scholarly journals The gene of agricultural grain-growing civilization of the modern Ukrainian territory as a marker of religious belief

2017 ◽  
pp. 126-138
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Zavaliy

The article «The gene of agricultural grain-growing civilization of the modern Ukrainian territory as a marker of religious beliefs» by О. Zavalii. The issue of the origins of the agricultural culture of the territory of modern Ukraine is considered in the article, based on the analysis of the leading foreign and domestic scientists’ research. The culture served as the source of religious beliefs based on the Natural worldview which was predetermined by the geographical living conditions.

Author(s):  
Kevin Vallier ◽  
Michael Weber

This chapter articulates and defends a “partially subjectivist” way of defining burdens on religious belief under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). On this view, courts should largely defer to plaintiffs as to what is a burden on their religious belief. There is only a minor requirement that the plaintiffs have to satisfy, which is to show that the government is doing something that pressures them to act in a way contrary to their beliefs—a relatively easy hurdle to clear. In general, courts are ill-equipped to determine what people’s religious beliefs really are, and this extends to determining when those beliefs are substantially burdened. More strongly, there is a tradition that says evaluating when people’s religious beliefs are burdened is really none of the court’s business. The partially subjectivist view honors these principles.


2016 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjaana Lindeman ◽  
Annika M. Svedholm-Häkkinen

AbstractNorenzayan et al.’s theoretical synthesis is highly plausible and commendable. However, the empirical evidence for the arguments on mentalizing, cognitive biases, and religious belief is currently not as strong as the writers suggest. Although certainly abundant and compelling, this evidence is indirect, contradictory, and weak and must be acknowledged as such. More direct studies are needed to support the theory.


1991 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-156
Author(s):  
Winfred George Phillips

In Brand Blanshard's major defence of reason in religion, Reason and Belief, he criticizes both Roman Catholics and Protestants for advocating contradictory theological doctrines and for believing beyond what the evidence supports. Claiming belief to be an ethical matter, with one morally responsible for one's religious beliefs, he holds that one is morally obligated in such metaphysical matters to believe only what the evidence warrants. Blanshard finds that religious beliefs typically fail to meet the standard of this ethics of belief, and thus his ethics appears inhospitable to religious belief.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-206
Author(s):  
Joseph Chadwin

AbstractThis article provides an overview of the major existing scholarship pertaining to childhood religion in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). More specifically, it examines lived childhood religion in a rural village in Gānsù province. This article challenges the commonly preconceived notion that children in the PRC do not regard religious belief as important and simply mirror the religious practices of their guardians. By utilising ethnographic data, I argue that children in the PRC are capable of constructing their own unique form of lived religion that is informed by, but crucially distinct from, the religious beliefs and practices of adults. The practices and beliefs of this lived religion can be extremely important to children and the evidence from fieldwork suggests that they tend to take both their practice and belief very seriously.


2021 ◽  
pp. 191-216
Author(s):  
Christian Smith ◽  
Amy Adamczyk

Church leaders, youth ministers, and volunteers are likely curious about the extent to which parents find congregations useful in transmitting religious beliefs and behaviors. This chapter explores how parents use religious congregations to transmit religious belief. The chapter discusses why parents tend to feel that they, rather than their congregations, are primarily responsible for passing on religious faith. Many parents select their congregations for fairly practical reasons, they have a lot of confidence in their own understanding of religion, and they want to be involved in all aspects of their child’s life, including religious development. This chapter also unpacks what parents see as the most valuable contributions that congregations provide for their children. These include the congregation’s role in providing religious education, making religion fun for their children, and transmitting cultural traditions.


Author(s):  
Ruth Boeker

This chapter brings together the results of the previous chapters and shows what role Locke’s moral, religious, metaphysical, and epistemic background beliefs play in his thinking about persons and personal identity. Locke breaks with traditional metaphysical debates, first, by adopting a metaphysically agnostic stance with regard to the materiality or immateriality of thinking substances and, second, by arguing for a kind-dependent approach to questions of identity over time. Locke’s moral and legal conception of a person, according to which persons are subjects of accountability, is informed by his moral and religious beliefs. His thinking about moral accountability can be challenged and has been challenged by his contemporaries. Although Locke has good reasons for distinguishing our idea of a person from that of a human being and of a substance, these reasons are based on his metaphysical agnostic views and his religious belief in an afterlife.


