How should a follower handle relationships, work, hardship, and community?

Honor your parents (Qur'an 17:23), deal fairly and tenderly with your spouse, earn honestly, meet hardship with patience and prayer (Qur'an 2:153), and stay inside a community of believers — faith is not lived alone.

Since this life is the only one, relationships and work carry its full weight: love, friendship, and useful work are the goods themselves, not preparation for something else. Hardship is met without cosmic consolation — with courage, honest grief, and the help of other people.

By ordinary human wisdom, chosen rather than commanded. Agnostics face hardship without promised cosmic compensation — Russell argued this can be done with dignity; others admit it is the stance's hardest hour, and some borrow consolations from the traditions around them.

Relationships run on love and forgiveness — 'seventy times seven' (Matthew 18:22); work is done 'as for the Lord, not for men' (Colossians 3:23); hardship is endured with hope, since suffering 'produces perseverance, character, and hope' (Romans 5:3–4); and no one carries life alone — believers are one body, bearing one another's burdens (Galatians 6:2).

Honor parents; keep marriage faithful; deal honestly — the Talmud says the first question in the final judgment is 'did you deal faithfully in business?'; visit the sick, comfort mourners, and do not separate from the community. Hardship is met with prayer, communal support, and the structured week of mourning (shiva).

The Sigalovada Sutta lays out mutual duties — parents and children, husband and wife, friends, teachers, employers and workers — and is often called the lay person's code. Hardship is met with the understanding of impermanence and with equanimity, not resignation; community is sustained by generosity and the temple.

Through an ordered frame: four legitimate aims of life — duty, prosperity, pleasure, and liberation — and, classically, four stages from student to householder to retiree to renouncer. Work is one's own dharma done well without craving the results, and hardship is met with equanimity as the ripening of karma rather than as cosmic injustice.

As a householder, not a renunciate: marry, raise children, earn honestly, give a share (dasvandh, a tenth), and treat the congregation as family. Hardship is met with chardi kala — 'ever-rising spirits' — and trust in God's order; the daily prayer closes by asking good for all humanity.

It is deliberately silent on relationships, work, and hardship; the silence is the design. Citizens draw guidance from their own religions and philosophies, and secularism's job is to guarantee the freedom to do so and to keep the law's protection equal when communities differ.

Relationships on honesty, consent, and mutual respect; work as contribution, not only wages; hardship met with human solidarity and practical help rather than prayer; community built through voluntary association and shared causes.

As free agreements among equals: marriage and friendship by consent, work by contract with careers open to talent, community as voluntary association. In hardship, the classical wing points to family, charity, and mutual aid; the egalitarian wing adds a public safety net as a matter of justice, not favor.

Relationships as partnerships of equals; work judged by fairness of pay and treatment; hardship met with solidarity rather than alone; community built through movements and mutual support. Okin pressed the point at home: the family itself is a school of justice — or of injustice.

Fellow nationals are treated as an extended family: work is a contribution to the common life, hardship is borne together — most visibly in war — and community runs through national institutions, from schools to the welfare state. Miller argues this shared identity is what makes strangers willing to sacrifice for one another.