Secular Values

(noun)

Secular values, as opposed to traditional values, base morality on human faculties such as logic, reason, or moral intuition, rather than on purported supernatural revelation or guidance (which is the source of religious ethics).

Related Terms

Examples of Secular Values in the following topics:

  • Value Clusters

    • With this economic shift, values began to change, too.
    • People from different backgrounds tend to have different sets of values, or value systems.
    • In general, the World Values Survey has revealed two major axes along which values cluster: (1) a continuum from traditional to secular values and (2) a continuum from survival to self-expression.
    • Secular values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values.
    • Industrialization tends to bring a shift from traditional values to secular ones.

  • Secularism and the Future of Religion

    • In studies of religion, modern Western societies are generally recognized as secular.
    • Some societies become increasingly secular as the result of social processes, rather than through the actions of a dedicated secular movement; this process is known as secularization.
    • Secularization is the transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward nonreligious values and secular institutions.
    • When discussing social structures, secularization can refer to differentiation.
    • Discuss the rise of secularism and its response in the West

  • Culture Wars

    • In American usage, "culture war" refers to the claim that there is a conflict between those conservative and liberal values.
    • Bush) believed in the importance of religion and traditional family values.
    • A culture war is a struggle between two sets of conflicting cultural values.
    • This can be framed to describe west versus east, rural versus urban, or traditional values versus progressive secularism.
    • They often accused their political opponents of undermining tradition, Western civilization and family values.

  • Nonmaterial Culture

    • Examples include any ideas, beliefs, values, or norms that shape a society.
    • Different cultures honor different values.
    • Beliefs can be religious or secular, and they can refer to any aspect of life.
    • Members take part in a culture even if each member's personal values do not entirely agree with some of the normative values sanctioned in the culture.
    • Norms, values, and beliefs are all deeply interconnected.

  • Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism

    • To the French, banning head scarfs is important because it helps maintain a secular society and gender equality.
    • But imposing these values on people with a different culture is ethnocentric and, therefore, has become controversial.
    • This leads to making incorrect assumptions about others' behavior based on your own norms, values, and beliefs.

  • Religion

    • Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that relate humanity to spirituality and moral values.
    • Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values.
    • Alternatively, children raised in secular homes tend not to convert to religion.
    • Secular people converted to religion and religious people became secular.

  • Defining Boundaries

    • This may be achieved by comparing the in-group to the out-group on some new dimension, changing the values assigned to the attributes of the group, and choosing an alternative out-group by which to compare the in-group.
    • Rituals, whether secular or religious, were for Durkheim the means by which groups maintained their symbolic and moral boundaries.
    • Mary Douglas has subsequently emphasized the role of symbolic boundaries in organizing experience, private and public, even in a secular society.

  • The Future of Religion

    • Secularization is a varied term with multiple definitions and levels of meaning.
    • The 'process' component of secularization would refer to how the theory is actualized.
    • It is in this sense that secularization has multiple definitions.
    • 1) When discussing social structures, secularization can refer to differentiation.
    • 5) When discussing populations, secularization can refer to a societal decline in levels of religiosity (as opposed to the individual-level secularization of definition four).

  • Social Correlates of Religion

    • The study also notes that more secular, pro-evolution societies come closer to "cultures of life. " Although these countries are far from perfect, they have, for example, low rates of lethal crime.
    • The model considers not only the changing number of people with certain beliefs, but also attempts to assign utility values of a belief as per each nation .

  • Sociology Today

    • The traditional focuses of sociology have included social stratification, social class, culture, social mobility, religion, secularization, law, and deviance.