Secularization

The Ancient Romans spoke of ‘Peoples’ and ‘Nations’. They saw traditions making a group into a people and distinguishing people (and, sometimes, ‘nations’) from each other. Different peoples (distinguished from each other on the basis of ancestral traditions) could live together in a nation and a nation itself could host multiple peoples and traditions. Consequently, they did not see Christians as …

[ Published on swarjyamag Aug 26, 2022] Let me recollect the question we agreed upon: how does the combined phrase (colonial mindset and servitude) make sense within the framework of my research programme? My hypothesis on religion includes characterizing the dynamics of its expansion. As I see it, such a dynamic includes (a) conversion and (b) secularization. The first side of the dynamic, …

Chairman Sir, Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Morning. Actually I’m the odd man out. We have success stories. We have spiritual leaders; we have an extraordinarily organizational leader in front of us. And now I have to do an exam. You see, normally I take exams in the university. Now I have to do an exam. The exam is this I must move you from these wonderful stories, success stories, good stories, to …

The Ancient Romans spoke of ‘Peoples’ and ‘Nations’. They saw traditions making a group into a people and distinguishing people (and, sometimes, ‘nations’) from each other. Different peoples (distinguished from each other on the basis of ancestral traditions) could live together in a nation and a nation itself could host multiple peoples and traditions. Consequently, they did not see Christians as …

First: there is nothing morally wrong in posting an opinion. My problem is that (a) it occurs within the context of generating and criticising knowledge; (b) its cognitive value is either zero or negative; (c) it is presented as though thoughtless opinions (almost all opinions are thoughtless) form a counterpoint to knowledge or are themselves candidates for knowledge (the latter are the …

The religious idea I am talking about in chapter 3 is this: Concrete and abstract characterize human thinking in the different phases of its development. By the time we reach chapter 7, and start thinking in terms of ‘secularization’, I will be talking about secularizing religious themes with respect to the same. Neither the words ‘concrete’ or ‘abstract’, nor the concepts associated with them …

While re-reading certain passages from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006), I was so shocked by his combination of ignorance and arrogance. Forgive me for some Dawkins- bashing: In a memorable passage, Dawkins discusses the problem of Trinitarianism in Christianity and extends it to other forms of “polytheism,” such as the cult of the Virgin Mary and the saints in Roman-Catholicism. “What …

People like Scott Atran and Sloan Wilson abuse evolutionary biology to produce ad hoc explanations of an explanandum whose truth they presuppose: the universality of religion. Their explanations are no better than those discussed by Balu in chapter 5 of ‘The Heathen in his blindness: Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion. ’. Paraphrasing Balu, we may say that they consist of ’two quarters of …

It is very disappointing to see how these evolutionary theorists of religion lack knowledge of religions other than garden variety Judeo-Christianity (where they seem to have at least some factual knowledge, as in Scott Atran’s case, they reproduce standard textbook stories about Hinduism that have been left behind a few decades back). If they did a serious study, it would perhaps strike them …

When we consider Paul Hacker’s story on ‘inclusivism as a typically Indian thought form’, all we can conclude is that he has used a typically Christian thought form to understand an aspect of the Indian cultural traditions, which he is unable to understand because it is completely different from what he knows. Hacker’s inclusivism is merely an attempt to strip the following Christian account from …

The theories (and discussions) about secularism constitute a test case for the claims advanced in ‘The Heathen in his blindness: Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion’ about the universalizing drive of religion. I have suggested that religion spreads by secularizing itself, and that the distinction between the secular and the religious is drawn by and within a religion. If this is the case, …

So far, our answers have always taken this form: in the moment of secularization, the formal structures or cognitive schemes of Christianity are diffused accordingly as they lose their specific doctrinal content. In this formulation, it is as though the logical form of religion is able to spread itself by disposing of its semantic content. Thus, both the common sense of the West and the scholarly …

Why did Christianity become a ‘universal’ religion? How did Christians replace the ‘chosen’ people? What was the logic behind the transformation of the Jewish god into God of the humankind? In the literature on the subject that I have read, the first two questions get a historical (semi-psychological) answer. Traces of this answer can also be found between the lines in ‘The Heathen…’. There is a …

Let us begin with the idea that religion is some kind of a system (or structure or whatever you feel like using) that maintains itself. That is to say, it is able to reproduce itself, and sustain itself. I call this the ‘simple reproduction’ of religion. This dynamic enables not only the reproduction of the community of believers but also the experiential intelligibility that the Cosmos has for …

Lets become clear about the nature of my claims about worldviews. The word carries multiple meanings. It has partly to do with the multiple meanings of the component words: world’ and ‘view’. In daily language-use, ‘world’ is used to pick out (a) a spatial and temporal slice of the cosmos (b) and/or the entire Cosmos itself. The first, the slices, are many: from the ‘social world’ to the …

To begin with the question raised in ‘The Heathen in his blindness: Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion’: Do all cultures, peoples, and individuals need a world view to navigate themselves in the world? The answer is in the negative because religion is not a cultural universal and the only examples we have of world views are religions. Are the atheists, free thinkers, and people ignorant of …

Though the book was published nearly two decades ago, Said’s Orientalism continues to be topical. Many have rejected the message of this work; others have attempted to develop its arguments yet further. This article will not be one more interpretation of Said’s book; after all, there are many such interpretations, including Said’s own. Instead, it probes the phenomenon of ‘post-Orientalism’. Even …

Today, there are multiple images of India current in the West. There is the mystic India, an image that the German Romantics created and the ‘flower children’ of the sixties made popular. There is the third world India with enormous poverty and suffering, which the developmental workers have projected. There is also the India, the centre of IT outsourcing, which the developments in the last decade …

1: Atheism is a phenomenon that came into being in the western culture at around the time of the so-called Enlightenment. The West claims that it liberated itself from the dogmas of the Christian religion in this Enlightenment, and those who call themselves atheists mean by this that they belong to the enlightened people who “have escaped from the dogmatic illusions of religion.” Now, as it has …

Question: One thing that Balu says is that propping up legislations against tricky proselytizations reflects the weaknesses of Indian culture needs to be explained though. How is it a weakness? How is it not a strength? In both the theory of rights and in discussions about liberty (or freedom), the following two ways of conceptualizing the issues have been present. One could see rights as an …