scholarly journals Problems of axiomatizing religion

Author(s):  
Paul Weingartner

AbstractThe paper discusses problems which arise in attempts to axiomatize parts of religion or religious belief systems. Besides those problems already investigated by Bochenski, like that of the propositional content or the meaning of religious discourse there are several further ones. This paper deals with the question whether full Classical Logic is suitable, whether one universe of discourse is sufficient, how to use definitions and analogous concepts and whether justifications satisfy credibility criteria.

Utafiti ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Plan Shenjere-Nyabezi

Despite Westernization and particularly the advent of Christianity and its widespread entrenchment on the African continent, traditional indigenous rituals continue to constitute an integral part of African religious belief systems and practices. This article presents the results of an ethnoarchaeological study of two death rituals that are conducted by the Ndau people of south eastern Zimbabwe. The rituals are a demonstration of attitudes towards death and beliefs about the role of the dead among the living. The Ndau do not believe that death signals and represents the end of life. In the same vein and perhaps more importantly, the Ndau do not believe that death just happens. It is caused by human agency out of jealousies, hatred and conflict among the living. These beliefs are central to the two rituals presented and discussed here: the first ritual is conducted to ascertain cause of death and the second to bring back the spirit of the deceased from a temporary state of limbo immediately after death. Meat and beer are central to these rituals, firstly as offerings to the deceased and secondly as an important part of the living celebration of the rituals. The paper then explores some interpretive implications of the rituals from an archaeological perspective.


Author(s):  
Harald Walach

Science and spirituality are at odds, due to the history of enlightenment. This led to freeing human inquiry from dogmatic and clerical bondage by religion. And because religion has been left behind by the new scientific narrative of a self-evolving world, driven by random accidents and mutations and natural laws, there seems to be no place for spirituality either. This contribution disentangles those conceptual problems. It first points out the history of this separation and its consequences. It is important to realize that spirituality and religion are two different things. While religion is a conceptual, ethical, ritual, and at times also a political framework, spirituality is the experiential core of all religions. As a human experience, it is universal and independent of religious belief systems. Spirituality, as a form of inner experiential access to reality, is also at the bottom of the scientific process—for instance, in important theoretical insights. 150 words


2021 ◽  
Vol 09 (03) ◽  
pp. 350-362
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Gibbons ◽  
Sherman A. Lee ◽  
Luke P. Fernandez ◽  
Emma D. Friedmann ◽  
Kaylee D. Harris ◽  
...  

The fading affect bias (FAB) is a robust phenomenon where unpleasant affect fades faster than pleasant affect. The FAB is believed to be coping mechanism designed to make life appear pleasant in the face of hardships and adversities. The FAB persists across several cultures and many event types (e.g., alcohol, religious, and death), even though low FAB has been demonstrated for social media events, videogame events, and events labeled as religious, but not spiritual. Although religion is also believed to make life more satisfying by providing existential meaning and social connectedness for their followers, research to date, has not examined religious differences in the FAB. Therefore, we examined the FAB using 2 measures of fading affect across participants’ self-reported religious affiliations and we found robust FAB effects for all categories except for an extremely small sample of Islamic followers. The FAB effects were strongest for Jewish and Buddhist affiliations and they were weakest for participants who did not report a well-known religious affiliation. The findings extend the literature on the FAB to religious belief systems. Future research should replicate the current study, examine the FAB for larger samples of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Jews, and test explanations for differential FAB effects across religious affiliations.


2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Herbert

Addressing complex social problems that are rooted in multiple causes is difficult. These issues often interact in unpredictable ways with numerous contributing factors, and they do not run along traditional departmental boundaries. For example, family violence is one of the most complex, multifaceted and poorly understood issues in Western society. Addressing family violence requires major social change in individual attitudes and relationships, cultural and religious belief systems and society's opinions, as well as comprehensive government strategies and a comprehensive range of services to support families and individuals affected by family violence. In this respect, it provided a useful case study through which to examine the implementation of complex social policy in New Zealand.


2013 ◽  
pp. 161-182
Author(s):  
Pedro Ipiranga Júnior

The purpose of this work is based on the following issues: how the religious aspect is focused on biographical works and what constitutes its function; how religious discourse interferes with conception of the genre of biographical and literary prose from the perspective of Lucian of Samosata. For that we will use as a benchmark for our analysis some conceptions about the religious phenomenon in works with biographical tone of Isocrates, Plato and Xenophon, in order to check how Lucian resumes and refigure issues there proposed. In a kind of biographical account and in epistolary form, Lucian somehow promotes a mimesis (here in the sense of a critical refiguring) of reports of Bios, in which he enacts a moral action figure, syncretizes or juxtaposes philosophical adhesion and religious belief. In the biographical works of Lucian: The passing of Peregrinus, Alexander the false prophet, Demonax and somehow Nigrinus, ‘conversion to a current philosophical’ concerns a pathos in the discourse, which is staged so explicitly dramatized and therefore undergo a treatment critical. Thus, we treat this work in order to delineate the constitution of pathos of biographical discourse and status of a distinctive literary biographical prose linked to religious and philosophical questions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Una Stojnić

Recent literature has presented a serious challenge for propositional accounts of content. It has been argued that certain bits of natural language discourse, in particular, modal claims, pose a fundamental challenge for propositional accounts, as they fail to express propositional content even relative to a context. The puzzling linguistic behavior of modal discourse suggests that context simply cannot determine propositional content for such claims. This appears to call for a re-thinking of the interaction between context and content, and their role in communication. Indeed, various non-propositionalist accounts that have been proposed to capture this puzzling behavior call for such re-thinking. Such accounts have received various implementations, for instance, in various expressivist and dynamic update semantics. These accounts deny that modals express ordinary propositional content, and they also deliver a non-classical logic. This chapter introduces the challenge, and the main features of non-propositional accounts that have been proposed as a solution.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document