Secular Quotes - Page 7

• The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition—that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable—is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute—the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures—is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.

  Theodore Dalrymple

  Religious, Loss, Men

  Theodore Dalrymple (2005). “Our Culture, What's Left of it: The Mandarins and the Masses”, Ivan R Dee

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• John Paul was the first modern pope to grow up in a secular culture: He attended public schools, danced with girls - indeed, as a teenager he had a crush on a beautiful Jewish girl who fled his hometown just ahead of the arrival of the Germans.

  Carl Bernstein

  Beautiful, Crush, Girl

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• In Holland, they have come to precisely the same conclusion. There they have adopted a system of secular education, because they have found it impracticable to unite the religious bodies in any system of combined religious instruction.

  Richard Cobden

  Religious, Body, Instruction

  Richard Cobden (1870). “Speeches on Questions of Public Policy”, p.574

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• The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Religious, Class, Luxury

  Kurt Vonnegut (2011). “Timequake”, p.74, Random House

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• America seems to be at once the most religious and the most secular of all nations.

  Will Herberg

  Christian, Religious, America

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• Moral theory develops from the divine command theory of medieval Christian philosophy, mixed up with a bit of ancient pagan virtue theory, to the purely secular moral sentiment and interpersonal reaction theories of Smith and Hume, to Kant's attempt to restore command theory but with something supersensible in the individual rather than God as the source of authority.

  Catherine Wilson

  Christian, Philosophy, Moral

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Gospel artists have to do something that secular artists don't always have to do and that's kind of abide by and reflect a certain set of values and morals. So everything that we do, every decision that we make, every picture that we take has a different weight on it. It's always interesting in balancing being an artist but being a minister as well.

  Jonathan McReynolds

  Artist, Interesting, Decision

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• What replaces Christianity isn't going to be Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and so on. It's going to be something else and something secular people may not like very much.

  Ross Douthat

  People, May, Christianity

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• I think it is fair, in a way, to describe certain forms of Marxism, for instance, as the secular equivalent of a religion. But, I think the same is true, to a certain extent, of secular liberalism as well.

  Ross Douthat

  Thinking, Way, Certain

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• If you're willing to recognize the religious element in one secular ideology, you need to be able to recognize it in your own.

  Ross Douthat

  Religious, Able, Needs

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• I think that secular liberals need to recognize that they are still, often, hanging their worldview on what are metaphysical ideas.

  Ross Douthat

  Thinking, Ideas, Needs

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• Even secular people can't really escape from the need to rest their ideas on some belief, some sort of commitment that is not scientific commitment.

  Ross Douthat

  Commitment, Ideas, People

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• Hannibal is very much a secular story, even though we dance right up to the supernatural a few times in the show, and, arguably, you could say we dipped our toe in an instance or two.

  Bryan Fuller

  Two, Stories, Toes

  "Bryan Fuller walks us through Hannibal's debut season (2 of 4)". Interview with Todd VanDerWerff, tv.avclub.com. July 24, 2013.

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• You've got a generation of young men - almost all are young men - in situations of great economic hardship, where they don't really have work. The chances of them making a decent life for themselves, of making a family, living in a kind of decent, happy way, are very, very remote. It's very hard for them to ever even have that as a dream, so when people are that deprived of the ordinary hope of human beings, it creates anger. And that anger can be channeled by unscrupulous persons, whether secular or religious leaders, and there's been a lot of that.

  Salman Rushdie

  Dream, Religious, Men

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• If you are a kid in America, and you live in a secular home and go to public school, you know nothing about Jesus of Nazareth. The only time you hear the word Jesus is when somebody's yelling at you - Jesus, okay?

  Bill O'Reilly

  Jesus, Home, School

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Once you get past the grand normative claims made in the West for literature, especially the novel, in the post-Christian era - that it is a secular substitute for religion, hallmark of modern civilization, a priori liberal and cosmopolitan, with authors appearing to implicitly embody such pious ideals - you encounter a less agreeable reality: parochialism, blinkered views, even racial prejudices of the kind the bourgeoisie have held everywhere.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Christian, Past, Reality

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think that when people experience something that seems to be supernatural, in some ways it cuts through the secular mindset.

  Nicky Gumbel

  Cutting, Thinking, People

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

  Susan Sontag

  History, Psychology, Matter

  "Illness As Metaphor" by Susan Sontag, ch. 7 (pp. 55-56), 1978.

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• Institutional Christianity has had clear secular benefits to American life for hundreds of years. It's played both a prophetic role in terms of generating moral critiques of American excesses, and so on, and also a communal role, in terms of building community as the country moved westward to the role my own Catholic Church played in assimilating generations of immigrants.

  Ross Douthat

  Country, Years, Community

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• Private religious speech can't be discriminated against. It has to be treated equally with secular speech.

  Samuel Alito

  Religious, Equality, Speech

  Samuel Alito during U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on His Nomination to the Supreme Court, www.washingtonpost.com. January 11, 2006.

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• Jesus communicated parables to the secular people around him and he used stories that were very relevant to their lives, and He was taking heaven's truth and packaging it in an earthly context.

  Stephen Kendrick

  Jesus, People, Heaven

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• If our lives are truly "hid with Christ in God," the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Art, Writing, May

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.102, Convergent Books

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• A big secular thing going on is technology and deflation. This is where I think millennials are getting that it is an improvement in life, and they're taking advantage of it.

  Ken Moelis

  Technology, Thinking, Millennials

  Source: nordic.businessinsider.com

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• There's a culture war in this country. Americans in recent years, as you know, have become more secular. They don't go to church as often. Bible reading, prayers in public are now frowned upon. And, of course, in addition to that, a lot of people have become much more supportive of LGBT rights. And in reaction to that, biblically conservative Americans feel that their faith is under assault.

  Tom Gjelten

  Country, Prayer, War

  "In Religious Freedom Debate, 2 American Values Clash" by Tom Gjelten, wmot.org. February 28, 2017.

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• Humanism cannot survive on a purely secular platform.

  Roger E. Olson

  Platforms, Humanism

  Source: www.biblegateway.com

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