God is dead ?

It isn’t so far the time that some thinkers and social scientists said: “God is dead “and they gladden “the Post – Christian era “.Some of them like Pitirim Sorokin, Kahn and Wiener characterized twentieth – century as: “empirical, this – worldly, secular, humanistic, pragmatic, utilitarian, contractual, epicurean, or hedonistic, and the like” but after a while, how much evidence is there in support of the idea?
The process of Secularization in Western society, or better to say, in Europe could be an evidence?I don’t think so. Secularization is the major step in contemporary development of religion in Europe but secularization partly means negation of power from religious institutions. But is that means the religion and God having no place in the heart of people?
It is just about Europe. In the USA religious institutions are alive and active.In the non – Western societies I find no evidence to prove that “God is dead“. Too many religious movements in so called third world appeared since late nineteenth – century.
Peter L. Berger is not so radical. He wrote in“A rumor of Angels” that modernization bends religious traditions and above that, they become engulfed in both modern western and non- western societies:
”…As we have seen, the crisis is refracted in different ways through the several prisms of religious traditions, but no tradition within the orbit of modern Western societies is exempt from it. A good case can also be made (though not here) that religious traditions in non-Western societies that are undergoing modernization become engulfed in the same crisis, the extent of the crisis keeping pace with the extent of modernization.”

Peter Berger, Religion and Modernity

Peter L. Berger is not unknown for students of Social Sciences. I just finished her distinguished book: ’’The Homeless Mind’’. He describes in this book that how objective modernity connects to subjective modernity and how modernity changes the consciousness of people.Technology and bureaucracy are two turning points of modernism and all other parts of modern world relate to these, parts like Urbanism, institutional differentiation and …

The main term for Berger in this book is Consciousness. He tells us that modern consciousness is completely different from, to say, old or traditional consciousness and the modern consciousness consist the character of new man. In other word modern man means modern consciousness.
Modern man has at all a different point of view. He sees everything from another perspective and therefore Religion is too another thing for him, not like before. He doesn’t need religion to justify his lack of knowledge…

All these but are about industrial societies. People in Third World have another reflection to the modernism and its consciousness.

Whit entrances of modernity to the third world appear two social trends: either third world society goes to communism or to a kind of social movement, and the two are from effects of modernism.

Religious movement is one of these social movements and that is completely far from, or better to say, opposed to tendency that industrial societies has adopted toward modernity.