Transcendental Idealism Transcendental idealism is a doctrine founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant’s doctrine maintains that human experience of things is similar to the way they appear to us—implying a fundamentally subject-based component, rather than being an activity that directly (and therefore without any obvious causal link) comprehends the things...
Subjective Idealism Subjective idealism, or empirical idealism, is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism; indeed, it is the contrary of eliminative materialism, the doctrine that...
What Is Soul Dualism? Soul dualism or multiple souls is a range of beliefs that a person has two or more kinds of souls. In many cases, one of the souls is associated with body functions (“body soul”) and the other one can leave the body (“free soul” or “wandering soul”). Sometimes the...
Objective Idealism Objective idealism is an idealistic metaphysics that postulates that there is in an important sense only one perceiver, and that this perceiver is one with that which is perceived. One important advocate of such a metaphysics, Josiah Royce (the founder of American idealism), wrote that he was indifferent “whether anybody calls all this Theism or...
Neutral Monism In the philosophy of mind, neutral monism is the view that the mental and the physical are two ways of organizing or describing the same elements, which are themselves “neutral”, that is, neither physical nor mental. This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things. Rather,...
Monism Monism attributes oneness or singleness (Greek: μόνος) to a concept e.g., existence. Various kinds of monism can be distinguished: Priority monism states that all existing things go back to a source that is distinct from them; e.g., in Neoplatonism everything is derived from The One. In this view only one thing is ontologically basic or...
Mandaeism Mandaeism or Mandaeanism (Arabic,مندائية) is a monotheistic religion with a strongly dualistic tendencies. Its adherents, known as Mandaeans, revere Adam, Abel, Seth, Enosh, Noah, Shem, Aram, and especially John the Baptist. They describe Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad as false Prophets. Mandaeans consider John the Baptist to be God’s most honorable messenger. Worldwide, there are thought to be between 60,000 and 70,000 Mandaeans and until the 2003 Iraq...
Dualistic Cosmology Dualistic cosmology is the moral or spiritual belief that two fundamental concepts exist, which often oppose each other. It is an umbrella term that covers a diversity of views from various religions, including both traditional religions and scriptural religions. Moral dualism is the belief of the great complement of,...
What is Dualism? Dualism (from the Latin word duo meaning “two”) denotes a state of two parts. The term ‘dualism‘ was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can...
Absolute Idealism Absolute idealism is an ontologically monistic philosophy “chiefly associated with Friedrich Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel, both German idealist philosophers of the 19th century, Josiah Royce, an American philosopher, and others, but, in its essentials, the product of Hegel”. It is Hegel’s account of how being is...
Sociological Classifications Of Religious Movements Various sociological classifications of religious movements have been proposed by scholars. In the sociology of religion, the most widely used classification is the church-sect typology. The typology states that churches, ecclesia, denominations, and sects form a continuum with decreasing influence on society. Sects are break-away groups from...
Mind Control Brainwashing (also known as mind control, menticide, coercive persuasion, thought control, thought reform, and re-education) is the concept that the human mind can be altered or controlled by certain psychological techniques. Brainwashing is said to reduce its subject’s ability to think critically or independently, to allow the introduction of new, unwanted...
New Religious Movements And Cults In Popular Culture New religious movements and cults have appeared as themes or subjects in literature and popular culture, while notable representatives of such groups have themselves produced a large body of literary works. Beginning in the 1700s authors in the English-speaking world began introducing members of...
Cult The term cult has come to usually refer to a social group defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or its common interest in a particular personality, object or goal. This sense of the term is controversial and it has divergent definitions in both popular culture and academia and it also has been an ongoing source of...
Christian Countercult Movement The Christian countercult movement or the Christian anti-cult movement is a social movement among certain Protestant evangelical and fundamentalist and other Christian ministries (“discernment ministries”) and individual activists who oppose religious sects which they consider “cults“. Overview Christian countercult-activism mainly stems from evangelicalism or fundamentalism. The countercult movement asserts that particular...
Anti-cult Movement The anti-cult movement (abbreviated ACM; sometimes called the countercult movement) is a social group which opposes any new religious movement (NRM) that they characterize as a cult. Sociologists David Bromley and Anson Shupe initially defined the ACM in 1981 as a collection of groups embracing brainwashing-theory, but later observed a significant shift in ideology towards pathologizing membership in NRMs. One element...
State Atheism State atheism is the incorporation of positive atheism or non-theism into political regimes. It may also refer to large-scale secularization attempts by governments. It is a form of Religion-State relationship that is usually ideologically linked to irreligion and the promotion of irreligion to some extent. State atheism may refer to a...
New Atheism New Atheism is a term coined in 2006 by the journalist Gary Wolf to describe the positions promoted by some atheists of the twenty-first century. This modern-day atheism is advanced by a group of thinkers and writers who advocate the view that superstition, religion and irrationalism should not simply be tolerated but should...
Negative And Positive Atheism This article covers the negative and positive Atheism. Negative atheism also called weak atheism and soft atheism is any type of atheism where a person does not believe in the existence of any deities but does not explicitly assert that there are none. Positive atheism also called strong atheism and hard atheism in the form...
Marxism And Religion 19th century German philosopher Karl Marx, the founder and primary theorist of Marxism, had an antithetical and complex attitude to religion, viewing it primarily as “the soul of soulless conditions”, the “opium of the people” that had been useful to the ruling classes since it gave the working classes false hope...