movement
After the publication of Pride's The Way Home, her ideas spread through informal social networks. Around this time, numerous church pastors issued sermons which were in accord with Pride's ideas and various small publications and a few Quiverfull-oriented books appeared.
As the Internet expanded several years later, the informal networks gradually took on more organized forms as Quiverfull adherents developed numerous Quiverfull-oriented organizations, books, electronic mailing lists, websites, and digests, most notably The Quiverfull Digest. The largely decentralized "Quiverfull" movement resulted.
From their onset, Quiverfull ideas have sometimes had a polarizing effect among Christians who hold to them and Christians who are skeptical of or disagree with them.
Motivations
Obedience to God
Quiverfull authors and adherents express their core motivation as a desire to obey God's commandments as stated in the Bible. Among these commandments, "be fruitful and multiply", "behold, children are a gift of the Lord", and passages showing God acting to open and close the womb are interpreted as giving a basis for their views. Quiverfull adherents typically maintain that their philosophy is first about an open, accepting and obedient attitude toward the possibility of bearing children. Within the view, this attitude may result in many, few or even no children, because God Himself maintains sole provenance over conception and birth. The duty of the Quiverfull adherent is only to maintain an "open willingness" to joyfully receive and not thwart however many children God chooses to bestow. Contraception in all its forms is seen as inconsistent with this attitude and is thus entirely avoided, as is abortion.
Missionary effort
Quiverfull's principal authors and its adherents also describe their motivation as a missionary effort to raise up many children as Christians to advance the cause of the Christian religion. Its distinguishing viewpoint is to eagerly receive children as blessings from God, eschewing all forms of contraception, including natural family planning, and sterilization.
Population and demography
According to journalist Kathryn Joyce, writing in the magazine The Nation: "[T]he Quiverfull mission is rooted in faith, the unseen," even if "its mandate to be fruitful and multiply has tangible results as well." Others remark that Quiverfull resembles other world-denying fundamentalist movements that grow through internal reproduction and membership retention such as Orthodox Jews (particularly Haredi and Hasidic Jews), and certain Christian denominations (such as the Amish and Mennonites, and Laestadian Lutherans in Finland). Many are thriving as seculars and moderates have transitioned to below-replacement fertility.
Beliefs
The principal Quiverfull belief is that Christians should maintain a strongly welcoming attitude toward the possibility of bearing children. With minor exceptions, adherents reject birth control use as completely incompatible with this belief.
Majority doctrine
Most Quiverfull adherents regard children as unqualified blessings, gifts that should be received happily from God. Quiverfull authors Rick and Jan Hess argued for this belief in their 1990 book:
"Behold, children are a gift of the Lord." (Psa. 127:3) Do we really believe that? If children are a gift from God, let's for the sake of argument ask ourselves what other gift or blessing from God we would reject. Money? Would we reject great wealth if God gave it? Not likely! How about good health? Many would say that a man's health is his most treasured possession. But children? Even children given by God? "That's different!" some will plead! All right, is it different? God states right here in no-nonsense language that children are gifts. Do we believe His Word to be true?
Quiverfull authors such as Pride, Provan, and Hess extend this idea to mean that if one child is a blessing, then each additional child is likewise a blessing and not something to be viewed as economically burdensome or unaffordable. When a couple seeks to control family size via birth control they are thus "rejecting God's blessings" he might otherwise give and possibly breaking his commandment to "be fruitful and multiply."
Accordingly, Quiverfull theology opposes the general acceptance among mainline Protestant Christians of deliberately limiting family size or spacing children through birth control. For example, Mary Pride argued, "God commanded that sex be at least potentially fruitful (that is, not deliberately unfruitful). ... All forms of sex that shy away from marital fruitfulness are perverted." Adherents believe that God himself controls via Providence how many and how often children are conceived and born, pointing to Bible verses that describe God acting to "open and close the womb" (see Genesis 20:18, 29:31, 30:22; 1 Samuel 1:5-6; Isaiah 66:9). Hess and Hess state that couples "just need to trust God to provide them with the perfect number of children for their situation."
Some Quiverfull adherents base their rejection of birth control upon the belief that the Genesis creation and post–Noahic flood Bible passages to "be fruitful and multiply" (see Genesis 1:22; 9:7) are un-rescinded biblical commandments. For example, Charles D. Provan argues:
"Be fruitful and multiply"... is a command of God, indeed the first command to a married couple. Birth control obviously involves disobedience to this command, for birth control attempts to prevent being fruitful and multiplying. Therefore birth control is wrong, because it involves disobedience to the Word of God. Nowhere is this command done away with in the entire Bible; therefore it still remains valid for us today.
Quiverfull advocates such as Rick and Jan Hess and Rachel Giove Scott believe that the Devil deceives Christian couples into using birth control so that children God otherwise willed to create are prevented from being born. In addition, a Quiverfull adherent was quoted in the 2001 Calgary Herald as making this statement: "Children are made in God's image, and the enemy hates that image, so the more of them he can prevent from being born, the more he likes it."
Infertility
Adherents view barrenness, referred to as an "empty quiver", as something to be accepted from God as His choice, which then becomes a matter of prayer in the hope that God may decide to miraculously intervene. Quiverfull adherents also see infertility treatments as a usurpation of God's providence and accordingly reject them. Adoption is viewed as a positive option through which couples can also rely on God's providence to send children. Biblical references to God's love for the orphan and the belief that people are saved through adoption into God's family are often noted.
Some circles do accept medical interventions, since improving opportunities for pregnancy is not seen to guarantee it any more than with any healthy couple. Also, some reproductive health problems may be seen as symptomatic of other health problems which need to be addressed generally.
