Free download.
Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device.
You can download and read online The Role of Religious Leaders in the Destiny of Humankind file PDF Book only if you are registered here.
And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with The Role of Religious Leaders in the Destiny of Humankind book.
Happy reading The Role of Religious Leaders in the Destiny of Humankind Bookeveryone.
Download file Free Book PDF The Role of Religious Leaders in the Destiny of Humankind at Complete PDF Library.
This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats.
Here is The CompletePDF Book Library.
It's free to register here to get Book file PDF The Role of Religious Leaders in the Destiny of Humankind Pocket Guide.
Religion, however, can play an important role in peace-making and conflict the short term destiny of countries caught up in civil war or regional strife. leaders the greatest gift religion, at its best, has given to humanity – the.
Table of contents
Again, we can learn from the etymology. The origin of the word is probably the Latin religare , to bind back. Not all uses of the term require reference to a divinity or divinities. This does not, however, give us a single essence of religion, since the conceptions of divinity are so various, and human relations with divinity are conceived so variously that no such essence is apparent even within Western thought.
The ancient Greeks, for example, had many intermediate categories between full gods or goddesses and human beings. There were spirits in Greek daimones and spiritual beings like Socrates's mysterious voice daimonion Apology , 31d1—4, 40a2—c3. There were heroes who were offspring of one divine and one human parent.
Religious Influence in Society
There were humans who were deified, like the kings of Sparta. This is just within the culture of ancient Greece. If we included Eastern religions in the scope of the discussion, the hope for finding a single essence of religion would recede further. We can start with the Greeks, and this means starting with Homer, a body of texts transmitted first orally and then written down in the seventh century BCE. So what does the relation between morality and religion look like in Homer?
The first thing to say is that the gods and goddesses of the Homeric poems behave remarkably like the noble humans described in the same poems, even though the humans are mortal and the gods and goddesses immortal.
Both groups are motivated by the desire for honor and glory, and are accordingly jealous when they receive less than they think they should while others receive more, and work ceaselessly to rectify this. The two groups are not however symmetrical, because the noble humans have the same kind of client relation to the divinities as subordinate humans do to them.
This includes, for example, sanctuaries devoted to them, dedications, hymns, dances, libations, rituals, prayers, festivals and sacrifices. There is a clear analogy with purely human client-relations, which are validated in the Homeric narrative, since the poems were probably originally sung at the courts of the princes who claimed descent from the heroes whose exploits make up the story.
The gods and goddesses are not, however, completely at liberty. It is sometimes said that the Presocratic philosophers come out of Homer by rejecting religion in favor of science. When Anaximenes around talks of air as the primary element differing in respect of thinness and thickness, or Heraclitus explains all change as a pattern in the turnings of fire igniting in measures and going out in measures, they are not giving stories with plot-lines involving quasi-human intentions and frustrations DK 13, A 5, DK 22, B But it is wrong to say that they have left religion behind.
Heraclitus puts this enigmatically by saying that the one and only wisdom does and does not consent to be called Zeus DK 22, B He is affirming the divinity of this wisdom, but denying the anthropomorphic character of much Greek religion.
The sophists, to whom Socrates responded, rejected this tie between human law and divine law and this was in part because of their expertise in rhetoric, by which they taught their students how to manipulate the deliberations of popular assemblies, and so change the laws to their own advantage.
The most famous case is Protagoras c. Protagoras is not correctly seen here as skeptical about morality or religion. But as Plato c. Even Thrasymachus, in the first book of Plato's Republic , thinks of justice as the same thing amongst gods and humans Republic , c. His view of what this justice is, namely the interest of the stronger, is disputed by Plato. But the claim that justice operates at both the divine and human levels is common ground.
Socrates c. Euthyphro is taking his own father to court for murder, and though ordinary Greek morality would condemn such an action as impiety, Euthyphro defends it on the basis that the gods behave in the same sort of way, according to the traditional stories.
Socrates makes it clear that he does not believe these stories, because they attribute immorality to the gods. This does not mean, however, that he does not believe in the gods. He was observant in his religious practices, and he objects to the charge of not believing in the city's gods that was one of the bases of the prosecution at his own trial.
He points to the spirit who gives him commands about what not to do Apology , 31d , and we learn later that he found it significant that this voice never told him to stop conducting his trial in the way that in fact led to his death Ibid. Socrates interpreted this as an invitation from the gods to die, thus refuting the charge that, by conducting his trial in the way he did, he was guilty of theft — i.
His life in particular was a service to god, he thought, because his testing of the wisdom of others was carrying out Apollo's charge given by the oracle at Delphi, implicit in the startling pronouncement that he was the wisest man in Greece Apology , 21a-d.
