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Religion and Politics

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Religion purports to answer people's ultimate and most important questions. These are among the questions that personal development, which is the same as true education, also addresses. Yet, from the late eighteenth and to the middle of the nineteenth century, "enlightened" thinkers expected religion to disappear by the twentieth century. Intellectuals came to find secular alternatives to religious faith: reason, science, art, and politics. Nevertheless, religion is making a strong comeback. This is not surprising. Religious and secular concerns are inseparable: In areas like marriage, contractual obligations, and personal development they overlap. Simultaneous with this revival of religion is a renewed interest in ethics, morality, and humanitarian concerns. From the subjective point of view, religion is a virtue that leads a person to render to God the homage due Him. As an objective manner of behavior and concrete manifestation of virtue, revealed religion comprises several things – for example, belief in, respect for, and submission to one God, who is personal, infinite, immanent, and transcendent. And there have to be acts of worship to show these things: Actions speak louder than words in religion as well as elsewhere. Lastly in the objective sense, revealed religions have to have institutions which regulate external religious activity, lest the activity become in some way an aberration, or abnormal, or impinge upon the rights of others. Personal development, another term difficult to define, means actualizing all the potential that is in a person: a process of becoming, of being all you can be in every area of your

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