People used to believe that modernization would automatically bring the demise of religion. Secular institutions and values had a Manifest Destiny to take over all the parts of life traditionally occupied by religion. That prediction has proved false. Yet if a secular future is not inevitable, it may yet be worth striving for. This course examines competing understandings of secularism and secularity, and considers whether individuals and societies can be secular in some areas and religious in others. Against the background of recent best-selling books written by secularists, skeptics, and atheists shocked to find themselves again on the defensive, students read historical, anthropological, and philosophical studies of secularization processes and of secularism itself as an ideology, a culture - or even a religion.
In prep I've started reading the works of the "four horsemen," Christopher Hitchens (god is not Great), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Sam Harris (The End of Faith), screeds all of them but in parts diverting. ("Four horsemen" is a self-ascription, the title of a 2-hour conversation of the four available on online.) Each has his hobbyhorses, and their points of disagreement are more interesting than when they're making a united front.In the library today I stumbled on another writer's attempt to cash in on the antireligious manifesto boom - indeed to sneak to the head of the queue by being really really brief and pithy. It's A. C. Grayling's Against All Gods (2007) and I don't recommend it - it's mostly just snide. But I did rather like his argument for rejecting the term atheism as a self-description: Presumably ... believers in fairies would call those who do not share their views ‘a-fairyists’, hence trying to keep the debate on fairy turf, as if it had some sensible content; as if there were something whose existence could be a subject of discussion worth the time. (34)
