The interreligious dimension of reasoning about God's existence

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

公民信息维权的道德保障

信息权利已经成为当代公民最基本的权利之一,但其实现状况却不尽如人意.究其原因,落后的社会经济文化发展水平,法律与道德体制的滞后与权力至上等传统观念的深入人心,极大地阻碍了公民积极维权的步伐.为此,从伦理层面上,应该通过信息伦理文化观念的建设、加强相关的伦理宣传和教育等措施培养和鼓励公民的信息维权意识,还应不断完善道德赏罚机制,适度引导公民形成积极维权的行为习惯.     

A systematic review of the relationship between religion and attitudes toward transgender and gender-variant people

Background: Prejudice against transgender people is widespread, yet in spite of the prevalence of this negativity relatively little is known about the antecedents and predictors of these attitudes. One factor that is commonly related to prejudice is religion, and this is especially true for prejudice targets that are considered to be “value violating” (as is the case for transgender individuals).

Method: In this paper, we present the findings of our systematic search of the literature on this topic and present the synthesized evidence. Our search strategy was conducted across five databases and yielded 29 studies (across 28 articles).

Results: We found consistent evidence that self-identifying as with either being “religious” or as Christian (and to a lesser extent, being Muslim) was associated with increased transprejudice relative to being nonreligious (and to a lesser extent, being Jewish). Additionally, we found consistent evidence that certain forms of religiosity were also related to transprejudice – specifically religious fundamentalism, church attendance, and interpretations of the bible as literal (transprejudice was unrelated to religious education).

Conclusion: Although this young, but important field of research is growing, more empirical exploration is needed to fully understand that nuances of the religion-transprejudice relationship.     

Culture Marker Versus Authority Marker: How Do Language Attitudes Affect Political Trust?

Is public trust in government representatives (i.e., bureaucrats, police, public servants) affected by the language they use? The conventional theory holds that, in a multilingual society, people favor government representatives who speak the listeners' dialects because it indicates a shared cultural identity, that is, the “culture-marker” effect. This article offers an alternative mechanism in which people's attitudes can be affected by the government designating the official language as a marker of political authority. Listeners will then project their respect for the political authority to the government representatives who speak this marker language. This mechanism is named an “authority marker” effect. Using a set of adjusted matched-guise experiments in China, this study examines the culture-marker and authority-marker effects. The results support the authority-marker effect by showing that listeners have significantly more trust in the bureaucrats who speak the official language than in those who speak the dialects of the listeners. The study also finds that this is a unique effect for speakers when they represent the government. Without that political identity, listeners will still respond more positively to speakers of their own dialects.