(Part 2) Best religious ethics books according to redditors

I simply remember reading the book, title was Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine by Dr. Paul Offit. It's an expose of cases where children were murdered by prayer.

Several states have laws exempting religious folks from prosecution for manslaughter. I think Idaho may be one of them. Here are a few links:

Idaho

And a quote from the above source:

>Idaho, on the other hand, is one of 6 states that has an exemption against manslaughter. This means a parent may not be charged with neglecting a child’s health even if the child dies.

Here's another link to Child's Health Care exemptions - this is a terrific link and should be read in its entirety

Two quotes from that site say:

>Fifteen states have religious defenses to felony crimes against children: Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

And:

>States with a religious defense to the most serious crimes against children include: Idaho, Iowa, and Ohio with religious defenses to manslaughter; Delaware and West Virginia with religious defenses to murder of a child; and Arkansas with a religious defense to capital murder.

And below is a quote from a document from the NDAA (the National District Attorneys Association)

>39 states, the District of Columbia and Guam have laws providing that parents or caretakers who fail to provide medical assistance to a child because of their religious beliefs are not criminally liable for harm to the child.

The entire PDF is at NDAA PDF

Or do a google search for "religious exemption from presecution state laws".

> The only thing I will say in defence of scientism is to point to its great success at explaining and predicting events about the natural world with minimal assumptions.

Scientism has not had great success in explaining or predicting anything. Science has. Science is not scientism. Nearly all serious epistemologies are eager to make room for science to do its work, but they differ from scientism in that they do not assume that any question outside of the scope of scientific testing is either unsolvable or just plain meaningless. So pointing to the success of science is not an argument for scientism; it's an argument for science, which, honestly, other epistemologies tend to justify far better than scientism does (Kant blows away any current pop scientist writer offering their scientistic defence of science).

> I am genuinely interested in what some good examples of these questions are

They're abundant. Moral questions, for one, are not ultimately scientific in nature, Sam Harris's poorly-argued and widely-mocked book aside. You cannot use science to determine a meta-ethics, even if science can be helpful to determine how to accomplish certain ethical goals once we've figured out what those goals should be.

Many religious/theological questions are also simply not scientific in nature. The theological question of creation--does existence have the character of "gift" from a higher source--is not scientific, because the gift-character of creation would not be tied to any particular scientific account of origins. Existential questions of human purpose can't be settled by scientific testing. Many would argue that mathematics tells us something true about reality but is not based in scientific empiricism. Even science itself, a great many would argue, cannot be self-grounding, and to make a robust philosophical defense of science you already have to step beyond the limits of scientism and acknowledge that there are meaningful questions about reality that are not scientific in nature.

It would be immensely helpful to read through a solid overview of the history of philosophy sometime, or a nice comparative introduction to epistemology.

Two books that I use with students specifically on the science and religion question, though, are Ian Barbour's Religion and Science and Langdon Gilkey's Nature, Reality, and the Sacred. They are both relatively easy overviews of the issue that make clear how scientific questions can differ from theological ones even on the same subject matter, like creation.

Looking for "Ethics" by (or rather edited) Peter Singer (amazon link here).

EDIT: Complete

Phillip Cole wrote sophisticated analysis of "Evil" in his book The Myth of Evil. The 30-second summary of his book is that evil can be divided into two categories: Pure Evil and Impure Evil.

Cole writes that "Impure Evil" is the term we apply to evil as done by humans, and "Pure Evil" is the term we would apply to the Devil, Satan (pick your own theology here). Cole concludes that we ultimately refer to acts which seem beyond the pale as "pure evil," and we shouldn't.

If your question is serious, it's worth reading.