These important questions and many other related ones will be explored and used to challenge your thinking and evaluative skills. This course is intellectually demanding, exciting, and challenging. You get the chance to assess the ideas of the most influential thinkers and movements of the past 2,500 years. Expect few hard and fast answers, but to have your critical faculties vigorously exercised. Religious Studies is an A Level worth considering and makes an excellent combination with science, humanities, and arts subjects. If you would like to sharpen your critical thinking, develop your analysis and evaluative skills, and tease your brain, this course is for you. All students follow the AQA Religious Studies (Philosophy of Religion, Ethics, Religion, and Dialogues) course which is assessed by two 3-hour written exams for each component. They will cover the following 2 units: Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: Arguments for the existence of God; Evil and Suffering; Religious Experience; Religious language; miracles and the self, death and the afterlife. The ethical theories of Natural Moral Law, Situation and Virtue Ethics; Issues of human and animal life and death (embryo research; cloning; abortion; euthanasia; capital punishment; the status and rights of animals; blood sports); Meta Ethics; Free will; conscience and a comparison of the views of Bentham and Kant. Study of Religion and dialogues: Sources of wisdom and authority; God/gods/ultimate reality; self, death, and the afterlife; Good conduct and key moral principles; expression of religious identity; religion and gender, sexuality, science, secularisation, and religious pluralism. This paper also includes a consideration of the dialogues between the philosophy of religion, ethics, and religion. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to develop their understanding of the connections between the two units. This subject would be particularly useful to anyone wishing to study medicine, or law or enter the paramedical, law enforcement, or teaching professions. Many Higher Education institutions look favorably upon this course due to the transferable thinking and reasoning skills that are developed, however, it is extremely useful if studying Criminology or Sociology. It is also useful in the following professions: Management: • Leisure and Travel • Marketing and Public Relations • Broadcasting and Journalism • Personnel Publishing: • Banking and Accountancy • Computing • Civil Service • International and Local Government. The subject complements a wide range of subject combinations; not only in arts, humanities, and social science, but also in the sciences. It is hoped that anyone who studies philosophy, ethics, and religion will arrive at a better understanding of the subjects, whatever their reactions to them. Equally important they will have a better understanding of themselves and their world, in whatever direction this may lead them.