Religious Premises Research Articles

Euthanasia: Buddhist principles.

Religions provide various forms of motivation for moral action. This chapter takes Buddhism as an example from within the Indian "family' of religions and seeks to identify the doctrinal and cultural principles on which ethical decisions are taken. Although beginning from very different religious premises, it is argued that the conclusions to which Buddhism tends are broadly similar to those found within mainstream Christianity.

Multiple Dimensions of Meaning in the Domains of Work, Family, and Leisure

The field of has a considerable investment in the idea that is fundamentally different from the rest of life. The legitimacy of research and theory on has often been presumed to require such a clear distinction. The fact that many, perhaps most, languages do not even have a word equivalent to leisure is bypassed in a concentration on the supposed Greek roots of the concept (Goodale & Godbey, 1988).What if isn't so special after all? What if all or most of the meanings that people find in are also found in other domains of life? Even in traditional studies, the issue has become somewhat muddied. For example, conceptualizing as or time is recognized as more complex than once assumed, i.e., deciding how free the must be. It is also evident that discretion, spontaneity, creativity, and involvement, said to characterize leisure, may be found in work as well. Further, the constraints of role expectations, resource limits, and personal inhibitions are found in settings. Even though the concept of freedom has been central to philosophical approaches to since Aristotle (Goodale & Godbey, 1988; Kelly, 1992), few would argue that is wholly free of obligation or work totally without discretion. In fact, self-determination is the key factor in work satisfaction (Kohn, 1990).From a psychological perspective, has been defined as perceived freedom, intrinsic motivation, and noninstrumentality (Neulinger, 1974). Again, however, such perceptions would seem to be possible in almost any realm of activity. Conversely, seldom if ever is any activity completely devoid of some sense of limitation and of meaning beyond the immediate experience. As a consequence, it is possible to argue that is moredimension or quality of action than a separate domain (Kelly, 1987a, 1992). Leisure is related to work, family, education, personal development, sexuality, and almost everything else rather than being a clearly distinct aspect of life.Making the boundaries more fuzzy than clearcut is also consistent with three current developments in studies. The first is attention to women's perspectives on and the need to reformulate some traditional male-oriented models (Henderson, Bialeschki, Shaw, & Freysinger, 1989). Women's is now seen as more connected to and even embedded in role relationships than that of men (Kelly & Godbey, 1992). The second development is the critique of the common work-leisure dichotomy (Parker, 1971) in favor of approaches that view the two as more overlapping than totally separate in time, space, and meaning (Zuzanek & Mannell, 1983). The third development is the attention given to Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow with its focus on involvement, challenge, and intrinsic or autotelic meaning. His experience sampling studies have found flow more often in work than in settings (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).At least the question is raised about the distinctiveness of leisure. Is it a domain or a dimension? Is it quite different from other aspects of life or related to them in multiple ways that are yet to be sorted out? Is there a universal meaning of or does it vary by gender, philosophical and religious premises, culture, and historical epoch? Has the desire to identify something special in order to legitimate the entire studies project led to an overemphasis on its uniqueness?The first section of this paper will offer a reformulation of issues related to dividing human life in society into three separate domains with work considered central. An alternative perspective of multiple intersecting roles is presented that avoids either/or formulations and proposes that the domains of work, family, and may be multi-dimensional. Six research questions are derived from this analysis that form the basis of an exploratory study of the dimensions of meaning in each of the domains of work, immediate community/family, and activity. …

Religious grounds in liberal politics

I. Introduction Since this essay is drawn from the draft of a book entitled Private Consciences and Public Reasons,[1] putting the essay in context and explaining how it relates to criminal justice ethics may aid the reader to see its relevance. A number of theorists of liberal democracy have urged that officials, and perhaps citizens, should not rely on certain kinds of grounds for the making of political judgments and political arguments. In other words, some or all people should exercise a kind of self-restraint, declining to rely on grounds that might appropriately affect their actions in personal life. Some proposed principles of restraint are cast in terms of intuitive (as opposed to reasoned) grounds and in terms of comprehensive grounds (broad philosophies of life). Such principles include many, or all, religious grounds; and the history of religious conflict in Western Europe and the growth of toleration and liberal democracy out of that conflict inform all the principles. But these principles are not cast directly in terms of religious bases of judgment. Other principles are cast in this way, and in this essay, I address the idea that officials and citizens should refrain from relying on religious grounds in particular. The underlying claim is that such reliance is contrary to fundamental premises of religious liberty and of separation of church and state, or is particularly threatening to social life. The basic problem whether people should refrain from relying on religious grounds is one of political philosophy. Consideration of this problem might itself begin from some particular comprehensive view, such as Roman Catholicism or traditional Marxism; but my analysis here is meant to stand relatively free of competing religious premises and views about the good life. It does assume the validity of basic premises of liberal democracy, including most importantly religious liberty. Although what I say is not framed particularly in terms of acceptable premises for criminal laws, it does apply to those premises. Often the output of political deliberations is a prohibition supported by a criminal sanction: a law, say, against having a late abortion, engaging in homosexual acts, or hunting certain animals. Part of my inquiry is whether religious bases of judgment appropriately underlie such prohibitions. Many theorists treat liberal democracies as a general class, assuming that a principle of self-restraint good for one is good for all. Much of my book is directed at that assumption. I argue that much depends on the present composition of society and its values, illumined by history. In what follows here, I make remarks that reflect this claim, but I do not explicitly defend it. II. What Is Reliance on a Religious Ground Before exploring the arguments for a principle of self-restraint as to religion, I need first to explain what amounts to reliance on a religious ground. This involves brief comment on: religious grounds as opposed to other grounds; reliance at the time of decision as contrasted with mere causal influence; religious support for chains of common reason; and reliance on religious premises as compared with reliance on religiously influenced culture and religious symbols. A principle that one should not employ religious premises in political decision and argument would obviously cover the following excerpt from an imaginary speech given by a legislator, Leslie, against regulation of factory farming: The Book of Genesis clearly states that animals are for the benefit of human beings. Factory farming benefits human beings; God has told us that we need not worry about effects on animals. Even when a ground for judgment lacks explicit religious content, it can involve reliance on religion if a religious basis underlies it or motivates it. Thus, if someone opposing legally permitted suicide says, No one has a right to take his own life, this is a religious ground if the speaker believes the ground can only be supported by belief in God. …

