Therefore

A customary way religions influence moral behaviour is by communicating explicit apodictic rules - the "thou shalt and thou shalt not"s often looked upon as commanded by God. These divine moral commands acquire additional authority by being shown to be compatible with the tradition's cosmology or world view, that is, the basic elements of reality - history, humans, nature, and ultimacy.Moreover - and here we come to the distinctive thrust of this book - even in the absence of articulated moral guides, religions justify certain ways of acting by showing them to be consistent inferences from the religion's underlying cosmology. The disclosed world is X; therefore, our obligatory conduct is Y.Chapters on issues of war and peace, indigenous peoples, sex and gender, bioethics and assisted death, ecology, and speech illustrate how obligatory moral conduct is legitimated by inferences from religious cosmologies.