دکتر مهدی ابوطالبی یزدی

Spirituality and meaningfulness of life is an issue that has pitted two traditional religious thoughts and the modern secular world against each other. The basic question is, "Is spirituality achieved only through religion, or is it possible to live a meaningful life in a secular society?" Religious spirituality relies on the immaterial world and spiritual affairs and can include moral values, religion, sacred or occult matters, mysticism, etc. or any kind of spiritual and spiritual state in life. Secular meaningfulness is focused on the point that meaningful life is the result of rationality, which is achieved as a result of free, conscious, voluntary and purposeful human action, and its fruit should be the improvement of human's worldly life conditions. With this understanding, it becomes clear that there is a fundamental difference between the two categories of religiosity and spirituality, as if spirituality can be separated from religiosity. The difference between religiosity and spirituality is that if religiosity is not out of servitude, it is not religiosity; But if spirituality comes from servitude, it is not spirituality. What secularism claims to try to realize is purifying human thoughts from superstitions and deviations.

The basis of the theory of secularism is that as modernity progresses (a set of phenomena including science, technology, and rational forms of authority), the influence of religion gradually diminishes, but Charles Taylor argues that the modern world not only hasn’t destroyed religion, but also in many cases, has led to its growth and development. The book "The Secular Age" is a detail of his views on secularism. Taylor talks about situations in the past where belief in God was pervasive, but things developed in such a way that belief in God became an option among other options. He describes the process of spreading secularism in the new West and what has happened to religion. In this process, for the religious, "God" and for the non-religious, "reason" describes perfection. This article, with a brief look at Taylor's work, examines the movement of the West (Western Europe and North America) from religious societies to secular societies, and after analyzing Taylor's theory of secularism, critiques and summarizes his ideas.