Monday, 7 November 2011

Agnosticism / Atheism: What's Hot Now: True Religion

Agnosticism / Atheism: What's Hot Now
These articles that had the largest increase in popularity over the last week // via fulltextrssfeed.com
True Religion
Nov 7th 2011, 10:03

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Religion, particularly forms of religion that are fundamentalist or fervent in nature, have experienced explosive growth in recent decades. Many have found this to be strange, considering that great scientific, social, and political progress made made in secular circles. What could be going on? What are people looking for that they don't find in secularism?

Summary

Title: True Religion
Author: Graham Ward
Publisher: Blackwell Publishers
ISBN: 0631221735

Pro:
•  Very interesting perspective on the development of secularism and religion
•  Provides a valuable way of approaching the shifts in modern religious beliefs and behavior

Con:
•  Probably not for the average reader •  Ward is not always direct in his arguments or the points he is making

Description:
•  Analysis of several hundred years of how religion and secular philosophy have developed in the West
•  Argues that the credibility of secularism has declined and people are looking for something new
•  Explains how and why religion is being used to create a basis for social order and cohesion

Book Review

In his book True Religion, Graham Ward argues that we are witnessing the slow implosion of modern secularism. Professor of Contextual Theology and Ethics at the University of Manchester, Ward is not trying to say that secularism is bad or even that it is disappearing. Instead, he argues that the credibility of secularism as the political and social philosophy which forms the basis of modernity has been undermined and people are now reaching out for alternatives.

Are they returning to the primitive, pre-modern forms of religion which secularism replaced? No, they are no longer accessible and do not exist as viable alternatives. They do, however, exist as important symbols for what people once had. It's not a religious revival because religion never really went away, but at the same time we are seeing the emergence of something new and perhaps unexpected.

Thus we find people trying to replace secularism with lurid, post-modern forms of religions which take on many of the trappings of pre-modern religion but which also contain much of the kitsch of modern consumer culture. What we have, then, is a market-driven and media-hyped version of the myths and religious symbols which once imbued western life with transcendental meaning.

The transcendent has been replaced, however, with something far more materialistic and even material in nature. It's a cheap fetishization of the transcendental impulse in which the values of "true religion" have been liquidated and all that remains are the husks of religious traditions.

And just what is this "true religion" that is the basis for the book's title? For centuries religion was the nexus in which western cultural, social, and political identity was formed. Religious beliefs, rituals, and behaviors were the glue which held together the community against all of the various forces and disagreements which threatened to tear it apart.

"[R]eligion here is a series of practices by which the sacred and the secular are bound each to the other. Religion is piety, devotion, adoration, pilgrimage. It regulates and reaffirms certain understandings of the self and the social and their relationship to the cosmic and the divine; through liturgies and sacramental offices it gives shape to time and meaning to space."

True Religion, by Graham Ward

True Religion, by Graham Ward

With the advent of the Protestant Reformation, however, this began to change because there was no longer a reliable "religion" which could be used. Did one opt for Catholicism or Protestantism? If Protestant, did one opt for Luther or Zwingli? Religion itself had become a force for social dissolution:

"This Catholic religious network, and the system of ideas which constructed a sacramental view of the world, was breaking up, being challenged, being transformed, being caught up in dissimulations, parodies, internalizations of violence, ironies and confusions. A certain crisis is evident which the religious worldview is trying to accommodate but cannot â€" for the crisis is within the religious worldview itself. From new practices came new pieties, new discursive formations giving rise to other understandings of 'reliigion'."

So what were people going to do?

» Continue...

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