Politicians commonly turn to religion to help deal with the modern decline in morality, only to be confronted with failure even among its leaders. To some extent, the contradiction between what the Church preaches and what it does can be explained by the fact that moral change is energised by the Spirit, who however does not work in society as a whole, does not force but prompts, and changes pe...

Iris Murdoch (1919–99) was a philosopher and novelist who wrote extensively on the themes of love, goodness, religion, morality. In this article, we explore her notion ‘moral vision’; idea that morality is not just about how act make choices, but see world in much broader sense.

One of the many possibilities of understanding culture is proposed by Clifford Geertz who understood culture as “a system of control mechanisms— plans, recipes, rules, instructions ... that guide behavior”(Geertz, 1973). This opinion is based on the assumption that “man is exactly the animal that is the most dependent upon such control mechanisms that exist outside the skin” (p. 44). But these ...

In the Kazakh and world literature an important place is occupied by the work of poets, whose works are imbued with religious and educational ideas. Their work is one of the main directions in the history of the formation and development of Kazakh literature. Works of religious content teach humanity and morality through the concepts of religion. The article is devoted to the study religious an...

We review contemporary work on cultural factors affecting moral judgments and values, and those affecting moral behaviors. In both cases, we highlight examples of within-societal cultural differences in morality, to show that these can be as substantial and important as cross-societal differences. Whether between or within nations and societies, cultures vary substantially in their promotion an...

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and...