Pub Date : 2023-04-25DOI: 10.1163/25892525-bja10045
P. Zuckerman
Berlinerblau’s latest work, Secularism: The Basics, is a thoughtful, insightful, brilliant, and accessible introduction to political secularism—full of global examples, relevant controversies, and ten core principles that underly the entire secularist phenomenon.
{"title":"Commentary on Secularism: The Basics","authors":"P. Zuckerman","doi":"10.1163/25892525-bja10045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/25892525-bja10045","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Berlinerblau’s latest work, Secularism: The Basics, is a thoughtful, insightful, brilliant, and accessible introduction to political secularism—full of global examples, relevant controversies, and ten core principles that underly the entire secularist phenomenon.","PeriodicalId":29677,"journal":{"name":"Secular Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78117472","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 : 2023-04-25DOI: 10.1163/25892525-bja10044
Stacey Gutkowski
My article offers commentary about Jacques Berlinerblau's new book Secularism: The Basics.
我的文章是对雅克·柏林布劳的新书《世俗主义:基础》的评论。
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Pub Date : 2022-10-13DOI: 10.1163/25892525-bja10032
J. Eller
Both scholars and the general public have tended to assume that Islam is immune to modernization and secularization and that Muslims are all fanatical religionists. However, the growing and increasingly active number of nonbelievers in Muslim-majority countries has been called a tsunami by religious authorities. This article surveys the current research on nonreligion and atheism in Islam-dominated countries, with special attention to Egypt. After examining the statistical information on nonbelief, including in unlikely places such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, the article considers the terminology of nonbelief in Arabic, which is not equivalent to English terminology and illustrates the local nature of nonreligion, constructed in relation to local concepts of religion. The article then discusses the social and legal perils of nonbelievers in societies still committed to religious belief and finally investigates the lives and activities of nonbelievers and atheists, individually, in groups, and online. The article concludes with some reflections on modernization and secularization, noting the forces that have made nonbelief more possible and prevalent in Muslim-majority contexts but also led to multiple specific secularities and atheisms.
{"title":"A Quiet Tsunami","authors":"J. Eller","doi":"10.1163/25892525-bja10032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/25892525-bja10032","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Both scholars and the general public have tended to assume that Islam is immune to modernization and secularization and that Muslims are all fanatical religionists. However, the growing and increasingly active number of nonbelievers in Muslim-majority countries has been called a tsunami by religious authorities. This article surveys the current research on nonreligion and atheism in Islam-dominated countries, with special attention to Egypt. After examining the statistical information on nonbelief, including in unlikely places such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, the article considers the terminology of nonbelief in Arabic, which is not equivalent to English terminology and illustrates the local nature of nonreligion, constructed in relation to local concepts of religion. The article then discusses the social and legal perils of nonbelievers in societies still committed to religious belief and finally investigates the lives and activities of nonbelievers and atheists, individually, in groups, and online. The article concludes with some reflections on modernization and secularization, noting the forces that have made nonbelief more possible and prevalent in Muslim-majority contexts but also led to multiple specific secularities and atheisms.","PeriodicalId":29677,"journal":{"name":"Secular Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75257352","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 : 2022-10-13DOI: 10.1163/25892525-bja10035
A. Atkinson
This paper re-engages with the science versus religion debate in the light of the last three decades of scholarly progress in the study of religion coming from the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion. I begin by asking (1) ‘if it is indeed possible to account for the origins of religious belief, its cultural transmission and evolution, and its maintenance—without any appeal to the real existence of any supernatural deity—then are we in a position to say we have explained it all away?’ If we are, how does this affect central themes in the philosophy of religion about God’s existence? In (2) I provide an outline of the cognitive and evolutionary approach to explaining religion. In section (3) I discuss abductive reasoning (3.1), problems with the accusation of having committed the genetic fallacy when answering (1) in favour of positive atheism (3.2), the need for first-order justifications of religious belief (3.3), and in (3.4) a peculiar divine attribute (i.e. omnipotent potential in a causal chain of events) that appears to immunise religious belief in a particular kind of supernatural deity from having been explained away.