Minority doctrine
Not all Quiverfull families and authors agree with each statement which was made by the movement's principal authors.
Samuel Owens considers the possibility that some aspects of a fallen universe may sometimes justify the option to use a non–potentially abortive birth control method. These aspects of a fallen universe include serious illnesses, inevitable Caesarean sections, and other problematic situations, such as disabling mental instability and serious marital disharmony. Owens additionally argues that birth control may be permissible for married couples who are called to a "higher moral purpose" than having children, such as caring long-term for many orphans or serving as career missionaries in a dangerous location.
Despite some variances, all Quiverfull families and authors agree that God's normative ideal for happy, healthy and prosperous married couples is to take no voluntary actions that will prevent them from having children.
Practices
Non-use of contraception
Quiverfull adherents maintain that God "opens and closes the womb" of a woman on a case-by-case basis, and that any attempts to regulate fertility are usurpation of divine power. Thus, the defining practice of a Quiverfull married couple is not to use any form of birth control and to maintain continual "openness to children," that is to say, engaging in routine sexual intercourse with no attempt to limit the possibility of conception. This practice is irrespective of the time of the month during the menstrual cycle, and is considered by Quiverfull adherents to be the principal—if not the primary—aspect of their Christian calling in submission to the Lordship of Christ.
Proponents of the Quiverfull movement also regard contraceptive pills and other similar contraceptives as unacceptable abortifacients.
Some Quiverfull adherents advocate for birth spacing through breastfeeding, so that the return of fertility after childbirth could be delayed by lactational amenorrhea.
Family organization, homeschooling, homesteading
Quiverfull authors and adherents advocate for and seek to model a return to biblical patriarchy. Mary Pride has more recently attempted to distance herself from the patriarchy movement and from a focus on the father's role in training daughters. In a column published in her magazine Practical Homeschooling in 2009, as well as in the afterword to the 25th-anniversary edition of The Way Home, Pride clarified her position that it is primarily mothers, not fathers, who should teach girls about women's roles and duties. As Emily McGowin notes in her 2018 book Quivering Families, however, "[Pride] differentiates herself from these approaches without denying the underlying gender hierarchy and pronatalism."
Quiverfull authors typically organize family governance to reflect an "umbrella of protection" with the mother as a homemaker under the authority of her husband and the children under the authority of both. Parents seek to largely shelter their children from aspects of culture deemed adversarial to their religious beliefs. Additionally, Quiverfull families strongly incline toward homeschooling and toward homesteading in a rural area. However, exceptions exist in substantial enough proportions that these latter two items are general and are often idealized correlations to Quiverfull practices and not integral parts of them.
Sterilization reversal surgery
Quiverfull adherents Brad and Dawn Irons run Blessed Arrows Sterilization Reversal Ministry. The couple advocates for Quiverfull ideas while providing funding, physician referrals, and support to Christians wishing to undergo sterilization reversal surgery.
Institute in Basic Life Principles founder Bill Gothard advocates for reversals, saying that sterilized couples have "cut off children" and should devote themselves instead to "raising up godly seed".
Criticism
The movement has been criticized by journalists from Glamour Magazine for what they perceive to be sexism and a demeaning approach to women.
Criticism from other Christians
James B. Jordan maintains that, while children are indeed blessings, they are only one among a wide range of blessings God offers, and prayerfully choosing foci among them is part of prudent Christian stewardship.
John Piper's Desiring God Ministries has published some comments that relate to Quiverfull:
Just because something is a gift from the Lord does not mean that it is wrong to be a steward of when or whether you will come into possession of it. It is wrong to reason that since A is good and a gift from the Lord, then we must pursue as much of A as possible. God has made this a world in which tradeoffs have to be made and we cannot do everything to the fullest extent. For kingdom purposes, it might be wise not to get married. And for kingdom purposes, it might be wise to regulate the size of one's family and to regulate when the new additions to the family will likely arrive. As Wayne Grudem has said, "it is okay to place less emphasis on some good activities in order to focus on other good activities."
Criticism from former Quiverfull adherents
Some women who have left the Quiverfull movement are now vocally critical of it. Vyckie Garrison spent 16 years living the Quiverfull lifestyle and had seven children before leaving her husband and ultimately becoming an atheist. She told Vice that her health was negatively affected by so many births and that over time, her husband became "a tyrant." Garrison founded the blog No Longer Quivering to share her own story and the stories of other women who had been harmed by the Quiverfull lifestyle. The blog is now maintained by Suzanne Titkemeyer, another former Quiverfull adherent who describes her years in the movement as "disastrous."
Likewise, some children who were raised in Quiverfull homes have grown up to speak out against the movement. In 2018, Eve [Hännah] Ettinger and Kieryn Darkwater started a podcast called Kitchen Table Cult in which they discuss their experiences of being raised Quiverfull and connect the ideology to current events such as the election of Donald Trump. In a 2015 interview about their upbringing, Ettinger said that in Quiverfull families, "the parents are just as confused as the kids, and often are struggling with deep-set psychological issues and need as much therapy and compassion as the kids do to recover from the dehumanizing reality of trying to have a perfect Quiverfull family to please a demanding and holy God."
CFCtoo, an advocacy group for survivors of the Quiverfull community Christian Fellowship Center, is advocating for New York to amend their mandated reporting laws to include clergy. CFCtoo argues that such laws are necessary to combat the Quiverfull movement's propensity for "incest, child sexual abuse, and systematic abuse coverups based on a twisted understanding of biblical forgiveness."
Notable adherents
Doug Phillips, a Calvinist Christian and the son of U.S. Constitution Party leader Howard Phillips. From 1998 to 2013, Doug Phillips was the president of Vision Forum Ministries, a now-defunct organization which advocated biblical patriarchy, creationism, homeschooling, and Quiverfull. Phillips and his wife, Beall, have seven children.
