Look inside the Edexcel A-Level Religious Studies guide (9RS0)

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Edexcel · A-Level · 9RS0
Religious Studies
Active Recall Guide
1,694 questions
Religious StudiesContents
Contents
9 topics, 132 subtopics
  1. Philosophy of Religion187
  2. Religion and Ethics169
  3. New Testament Studies164
  4. Buddhism198
  5. Christianity194
  6. Hinduism210
  7. Islam195
  8. Judaism185
  9. Sikhism192
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Religion and EthicsQuestions
Religion and Ethics
Environmental Ethics
  1. What do Jews and Christians usually mean when they call humanity a steward of creation?
  2. Is stewardship the same as conservation?
  3. Give a worked religious position and a worked secular position on the environment.
  4. How do religious and secular thinkers argue about animal welfare?
  5. Define sustainability and explain why it is an ethical idea and not just an economic one.
  6. Why is waste management treated as a moral issue rather than a technical one?
  7. What makes climate change a hard case for ethics?
  8. Explain J Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis.
  9. What did A Næss mean by deep ecology?
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Religion and EthicsAnswers
Answers
Environmental Ethics
  1. That the earth belongs to God and human beings hold it in trust rather than owning it. Reading the Genesis creation accounts this way, Jews and Christians take dominion to mean responsible care for which humanity is answerable to God, not a licence to exploit. Muslims express a similar idea through khalifah, humanity as God's trustee on earth.
  2. No. Stewardship is a religious account of why humans are accountable for the natural world; conservation is the practical management of habitats, species and resources. A conservationist need hold no theology at all, and stewardship can be argued for on grounds a secular conservationist would reject.
  3. Religious: Catholic teaching in Laudato Si' (2015) treats care for creation as a moral duty, links environmental damage to injustice against the poor, and criticises a throwaway culture of consumption. Secular: deep ecology holds that non-human life has value in its own right, independent of any use to humans, so the whole biosphere generates obligations. Students may argue from either, or set them against each other.
  4. Hindus, Buddhists and Jains appeal to ahimsa, non-harming, and many practise vegetarianism; Jewish and Muslim law imposes rules on slaughter that are themselves argued to reduce suffering, though critics dispute this. On the secular side, Peter Singer argues that a being's capacity to suffer is what earns it equal consideration, so ignoring animal pain is speciesism, while Tom Regan grounds protection in the rights of animals as subjects of a life.
  5. Sustainability is meeting present needs without destroying the capacity of future generations to meet theirs. It is ethical because it asks whether people who do not yet exist can make claims on us, and whether present consumption can be justified against future cost.
  6. Because how much a society throws away reflects choices about consumption, and because the burden of landfill, incineration and exported plastic falls unequally, often on poorer communities and poorer countries. Religious critics add that treating goods as disposable expresses ingratitude for gifts held in trust.
  7. Responsibility is diffuse, the harm is delayed, and those who caused least of the problem are frequently most exposed to it. Ordinary ideas of blame and compensation strain, which is why the debate has moved towards climate justice: who owes what to whom across nations and generations.
  8. Lovelock proposed that the earth's living things, atmosphere, oceans and rocks function as a single self-regulating system that keeps conditions suitable for life. His concern is the stability of that whole system, not the survival of any one species, and in later work such as The Revenge of Gaia he was pessimistic about human damage, arguing that nuclear power was necessary and criticising much green orthodoxy as sentimental.
  9. Næss distinguished shallow ecology, which protects nature because people need it, from deep ecology, which holds that the flourishing of all life has value in itself. His platform included biospherical egalitarianism, respect for diversity and a call to reduce human population and interference, alongside self-realisation, an enlarged sense of self that identifies with the wider natural world.
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BuddhismQuestions
Buddhism
The Three Marks of Existence and the Five Khandas
  1. Name the three marks and give each in a sentence.
  2. Why do Buddhists say the three marks run through absolutely everything?
  3. Show how the three marks turn up inside other Buddhist teachings.
  4. If everything is impermanent, what do Buddhists say about ultimate reality?
  5. What difference do the three marks make to how a Buddhist sees the point of living?
  6. List the five khandas and say what each contributes to a person.
  7. How does the khanda analysis support anatta?
  8. If there is no self, who is reborn?
  9. Explain how karma works if actions have no permanent agent behind them.
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BuddhismAnswers
Answers
The Three Marks of Existence and the Five Khandas
  1. Anicca: everything conditioned is in process and nothing stays. Dukkha: because it does not stay, it cannot finally satisfy. Anatta: nothing in it is a permanent, independent self.
  2. Because they are held to be features of conditioned existence as such, not of unpleasant bits of it. A pleasant experience, a mountain and a mind are all impermanent, all incapable of lasting satisfaction, and all without a fixed essence, which is why the marks are treated as a description of reality rather than a complaint about it.
  3. They underwrite the whole system. Anicca is what dependent origination describes in motion; dukkha is the first Noble Truth; anatta is why rebirth is not the travel of a soul, and why the five khandas are analysed at all. Meditation practice is largely training in seeing the three directly instead of assenting to them.