{"title":"Has Religion Been Explained Away?","authors":"A. Atkinson","doi":"10.1163/25892525-bja10035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/25892525-bja10035","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper re-engages with the science versus religion debate in the light of the last three decades of scholarly progress in the study of religion coming from the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion. I begin by asking (1) ‘if it is indeed possible to account for the origins of religious belief, its cultural transmission and evolution, and its maintenance—without any appeal to the real existence of any supernatural deity—then are we in a position to say we have explained it all away?’ If we are, how does this affect central themes in the philosophy of religion about God’s existence? In (2) I provide an outline of the cognitive and evolutionary approach to explaining religion. In section (3) I discuss abductive reasoning (3.1), problems with the accusation of having committed the genetic fallacy when answering (1) in favour of positive atheism (3.2), the need for first-order justifications of religious belief (3.3), and in (3.4) a peculiar divine attribute (i.e. omnipotent potential in a causal chain of events) that appears to immunise religious belief in a particular kind of supernatural deity from having been explained away.","PeriodicalId":29677,"journal":{"name":"Secular Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82265195","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 : 2022-10-13DOI: 10.1163/25892525-bja10036
Carl P. Ellerman
This study is motivated by the plea of a renowned philosopher who urged humankind to break the habit of reverencing and submitting to seemingly great human beings, whose great mistakes issue in tragic historical events that threaten the survival of civilization. Conceiving World War Two as a modern tragedy, and using instructive elements of this era to identify an enraptured nation’s worship of a seemingly great leader, the author sources evolutionary biology to evidence the thesis that hereditary human nature, now conceived as a maladaptive Paleolithic Curse, is the origin of humankind’s emotional instability, ruinous aggression, enduring worship of fallible alphas, divisive tribalism, and mastery of artful deceptions. While challenging the facile claim of epigenetic science that education will produce a worldwide enlightenment enabling humankind to defeat the Paleolithic Curse, the forced choice of retrofitting the human genotype by advocates of volitional selection underlies this analysis of humankind’s lesser greatness.
{"title":"The Great Man Theory of History and the Paleolithic Curse of Humankind","authors":"Carl P. Ellerman","doi":"10.1163/25892525-bja10036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/25892525-bja10036","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This study is motivated by the plea of a renowned philosopher who urged humankind to break the habit of reverencing and submitting to seemingly great human beings, whose great mistakes issue in tragic historical events that threaten the survival of civilization. Conceiving World War Two as a modern tragedy, and using instructive elements of this era to identify an enraptured nation’s worship of a seemingly great leader, the author sources evolutionary biology to evidence the thesis that hereditary human nature, now conceived as a maladaptive Paleolithic Curse, is the origin of humankind’s emotional instability, ruinous aggression, enduring worship of fallible alphas, divisive tribalism, and mastery of artful deceptions. While challenging the facile claim of epigenetic science that education will produce a worldwide enlightenment enabling humankind to defeat the Paleolithic Curse, the forced choice of retrofitting the human genotype by advocates of volitional selection underlies this analysis of humankind’s lesser greatness.","PeriodicalId":29677,"journal":{"name":"Secular Studies","volume":"67 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73629446","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 : 2022-10-13DOI: 10.1163/25892525-bja10034
J. Vanheste
Over the past century, there have been remarkable changes in the appreciation of T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). From the interwar years up to the 1950s, he was for decades an icon of high culture and outstanding moral values, of everything that is beautiful and good and deserves admiration; while from the 1970s onwards he became a symbol of a completely different kind: one of elitism and conservatism, of everything that is wrong and deserves condemnation. Over the past twenty years, gradually a more balanced view has been established. In this article I outline this development, relate it to general changes in the cultural climate, and argue that, a hundred years after publication of his major poem The Waste Land (1922), T.S. Eliot remains highly significant to us both as a poet and a cultural critic.
