The relationship between Religion and Ethics in todays World - Essay Example

But we see everyday ethical notions being deliberated upon and changed to suit particular circumstances and individual and mass preferences. Religious precepts are based on the revelations of the original prophets. The precepts were later formalized into written texts of all the religions. Whereas on one hand religious precepts lay the roadmap to salvation, on the other, they also help a human to judge between right and wrong. But slowly decadence set in the free thinking ideals of every religion and the religious precepts got permanence as dogmas.

The modern ethics are based upon the theories of ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The ethical notions witnessed resurgence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The ideas of liberty, freedom and equality took route in European society later got spread out all over the world. What began as an intellectual movement pioneered by such free thinkers as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Hobbes acquired political dimensions in the French Revolution and the American War of Independence.

Individual liberty is both the cause and effect of free thinking. Free thinking also promotes the cause of ethical judgment. The sphere of Ethics now spreads beyond individualized thinking to help mankind to frame rules for societies, cultures, and countries. What may be ethical in one country, a geo-political region, or a continent may not be so in another. In other words, ethics hold a huge scope for variance, and argument, whereas religion is guided by dogmas that are most part rigid, unalterable and beyond question.

Religious dogmas, too, may have had very logical origin but with passage of time they come to be accepted as divine ordainments and have to be accepted by the people without question. The clash of religion and ethics today gets reflected in different forms. The debate over ethics and