PHILOSOPHY OF GANDHI: VIEWS ON RELIGION AND GOD

Religion, according to Gandhi, is more or less, a way of life, and as such is the personal concern of the individual who has to choose his way of life. Gandhi believes that different religions are the different ways of apprehending the Truth. The basic conviction of Gandhi is that there is one reality – that of God, which is nothing else but Truth. His religious ideas are also derived from that conviction. If Truth is God, sincere pursuit of Truth is religion. Religion is ordinarily defined as devotion to some higher power or principle, Gandhi is not against such a description of religion, he only qualifies it further by saying that higher principle being truth, devotion to Truth (or God) is religion. Gandhi believes that true religion has to be practical. Therefore, he says that religion should pervade every aspect of our life. Religion is the belief that there is an ordered moral government of the universe, and this belief must have practical bearings for all aspects of life. According to Gandhi there is no difference between religious ideal and metaphysical or moral ideal, the religious way is also the way of truth – Sathyagraha. This paper discuss about Gandhi’s ideas of God, religion, the way of religion and the religious harmony in the world.

Holy Saturday Between the Sublime and Beautiful: Fantastic Realism in Kristeva and Desmond's Dostoevskian Ideal

This article examines Dostoevsky's "fantastic realism," which challenges the explanation of rationalism or empiricism in the need for determinate categories fixed in nature. His use of paintings by Hans Holbein, Claude Lorrain, and Raphael in terms of the sublime and beautiful exemplify an understanding of Holy Saturday and its status between death and resurrection. Julia Kristeva's reading of Dostoevsky's melancholy as exemplifying a religious ideal and William Desmond's metaxological philosophy allows us to propose a terminology that rhymes with Dostoevskian between-ness, a conclusion that does not resolve the space between the beautiful and the sublime but remains open to the confessional enigmatic liminality that is Holy Saturday.

Job

This essay treats the character of Job as a religious ideal, the topic of theodicy, the poetic achievement of the book, the literary genre of Job and its relation to other biblical Wisdom Literature, and Job in relation to “exemplary sufferer” texts from Mesopotamia and Ugarit. The remainder of the essay moves through the book, section-by-section. First is the prose tale in chs. 1–2 and the act-consequence nexus, the character שטן, Job’s wife, and the meaning of ברך and נחם. Next are the monologues and dialogues in chs. 3–31 and the arguments of Job and his friends. The third section treats the “answers” given by Elihu (chs. 32–37) and YHWH (chs. 38–42), including Elihu’s claim to revelation and YHWH’s use of strange animals. Last is the closing prose tale, including Job’s repentance (42:6) and restoration, along with various expansions of the tale in early Christian traditions.

Servants of god?: Servi in the letters of Gregory the great

When Gregory the Great styled himself 'servant of the servants of God' in his correspondence, he was drawing on a long tradition of using service as a metaphor to describe appropriate religious leadership and piety. However, his letters also reveal a church filled with servi, whose service to religion was neither metaphorical nor chosen, and upon whom both religious institutions and individuals were utterly dependent. This article explores the conjunction and disjunction between the rhetoric of service as a religious ideal in Gregory's correspondence, and the reality of service, which his letters indirectly reveal. It argues that the rhetoric and reality of service both shaped each other and that service thereby became a determinative model of behaviour in late antique and early medieval Christianity. Gregory's letters are therefore a useful case-study through which to explore an important issue in the development of the church as a sociallyembedded institution.

« La religion se trouvera vraie » : désenchantement et merveilles de la science chez Renan

In 1863, the publication of Vie de Jésus makes Renan part of the movement of “desymbolisation” and secularization of sacred texts. Eliminating the notion of miracles from his writing on religion, Renan anticipates the pattern of Weber and Gauchet’s “disenchantment of the world”. It is thus by the methods of scientific analysis (eviction of miracles and psychological explications instead) that Renan is able to piece together the Messiah’s life, putting forward the idea of an organic Parousia, and making science a new religious ideal.

Five Stages of Religious Practice in the Early Yogācāra Philosophy

Ascending by the stages of religious practice according to Mahāyāna teaching, an adept finally achieves the enlightenment and leaves the wheel of deaths and rebirths. The first stage of the practice according to "The Compendium of Mahāyāna" by Asanga (4th century) is the stage of accumulation. On this stage, an adept follows the rules of monastic discipline improving his moral virtues. His aim on this stage is to make morality natural for him, when moral behavior does not demand special from him. The second stage is the preparatory one, and here the adept proceeds to the meditative practice based on his moral achievements, gradually eradicating afflictions that obstruct enlightenment. On the third stage, the stage of seeing he intuitively comprehends the essence of four Noble truths. On the fourth stage, the stage of cultivation he finally eradicates afflictions remaining in his consciousness after the third stage. The last, fifth stage of conclusion leads him to enlightenment and nirvā a. But there is a paradox in the religious ideology of Mahāyāna. The religious ideal of Mahāyāna is the bodhisattva, or the person who voluntarily renounce to enter into nirvā a for the sake of other sentient beings whom he vowed to save from sa sāra. But if a person enters into nirvā a he cannot already save other beings. Therefore if a person seeks to realize the religious ideal of Mahāyāna he cannot go through this way till the end and must stop "on the threshold of enlightenment" retaining some minimum of unwholesome dharmas in his consciousness. For solving this problem Mahāyāna thinkers introduced the notion of "unestablished nirvā a" (aprati hita-nirvā a) or the state of enlightenment that does not exclude being in sa sāra and allowing bodhisattva to preach Dharma and to lead all sentient beings to the liberation from the wheel of rebirths.

Dreaming of Prosperity at Home

The demands of Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism on the family and gender roles are many. The home is a space where the paradox of Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism is lived out daily. In traditional Christianity, the family is supposed to be a small-scale replica of the church, where there is a father who serves as the priest, a mother who is his assistant, and a congregation, represented by children who need instruction and guidance. This chapter shows how Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism shapes family dynamics and the logic they use to bridge their family reality to the religious ideal.

The Search for One’s Own Ideology as the Primary Task of Social Power

Scientific knowledge of the historical future requires methodology. And methodology is the application of ideology in scientific research in General, and in research of social processes in particular. For example, religion is always an ideology. It is an illusory ideology. Illusory not because it cannot be as described by the religious ideal (that the ideal is unattainable). For Man, as for his creation — God — there is no unattainable and cannot be. Religion is illusory, not in the sense of an ideal, but in the sense that it cannot be and become in this way, through faith. Religion creates and strengthens (fixes) the ideal but proceeds from the fact that the ideal created by man is a creative force. But God is not power. It’s just a representation of human power. And what the person who created it expects from God is a human goal.