{"title":"The Waste Land 100 Years On","authors":"J. Vanheste","doi":"10.1163/25892525-bja10034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/25892525-bja10034","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Over the past century, there have been remarkable changes in the appreciation of T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). From the interwar years up to the 1950s, he was for decades an icon of high culture and outstanding moral values, of everything that is beautiful and good and deserves admiration; while from the 1970s onwards he became a symbol of a completely different kind: one of elitism and conservatism, of everything that is wrong and deserves condemnation. Over the past twenty years, gradually a more balanced view has been established. In this article I outline this development, relate it to general changes in the cultural climate, and argue that, a hundred years after publication of his major poem The Waste Land (1922), T.S. Eliot remains highly significant to us both as a poet and a cultural critic.","PeriodicalId":29677,"journal":{"name":"Secular Studies","volume":"85 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81210174","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 : 2022-03-30DOI: 10.1163/25892525-bja10031
Carl P. Ellerman
Motivated by Socrates’ warning to avoid the kisses of beautiful people, given the risk of losing rational self-government if seduced by a beautiful face, this account of Heidegger’s seemingly apolitical, Socratic defense of philosophy is a warning about the corruption of reason that may issue from commerce with the deceptively beautiful arguments, or cognitive kisses, of philosophers. Particularly philosophers who have a political agenda, this having been true of Heidegger, whose philosophy was infected with a militant fascism antithetic to truth-seeking Socratic philosophers. The test of ideas developed by America’s pragmatic philosophers, Pierce, James, and Dewey, is presented as an antidote to the malignant arguments of Nietzsche and Heidegger, whose deceptively beautiful arguments were destructive to humankind. Concluding remarks identify current threats to rational self-government writ large, by focusing on our postmodern information age in which almost anyone can become a spellbinding producer of deceptively beautiful, virulent information in cyberspace.
{"title":"The Kiss of a Philosopher","authors":"Carl P. Ellerman","doi":"10.1163/25892525-bja10031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/25892525-bja10031","url":null,"abstract":"Motivated by Socrates’ warning to avoid the kisses of beautiful people, given the risk of losing rational self-government if seduced by a beautiful face, this account of Heidegger’s seemingly apolitical, Socratic defense of philosophy is a warning about the corruption of reason that may issue from commerce with the deceptively beautiful arguments, or cognitive kisses, of philosophers. Particularly philosophers who have a political agenda, this having been true of Heidegger, whose philosophy was infected with a militant fascism antithetic to truth-seeking Socratic philosophers. The test of ideas developed by America’s pragmatic philosophers, Pierce, James, and Dewey, is presented as an antidote to the malignant arguments of Nietzsche and Heidegger, whose deceptively beautiful arguments were destructive to humankind. Concluding remarks identify current threats to rational self-government writ large, by focusing on our postmodern information age in which almost anyone can become a spellbinding producer of deceptively beautiful, virulent information in cyberspace.","PeriodicalId":29677,"journal":{"name":"Secular Studies","volume":"66 6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87758054","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 : 2022-03-30DOI: 10.1163/25892525-bja10029
Christoph De Spiegeleer
This article explores how the control of religious authority over funerary culture became a contentious issue on a pan-European level during the course of the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. A comparative analysis of the conflicts around burial and cremation in various European nation-states highlights the two-dimensional character of these ‘funerary culture wars’. Freethinkers were radical players in these institutional and cultural conflicts as they challenged the tight grip of churches on the ‘death systems’ in their respective cities and countries. We will show how the institutional and cultural secularisation of funerary culture was not a universal and inevitable developmental trend but rather a historically variable and contingent outcome of social and political struggles around concrete change. We zoom in on the city of Brussels where freethinkers made new secular funerary practices very visible from the middle of the 19th century onwards.
