Religion and Secularism

Religion and Secularism

Thesis Problem

There are a number of notions in the context of which the modern age is taken as secular. At times, the fact that is referred to is that religion or God no more exists in the communal life, or the decline of practice and belief are referred to. Moreover, in the event that a more structural level of belief or conditions are investigated, it may be observed that there is a budge to secularity in the North and the West Atlantic zone that comprises a shift from a society wherein faith in God is accepted and certainly, simple, to the one wherein it is taken as an alternative which is not the merest the take on. For this reason, modern secularity should be realized as a discipline of progressively multiform contestation wherein all the positions are delivered questionable and uneasy since it may be challenged in a number of ways.

Discussion

The European Enlighten procreated a novel worldview which has come to be known as secularism, and the expansion of this worldview has posed consequences all through the world. The establishment of secular practices and ideas intensely changed the political and religious institutions which, in the middle ages, had taken over the European society. Secularism was taken for granted by the initial generations of anthropologists, as the anticipated consequence of the cultural advancement. However, more recently, the anthropologists have started reconsidering the disposition of secularism as well as Enlightenment. This was most sharply driven by the resistance to the secular institutions of the states in West, by a group of immigrants that lives in those states as well as by a group that lived in states other than West who persist that religious identity and citizenship belong collectively.

The most difficult perhaps have been the endeavours of a few Muslim groups for adapt to the way of living in Western secular states. The demarcation amid what is expected by a liberal democratic state and what is desired by some Muslims has been explored recently by the contemporary anthropologists (Douglas, 2004). Usually, Secularism is marked out as the severance of state and religion, and it is widely taken as the Enlightenment solution to the irresolvable and bloody wars of religions which trailed the Reformation. The secularism in Europe presumed a particular post Reformation notion idea of religion and quite a specified post Enlightenment notion of the state together with a concept of secular citizenship which greatly owes to the concept of separate agency established in Protestant theology.

The specifications of modern secularism can be elucidated in the event that we take into consideration the demarcation set out amid orthopraxy and orthodoxy. Thus, religion in European secularism is primarily defined in the context of the beliefs to which its supporters and believers are devoted. In the same way, the secular state at all times is taken as the modern or contemporary nation state having a capitalist market. The Enlightenment idea of citizenship evolves from these realizations of state and ...