The moment has come, as we enter the teenies, to forget the idea of a Palestinian state existing side by side with a Jewish state, and to argue and agitate instead for the only remaining, viable and democratic option: a single, secular and binational state for Israelis and Palestinians.
I was raised in a conservative Christian household. We weren’t even allowed to watch ‘secular’ television, anything that was deemed not proper for Christians.
Europe today is the most secular region in the world. Europe is the only region in the world experiencing population decline. Wherever you turn today the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families.
A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.
You grow up and recognize that in any educated secular society, there’s no excuse for ignorance. You have to recognize in yourself, and challenge yourself, that if you see racism or homophobia or misogyny in a secular society, as a member of that society, you should challenge it. You owe it to the betterment of society.
The BJP brand of Hindutva was originally rooted in middle-class disenchantment with secular hypocrisies; Modi’s version is defined simply by hard-edged hatred.
We weren’t allowed to have secular music in the house growing up. I was home-schooled, and gospel was the only choice we had.
I teach in the Divinity School at Duke University, a very secular university. But before Duke, I taught fourteen years at the University of Notre Dame.
The Church of Christ is constituted in two orders, the clergy and the people, the one having the care of the Church that all may be ruled for the salvation of souls; the other contains kings, princes, and nobles who have to carry on secular government that all things may lead to the peace and unity of the Church.
Historically, religion has often proved a more lethal and more divisive force than any secular ideology. It has also often been a more divisive force than race.
The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else – mind, spirit, morality, meaning – into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.
‘Snow’ is my most popular book in the United States. But in Turkey, it was not as popular as ‘My Name is Red,’ or even ‘The Museum of Innocence,’ because the secular leaders didn’t want this bourgeois Orhan trying to understand these head-scarf girls.
I grew up pretty secular. I went to public school, and all the Jews that I knew, none of them were religious. While probably half of my friends were Jewish, they were all secular Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we knew we were Jewish, but it wasn’t a major part of our existence.
You want to have two guys making out in front of your 4-year-old? It’s OK with them. A guy smoking a joint, blowing the smoke into your little kid’s face? OK with them. And I’m not exaggerating here. This is exactly what the secular movement stands for.
To think that the heritage of the West, including post-war liberalism, was a selfish, secular, practical arrangement of politics is a fiction.
Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.
A desire to rescue secular America from fallen grace has driven conservative evangelicals at least since the 1970s, when Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority as a vehicle for conservative Christians to muscle their way into national politics.
It’s strange because we think of the upper middle class, for example, as being secular, that they’ve fallen away from religion. Well, it turns out that the upper middle class goes to church more often and feels a much stronger affiliation with their religion than the white working class.
In America, you keep on hearing productivity is low; secular stagnation, it’s a new normal. It’s just not true: We’ve had multiple wars; we’re not educating our kids. We had government shut downs, badly-spent money, failures in the health system, failures and an extreme amount of regulation – that’s why we’re going slow.
No secular state ever existed and none would exist until the end of the French Revolution, and so we understand that America was built on the Judeo-Christian ethic and we believe that this nominee is going to see to it that those truths are upheld.
There’s one profound difference between secular and religious pilgrimages. It’s inconceivable that a Muslim would feel a sense of anticlimax when reaching Mecca. But for a secular pilgrim, the potential for disappointment is always there.
The focus of my research is how secular movements originated in West Asian countries and subsequently changed to pan-Islamic movements. The role of Western countries in this aspect is also a part of the research.
We have plenty of examples from twentieth-century history where, out of fear of liberalism or Communism, religious conservatives made alliances with secular populists and nationalists, and it ended up going pretty badly for everybody.
I’ve liked being Jewish in America – there’s a secular version of Jewishness there that’s more about bagels and jokes than going to synagogues.
When I was ordained as a pastor, I walked away from secular music for seven, eight years. It took me that time to learn that God is love.
Closely allied to the assumption that Democrats can’t win because they’re too secular is the view that they can’t win if they’re too liberal. This assumption has steered Hillary Clinton toward the center, following her husband. I tend to share this view myself.
Tel Aviv was established in 1909 by a group of secular Jewish families; Judaism’s origin story is about 2,000 years older.
Secular thinkers have a separation between thinking and doing. They don’t have a grasp of the balance sheet. The doers are selling us potted plants and pizzas while the thinkers are a little bit unworldly. Religions both think and do.
As far apart as they are theologically, Mormons and evangelical Christians may have more in common with each other anthropologically than they do with secular Americans watching ‘Big Love’ on HBO.
The reason Buddhism can be so naturalised is because, stripped of its supernatural elements, its core teachings can be giving a sound, secular philosophical interpretation. In other words, it becomes a religion acceptable to the contemporary, naturalistic mind only when it ceases to be a religion.
Not even the most secular among us can fail to be uplifted by Christianity’s architectural legacy – the great cathedrals. These immense and glorious buildings were erected in an era of constricted horizons, both in time and in space.
AAP does secular politics.
Our freedom fighters have struggled to oust imperial forces and establish a secular nation. It cannot be broken by the Sangh Parivar and Modi easily.
We have left and right; religious and secular; Druse; ultra-Orthodox women. Unity is very important.
Secular societies establish tolerance by being equally non-accommodating toward all religious demands within the public sphere.
Our secular culture is adrift in a sea of relativism, escapism, and self-indulgent inanities, with our media and entertainment elites leading the parade.
My family and I were welcomed to Canada more than 40 years ago. We sought and obtained refuge in a liberal, modern, and secular society, and put the ugliness of genocidal religious hate and associated tribalism behind us – or so we thought.
If we weren’t born with anti-social passions – narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious – why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?
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.
Can a secular artist be used as a vessel to bring souls to Christ? Of course… this is God we are talking about!
I come from a secular background.
The majority of Jews are secular… the Nazis never checked if anyone was going to the synagogue or eating kosher.
One of the features of a democracy is the disentanglement of the sacred from the secular because in religiously pluralistic countries, no one can legitimately claim special status by faith membership.
Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language.
Every fundamentalist movement I’ve studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.
The sad reality is that there are no purely domestic issues in Israel. Issues that would be dealt with by municipalities in other countries – such as how to deal with a dangerous bridge or how to resolve conflicts between religious and secular bus riders – become major international issues when they occur in Israel.
In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it’s a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.
