Are the views of religious people important on societal issues?

[Manna]

May peace be with you all.

I've talked before in other threads about my love and enjoyment of religion.

It is so great that I decided to do my final year university project on the views of individuals from Abrahamic religions on certain issues in society and how this issues should be dealt with.


First part
This discussion is a two part discussion. Firstly, I invite anyone interested to take part in this short survey. The benefit in doing the survey is that they views of individual's from Abrahamic religions will be heard. In today's society, the views of religious people such as myself are often not taken into consideration when policies are implemented or laws are changed. For example, in scientific literature on sociology there has been a great decline on work being done exploring how certain societal issues affect religious people. This is why I am doing this study to try encourage more focus on the views of religious people when it comes to modern day issues and also certain ways of life and groups (e.g., not having sex at all because of no sexual attraction and whether atheism is problematic).

Religion, Personality and your views about groups Survey (this is the survey link)


Second part

After seeing the survey questions, it will be interesting to have a discussion about some of the questions on the survey and see how are views differ, which points are important etc.

One example point on the survey to get discussions started is:

People ought to put less attention to the Bible/Quran/Torah and religion and instead they out to develop their own moral standards.

Do you agree/disagree and why?

 

[ReligiousAndProud]

Hi all,

I'm new here so not too sure how things work on this forum but I'm a Muslim and I like talking about religion in general and learning about it.

Interesting survey, and didn't take too long to complete.

About that one particular point you mentioned, I think that a person's religious book, in my case the holy Qur'an, is very important. Who are we to say which moral standards are good and not? God did this for us and so we do not need to go and try take on God's job of deciding what a good life entails. So my answer would be that religion has all the answers. If you search deep enough in religion you can even solve society-based problems.

 

[idea]

People ought to put less attention to the Bible and religion and instead they out to develop their own moral standards.

Three varieties of ethics:
1. Ethical skepticism – believes ethics are subjective personal opinion – believes there are no reliable ethical standards
2. Ethical relativism – ethical standards are relative to society or culture
3. Ethical absolutism – same ethical standards applies to everyone

I recently taught an ethics class for engineers, and asked "What variety of ethics do engineers have to have?" Most people chose #2... Engineers actually have to be #3's though - different countries might have different regulations etc., but a good engineer should uphold safe building practices regardless of what country they are in... What's "safe" or not isn't changed by someone's opinion, or local laws and ordinances - safe is not "relative", human life is not worth less in one country over another etc. etc. so you pretty much have to ignore the laws of the land, and hold to higher absolutist values as an engineer. I think this applies to everything - what's safe or not, what is ethical or not - it's not an opinion, it's not relative to a society or culture (doing drugs is bad no matter what culture you are in). That is what ethics are - those values that promote the safety and well-being of individuals and society - and "don't lie", "don't steal", don't murder, etc. etc. love one another - these values are universal, and come from more than just the Bible.

 

[Caladan]

Well, some of the survey's questions are contradictory. For example what's the idea of placing tough action on both crime or 'sexual immorality' in the same question? Unless one is guiding the people surveyed into preconceived conclusions. Many other questions are just as silly, and reading them I can almost conclude that the surveyor is assuming that British society is filled with xenophobes and fanatics.
BTW, you didn't write the survey did you? Because if you did I realize I've just insulted you

I will address part of your OP above. First while religious people may feel that they lost the influence their power structures used to have (true in many cases in the developed world), it's still secular people like me who pay the price of religious laws which have compromised the secular fabric of the (my) state. For example, life is more complicated for me beaurocratically because my wife is not Jewish in the Israeli state, if I need public transport during the Sabbath again I have to struggle, even 'minor' things such as having dietary laws enforced on the general products market are a liability.
As for developing a personal set of moral standards, I personally don't see an alternative. We have to react according to the circumstances we see and experience in life, how we react, what we think, and what we feel is instrumental in this.

 

[Manna]

Thanks for completing the survey ReligiousAndProud and Caladan! The questions were mostly composed by my supervisor so I'm not offended but feedback is very good so that improvements can be made for the future so all feedback is welcomed and would be good actually

First while religious people may feel that they lost the influence their power structures used to have (true in many cases in the developed world), it's still secular people like me who pay the price of religious laws which have compromised the secular fabric of the (my) state. For example, life is more complicated for me beaurocratically because my wife is not Jewish in the Israeli state, if I need public transport during the Sabbath again I have to struggle, even 'minor' things such as having dietary laws enforced on the general products market are a liability.

That's a good point, and at the same time I'm wondering if religion would be separated from state for all countries not just most developed countries, would there not be a risk of the importance of religion declining even more than it is now?

Another interesting point is that many secular developed nations (e.g., U.S., Italy, U.K., Russia, Germany, Korea just to name a few) often have political leaders publicly engage in religious ceremonies, practises or customs, whether it's church attendance or wearing a cross or saying "God bless America). Is this an issue as well? Should secular nations completely dissociate from religion to the extent that for example political leaders do not engage in religious ceremonies, practises or customs publicly? Although this might be a positive achievement for secularism, I wonder about the effect it will have on religion.

Three varieties of ethics:
1. Ethical skepticism – believes ethics are subjective personal opinion – believes there are no reliable ethical standards
2. Ethical relativism – ethical standards are relative to society or culture
3. Ethical absolutism – same ethical standards applies to everyone

This is a nice distinction of different types of ethics. I would say that ethical absolutism is what I would agree with. Religion and holy books teach these ethics. It is true that there are universal ethics such as not to steal, murder or rape and in this case the answer is quite simple. How about though when we are talking about grey areas for which the answers are not simple. For example, with stem cell research is it ethical to use the cells of a few weeks or months old foetus in order to cure someone of Parkinson's Disease (where a person can't function because their body either won't move or moves too much without their control?). Imagine the person with the disease is a great philanthropist donating for good causes, scientist working on cures for diseases or even theologian promoting messages of peace and love. In this case, is it ethical to give these great contributors to humanity the ability to continue contributing through essentially killing a few week old foetus. This is a hard question for which I'm not sure of the answer.

 

[4consideration]

Hi all,

I'm new here so not too sure how things work on this forum but I'm a Muslim and I like talking about religion in general and learning about it.

Interesting survey, and didn't take too long to complete.

About that one particular point you mentioned, I think that a person's religious book, in my case the holy Qur'an, is very important. Who are we to say which moral standards are good and not? God did this for us and so we do not need to go and try take on God's job of deciding what a good life entails. So my answer would be that religion has all the answers. If you search deep enough in religion you can even solve society-based problems.

I'm curious what country you are in and why or how you may think that religion can solve that country's society-based problems.