#secular

Perhaps more than ever before, there is that aggressive secularism and there are those who would indeed try to destroy our Christian heritage and culture and take God from the public square. Religion must not be taken from the public square. ↗

— Keith O'Brien

#before #christian #culture #destroy #ever

The entity God created to traffic His transcendence has fallen far from its mission when it chooses instead to traffic what can be found on any street corner or at the local mall. You may ask, "But how has the church done that?" * By offering secularists what they find mildly interesting and calling it church. *By submitting to self-help sermons where encounter with God is not even on the agenda. * By letting the horizontal excellence of the show stand in for Vertical impact. *By substituting the surprise or shock of superficial entertainment for the supernatural. Church was designed to deliver what we were created to long for. Church must again be about a Vertical encounter that interrupts and alters everything. ↗

— James MacDonald

#purpose #secularists #transcendence #vertical #world

Better for them to deny the mind--and with it rationality, truth, and science itself--than to admit the soul. Once again, the secularist manifests the very dogmatism of which he accuses the religious believer, and in rationalizing it is willing to contemplate absurdities of which no religious believer has ever dreamed. ↗

— Edward Feser

#secularism #dreams

Christians walk as strangers in the world: They are untamed. They are free. To persevere with love, yet untamed by man, is often what leaves that open space for divine revelation when God so wills. ↗

— Criss Jami

#apologetics #christianity #christians #divine #divine-intervention

But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter's forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#russia #secularism #education

My people are going to learn the principles of democracy the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will, every man can follow his own conscience provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow men. ↗

— Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

#religion #secularism #men

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#religion #secularism #art

Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas. ↗

— Ronald Reagan

#secular #separation-of-church-and-state #teacher

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. ↗

— Henry Van Dyke

#comes #critic #dismal #every #every man

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#alabama #biologically #evolution #freshman #freshman year