  4. Theravada teaching distinguishes the conditioned, which bears all three marks, from nibbana, which is unconditioned and so not impermanent, though it is still not a self. Mahayana thought more often speaks of emptiness (sunyata) as the way things ultimately are, meaning the absence of inherent existence rather than a hidden substance behind appearances.
  5. They rule out one answer and supply another: nothing conditioned can be a final resting place, so a life spent securing possessions, status or even a self is built on a mistake. What a human life is for is reframed as awakening and the ending of craving, with compassion for others caught in the same predicament.
  6. Rupa, physical form; vedana, the feeling-tone of experience as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral; sanna, recognition and labelling; sankhara, volitional and emotional formations, where karma is made; vinnana, consciousness or awareness of an object. Between them they cover everything a person is.
  7. By exhaustion. Examine each of the five and none is permanent, none is fully under control, and none is found to own the others; nor is any self discovered apart from them. Buddhists conclude that 'self' names a process, in the way 'chariot' names an assembly of parts and not a thing over and above them.
  8. Theravada answers that nothing is transferred; rather, one process conditions the next, as a flame passes from candle to candle without a substance crossing between. Continuity is causal, carried by karmic tendencies, which is why the tradition says the new life is neither the same person nor a different one.
  9. Karma in Buddhist teaching means intentional action: the volition in sankhara conditions later experience. The doctrine needs a causal stream, not an unchanging doer, so Buddhists deny the agent while keeping full moral responsibility, since the stream that acts is the very stream that inherits the result.
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IslamQuestions
Islam
The Six Beliefs of Islam
  1. What are the six articles of faith that Sunni Muslims traditionally list?
  2. Why do Muslims describe these beliefs as interlocking rather than as a list?
  3. How does the Twelver Shi'a scheme of fundamental beliefs differ in shape?
  4. What work does adalat do in Shi'a theology?
  5. Tawhid is usually translated as oneness. What does it rule out as well as affirm?
  6. Why do Muslims speak of Allah through the 99 Beautiful Names?
  7. What does W Chittick identify as the central balancing act in Muslim talk about Allah?
  8. How does S H Nasr characterise the place of tawhid in Islam as a whole?
  9. What do Muslims believe about angels, and what are they for?
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IslamAnswers
Answers
The Six Beliefs of Islam
  1. Belief that Allah is one; belief in angels; belief in the revealed scriptures; belief in the prophets; belief in the Day of Judgement; and belief in divine decree, qadr. Sunni tradition calls them the pillars of faith, arkan al-iman, and summarises them in a set creedal formula that many Muslims learn by heart.
  2. Because each depends on tawhid. Angels and prophets are the means by which the one God communicates; the scriptures are that communication; judgement is the moral outcome of accepting or refusing it; and qadr is the framework within which the whole thing runs. Remove the first and the rest lose their point.
  3. Twelver Shi'a Muslims speak of five roots of religion: tawhid, divine justice (adalat), prophethood, the Imamate and the resurrection. The content overlaps heavily with the Sunni six, but adalat and the Imamate are raised to the status of foundations, while angels, scriptures and decree are treated within those headings rather than listed separately.
  4. It holds that justice belongs to Allah's very nature rather than being simply whatever Allah happens to will, so Allah cannot act unjustly. Twelver Shi'a Muslims draw from this that human beings must be genuinely free, since punishing someone for what they could not avoid would be unjust. Much Sunni theology, especially the Ash'ari school, instead makes the good whatever Allah decrees, and puts the weight on omnipotence.
  5. It affirms that Allah is one, without partner, parts or offspring, and unlike anything created. It rules out shirk, associating anything with Allah, which Muslims regard as the gravest of sins; it rules out picturing the divine in creaturely form, which shapes Islamic art; and it rules out any intermediary whose permission is needed for access to Allah.
  6. Muslims hold that the divine essence is unknowable in itself, so the names are how Allah has chosen to be known: the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Sovereign, the Holy, the Just, the Provider. They are recited in remembrance, counted on prayer beads, and give many Muslims their own names, such as Abd al-Rahman, servant of the Merciful.
  7. Chittick, working largely through Ibn Arabi, sets tanzih against tashbih. Tanzih declares Allah utterly incomparable, beyond every image; tashbih recognises that revelation does speak of Allah in relational terms, as seeing, hearing and near. He argues that holding only tanzih leaves a God too remote to worship, holding only tashbih makes an idol, and the tradition's achievement is refusing to let go of either.
  8. Nasr treats tawhid not as one doctrine among six but as the principle that generates a whole civilisation: its law, art, science and metaphysics are, on his account, so many applications of unity. He also holds that recognition of the one God belongs to fitrah, the human being's primordial nature, so that faith is a remembering rather than an acquisition.
  9. Muslims hold that angels are created from light, lack lower appetites and cannot disobey, and serve as Allah's agents. Jibril carries revelation, Mika'il is associated with sustenance, Israfil will sound the trumpet at the end, the angel of death takes souls, two angels question the dead in the grave, and recording angels write each person's deeds. They are never worshipped.
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