#secular

Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone one the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil-in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn't think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one's heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one's naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions. ↗

— Joseph Epstein

#conservatives #government #leftism #liberalism #liberals

The theological perspective of participation actually saves the appearances by exceeding them. It recognizes that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that for phenomena really to be there they must be more than there. Hence, by appealing to an eternal source for bodies, their art, language, sexual and political union, one is not ethereally taking leave of their density. On the contrary, one is insisting that behind this density resides an even greater density – beyond all contrasts of density and lightness (as beyond all contrasts of definition and limitlessness). This is to say that all there is only is because it is more than it is. (...) This perspective should in many ways be seen as undercutting some of the contrasts between theological liberals and conservatives. The former tend to validate what they see as the modern embrace of our finitude – as language, and as erotic and aesthetically delighting bodies, and so forth. Conservatives, however, seem still to embrace a sort of nominal ethereal distancing from these realities and a disdain for them. Radical orthodoxy, by contrast, sees the historic root of the celebration of these things in participatory philosophy and incarnational theology, even if it can acknowledge that premodern tradition never took this celebration far enough. The modern apparent embrace of the finite it regards as, on inspection, illusory, since in order to stop the finite vanishing modernity must construe it as a spatial edifice bound by clear laws, rules and lattices. If, on the other hand, following the postmodern options, it embraces the flux of things, this is an empty flux both concealing and revealing an ultimate void. Hence, modernity has oscillated between puritanism (sexual or otherwise) and an entirely perverse eroticism, which is in love with death and therefore wills the death also of the erotic, and does not preserve the erotic as far as an eternal consummation. In a bizarre way, it seems that modernity does not really want what it thinks it wants; but on the other hand, in order to have what it thinks it wants, it would have to recover the theological. Thereby, of course, it would discover also that that which it desires is quite other than it has supposed ↗

— John Milbank

#god #liberalism #philosophy #radical-orthdodoxy #secularism

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves. ↗

— M. H. Abrams

#century #enlightenment #major #philosophers #secular

وإذ تتحول التجربة إلى «أصل» فإنها تُثْقِل على كل التاريخ اللاحق، وذلك من حيث تغدو موضوعاً للامتثال والتكرار، بدل أن تكون ساحة للتمثُّل والحوار. وإذن، فإن «الأطلقة» - وليس سواها - هي ما يُحيل تجارب البشر من «تاريخ حي» إلى «نصٍ أو أصلٍ جامد» يقف خارجه؛ على النحو الذى يكون معه أشبه بالشاهد المصمت المُعلق على قبر صاحبه، والذي لا يعرف الخَلَف اللاحق إلا التعبُّد في ظلاله. وتلك هي جوهر الممارسة السلفية؛ على أن يكون معلوماً أن هذه الممارسة لا تقف عند حدود من يُقال أنهم سلفيو هذا الزمان، بل تتجاوزهم إلى من يُقال أنهم حداثيوه أيضاً. و سواء مورست هذه «الأطلقة»، تحت يافطة الدين أو العلمانية، فإنها تمثل خطراً داهماً على الدولة ↗

— علي مبروك

#religion #secularism #religion

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. ↗

— Bill O'Reilly

#exactly #exaggerating #face #front #guy

From my point of view, there is a tremendous amount to be said for secular humanism. ↗

— Vidal Sassoon

#humanism #point #point of view #said #secular

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

Secular humanists suspect there is something more gloriously human about resisting the religious impulse; about accepting the cold truth, even if that truth is only that the universe is as indifferent to us as we are to it. ↗

— Tom Flynn

#accepting #cold #even #gloriously #human

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence. ↗

— Yann Martel

#art #background #beyond #bounds #certainly

Psychologists have set about describing the true nature of women with a certainty and a sense of their own infallibility rarely found in the secular world. ↗

— Naomi Weisstein

#certainty #describing #found #infallibility #nature