Posted on 05/23/2011 5:04:29 PM PDT by AustralianConservative
A Bachelor’s Degree in Atheism? In more how-now news, California's Pitzer College is starting a department of “secular studies.” To critical thinkers, however, groupthink-related questions are hard to suppress. From Alan Jacobs a professor of English at Wheaton College, in The Wall Street Journal:
Religious believers may see another sign of encroaching, well, secularism on American campuses.
Let the evangelism commence:
The sociologist behind the new Pitzer department, Phil Zuckerman, clearly isn't telling a narrative of decline: “There are hundreds of millions of people who are nonreligious,” he told the New York Times. “I want to know who they are, what they believe, why they are nonreligious.”
[…]
This assumes that Pitzer’s program in secular studies will bring a critical, analytical approach to its subject. Mr. Zuckerman—who runs a website called “Phil Zuckerman’s 65 Greatest Songs for Atheists and Agnostics”—might belong to a team and be inclined to cheer for it. But that doesn't mean he can't be a fine scholar in his field, just as many Christians are fine scholars of the history of religion.
Some of Mr. Zuckerman’s scholarship acknowledges that secularism is far from dominant or inevitable. In an article in “The Cambridge Companion to Atheism,” he notes that “most nations in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia contain almost no atheists.” And while some societies are seeing increasing non-belief in God, “atheism overall may be in decline, due to the demographic fact that highly religious nations have the highest 22 birthrates in the world, and highly irreligious nations have the lowest birthrates in the world.”
Adult-to-adult: I’m more skeptical. In 2005, Pitzer College was identified, by the Princeton Review, as one of the 10 most politically liberal colleges and universities, in the United States. Their current courses scream secular fundamentalism.
(Excerpt) Read more at weekendlibertarian.blogspot.com ...
They are renaming Liberal Arts? ;0)
This might actually be an interesting course of study, but only if they took the idea of ‘secular’ quite literally.
By this, I mean the philosophy of socialism can be described as “the bastard child of Christianity”, borrowing heavily from the Judeo-Christian mythos, while intensely perverting it. But this translates almost universally: there is no secularism without religion.
Even the English language are laced with Biblical references, as well as Biblical references via Shakespeare. So here’s the first truly secular question: if these references are removed from the English language, what is left?
From there you move into the harder questions of what is socialism, secular humanism, or even atheism, when stripped of their religious underpinnings?
My guess is that it is “anthropomorphic animist”, which is a religion itself, after a fashion. Like something Native Americans came up with to explain where trees came from.
Secular studies = Gaia worship (eventually, but not too fast)
The continued removal of God from Western Civilization.
This will really help boost Obama’s job numbers.
“There is no secularism without religion” is exactly right. What many atheists and others don’t understand is that when muslims hear the word secular, they really hear “Christian” since they don’t seperate the two.
I read the article and the course was designed to challenge nonbelievers about THEIR beliefs, not indoctrinate them further. It could actually be an interesting form of 1st level evangelism.
Good points: We can’t understand Shakespeare without the Bible, or Bach without Christianity.
Point taken and filed.
And that might make for an interesting study of “secularism”. There is something there, without the Christian framework.
However, western philosophy, if stripped of religion, Decartes, Kant, Nietzsche, socialism, etc., all have critical breakdowns. They do not have substance except in relation to religion. Though most are a rejection of religion, they are nothing without it.
Much more success would be found in the East, where secularism goes back to about 500 B.C., both with Legalism and Confucianism. Yet both of these were far more harmonious with Animism, Taoism, Buddhism and multi-Theistic Hinduism, while each retained their individuality.
Secularism in the West didn’t get started in earnest until the 16th Century, and in the Muslim world only in the 20th Century, derivative of western secularism.
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