127JESUSand many different branches of Jainism,
but most of them are associated with one
of these two main sects.
Jains are expected to live out five basic
vows: ahimsa (nonviolence), satya (truth),
asteya (non-stealing), brahmacarya (celi-
bacy), and aparigrapha (non-possession).
The way in which these principles are
lived out varies depending upon whether
one is a householder or a renunciant.
Jains identify 14 stages (gunasthanas)
of the path to liberation (moksha marg).
The ascetic vows (mahavratas) are taken
at the sixth stage. Only ascetics can attain
liberation. Because the world is timeless,
Jains do not believe in a creator God.
However, they consider the liberated soul
(arhat or kevalin) to be divine, and they
worship the Jinas.
JAMES, WILLIAM (1842–1910).
American philosopher and psychologist,
brother of the writer Henry James. William
James was one of the main defenders of
pragmatism, an American philosophical
tradition that appealed to the effect of a
belief upon one’s actions for the meaning
of that belief. According to James’ prag-
matism, the true beliefs are the ones that
work. In his psychological writings he
argues against mind-body dualism and is
best known for the James-Lange theory
of emotions, in which emotions are part of
the physiological response to stimuli, not
the cause of the physiological response.
James was interested in religious expe-
riences throughout his career. His book,
Va r i e t i e s of Religious Experience (1902),
looked at the ways that mystical experi-
ences motivate people to believe in a
divine power and, in the case of “healthy-
minded” experiences, make them better
persons. We may judge religious experi-
ences not by the authority that under-
writes them, but by their consequences,
“not by their roots, but by their fruits.”
He is careful to say that the experiences
do not provide evidence for the existence
of God, for we can never tell if they are
genuine experiences or mere deceptions,
and he thinks they can be reproduced
through the use of drugs.
In his essay “The Will to Believe”
(1897), he argues against the view that we
are only justified in believing something
if we have sufficient evidence for it;
he instead claims that often we need to
believe something first in order for our
actions to bring it about. He holds that
agnosticism is the same as atheism since
they result in the same actions, and he
argues that religious believers may be jus-
tified even without full evidence for their
beliefs. He is the author of The Principles
of Psychology (1890), The Will to Believe
and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
(1897), The Varieties of Religious Experi-
ence (1902), Pragmatism (1907), A Plural-
istic Universe (1909), and Essays in Radical
Empiricism (1912).JESUS (c. 4 BCE–c. 30 CE). The central
figure of Christianity, Jesus was born and
lived in modern-day Palestine in the early