The term “secular” generally refers to things that are not religious or not directly connected to religious or spiritual matters. It can have different meanings depending on the context in which it is used. Here are a few common interpretations of the term:
Secularism: Secularism is a principle or ideology that advocates for the separation of religious and governmental institutions. It promotes the idea that religion should not have a privileged position in the affairs of the state and that religious beliefs should not dictate public policy or laws. Secularism aims to ensure equality and freedom of religion or belief for all individuals, regardless of their religious or non-religious affiliations.
Secular society: A secular society is one in which the influence of religion is minimized or restricted in public life. It is characterized by a diverse range of religious beliefs and non-religious worldviews coexisting within a framework of shared values and principles that are not based solely on religious doctrines. In a secular society, individuals have the freedom to practice their religion or follow no religion at all, and the state remains neutral in matters of faith.
Secular education: Secular education refers to an educational system or approach that is not based on religious teachings or doctrines. It is a system that provides education without promoting or favoring any particular religious belief system. Instead, secular education focuses on imparting knowledge and skills in various academic disciplines while encouraging critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and respect for diverse perspectives and beliefs.
Secular ethics: Secular ethics is an ethical framework that does not rely on religious or supernatural beliefs for its foundations. It seeks to develop moral principles and values based on reason, empathy, and humanistic principles. Secular ethics often emphasizes concepts such as human rights, justice, compassion, and the well-being of individuals and society as a whole.
These are just a few examples of how the term “secular” can be understood and applied in different contexts. It is important to note that interpretations of secularism can vary across cultures and societies, and the implementation of secular principles can differ depending on the specific legal and cultural frameworks of a given country or region.
Secular Quotes
1. “Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . We need believing people.”
— Adolf Hitler
2. “Secular humanists suspect there is something more gloriously human about resisting the religious impulse; about accepting the cold truth, even if that truth is only that the universe is as indifferent to us as we are to it.”
— Tom Flynn
3. “n our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out.”
— Tom Hiddleston
4. “Religion says earn your life. Secular society says create your life. Jesus says, ‘My life for your life.”
— Timothy Keller
5. “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”
— George Bernard Shaw
6. “In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.”
— John Taylor Gatto
7. “Although the Nasser revolution of 1952 was secular, the culture remained deeply religious – but it was a faith of moderation and tolerance. Women made up nearly half my class at university, and my senior academic adviser there was a woman. In Alexandria, my friends were Christians and Muslims.”
— Ahmed H. Zewail
8. “One of the greatest dangers is secular religion – state worship.”
— Noam Chomsky
9. “The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.”
— Gilbert K. Chesterton
10. “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
— Thomas Paine
11. “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
— Richard Dawkins
12. “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.”
— Thomas Jefferson
13. “And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”
— James Madison
14. “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.”
— Benjamin Franklin
15. “Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.”
— Richard Dawkins
16. “The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.”
— Benjamin Franklin
17. “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”
— Seneca the Younger
18. “The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.”
— Aristotle
19. “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
— Epicurus
20. “Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.”
— Epicurus
21. “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”
— Mark Twain
22. “My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go.”
— Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
23. “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
— Douglas Adams
24. “Religions are all alike- founded upon fables and mythologies.”
— Thomas Jefferson
25. “A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.”
— Mark Twain
26. “Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.”
— Robert Green Ingersoll
27. “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
— Thomas Jefferson
28. “The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”
— Steven Weinberg
29. “The Church says the Earth is flat. But I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the Moon. And I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.”
— Robert Green Ingersoll
30. “Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
— Albert Einstein
31. “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise…. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”
— James Madison
32. “It was the schoolboy who said, Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
— Mark Twain
33. “Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.”
— Madalyn Murray O’Hair
34. “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”
— Thomas Jefferson
35. “The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.”
— Richard Dawkins
36. “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.”
— John Adams
37. “Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
— Epicurus
38. “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”
— Thomas Paine
39. “[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
— James Madison
40. “Faith: not wanting to know what is true.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
41. “I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved – the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!”
— John Adams
42. “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.”
— James Madison
43. “Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to secure & perpetuate it needs them not.”
— James Madison
44. “Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
45. “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.”
— Thomas Jefferson
46. “Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.”
— Thomas Paine
47. “The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature. . . . [In] the formation of the American governments . . . it will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of heaven. . . . These governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.”
— John Adams
48. “Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.”
— Henry Van Dyke
49. “. . . Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.”
— John Adams
50. “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
— Richard Dawkins
51. “If we maintain the open-mindedness of children, we challenge fixed ideas and established structures, including our own. We listen to people in other denominations and religions. We don’t find demons in those with whom we disagree. We don’t cozy up to people who mouth our jargon. If we are open, we rarely resort to either-or: either creation or evolution, liberty or law, sacred or secular, Beethoven or Madonna. We focus on both-and, fully aware that God’s truth cannot be imprisoned in a small definition.”
— Brennan Manning
52. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
— James Madison
53. “I’m not against religion in the sense that I feel I can’t tolerate it, but I think written into the rubric of religion is the certainty of its own truth. And since there are 6,000 religions currently on the face of the earth, they can’t all be right. And only the secular spirit can guarantee those freedoms and it’s the secular spirit that they contest.”
— Ian Mcewan
54. “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
55. “A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
— Albert Einstein
56. “Question with boldness even the existence of a god.”
— Thomas Jefferson
57. “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, – as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, – and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”
— John Adams
58. “I can’t tell Black people to fight a war that is Israel’s war. What kind of leader will you be, or should I be, to allow these babies Black, white and brown, to fight Israel’s war, because Zionists dominate the government of the United States of America and her banking system.”
— Louis Farrakhan
59. “I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. 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 against the liberty of his fellow-men.”
— Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
60. “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.”
— Thomas Jefferson
61. “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”
— Thomas Paine
62. “If by ‘intellectual’ you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts and forming ideas for people in power, and telling people what they should believe…they’re really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task it is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population SHOULD be anti-intellectual in that respect.”
— Noam Chomsky
63. “To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.”
— Joseph Addison
64. “The war with Iraq … had to be one of the greatest nonsequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that.”
— Barbara Ehrenreich
65. “I believe in freedom, I’m for a world without borders. But that’s an ideal. On a practical level, I’m for a secular state where religion only plays a minor role.”
— Shahin Najafi