Quotes About Secularism

For these Muslims, the real enemy—the thing they fear and hate—isn't Catholicism. It's secularism. It's laicism. It's atheist materialism. They think of Catholics as fellow believers. Catholicism is a religion of the Book. Catholics are one step away from converting to Islam—that's the true, original Muslim vision of Christianity.

I didn't blame Curtis for coming to what was nominally a Protestant church and expecting to hear about the Bible. I'd also had to adjust to the AUUCC's staunch secularism. Having been drawn there to grieve my mother, I would have loved some divine reassurance, but during my very first visit Sparlo said, "There are no answers, only the eternal questions," and I remember thinking, Damn, one more time, nobody's offering any certainty.

For millions of Arabs and Muslims, this universe of abstract systems, this world of Western freedom and individualism, constitutes the soullessness of modernity. The attack on the World Trade Center, in this interpretation, was not so much an attack on the United States, but on modernity—secular, non-tribal modernity—itself.

Atheism too has become a religion, just as their brothers and sisters who are theists by hearts and minds.

Atheists enjoy weekends, even though they are more religious, rather than scientific.

The spiritual starvation diet offered by secularism made people so hungry that they now eat anything.

I'm an atheist. I wouldn't even call myself an agnostic. I am an atheist.

Christians should be on the front lines fighting to liberate society from its captivity to secular worldviews.

As long as Christianity is treated as "moral poetry" and "tales of consolation," it poses no threat to the sovereignty of secularism.

Secular ideologies preach liberty, but they practice tyranny.

A secular approach to politics first took root in the universities, the seedbed where worldviews are planted and nurtured. As William Galston of the Brookings Institution explains, in the modern age, scholars decided that the study of politics must be "scientific"—by which they meant value free.1 As a consequence, political theory was no longer animated by a moral vision. It became purely pragmatic.

The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.

A Christian approach to any field needs to be both critical and constructive. We cannot simply borrow from the results of secular scholarship as though that were spiritually neutral territory discovered by people whose minds are completely open and objective- that is, *as though the fall had never happened*.

Secular ideologies preach liberty but practice tyranny.

The mask of secularism may differ in thickness, may be less visible, but religion is always there hidden under hallowed big beautiful words

los saberes humanísticos, la cultura y la enseñanza constituyen el líquido amniótico ideal en el que las ideas de democracia, libertad, justicia, laicidad, igualdad, derecho a la crítica, tolerancia, solidaridad, bien común, pueden experimentar un vigoroso desarrollo.

Não nos damos conta, de fato, de que a literatura e os saberes humanísticos, a cultura e a educação constituem o líquido amniótico ideal no qual podem se desenvolver vigorosamente as ideias de democracia, liberdade, justiça, laicidade, igualdade, direito à crítica, tolerância, solidariedade e bem comum.

The only way, they argued, to prevent a revolution was to rule Russia with an iron hand. This meant defending the autocratic principle, the unchecked powers of the police, the hegemony of the nobility, and the moral domination of the Church, against the liberal and secular challenges of the urban-industrialize order.

Neither secular progress nor secular progressives have brought the West where they once promised. Nor can they.

The modern world is highly secular in certain parts, and nowhere more than in the world of the educated elites. Such people are notoriously "tone deaf" and their natural habitat is "a world without windows," as Weber and Berger have described them.

As followers of Jesus, we must not duck the enormity of a simple but shattering fact: with relatively few exceptions, such as some branches of Buddhism, almost all the most militantly secularist societies in history have been the product of Christian societies. The church is a leading spawning ground for atheists.

Whether or not the Christian faith is true is now irrelevant. All that matters is that to more and more people in the modern world it no longer seems true.

Imperialism has not allowed us to achieve historical normality,' Octavio Paz lamented in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Paz was surveying the confused inheritance of Mexico from colonial rule, and the failure of its many political and socio-economic programmes, derived from Enlightenment principles of secularism and reason. Paz himself was convinced that Mexico had to forge a modern politics and economy for itself.

Nationalism has again become a seductive but treacherous antidote to an experience of disorder and meaninglessness: the unexpectedly rowdy anticlimax, in a densely populated world, of the Western European eighteenth-century dream of a universally secular, materialist and peaceful civilization.