America’s freedom of religion, and freedom from religion, offers every wisdom tradition an opportunity to address our soul-deep needs: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, secular humanism, agnosticism and atheism among others.
Secular
Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.
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.
I’d like the United States to become what it was always meant to be, which is a secular nation – more publicly committed to reason, to improving understanding, and promoting education.
Strong Islamist trends make a fundamentalist Palestine more likely than a small state under a secular government.
The core of the person is what he or she loves, and that is bound up with what they worship – that insight recalibrates the radar for cultural analysis. The rituals and practices that form our loves spill out well beyond the sanctuary. Many secular liturgies are trying to get us to love some other kingdom and some other gods.
One can’t understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive – they’re reacting to what they call secular humanism.
More people need to understand the games secular liberals play. Here’s one rule-of-thumb: No matter how bad a story sounds – particularly if it sounds bad – recognize the pattern of defamation.
The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.
Contrary to what many Westerners believe, Islam has a rich tradition of secular painting in spite of its ban on images. It is only in religious rituals that the use of pictorial representation is totally prohibited.