Legitimizing Human Rights: Secular and Religious Perspectives by Angus J. L. Menuge

Author:Angus J. L. Menuge [Menuge, Angus J. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Human Rights
ISBN: 9781472402486
Google: LhFv8Re-OrMC
Goodreads: 17648609
Publisher: Not Avail
Published: 2013-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.1 A decision tree for life

Accordingly, our lives will be informed and guided by our conscious and subconscious answers to these ultimate religious questions. One who trusts Jesus as a guide will likely have a profoundly different idea about how life should be lived, than one who places his trust in one’s self or in the opinions of other humans who might control one’s self.

Stephen Prothero, a professor of Religion at Boston University comes to a conclusion similar to that of Clouser. In God is not One Prothero compares and contrasts nine religions of the world, including Atheism. He argues that the common denominator of all religions is that they identify a core problem of life. They then identify a solution to the problem, techniques for reaching the solution and exemplars for charting the path from problem to solution (Prothero 2010: 14).

For example, Prothero argues that “in Christianity … the problem is sin … the solution (or goal) is salvation; the technique for achieving salvation is some combination of faith and good works; and the exemplars who chart this path are the saints in Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy and ordinary people of faith in Protestantism”; whereas “[I]n Buddhism … the problem is suffering, the solution (or goal) is nirvana, the technique for achieving nirvana is the Noble Eightfold Path, which includes such classic Buddhist practices as meditation and chanting, and the exemplars … are arhats (for Theravada Buddhists), bodhisattvas (for Mahayana Buddhists), or lamas (for Vajrayana Buddhists)” (Prothero 2010: 14–15).

Prothero describes Atheism as a religion which holds that:

[theistic] religion is itself the problem. [Theistic] religious belief is man-made and murderous—irrational, superstitious, and hazardous to our health. The solution is to flush this poison out of our system—to follow the courageous examples of heroic unbelievers from Diagoras to Freud to the patron saints of the New Atheism: American writer Sam Harris, American philosopher Daniel Dennett, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, British journalist Christopher Hitchens, and French philosopher Michel Onfray. And where will this cleansing lead? To a postreligious utopia. Without the foolishness of faith, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. (Prothero 2010: 318)

The atheistic technique for getting from the problem to the solution is to use “reason over revelation, logic over faith, and scientific experimentation over magical thinking” (Prothero 2010: 318). Thus Atheism enshrines reason and materialistic science over reasoned and rational applications of the “wisdom of God.”

Prothero’s idea that all religions seeks to solve an ultimate problem of life addresses the third key question—how should one live life? His analysis assumes that the religion in question has already answered the first two questions—where do we come from and what is the nature of life? Thus the core problem, once the first two questions are answered, deals with how life should be led from an ethical and moral standpoint.

Although dictionaries are not dispositive, they often tend to succinctly summarize collective viewpoints. Interestingly, the first listed definition in a popular dictionary is consistent with the foregoing conclusions about the meaning of the word “religion.

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