- What are religious norms?
- Characteristics of religious norms
- Examples of religious norms
- Other types of standards
We explain what religious norms are, who they affect, their characteristics and examples. In addition, other types of standards.
What are religious norms?
A rule is a directive or prohibition that serves to regulate the conduct or the behaviour humans in a specific area of life. And we also know that there are many types of rules, depending on the authority that issues them and the order of things that it aspires to control.
Thus, religious norms are those emanating from some religious authority, such as a church, priestly bureaucracy or spiritual leader. Consequently, they are accepted and practiced by their membership, in order to respect some kind of mystical or spiritual principles, which constitute the doctrine of their faith.
Put in simpler terms, religious norms are those to which a community or individual adhere to respect the vital guidelines that their God, or their set of beliefs, determine that they are correct or moral. Therefore, they only concern those who practice that specific faith or follow that specific cult.
They generally do not have legal significance, nor are they capable of inflicting on those who disrespect them greater punishment than rejection by the religious community. However, in some countries with theocratic rule, religious norms may coincide with legal norms that govern political, economic and social life.
Characteristics of religious norms
Generally, religious norms have to do with the intimate life, the relationship with others and the ways of organizing prayer, as well as attitudes general around life and existence.
They can be very different from each other, depending on the religion to which they belong, and in general they serve to reinforce the philosophy or the vision of the world that it, deep down, proposes. Depending on the strictness of the religionTherefore, the rules may be more prohibitive or lax, more specific or more general.
Generally, the religious norms are:
- Incoercible. That is, no one can force us to follow them, but we must submit to them voluntarily.
- Internal. Well, generally it is we ourselves who know if we have fulfilled them or not in our daily lives.
- Unilateral. Since they come from a tradition moral and cultural, and are not the result of social consensus.
Examples of religious norms
Some examples of religious norms are as follows:
- Practitioners of the Jewish and Islamic religions are prohibited from eating pork. In the case of the latter, also the intake of alcohol.
- According to the Bible and therefore the Christian and Jewish creed, the moral conduct of the faithful must be governed by the 10 commandments proposed by the prophet Moses.
- Women of the Jewish and Islamic cults must cover their hair and other parts of the body considered modest.
- In the Jewish tradition, male children are circumcised on the eighth day after they are born, while in the Christian tradition they must be baptized in a church.
- Chinese traditional religion demands of its faithful the I respect ancestors and their veneration on a family home altar.
Other types of standards
Norms or normative orders can be of many types, according to the authority that issues them or the vital space that they try to regulate or control. Thus, it is possible to also speak of:
- Legal norms. They are created by judicial institutions. They regulate the lives of the individuals of a nation, according to a set of laws that the Condition reinforces through monopoly of the violence.
- Moral standards. They govern the behavior of individuals according to what each society understands as "good", "bad" or "adequate", based on their particular tradition.
- Social norms. They facilitate coexistence of the individuals of a community, based on mutual agreement and consensus.