Lesson 2 Flashcards
What does secular mean
-Fewer people attend acts of worship or claim to belong to a religion.
-More people claim to be atheist and argue that they can lead moral lives based on reason and evidence.
-Fewer features of life (education, health care) are organised directly by the Church.
-Political decisions are made without reference to religious ideas.
-People are free to believe, or not to, as they wish.
Thomas Aquinas
-Argued that human reason can grasp certain truths, but only as a first step.
-Doctrine and scripture are needed to see the whole truth.
-Works of Aristotle regarding Natural Moral Law – people reflected on the role of religion and saw how religion and rational thought seemed to work together to allow people to develop personal morality.
Power of conscience
-During the Protestant Reformation, the authority of scripture was challenged and the idea of interpretation through individual conscience and understanding was accepted.
-Challenged the idea of universal truth and not confirming to the national religion.
-The rise of scientific thinking led others to believe that God wasn’t necessary.
19th century
-People came to see faith as a matter of personal commitment.
-Schleiermacher saw faith as a way of seeing life as a whole.
-Philosophers such as Marx and Freud started to see religion as something functional, for example, keeping the working class from fighting their oppressors or satisfying a psychological need.
LUDWIG FEUERBACH
(1804-1872) was a German philosopher and anthropologist. His most well known book The Essence of Christianity (1841) argued that Christianity was nothing more than the projection of human hopes and aspirations.
Ludwig quote
It is not as in the bible that god created man in his own image but on the contrary man created god in his own image
FEUERBACH, MARX AND FREUD:
-Detractors of religion.
-Religion is a dangerous illusion.
-A projection of aspects of humankind.
FEUERBACH
Religion is a matter of cultivating a sense of self within the world in a way that is human.
Finding peace with God is to become one with one’s true nature.
HUMANISM
– The belief that people can live good lived without religious or superstitious beliefs.
The replacement of religion as the source of truth and moral values
-Thomas Aquinas argued that human reason can grasp certain truths, but only as a first step.
-Doctrine and scripture are needed to see the whole truth.
-During the Renaissance, people rediscovered classical thought, including the works of Aristotle about Natural Law.
-People reflected on the role of religion in society.
-They saw that thirteenth-century thought contrasted with the Dark Ages (fifth-tenth centuries CE), when intellectual life was stifled by the authority of religion.
-In the Dark Ages, religion seemed to be opposed to rational thought, but in the thirteenth century, religion and rational thought seemed to work together to allow people to develop personal morality.
Modern secular humanism
Modern secular humanism is, in many ways, a form of theology without God, with an ultimate belief that humankind improves through reason and evidence. The following extract is taken from the British Humanist Association website
