Secular Quotes - Page 13

• If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped.

  Paul Johnson

  Religious, Believe, Political

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• In self-examination, take no account of yourself by your thoughts and resolutions in the days of religion and solemnity; examine how it is with you in the days of ordinary conversation and in the circumstances of secular employment.

  Jeremy Taylor

  Self, Ordinary, Employment

  Jeremy Taylor (1851). “Readings for every day in Lent”, p.45

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• Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

  Richard Powers

  Prayer, Reading, Lasts

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• For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.

  Andre Dubus

  Spiritual, Men, Dancing

  Andre Dubus (2010). “The Times Are Never So Bad: A Novella and Eight Short Stories”, p.121, Open Road Media

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• We are not relevant when we mirror secular culture. We are relevant when we are what they long to be.

  Bill Johnson

  Mirrors, Long, Culture

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• The only difference between a Religious Humanist and a Secular Humanist is what they do on Sunday.

  Fred Edwords

  Religious, Sunday, Differences

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• Humanism is an overemphasis on human worth and ability, leading man to glorify himself instead of God...While its historical forms may vary, humanism inevitably leads people away from God and spiritual concerns. It promotes the false idea that man is good and that he is superior to God. Secular Humanism of the twentieth century altogether rejects belief in God and worships man as God. The pride of humanism will not go unpunished.

  David Fisher

  Spiritual, Pride, Men

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• Secular humanism does not have the essential attributes of a religion: belief in a deity, the wish for some sort of afterlife, sacred dogma or texts, or an absolutist moral creed. Instead, it expresses a philosophical and ethical point of view, and it draws upon the scientific method in formulationg its naturalistic view of the nature.

  Paul Kurtz

  Philosophical, Views, Afterlife

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• Once Mel Gibson revealed himself to be, like the president, a person of serious religious faith, the gloves came off. Mel Gibson has done a major favor for serious faith, both Jewish and Christian, in America. He has made it "cool" to be religious, but in so doing he has unleashed the hatred of secular America against himself personally, against his work and against his family. God bless him.

  Daniel Lapin

  Christian, Religious, America

  "Why Jewish groups passionately hate Mel Gibson". www.wnd.com. April 10, 2004.

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• I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern, secular, nonreligious man, state bureaucracy is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the divine; the impenetrable omnipotence of bureaucracy harbors is divine enjoyment. It is the performance of its very purposelessness that generates an intense enjoyment, ready to reproduce itself forever.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Men, Thinking, Omnipotence

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• Historically speaking, religious and conservative groups always wanted the control over the private sphere that impacts women most, as reflected by family law and women's access to resources and mobility. And often secular groups traded this for economic incentives and trade.

  Zainab Salbi

  Religious, Impact, Law

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• While the secular world pushes woman to find her identity in herself as a sex object, the popular teachings in the Church, equally mistaken, encourage woman to find her identity in her roles as wife and mother rather than in her status as a person in Christ, a daughter complete in Him.

  Leanne Payne

  Daughter, Mother, Sex

  Leanne Payne (1995). “The Healing Presence: Curing the Soul Through Union with Christ”, p.65, Baker Books

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• We need to employ a secular approach to ethics, secular in the Indian sense of respecting all religious traditions and even the views of non-believers in an unbiased way. Secular ethics rooted in scientific findings, common experience and common sense can easily be introduced into the secular education system. If we can do that there is a real prospect of making this 21st century an era of peace and compassion.

  Dalai Lama

  Religious, Real, Compassion

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• Sons or fathers, poor men or rich men, sacred or secular: all are homosexual in their worship of everything phallic.

  Phyllis Chesler

  Father, Son, Men

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• There is nothing - not any religious or secular body of work - that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.

  Dennis Prager

  Religious, Civilization, Progress

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• In India in particular, where millions have no home but the streets, virtually every life event is carried out in public: prayer, eating, sleeping, nursing, crude dentistry, even bodily functions. In the secular West, where nothing is sacred, everything seems hidden; yet in Asia, where nothing is hidden, everything is sacred.

  Steve McCurry

  Prayer, Home, Sleep

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• The fact that institutional churches have gone into decline doesn't mean that we're going to enter some purely secular age. Secular people need to be aware of that.

  Ross Douthat

  Mean, People, Age

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• Oh that God would help me waken in you a single passion for a single great reality that would unleash you, and set you free from small dreams, and send you, for the glory of Christ, into all the spheres of secular life and to all the peoples of the earth.

  John Piper

  Dream, Passion, Reality

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• I think that the church in America today is so obsessed with being practical, relevant, helpful, successful, and perhaps well-liked that it nearly mirrors the world itself. Aside from the packaging, there is nothing that cannot be found in most churches today that could not be satisfied by any number of secular programs and self-help groups.

  Michael Horton

  Successful, Thinking, Church Today

  Michael Horton (2008). “Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church”, p.16, Baker Books

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• The bloody years of war and all the atrocities in European history have taught the Europeans that secular politics free of religious hatred is mainly a question of peace. This concept is not anchored in the same way in the consciousness of Turks, which has to do with the fact that the secular was forced upon us by the army.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Religious, War, Army

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• We're a very religious country; the government's secular.

  Tucker Carlson

  Country, Religious, Government

  "The Situation" with Tucker Carlson, www.nbcnews.com. December 7, 2005.

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• Liberals say that we are secular country with a majority of Christians, absolutely.

  Rachel Maddow

  Christian, Country, Majority

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• If India is not to declare spiritual bankruptcy, religious instruction of its youth must be held to be at least as necessary as secular instruction.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Spiritual, Religious, India

  Mahatma Gandhi (1959). “India of My Dreams”, p.183, Rajpal & Sons

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• All human beings are moral beings. So, certainly there are alliances. We are in the countries, that are secular states, and we obey its laws. I think we must recognize that common moral base. But in alliances we must always be careful just of what level the alliance is perceived. I will go and lecture to an atheist society, for example, but I will not lecture for them, because I am not an atheist. You see the difference.

  John Lennox

  Country, Atheist, Thinking

  Source: www.christiantelegraph.com

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• There are students whose religious upbringing is going to make them feel uncomfortable in a class where certain kinds of secular ideas are presented. There are students whose ideas about history or sexuality are going to be similarly challenged to question, to affirm or to change those ideas. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be exposed to them; that's why they're at school. That's why they come to university: to be taught how to think well and critically about material that they're being presented with. But it's the teacher who is certified to teach them how to do that.

  Joan Wallach Scott

  Teacher, Religious, School

  Source: www.salon.com

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