Download or read book Sacred Modes of Being in a Postsecular World written by Andrew Hass and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If our present phase of late modernity is its own Götterdämmerung, playing out the final act of a perpetual cycle, then its libretto must consist of that still persistent antagonism that sets "religion" against "the secular". The drama, in the fading light of the gods, finds its dynamic in religion's fight for survival, even if the secular too betrays its own fallibility. That fight is the West's fight; but then, the antagonism is the West's antagonism. As Nietzsche said, "'World' is a Christian term of abuse". But if, in the idolisation of this world, the secular has now too become an idol, then the passage from Götter to Götzen is circular, insofar as the movement of the one seems to inhere in the movement of the other, just as the twilight of the one seems to invoke the twilight of the other. All religions will at some point succumb to idolatry; all idolatries will at some point succumb to religion. Nietzsche saw this right at the beginning of positivism: "I am told that that cleverest of Jesuits, A. Comte, who wanted to lead his Frenchmen to Rome via the detour of science, found his inspiration in this book [De Imitatione Christi]. I believe it: 'the religion of the heart"--