Worldviews and their influence on human perception

Religion

Meaning

Ethics

Future

Monotheism

Monotheism means the worship of one god.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all monotheistic religions: God demands an exclusive relationship with His followers and an acknowledgement of His unique power.

All major monotheistic faiths have a concept of the 'end of days' or final judgment

Deism

God as the divine watchmaker.

God sent into motion the universe with His power but we are now able to use our own reason to govern our lives.

Enlightened reason and science is the best way to understand the future.

Naturalism

The natural world is the source of meaning.

Ethics can be found 'in nature.'

Rather than formal religion, we must look to nature for guidance.

Nihilism

Life has no inherent meaning.

There is no system of morality inherent to the human condition beyond that which we construct.

We are adrift and not heading to a purposeful future.

Existentialism

There is no inherent meaning: we have a responsibility to construct meaning.

Given that human beings are totally free, we must create moral structures for ourselves that are useful.

We must move forward and not be curtailed by fear and superstition. As free beings in an uncaring universe we have responsibilities to ourselves and others.

Pantheism

God is in everything.

Human beings must show respect for others and the natural world, given the presence of God in all things.

Respect for the environment and other aspects of nature is imperative, to acknowledge the divine within everything.

New Consciousness

Spirituality is found within the individual, not formal faith structures.

Human beings must respect themselves first before they can respect others.

Looking within is the first step to spiritual awakening.

Religious traditions: A comparison

All religious traditions, whether ancient like the major monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam or recent like the New Consciousness movement, attempt to make sense of the world to help human beings understand their place within it. Monotheistic religions stress the direct, personal connection that God has with human beings. God demands that His creation acknowledges that he is the creator and the one God. "You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God..." (Exodus 20:5). This is fundamentally different from the 18th century Enlightenment philosophy of Deism. While Deists acknowledge God as the creator, they believe that He endowed humans with reason and has now stepped back from caring about world events. Now our reason must hold sway in determining ethical decisions.

Freedom and the freedom to choose to do right and to sin is an important component of monotheistic faiths. However, the 20th century philosophies of existentialism and nihilism stress the negative rather than the positive aspects of such freedom. Nihilists suggest that there is no inherent truth structure at all to the evolution of the universe. Existentialists concur but, in adopting at least some of the perspective of monotheism, stress the responsibility of human beings to do what is right. With freedom comes great responsibility, including the often heavy responsibility of creating a moral structure in the absence of God. Yet this freedom does not necessarily make the individual happy. The existentialist Jean Paul Sartre famously said that anguish is inherent to the human condition (Zunjic 2012).