Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T09:12:22.651Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Religion, Society and Secular Values

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

Abstract

Our paradigm for religion is Christianity, which appeared as a sub-society, the culture of which differed both from Jewish culture and from that of the Greeks and Romans. Human beings are essentially social, depending upon society for all rational thought and activity. As social beings we live with regard to customs we think good on the whole. Customs are rationalised by theoretical and moral beliefs. They contrast with nature and also with convention and habit. Religions, like families, are societies intermediate between individuals and states. So-called secular values concern the same things as religious and have comparable practical consequences.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 On Liberty, Representative Government, The Subjection of Women (London: Oxford University Press 1960), 40.

2 Living with Difference (Cambridge: The Woolf Institute, 2015).

3 The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Longmans Green, 1928), 31.

4 Religion Without Revelation (London: Benn, 1927), 135.

5 Atheism considered as a Christian sect’, Philosophy 90 (2015): 277303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 What I Believe (New York: Dutton, 1925), 5.

7 So, in effect, William P. Alston (in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (London and New York, 1967), s. v, ‘Religion’).

8 See William Charlton, ‘Is the concept of the mind parochial?’ in Conceptions of Life and the Good Life in Early China and Greco-Roman Antiquity, ed. Richard King (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 213–26.

9 The Social Contract 4. 8.

10 Hobbes, Leviathan 1.4 (the reference to God is probably tongue-in-cheek); Locke, Essay 3.1.2.

11 See Strang, Colin, ‘The Perception of Heat,Aristotelian Society 61 (1961) 239–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 System of Logic 6. 7. 1

13 Utilitarianism, Chapter 4.

14 Utilitarianism, Chapter 2. Mill conceived all pleasure, pain and sorrow on the model of bodily sensations.

15 Gaudium et Spes, s. 26

16 On Liberty, 87, 72.

17 Rhetoric 2 1385a17–19

18 Lothair (1870), Chapter 48.

19 Warnock, M. (2008). ‘A duty to die?Omsorg. Nordisk tidsskrift for palliativ medisin 4: 35Google Scholar.

20 Quotations from Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 2–3; Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, tr. Austryn Wainhouse (Glasgow: Collins, 1972), 165; and Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes(Glasgow: Fontana 1978), 148. The tendency to reintroduce purpose by the back door is fully documented by Mary Midgley in Evolution as a Religion (London: Methuen, 1985) and other books.

21 So J.L. Mackie in The Cement of the Universe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 156, 221.

22 For documentation, see A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 46 E, 44 C.

23 Long and Sedley, 54 B; Seneca, Natural Questions, Preface 13.

24 Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 250.

25 So Mary Midgley, Are You An Illusion (Durham: Acumen, 2014), 4.

26 An Intelligent Person's Guide to Ethics (London: Duckbacks 2001), 147.

27 Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 16.

28 Libertas Praestantissimum, Encyclical of Leo XIII (1888); see Denzingger-Schõnmetzer, Enchiridion (Rome: Herder 1976), s.3249. The Church accepted Gratian's identification (Decree, Distinction 1) of natural law as defined in Roman jurisprudence with Mosaic law, and gave the name ‘eternal law’ to both.

29 Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes (7 December 1965) s. 17.

30 Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Geoffrey Chapman 1999) s. 1731.

31 On Liberty, 130.

32 The Social Contract 2. 3. Rousseau calls banning them ‘the unique and sublime institution of the great Lycurgus’.

33 On Liberty, 128.

34 The Descent of Man, (2 Vols., London, 1871), 2 362–3.

35 Totem and Taboo (London: Hogarth Press 1986), 124–5, 141–2.

36 The Ancient City, translated Willard Small (Boston: Lothrop 1871), 49.

37 On Liberty, 131.

38 Favoured by Mill, On Liberty, 132.

39 Social Contract 4. 8.

40 ‘Tolerating the intolerable’, in Philosophy as a Humanist Discipline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 131.

41 Op.cit., 134