Charles D. Provan, whose book The Bible and Birth Control is routinely cited by Quiverfull adherents as providing an important theological justification for their movement. Provan was mentioned in a November 27, 2006, article about Quiverfull in The Nation. He also authored books and articles on other Christian topics. Before Provan's death in 2007, he and his wife had 10 children.
R. C. Sproul, Jr., a Calvinist Christian theologian and the son of the noted Reformed theologian and founder of Ligonier Ministries, Robert Charles Sproul. Sproul Jr. and his wife, Denise, had eight children before Denise died.
Nancy Campbell, an author, speaker, and mother of 10 children. Nancy and her husband Colin run Above Rubies, "a ministry to encourage women in their high calling as wives, mothers, and homemakers. Its purpose is to uphold and strengthen family life and to raise the standard of God's truth in the nation." Campbell's magazine has a worldwide circulation of over 160,000 and her daughters Serene and Pearl have launched a successful rebranding of Quiverfull values in their Trim Healthy Mama line.
Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, known for the reality TV show 19 Kids and Counting.
See also
Childfree
Christian views on contraception
Natalism
Overpopulation
Traducianism
Turpin case
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
References
Further reading
Books advocating a Quiverfull position
Adams, Shelly and Morgan. Arrows in His Hand (children's book). Monument Pub., Monument, CO: 2007.
Andrews, Robert. The Family: God's Weapon for Victory. Winepress Publishing 1996. ; Sentinel Press 2002.
Campbell, Nancy. Be Fruitful and Multiply. Vision Forum, San Antonio, TX: 2003.
Flanders, Jennifer. Love Your Husband/Love Yourself: Embracing God's Purpose for Passion in Marriage. Prescott Publishing, Tyler, TX: 2010.
Hess, Rick and Jan. A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ. Wolgemuth & Hyatt Publishers, Brentwood, TN: 1990.
Houghton, Craig. Family UNplanning. Xulon Press, Longwood, FL: 2006.
Owen, Jr., Samuel A. Letting God Plan Your Family. Crossway Books, Wheaton, IL: 1990.
Pride, Mary. The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality. Good News Pub, Wheaton, IL: 1985.
Provan, Charles D. The Bible and Birth Control. Zimmer Printing, Monongahela, PA: 1989.
Chapter of Provan's book available here. Audio files of Provan's complete book available by searching with his name at sermonaudio.com
Scott, Rachel. Birthing God's Mighty Warriors. Xulon Press, Longwood, FL: 2004.
Books which advocate Quiverfull as a secondary focus
Farris, Vickie. A Mom Just Like You. B&H Publishing Group, Nashville, TN: 2002.
Sources which are critical of Quiverfull
Ettinger, Eve, and Kieryn Darkwater. Kitchen Table Cult podcast.
Joyce, Kathryn. Women’s Liberation Through Submission: An Evangelical Anti-Feminism Is Born.
Joyce, Kathryn. Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. Beacon Press, Boston, MA: 2009. .
McFarland, Hillary. "Quivering Daughters: Hope and Healing for the Daughters of Patriarchy". Darklight Press, 2010.
McGowin, Emily. Quivering Families: The Quiverfull Movement and Evangelical Theology of the Family. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018.
McKeown, John. "US Protestant natalist reception of Old Testament "fruitful verses": a critique." Liverpool University PhD thesis, 2011. Revised as book God's Babies: Natalism and Bible Interpretation in Modern America, OpenBook, 2014.
No Longer Quivering blog (originally created by Vyckie Garrison).
External links
QuiverFull.Com
Video feeds of ABC News Nightline on Quiverfull
Christian fundamentalism
Christian movements
Christian new religious movements
Christian terminology
Conservatism in the United States
Evangelicalism in the United States
Homeschooling
Natalism
Religious views on birth control
Social conservatism | 0.773778 | 0.995556 | 0.770339 |
Worldview | A worldview or a world-view or is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual's or society's knowledge, culture, and point of view. A worldview can include natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and ethics.
Etymology
The term worldview is a calque of the German word , composed of ('world') and ('perception' or 'view'). The German word is also used in English. It is a concept fundamental to German philosophy, especially epistemology and refers to a wide world perception. Additionally, it refers to the framework of ideas and beliefs forming a global description through which an individual, group or culture watches and interprets the world and interacts with it as a social reality.
and cognitive philosophy
Within cognitive philosophy and the cognitive sciences is the German concept of Weltanschauung. This expression is used to refer to the "wide worldview" or "wide world perception" of a people, family, or person. The of a people originates from the unique world experience of a people, which they experience over several millennia. The language of a people reflects the of that people in the form of its syntactic structures and untranslatable connotations and its denotations.
The term is often wrongly attributed to Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of German ethnolinguistics. However, Humboldt's key concept was Weltansicht. Weltansicht was used by Humboldt to refer to the overarching conceptual and sensorial apprehension of reality shared by a linguistic community (Nation). On the other hand, , first used by Immanuel Kant and later popularized by Hegel, was always used in German and later in English to refer more to philosophies, ideologies and cultural or religious perspectives, than to linguistic communities and their mode of apprehending reality.