Pious Endowments in Medieval Christianity and Islam

The endowment of religious, charitable, and educational enterprises by the establishment of trusts in land, the income from which could be devoted to such uses, was an immensely popular form of pious expression in both medieval Christendom and the Islamic world. The motives for, and applications of such endowments differed markedly, however, between the two religious cultures. The endowment of prayers and masses for beneficiaries, living and dead, exemplified the sacramental and sacerdotal quality of pre-Reformation Christianity. This ritualistic and ecclesiastical use of endowments in Latin Christian Europe and the Orthodox East, a use dependent on the existence of a sacramental system and an institutional church, contrasted sharply with the broader application of the Muslim waqf, by means of which pious individuals and groups sponsored a wide variety of charities, explicitly life-oriented and quite unconnected with a corporate clerical establishment. The infinite multiplication of private acts of charity by devout Muslims manifested the moralistic bent of Islam, which aspired to recast society according to the norms of the Qur'an and sacred law. The contrasting uses to which the two religious systems put the gifts and legacies of the faithful reflected the operation of fundamentally different religious premises, whereas the institutionalization of these premises in a shared legal fiction, the trust, assured their enforcement in society and life.

The Old Woman As Meta-Question: A Religionist's Reflections On Nozick's View of the State

The relationship between religion, specifically theology or philosophy of religion and analytic philosophy is here explored in terms of a recent compelling example of the latter discipline. Nozick's theory of the state has significant moral consequences. Thus, though it does not directly deal with religion, it may be taken as an illuminating example of how the use of the analytic method may lead to fundamental and irreconcilable conflicts with philosophizing which proceeds from religious premises. The work of John Rawls is utilized to point up the methodological issue since Rawls is much on Nozick's mind. In Rawls the content of the philosophy is much more acceptable to a biblical view but is, by the rational standards employed by Rawls and Nozick, not warranted. By contrast a specific real case, that of a senile old lady, is used to point up the fundamental commitments of the biblical religionist which lead him, in the author's case, to find Nozick's logically developed position untenable. In the face of admittedly disturbing consequences Nozick changes his ethics. Yet the reason for his conclusions, his rigorous development being accepted, was his premise which was only methodologically validated. The author contends that analytic philosophers not uncommonly make the jump from methodologically taken assumptions to reality claims and wonders why, for example, rather than changing his ethics Nozick does not change his premise. This turns out to be a matter of difficulty of inter-meta-stance discussions and an affirmation of certain biblical, analytically unacceptable premises even if these are philosophically deplored as mere fideism. EUGENE BOROWITZ is Professor of Education and Jewish Religious Thought at Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, and chairman of its faculty. He is also the founder and editor of Sh'ma, A Journal of Jewish Responsibility.

Religious Presuppositions of Logic and Rationality

There is a crisis in philosophical rationality today—in which modern logic is implicated—that can be traced to the abandonment of a common background of principles. The situation has no parallel within the pre-modern tradition, which not only admits of such principles (as an unproblematic presumption), but also refers them back to a set of assumptions grounded in a clearly religious frame of mind. Modern conceptions of rationality claim complete independence from religious sources, as from tradition more generally, and typically end up disposing of first principles altogether. The result is a fragmentation of reason, which can be seen to be dramatically exemplified in the realm of modern logic, populated by countless different systems and incompatible conceptions of what it is to be a logic. Many of the conceptual choices that became implicit in the philosophical discussions eventually leading to the rejection of the religious picture, and ultimately to the aforementioned crisis, were themselves originally linked to religious premises, so that all along, a kind of religious subconscious has subsisted throughout those disputations; however, the lack of any proper recognition of this background obstructs the possibility of making a reasonable assessment of the nature and causes of the crisis. Alasdair MacIntyre, whose thought inspires the argument developed here, reached similar conclusions regarding practical (or moral) rationality and the effects of abandoning the teleological framework of Aristotelian (and Thomistic) philosophy. MacIntyre’s arguments can be adapted, as he suggests, to deal with reason more generally, and his insistence upon the tradition-laden character of rational enquiry can help point toward the grounding of human reason in religion.