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Religion, rights, and civil society

Q: What did Karl Marx say about religion?

Karl Marx had scoffed that religion was 'the opiate of the people,' foisted upon the underclass by elites in order to buttress economic inequalities and keep the poor content with the status quo.

Q: What did Samuel Huntington say?

In a controversial 1996 book titled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order , Samuel Huntington argued that religion, and in particular differences between Christianity and Islam, would become the preeminent force in international relations during the twenty-first century.

14 important questions on Religion, rights, and civil society

What led many influential voices to affirm the death of religion?

The experience of two world wars in the space of 30 years, and in particular the suffering of millions of innocent noncombatants in those conflicts, led many influential voices to affirm the death of religion, or at least its displacement to the fringes of human life.

How did more people come to see religion in the new age?

As distinct religious traditions intersected in a highly mobile age, more people come to share the view that sacred stories were relative to time and place, less the mirror of some absolute reality and more the product of human imagination.

What did Karl Marx say about religion?

Karl Marx had scoffed that religion was "the opiate of the people," foisted upon the underclass by elites in order to buttress economic inequalities and keep the poor content with the status quo.

What did proponents of atheistic existentialism say?

Proponents of atheistic existentialism, while perhaps lamenting the fact that there was no suprahuman reality or transcendent truth, urged women and men to forge their own meaningful value system in an otherwise absurd universe.

What has become on of the dominant features of recent global history?

If we examine the power of religious ideals to inform individual behavior and inspire collective action since the 1950s, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that an unanticipated revival of the sacred, especially within the established traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, has become one of the dominant features of recent global history.
New, nontraditional religious movements have also proliferated, especially among the middle class in the developed West.

What is Livingston's definition of religion?

To borrow Livingston's useful definition, religion is the human response, through beliefs and actions, to a conception of the ultimate or sacred.

What did Samuel Huntington say?

In a controversial 1996 book titled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington argued that religion, and in particular differences between Christianity and Islam, would become the preeminent force in international relations during the twenty-first century.

What is behind the modern Western idea of the appropriate relationship between religion and the state?

The modern Western idea of the appropriate relationship between religion and the state traces its roots to an Enlightenment minimalist argument. Simply put, it calls for the privatization of religion, its removal from the public square, and its relegation to the realm of personal choice.
Exponents of this position argue that the close relationship between church and state during the medieval and early modern centuries provided ample evidence of cruelties and abuses initiated in the name of orthodoxy. Wars, persecutions, inquisitions, crusades, pogroms, the debasement of women - all had been undertaken in the name of a benevolent and merciful God.

How do believers of the 1950s view the relationship between state and church?

The notion that the authority of the state is not anchored in religion, or that political leaders should not claim religious sanction for their authority, strikes many people in the non-Western world as preposterous.

Which two groups exist who continue to justify religion?

In recent decades, this tension between modernizers and fundamentalists has been especially pronounced in the Islamic world, where submission to God has always involved a total way of life.
Small groups of well-educated religious militants from all the major faith traditions have been able to influence domestic and international politics through ready access to modern communications technology.
More disturbingly, some religious militants have turned to violence, confident that their noble ends justify ignoble means.

What did some fundamentalists claim?

Dedicated to the notion that the postwar move to privatize and relativize religion is another malevolent feature of Western colonialism, a small number of fundamentalists claim the right to use force in pursuit of a public sphere that is guided by a single religious metanarrative or story.
According to this perspective, God has enemies and is in need of human assistance to deal with the problem. Acts of non-state terrorism driven by a religious agenda had become a source of deep concern in countries around the world.

What helped shintoism survive the war?

More than 100,000 Shinto shrines served the population at the start of the twenty-first century, each one providing the visitor a forum for ritual activities that complement personal devotion.
Japan's aging population also contributed to the staying power of traditional religion.

What is at the core of every major faith tradition?

At the core of every major faith tradition was an affirmation of human dignity and equality.
Although imperfect and often thankless, humans were nevertheless gifted with the means to a better place upon completion of this terrestrial journey.

Name some organizations who defend human rights.

Dozens of international organizations such as Amnesty International, founded in London in 1961, and Human Rights Watch, established in the wake of the 1978 Helsinki Accords, provided investigatory services, monitoring of government actions, and public advocacy and awareness campaigns around the world.
Some NGOs focused their energies on specific demographics, such as the Children's Defense Fund, Refugees International, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the US, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose mandate was to confront anti-Semitism worldwide.

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

A Concise History of the World Since 1945 | 9781352010206 | W M Spellman

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Religion, rights, and civil society

14 important questions on Religion, rights, and civil society

What led many influential voices to affirm the death of religion?