Secular Quotes - Page 18

• Growing up we were secular Jews, but what I got out of Judaism at that time in my life was questions. Everything was a question. "Dad, is there a heaven? Is there a hell?" You never could get an answer. That informed a lot of my reasons for getting into Scientology, because they had all the answers. They said I was not my body, not my mind. I don't have a soul; I am an immortal soul. I've lived many lives and I'll live endlessly into the future, and as an immortal soul I have no gender.

  Kate Bornstein

  Growing Up, Dad, Heaven

  "'A Queer and Pleasant Danger': Kate Bornstein, Trans Scientology Survivor". Interview with Nicole Pasulka, www.motherjones.com. May 5, 2012.

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• The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Religious, Pluralism Is, Political

  Christopher Hitchens (2014). “Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere”, p.104, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I do not regard myself as a Christian politician. I regard myself as a politician who just happens to think religion matters. I would be appalled, absolutely appalled, to think religion drove anyone's politics in a secular democracy like ours.

  Tony Abbott

  Christian, Thinking, Democracy

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• Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. ... Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.

  Max Horkheimer

  Men, Thinking, Law

  Max Horkheimer (1970). “Zeitschrift Fur Sozialforschung”

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• And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren't involved in helping godly men in getting elected than we're going to have a nation of secular laws. That's not what our founding fathers intended and that's certainly isn't what God intended.

  Katherine Harris

  Father, Godly, Men

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• Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.

  Stephen Young

  Vanity, Moral, Kind

  Stephen Young (2003). “Moral Capitalism: Reconciling Private Interest with the Public Good”, p.9, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• Some people simply use their faith as a lexicon of behavioral reasoning; without that they would be forced to face their own moral and ethical failings honestly according to a secular code of right and wrong.

  Deborah Feldman

  People, Would Be, Lexicon

  Deborah Feldman (2014). “Exodus: A Memoir”, p.75, Penguin

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• The demand that Islam makes of women is to not attract attention to yourself, and if you are in a secular society, that attire does exactly that, and it is a political symbol, no longer religious.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Religious, Secular Society, Political

  "The Interview: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on reforming Islam". Interview with Brian Bethune, www.macleans.ca. April 13, 2015.

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• People should not rush to change religions. There is real value in finding the spiritual resources you need in your home religion. Even secular humanism has great spiritual resources; it is almost like a religion to me.

  Dalai Lama

  Spiritual, Real, Home

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can "drive" on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participation requires total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.

  Joan Didion

  Thinking, People, Mind

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• She [Hillary Clinton] is the epitome of the progressive - the secular progressive movement. And she counts on the fact that people are uninformed, the Alinsky Model, taking advantage of useful idiots.

  Benjamin Carson

  People, Movement, Facts

  Source: www.cbsnews.com

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• By and large, reporters and editors are devoutly secular and deeply distrustful of those who act on faith.

  Don Feder

  Christian, Religious, Editors

  Don Feder (1996). “Who's Afraid of the Religious Right?”, p.33, Regnery Publishing

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• If once in America the question of religious toleration was raised in defense of nonbelievers who dissented from religious orthodoxy, today it is raised by believers who feel excluded from a predominantly secular public world.

  Alan Wolfe

  Christian, Religious, America

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• It's obvious throughout secular and church history that significant legislation follows only after dramatic action.

  Carter Heyward

  Church, Action, Dramatic

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• When men in secular life, who might be religious or not, see women being treated as secondary in the eyes of God, they assume that it's OK for them to do it.

  Jimmy Carter

  Religious, Eye, Men

  "Jimmy Carter on His New Book Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 31, 2014.

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• Philip Kitcher has composed the most formidable defense of the secular view of life since Dewey. Unlike almost all of contemporary atheism, Life After Faith is utterly devoid of cartoons and caricatures of religion. It is, instead, a sober and soulful book, an exemplary practice of philosophical reflection. Scrupulous in its argument, elegant in its style, humane in its spirit, it is animated by a stirring aspiration to wisdom. Even as I quarrel with it I admire it.

  Leon Wieseltier

  Book, Philosophical, Reflection

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• The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Needs, Authorship, Priests

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.40, Рипол Классик

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• No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.

  H. L. Mencken

  Truth, Law, Ideas

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.382, Knopf

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• I am deeply discouraged by Catholic Bishops who say Catholics cannot support same sex marriage in our secular culture.

  Anne Rice

  Sex, Support, Catholic

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• I think I'm fascinated by the power of religion in our culture. Like a lot of secular, liberal people, I ignored it for a long time. Lately, of course, just from a political perspective, it's impossible to ignore.

  Tom Perrotta

  Thinking, People, Perspective

  "Tom Perrotta serves 'Leftovers' with grief, empathy". Interview with Brian Braiker, www.usatoday.com. September 8, 2011.

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• Restoring prayer ... will scarcely at this date solve the grievous public school problem. Public schools are expensive and massive centers for cultural and ideological brainwashing, at which they are unfortunately far more effective than in teaching the 3 R's or in keeping simple order within the schools. Any plan to begin dismantling the public school monstrosity is met with effective opposition by the teachers' and educators' unions. Truly radical change is needed to shift education from public to unregulated private schooling, religious and secular, as well as home schooling by parents.

  Murray Rothbard

  Education, Teacher, Religious

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• It is short-sighted, not to say stupid, in the correct desire to be relevant as Christian artists in an unchristian age, to pick up the secular fashion of the immediate generation before us and immerse oneself in that as your tradition. That's why Christian artists so often seem to be a generation late.

  Calvin Seerveld

  Christian, Fashion, Stupid

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• Self-righteousness is much like a spiritual egocentricity. It constitutes a secular type of love that thrives under conditionality, one in which is only existent after an individual meets the adopted standards of the condemner; oppositely, unconditional love is a holy love.

  Criss Jami

  True Love, Spiritual, Unconditional Love

  Criss Jami (2015). “Killosophy”, p.121, Criss Jami

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• Wouldn't it be a great thing if all who are well schooled in secular learning could hold fast to the "iron rod," or the word of God, which could lead them, through faith, to an understanding, rather than to have them stray away into strange paths of man-made theories and be plunged into the murky waters of disbelief and apostasy?

  Harold B. Lee

  Men, Iron, Water

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• Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.

  Alistair Cooke

  Christmas, Christian, Country

  Alistair Cooke (2007). “Letter from America, 1946-2004”, p.131, Knopf

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