Quotes About Secularism

The delicate task that faces our civilization today is not to reform the secular, rationalist orthodoxy, which has passed beyond the point of redemption. Rather, it is to breathe new life into the older, now largely comatose, religious orthodoxies—while resisting the counterculture as best we can, adapting to it and reshaping it where we cannot simply resist.

We in our secular, rationalist world are utterly unprepared for such existential-spiritual spasms. For one thing, we do not study the history of religion in any serious way, even for explanations of religious phenomena. Instead, we look for sociological explanations, or economic explanations, or even political explanations, and we do so precisely because we find it almost impossible to posit spiritual appetites and spiritual passions as independent, primary forces in human history.

The public school has become the established church of secular society.

Prohibiting a visible religious sign, which isn't a manifestation of militancy, would look like a fight against religions.

The Communist vision is the vision of man without God.

Education was in danger from the source that always hampered it—religious fanaticism.

3. Secular ideas have replaced the traditional view.

Once objective duty, goodness, and virtue were abandoned under the guise of scientism and secularism, the only moral map that could replace objective morality is what Daniel Callahan has called minimalistic ethics —anything is morally permissible provided only that you do not harm someone else.

I decided to take God and organized religion seriously, and to reject the secular life which in my teens had looked attractive because it allowed me to act in any way that I wanted.

Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

To imply that religious believers have no right to engage moral questions in the public square or at the ballot is simply to establish a Reichian secularism as our state faith.

Most atheists bristle at the thought that atheism has anything to do with faith, but not Penn Jillette.

I believe that secularism is not the enemy of spirituality. Our spirits are in fact secular and free. But the enemy of your spirit is materialism which produces legalism.

To imply that religious believers have no right to engage moral questions in the public square or at the ballot is simply to establish a Reichian secularism as our state faith.

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.

Religious lobbyists have used the "secularism" and "discrimination" arguments to cover their voracious and seemingly insatiable demands to obtain rights to act however they choose. They "need" legislatures to help them, because they are so weak and so discriminated against, or at least that is their shtick.

No gods, no masters.

Secular self-assertion, perhaps inevitably, developed more slowly; it was one thing to act in 'unfeminine' ways if divinely inspired, not quite so easy to act unconventionally out of personal ambition.

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

There is no god, there is no god, there is no god at all. He who invented god is a fool. He who propagates god is a scoundrel. He who worships god is a barbarian.

Secular humanism rightly looks to reason and science, but lingering there is not enough. Religions hasten to tie secularism down to materialism, and link materialism with egoism, nihilism, and anarchy. Compared to that portrayal, spirituality or even supernaturalism might look sane and safe.

Secular humanism finds that human life is meaningful and worthy, for no better reason than we judge life to be meaningful and worthy. Needing to be told by a higher authority how life is meaningful only deprives our lives of their intrinsic worth. Dignity and autonomy cannot depend on someone else, not even a god, who decides that you are worthy—one must affirm one's own right to live for oneself.

I argue that most of the moral development of the past several centuries has been the result of secular not religious forces, and that the most important of these that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment are science and reason, terms that I use in the broadest sense to mean reasoning through a series of arguments and then confirming that the conclusions are true through empirical verification.

highly secularised countries like Sweden and Denmark, where rates of religiosity are among the lowest in the world, seem not to have much death anxiety at all