God's in the Global Village Research Assignment Paper (Essay Sample)

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Sociology and religion
The global village is evident both economically and socially when the planet is being interconnected to form a global community. In the modern Era, Kurtz highlights various challenges that face religion. The challenges include technology advancement which serves as a means of spreading evil, existing culture, individualism, mass media influence, and terrorism. Other challenges according to Kurtz are relativism, secularism, the reinforced value of “culture of waste” and “culture of the moment” and lastly existence of a culture that emphasizes the given community to make permanent choices as transiency and uncertainty condition it. But as Kurtz highlights, some of these challenges are greater opportunities. For example, technological advancement is a good channel or platform for spreading the gospel, the gospel news of faith, service, love, kindness among others is spread to a vast region faster and cheaply (Porter, p.54).
Sociology of religion enables us to meet these challenges and even goes further to identify how we can utilize the religion opportunities in the modern era. Sociology of religion offers an excellent platform for understanding of the theories and methods which concern the fundamental facts of human life (Kurtz, p.19). These theories also highlight the core issues of being a human and part of natural order. With this understanding, we can be able to be orderly and create our ethos. The ethos includes a valid agreement between parties to promote cultural interactions, and conflict resolution while allowing cultural diversity on the planet (Porter, p.32).
Religious sociologists always view religious and cultural traditions as the sacred canopy. Religion is a sacred canopy over people’s lives that tends to answer fundamental questions about the way the planet is the way it is (Kurtz, p.26). The religious sociologists used this canopy to provide solutions to both the mundane and profound queries about humanity: what is the sacred meaning being on earth? What is the reason for people dying or suffering? How can we afford food on the table? The sacred canopy covers a small fraction that is a small subculture like tribe isolation like a religious commune. People mostly use it to validate either as a national elite or a resistance movement (Porter, p.23).
Religion is viewed to be the central pillar of the world construction process since it’s highly involved in the process: the sacred beliefs and opinions of people. Berger (1969, p. 52-63) observed that the sacred canopy construction involves three elements: internalization, externalization, and objectivation. Externalization simply is the continuous pouring of humans in the world. In our lives, each one of us has his thoughts about what surrounds him. These ideas and the actions we possess continuously affect the outlook of the world. Through his activities, we can create material objects like books, toys, buildings, and cultural objects like social networks, money, and institutions that successfully change the world in either way.
Objectivation tries to observe how this creation becomes external to us. Objectivation implies that after projection of this nature in our world, the very same objects confront us, externally or separate to us. Most often, creators of fictional characters lose control over “Guys” since they develop their personalities. After establishing the institution such as a school, church, or industry, with time it takes its own life, able to function independently free from even views of the original designers.
Internalization is the last stage of world construction. In this stage, we can view the objective world and change it from external world structures back into our subjective conscious structures through internalization process. Therefore, we internalize ours outside through internalization. Most people can accept culture’s sacred canopy naturally. Every society, Berger (1969, p. 67), creates its nomos, these are significant orders that human imposes themselves based on the individual experiences. Traditionally, this construction process has always been a religious mission although with the arrival of modern era it has become a dispersed.
Secularization of the society refers to the removal of responsibilities from the religious institutions which lead to religion privatization. An example of this is of Europe’s Christian churches establishment. The religious marketplace includes individual preferences or the process of cultural production. Hence, the religious marketplace is a rational choice model which views people as free agents who can make their own rational choices (Kurtz, p.28).
From scholars, secularization concept was very fundamental to the understanding of the social scientific study of religion. Rodney Stark (1999, p. 249) was able to observe that for more than two centuries, western intellectuals and the social scientists have always been forecasting the end of religion. Each of the current generation believed that I the near time to come the world will come to an end and humans will exist supernaturally.
There are debates which surround secularizatio...