In 1911, the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey published an essay entitled "The Types of and their Development in Metaphysics" that became quite influential. Dilthey characterized worldviews as providing a perspective on life that encompasses the cognitive, evaluative, and volitional aspects of human experience. Although worldviews have always been expressed in literature and religion, philosophers have attempted to give them conceptual definition in their metaphysical systems. On that basis, Dilthey found it possible to distinguish three general recurring types of worldview. The first of these he called naturalism because it gives priority to the perceptual and experimental determination of what is and allows contingency to influence how we evaluate and respond to reality. Naturalism can be found in Democritus, Hobbes, Hume and many other modern philosophers. The second type of worldview is called the idealism of freedom and is represented by Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Bergson among others. It is dualistic and gives primacy to the freedom of the will. The organizational order of our world is structured by our mind and the will to know. The third type is called objective idealism and Dilthey sees it in Heraclitus, Parmenides, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hegel. In objective idealism the ideal does not hover above what is actual but inheres in it. This third type of worldview is ultimately monistic and seeks to discern the inner coherence and harmony among all things. Dilthey thought it impossible to come up with a universally valid metaphysical or systematic formulation of any of these worldviews, but regarded them as useful schema for his own more reflective kind of life philosophy. See Makkreel and Rodi, Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, volume 6, 2019.
Anthropologically, worldviews can be expressed as the "fundamental cognitive, affective, and evaluative presuppositions a group of people make about the nature of things, and which they use to order their lives."
If it were possible to draw a map of the world on the basis of , it would probably be seen to cross political borders— is the product of political borders and common experiences of a people from a geographical region, environmental-climatic conditions, the economic resources available, socio-cultural systems, and the language family. (The work of the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza aims to show the gene-linguistic co-evolution of people).
According to James W. Underhill, worldview can periodically be used very differently by certain linguists and sociologists. It is for this reason that Underhill, and those who influenced him, attempted to wed metaphor in, for example, the sociology of religion, with discourse analysis. Underhill also proposed five subcategories for the study of worldview: world-perceiving, world-conceiving, cultural mindset, personal world, and perspective.
Comparison of worldviews
One can think of a worldview as comprising a number of basic beliefs which are philosophically equivalent to the axioms of the worldview considered as a logical or consistent theory. These basic beliefs cannot, by definition, be proven (in the logical sense) within the worldview – precisely because they are axioms, and are typically argued from rather than argued for. However their coherence can be explored philosophically and logically.
If two different worldviews have sufficient common beliefs it may be possible to have a constructive dialogue between them.
On the other hand, if different worldviews are held to be basically incommensurate and irreconcilable, then the situation is one of cultural relativism and would therefore incur the standard criticisms from philosophical realists.
Additionally, religious believers might not wish to see their beliefs relativized into something that is only "true for them".
Subjective logic is a belief-reasoning formalism where beliefs explicitly are subjectively held by individuals but where a consensus between different worldviews can be achieved.
A third alternative sees the worldview approach as only a methodological relativism, as a suspension of judgment about the truth of various belief systems but not a declaration that there is no global truth. For instance, the religious philosopher Ninian Smart begins his Worldviews: Cross-cultural Explorations of Human Beliefs with "Exploring Religions and Analysing Worldviews" and argues for "the neutral, dispassionate study of different religious and secular systems—a process I call worldview analysis."
The comparison of religious, philosophical or scientific worldviews is a delicate endeavor, because such worldviews start from different presuppositions and cognitive values. Clément Vidal has proposed metaphilosophical criteria for the comparison of worldviews, classifying them in three broad categories:
objective: objective consistency, scientificity, scope
subjective: subjective consistency, personal utility, emotionality
intersubjective: intersubjective consistency, collective utility, narrativity
Characteristics
While Leo Apostel and his followers clearly hold that individuals can construct worldviews, other writers regard worldviews as operating at a community level, or in an unconscious way. For instance, if one's worldview is fixed by one's language, as according to a strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, one would have to learn or invent a new language in order to construct a new worldview.
According to Apostel, a worldview is an ontology, or a descriptive model of the world. It should comprise these six elements:
An explanation of the world
A futurology, answering the question "Where are we heading?"
Values, answers to ethical questions: "What should we do?"
A praxeology, or methodology, or theory of action: "How should we attain our goals?"
An epistemology, or theory of knowledge: "What is true and false?"
An etiology. A constructed world-view should contain an account of its own "building blocks", its origins and construction.
Terror management theory
A worldview, according to terror management theory (TMT), serves as a buffer against death anxiety. It is theorized that living up to the ideals of one's worldview provides a sense of self-esteem which provides a sense of transcending the limits of human life (e.g. literally, as in religious belief in immortality; symbolically, as in art works or children to live on after one's death, or in contributions to one's culture). Evidence in support of terror management theory includes a series of experiments by Jeff Schimel and colleagues in which a group of Canadians found to score highly on a measure of patriotism were asked to read an essay attacking the dominant Canadian worldview.
Using a test of death-thought accessibility (DTA), involving an ambiguous word completion test (e.g. "COFF__" could either be completed as either "COFFEE" or "COFFIN" or "COFFER"), participants who had read the essay attacking their worldview were found to have a significantly higher level of DTA than the control group, who read a similar essay attacking Australian cultural values. Mood was also measured following the worldview threat, to test whether the increase in death thoughts following worldview threat were due to other causes, for example, anger at the attack on one's cultural worldview. No significant changes on mood scales were found immediately following the worldview threat.
To test the generalisability of these findings to groups and worldviews other than those of nationalistic Canadians, Schimel et al conducted a similar experiment on a group of religious individuals whose worldview included that of creationism. Participants were asked to read an essay which argued in support of the theory of evolution, following which the same measure of DTA was taken as for the Canadian group. Religious participants with a creationist worldview were found to have a significantly higher level of death-thought accessibility than those of the control group.
Goldenberg et al found that highlighting the similarities between humans and other animals increases death-thought accessibility, as does attention to the physical rather than meaningful qualities of sex.
Religion
Nishida Kitaro wrote extensively on "the Religious Worldview" in exploring the philosophical significance of Eastern religions.
