Literatura académica sobre el tema "Defenses against religion"

AbstractA number of religious thinkers have uncritically made use of psychoanalytic object relations theory. I argue that this uncritical appropriation is dangerous to religious thought because object relations theorists tend, implicitly, if not explicitly, to deny the reality of the object of religious faith or Mystery. I analyze the defenses against Mystery in object relations theory in order to uncover what is denied by them. This critical analysis allows object relations theory to be reappropriated by religious thinkers as a valuable source of insights into the ways Mystery manifests itself in human life.

Abstract In accordance with Terror Management Theory research, secular beliefs can serve an important role for mitigating existential concerns by providing atheists with a method to attain personal meaning and bolster self-esteem. Although much research has suggested that religious beliefs are powerful defense mechanisms, these effects are limited or reveal more nuanced effects when attempting to explain atheists’ (non)belief structures. The possibility of nonbelief that provides meaning in the “here and now” is reinforced by the importance placed on scientific discovery, education, and social activism by many atheists. Thus, these values and ideologies can, and do, allow for empirically testable claims within a Terror Management framework. Although religious individuals can and largely do use religion as a defense strategy against existential concerns, purely secular ideologies are more effective for atheists providing evidence for a hierarchical approach and individual differences within worldview defenses. Evidence for and implications of these arguments are discussed.

Recent research has demonstrated that nostalgia is a source of meaning in life that people utilize when managing existential concerns. The current studies further explored the existential function of nostalgia by testing the prediction that nostalgia decreases ideologically extreme defenses against existential threat (i.e., self-sacrifice on behalf of one’s nation or religion). Results supported this hypothesis. In Study 1, mortality salience increased willingness to engage in nationalistic self-sacrifice for those low, but not high, in trait nostalgia. In Study 2, manipulated nostalgia mitigated the relationship between death-thought accessibility and willingness to engage in religious self-sacrifice.

Abstract Frances Power Cobbe led the Victorian movement against vivisection. Cobbe is often remembered for her animal welfare campaigning, but it is rarely recognized that she approached animal welfare as a moral philosopher. In this article, I examine the philosophical basis of Cobbe's antivivisectionism. I concentrate on her 1875 article “The Moral Aspects of Vivisection,” in which Cobbe first locates vivisection within the historical movement of Western civilization and the tendency for science to supersede religion and then endeavors to refute the defenses of vivisection one by one. I emphasize the philosophical considerations that led Cobbe to oppose animal experimentation on a reasoned basis.

The State of New York recently issued its first physician-certified “intersex” birth certificate, correcting a 55-year-old’s original birth certificate. This is a positive step towards eliminating the traditional binary approach to a person’s birth sex, but it creates potential uncertainties in the employment discrimination context. Over the past several years, the definition of what constitutes “discrimination on the basis of sex” has both expanded (with the legalization of same-sex marriage) and narrowed (restricting the use of gender specific bathrooms). Until recently it appeared that a broader definition of the term “sex” would become the judicial—and possibly legislative—norm in a variety of contexts. However, several obstacles have emerged to jeopardize true equality for the LGBTQIA community, including (1) inconsistent judicial opinions regarding the meaning of “sex,” (2) the increased ability of employers to utilize religion or “any other factor” as a defense to discrimination claims, (3) regressive executive policies regarding the definition of “sex,” and (4) uncertainty about the extent to which transgender individuals may remain in the military. Although each of these issues warrants thorough analysis and has sparked scholarly debate, in this Article we focus on another critical inequality: wage disparity. Specifically, we are concerned with the problem posed for DSD and transgender individuals, given the Equal Pay Act’s requirement that plaintiffs demonstrate they are paid differently from the “opposite sex” for a wage disparity claim. The Equal Pay Act (EPA) is outdated and discriminatory in its application, and it unnecessarily subjects an entire segment of the workforce—LGBTQIA individuals—to continued discrimination. The EPA requires that plaintiffs prove their cases through reference to an opposite sex comparator, but then defers to the employer’s subjective definition of who “the opposite sex” is. This makes LGBTQIA plaintiffs’ cases essentially unwinnable. Uncertainty for the LGBTQIA community is further compounded by the expansion of the employer’s right, under both the Equal Pay Act and Title VII, to invoke religion, conscience, or “any other factor” as an affirmative defense to discrimination claims. In this Article, we discuss the interplay between a plaintiff’s sex-specific protections (against sex-based employment discrimination under Title VII and against wage disparity under the Equal Pay Act) and an employer’s affirmative defenses (under Title VII, the EPA, and current interpretations of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act). Our discussion concludes with recommendations for an expansive definition of the word “sex” and the adoption of the recently proposed Equality Act to help alleviate all forms of sex-based discrimination in the employment context.

