Background & aim: Many researchers believe that religious doctrines have persistent effects on the mental and physical health and other aspects of human life. This study aimed to investigate the effect of pregnancy-related religious training on religious attitudes among pregnant women. Methods: This interventional study was conducted on 84 pregnant women with low and medium levels of religious ...

As a theologian working in Western Europe, religious plurality is unavoidable for me. It seems that our context can no longer be identified in terms of secularization. Competing worldviews and complementing religious stories dictate the religious landscape (and increasingly so, due to migration and global communication). The religions present in my country, however, are not monolithic and stabl...

Scholars have debated the manner in which religious beliefs influence economic organization. This paper examines a particular case–the craft guilds of medieval England–to show how religious doctrines influence the ability of a group to enforce cooperation. When mortality rates are high, repeated interaction alone cannot sustain cooperation, but spiritual sanctions in the afterlife can sustain c...

The ethical structure of the Albanian customary code, the Kanun, is deemed to represent the ethical value system of a society without state power. In spite of the appearance of civilizations and the resultant advent of an incipient state power, humans seemed to have known only the ethical value system of a society without state power until Gotama, Socrates, Plato and Jesus proposed new religiou...

instrumentalism (in the science) refers to a view that considers scientific theories as nothing more than instruments for prediction. sometimes the traces of this attitude have been searched in the writings of plato and aristotle; but mostly the pioneers of the theory have been thought to be the priests who regarded the scientific propositions as mere hypothesis, in order to defend religious do...

Requests by patients or their families for treatment which the patient's physician considers to be "inappropriate" are becoming more frequent than refusals of treatment which the physician considers appropriate. Such requests are often based on the patient's religious beliefs about the attributes of God (sovereignty, omnipotence), the attributes of persons (sanctity of life), or the individual'...

Religious fundamentalism is a distinctive set of beliefs and behaviour pattern in most modern religious communities. It is a religious way of being that manifests itself as a strategy among the believers to preserve the authenticity of their identity based on doctrines, beliefs and practices from a sacred past. This religious identity becomes the exclusive basis for a reimagined political and s...