According to Neo-Calvinist David Naugle's World view: The History of a Concept, "Conceiving of Christianity as a worldview has been one of the most significant developments in the recent history of the church."
The Christian thinker James W. Sire defines a worldview as "a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true, or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic construction of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being." He suggests that "we should all think in terms of worldviews, that is, with a consciousness not only of our own way of thought but also that of other people, so that we can first understand and then genuinely communicate with others in our pluralistic society."
The commitment mentioned by James W. Sire can be extended further. The worldview increases the commitment to serve the world. With the change of a person's view towards the world, he/she can be motivated to serve the world. This serving attitude has been illustrated by Tareq M Zayed as the 'Emancipatory Worldview' in his writing "History of emancipatory worldview of Muslim learners".
David Bell has also raised questions on religious worldviews for the designers of superintelligences – machines much smarter than humans.
See also
Life stance
References
External links
Wikibook:The scientific world view
Wiki Worldview Themes: A Structure for Characterizing and Analyzing Worldviews includes links to roughly 1000 Wikipedia articles
– a 2002 essay on research in linguistic relativity (Lera Boroditsky)
inTERRAgation.com—A documentary project. Collecting and evaluating answers to "the meaning of life" from around the world.
The God Contention—Comparing various worldviews, faiths, and religions through the eyes of their advocates.
Cole, Graham A., Do Christians have a Worldview? A paper examining the concept of worldview as it relates to and has been used by Christianity. Contains a helpful annotated bibliography.
World View article on the Principia Cybernetica Project
Pogorskiy, E. (2015). Using personalisation to improve the effectiveness of global educational projects. E-Learning and Digital Media, 12(1), 57–67.
Worldviews – An Introduction from Project Worldview
"Studies on World Views Related to Science" (list of suggested books and resources) from the American Scientific Affiliation (a Christian perspective)
Eugene Webb, Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009.
Benjamin Gal-Or, Cosmology, Physics and Philosophy, Springer Verlag, 1981, 1983, 1987, , .
Conceptual modelling
Belief
Consensus reality
Psychological attitude
Psychological concepts
Concepts in epistemology
Epistemology of religion | 0.772331 | 0.997345 | 0.77028 |
Religious movement | A religious movement is a theological, social, political, or philosophical interpretation of religion that is not generally represented and controlled by a specific church, sect, or denomination. A religious movement is characterized by significant growth in people, ideas and culture. Otherwise, it ceases to be a movement.
Christian movements
Charismatic movement
Christian fundamentalism movement
Home church movement
Mission movement
Revival movement
Reform movements
Ecumenical movement
Protestantism
Religious orders
Other religious movements
Fundamentalism – "Global fundamentalism," is an uncomplimentary epithet for religious groups that are viewed as out of sync with the modern world.
New Age movement
New religious movement
Cult
Sociological classifications of religious movements
Sociological classifications of religious movements
Related types of social movements
Art movement
Civil rights movement
Human rights movement
Labour movement
Peace movement
Political movement
Social movement
References
External links
Movements
Theology | 0.792602 | 0.971819 | 0.770266 |
Cosmopolitanism | Cosmopolitanism is the idea that all human beings are members of a single community. Its adherents are known as cosmopolitan or cosmopolite. Cosmopolitanism is both prescriptive and aspirational, believing humans can and should be "world citizens" in a "universal community". The idea encompasses different dimensions and avenues of community, such as promoting universal moral standards, establishing global political structures, or developing a platform for mutual cultural expression and tolerance.
For example, Kwame Anthony Appiah articulates a cosmopolitan community where individuals from varying locations (physical, economic, etc.) enter relationships of mutual respect despite their differing beliefs (religious, political, etc.). In a looser but related sense, "cosmopolitan" is also used to describe places where people of various ethnic, cultural and/or religious backgrounds live together and interact with each other.
Etymology
The word derives from the , or kosmopolitês, formed from "", kosmos, i.e. "world", "universe", or "cosmos", and , "politês", i.e. "citizen" or "[one] of a city". Contemporary usage defines the term as "citizen of the world".
Definitions
Definitions of cosmopolitanism usually begin with the Greek etymology of "citizen of the world". However, as Appiah points out, "world" in the original sense meant "cosmos" or "universe", not earth or globe as current use assumes.
In the United States, two forms of cosmopolitanism have been established. For one, there is a political cosmopolitan nationalism that has defined and constructed other races. On the other hand, ethno-cultural cosmopolitanism that celebrates multiculturalism has benefited from an upswing in the United States after World War II. A definition of cosmopolitanism that handles this issue is given in a recent book on political globalization:
Cosmopolitanism can be defined as a global politics that, firstly, projects a sociality of common political engagement among all human beings across the globe, and, secondly, suggests that this sociality should be either ethically or organizationally privileged over other forms of sociality.
The ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi in preserved scripts said that "universal love and mutual benefit" could be attained "to regard other people's countries as one's own". The Chinese term tianxia (all under Heaven), a metonym for empire, has also been re-interpreted in the modern age as a conception of cosmopolitanism, and was used by 1930s modernists as the title of a Shanghai-based, English-language journal of world arts and letters T'ien Hsia Monthly.
Philosophical
Philosophical roots
Cosmopolitanism can be traced back to Diogenes of Sinope, the founder of the Cynic movement in Ancient Greece. It was said that when Diogenes was "Asked where he came from, he answered: 'I am a citizen of the world (kosmopolitês)'". At the time, the broadest basis of social identity among Greeks was either the individual city-state or the culturally and linguistically homogeneous Hellenic group.
Stoicism, another Greek school of thought that was founded roughly a century later, built upon Diogenes' idea, with many of its thinkers and adherents stressing that each human being "dwells [...] in two communities – the local community of our birth, and the community of human argument and aspiration". A common way to understand Stoic cosmopolitanism is through Hierocles' circle model of identity, which states that individuals should regard themselves as concentric circles: the first one around the self, followed by immediate family, extended family, local group, citizens, countrymen, humanity. Within these circles human beings feel a sense of "affinity" or "endearment" towards others, which the Stoics termed Oikeiôsis. The task of world citizens becomes then to "draw the circles somehow towards the centre, making all human beings more like our fellow city dwellers, and so forth".
Modern cosmopolitan thinkers
In his 1795 essay "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch", Immanuel Kant stages a ius cosmopoliticum (cosmopolitan law/right) as a guiding principle to help global society achieve permanent, enduring peace. Kant's cosmopolitan right stems from an understanding of all human beings as equal members of a universal community. Cosmopolitan right thus works in tandem with international political rights, and the shared, universal right of humanity.
Kant's cosmopolitan right is fundamentally bound to the conditions of universal hospitality and the right of resort. Universal hospitality is defined as the right to be welcomed upon arrival in foreign territory, but is contingent on a guest arriving in a peaceful manner. Kant makes the additional claim that all human beings have the basic right of resort: the right to present oneself in a foreign land. The right of resort is derived from Kant's understanding of the Earth's surface as essentially communal, and further emphasizing his claims on equally shared universal rights among all human beings.
The philosophical concepts of Emmanuel Levinas, on ethics, and Jacques Derrida, on hospitality, provide a theoretical framework for the relationships between people in their everyday lives and apart from any form of written laws or codes. For Levinas, the foundation of ethics consists in the obligation to respond to the Other. In Being for the Other, he writes that there is no "universal moral law," only the sense of responsibility (goodness, mercy, charity) that the Other, in a state of vulnerability, calls forth. The proximity of the Other is an important part of Levinas's concept: the face of the Other is what compels the response.
For Derrida, the foundation of ethics is hospitality, the readiness and the inclination to welcome the Other into one's home. Ethics, he claims, is hospitality. Pure, unconditional hospitality is a desire that underscores the conditional hospitality necessary in our relationships with others. Levinas's and Derrida's theories of ethics and hospitality hold out the possibility of an acceptance of the Other as different but of equal standing. Isolation is not a feasible alternative in the world, therefore, it is important to consider how best to approach these interactions, and to determine what is at stake for ourselves and the others: what conditions of hospitality to impose, and whether or not we have responded to the call of the Other. Further, both theories reveal the importance of considering how best to interact with the Other and others, and what is at stake.
Derrida in an interview with Bennington (1997) summarized "cosmopolitanism",
A further state of cosmopolitanism occurred after the Second World War. As a reaction to the Holocaust and other atrocities, the concept of crimes against humanity became a generally accepted category in international law. This clearly shows the appearance and acceptance of a notion of individual responsibility that is considered to exist toward all of humankind.
Philosophical cosmopolitans are moral universalists: they believe that all humans, and not merely compatriots or fellow-citizens, come under the same moral standards. The boundaries between nations, states, cultures or societies are therefore morally irrelevant. A widely cited example of a contemporary cosmopolitan is Kwame Anthony Appiah.
Some philosophers and scholars argue that the objective and subjective conditions arising in today's unique historical moment, an emerging planetary phase of civilization, creates a latent potential for the emergence of a cosmopolitan identity as global citizens and possible formation of a global citizens movement. These emerging objective and subjective conditions in the planetary phase include improved and affordable telecommunications; space travel and the first images of our fragile planet floating in the vastness of space; the emergence of global warming and other ecological threats to our collective existence; new global institutions such as the United Nations, World Trade Organization, or International Criminal Court; the rise of transnational corporations and integration of markets often termed economic globalization; the emergence of global NGOs and transnational social movements, such as the World Social Forum; and so on. Globalization, a more common term, typically refers more narrowly to the economic and trade relations and misses the broader cultural, social, political, environmental, demographic, values and knowledge transitions taking place.
Contemporary cosmopolitan thinkers
Thich Nhat Hanh discusses what he calls "Interbeing" as a way of living one's life in relation to others; "Interbeing" might easily be compared to cosmopolitanism. Nhat Hanh's philosophical beliefs are grounded in the precepts of Buddhist teachings, which involve compassion and understanding to protect and live in harmony with all people, animals, plants, and minerals. He further describes what he calls "Mindfulness Training of the Order of Interbeing" as being aware of sufferings created by, but not limited to, the following causes: fanaticism and intolerances that disrupt compassion and living in harmony with others; indoctrination of narrow-minded beliefs; imposition of views; anger; and miscommunication. Understanding and compassion for others seems to be achieved by the understanding of others' suffering and the root causes of suffering. Therefore, to be responsible is to recognize and understand suffering, which then leads to compassion. It is through this process that others can be recognized as people.
Other theorists, philosophers, and activists contend that recognizing suffering is necessary to end violence. In Scared Sacred, Velcrow Ripper takes a journey to different sites of great suffering that ultimately leads him toward developing compassion. In "The Planet", Paul Gilroy explores how the construction and naturalization of race and the hierarchies produced by difference shape the hatred of others. It is the deconstruction of these ideologies that can lead to the compassion and humanization of others. Thus individual responsibility is being aware of what Judith Butler calls the precariousness of life in self and other; being a cosmopolitan seems to be, above all, a social, ethical enterprise.
In Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Kwame Anthony Appiah notes how social ethics seem to operate: Whatever obligation one might have to another, especially a foreign other, that obligation does not supersede the obligations one has to those people most familiar to them. However, as Judith Butler questions, "at what cost do I establish the familiar as the criterion" for valuing others? If one values the familiar more than the foreign, what are the consequences? Paul Gilroy offers a possible alternative to this emphasis on familiarity arguing that "methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one's own culture and history ... might qualify as essential to a cosmopolitan commitment." This estrangement entails a "process of exposure to otherness" in order to foster "the irreducible value of diversity within sameness."
For Gilroy, being cosmopolitan seems to involve both a social, ethical enterprise and a cultural enterprise. In "The Planet", Gilroy describes the cases of Tom Hurndall and Rachel Corrie; each seems to exemplify what might be considered Gilroy's figure of the cosmopolitan. Both Hurndall and Corrie removed themselves (geographically) from their home cultures, presumably both physically and mentally estranging themselves from their own cultures and histories. Hurndall and Corrie were both killed in 2003 (in separate incidents). Gilroy's model of estrangement might actually undermine itself through its examples; this might be construed as a failure of Gilroy's theory to address the practical difficulties of estranging oneself from the familiar.
The Venus Project, an international, multidisciplinary educational organization created by Jacque Fresco, works to spread cosmopolitan ideas by transcending artificial boundaries currently separating people and emphasizing an understanding of our interdependence with nature and each other.
Some forms of cosmopolitanism also fail to address the potential for economic colonization by powerful countries over less powerful ones. Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, observes that when nations achieved independence from European colonizers, frequently there was no system in place to secure their economic future, and they became "manager[s] for Western enterprise...in practise set[ting] up its country as the brothel of Europe." When "third world" nations are drawn into economic partnerships with global capital, ostensibly to improve their national quality of life, often the only ones benefitting from this partnership are well-placed individuals and not the nation itself. Others highlighted the importance of moving beyond Western liberal values. Drawing on classical realism, they consider liberalism insufficient to promote equality between nations, breaking the iron laws of competition between states; instead, they look at Byzantine and other pre-modern cultures. Likewise, Mahmood Mamdani in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim suggests that the imposition of Western cultural norms, democracy and Christianity to name only two, has historically resulted in nationalist violence; however, Appiah has implied that democracy is a pre-requisite for cosmopolitan intervention in developing nations.
Much of the political thinking of the last two centuries has taken nationalism and the framework of the sovereign nation-state for granted. With the advance of globalization and the increased facility of travel and communication, some thinkers consider that the political system based on the nation-state has become obsolete and that it is time to design a better and more efficient alternative. Jesús Mosterín analyzes how the world political system should be organized in order to maximize individual freedom and individual opportunity. Rejecting as muddled the metaphysical notion of free will, he focuses on political freedom, the absence of coercion or interference by others in personal decisions. Because of the tendencies to violence and aggression that lurk in human nature, some constraint on freedom is necessary for peaceful and fruitful social interaction.
Especially, there is no rational ground for curtailing the cultural freedoms (of language, religion and customs) in the name of the nation, the church, or the party. From this point of view, the Internet provides a much more attractive model than the nation-state. Neither is there any just reason for restraining the free circulation of people, ideas, or goods. Mosterín thinks that the nation-state is incompatible with the full development of freedom, whose blossoming requires the reorganization of the world political system along cosmopolitan lines. He proposes a world without sovereign nation-states, territorially organized in small autonomous but not-sovereign cantonal polities, complemented by strong world organizations.
Criticizing the abstract nature of most versions of cosmopolitanism, Charles Blattberg has argued that any viable cosmopolitanism must be "rooted," by which he means based upon a "global patriotism."
More general philosophical reviews of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism are also available. Carol Nicholson compares John Searle's opposition to multiculturalism with Charles Taylor's celebration of it. She uses Richard Rorty as a triangulation point in that he remains neutral about multiculturalism, but his philosophical analysis of truth and practice can be deployed to argue against Searle and in favor of Taylor. At a conference on "Philosophy in a Multicultural Context", Rasmus Winther excavated the philosophical assumptions and practices connected with cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. He develops Bruno Latour's conception of the philosopher as public diplomat.
Political and sociological
Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) observed the development of what he called the 'cult of the individual', which is a new religion that replaced the Christianity that was dying out, and which is centered around the sacredness of human dignity. This new religion would provide the new foundations of Western society, and these foundations are closely related to human rights and individual nation's constitutions. A society's sacred object would be the individual's human dignity, and the moral code guiding the society is found in that country's way of interpreting human dignity and human rights. Thus, rather than finding solidarity through national culture, or a particular traditional religious doctrine, society would be unified by its adherence to political values, i.e. individual rights and a defence of human dignity. Durkheim's cult of the individual has many similarities to John Rawls' political liberalism, which Rawls developed almost a century after Durkheim.
In his posthumously published (1957) "Professional Ethics and Civic Morals" Durkheim wrote that:
Ulrich Beck (May 15, 1944 – January 1, 2015) was a sociologist who posed the new concept of cosmopolitan critical theory in direct opposition to traditional nation-state politics. Nation-state theory sees power relations only among different state actors, and excludes a global economy, or subjugates it to the nation-state model. Cosmopolitanism sees global capital as a possible threat to the nation state and places it within a meta-power game in which global capital, states and civil society are its players.