AbstractWhile in some disciplines the comparative method is used unhesitatingly, in others it is spurned. In the field of religious studies, the method has long been rejected, and that rejection far antedates the anti-comparativist stance of postmodernism. This article identifies the main objections commonly lodged against the method and attempts to refute them all - as mischaracterizations either of the method or of the quest for knowledge itself. The article then considers the use of the method by the two figures in religious studies still singled out as the most egregious practitioners of it: James Frazer and William Robertson Smith. In actuality, not even they turn out to be guilty of any of the objections lodged against the method. At the same time they turn out to employ the method in contrary ways. Frazer uses the method to show the similarities among religions; Smith uses it as much to show the differences. The contrasting use of the same method by its most famous practitioners shows that the method is not merely malleable but indispensable to all scholars of religion - those seeking the particularities of individual religions no less than those seeking the universals of religion.

PHYSICO-THEOLOGY: Religion and Science in Europe, 1650-1750 by Ann Blair and Kaspar von Greyerz, eds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 274 pages, including bibliography and index. Hardcover; $54.95. ISBN: 9781421438467. *What is physico-theology? Is it merely a peculiar term for what is more generally known as natural theology? Physico-theology makes its clearest first appearances in John Ray's Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691), Miscellaneous Discourses (1692), and Three Physico-Theological Discourses (1713). It also appears in William Derham's Physico-Theology (1713) and Astro-Theology (1715). Historically, these works set the standard for what the authors of Blair and Greyerz's edited collection of papers include within "physico-theology." Using these titles as a guide makes it possible to judge that, while Walter Charleton's earlier book The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature: A Physico-Theologicall Treatise (1652) uses the expression, it is not found consistently within the genre; many other books that do not employ the technical term still belong within the tradition. If Ray had any predecessor, it is likely Robert Boyle, as Katherine Calloway argues from Boyle's Disquistion about Final Causes (1688). Her emphasis on this book, rather than Boyle's other earlier "physico-" titled books, is appropriate because it emphasizes not only the teleological aspect of physico-theology, but more importantly the empirical drive. *It is a small oversight in this collection that there was no chapter devoted entirely to Boyle, given how well he fits within the physico-theological genre. Henry More's Antidote against Atheism (1653) is frequently discussed in the collection as a possible forerunner of physico-theology. Calloway even shows that Ray follows him in the order of his arguments. However, she is right to say that More's Platonism is antithetical to the empirical impulse of physico-theological writers. Peter Harrison sets the term physico-theology etymologically in the company of similar words such as "physico-medical," "astro-theology," and "insecto-theology," all current through the period examined. These novel terms signal disciplinary boundary crossing where "physico-" is the catch-all for the many specialized "theologies" from nature. They explore the liminal zone of the questions of creation, generation, and eschatology in their most developed forms of those theologies. *Kaspar von Greyerz explains that by 1728 physico-theology was now firmly established, as evidenced by the editorial work of Johann Fabricius in his translation of Derham's Astro-Theology. Added to the translation was a bibliography of related works that Fabricius used to establish physico-theology within an older and more robust pedigree. In numerous new editions up until 1765, he increased this bibliography to seventy-five pages. Fabricius can include so many related works because he had a broader notion of physico-theology that reinforced "recognition of, as well as love and respect for, the creator." This seems to be a continuation of the theme in the German context as shown by Kathleen Crowther in the work of Jakob Horst, a seventeenth-century German Lutheran. *So, is there a difference between physico-theology and natural theology? Scott Mandelbrote suggests that while both are concerned with divine design and purpose, physico-theology tends to emphasize special providence or care. Several of the contributors to this volume also emphasize the apologetic role this played either against the bare mechanism that was attributed to Descartes or atheism more generally. Rienk Vermij holds that physico-theology was more about nature, whereas natural theology about theology, supported, in part, by the fact that it was primarily natural philosophers and naturalists who wrote on the subject, not theologians. In his examination of two physicians who wrote on physico-theology, the Dutch Bernard Nieuwentijt and the German Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Vermij argues that physico-theology seeks to inform the interpretation of nature through the Bible. In contrast, in natural theology, it is nature informing one's knowledge of God. *In reality, many writers in the