Your Unique View Of The World #3 - Worldview

Major Worldview Overview

Secular Humanism and Post-Modernism


    Secular Humanism is a view of the world that puts man, the human, squarely in the center. The motto of Secular Humanism is "Man is the center and measure of all things." In this view Man is responsible to pull himself up from the primordial darkness and project himself forward into the future, being responsible to no god, but relying on his own cunning and strength of will. Secular Humanism is basically a materialistic belief system, with the concept of the soul relegated to the brain, as in the phrase "the mind is what the brain does. He uses his knowledge of science and technology to make the world in the image of his own dictates. This view affords a high view of man as a being that is good at the heart and able to rise high above difficult circumstances by a focus on education and training towards excellence. The main view of man is that of an unconstrained vision, where men are trusted to do the highest and best without accompanying rules or strictures. Men who fall short of this great goal are simply in need of help and education. Evil in this view is seen as not within the man, but the result of the wrong environmental situation. Given a better environment, the man is able to right his wrongs and reform positively.
    Postmodernism is a relatively new take or twist on an old view of the world, called Nihilism. Postmodernism is the main driving worldview of the American pop culture. The motto of Postmodernism is "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."  This view is really somewhat similar to the atmosphere of that of the New Testament in the times of Jesus. The New Testament period was full of competing and various conceptions of life and reality. There were many competing ideas of the function of the physical versus the material, with some elevating the natural world, and others emphasizing the spiritual. Today, along with a pervasive relativism and emphasis on experience, the Postmodern also rejects anything objective in favor of the subjective. There is a deep distrust and cynicism within postmodernism, causing a sense of purposelessness that is then embraced irrationally as liberation. The "reality tv" craze is a postmodern phenomena. It is the idea of the point of life as being the goal of having your "fifteen minutes of fame." In Postmodernism there is no real freedom, because there is belief that we are merely caught in a trap from which we cannot escape. The Postmodern is concerned with the here and now, and caught up with the idea that all things are entertainment, mere events and mere experiences. Postmodernism is full of rhetoric that speaks of "progress" while losing the respect for European and Western cultural distinctives. To the postmodern, any one who believes a narrative as true and real is considered to be unenlightened and close-minded. Just like it's older brother Nihilism, Postmodernism simply posits a future and a hope, but then cynically denies the reality or possibility of meaning and purpose in the universe, opting instead for an intellectual sounding but empty philosophy. 


from JavaJazzJesus