Religion: Making the World Better?

Religion: Making the World Better?

Online book, first draft, 13 April 2024. (67 pages).

Part 1: Easter 2024 (23 pages)

Part 2: Religion and Mathematics (44 pages)

Part 1: Easter 2024

1 Better world? infant mortality, 1990-2022

2 Better world: self and other; positive and negative

3 Religion: negative towards the other

4 Easter, 2024: positive towards the other

  Easter: juxtaposition and ambivalence; a distribution of opinions and practices

  … six days of work and one day of rest

  … Holy Days and holidays

  Easter messages: preachers, politicians and the Pope

  Low Sunday … possible evidence-based attributes of God

5 Easter is early: religious time, calendar time and astronomical time

6 The religion of a nation

     Is Germany Christian?

     Is Britain Christian?

     … Britain’s political leaders

     … Christian Britain: David Cameron, 2014

     … British Christianity, 1611

    Is Scotland Protestant?

[Religion and the system of nations and empires]

[Religion … power, culture and value]

7 Religious competition: success, size, share, strength and chance

8 Religion trajectories: survival, strength and chance

9 Religion and Enlightenment (and its critics)

    Secular conceptions of violence: “aggression in the life-world”

Religious selection and secular selection

10 Selected links … chapters from the Yearbooks and other writings

Part 2: Religion and Mathematics (44 pages)

1 Religion: the world and the UK

2 Religion and reality

3 Religion and reason

4 Jehovah and Dakon … Judaism, Christianity and Islam

5 Religion and values in society

6 Possible gods

7 Models of possible gods

1 Religion: the world and the UK

1.1 World religions: the future, 2010-2050

1.2 The British Academy explores faith, 2015

2 Religion and reality

3 Religion and reason

4 Jehovah and Dakon … Judaism, Christianity and Islam

4.1 Handel’s Samson … Israelites’ Jehovah versus Philistines’ Dakon

4.2 Tom Holland’s ‘Deradicalising Muhammad’

4.3 Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the three Abrahamic faiths

4.4 Negativity in Judaism, Christianity and Islam

4.5 ‘Our values’, the religious aspect: Israel and Palestine …

5 Religion and values in society

5.1 ‘Promoting positive human values’: kindness to oneself and others

5.2 A model of life and an image of a positive society

5.3 Religion’s attitudes to sex and gender issues

5.4 Ireland’s referendum on same-sex marriage

6 Possible gods

6.1 Different selections from religion’s mixture of positivity and negativity

6.2 Alternatives to religion as the centre of one’s personal life

6.3 Jesus, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King

6.4 Heavens on earth: feudalism, Utopia 1516, capitalism, communism, fascism

7 Models of possible gods

7.0 God and good

7.1 Doubting God

7.2 God: beliefs about existence, power, constancy and value

7.3 Contexts in which gods might be involved

7.4 Levels of involvement which gods might have … designer or participant

7.5 Emotions, personalities and relationship styles which a god might display

7.6 A mathematical model

THE END