Don’t Bring Your Religion to the Discussion. Really?
Introduction In his book, The Secular Age , Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, traced the development of secularism across three significant epochs: impossible not to believe, possible not to believe, impossible to believe. The first stage (impossible not to believe) describes the traditional, pre-modern age where belief in a God was ubiquitous, and it was mostly impossible not to believe in God. In those days, the question was which God or god exists, not whether there was God or a god. In fact, Miles Coverdale coined the word atheist when translating the bible to English in 1534. He had to come up with a word to describe unbelief. But we moved from the pre-modern age to the modern age, where it was now possible not to believe. The French Revolution (and its rationalism) and the mainstreaming of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species began to provide a philosophical foundation for the popularity of unbelief. Soon, an entire economic and political system-communism-was...