Author(s):  
Ronald F. Inglehart

Well into the 20th century, leading social thinkers argued that religious beliefs reflected a prescientific worldview that would disappear as scientific rationality spread throughout the world. Though the creationism of traditional religion did give way to evolutionary worldviews, this failed to discredit religion among the general public. Religious markets theory argues that the key to flourishing religiosity is strong religious competition, but recent research found no relationship between religious pluralism and religious attendance. The individualization thesis claims that declining church attendance does not reflect declining religiosity; subjective forms of religion are simply replacing institutionalized ones. But empirical evidence indicates that individual religious belief is declining even more rapidly than church attendance. Secularization’s opponents hold that humans will always need religion. This claim seems true if it is broadened to hold that humans will always need a belief system. Norris and Inglehart argue that as survival becomes more secure, it reduces the demand for religion.


1989 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Holyer

Sceptical arguments, it is commonly claimed, may succeed in disarming some powerful objections to religious belief, but they do nothing more than establish a state of parity between the believer and the objector. For this reason, they make no positive contribution to the justification of religious belief and therefore are of value only to the fideist who insists that religious beliefs do not have and do not need rational support. However, while this opinion is widely held by philosophers of religion, it ignores the fact that sceptical arguments have given rise to a constructive tradition in epistemology: what is often referred to as naturalism. In what follows I shall develop a suggestion from this tradition, and that is that sceptical arguments lead not to an abandonment of claims to justified belief but to a revision and contextualization of our epistemic standards. Though this suggestion can be found in a number of philosophers in this tradition, my inspiration for it comes from Pascal, who made an important place for scepticism in the evidentialist argument for Christianity which we find in the Pensées. To develop this suggestion, I shall first sketch a position inspired by Pascal and then argue that the possibilities it suggests have been insufficiently considered in a number of recent discussions of the importance of sceptical arguments in the epistemology of religious belief.


Africa ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shane Doyle

AbstractThe Cwezi-kubandwa cult was the most prominent form of religious belief in the interlacustrine region of East Africa during the pre-colonial period. It has long been regarded as providing ideological support to monarchical regimes across the region. Recently, though, scholars have contrasted the hegemonic ambitions of the state with evidence that Cwezi-kubandwa also provided opponents of pre-colonial authority structures with both ideological and organizational resources. In particular historians of the cult have hypothesized that Cwezi-kubandwa offered women a refuge from patriarchal political and domestic institutions, and that Cwezi-kubandwa was dominated by women in terms of its leadership, membership and idioms. This article challenges the new orthodoxy by suggesting that both traditional religion's hegemonic and counter-hegemonic roles may have been over-estimated. A re-examination of the Nyoro sources indicates instead that Cwezi-kubandwa was far from homogeneous and dominant, that kubandwa was not obviously oppositional to other, supposedly male-dominated, religious beliefs, and that Cwezi-kubandwa brought female exploitation as well as empowerment. These findings require either a re-evaluation of the nature of Cwezi-kubandwa across the region, or recognition that the cult was much more geographically diverse than has hitherto been believed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 321-330
Author(s):  
Peter Kaiser ◽  
Marie T. Benner ◽  
Kai Pohlmann

AbstractReligion has always had an influence on the causal attribution of people, i.e. how is your own destiny, happiness and misfortune interpreted? Since religious belief is not static, it is strongly influenced by the experiences that sufferers have gained in their past. It therefore plays an important role in dealing with trauma and stress in humanitarian crises – especially in vulnerable populations (such as refugees) and can be a source of power in difficult times. There are systematic studies on psychological implications of trauma in the context of war and forced migration on affected populations, especially regarding the development of post-traumatic stress disorder, but the effects of religious beliefs are not well understood yet. This study examines the role of religion in the daily lives of Karen refugees in long-term refugee settings along the Thai-Myanmar border and the possible influence that religion can have on dealing with crisis situations and one's own destiny. Resilience is a factor that is easily overlooked by mental health services, especially in situations where people are dependent on third party help. Psychosocial health care should take into account the role of religious beliefs in terms of expectations and causal attribution.


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