physico-theology genre are skeptical of the possibility of natural theology. Some of the most insightful chapters in this book were those in which theology was understood as a motivation and foundation for studying nature. Anne-Charlott Trepp noted that the Lutheran ubiquity of Christ in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper was no less a ubiquity of Christ in nature, grounding the possibility of physico-theology. Further, the Pietist emphasis on experience in religious life was conducive to empirical study. "For, as God revealed himself through the materialized word in every individual creature, individual things immanent to the world, even the lowest in nature's hierarchy, gained a new dignity and transcendence not least in their bodily presence and materiality" (p. 133). *Martine Pécharman's treatment of Blaise Pascal's rejection of natural theology shows that the Jansenist Pascal proved more Calvinist than many of the English authors innate to the physico-theological project. Pécharman reveals how the early editors of Pascal's Pensées obscured both his skepticism about the sinful human's ability to rightly read the divine in nature, and also obscured Pascal's remark that the creation was insufficient to bring one to salvation. Instead, as Pascal said, nature alone will lead one to atheism or deism. This is, in fact, what happened not long after, as John Brooke notes, among the English Latitudinarians. Nöel-Antoine Pluche, another Jansenist, also avoids teleological arguments, as Nicolas Brucker explains. Pluche's survey work, The Spectacle of Nature, was aimed at an elite French audience. "The question is rather how to know more about Creation, and therefore how to better revere the Creator" (p. 189). This theme of wonder leading to reverence permeates all physico-theological writers. *Physico-theology, even when not named as such, was also an active part of defenses against the early stages of biblical criticism (e.g., Spinoza and La Peyrère). Eric Jorink describes the detailed work of the Dutch author Willem Goeree, who used math and engineering to reconstruct a plausible Noah's Ark. Jorink briefly mentions Kircher's earlier attempt, but it would have been interesting to compare the two authors on that subject: a Dutch Calvinist and a German Jesuit. Did physico-theology join them or divide them? Antonio Vallisneri, a naturalist at the University of Padua, struggled to reconcile fossils, geological formations, and the Flood. Brendan Dooley shows that, at least in Vallisneri's work, physico-theology was not always, even if predominantly, adulatory toward divine providence. Vallisneri was comfortable with unresolved questions of fossils and the Flood. *John Brooke, in his chapter "Was Physico-Theology Bad Theology and Bad Science?," succumbs to the presentism he seeks to undermine with that provocative title. Regarding "bad science," he judges that while the proponents of physico-theology were all leaders in their fields, they were unduly "anthropocentric" in their reading of nature. Yet, when he comes to answer the question of "bad theology," he says it is a question that cannot be answered, since it is contingent on one's theological stripe. Why, one may ask, did he not rate science by the same standard, admitting his own scientific prejudice against the "anthropocentrism" of divine design, as if it somehow reduced the quality of the science? Despite this bias, Brooke adds an important theological insight in that design arguments that highlight divine care tend to pass too quickly over sin and natural evil. Pascal, as noted above, was an exception to this rule. *Brian Ogilvie, looking at several authors doing "insecto-theology," does not see the design theme as anthropocentrism, but rather that the attention of physico-theologians to function and design in insect morphology and behavior fostered genuine contributions to the field. Aesthetic values can be as much a part of what one brings to and takes away from physico-theology. Simona Boscani Leoni shows this happening as the perception of the Swiss Alps went from jagged and ugly to praiseworthy--a physico-theology of mountains moving in parallel with that trajectory. A deeper look into a connection between physico-theology of the mountains and Albrecht von Haller's poem Die Alpen (1732) would have been interesting here, especially given Haller's Swiss Calvinism and active role in questions of natural philosophy and religion. In botany, as "form" comes to serve the interests of beauty more than function, physico-theology can become unnecessary, as Jonathan Sheehan shows in an investigation of studies of flowers during this time. *This volume presents the subject with excellent variety, yet editorially holds together well, serving as an introduction to the intellectual phenomenon of physico-theology. Chapters sometimes overlap in their discussion of key works of the period, but this happily serves to connect them together. Like the disciplinary boundary crossing which is physico-theology, this collection of papers, handling authors mostly writing in the period 1690-1740--neither really "Scientific Revolution" or "Enlightenment" in our usual historical categories--gives insight into a generation that might otherwise be undervalued because it does not easily fit into either. It is a liminal zone where interesting natural experiments can happen. *Reviewed by Jason M. Rampelt, PhD from the University of Cambridge, Edgeworth, PA 15143.

