Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190095871.003.0003
P. Gifford
This chapter traces the transformation of cognition in the West. By sketching the example of Christian belief in the Christendom of the Middle Ages, this chapter shows that the natural, immediate and normal way of understanding reality was in terms of otherworldly forces; events were actually experienced as the work of these forces. Manipulating these forces was often achieved through relics, and resulted in miracles. Beginning in the sixteenth century, this cognitive style gradually receded in importance, as the scientific revolution and its subsequent application in technology, steadily encouraged a completely new mode of cognition, one seeking explanation in terms of this-worldly causes. Religious tradition and authority gradually gave way to observation and experiment. Not all cultures share this scientific approach, as is argued in reference to Africa (Senegal in particular) where the normal explanation of worldly events is in terms of malleable otherworldly forces.
{"title":"A Cognition Transformed","authors":"P. Gifford","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190095871.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190095871.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter traces the transformation of cognition in the West. By sketching the example of Christian belief in the Christendom of the Middle Ages, this chapter shows that the natural, immediate and normal way of understanding reality was in terms of otherworldly forces; events were actually experienced as the work of these forces. Manipulating these forces was often achieved through relics, and resulted in miracles. Beginning in the sixteenth century, this cognitive style gradually receded in importance, as the scientific revolution and its subsequent application in technology, steadily encouraged a completely new mode of cognition, one seeking explanation in terms of this-worldly causes. Religious tradition and authority gradually gave way to observation and experiment. Not all cultures share this scientific approach, as is argued in reference to Africa (Senegal in particular) where the normal explanation of worldly events is in terms of malleable otherworldly forces.","PeriodicalId":212507,"journal":{"name":"The Plight of Western Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122888679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190095871.003.0006
P. Gifford
This chapter addresses the limits of religious change. It argues that invoking the notion of change is sometimes less helpful than admitting that something has been discarded or hollowed out or evacuated. A new mentality has arisen in the West, which has marginalized the awareness of the otherworldly that is indispensable to ‘religion’ as substantively understood. Moving to this new cognitive style has constituted a definitive break (the ‘Great Ditch’) in the history of humankind. This new cognitive style is the essential plank of modernity. Modernity can be manifested in a variety of cultural expressions but the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ is misleading if it suggests that modernity is possible without it. Religious institutions persist in the West, in many cases with considerable power and influence, but they have been largely NGO-ized or reduced to the role of pressure groups or agencies within civil society. Their role today is as promoters of human values; it is hardly the role traditionally claimed, which was relating the human to the otherworldly. It is not that religion ‘poisons everything’, as some New Atheists say; it is that a new cognitive style has changed the human situation irrevocably.
{"title":"The Future","authors":"P. Gifford","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190095871.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190095871.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter addresses the limits of religious change. It argues that invoking the notion of change is sometimes less helpful than admitting that something has been discarded or hollowed out or evacuated. A new mentality has arisen in the West, which has marginalized the awareness of the otherworldly that is indispensable to ‘religion’ as substantively understood. Moving to this new cognitive style has constituted a definitive break (the ‘Great Ditch’) in the history of humankind. This new cognitive style is the essential plank of modernity. Modernity can be manifested in a variety of cultural expressions but the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ is misleading if it suggests that modernity is possible without it. Religious institutions persist in the West, in many cases with considerable power and influence, but they have been largely NGO-ized or reduced to the role of pressure groups or agencies within civil society. Their role today is as promoters of human values; it is hardly the role traditionally claimed, which was relating the human to the otherworldly. It is not that religion ‘poisons everything’, as some New Atheists say; it is that a new cognitive style has changed the human situation irrevocably.","PeriodicalId":212507,"journal":{"name":"The Plight of Western Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129771561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190095871.003.0004
P. Gifford
This chapter argues that Western religion today, besides losing public importance, has also largely been transformed in accordance with this cognitive shift to the ‘this-worldly’. The chapter shows how arguments like ‘believing but not belonging’ and ‘vicarious religion’ do not discredit the secularization thesis; nor does the idea that Christianity gave rise to Western modernity and therefore the West must be religious. The decreasing salience of Christianity became undeniable in the Victorian age. The 1960s saw this trend intensified and diffused more widely; this cognitive shift is illustrated in both the workings of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and in the World Council of Churches Uppsala Assembly (1968). The Christianity that the mainline Western churches exhibit today has become internally secularized, evidenced in characteristic works of modern academic theology.
{"title":"Western Religion Today","authors":"P. Gifford","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190095871.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190095871.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter argues that Western religion today, besides losing public importance, has also largely been transformed in accordance with this cognitive shift to the ‘this-worldly’. The chapter shows how arguments like ‘believing but not belonging’ and ‘vicarious religion’ do not discredit the secularization thesis; nor does the idea that Christianity gave rise to Western modernity and therefore the West must be religious. The decreasing salience of Christianity became undeniable in the Victorian age. The 1960s saw this trend intensified and diffused more widely; this cognitive shift is illustrated in both the workings of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and in the World Council of Churches Uppsala Assembly (1968). The Christianity that the mainline Western churches exhibit today has become internally secularized, evidenced in characteristic works of modern academic theology.","PeriodicalId":212507,"journal":{"name":"The Plight of Western Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133911018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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