Religion, Science and Society – Thought Economics
Socrates makes it clear that his view is the second though he does not argue for this conclusion in addressing this question, and he is probably relying on the earlier premise, at Euthyphro , 7c10f, that we love things because of the properties they have. See Hare, Plato's Euthyphro , on this passage. But his view is not an objection to tying morality and religion together. He hints at the end of the dialogue Euthyphro , 13de that the right way to link them is to see that when we do good we are serving the gods well.
Plato probably does not intend for us to construe the dialogues together as a single philosophical system, and we must not erase the differences between them. But it is significant that in the Theaetetus b , Socrates says again that our goal is to be as like the god as possible, and since the god is in no way and in no manner unjust, but as just as it is possible to be, nothing is more like the god than the one among us who becomes correspondingly as just as possible.
In several dialogues this thought is connected with a belief in the immortality of the soul; we become like the god by paying attention to the immortal and best part of ourselves e. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is also tied to the doctrine of the Forms, whereby things with characteristics that we experience in this life e. This train of thought sees the god or gods as like a magnet, drawing us to be like them by the power of their goodness or excellence. In Plato's Ion d , the divine is compared to a magnet to which is attached a chain of rings, through which the attraction is passed.
This conception is also pervasive in Aristotle —22 , Plato's student for twenty years. Mention of the divine is not merely conventional for Aristotle, but does important philosophical work. In the Eudemian Ethics b5—22 he tells us that the goal of our lives is service and contemplation of the god. He thinks that we become like what we contemplate, and so we become most like the god by contemplating the god. Incidentally, this is why the god does not contemplate us; for this would mean becoming less than the god, which is impossible.
As in Plato, the well-being of the city takes precedence over the individual, and this, too, is justified theologically. It is nobler and more divine to achieve an end for a city than for an individual NE b9— Aristotle draws a distinction between what we honor and what we merely commend NE , b10— There are six states for a human life, on a normative scale from best to worst: divine which exceeds the merely human on the one extreme , virtuous without wrongful desire , strong-willed able to overcome wrongful desire , weak-willed unable to do so , vicious and bestial which exceeds the merely human on the other extreme, and which Aristotle says is mostly found among barbarians NE , a15— The highest form of happiness, which he calls blessedness, is something we honor as we honor gods, whereas virtue we merely commend.
It would be as wrong to commend blessedness as it would be to commend gods NE , a10—a The activity of the god, he says in the Metaphysics , is nous thinking itself b The best human activity is the most god-like, namely thinking about the god and about things that do not change. Aristotle's virtue ethics, then, needs to be understood against the background of these theological premises.
Navigation menu
He is thinking of the divine, to use Plato's metaphor, as magnetic, drawing us, by its attractive power, to live the best kind of life possible for us. This gives him a defense against the charge sometimes made against virtue theories that they simply embed the prevailing social consensus into an account of human nature. Aristotle defines ethical virtue as lying in a mean between excess and defect, and the mean is determined by the person of practical wisdom actually the male, since Aristotle is sexist on this point. He then gives a conventional account of the virtues such a person displays such as courage, literally manliness, which requires the right amount of fear and confidence, between cowardice and rashness.
There are tensions in Aristotle's account of virtue and happiness. It is not clear whether the Nicomachean Ethics has a consistent view of the relation between the activity of contemplation and the other activities of a virtuous life see Hare, God and Morality , chapter 1, and Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle , chapter 7. But the connection of the highest human state with the divine is pervasive in the text. One result of this connection is the eudaimonism mentioned earlier. If the god does not care about what is not divine for this would be to become like what is not divine , the highest and most god-like human also does not care about other human beings except to the degree they contribute to his own best state.
This degree is not negligible, since humans are social animals, and their well-being depends on the well-being of the families and cities of which they are members. Aristotle is not preaching self-sufficiency in any sense that implies we could be happy on our own, isolated from other human beings. But our concern for the well-being of other people is always, for him, contingent on our special relation to them. We therefore do not want our friends to become gods, even though that would be the best thing for them. Finally, Aristotle ties our happiness to our end in Greek, telos ; for humans, as for all living things, the best state is its own activity in accordance with the natural function that is unique to each species.
For humans the best state is happiness, and the best activity within this state is contemplation NE , b17— The Epicureans and Stoics who followed Aristotle differed with each other and with him in many ways, but they agreed in tying morality and religion together. For the Epicureans, the gods do not care about us, though they are entertained by looking at our tragicomic lives rather as we look at soap operas on television. We can be released from a good deal of anxiety, the Epicureans thought, by realizing that the gods are not going to punish us.
Our goal should be to be as like the gods as we can, enjoying ourselves without interruption, but for us this means limiting our desires to what we can obtain without frustration. They did not mean that our happiness is self-interested in any narrow sense, because they held that we can include others in our happiness by means of our sympathetic pleasures.
The Stoics likewise tied the best kind of human life, for them the life of the sage, to being like the divine. The sage follows nature in all his desires and actions, and is thus the closest to the divine. Morality and religion are connected in the Hebrew Bible primarily by the category of God's command. Such commands come already in the first chapter of Genesis.