In recent years, several theorists have defended a form of neutrality that seeks to equalise the benefits that state policies bestow upon citizens’ conceptions of the good life. For example, when state policies confer special benefits upon a conception that revolves around a particular culture, religion or type of sports, other cultures, religions or types of sports might be due compensation. This article argues that this kind of neutrality – which I refer to as ‘hands-on neutrality’ – cannot be vindicated, whether it takes a resourcist form or welfarist form. After explaining why states cannot simply avoid bestowing unequal advantages upon citizens’ conceptions of the good life, I identify several versions of hands-on neutrality and show that all of them fail to respect the moral equality of citizens. (In so doing, however, I do find that a different form of neutrality is appropriately applied under a more limited set of conditions, which is lottery-based.) I conclude by showing that in cases where theories of hands-on neutrality have intuitive force, more plausible rival principles can account for our intuitions.

Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo are African Diaspora religions brought to the Americas by devotees who survived the transatlantic slave trade. Both are suffused by philosophies of communicating with the divine and serving a pantheon of sacred spirits. Both faiths have been misunderstood, with practitioners’ beliefs denigrated and their rituals stereotyped as crude, misguided, malevolent, or even criminal. However, each of the four articles in this special edition of Nova Religio speaks to how practitioners of Vodou and Voodoo, across different locales, social environments, and historical time frames, have pushed back against marginalization and defended their identities and legacies, while building religious communities of remarkable resilience.

Historians of liberalism have tended to ignore or underplay the contribution of southern Europe. However, in the 1820s this part of the world was at the forefront of the struggle for liberal values. This essay explores the relationship between constitutional culture and religion during the liberal revolutionary wave that affected Portugal, Spain, the Italian peninsula and Greece, by examining parliamentary debates, the revolutionary press, literature targeting the masses, religious sermons and exile writings. It argues that rather than rejecting religion, liberals strove to find an accommodation between their values and revealed truth—they were convinced that no society could survive without religious morality. In this way, they developed a variety of religious attitudes that ranged from deism to forms of crypto-Protestantism without abandoning their established religions. At the same time, although they defended individual rights and freedom of expression against the opposition of the churches, and argued for reformed and enlightened forms of religiosity, most of them considered the religious uniformity of their societies advantageous and even opposed religious toleration.

This book deals with a fascinating and original claim in 16th-century Europe. Witches should be cured, not executed. It was the physician and scholar Johann Wier (1515-1588) who challenged the dominant idea. For his defense of witches, more than three centuries later, Sigmund Freud chose to put Wier’s work among the ten books to be read. According to Wier, Satan seduced witches, thus they did not deserve to be executed, but they must be cured for their melancholy. When the witch hunt was rising, Wier was the first to use some of the arguments adopted in the emerging debate on religious tolerance in defence of witches. This is the first overall study of Wier which offers an innovative view of his thought, by highlighting Wier’s sources and his attempts to involve theologians, physicians, and philosophers in his fight against cruel witch hunts. Johann Wier: Debating the Devil and Witches situates and explains his claim as a result of a moral and religious path as well as the outcome of his medical experience. The book aims to provide an insightful examination of Wier’s works to read his pleas emphasizing the duty of every good Christian to not abandon anyone who strays from the flock of Christ. For these reasons, Wier was overwhelmed by bitter confutations, such as those of Jean Bodin, but he was also celebrated for his outstanding and prolific heritage for debating religious tolerance.

AbstractLike many of his contemporary students, Hans Reichenbach was a member of the Freistudentenschaft. This movement strongly defended the idea of moral self-determination and intellectual autonomy of the individual, and aimed at reforming the German university system that the Free Students regarded as no longer adequate to reflect their needs. As a Free Student, Reichenbach stood against any form of dogmatism, be it scholastic, religious, philosophical, political, or institutional. It is against this background that he developed the ideals that would ultimately provide the basis for his philosophical thought, and to which he would remain faithful until the end of his life.The aim of this paper is to provide a brief overview of Reichenbach’s experience as a Free Student and its impact on his later work. I will consider archival materials that significantly epitomise his early involvement within the German Youth Movement, specifically in relation to: his political partaking in the university reform, which extends until 1919; a psychological research project he carried out around 1912–1913; and his position on the war, which emerges in his 1915 correspondence with the education reformer Gustav Wyneken.