It is important to mark a distinction between Beck's cosmopolitanism and the idea of a world state. For Beck, imposing a single world order was considered hegemonic at best and ethnocentric at worst. Rather, political and sociological cosmopolitanism rests upon these fundamental foundations:
"Acknowledging the otherness of those who are culturally different"
"Acknowledging the otherness of the future"
"Acknowledging the otherness of nature"
"Acknowledging the otherness of the object"
"Acknowledging the otherness of other rationalities"
A number of philosophers, including Emmanuel Levinas, have introduced the concept of the "Other". For Levinas, the Other is given context in ethics and responsibility; we should think of the Other as anyone and everyone outside ourselves. According to Levinas, our initial interactions with the Other occur before we form a will—the ability to make choices. The Other addresses us and we respond: even the absence of response is a response. We are thus conditioned by the Other's address and begin to form culture and identity. After the formation of the will, we choose whether to identify with the addresses by others and, as a result, continue the process of forming identity.
During this process, it is possible to recognize ourselves in our interactions with Others. Even in situations where we engage in the most minimal interaction, we ascribe identities to others and simultaneously to ourselves. Our dependence on the Other for the continuous formation of language, culture, and identity means that we are responsible to others and that they are responsible to us. Also once we've formed a will, it becomes possible to recognize this social interdependence. When we have gained the capacity for recognition, the imperative is to perform that recognition and thereby become ethically responsible to the Other in conscience.
Cosmopolitanism shares some aspects of universalism – namely the globally acceptable notion of human dignity that must be protected and enshrined in international law. However, the theory deviates in recognising the differences between world cultures.
In addition, cosmopolitanism calls for equal protection of the environment and against the negative side effects of technological development. Human dignity, however, is convoluted because it is necessary to first distinguish who has the right to be respected and second to consider what rights are protectable. Under cosmopolitanism, all humans have rights; however, history shows that recognition of these rights is not guaranteed.
As an example, Judith Butler discusses a Western discourse of "human" in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Butler works through the idea of "human" and notes that "human" has been "naturalized in its 'Western' mold by the contemporary workings of humanism" (32). Thus, there is the idea that not all "human" lives will be supported in the same way, indeed, that some human lives are worth more protection than others. Others have extended this idea to examine how animals might be reconfigured as cosmopolitan, present the world-over with varying identities in different places.
This idea is reiterated in Sunera Thobani's "Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada," where she discusses a discourse in which Muslim people fall into a good/bad dichotomy: a "good Muslim" is one who has been Westernized and a "bad Muslim" is one who visibly rejects Western cultural influences. Thobani notes that it is through media representations that these ideas become naturalized. Individuals who embrace Western ideals are considered fully "human" and are more likely to be afforded dignity and protection than those who defend their non-Westernized cultural identities.
According to those who follow Beck's reasoning, a cosmopolitan world would consist of a plurality of states, which would use global and regional consensus to gain greater bargaining power against opponents. States would also utilize the power of civil society actors such as Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and consumers to strengthen their legitimacy and enlist the help of investors to pursue a cosmopolitan agenda.
Other authors imagine a cosmopolitan world moving beyond today's conception of nation-states. These scholars argue that a truly cosmopolitan identity within global citizenship will take hold, diminishing the importance of national identities. The formation of a global citizens movement would lead to the establishment of democratic global institutions, creating the space for global political discourse and decisions, would in turn reinforce the notion of citizenship at a global level. Nested structures of governance balancing the principles of irreducibility (i.e., the notion that certain problems can only be addressed at the global level, such as global warming) and subsidiarity (i.e., the notion that decisions should be made at as local a level possible) would thus form the basis for a cosmopolitan political order.
Daniele Archibugi proposes a renewed model for global citizenship: institutional cosmopolitanism. It advocates some reforms in global governance to allow world citizens to take more directly a part into political life. A number of proposals have been made in order to make this possible. Cosmopolitan democracy, for example, suggests strengthening the United Nations and other international organizations by creating a World Parliamentary Assembly.
Criticism
"Cosmopolitanism" became a rhetorical weapon used by nationalists against "alien" ideas that went counter to orthodoxy. European Jews were frequently accused of being "rootless cosmopolitans." Joseph Stalin in a 1946 Moscow speech attacked writings in which "the positive Soviet hero is derided and inferior before all things foreign and cosmopolitanism that we all fought against from the time of Lenin, characteristic of the political leftovers, is many times applauded."
In the German Democratic Republic, cosmopolitanism was characterized as a bourgeois-imperialist ideology that rejects the nations' right to independence and national sovereignty. Cosmopolitanism was said to promote the dismantling of national and patriotic traditions and national culture. It was said to be advocated by the Anglo-American imperialism with an aim to establish world hegemony (World Government) operating in the interests of monopoly capitalism. Its opposite was not chauvinist bourgeois nationalism, but patriotism; love of one's native place, one's country. Love of the homeland was said to be one of the deepest feelings of the working people, expressed in the struggle against conquerors and oppressors. Television journalist Jeff Greenfield believes that in the 21st century cosmopolitanism was viewed by Vladimir Putin in as a threat to Russian nationalism, and also by nationalists in Hungary and Poland. In modern times, Stephen Miller, a Trump administration senior policy advisor, publicly criticized CNN reporter Jim Acosta as exhibiting "cosmopolitan bias" during a discussion on the government's new immigration plan.
References
See also
Anarchism
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Non-denominational | A non-denominational person or organization is one that does not follow (or is not restricted to) any particular or specific religious denomination.
The term has been used in the context of various faiths, including Jainism, Baháʼí Faith, Zoroastrianism, Unitarian Universalism, Neo-Paganism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Wicca. It stands in contrast with a religious denomination. Religious people of a non-denominational persuasion tend to be more open-minded in their views on various religious matters and rulings. Some converts towards non-denominational strains of thought have been influenced by disputes over traditional teachings in the previous institutions they attended. Nondenominationalism has also been used as a tool for introducing neutrality into a public square when the local populace is derived from a wide-ranging set of religious beliefs.
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Nondenominational Christianity
Non-denominational Muslim
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References
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