#secular

Reading is the last act of secular prayer. ↗

— Richard Powers

#last #prayer #reading #secular

Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists. ↗

— Dennis Prager

#angry #atheism #atheists #more #people

As far as the public is concerned, India is amazingly secular. ↗

— Shahrukh Khan

#as far as #concerned #far #india #public

Secular writers can tell a story about the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual parts of a character. But no matter how well they tell the story, they miss a facet that is innately part of all of us - the spiritual. ↗

— Karen Kingsbury

#character #emotional #facet #how #innately

More recently, as faith gave way to materialism, anti-Semitism assumed a secular mode, harnessing itself to the dominant ideologies of both the Left and the Right. ↗

— Jack Schwartz

#assumed #both #dominant #faith #gave

Those who use religion for their own benefit are detestable. We are against such a situation and will not allow it. Those who use religion in such a manner have fooled our people; it is against just such people that we have fought and will continue to fight. ↗

— Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

#inspirational #religion #secularism #inspirational

It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church, and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government. ↗

— Roy Moore

#both #church #god #government #meant

I sometimes think that Thomas Cook should be numbered among the secular saints. He took travel from the privileged and gave it to the people. ↗

— Robert Runcie

#cook #gave #i #numbered #people

I believe that pluralistic secularism, in the long run, is a more deadly poison than straightforward persecution. ↗

— Francis Schaeffer

#deadly #i #i believe #i believe that #long

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about? Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#atheism #debate #ethics #existence #existentialism