#secularism

The process of secularisation arises not from the loss of faith but from the loss of social interest in the world of faith. It begins the moment men feel that religion is irrelevant to the common way of life and that society as such has nothing to do with the truths of faith. ↗

— Christopher Henry Dawson

#faith #history #religion #secularism #faith

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

The secularizing 'values' and events that have been predicted would happen in the Muslim world have now begun to unfold with increasing momentum and persistence due still to the Muslims' lack of understanding of the true nature and implications of secularization as a philosophical program. ↗

— Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas

#secularization #nature

I want the French people to respect values that allow each individual to practice his or her faith, but in the frame of our common rules of secularism. ↗

— Francois Hollande

#common #each #faith #frame #french

It seems true that the growth of science and secularism made organized Christianity feel under threat. ↗

— Mary Douglas

#feel #growth #made #organized #science

To imply that religious believers have no right to engage moral questions in the public square or at the ballot is simply to establish a Reichian secularism as our state faith. ↗

— Maggie Gallagher

#believers #engage #establish #faith #imply

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

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#fanatic #irrationality #secularism #love