The first decades of the twentieth century saw considerable controversy over the role of more traditional Christianity at major universities. Some popular critics warned the public that universities were becoming hostile to old-time religion. Catholic universities, which were outside the mainstream, remained conservative and strengthened defenses against modern thought with neo-Thomist philosophy. The new Methodist universities had some of the most prominent controversies. Vanderbilt University was moving toward more progressive Christian views, but these were opposed by some archconservative Methodists. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching put pressure on schools to be nonsectarian and to sever denominational ties if they were to participate in the attractive faculty retirement program. Syracuse University, a Methodist school under Chancellor James R. Day, is the most revealing case of resistance to this pressure.

By the mid-1870s, Black Christians had so successfully defended their Christian citizenship that white Democrats attacked black Christianity as well as black citizenship to justify their violent political takeovers of state and local governments. In the absence of federal defense of Black political rights, southern Democrats quickly gained control of the Mississippi River Valley. Black Christians denounced these changes and organized religious and political defenses of their rights through religious newspapers, denominational organizations, and Republican Party politics. White Christians claimed their political violence was a necessary means to restore order and defend their families, and they ignored the trauma they perpetrated against black families and communities.

This chapter makes the case for religious freedom as a universal human right. It argues that religion is a universal human phenomenon and a good that merits protection by the law. It argues against the “new critics,” who hold that there is no universal phenomenon called religion, that religion and religious freedom are inventions of the modern West and have deep Protestant roots, that the West has imposed religious freedom through its power in colonialist and imperialist fashion, particularly vis-à-vis Islam, and that religious freedom ought not to be exported through the foreign policies of Western states. To each of these assertions, the chapter offers counterarguments.

Abstract The discourses of supporters and critics of polemics point out what polemics do and how they are shaped by the shared condition of being a religious minority. Critics condemn and reject polemics as unethical and allege that they undermine boundaries between public and private, personal and political, and friend/brother and enemy. They see polemics as detrimental to Indian Muslims. Defenders of polemics argue, on the other hand, that they separate right from wrong, religion from politics, and friend/brother from enemy. Polemics provide an opportunity for Muslims to perform their citizenship in India. Both discourses are largely disconnected from theology and understand polemics in largely non-theological terms, though they are united in stressing that polemics isolate religion as a distinct social reality.

This chapter interprets William James' entire career in the light of his affinity with the liberal Protestant elite of his time and place on the one hand, and his devotion to the calling of modern science on the other. It takes seriously his many references in Pragmatism to religious searching and indeed to “salvation,” so often left out of account by secular students of his thought. It reads Varieties of Religious Experience as the pivotal point in James' turn from a “separate spheres” defense of religion to an effort to mobilize a community of inquiry willing to test religious claims by experience. Against scholars who prefer to read James' corpus as a synchronic whole, the chapter shows that the meaning of his various works is best grasped when his career is approached diachronically, with each text analyzed according to the stage it marks in the development over time of his preoccupation with religion's relation to science.

Abstract The period with which this book is concerned is the first three centuries of the Roman Empire, from the first emperor Augustus (31 BCE-14 CE) to the first Christian emperor Constantine (306-37 CE). The period was marked by the existence of a great variety of religious traditions: civic cults, private religious associations, official cults of the Roman state, and personal observances. The adherents of these religions attacked each other with great ferocity at times. In response there emerged the practice of apologetic, the defence of a religion against actual or perceived opponents. It is the aim of this volume to examine the development of the literary expression of such apologetic among pagans, Jews, and Christians. In commissioning contributions from scholars who work with very different literary materials, the editors laid down a working definition of apologetic, taking as the core meaning of the term the sense in which it is commonly applied to the formal treatises undertaken in defence of Christianity from the second century onwards.

Abstract The Last Defense of External Continuity In our search for the essential continuity, we must once more protect our selves against the external continuity which forces itself upon us. Nine tenths of the “religious works of art” which we know evidence no inner, essential continuity between holiness and beauty, having only a purely external connection, which admittedly can be very refined, violating neither arc nor religion, but not proclaiming their unity.

