The Secular Worldview

Essay by runescape September 2006

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Worldview is the term we use to think and speak about a whole way of thinking, feeling and acting about life. A secular worldview is the way of thinking about the world where the only truth worth considering is one based on human values alone. Only the value of this world matter, religion is pushed out of the picture, and science and technology are believed to provide the answers to life's problems.

Such a worldview did not come into being all at once. Rather, it evolved from a number of historical movements that changed the way people thought about the world, society and themselves these movement began at last as early as the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, and entered into full power with the political, social and economic revolutions of the last two hundred years.

The Anthropocentric Approach

The modern worldview is an anthropocentric {meaning "human centered"} approach.

Modern worldview, including most religious ones, tend to be anthropocentric. The value of human individuals and human communities is central. Humanity becomes interested is itself and its own story, and this interest has taken both religious and non-religious forms.

As early as the fifth century B.C.E, the Greek philosopher Potagoras argued that humanity is the measure of all thing. The anthropocentric worldview expresses the values of humanism, a point of view that exalts human values and uses the dignity and ultimate worth of human beings as its starting point. Humanism recognizes that people are free and responsible individuals, and looks to the ideals of the classical culture of the Greeks and Romans, and the art and thought that stems from the Renaissance and the work of artists like Michelangelo and Durer. The term humanism has been applied to modern approaches as different as Christian humanism, scientific humanism and secular...