{"id":971,"date":"2002-08-13T09:32:35","date_gmt":"2002-08-13T17:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2002\/08\/13\/charles-taylor-on-what-it-means-to-be-secular\/"},"modified":"2002-08-13T09:32:35","modified_gmt":"2002-08-13T17:32:35","slug":"charles-taylor-on-what-it-means-to-be-secular","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2002\/08\/13\/charles-taylor-on-what-it-means-to-be-secular","title":{"rendered":"Charles Taylor on \u201cWhat It Means to Be Secular\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Noted philospher <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcgill.ca\/news\/archives\/summer2000\/taylor\/\">Charles Taylor<\/a> (who seems to be a Christian) has just been interviewed in Books and Culture on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/bc\/2002\/004\/14.36.html\">What It Means to Be Secular<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s pretty interesting stuff. For example<\/p>\n<p><i>To say we live in a secular civilization is to say that God is no longer inescapable. It doesn\u2019t mean that we live in a society from which God has been expelled. I don\u2019t think we ever will live in such a society for very long; the Communists tried that. But the nature of this modern secular society is that it\u2019s deeply plural. We have to accept that the ultimate grounding of the civilization we share in common is up for&nbsp;grabs.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>and later&nbsp;on<\/p>\n<p><i>There is an alternative readingnamely, that we\u2019re moving to a society where more and more the consensus will be around an unbelieving variant of the modern social imaginary. But to me this seems to be just a dream. It\u2019s a dream that arises among those who are deeply into an atheist or non-believing position and are convinced as a matter of faith that religion will gradually disappear and everyone will think as they do. For them, the secular world is one in which we all end up agreeing fundamentally that there\u2019s no God, and that agreement is the basis of everything. That\u2019s an impossible scenario, and the more they think like that, the worse it\u2019s going to&nbsp;be.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Noted philospher Charles Taylor (who seems to be a Christian) has just been interviewed in Books and Culture on What It Means to Be Secular. It\u2019s pretty interesting stuff. For example To say we live in a secular civilization is to say that God is no longer inescapable. It doesn\u2019t mean that we live in \u2026 <a href=\"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2002\/08\/13\/charles-taylor-on-what-it-means-to-be-secular\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> \u201cCharles Taylor on \u201cWhat It Means to Be Secular\u201d\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-of-random-interest"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Ded-fF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}