Editorial

Citation

Alam Choudhury, M. (2009), "Editorial", Humanomics, Vol. 25 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/h.2009.12425caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Humanomics, Volume 25, Issue 3.

The contributions to this issue comprise interesting papers on the economic interpretation of religious behavior, both among Christians and Muslims. It is important to know a rational explanation of such behavior because religion is a great and spanning institution watershed that is deeply rooted in the human psyche. Human preferences that form institutional preferences in a collective sense are at the roots of human communities as social and economic embedded entities. Therefore, they have epistemological basis for their explanation. But as an epistemological explanation, the religious behavioral basis of institutions presents different outlooks. A rational examination and analysis of such approaches to behavioral phenomena would discern the worthy and the not-worthy elements of the religious attitudes to worldly issues.

The initiating question is this: Should ethics, righteousness and morality be necessarily premised on religion? To answer this question it is important to understand what can be the moral obligation for ethical definition. Religious precepts that solely resort to metaphysical abstruseness without a clear human relationship that is of the world and its domain of wellbeing and its actualization turn out to be uninteresting for human needs. Why should individuals and communities, people and civilization need such a religious persuasion for human future and wellbeing? If the answer is not clearly presented then the utility of such religions dissipate and the institutions, behavior and communities premised on them fade away. Religious elements of the experiments disappear.

Wellbeing and religious expression to be ethical therefore ought to break away from sheer metaphysical strictures. It can then be made to rest on a transmission of codes that have human utility. Thereby, communities and societies come to embrace such values for the common good. Such a religion, and its epistemological and ontological origin and applications to diverse issues of life consequently becomes the accepted domain of human activity of the longue durée.

So in the papers contributed in this volume, the reader may look for differences in the religious approach and experience on social issues from the Christian and Islamic viewpoints. But such a query and the presentations made in the papers ought to be authentically grounded on the diversity of religious experiences. Without such an epistemological and original reference in the inquiry, religious practice becomes futile, and merely self-asserting. It then rests on received ideas. These are merely quoted in the intellection process to provide a religious premise on specific economic and social issues.

Humanomics pursues original and authentically epistemological inquiries on substantively moral and ethical roots of socio-scientific issues. Out of such original inquiries it is hoped that fresh answers can be provided with rational explanation and substantive formalism on the impending problems.

Masudul Alam Choudhury