In the research analysis of historical urban and architectural developments was confronted with the newest concepts in town planning and architecture. The search was set against the background of political and social situation as well as changing technical possibilities. Applied methodology was focused on finding links between forms created by people and crucial events characterizing analyzed periods. The methods involved included studies of literature, historical registers in museums and research in situ. Oval or circular urban systems and structures were shaped by several factors: safety, community demand, worship, expression of emotions and experience of decision makers and builders. At times when the defence of people and their possessions was a frequent necessity it was a ring of walls or circular rampart or tower on a plan of a circle that were used. Logics of this solution can be easily proved by simple equations. When mathematics imbued with magic or religion, and became a tool of shaping architecture, use of a ring was symbolic, and often used in sacred urban layouts and architecture. Circle, as the most perfect of figures was appreciated by the people of power of all periods up to now. First theoretical urban plans developed either from circular focal building or implemented circle or ring in shaping the whole layout. In the era of rationalism theorists of that time saw the opportunity to organize functional zones in concentric way. Recent decades unveiled new phenomena: circular projects in urban and architectural scale.

If killing a single person is considered as a major crime that forbidden by Sharia and law at the international level and at the level of all religions and divine legislation, so what about the concept of genocide!! Here, not just an individual with a weak influence on society is killed, but thousands of individuals, that means an entire nation, a future, energy and human and intellectual capabilities that can tip the scales, and on the other hand, broken and half-dead hearts are left behind from the horrific scenes of killing they witnessed before their eyes, moreover, the massacres of genocide continues to excrete its remnants and consequences for long years and for successive generations, and it may generate grudges of revenge among generations that did not receive the adequate awareness and psychological support which are necessary to rehabilitate these generations to benefit from the tragedies and bitter experiences of life to turn them into lessons and incentives to achieve progress and advancement. Genocide is a deadly poison whose toxic effect extends from generations to others unless it is wisely controlled. Here the role of the international community and its legal, legislative and humanitarian stance from these crimes is so important and supportive. Genocide can be occurred on two levels: external and internal. As for genocide on the external level: this is what happened at the hands of foreign powers against a certain people for colonial and expansionist goals in favor of the occupier or usurper. There are many examples throughout history, such as the Ottoman and British occupations...etc Whereas genocide at the internal level, can be defined as the repressive actions that governments practice against their own people for goals that could be extremist, racist or dictatorial, such as t ""Al-Anfal"" massacre in 1988 carried out by the previous regime against the Kurds in the Kurdistan region. The number of victims amounted at one hundred thousand martyrs, most of them were innocent and unarmed people from children, women and the elderly, and also the genocide which was practiced against of the organizers of Al-Shaibania Revolution in 1991 was another example of genocide in the internal level. It is possible to deduce a third level between the external and internal levels, which is the genocide that is done at the hands of internal elements from the people of the country, but in implementation of external agendas, for example, the scenes of organized and systematic sectarian killing that we witnessed daily during (2007) and (2008), followed by dozens of bloody explosions in various regions throughout the capital, which unfortunately was practiced by the people of the country who were misguided elements in order to destabilize the security of the country and we did not know until this moment in favor of which external party!! In the three aforementioned cases, nothing can justify the act of killing or genocide, but in my personal opinion, I see that genocide at the hands of foreign forces is less drastic effects than the genocides that done at the hands of internal forces that kill their own people to impose their control and to defense their survival, from the perspective of ""the survival for the strongest, the most criminal and the most dictatorial. The matter which actually dragged the country into the abyss and the ages of darkness and ignorance. As for the foreign occupier, he remains an occupier, and it is so natural for him to be resentful and spiteful and to keep moving with the bragging theory of that (the end justifies the means) and usurping lands illegally, but perhaps recently the occupier has begun to exploit loopholes in international laws and try to gain the support of the international community and international organizations to prove the legitimacy of what has no legitimacy, in the end to achieve goals which pour into the interest of the occupiers' country and from the principle of building the happiness and well-being of the occupiers' people at the expense of the misery and injustice of other peoples!! This remains absolutely dehumanizing societal crime, but at least it has a positive side, which is maximizing economic resources and thus achieving the welfare of a people at the expense of seizing the wealth of the occupied country. This remains the goal of the occupier since the beginning of creation to this day, but today the occupation associated with the horrific and systematic killing has begun to take a new template by framing the ugliness of the crime with humanitarian goals and the worst, to exploit religion to cover their criminal acts. A good example of this is the genocide that took place at the hands of the terrorist organization ISIS, that contradictory organization who adopted the religion which forbids killing and considers it as one of the greatest sins as a means to practice the most heinous types of killing that contemporary history has witnessed!! The ""Spiker"" and ""Sinjar"" massacres in 2014 are the best evidence of this duality in the ideology of this terrorist organization. We may note that the more we advance in time, the more justification for the crimes of murder and genocide increases. For example, we all know the first crimes of genocide represented by the fall of Baghdad at the hands of the Mongol leader ""Hulagu"" in 1258. At that time, the crimes of genocide did not need justification, as they were practiced openly and insolently for subversive, barbaric and criminal goals!! The question here imposes itself: why were the crimes of genocide in the past practiced openly and publicly without need to justify the ugliness of the act? And over time, the crimes of genocide began to be framed by pretexts to legitimize what is prohibited, and to permit what is forbidden!! Or to clothe brutality and barbarism in the patchwork quilt of humanity?? And with this question, crossed my mind the following ""Aya"" from the Glorious Quran (and do not kill the soul that God has forbidden except in the right) , this an explicit ""Aya"" that prohibits killing and permits it only in the right, through the use of the exception tool (except) that permits what coming after it . But the"" right"" that God describes in the glorious Quran has been translated by the human tongues into many forms and faces of falsehood!! Anyway, expect the answer of this controversial question within the results of this study. This study will discuss the axis of (ideologies of various types and genocide), as we will analyze excerpts from the speeches of the former regime that were announced on the local media after each act of genocide or purification, as the former regime described at that time, but the difference in this study is that the analysis will be according to a scientific and thoughtful approach which is far from the personal ideology of the researcher. The analysis will be based on a model proposed by the contemporary Dutch scientist ""Teun A. Van Dijk"". Born in 1943, ""Van Dijk"" is a distinguished scholar and teaching in major international universities. He has authored many approved books as curricula for teaching in the field of linguistics and political discourse analysis. In this study, Van Dijk's Model will be adopted to analyze political discourse ideologies according to forty-one criteria. The analysis process will be conducted in full transparency and credibility in accordance with these criteria without imposing the researcher's personal views. This study aims to shed light on the way of thinking that the dictatorial regimes adopt to impose their existence by force against the will of the people, which can be used to develop peoples' awareness to understand and analyze political statements in a scientific way away from the inherited ideologies imposed by customs, clan traditions, religion, doctrine and nationalism. With accurate scientific diagnosis, we put our hand on the wounds. So we can cure them and also remove the scars of these wounds. This is what we seek in this study, diagnosis and therefore suggesting the suitable treatment "

