Rational Religion, Kant's Moral Pilgrimage

Kant believed that the object of faith is the transcendental thought of prerequisite in moral practice, which contains the possibility of perfect moral practice, that is, the possibility of complete morality and the possibility of integration of both happiness and morality, and the immortality of the soul and the existence of God, which makes the integration possible. Unlike so-called "facts" that can be demonstrated in theory, such transcendental thoughts can be believed as "truth" in moral practice. Kant called them "rational belief" or "faith of practical reason", for moral practice is the application of pure practical reason. This paper attempts to interpret and analyse Kant's rational religion of moral worship, and reveals that only within the hypothesis of the existence of God, can achieve the goal of perfect goodness, as well as reconstruction of moral world in Kant's moral philosophy system.Western scholars interpret Kant's moral philosophy in tow tendencies: on the one hand, some concern Kant's effort on the proof of the existence of God and critique of old metaphysic, and pull Kant's moral philosophy to positivism; the other hand, some stress the consistency between Kant's moral philosophy and theology, and believe that there is an independent religious system or even "God centered" theory. These two kinds of interpretation have their own insight, but not so complete. Therefore, this article tries to analyze Kant's rational religion, with its character and its significance.The first chapter discusses Kant's basic philosophy of moral worship of the rational religion. With the influence of Enlightenment movement of reason, as well as the mechanistic world view, Kant promoted rational religion, with reason to prove religion. That true religion should be the natural religion of all people- which is the humanity ethic worship of rational religion.The second chapter discusses the theory framework of Kant's rational religion. According to Kant, the defect of human moral motivation is that it takes emotional motives as moral motives, which do not meet the requirements of reason. Kant looked for an absolute moral basis for all people, which means that it is necessary to exclude all principles of empirical discipline, and to tanscendentalize the object of moral beliefs. Thus the pure form of reason is becoming the only requirement of moral law, at the same time, the self-regulation of the will of the reason prove that pure morality can be self-sufficient. However, the practice of non-pure morality must rely on two prerequisites - immortality of the soul and the existence of God. On this basis, Kant concluded that the essence of religion is to take moral obligation as the commands of God.The third chapter discusses human beings in the bounded rationality who have a duality of good and evil, and analyses the difficulty of the integration of happiness in emotional world and perfect virtues in intellectual world. Only with the hypothesis of the existence of a rational religion and the existence of God, can the ultimate goal of goodness of morality achieve. Finally, within the moral society which Kant called the kingdom of virtue, and only with the help of rational religion as the established moral order, can all finite rational being fairly shares the happiness which is brought from morality.