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Virginia Postrel is an author and speaker whose work spans a broad range of topics, from social science to fashion, concentrating on the intersection of culture, commerce, and technology. Postrel[…]
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Why we haven’t all become secular yet.

Virginia Postrel: Obviously another area that everybody talks about these days is it has to do with religion. How do we . . . There was this notion among the intellectual elites in the west and . . . that religion would just die out over time. I . . . Because I came from a religious place where everybody’s religious, I sort of found that hard to imagine. There’s a huge religious impulse in human beings. Maybe it’s biologically wired in, and people if they don’t . . . it expresses itself in many, many, different ways. And so I think that if you study the diversity of religion, it sort of takes away from the notion of sort of one true faith. But I also think it takes away from the notion of, “Oh everyone is inevitably going to be secular.” Because if that’s the case, wouldn’t it have happened already someplace?

Recorded on: 7/4/07

 


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