RELIGION: Major in secular studies?

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Reading my New York Times on this fine, sunny Mother’s Day, I come to an article written by Laurie Goodstein entitled: PITZER COLLEGE IN CALIFORNIA ADDS MAJOR IN SECULARISM, May 8, 2011.

Now we all know that the United States is very, very religious but I have been hearing more and more about people saying “they have no religion”.  In fact, that number has doubled in the last 20 years to about 15% of the population, still small but growing.

It appears that Pitzer will be the first school in the country to offer a major in secular studies. They have to quickly underline that this will not be an “anti-religious” course as any religious course should not be thought of as against non-believers; studying belief is just as valid as studying non-belief.

The designer of the curriculum, Phil Zuckerman, is very interested in knowing why some people are non-religious and I am too. He said that in some countries huge amounts of people call themselves just atheists (Czech Republic, Scandinavia, etc.) why?

He also said that Canada is undergoing a huge wave of secularization, why?

I have always maintained that humans have a religious gene in their DNA so the invention of religion was predestined from the very beginning; we need religion to explain what we cannot explain.

Maybe now some people are seeing how much damage religions can do (seeing the bad side of religion) and maybe they are intellectually insulted by the premise of religion and would rather explore the universe on their own, just using the facts available?

Is this the beginning of a new era of human history? Gee, I hope so…

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