Secular Quotes - Page 21

• From time to time I have wished to do more work in philosophy of religion, but the demands and challenges have been such that it needed more work than I had time for. I sneaked a chapter into my book on loyalty that touched on some issues in the area. Maybe in the future I will try responding to Philip Kitcher's excellent critique: Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism - it gets closer to me than much of what is produced in the field.

  John Kleinig

  Loyalty, Philosophy, Book

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

  Michael Shermer

  Survival, Democracy, Enlightenment

  Michael Shermer (2012). “The Believing Brain: From Spiritual Faiths to Political Convictions – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths.”, p.122, Hachette UK

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• A Muslim fanatic and a Christian fanatic, a Jewish fanatic, a secular fanatic, an atheist fanatic, a communist fanatic - all of them are the same. The thinking that, 'If you don't think like me, that if you are not with me, then you are against me;' this is something to condemn.

  Marjane Satrapi

  Christian, Atheist, Thinking

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• We need to find secular ways to cultivate warm-heartedness. We need secular ways to educate ourselves about inner values. The source of a happy life is within us. Trouble makers in many parts of the world are often quite well educated, so it is not just education that we need. We need to pay attention to inner values.

  Dalai Lama

  Happy Life, Needs, Attention

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• The most efficacious secular book that ever was published in America is the newspaper.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Book, America, Newspapers

  Henry Ward Beecher (1863). “Freedom and War: Discourses on Topics Suggested by the Times”, p.150, Gale Cengage Learning

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• Every Christmas now for years, I have found myself wondering about the point of the celebration. As the holiday has become more ecumenical and secular, it has lost much of the magic that I remember so fondly from childhood.

  Whitley Strieber

  Christmas, Holiday, Years

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• There will never be peace until God's house and God's people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world. How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money changers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top. .... There is absolutely no way that government can operate successfully unless led by godly men and women operating under the laws of the God of Jacob

  Pat Robertson

  Religious, Atheist, Godly

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• I illustrate with a quotation from the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who died recently and is, I suspect, now having a lengthy conversation with his maker. Rorty argued that secular professors ought “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.

  Richard Rorty

  Religious, Atheist, College

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• The ultimate goal of the anti-religious elites is to transform America into a completely secular nation, a nation that is legally and culturally biased against Christianity.

  Ron Paul

  Religious, America, Goal

  "The War on Religion" by Ron Paul, www.lewrockwell.com. December 30, 2003.

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• For people raised and programmed on the patriarchal religions of today, religions that affect even the most secular aspects of our society, perhaps there remains a lingering, almost innate memory of sacred shrines and temples tended by priestesses who served in the religion of the original supreme deity. In the beginning, people prayed to the Creatress of Life, the Mistress of Heaven. At the very dawn of religion, God was a woman. Do you remember?

  Merlin Stone

  Memories, People, Heaven

  Merlin Stone (2012). “When God Was A Woman”, p.36, Doubleday

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• So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.

  E. O. Wilson

  Views, Years, Alabama

  "Transcript of the complete E.O. Wilson interview". blog.cleveland.com. March 01, 2009.

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• The reason Buddhism can be so naturalised is because, stripped of its supernatural elements, its core teachings can be giving a sound, secular philosophical interpretation. In other words, it becomes a religion acceptable to the contemporary, naturalistic mind only when it ceases to be a religion.

  Julian Baggini

  Teaching, Philosophical, Buddhism

  "Can a religion survive being stripped of its superstitions?" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. February 9, 2012.

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• There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Sacred, Messages, Incarnation

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.45, Convergent Books

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• Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Religious, Art, Categories

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.24, Convergent Books

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• This is the humbling truth that lies at the heart of Christianity. We love to be our own saviors. Our hearts love to manufacture glory for themselves. So we find messages of self-salvation extremely attractive, whether they are religious (Keep these rules and you earn eternal blessing) or secular (Grab hold of these things and you’ll experience blessing now).

  Timothy Keller

  Religious, Lying, Heart

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• And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Running, Despair, Noise

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• A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.

  Hans-Georg Gadamer

  Religious, Art, Giving

  "Truth and Method". Book by Hans-Georg Gadamer (p. 76), 1960.

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• Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Men, Doe, Ministry

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• Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviors by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively. . . .

  Sigmund Freud

  Religious, Fear, Civilization

  Sigmund Freud (1973). “Abstracts of the Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud”

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• Saddam Hussein was not an Islamist. He's not a radical jihadist. He's not a radical Muslim. I mean, he was a - he was a Baathist. He was a secular - even though he professed to be a good and devout Muslim.

  Rick Santorum

  Mean, Hussein, Radical

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• Europe today is the most secular region in the world. Europe is the only region in the world experiencing population decline. Wherever you turn today the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families.

  Jonathan Sacks

  Religious, Average, Europe

  "Falling birth rate is killing Europe, says chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks" by Riazat Butt, www.theguardian.com. November 5, 2009.

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• Secular writers can tell a story about the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual parts of a character. But no matter how well they tell the story, they miss a facet that is innately part of all of us - the spiritual.

  Karen Kingsbury

  Spiritual, Character, Emotional

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• Recent decades clearly demonstrate that the more secular our Public Schools become the less successful they become academically.

  David Barton

  Education, School, Successful

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• Religion appears in so many contexts in WW1. Religion shaped the national identities and ambitions of several of the key players, especially Germany and Russia, both of which defined themselves as messianic nations. In both countries too, secular elites delved deeply into apocalyptic and prophetic ideas, giving their nations a millenarian bent.

  Philip Jenkins

  Country, Ambition, Player

  Interview with Scott McKnight, www.patheos.com. January 23, 2016.

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• It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.

  Alain de Botton

  Atheist, People, Priorities

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