Word: sociologists
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...atheism may be on the wane, but to some appalled and devout Christians, unbelief seems ascendant, and Antichrist just around the corner. The trouble with the image, according to an international symposium on unbelief last week, is that it is all wrong. "The modern world," declared University of California Sociologist Robert N. Bellah without irony, "is as alive with religious possibility as any epoch in human history...
Part of the problem, explained Sociologist Bellah, derives from the traditional idea of belief. From the days of the church fathers, Christianity has tended to equate belief with intellectual assent to a given body of dogma. In Bellah's view, young people today see it rather as a commitment, part of a "quest for personal authenticity" that can take them into Black Power or the Peace Corps, hippiedom or Zen, drugs or sex. Some of these convictions hardly qualify as "beliefs" by any standard, and most of them are clearly not oriented toward God at all. Nonetheless, they...
Beliefs from Within. Children raised in benevolent American homes, argued Sociologist Peter L. Berger (TIME, Jan. 10) of New York's New School for Social Research, often turn to unbelief when they move from the unprecedented happiness of a modern childhood into the cruel adult world. When they encounter institutions that are not as benign as they should be, they revolt. Harvey Cox laid the blame for such revolts at the door of the church itself. "It may be that the major reason for unbelief is not that people find the Gospel incredible but that they find the church...
...Sociologist Thomas Luckmann of Frankfurt University predicted that eventually the categories of "belief" and "unbelief" will disappear. "A particular form of religion, institutional specialization, is on the wane," he contended, and as it goes, the distinctions between believers and nonbelievers will fade. One type of person will then evolve his private set of ultimate values; another will find that he can express his best through one of the churches that remain. But Luckmann warns that the surviving churches must understand their true role: not to command belief but to help each person articulate his beliefs from within himself...
Final Placement Syndrome is "what the ordinary sociologist calls 'success.' " Freud's theory that frustration arises from foibles such as penis envy, the Oedipus complex or the castration complex is nonsense, says Peter, who cheerfully regards Freud as a "satirist at heart." On the contrary, "frustration occurs as a result of promotion," because most people who are promoted genuinely wish to be productive...