Legal and religious regulation: interaction, contradictions and responsibility of the subjects of social relations

Introduction: the article offers an analysis of the characteristics inherent in legal and reli-gious regulation of social relations. A special attention is given to social, religious and legal re-sponsibilities as the social relations regulators. The authors carried out a comparative analysis of religious orthodox and legal responsibilities based on their characteristics, principles, and functions. The article explores contradictions between legal and religious orthodox regulation of social relations. The authors define the social nature of the contradictions and analyze the current legislation regarding the problems caused by them. The right to freedom of conscience, the right to sexual freedom, the application of assisted reproductive technologies are analyzed in comparison with the requirements of Orthodox religion. Purpose: to define the interaction between legal and religious regulation in terms of religious and legal responsibility, to identify the social nature of contradictions between legal and religious orthodox regulation of social re-lations, to reveal the reasons for the contradictions, as well as the ways to balance them. Methods: the authors applied the comparative method to analyze and compare the require-ments which religious and legal norms contain. The formal legal method was used to carry out a structural analysis of legal and religions norms, to single out their primary and secondary characteristics. The categories of dialectics enabled the authors to identify the essential features of contradictions between legal and religious norms. Results: the reasons for contradictions be-tween legal and religious regulation have been detected and the ways and means of their elimi-nation have been defined, which involve the development of new moral norms and principles and updating the current legislation in compliance with the requirements of religious norms firmly established in society. The authors have identified the common characteristics of reli-gious orthodox and legal responsibilities by interpreting them as an integral social phenomenon having positive and negative aspects of realization. Conclusion: there is an interaction between legal and religious orthodox regulation due to the common goals, functions, and results. They are also linked by the function of legitimation which religious norms can perform with regard to legal ones. Religious and legal responsibilities also share common goals and moral stances re-flected in the principles of justice and humanism, as well as the functions of regulation, reestab-lishment, retribution, education, and prevention. There are positive and negative aspects of both legal and religious responsibilities realization. The reasons for contradictions between religious and legal norms are caused by the following factors: the uneven development and changing of legal and religious norms, the lack of radical ways to change the existing religious rules of be-havior in religious regulation; peculiar features of the legal norms content. Religious norms use obligations and prohibitions to a greater extent than permissions, whereas the democratization of society indicates the extension of the permission sphere in legal regulation of social relations, as well as the imperfection of both legal and religious norms, and also the contradictions which social relations contain.