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Location: Germany

I’m a Ph.D. student of Sociology in Germany. I did read somewhere that Weblogs today are more functional than thesis committee. I would like to know how it works for my thesis about fate of Religion in the epoch of Modernity specially in the Third World.

Friday, December 21, 2007

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.”

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