Quotes About Secularism

This ideology failed because it was a profoundly inauthentic prescription: it is humanly impossible to genuinely respect beliefs no matter how irrational, immoral, or absurd. The resulting culture was emotionally frozen and often did not lead to fruitful discussion between worldviews in general, and between secularism and religion in particular.

European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular. That conviction has had crucial, indeed lethal, consequences or European public life and European culture.

I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the Gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the Earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.

The secular mind and heart, however gifted and personally charming, has no place in the leadership of the church.

While the Christian faith clearly teaches that believers are to be involved as good citizens in the state, nevertheless, it is obvious why so many secularists are addicted to politics because political power is a surrogate for a Higher Power.

The modern Muslim state has never presented itself as secular. Muslim nationalist forces, trapped by a militant and colonialist West unable to share or export its humanism, were driven to build up a rampart, to entrench themselves within the past.

Well, I myself am a 100% atheist. And I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which dominates our entire life, is assuming a more and more religious character.

Nothing—not even the US Army—more threatens the future of a democratic, pluralistic and (dare we wish, secular) Iraq than the political ascendancy of Islamic fascists like Al Sadr.

Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.

The secular" is conceptually prior to the political doctrine of "secularism", that over time a variety of concepts, practices and sensibilities have come together to form "the secular".

Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan were self-proclaimed atheists.

Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.

I'm not looking ahead joyfully to the rest of my life or the future of the human race. I've always written about man as an animal species among other animals, competing for limited resources. Our population is exploding. Our environment is dying. Science has debunked God.

I am an atheist, and I believe that religion should not be in the classrooms; it has to be in the churches. In the classrooms, you have to form citizenship, not people with religious beliefs, that corresponds to the private sphere.

Freedom of religion does not entitle your religion to have a privileged position within the public sphere.

If there can be Muslim and Christian countries, why can't there be a Hindu country?

I don't think it's a good thing to have Christian states, Muslim states, or any kind of ethnic states.

There are some who believe that secularism and Islam are not compatible. But Muslims should show everyone that this is not the case. It's up to them to show that you can be French and Muslim and still respect secular rules.

And also a lot of Muslims are no more religious then the average Swede. For them it's natural that human rights come first.

I absolutely refuse to associate myself with anyone who cannot discern the essential night-and-day difference between theocratic fascism and liberal secular democracy, even less do I want to engage with those who are incapable of recognizing the basic moral distinction between premeditated mass murder and unintentional killing.

Find a society that's adopted the teachings of Spinoza, Voltaire, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and gone down the pits—as a result of doing that—into famine and war and dictatorship and torture and repression. That's the experiment I would like to run. I don't think that's going to end up with a gulag.

The Dalai Lama, for example, is entirely and easily recognizable to a secularist. In exactly the same way as a medieval princeling, he makes the claim not just that Tibet should be independent of Chinese hegemony—a "perfectly good" demand, if I may render it into everyday English—but that he himself is a hereditary king appointed by heaven itself. How convenient! Dissenting sects within his faith are persecuted; his one-man rule in an Indian enclave is absolute;

The Constitution provides for freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

Men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion.