Secular America - Pharisees of the New Millennium Assignment

Secular America - Pharisees of the New Millennium - Assignment Example Secularization has been at the core of America’s founding as a nation. Religion has been given a minor role and influenced by the Founding Fathers based on the fundamental fact that it is against rational thinking and that it provides a less valid way of understanding reality, at least, in comparison with the humanist perspective, science, among other social institutions. According to Ostwalt (2003), this phenomenon gained traction sometime in the 1960s when the prevalent thought was religion as something that controls and manipulates and that freedom from it is an ideal way of life, a form of enlightenment for humanity (2). Morrison (1948) observed that the core liberalism in America emerged proposing a radical criticism of the Christian faith in light of modern culture instead of proposing a radical criticism of modern culture in the light of Christian faith (87). This came with his discourse that posited how Protestantism, the dominant religion in America, has embraced mode rn culture so that most of its components appeared to be sanctioned and ended up secularizing the American public life (Smith, 2003, 303).  Today, even with the aggressive initiatives on the part of religious authorities, to reverse or counter the influence of secularization, there is very little impact achieved. This can be attributed to several fundamental reasons. One of these is that argument that states how many forces of secularization are identified with the values of Romanticism, the Renaissance in addition to the Enlightenment and scientific revolutions, which have been encouraged by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church itself (Norman, 2007, 32). The idea is that these phenomena and institutions created social constructs that established the platform and environment in which secularization took root, thrived and flourished.

Finance Class paper on Asset Bubbles Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Finance Class paper on Asset Bubbles - Essay Example The focus of this document it is to examine the cause of asset price bubbles using classic decision model. Classical decision-making model presumes that people objectively scrutinize the challenges affecting them and that they have full information of the situation (Kahneman et al. 53). By relying on that information, they can examine various alternatives of addressing those issues being aware of the repercussions of those alternatives before making an optimal resolution. This model when applied by investors it assumes that the investors assess various investments alternatives impartially having complete knowledge about the market value of the assets currently and in the future. Since they make an objective analysis, there is usually high demand for assets as many people purchase them the future price will continue to rise indefinitely (Kahneman et al. 61). However, the situation reverses causing a sudden drop in value of those assets resulting to the economic crisis. The issue of the decision-making model involves bound and unbound problems and can be used to elaborate the occurrence of the reverse situation of the asset prices. Bound problems are issues within the control of decision makers while unbound problems are beyond the power of the decision makers. For example, investors make predictions and commit their resources to the assets. (Kahneman et al. 94). However, the financial system such as the banking industry affects the market liquidity. The implication of the change in market liquidity is that at first the bank reduces lending rates attracting investors to take more money for investing in various assets and consequent increase in market liquidity (Kahneman et al. 124). As the demand for assets increases so is the increase in their values. However, banks raise lending rates in the future due to excess liquidity resulting to decline in market liquidity (Kahneman et al. 175). The decreased flow