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A Secular Age (2007)

por Charles Taylor

Otros autores: Ver la sección otros autores.

Series: Gifford Lectures

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1,414812,997 (3.92)7
"What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we - in the West, at least - largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean - of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others." "Taylor offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created." "What this means for the world - including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence - is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless."--Jacket.… (más)
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Mostrando 1-5 de 8 (siguiente | mostrar todos)
I'm not sure if I am going to finish this. Taylor's writing would benefit from being pared down and concise. Length does not necessarily make for clarity in this case. In some ways, it's a little sad - Taylor has based this book on a lifetime of study and writing; I get the sense that he cannot bear to leave out any well-made point, any apt example, any interesting fact, or any felicitous phrase, and he has ended up overburdening this book. I gave up on the introduction, and moved on to the first chapter. He says that "we" means those "who live in the West, or the Northwest, or otherwise put, the North Atlantic world." He adds that secularity extends beyond. I am an example of the secular person that Taylor is discussing, but I know that many people are not like me. Looking at less secular places, where religion still has a commanding role, does not convince me that secularism is a bad thing.

I have read several books this year on similar subjects. I am a bit tired of having modernism attacked with sanitized versions of the past - particularly since the authors can't agree on what it was like. There is an adage that in theory, there's not difference between theory and practice, in practice there is. In considering the here and now, people so often look at what is (practice), but see other times and places according to theory. Taylor seems to like the three estates idea of complementarity, where some pray, some work, and some fight, in theory to protect the other estates. In truth, then as so often now, "Oh dear me, the world is ill divided/Them that work the hardest are the least provided." * Those who work got the least, although their religion would like them to believe that the work of prayer is more important than feeding the population. Their so-called protectors have an unnerving habit of invading other people, taxing the workers to pay for their armies, dragging workers into their fights, and keeping the spoils for themselves.

In discussing why it used to be impossible not to believe in god, they keep ignoring the elephant in the room: i.e, the Latin churches' willingness to use violence to extend their reach (like the Northern Crusades) and to keep their captive audience in line (The Albigensian Crusade, the burning of heretics.) A person would have to feel very strongly to risk the violence that would descend on them for not conforming or stating outright disbelief. The churches are not alone in using violence to stifle dissent, my point is that the risks, and the lack of a way for common people to record opinions, means that we are probably more in the dark about what they thought than we would like to think. In chapter 1, Taylor does get into the justification for this, i.e., that if one member of a community failed in their religious duty, god's wrath might fall the community as a whole. This occurs in other religions as well. Ordinary citizens of the Roman Empire were said to dislike Jews because they didn't participate in communal religious celebrations, still the government didn't persecute them for it and allowed the Temple to substitute praying to their god for the good of the empire for worshiping the emperor. Still other cultures managed to live side by side with different gods and religions; perhaps polytheists were willing to worship other gods as part of a community effort. This has always struck me as a difference between the Jewish bible and the letters of Paul. In the former, the Jews as a nation were collectively responsible, whereas in the letter of Paul, the Christians lived in communities within the larger pagan world, and outside of their willingness to preach to them, but only if they wanted to listen, contented themselves with not trying to control them. This got lost, as soon as Christians got enough power to attack other people.

My second objection is that we don't actually know what common people thought in the past. When people discuss the "Medieval Mind," whose mind do they mean? Authority figures, usually. Just because the church taught something doesn't prove that people believed it. The church believed that god placed each person in their station, but this didn't stop serfs from escaping. The English Peasant's Revolt of 1381 left us the quote: "When Adam delved and Eve span,/Who was then the gentleman?" Clearly the idea that god put them in their place didn't always impress the lower classes.

I often use the Epicurean Paradox as a partial explanation for my own atheism, it boils down to: "If god can prevent evil and doesn't why call him good, if he cannot prevent evil, why call him god.?" I don't think that it requires any great education to ponder the question of evil, but it did require great courage or outrage to speak it aloud in earlier times.

I don't think that the difference between 1500 and now is quite as stark as Taylor would have it. Most people in the US believe in a god, 40% of them believe that the world is less than 10k years old, people still consult fortune tellers, cast spells, light votive candles, and otherwise pray to saints. To me, secularism denotes a lack of an official presence for religion in governing society, separation of church and state, and freedom of religion and nonreligion. I was also interested to see that Taylor blamed the mind-body problem on secularism - other people that I have read argued that is an artifact of Christianity's Greek influences, and does not occur in Judaism. Modern psychology and biology are certainly moving away from that idea, as well as the idea that only human beings have a mind.

