Compare Traditions on One Technology
Choose a technology and read the traditions' recorded stances side by side — each with its rationale in its own terms. The comparison is the section's method in one view: the differences are in the reasons.
Nuclear power
The reactor judged apart from the bomb: prudence, waste, and descendants on one side of the ledger, decarbonization arithmetic on the other — and no magisterium with a binding word. The full register entry
Catholic
Contested within the tradition
The magisterium has issued no binding condemnation of civilian nuclear power; the question is treated prudentially under stewardship and the safety owed to neighbors and descendants, with bishops’ conferences of affected countries (Japan after 2011, Germany) pressing for phase-outs their universal Church has not mandated.
- Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan, statements after Fukushima (2011)
Secular and naturalist
Contested within the tradition
Secular assessment divides on arithmetic: climate models in which decarbonization without nuclear is harder (IPCC pathways) against waste, cost, and proliferation arguments — a technical quarrel conducted in the open.
- IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, mitigation pathways (2022)
Shinto
Unknown or undetermined
Japan’s post-Fukushima arguments drew on the vocabulary of pollution and purification; the Association of Shinto Shrines has no official position on reactors, and Shinto voices appear on both sides of the restart debates — a silence of doctrine that the register records as undetermined at the level of the tradition.
- Ian Reader, Religion in Contemporary Japan (1991)