{"title":"‘Funerary Culture Wars’ in Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Europe and the Case of the Brussels’ Freethought Movement","authors":"Christoph De Spiegeleer","doi":"10.1163/25892525-bja10029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/25892525-bja10029","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how the control of religious authority over funerary culture became a contentious issue on a pan-European level during the course of the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. A comparative analysis of the conflicts around burial and cremation in various European nation-states highlights the two-dimensional character of these ‘funerary culture wars’. Freethinkers were radical players in these institutional and cultural conflicts as they challenged the tight grip of churches on the ‘death systems’ in their respective cities and countries. We will show how the institutional and cultural secularisation of funerary culture was not a universal and inevitable developmental trend but rather a historically variable and contingent outcome of social and political struggles around concrete change. We zoom in on the city of Brussels where freethinkers made new secular funerary practices very visible from the middle of the 19th century onwards.","PeriodicalId":29677,"journal":{"name":"Secular Studies","volume":"139 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76668789","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 : 2022-03-30DOI: 10.1163/25892525-bja10027
Christoph De Spiegeleer, Niels De Nutte, Jeffrey Tyssens
The newly founded Secular Studies Association Brussels (ssab)1 brings together scholars from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel with expertise in the philosophical, historical, political and legal aspects of secularism and nonreligion. As founding sabb-members, we decided to devote a theme section to one of the interdisciplinary research group’s main lines of research: the role of secularity and secularisation in shifting attitudes and practices surrounding death throughout history. As an analytical term, secularity refers to “forms and arrangements for distinguishing between religion and other societal areas, practices and interpretations”. Secularisation indicates the decline of religion’s cultural and institutional authority in other societal sub-domains (Kleine & Wholrab-Sahr 2016). With this introduction to the theme section, our aim is to link the history of death to ongoing sociological debates on secularisation and secularity.
{"title":"Secularity and Belgium’s Death System, 1850–1950","authors":"Christoph De Spiegeleer, Niels De Nutte, Jeffrey Tyssens","doi":"10.1163/25892525-bja10027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/25892525-bja10027","url":null,"abstract":"The newly founded Secular Studies Association Brussels (ssab)1 brings together scholars from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel with expertise in the philosophical, historical, political and legal aspects of secularism and nonreligion. As founding sabb-members, we decided to devote a theme section to one of the interdisciplinary research group’s main lines of research: the role of secularity and secularisation in shifting attitudes and practices surrounding death throughout history. As an analytical term, secularity refers to “forms and arrangements for distinguishing between religion and other societal areas, practices and interpretations”. Secularisation indicates the decline of religion’s cultural and institutional authority in other societal sub-domains (Kleine & Wholrab-Sahr 2016). With this introduction to the theme section, our aim is to link the history of death to ongoing sociological debates on secularisation and secularity.","PeriodicalId":29677,"journal":{"name":"Secular Studies","volume":"553 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77445192","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 : 2022-03-30DOI: 10.1163/25892525-bja10028
Jeffrey Tyssens
In 19th-century Belgium, cemeteries and burials gave rise to a major conflict between the Catholic Church and different kinds of secular people in Belgium. While these confrontations are quite well known in large urban environments, far less research has been produced about their counterparts in small-town settings. This article studies the options secular people had in those ‘backwater’ contexts in the province of Antwerp from the first secular burials in the 1860s up to the turn of the century. Following Albert Hirschman’s ‘voice / exit / loyalty’-scheme, we focus upon the choices that could be made and who could make them within the framework of local power relations. We will show how the particularities of social integration (or the lack thereof) generated the profiles of the individuals best equipped to break with Church-dominated community rituals and help to enforce local funerary policy transformations.
{"title":"Early Secular Burials in 19th-Century Flemish Provincial Towns","authors":"Jeffrey Tyssens","doi":"10.1163/25892525-bja10028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/25892525-bja10028","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 19th-century Belgium, cemeteries and burials gave rise to a major conflict between the Catholic Church and different kinds of secular people in Belgium. While these confrontations are quite well known in large urban environments, far less research has been produced about their counterparts in small-town settings. This article studies the options secular people had in those ‘backwater’ contexts in the province of Antwerp from the first secular burials in the 1860s up to the turn of the century. Following Albert Hirschman’s ‘voice / exit / loyalty’-scheme, we focus upon the choices that could be made and who could make them within the framework of local power relations. We will show how the particularities of social integration (or the lack thereof) generated the profiles of the individuals best equipped to break with Church-dominated community rituals and help to enforce local funerary policy transformations.","PeriodicalId":29677,"journal":{"name":"Secular Studies","volume":"59 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85323265","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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