*Jute Mill Song" by Mary Brookbank
  PuddinTame | Aug 31, 2023 |
Like many sociology or philosophical examinations this is grotesquely and unnecessarily wordy as if to impress fellow academics while simultaneously being fairly shallow analysis. For example, instead of the author devoting five pages in his attempt to describe subjective religious experiences he could have just said, "numinous experiences," and been done with it. Instead he uses abstract terms like "senses of fullness," and included long unnecessary quotes from Gurus no one has ever heard of. Instead of simply saying "present cultural bias" which everyone understands, he goes on at length using the descriptor, "the unacknowledged shape of the background." The pretentiousness is staggering! Then he views depth psychology as exclusively Freudian, dismisses the post-Freudian understanding of the religious function and fails to even mention Jung who has contributed more understanding to human religiosity than probably anyone in any field. Then the author fails to give much appreciation to the environmental movement as a widespread moral religious expression of Earth Goddess worship because of its inherent materialist nature and lack of focus on the sky-deity which he assumes renders it secular. It seems his understanding of religiosity is generally constrained to the Judeo-Christian idea of a transcendent sky-God and thus lacks any comprehensive anthropological understanding of religion as well. This is a heady topic for sure, but it could have easily been done in 500 pages instead of 850 and it would have been far better if he understood social psychology better and the function of the religious psyche. His excessive writing does not clarify his points to readers but confounds and overwhelms them. ( )
1 vota Chickenman | Sep 14, 2018 |
An immense, sweeping, magisterial exploration of Western civilization, primarily over the past 500 years, as a quest to answer the question: how come in 1500 everyone believed in God and took it for granted, but by 2000 unbelief was seen as a valid option?

Taylor identifies all sorts of inter-related trends which have led to the present secular age: disenchantment, the development of the "buffered self" (as opposed to one porous to other people and spiritual forces around oneself; the ability to see oneself as an individual, independent unit, as if from above), the loss of an understanding of one's place in the cosmos replaced by random existence in the void known as the universe, and the constant agitation toward Reform in "Latin Christendom" which has marked most of the last millennium. Taylor then traces these trends over a 500 year period: the Reformation and the critique of "good magic," the rise of neo-Stoicism and the ordering of the elite, leading to a more ordered view of things, getting to the idea of "providential Deism" by the 18th century, God as setting up a system and operating according to these fixed ideas of order, all preparing the ground for the tumults of the 19th and 20th centuries. In these ways a highly communal, enchanted culture has become highly individualistic and secularized.

Such is a gross oversimplification of Taylor's narrative and does not give justice to the account. He does well at showing how the Reformation argumentation against various tenets of Catholicism not only go back to the Reform movement concept but even to the critique of the "Axial" age against the "pre-Axial" age, the shift away from pagan idolatry toward monotheism, and how many aspects of primal, "pagan" spirituality were maintained for quite a long time...and all of this reform paved the way for the same argumentation to be used against Protestant Christianity and the idea of Christianity itself. Neither modernity nor secularity are portrayed as downward spirals into the abyss; for most of the narrative Taylor is content to tell the story without providing judgment, and when he does render his own judgments, they prove nuanced, attempting to find the good, absorb the legitimate critiques, but also show the failings of the present synthesis. He spoke of the resurgence of Christianity in the 18th and 19th centuries as the age of mobilization; he sees many of the same animating trends within it in the drive for reform in culture itself.

His chapters on the state of religion and secularity today are quite insightful, as are the discussions of the dilemmas faced by all the inheritors of the Western tradition. He does well to see three real disputants, traditional religious belief, secular humanism, and a Nietzschean "post-humanism", all at times allying against another, all uneasily seeking the way forward.

He does well at expressing the dangers of moralism as replacing the grace and power found in Christianity as well.

A work to be read, grappled with, and digested. Truly indeed a monumental and epochal work. ( )
2 vota deusvitae | Feb 11, 2018 |
A painful exacting description of the gradual displacement of a religious world with the scientific viewpoint enjoyed today. This is not easy reading, or clear. View it as an extensive conversation with an acquaintance, who is not happy when meeting with the question "What exactly do you mean by that?" His responses are somewhat catty and lead to even more involved responses. While I came to understand what he was getting at, none-the-less there was more exasperation than exhilaration in the discovery. ( )
1 vota DinadansFriend | Nov 8, 2015 |
The Path to Exclusive Humanism
One can see the development of the western societies as a road to progressive secularization, a way that leads to a social organization in with religious beliefs are no more necessary to explain the human life. This narrative, Charles Taylor convincingly argues, is questionable and has alternatives. The development of science and the reinvention of the individual aren't incompatible with the desire of transcendency. Modern societies show the revival of religious beliefs - the author refers the examples of the United States and Latin American countries - and entertain ideas and institutions based in a conception of the human that is not exclusively naturalistic. This is a most read book by whom wants to understand postmodern human society. ( )
1 vota MarcusBastos | Jul 29, 2015 |
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Nombre del autorRolTipo de autor¿Obra?Estado
Charles Taylorautor principaltodas las edicionescalculado
Costa, Paoloautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
Groot, GerTraductorautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
Holland, DennisReaderautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
Joana ChavesTraductorautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
Jones, TimDiseñador de cubiertaautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
Marshall, KarenAuthor photographerautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
Savidan, PatrickTraductionautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
Schulte, JoachimÜbersetzerautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
Stoltenkamp, MarjoleinTraductorautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
VeerArtista de Cubiertaautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
Why, Annamarie McMahonDiseñadorautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
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This book emerges from my Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in the spring of 1999, entitled "Living in a Secular Age?". It's been quite some time since then, and in fact the scope of the work has expanded. (Preface)
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that is some sense we do: I mean the "we" who live in the West, or perhaps the Northwest, or otherwise put, the North Atlantic world -- although secularity extends also partially, and in different ways, beyond this world. (Introduction)
One way to put the question that I want to answer here is this: why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, by even inescapable.
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"What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we - in the West, at least - largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean - of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others." "Taylor offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created." "What this means for the world - including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence - is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless."--Jacket.

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