#secular

Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America's oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream--not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I'll toast you from hell. ↗

— Joe Bageant

#christian #extremism #fundamentalism #ignorance #politics

Private religious speech can't be discriminated against. It has to be treated equally with secular speech. ↗

— Samuel Alito

#against #discriminated #equally #private #religious

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred. ↗

— David Antin

#casual #emphasize #i #sacred #secular

If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy. ↗

— Thomas Aquinas

#death #even #heresy #more #much

Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#been #center #different #different ways #drag

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction. ↗

— Joseph Addison

#deny #fact #ground #morality #obvious

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade. ↗

— Hannah Arendt

#authority #day #decade #defiance #established

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. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#convinced #every #fundamentalist #gut #i

But the West is trying to weaken Islam from outside and inside. They attack our people and invade our countries from outside, and they weaken us from within with ideas like secularism, liberalism and democracy. This is all designed to contaminate our pure Islam. ↗

— Abu Bakar Bashir

#contaminate #countries #democracy #designed #ideas

One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism. ↗

— Peter L. Berger

#christian #christian right #humanism #movements #reacting