Quotes About Secular

If a person is homosexual by nature - that is, if one's sexuality is as intrinsic a part of one's identity as gender or skin color - then society can no more deny a gay person access to the secular rights and religious sacraments because of his homosexuality than it can reinstate Jim Crow.

The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights. But at the same time, it offers a valuable perspective from which we can understand and critique some of the ugly parts of secular societies.

there's a deeper reason so many young psychologists began to study morality from a rationalist perspective, and this was Kohlberg's second great innovation: he used his research to build a scientific justification for a secular liberal moral order.

King rejects churches that embrace "a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, unbiblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular." But

Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.

Communes are good examples of co-operation without kinship. Sosis found that 6 per cent of secular communes were still in existence twenty years after their founding, as compared with 39 per cent of religious ones. In a follow-up study he found the more demanding the religious group, the longer its lifespan.2 Religion creates and sustains communities.

One of the most wonderful things about the Bible teaching is that we get rid of the distinction between the sacred and the secular. That is one of the most important steps in the whole history of the soul. God is present everywhere. For those who understand Jesus' teaching, it is always the Sabbath Day, and the place whereon they stand is holy ground.

liberty and the homeland of the Jews. Athenian democracy had shifted to Washington, and ancient Judaism had taken a secular form in the state of Israel.

My argument is that we will not be able to fight fundamentalism until we produce a modern progressive secular educated class of people who know the traditions and take the best of it.

let anyone using those weasel words "freedom of worship" know, they have "freedom of worship" in China and it is meaningless and it is vile. "Freedom of worship" says you may do what you like in that building on Sunday mornings or whenever you like, but when you come out you will bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state. That is the antithesis of what the Founders meant in guaranteeing "freedom of religion.

Wilberforce's decision to remain in politics made the transfer of Christian ideas into the previously "secular" realm of society possible for generations of Christians to follow.

I was born to a Hindu father and Muslim mother on Christmas day. You can't get more secular than that.

I felt it was a privilege that I came from such a rich background. I had the best of both worlds. My mother was a Shia Muslim, while my father was a janoi-clad man. He never pretended to be secular.

In the biblical worldview, the purpose of all creation is to benefit man. This anthropocentric view of nature, and indeed of the whole universe, is completely at odds with the current secular idealization of nature. This secular view posits that nature has its own intrinsic meaning and purpose, independent of man.

Sports are the ultimate secular religion. Instead of being worried about whether your kids will be okay or how your job is going, you have your team, and you can focus all of your angst and your hopes and dreams on your team. I am in no way saying it always relieves any of this!

The core of the person is what he or she loves, and that is bound up with what they worship - that insight recalibrates the radar for cultural analysis. The rituals and practices that form our loves spill out well beyond the sanctuary. Many secular liturgies are trying to get us to love some other kingdom and some other gods.

We need to agree on common values for all religions as soon as possible, a kind of secular Ten Commandments on which we will build the world of tomorrow.

Furthermore, in the 13th/19th century philosophy began to see itself as a complete replacement for religion as one can see in the rise of the very idea of ideology at that time, a term used widely today even by Muslims who rarely realize the essentially secular and anti-religious character of the very concept of ideology which has gradually come to replace traditional religion in so many circles.

We are coming into a season in which spiritual commissioning to a secular job is as important as a full-time ministry. Those in secular positions must have the same intensity of calling as those who have received a mandate for church ministry.

Consider what it might look like if we were without this divine grace in the Western world. We would probably become like many third world countries held hostage in poverty and hunger. Perhaps it would take time for our economic structures to collapse, but it would become obvious to everyone that we had been divinely blessed and that this blessing was no longer available. This is why it is so important for us—especially individuals in the secular arena—to humble ourselves.

In the first place, Hildegard calls for a marriage of science and spirituality. For religion and the secular sciences to be sundered as they currently are is a blunder of immense proportions on the part of our species—and with potentially dire consequences.

It is a terrible thing that religious people today can be so indifferent to the cruelty of the farms, shrugging it off as so much secular, animal rights foolishness. They above all should hear the call to mercy. They above all should have some kindness to spare.

Ideologies, and hence ideological clashes, antagonism, and fixations, are as old as civilization itself. During most of history, ideologies were mainly religious, whereas during modern times they have taken the form often described as secular religions or religion substitutes. They have always served to legitimize socioeconomic and political orders, or have projected alternatives to them.

In its secular rendering the unicorn was a creature of nobility and awesome though benign power. It was a creature of compassion, though solitary, and indomitably fierce