Human, as a species, is very variable, and his variability is at the basis of his social organization. This variability is maintained, in part, by the chance effects of gene assortment and the variation in these genes is the result of mutations in the past. If our remote ancestors had not mutated we would not he here; further, since no species is likely to he able to reduce its mutation rate substantially by the sort of selection to which it is exposed, we may regard mutations of recent origin as part of the price of having evolved. We are here: all of us have some imperfections we would wish not to have, and many of us are seriously incommoded by poor sight, hearing or thinking. Others among us suffer from some malformation due to faulty development. A few are formed lacking some essential substance necessary to metabolize a normal diet, to clot the blood, or to darken the back of the eye. We will all die and our deaths will normally be related to some variation in our immu-nological defences, in our ability to maintain our arteries free from occlusion, or in some other physiological aptitude. This massive variation, which is the consequence both of chance in the distribution of alleles and variety in the alleles themselves, imposes severe disabilities and handicaps on a substantial proportion of our population. The prospects of reducing this burden by artificial selection from counsel¬ling or selective feticide will be considered and some numerical estimates made of its efficiency and efficacy. Screening is a procedure by which populations are separated into groups, and is widely used for administrative and other purposes. At birth all babies are sexed and divided into two groups. Later the educable majority is selected from the ineducable minority; later still screening continues for both administrative and medical purposes. Any procedure by which populations are sifted into distinct groups is a form of screening, the word being derived from the coarse filter used to separate earth and stones. In medicine its essential features are that the population to be screen¬ed is not knowingly in need of medical attention and the action is taken on behalf of this population for its essential good. A simple example is provided by cervical smear examination, the necessary rationale for which must be the haimless and reliable detection of precancerous changes which can be prevented from becoming irreversible. Any rational decision on the development of such a service must be based on a balance of good and harm and any question of priorities in relation to other services must be based on costing. The balance of good and harm is a value judgement of some complexity. In the example of cervical smears anxiety and the consequences of the occasional removal of a healthy uterus must be weighed against the benefits of the complete removal of a cancerous one, and such matters cannot be costed in monetary terms. In fact, even such an apparently simple procedure as cervical screening is full of unknowns and many of these unknowns can only be resolved by extensive and properly designed studies. In genetic screening the matter is even more complicated, since the screening is often vicarious; that is, one person is screened in order to make a prediction on what may happen to someone else, usually their children, who may be un¬conceived or unborn. Further, the action of such screening may not be designed to ameliorate disease, but to eliminate a fetus which has a high chance of an affliction, or to prevent a marriage in which there is a mutual predisposition to producing abnormal children. These considerations impose very considerable dif¬ferences, since the relative values placed on marriage, on having children within marriage, and on inducing abortion, vary widely between individuals and between societies.

