Secularism Quotes

It seems true that the growth of science and secularism made organized Christianity feel under threat. (Mary Douglas)

But the West is trying to weaken Islam from outside and inside. They attack our people and invade our countries from outside, and they weaken us from within with ideas like secularism, liberalism and democracy. This is all designed to contaminate our pure Islam.

Abu Bakar Bashir

... generally speaking, Muslim tolerance of unbelievers was far better than anything available in Christendom, until the rise of secularism in the 17th century.

Bernard Lewis

I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don't constitute works of political philosophy but rather writings that stand in utter contradiction to concepts like logic, freedom, feminism, secularism, brotherhood - which are my ideals.

Michel Onfray

Catholics and evangelicals need to remain allied, and in solidarity, against the increasingly aggressive secularism of our age.

Gary Bauer

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

French laicite is probably aggressive and antagonistic to the religion, but there are other models of secularism in the world where there could be reconciliation between religion and secularism.

Rashid al-Ghannushi

For me, development gives strongest foundation to the secularism.

Narendra Modi

In this type of the [...] every five years, the secularism is changing the meaning. So now I am thinking that I must come with a new meaning of the secularism.

Narendra Modi

In general, Western culture is deeply post-Christian. It is the product of the Enlightenment, which introduced into European culture the leaven of secularism that has by now permeated Western society. While most of the original Enlightenment thinkers were themselves theists, the majority of Western intellectuals today no longer considers theological knowledge to be possible. The person who follows the pursuit of reason unflinchingly toward its end will be atheistic or, at best, agnostic.

William Lane Craig

That dualism of the Church and the Chapel taken together has been one of the most potent influences in the life of our country. The one fostering, perhaps, more than the other, the respect for authority and tradition and the sense of historical continuity; the other laying its main emphasis on individual obedience to eternal law. They both have defects of their qualities, but they have both been, and are, and will be great social forces with great political consequences. Both at their best penetrate life with serious purpose, and are in constant war with that spirit of secularism which finds its paradise in idleness and frivolity, with which no country can ever prosper. (Stanley Baldwin)

After all the wild claims made about their findings, the experts themselves have finally spoken... In a normal setting, the ASI findings should finish once and for all the campaign of history denial by the Marxists and their Muslim camp followers. But the world of Indian secularism is a fantasy-land where hard facts don't count for much. So, a great many diehards unflinchingly reject the findings of science.

Koenraad Elst

In the West, secularism implies pinpricking religious fraud and arrogance, but in India, secularists are the most eloquent defenders of myth and theocracy.

Koenraad Elst

The secular intelligentsia... could reasonably have taken the position that a temple was indeed demolished to make way for a mosque but that we should let bygones be bygones. Instead, they went out of their way to deny facts of history. Rajiv Gandhi thought he could settle this dispute with some Congressite horse-trading: give the Hindus their toy in Ayodhya and the Muslims some other goodies, that will keep everyone happy. But this solution became unfeasible when many academics construed this contention as a holy war for a frontline symbol of secularism.

Koenraad Elst

Ever since I have been writing on secularism and religious conflict, and particularly about Islam, I have had plenty of mud thrown at me. What I have never seen so far is an actual refutation of my central theses.

Koenraad Elst

This is not an idealization but a firm reality : no matter what the "evils of Hindu society" may have been, subjecting the individual's freedom of religion to any public authority is not one of them. No wonder that Voltaire, who strongly opposed the Church's totalitarian grip over men's lives, and may count as one of the ideologues of secularism, mentioned the religions of India and China as a model of how religion could be a free exploration by the individual.

Koenraad Elst

Of course we may assume many general and non-historical meanings for secularism, but turning a subject that is in all its existence a historical matter into a non-historical matter is a blatant mistake.

Mohammad Khatami

Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European.

Mark Steyn

We all know that the besetting danger of Churches is formalism; the besetting danger of State action, of corporate action, is officialism and mechanism; and we all know that it is a drawback to many modern ideals that they rest upon materialism and a soulless secularism.

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn

What you see today is a clear example of what happens when religion is directly involved with the government. One should not confuse secularism with something that may sound like you are against religion. It is in everyone's interest to have a clear line of separation.

Reza Pahlavi

Bourgeois triumph thus imbued the French Revolution with the agnostic or secular-moral ideology of the eighteenth century enlightenment, and since the idiom of that revolution became the general language of all subsequent social revolutionary movements, it transmitted this secularism... (Eric Hobsbawm)

But there is an even more potent cause for the near total erasure of such material from our public discourse and our instruction. And that is the form of "secularism” which we have practised these forty-five years: a "secularism” in which double-standards have been the norm, one in which everything that may remove the dross by which our national identity has been covered has become anathema.

Arun Shourie

A [...] form of present-day secularism is activism, which discounts contemplation and all interiority.

Henri de Lubac

Well, I don't think there are any methodological conflicts either. As for those social conflicts, those aren't conflicts-in my opinion-between science and religion. They're conflicts between Christians and atheists or Christians and secularists: Christians want to do things one way, secularists want to do things another way. But that's not a science/religion conflict at all. You might as well say it's a science/secularism conflict. In each case, each group wants to do science and then use it in a certain way.

Alvin Plantinga

Those people overseas didn't go to Ivy League schools... Well, we're so sophisticated, we think we've got everything figured out. We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn't real, we know about all this stuff. And if we've been in many schools, in the most advanced schools, we have been inundated with skepticism and secularism. And, uh, overseas they're simple, humble. You tell 'em God loves 'em and they say, "Okay, he loves me". You say God will do miracles and they say, "Okay, we believe him."

Pat Robertson

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