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Religion, Society and Secular Values

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

William Charlton
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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
Information
Philosophy , Volume 91 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 321 - 343
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Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2016 

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References

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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.

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

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41 Op.cit., 134