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worldviews
•nytimes.com/2007/05/02/education/02spirituali...
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laodan discovered 14 months ago- Matters of Faith Find a New Prominence on Campus in the NYT by Alan Finder
Peter J. Gomes has been at Harvard University for 37 years, and says he remembers when religious people on campus felt under siege. To be seen as religious often meant being dismissed as not very bright, he said. No longer. At Harvard these days, said Professor Gomes, the university preacher, "There is probably more active religious life now than there has been in 100 years". Matters of Faith Find a New Prominence on Campus
What's going on? Science and rationalism have never offered a simple and all encompassing worldview answering the many foundational questions that each of us hears popping in his mind at one or another moment in his life. Where does the universe come from? How do I fit in the wholeness of the universe? What is life? Is there life after death? And so on. It is not as if it was impossible to find credible answers to those questions from a rationalist or scientific standpoint but fact is that only those who accumulated a vast body of scientific knowings can possibly find such credible answers. That means that the vast majority of students and should I say the vast majority of citizens do not have the means to find them. Living without certainty in your head about those foundational questions can be distressful, for, you will never find peace of mind and you will also never fully sense the warmth and security offered by in any group or society. Individuals, at the image of atoms, are the components of the grouping they belong to. Atoms of iron unrelated to other atoms of iron are nothing. Their existence is conferred by the iron. The same goes for human individuals. We can't possibly exist by or on ourselves. It's the grouping we belong to that confers us individual existence. And the belonging to a grouping is realized through the sharing of a common worldview. It is as if life or humanity were polar: on one side the group, the society and on the other the individuals. Take out the sharing of a common worldview (belief system) by the individuals or give them latitude to believe in what they want and the grouping starts to disintegrate. Late modernity concludes on such a societal atomization and societies start to disintegrate. The individuals feel more and more ill at ease and experience a growing yearning for sharing a common worldview with others. This is what this article is all about and it is is also what many Chinese are experiencing nowadays after the chaos unleashed on them by the rapid entry of their country into modernity... But beware, for, past worldviews, if they can satisfy the individuals, never will satisfy their societies. Today's conditions on the ground in terms of established knowings are different from the time those past worldviews emerged. And so societies driven by hegemonic past worldviews are bound to lose out to those that succeed to devise worldviews out of present conditions.
- Matters of Faith Find a New Prominence on Campus in the NYT by Alan Finder