Teaching ethical aspects in the social sciences has always been a challenge, both for the professors and students involved. Ethical values and dilemmas can be presented through educational movies, examples from clinical, organizational or pedagogical practice, or even through personal disclosures offered with 'pros' and 'cons' arguments. In the past few years we took over this challenge, when conducting classes and seminaries at the disciplines "Educational Psychology" and "Foundations of Pedagogy" with first and second year students enrolled in the Teachers' Training Module, at the University "POLITEHNICA" of Bucharest. Several themes for applications (e.g., designing and conducting a social experiment; naive subjects; cooperation and empathy; obedience and authority; manipulation of external variables in a social context, e.g. a laboratory or a classroom) tackled the concept of how the moral values develop from childhood and adolescence through adulthood. For their exemplification we chose from time to time to present the series of experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram. In this classical, yet impossible to repeat nowadays experiment, he concluded that people- from various walks of life- obey either out of fear or out of a desire to appear cooperative, even when acting against their own better judgment, moral values and desires. Discussing with the students about the results of this experiment left us, almost every time, with a controversial state- students divided themselves into 'those who obey' vs. 'rebels', with some of them situating in between ("obeyed but blames themselves') (exactly as the participants in the original experiments!) In the long run, due to this extraordinary reaction we had from our students, these applications used for educational purpose became more complex. Thus, we translated a topic for an essay used by us in a Master of Bioethics program in the USA (2014-2015) and we reframed it for educational purpose. The topic refers to "Death and dying" and presents 6 types of killing which are legally sanctioned in the United States, including, for example, killing in self-defence or the capital punishment. The initial task we had in the Master program was, leaving legality aside and focusing only on morality, to rank each six of the categories in order--most immoral (#1) to least immoral (#6) according to our personal values. In doing so, we were also asked to provide a moral argument to justifying our ranking. Also, we were told that for the purposes of this essay, religious or legal arguments are not acceptable. This essay presents in extenso a personal exemplification of a possible ranking of these categories, the results of the exercise performed with the students, and proposes furthermore an educational framework- ready to be used by them. Thus, we hope to offer a relevant and actual application for teaching ethical issues in an university setting, which goes beyond a mere description of theoretical concepts and provides ethical tools for understanding the social life.

The Defenders Front of Islam or the Front Pembela Islam (FPI) is an Islamist civilizational populist movement in Indonesia. Its religious and political blueprints have been a challenge to the elites in power. In 2017 and 2019, it was involved in the contest of electoral politics to fight against the elites by implementing the populist politics that tends to undermine the democratic process. As a result, it was banned in 2020 but re-established a year later. In 2024 elections, it supports for Anies Baswedan-Muhaimin Iskandar to compete against Prabowo Subianto-Gibran Rakabuming and Ganjar Pranowo-Mahfud MD. The findings suggest that by applying the Islamist civilizational populism, the FPI instrumentalizes the informal religious law to support its political mobilization. It emphasizes the legal-centric perspective of “sharia,” which gives the FPI’s activists and its wider audience only one imperative option to solve the problem: join in the populism. We arguably state that the informal religious law can contribute to the process of Islamist civilizational populist mobilization.