"There is a continuous skewing of the historical perspective toward religious explanations. Secularization is the wonderful mechanism by which religion becomes nonreligion. Marxism is secularized Christianity; so is democracy; so is utopianism; so are human rights. Everything connected with valuing must come from religion. One need not investigate anything else, because Christianity is the necessary and sufficient condition of our history. This makes it impossible to take Hobbes or Locke seriously as causes of that history, because we know that superficial reason cannot found values and that these thinkers were unconsciously transmitting the values of the Protestant ethic. Reason transmits, routinizes, normalizes; it does not create. Therefore Weber gives short shrift to the rational side of our tradition. Philosophy’s claims are ignored; religious claims are revered. Dogmatic atheism culminates in the paradoxical conclusion that religion is the only thing that counts."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 211
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Secularization
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Secularization
7 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Secularization →
Related Quotes
"Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology, ... strove to insert and settle “society” in the place vacat…"
"Secularization theory is a term that was used in the fifties and sixties by a number of social scientists and histori…"
"We must discover the rational substitutes for those religious motives that have, for so long, served as the vehicle f…"
"Augustine claimed that human beings had totally lost their capacity for free will as a result of Adam’s original sin.…"
"Secularization is a welcome process if it allows us to analyze literature and art without moral preconception and ser…"
"As the dominant social ethic changed from a religious to a secular one, the problem of heresy disappeared, and the pr…"
"Scholars, journalists, activists, and others have an almost knee-jerk tendency to praise Bangladesh's beginnings as a…"
"Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state. Take out Judaism from Israel and it will collapse like a house of card…"
"They were afraid that once Islam became the state - religion in Pakistan , other religious groups would be discrimina…"
"India was declared a “secular, socialist republic” under Indira Gandhi’s Emergency dictatorship, which many vocal sec…"