#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

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

— David Antin

#casual #emphasize #i #sacred #secular

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

All people, even secular people, are seeing books on the market like The End of History. ↗

— Tim LaHaye

#end #even #history #like #market

Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language. ↗

— Kenneth Burke

#how #language #light #nature #our

Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#before #everyone #him #i #liberating

The Way is not a religion: Christianity is the end of religion. 'Religion' means here the division between sacred and secular concerns, other-worldliness, man's reaching toward God in a way which projects his own thoughts. ↗

— David Kirk

#christianity #concerns #division #end #god

Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partly with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself. ↗

— Emma Goldman

#atheism #bravery #secular #change

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

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