Week 8 - Pahuaja Thao

The world of spirituality is a topic that are pushed into the darkness in the western academia. Unlike spirituality, science has the ability to explain every phenomenon. Due to this, the spiritual realm is put aside to the margin in western academia like Riyad A. Shahjahan stated in his article “Spiritually in the Academy: Reclaiming from the Margins and Evoking a Transformative Way of Knowing the World”. This also means that western ideas dominates western academia. To the westerners, it may seem that their views are more logical but that does not mean they should only shine light upon their beliefs when there is so much more out there. Western academia talks about being open minded but yet they close off their minds to ideas and beliefs that are illogical and unexplained. For example, they believe that mental illness is something we can define and explain but what if it is something more than that. What if it deals with that person’s spirit instead of their physiological state. They don’t want to accept that. When spirits are involved, they know they cannot explain such a thing with science so they do what they see fits best. Just like history, they get to decide what is right and what is wrong.

Question:

Why is it that Western Academia push away the topic of the spiritual realm instead of trying to understand it?