Can its followers truly live by it in full — or do they quietly borrow from other worldviews to make life work?

Yes, it can be lived — gradually, in community, with mercy for weakness. Muslims fall short, but the shortfall indicts the driver, not the law. The quiet borrowing mostly runs the other way: secular ethics live off religious capital.

This is a serious question, and some of the sharpest doubts come from atheists themselves: John Gray argues that secular humanism quietly lives on borrowed religious hope. Naturalists like Kitcher and Wielenberg answer that love, morality, and meaning are humanly available without borrowing; and defenders point to largely secular societies such as Denmark that function well by ordinary measures. What atheism admittedly cannot supply on its own terms is cosmic justice or reunion with the dead — its thinkers say the honest course is to stop expecting them.

This is where agnostics owe the most honesty, and the best of them pay it. No one lives in pure suspension: weddings, funerals, children's upbringing, and one's own death force choices that will not wait for evidence, and agnostics meet them by borrowing — ethics and purpose largely from humanism, ceremony often from the religion of their culture. Their defense is that the borrowing is open: agnosticism never claimed to be a complete way of life, only a truthful stance on one question, and honesty about the gap is part of the stance.

Christians themselves answer no — not in full: the Sermon on the Mount sets a standard ('be perfect,' Matthew 5:48) that the tradition says no one but Christ has met, which is why the whole system runs on grace rather than achievement (Romans 7 is Paul's own confession of falling short). The tension shows in public life: no Christian society has governed by 'turn the other cheek,' borrowing instead from Roman law and secular statecraft — Niebuhr made this candor famous. Defenders reply that the ethic was given to disciples, not legislatures, and that the saints show the life is livable in substance if never in perfection.

Observant Jews demonstrably live the whole system — Shabbat, kashrut, family law, daily prayer — and have for many centuries; halakha was built for full-life practice. The honest caveat runs the other way: most Jews today do not keep full halakha (Pew documents large secular and non-observant majorities), and the liberal movements openly weigh outside ethical thought — which they defend as Judaism's own ongoing revelation, not borrowing.

The full path is livable — but it was designed for renunciants, and only a small minority ever live it whole. Lay Buddhists everywhere blend it with local religion, family ambition, and modern economics; merit-making largely replaces meditation. Critics add that strict non-attachment sits awkwardly with married love and grief; the tradition answers that love without clinging is love perfected, and that the Sigalovada Sutta provisions family life fully.

Better than most, by design: the four-aims scheme blesses ordinary life — family, wealth, pleasure — so the householder is not living a compromise. The strain shows elsewhere: modern Hindus who affirm human equality must quietly set aside what the dharma texts say about caste and gender, and the renouncer ideal that crowns the system is lived in full by only a very few.

The full discipline is hard — pre-dawn prayer, lifelong uncut hair, constant remembrance — and most Sikhs have never taken formal initiation; in the diaspora many cut their hair. Sikhs answer that the tradition itself recognizes degrees of discipleship on a single path, with the Khalsa as the summit rather than the entry gate — an acknowledged gap between the ideal and the average life.

Officials can and do live it in role — judging, teaching, and legislating without invoking their creeds. The harder question is citizens: people cannot fully bracket their deepest convictions when voting on life, death, and family, and Rawls himself loosened his rule to admit religious reasons into public debate provided public reasons follow in due course (the 'proviso'). Honest secularists also grant that the framework runs on moral energies — dignity, conscience — that it did not itself generate.

In daily ethics, yes — honesty, kindness, and civic duty need no borrowing. Critics argue the strain shows at the edges: facing death, absolute evil, and unconditional dignity, where — they claim — humanists lean on hopes and certainties shaped by religion. Humanists like Kitcher reply that grief and mortality are met honestly with human resources — love, memory, community — and that calling every human consolation borrowed assumes religion owns them.

Only partly — and thoughtful liberals concede it. Liberal citizens live off families, faiths, and communities that liberalism did not create and, by its own rules, cannot command; Böckenförde's famous dictum holds that the liberal state lives on preconditions it cannot itself guarantee. The loneliness and civic-decline data (Putnam's Bowling Alone and its successors) sharpen the point: the freedom to leave every bond has left many with few bonds. Liberals answer that chosen bonds are real bonds — but the dependence on borrowed moral capital is genuinely contested.

In democracies, largely yes: its demands are law and daily conduct, not heroic metaphysics. The honest strain shows at home — studies find even self-described egalitarian couples drift into unequal domestic work, Hochschild's 'second shift.' Feminists read this as proof the problem runs deeper than law; critics read it as evidence of preference; both readings are on the record.

No — and almost no one tries. Nationalism is a 'thin' doctrine: it answers political questions only, so every nationalist borrows a fuller worldview — a religion, liberalism, socialism — for God, morality, and death. Daily life crosses it constantly too: people trade, marry, and migrate across nations without a second thought, which Billig notes coexists easily with routine national loyalty.