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Secularism Quotes

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Secularism Quotes

“When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather VINDICTIVENESS. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.”

JusticeSinChristianityMoralityForgivenessSocial MediaSecularism
Author:Alan Jacobs
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“I finished kindergarten and 3 grades in Russia. I don't really remember anyone talking about religion back there. Over here kids start asking me stupid shit right away... like ARE YOU JEWISH. ARE YOUR PARENTS RICH... obviously not. Now, I have a question for YOU. Are those things supposed to go together somehow? Will you give me lots of money if I give you a little part of penis perhaps? How does that whole Making money out of nothing scheme work exactly? I've been trying to figure this shit out for 20+ years now. Mnuchin promised people like me 1200 bucks a month ago. I still didn't get shit. WTF. Im pretty sure he said "Immediately" TWO MONTHS ago.”

JusticeMoneyEconomicsCovid 19Work EthicSecularismStimulusTreasury
Author:Dmitry Dyatlov
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“Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.”

WarChristianityHistoryDemocracyIsraelLondonRussiaOppressionFranceTortureBritainTerritoryWorld War IFree SpeechColonialismPersecutionPalestineDiplomacySecularismFanaticism19th CenturyAncestryJerusalemReligious ExtremismEthnic CleansingJewsArmageddonLeftismAntisemitismBolshevismCrimeaPalestiniansArabsZealotryHouse ArrestPhilip RothBedouinCrimean WarRamallahArthur BalfourRaimonda Tawil
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“We Are Freedom Fighters (Sonnet 2260) Right to leave religion is just as fundamental as right to religion. Freedom of dress is just as important as freedom of the press. Freedom to breastfeed without shame is just as sacred as freedom to pray. Freedom to choose not to have child is just as respectable as motherhood. Freedom to love outside tradition is just as divine as jesus on the mount. Freedom to dream across color and collar is just as elemental as drinking water. Any halfwit can write Declaration of Independence, while denying people's rights behind closed doors. My Declaration of World Independence is this, rights of another only enhance my own.”

FreedomSlaveryFeministCivil RightsAbortionLgbtqFundamentalismSecularismIndependence DayInclusive
Book:Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper
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“Well, grief can lead some people to dark places from where they simply never return. I have seen it often. People constricting around an absence, growing hard and mad and furious at the world, and never recovering. There is nothing to lead them from the abyss. And beyond that, too, I think the point-blank rejection of all spiritual matters as mere nonsense has its own problems. I'm talking about the outright rejection of religion by some who basically see it as a kind of inherent evil. That stance is a denial of all the potential good religion brings: the comfort, the succour, the redemption, the community. This thinking can bring its own kind of nothingness - not always, of course, but often. And, as we are seeing, people find a version of religion elsewhere, in tribalism, in their identity, in politics, for God's sake, in possessions. Look at our glorious secular world as it stands today. To me, secularism can also feel like a kind of hardening around an absence.”

GodReligionGriefChristianitySecularism
Book:Faith, Hope and Carnage
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“I decide what I am, and I decide the parameters of what I am - for example, I can be a monk and still fall in love, just like, I can be a muslim poet, and still consider the koran to be flawed - I can be a theologian of any faith, and consider all the scriptures to be a mix of good and bad - my mind is the measure, not convention; life is my constitution, not tradition. This is how I created whatever I've created, not in defiance of convention, but indifference - I built my universe, aloof from foolish fractures, to men of ritual it's a terrible sacrilege.”

ReasonTheologyDivinityHumanistSufismDogmaFundamentalismSecularismNonsectarianismFree Thinker
Book:The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology
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“Thomas Paine invented the name of the Age of Reason; and he was one of those sincere but curiously simple men who really did think that the age of reason was beginning, at about the time when it was really ending. Being a secularist of the most simple-minded sort, he naturally aroused angry passions at the moment, as does any poor fellow who stands on a chair and tries to heckle heaven in Hyde Park. But considering him in retrospect, the modern world will be more disposed to wonder at his belief than at his unbelief. The denial of Christianity is as old as Christianity; we might well say older. The anti-clerical will probably last as long as the Church, which will last as long as the world. But it is doubtful when we shall see again the positive side of Paine's philosophy; the part that was at once credulous and creative. It is impossible, alas, for us to believe that a Republic will put everything right, that elections everywhere will ensure equality for all. For him the Church was at best a beautiful dream and the Republic a human reality today it is his Republic that is the beautiful dream. There was in that liberalism much of the leisure of the eighteenth-century aristocrats who invented it; and much of the sheltered seclusion also. The garden which Voltaire told a man to cultivate was really almost as innocent as the garden of Eden. But the young men who saw such visions were none the less seeing visions of paradise, though it was an earthly paradise. Rationalism is a romance of youth. There is nothing very much the matter with the age of reason; except, alas, that it comes before the age of discretion.”

