Book Description

One of the challenges facing the world today is the question of religious freedom: how and to what extent millennia-old religious beliefs and practices, central to the lives of millions of people, can or should be accommodated. The question is particularly acute in the post-Christian, Western, secular states characterised by the claimed pluralism of so-called comprehensive doctrines. In this work on religious freedom and secularism I suggest that not only the dominant view of religious freedom as just one of the human rights does not have a satisfactory answer to these challenges, shorn of its historical and conceptual roots in the Judeo-Christian intellectual tradition, but that the very socio-political framework in which these challenges are posed today is incoherent and unsatisfactory for the reasons discussed. The background to this discussion is the increasingly evident realisation by many voices that while political and individual freedom is a necessary condition for individual and social flourishing it is not a sufficient condition. The ideas of personal freedom and individual autonomy had a transformative and revolutionary impact in the West; yet they were largely actualised thanks to the doctrines of a particular - Christian - religious tradition. Contents Chapter 1. Religious freedom and human rights Chapter 2. Religion, freedom and the secular age Chapter 3. The myth of the secular state Chapter 4. Kant on reason, morality and religion Chapter 5. Reason and the varieties of secularism Chapter 6. The challenge of voluntarism Edgar Ter Danielyan holds a First in Philosophy and Theology from Heythrop College, University of London, a research MA in Philosophy from the University of Buckingham (where he studied under the late Sir Roger Scruton), a Chartered Fellowship in Computing, and a Catholic Certificate in Religious Studies with Distinction from the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales.