Secularist Values. For Dennis Prager

Secularist explanations of the world (modern physics, astronomy, evolution) have NOT  made the world less wondrous, and have not undermined the validity or the authority of our wonderment. Taking pleasure in the flight of a bird is not undermined by knowing a lot more than our ancestors did about how that bird evolved, and about how it works: on the contrary. 


Atheism  finds and create its own values, and these are quite varied—for instance, “helping children with their homework or cooking good meals,” or “men campaigning to protect doctors from murderous antiabortion activists or Jews campaigning against Israeli settlements on the West Bank.” He faults Charles Taylor for assuming that modern secular life “is beset with the malaise of meaninglessness.” Weber’s word for disenchantment, Entzauberung, actually means “the elimination of magic,” but it is a mistake to infer the loss of meaning from the loss of magic. 

If a malaise besets contemporary life, Robbins writes, it may have been produced not by the march of progress but by the faltering of progress—“by the present’s failure to achieve a level of social justice that the premodern world did not even strive to achieve.”