The first purpose of this article is to articulate some different approaches on the issue of “Religion and Bioethics”, and to clarify the relationship between them. Roughly classified, there are three different approaches to the issue : discussions on bioethics based on the specific religious viewpoints, discussions on the influence of religious tradition to the bioethical debate in each society, and discussions on the possibility of spiritual bioethics without resorting to any specific religion. There are some different meanings or dimensions in both the words “religion” and “bioethics”, and it is why there are such different approaches to “Religion and Bioethics”, focusing on the different dimensions of this theme.
Secondly, we want to examine the relationship between religious traditions and scientific technology and reject the over-simplified idea of religion as a “brake” which stops the development of science and technology. It is necessary to distinguish between the problems that we can address within the limit of secular ethics, and the problems in which we need to refer to religious or spiritual viewpoints. The most important role of religion is to propose such questions often tended to be ignored in secular bioethics, rather than to give an absolute answer to them.
