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| Secularization |
Secular and secularity derive from the Latin word saeculum which meant "of a generation, belonging to an age" or denoted a period of about one hundred years. Saeculam was the profane time and the time of ordinary historical succession, as opposed to sacred time. Time was interwoven with higher times variously called eternity,the time of the ideas,or the time of the origin, what the time of God.
The term secularism was coined in by George Jacob Holyoake, socialist. It is the byproduct of Renaissance and enlightenment in western country.we first learn what is secularization meaning in Sociology.
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What is secularization
Secularization is the transformation of a society from close identification with religious value and institution towards non religious value and secular institution. Society progress particularly through modernization and rationalization.
Prof. M.N. Srinivas
Srinivas define secularisation as
“The term implies that what was previously regarded as religious is now ceasing to be such and it also implies a process of differentiation which results in the various aspects of society, economic, political, legal and moral becoming increasingly discrete in relation to each other.”
Yogendra Singh
• He described “The spread of the process of secularisation implies that various issues and events in personal and social life are evaluated not from the religious point of view, but from the utilitarian point of view”.
• Prof. Singh has included both the personal and social life. He feels that all the events of personal and social should be free from religious norms and values. Rather these events should be evaluated from the utilitarian point of view.
Brian Wilson define securitization as “the process whereby religious thinking, practices and institutions lose their social significance”. This is the process in which social Institutions gain considerable autonomy and religious consciousness declined whereby instead of being pervasive, determinate influence, religion become a department of the social order. He mentions the following three features of secular society. They are the prvalence of instrumental value, Rational procedure and technological method.
Peter barger define ‘secularization means the process by which sector of society can culture are remove from the dominant of religious institution and symbol.’
Emil Durkheim
He was a French sociologist who, like most of the early grand theorists of that discipline, made a sociology of religion the core of his social thought. He was an atheist and a scientific positivist.
He said collective act of worship integrates social institutions. It does this in a special way – with “collective effervescence.” “Collective effervescence” is a dynamic social force produced when people get together; it is the life of the group over and above the lives of the individuals who make up the group. “Collective effervescence” is a very powerful social force that people mistake for what they call “the sacred.”
In modern Society population increase and scientific-technological change, is “organic” and highly differentiate.
Modern society and its “organic solidarity” cannot sustain religion – in it, people no longer share the same values. people choose their own path through our now very complex social ecology and shape themselves in unique ways as they walk that path. In the course of time religion dies and is replaced by the “Cult of the Individual” and by notions of the dignity of each of us. Hence, secularization leads inevitably to the death of religion.
Origin, process and evolution
Secularization was greatly aided by transformation of human consciousness by popularisation of scientific ideas among people. secularization was the product of renaissance and enlightenment Which assaulted by dignity of a person.
In 16th century, The protestant reformation was affected in Catholic Europe. Martin Luther, John Calvin and Henry VIII challenged papal authority and questioned the Catholic Church’s ability to define Christian practice. Martin Luther the principal initiator of the Protestant reformation, had advocated the individuals right to understand the word of God, independent of the church.
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer known as the father of modern astronomy.He said the earth move around the sun.His theory was heart to the believe of the Catholic Church. The theory was immediately condemned by the church.
Galileo galilei was an Italian physicist and astronomer.Galileo’s observation was strengthened in the belief of Copernicus theory that the earth And all other planets revolve around the sun. This contradicts the Catholic belief that the earth was the centre of the universe end the sun and planets revolves around it. in 1616, gailey was accused of being a heretic, a person who opposed church teaching.He was sentence to life imprisonment in 1933.
Johannes Kepler , who formulated Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and demonstrated that the orbits of the planets around the sun are elliptical rather than circular. He “saw his science as a religious duty and wrote as if it were a complicated piece of theology. ... Sheet after sheet of calculations are punctuated with mystical speculation and prayers.”
Sir Isaac Newton propounded law of motion in 1687.In his famous book philosophise Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Principia , He described incorporating mass, force, and gravity. The world is governed by rational laws overflowed from signs into philosophy and politics. Principia, Therefore become a major inspiration for the 18th century enlightenment.
All the above thesis together demolished biblocal cosmology. That is the belief that the earth was the centre of the universe, End that the entire creation was anthropomorphic.
Charles Darwin’s revolutionary theory was that new species arise naturally, by a process of evolution, rather than having been created by God. He concluded that species ‘change’ or ’evolve’ over time through the appearance of new traits that slowly modify ancestral forms until their forms of distinctly different.
Darwin theory against The thought of society that the entire human pieces descended from one ancestor. Adam and Eve were the Bible’s first man and first woman and all humans have descended from them. As stated in the Bible, Adam and Eve were created by God to take care of His creation, to populate the earth, and to have a relationship with Him. Their very names are indicative of their roles. The fundamentalist protests against him. As a result US passed the first anti evolution law in 1923. This band the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theories of biological evolution in public school.
Conclusion
The Renaissance thinker an astronomers Challenge the technological vision of the Cosmos. The ideas photos by the astronomers and naturalist were confined to a few. The securitization process popularise them among through publicity, mass education, free press and social movement.
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