Discussion: Secular View of Authority

Discussion: Secular View of Authority

Discussion: Secular View of Authority

Week 3 discussion You are in a place of influence in your professional life where you can help people be successful. Describe the relationship and what actions you have taken or could take to serve others. Based on the textbook, how does your response compare to the views of authority according to servant leadership? How does your response compare to the secular view of authority?

Secularity (derived from the word “secular” which comes from  saeculum meaning “worldly”, “of a generation”, “temporal”, or a span of about 100 years) is the state of being separate from , or of not being exclusively allied with or against any particular .

Historically, the word secular was not related or linked to religion, but was a freestanding term in Latin which would relate to any mundane endeavour. However, the term,  ( being the genitive plural of saeculum) as found in the  in the  translation (circa 410) of the  phrase εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων (eis toùs aionas ton aiṓnōn), e.g. at , was used in the early Christian church (and is still used today), in the , to denote the coming and going of the ages, the grant of eternal life, and the long duration of created things from their beginning to forever and ever.

The idea of a dichotomy between religion and the secular originated in the . Furthermore, since religion and secular are both Western concepts that were formed under the influence of Christian theology, other cultures do not necessarily have words or concepts that resemble or are equivalent to them.

In many cultures, “little conceptual or practical distinction is made between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ phenomena” and the very notions of religious and nonreligious dissolve into unimportance, nonexistence, or unawareness, especially since people have beliefs in other supernatural or spiritual things irrespective of belief in God or gods.

Conceptions of what is and what is not religion vary in contemporary  as well. The shared term for “” or “no religion” (無宗教, Chinese pron. wú zōngjiào, Japanese pron. mu shūkyō) with which the majority of East Asian populations identify themselves implies non-membership in one of the institutional religions (such as Buddhism and Christianity) but not necessarily non-belief in traditional folk religions collectively represented by Chinese  (shén dào) and Japanese  (both meaning “ways of gods”).