Lifelong Learners

The understanding of religion in the middle ages and the reactive stance is taken against a number of scientific developments that led to processes such as the Renaissance, Reform, and the Age of Enlightenment in European history. All these processes have paved the way for the formation of modern sciences and the concept of modernity. In parallel with these transformations occurring in the modern individual and modern society, changes were observed in the field of mentality and truth. Undoubtedly, the most important area in which this change is seen emerges in the "positioning of religion". The "God-centric" understanding was abandoned, and the "human" factor was placed on top of the human-god-nature triangle, and scientific knowledge started to play a dominant role in the life of modern man by overshadowing "divine knowledge". After the processes of modernism and postmodernism, the "human" placed at the top of the hierarchy ha...

In this article, the approaches of Indian religions that exhibit a polytheistic structure will be discussed. By naming Indian religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, which are born in the Indian Peninsula and show similarities in terms of certain features, are meant. Having a polytheistic understanding, Hinduism hosted many different god conceptions during the formation process. Hinduism reveals to its believers a circular view of the realm. According to this, the universe consists of four successive periods. Each period gets worse in the context of moral principles than the previous one. The world can only be reborn by preparing the ground for extinction at the end of the fourth period. The cyclical realm view thus continues forever. Time fiction includes the belief of “samsara and karma”. Expressing spiritual migration, samsara states that the spirits continue to exist in this cycle until they reach ultimate salvation, namely "moksha". How people wil...

                                                                                   Photo By: Met Museum                                            Before going into the details of the subject, it is very important to focus on the concept of "civilization" to better understand the subject. The word civilization is derived from the Arabic root "m-d-n", which means "settling and residing somewhere" and means "urbanism, sedentary life, living well and prosperous". This concept, which started to be used in the last periods of the Ottoman Empire, corresponds to the term "civilization" in Western thought. To express the concept of civilization in Turkish, the word “civili...