In this episode we look at the idea of goodness and how humanity has shifted its understanding of why we pursue it.
How did humanity come to accept goodness in the same movement as distancing themselves from God? How did agape love descend to a form of measured universal sympathy? Is this is natural progression of humanity once the structures of religion are removed? We explore these and other questions, and seek to address the issue of how to be a missionary in this space in today's world.
"They could find within their own human resources the motivation to universal beneficence and justice" (p248).
"The disengaged, disciplined agent, capable of remaking the self, who has discovered and thus released in himself the awesome power of control, is obviously one of the crucial supports of modern exclusive humanism" (p 257).
"Like all striking human achievement, there is something in it which resists reduction to these enabling conditions" (p258).
"The core of the subtraction story consists in this, that we only needed to get these perverse and illusory condemnations off our back, and the value of ordinary human desire shines out, in its true nature, as it has always been" (p253).
References:
-Pages of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor: (242-259)
Website:
-https://sites.google.com/contemplatingculture