ReasonSecularismRationalismThomas Paine
Book:William Cobbett
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“I don't live, I combust (Constitution of Humanity, S.2708) I'm not a nerd, I'm the manufacturing plant of humanitarian nerds, whose nationality is humanity, whose worship is reason, whose madness is world uplift, whose culture is integration. I don't think, I roar. I don't write, I pour. I don't live, I combust, so you may outgrow the shore. I'm not a citizen of the planet, I'm the Engine of Earth Society. I'm bound by no constitution, I'm the Constitution of Humanity. Cleansed of all newage gullibility, immunized against organized bigotry, neither vegetable nor animal, cometh the call, cometh the tsunami.”

SacrificeScientistSocial JusticeHumanitarianService Of HumanityActivistHumanitarianismSecularismFreedom FighterHumanitarian Aid
Book:Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
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“Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.”

LifeDeathLiteratureMusicFeminismIraqTerrorismPakistanSecularismAl QaedaOsama Bin LadenTheocracyExorcismArab SpringIslamism2011September 11 AttacksDeath Of Osama Bin LadenSunni IslamAbu Musab Al ZarqawiAl Qaeda In Iraq
Book:The Enemy
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“Masterclass for Humans (The Sonnet) Only the Native Americans are real Americans, Everybody else is an immigrant. Before you tell someone to go back to their country, Start by heading back to Britain yourself. Only Indigenous people are real Canadians, Kiwis, and Aussies, everybody else is an immigrant. Before you yell slurs at an immigrant of today, Start by heading back to Europe yourself. Turkey was transformed by one man, Upon the foundation of thoughts most rational. Before you bring back the days of fanaticism, Start by taking down the statues of Mustafa Kemal. India never had any organized religion, Brahmin barbarians peddled a myth to have control. Before you cremate a secular beacon into safron ashes, Wipe out all memories of Kabir, Ambedkar and Tagore. From discrimination to assimilation, That's how we walk the course of progress. Till every trace of intolerance is history, Keep on struggling against mindlessness.”

IntoleranceColonialismAmerican HistoryWhite SupremacySecularismDiversity And InclusionHate CrimeSystemic RacismCultural IntegrationIndigenous Rights
Book:Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo
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“Naskar, The Origin Story (Sonnet 1999) Naren, Subhas, Abhijit, three vessels, one spirit. All three spring from paramhansa, in paramhansa we three perish. One mission, three vessels - one teacher, three students. Erase the one teacher, and you erase our driving promise. Before the scientist emerged poet, he was but a wandering monk - born nirvikalpa from sahasrara Gadadhar - Naren, Subhas, Abhijit, are not three but one. Awake, arise, adopt the world! Give me brains, and give me heart. Whenever fear and fanaticism take hold, from amongst you will rise a Naskar.”

ToleranceIntoleranceNondualityAdvaitaSecularismFanaticismNaskarNaskarismAbhijit Naskar
Book:Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood
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“It pains me to say this, today's humans only look human, but act like animals. They judge before they understand - they conclude before they realize - they proclaim before they recognize. They talk about harmony yet in their psyche they are more broken and conflicted than a broken glass. As a result, harmony has become yet another pompous ideology for them to take pride in, without sacrificing anything on their part - they simply talk about harmony while desperately clinging to their own beloved tribal labels and expect peace to manifest magically out of thin air. That's not how harmony works my friend.”

HarmonyHumanitarianWise SayingsWorld PeaceSecularismSectarianismPeace And HarmonyCivilized BeingsUniversal Harmony
Book:Fabric of Humanity
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“Be one and be civilized. By civilized I don't mean that phony kind of civilized pretense where you pretend to be egalitarian, yet the moment your kid brings home a partner of color, or of a different religion, you instantaneously burst out in shock and try either to break them apart by all cheap means available, or to convert your future in-law into your own religion. Such primitive act is no different from the acts of terrorism.”

ReligionSpiritualityRacismHarmonyDiscriminationBigotryFundamentalismSecularismCivilized SocietyCivilized Behavior
Book:Fabric of Humanity
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“How to tell a human from ape, when both look the same? Look for the creature that considers everyone outside their religion a heathen, and everyone outside their culture a heretic - that's a textbook ape. Now look for the being that finds the same human spirit in every culture, religion and nation - that right there, is a rare human specimen.”

FaithToleranceBigotryIntoleranceSecularFundamentalismMulticulturalismSecularismInterfaithInclusive
Book:Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper
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