Secular Quotes - Page 11

• Secular humanists should recognize those forms of religion as allies in the struggle for human advancement. They should also learn from them, as they try to build a fully secular world in which people can have the opportunity to live rich and fulfilling lives.

  Philip Kitcher

  Struggle, Opportunity, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• To me music is music. A person of faith, a person that calls themselves a Christian, they are the Christian and they make music. Some music has more to do about God than other music, but in reality what makes the difference between "secular" and "Christian" music is simply a marketing channel.

  Michael Gungor

  Christian, Reality, Differences

  Source: mousertime.blogspot.com

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• The distinction between the religious and secular orders is a fundamental aspect of Christianity. This distinction is an innovation compared to Islam and Judaism, and it is an advantage that has helped shape Europe.

  Walter Kasper

  Religious, Order, Europe

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I think the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is sixteen tends toward the elimination of religious superstition.

  Paul Blanshard

  Christian, Religious, Educational

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• What Alpha offers, and what is attracting thousands of people, is permission, rare in secular culture, to discuss the big questions - life and death and their meaning.

  Madeleine Bunting

  People, Life And Death, Culture

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• As women are taking an active part in pressing on the consideration of Congress many narrow sectarian measures, such as more rigid Sunday laws, the stopping of travel, the distribution of the mail on that day, and the introduction of the name of God into the Constitution; and as this action on the part of some women is used as an argument for the disfranchisement of all, I hope this convention will declare that the Woman Suffrage Association is opposed to all union of Church and State, and pledges itself as far as possible to maintain the secular nature of our Government.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Sunday, Names, Government

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• Kafka's writings often display an insidious power to describe a wholly secular and "factical" world in which the eerie or "unheimlich" elements gang up behind or beneath the ego's awareness and immerse it in a waking dream of something Other, an alien world-order similar to ancient irrationalist cultures (in transition from primitivism to civilized mythos-culture).

  Kenny Smith

  Dream, Writing, Order

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• The courts used to be, fair and square, the avengers of secular crimes; but nowadays they demand respect even for the criminal.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Respect, Squares, Justice

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• I think this is why the practice is such a comfort to secular urbanites like me-it's a technique, not a faith. You don't have to believe in anything, even yoga itself, to find joy and solace in the conscious joining of breath and movement, or relief in slowing the whirling of the mind. You just have to do it.

  Michelle Goldberg

  Yoga, Believe, Thinking

  Michelle Goldberg (2015). “The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West”, p.10, Vintage

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• Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the 'last man' he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.

  John Carroll

  Religious, Men, Comfort

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.78, Taylor & Francis

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• In India in particular, where millions have no home but the streets, virtually every life event is carried out in public: prayer, eating, sleeping, nursing, crude dentistry, even bodily functions. In the secular West, where nothing is sacred, everything seems hidden; yet in Asia, where nothing is hidden, everything is sacred.

  Steve McCurry

  Prayer, Home, Sleep

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• But when we reduce sex to a function, we also invoke the idea of dysfunction. We are no longer talking about the art of sex; rather, we are talking about the mechanics of sex. Science has replaced religion as the authority; and science is a more formidable arbiter. Medicine knows how to scare even those who scoff at religion. Compared with a diagnosis, what's a mere sin? We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.

  Esther Perel

  Religious, Art, Sex

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• Deflation and secular stagnation are the risks of our time.

  Lawrence Summers

  Inspiring, Risk, Economic

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• If you create enough space in Egypt, civil society will revive itself, and then will you have all of these secular forces, liberals, nationalists and others, compete with the Islamists. And then you will see the Islamists reduced to their size.

  Hisham Melhem

  Space, Egypt, Size

  "After Egypt's 'Cosmic' Day, Will Army Usher in Democratic, Civilian Government?". "PBS NewsHour" with Jim Lehrer, www.pbs.org. February 11, 2011.

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• The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Believe, Denial, World

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• The ultra-right would have us believe that families are in trouble because of humanism, feminism, secular education, or sexual liberation, but the consensus of Americans is that what tears families apart is unemployment, inflation, and financial worries.

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Believe, Worry, Feminism

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin (1983). “Family politics: love and power on an intimate frontier”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• Sons or fathers, poor men or rich men, sacred or secular: all are homosexual in their worship of everything phallic.

  Phyllis Chesler

  Father, Son, Men

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• Have we come to the point where it is now considered a secular blasphemy to acknowledge the name of God at all?

  William Bennett

  Christian, Religious, Names

  William John Bennett (1994). “The De-valuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children”, p.206, Simon and Schuster

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• There is nothing - not any religious or secular body of work - that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.

  Dennis Prager

  Religious, Civilization, Progress

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• Hope and optimism are different. Optimism tends to be based on the notion that there's enough evidence out there to believe things are gonna be better, much more rational, deeply secular, whereas hope looks at the evidence and says, "It doesn't look good at all. Doesn't look good at all. Gonna go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever." That's hope. I'm a prisoner of hope, though. Gonna die a prisoner of hope.

  Cornel West

  Believe, Odds, People

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• The safest way for a state is to lay down the rule that religion is comprised solely in the exercise of charity and justice, and that the rights of rulers in sacred, no less than in secular matters, should merely have to do with actions, but that every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Exercise, Men, Thinking

  "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" by Baruch Spinoza, ch. 20, 1677.

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• Secular humanism debases the human.

  Sinclair B. Ferguson

  Secular Humanism, Humans, Humanism

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• Paul Brunton was surely one of the finest mystical flowers to grow on the wasteland of our secular civilization. What he has to say is important to us all.

  Georg Feuerstein

  Flower, Civilization, Important

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• Iraq's always been very secular.

  William Kristol

  Iraq

  "Christofer Cerf and Victor Navasky on Iraq". "Bill Moyers Journal", billmoyers.com. May 2, 2008.

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• This is what is meant by "sacrifice", literally, the "making sacred" of an animal consumed for dinner. Yet sacrfice, because it dwells on the death, is a concept often shocking to the secular modern Western mind - to people who calmly organize daily hecatombs of beasts, and who are among the most death-dealing carnivores the world has ever seen.

  Margaret Visser

  Food, Sacrifice, Animal

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