Philosophy of religion exam review questions answers - Essay Example

397). What does he mean by this? William Cavanaugh wrote his essay as he is unpleasantly surprised by the fact that the government wants the religion to play the role of “peace creator”. Such approach can easily return us to the Middle Ages’ level of development as every person in democratic country should feel free in choosing his/her religious beliefs. Our ethical principles should be based first of all on justice, democracy and positive examples and religion should not direct our behavior.

Actually during “the wars of religion” there were many alliances created not because of religious allegiance. The perfect example of is the alliance during the 3rd war when protestants were allied to William of Orange who needed that alliance in order to establish political control. “Wars of religion” usually served as pretexts for starting military actions to establish control in another country. The term “development of doctrine” was used by John Henry Newman, who studied how religious dogmas were developed through time.

He made the conclusion that Catholic teaching was the most developed through time in comparison to other christen teachings, the dogmas of which mainly remained unchanged. The views of Plato and Freud were similar in one thing: they considered love to be the most important in our life. However, Freud considered love to be the production of physical desire, while Plato stated that physical desire is the consequence of spiritual affection. Plato was against sexual activity that is fulfilled only to satisfy physical needs.

He valued spiritual love high and considered erotic attraction of a person to be the consequence of spiritual affection. According to Plato, erotic attraction does not depend on appearance or sexual appeal, it fully depends on spiritual feeling. The first principles are found when our