Secular Quotes - Page 24

• The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal [secular] concerns of men.

  Noah Webster

  Book, Men, Evil

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• [The Royal Society] is quite simply the voice of science in Britain. It is intellectually rigorous, not afraid to be outspoken on controversial issues such as climate change, but it is not aggressively secular either, insisting on a single view of the world. In fact, there are plenty of eminent scientists - Robert Winston, for instance - who are also men of faith.

  Bill Bryson

  Faith, Science, Men

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• Politics in America is the binding secular religion.

  Theodore White

  America, Political, Politics

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• The available divorce data show that marital breakdown is now considerably more common in the Bible Belt than in the secular Northeast. . . . The percentages of broken families and unwed mothers remained higher in places like Arkansas and Oklahoma than in New York and Massachusetts.

  Joe Conason

  Mother, New York, Divorce

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• My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in.

  Timothy Leary

  Jobs, School, Mean

  Timothy Leary (1968). “The Politics of Ecstasy”

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• People of faith should not invoke the power of the state to decide what everyone can believe or think or read or do. In such cases, like abortion or prayer or prohibition or sexual identity, the proper role of religion is to appeal to the free conscience of each person, not the coercive rule of secular law.

  Edward Kennedy

  Prayer, Believe, Thinking

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• Nonbelievers are protected by the religion clauses of the Constitution not because secular humanism is a religion, which it is not, but because when the government acts on the basis of religion it discriminates against those who do not "believe" in the governmentally favored manner.

  Norman Dorsen

  Believe, Government, Atheism

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• Zionism is an abominable, racist and colonial movement. Like all colonial and apartheid systems, it's in the interest of all that it be swept away. My hope is to see it replaced, without any bloodshed, with a democratic, secular and lay state – for example on the borders of historic Palestine – and where Palestinians and Israelis could live under equal rights of citizenship without ethnic and religious discrimination. It's a wish that I hope will soon become a reality.

  Vittorio Arrigoni

  Religious, Reality, Rights

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• It goes beyond mere 'acknowledgment' of religion because its sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function in this context. In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience.

  Barbara Brandriff Crabb

  Religious, Prayer, Taken

  "Federal judge rules Day of Prayer unconstitutional". www.foxnews.com. April 15, 2010.

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• What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Spiritual, Real, Giving

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• America's founding fathers did not intend to take religion out of education. Many of the nation's greatest universities were founded by evangelists and religious leaders; but many of these have lost the founders concept and become secular institutions. Because of this attitude, secular education is stumbling and floundering.

  Billy Graham

  Religious, Attitude, Father

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• My position is that since the non-secular status of my garden is not recognised by the law; by the world of the public, then the garden can only be private. So, I closed the garden to the public.

  Ian Hamilton Finlay

  Garden, Law, World

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• Sometimes I think the environment in which we operate is entirely too secular. The fact that we have freedom of religion doesn't mean we need to try to have freedom from religion

  William J. Clinton

  Christian, Religious, Freedom

  William J. Clinton “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, William J. Clinton, 1993, Bk. 2, August 1 to December 31, 1993”, Government Printing Office

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• Many books condemn 'secular' culture, just as many books advocate (consciously or unconsciously) accommodating ourselves to culture. Brett has written something much different: a biblically informed and culturally savvy approach to consuming culture in a God-honoring, community-building, and mission-advancing way.

  Mike Erre

  Book, Community, Different

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• The modern public school derived from a philosophy of freedom reflected in the First Amendment ... The non-sectarian or secular public school was the means of reconciling freedom in general with religious freedom.

  William J. Brennan

  Religious, Philosophy, School

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• Christian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that all consensual sexual acts are morally equal. That belief is anti-biblical and amoral; to codify it into law is to codify a lie.

  Pat Buchanan

  Christian, Lying, Biblical

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• It is wrong for a secular government to promote prayer. We think the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. What if the president declared a National Day of Cursing God because He failed us on September 11? Americans would say, "You've overstepped your authority." That's how we feel when he promotes prayer.

  Dan Barker

  Prayer, Thinking, Government

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• We're going to bring back God and the Bible and drive the gods of secular humanism right out of the public schools of America.

  Pat Buchanan

  School, America, Scary

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• Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.

  Carl Sagan

  Children, Believe, Mean

  Carl Sagan (1997). “Contact”, p.251, Simon and Schuster

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• If someone were to ask whether communications skills or meekness is most important to a marriage, I'd answer meekness, hands down. You can be a superb communicator but still never have the humility to ask, 'Is it I?' Communication skills are no substitute for Christlike attributes. As Dr. Douglas Brinley has observed, 'Without theological perspectives, secular exercises designed to improve our relationship and our communication skills (the common tools of counselors and marriage books) will never work any permanent change in one's heart: they simply develop more clever and skilled fighters!

  John Bytheway

  Clever, Communication, Book

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• When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there is no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Two, Issues

  Bertrand Russell (1957). “Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects”, p.198, Simon and Schuster

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• You say, 'Well, I love secular music.' Let me just share something with you: I don't care. I'm not going to go there; this is what I'm going to tell you: It doesn't matter to me whether it's secular or Christian. My question is, what's being said in those words? Because if what's being said in those words contradicts the will of God, you're violating His will, and you're loving it.

  Paul Washer

  Christian, Secular Music, Care

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• If the many and the One be indeed the same Reality, then it is not all modes of worship alone, but equally all modes of work, all modes of struggle, all modes of creation, which are paths of realization. No distinction, henceforth, between sacred and secular. To labour is to pray. To conquer is to renounce. Life is itself religion. To have and to hold is as stern a trust as to quit and to avoid.

  Sister Nivedita

  Struggle, Reality, Sacred

  Sister Nivedita (2016). “Swamiji and His Message”, p.37, Advaita Ashrama (A publication branch of Ramakrishna Math, Belur Math)

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• God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.

  Salman Rushdie

  Years, Religion, Atheism

  "In God We Trust". Essay by Salman Rushdie, 1985.

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• Secular music, do you say, belongs to the devil? Does it? Well, if it did I would plunder him for it, for he has no right to a single note of the whole seven. Every note, and every strain, and every harmony is divine, and belongs to us.

  William Booth

  Secular Music, Devil, Doe

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