In any matter of moral importance, our first task, before we plunge ahead and decide what to do, is to figure out what we ought to do.

Kant considers belief in God and immortality to be items of "faith" because he relates faith to the pursuit of ends - in this case, the highest good.

Not only in order to act morally, but even to formulate theoretical questions, devise experiments, choose which ones to perform and what conclusions to draw from then - we must presuppose that we are free. That's the sense in which it is true that for Kant "we must assume we are free."

That Hegel's theory is derivative from Fichte's does not prevent it from being strikingly original and of independent value.

There is a very common, though also very silly, picture of Kant according to which as empirical beings we are not free at all, and we are free only as noumenal jellyfish floating about in an intelligible sea above the heavens, outside any context in which our supposedly "free" choices could have any conceivable human meaning or significance. Part of the problem here is that Kant faces up honestly to the fact that how freedom is possible is a deep philosophical problem to which there is no solution we can rationally comprehend.

There is a tradition of "modernist" theology arising out of post-Kantian thought - Fichte was the real father of it, but Schleiermacher and others also developed it - which might have more promise if it had greater influence on popular religion.

Kant does not think that the silly commandment "universalize your maxims" is the be-all and end-all of ethics or that it provides us with some sort of general decision procedure that is supposed to tell us what to do under all circumstances.