Tag Archives: Topic: Secularism

Dennis Prager at NRO: In our dialogue, we agreed that her book’s subtitle was accurate, but we disagreed as to the cause. Freitas, who holds a Ph.D. in religious studies, blamed it on peer pressure, the sex-drenched social media of young people, and the ubiquity of pornography. I blamed three other culprits: feminism, careerism, and secularism.

The Bell Towers: As the president of Secular Pro-Life, I have been asked to present the non-religious case against abortion.  But actually, you’ve probably heard it already.  Many people who hear the secular arguments against abortion simply fail to recognize them as secular, because they expect pro-life apologetics to have a religious source.  Expectations powerfully color the way we see reality.  Discard these expectations, however, and you will soon find that most arguments against abortion do not require the existence of a god.

R.R. Reno of First Things at Imprimis (Hillsdale College): RELIGIOUS LIBERTY is being redefined in America, or at least many would like it to be. Our secular establishment wants to reduce the autonomy of religious institutions and limit the influence of faith in the public square. The reason is not hard to grasp. In America, “religion” largely means Christianity, and today our secular culture views orthodox Christian churches as troublesome, retrograde, and reactionary forces. They’re seen as anti-science, anti-gay, and anti-women—which is to say anti-progress as the Left defines progress.

Christian Concern: A special event has been held at the Council of Europe in relation to two UK Christians who are seeking a referral to the Grand Chamber in their religious freedom cases at the European Court of Human Rights.

Mary Eberstadt’s new book is now available on Amazon.

Christian Concern: Three Christians whose cases were rejected by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) earlier this year have requested a referral to the Grand Chamber.

LifeSiteNews: [Bishop Jean Laffitte, Secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family] . . . affirmed what many in the pro-family movment have long believed, that the push for “gay marriage” is not coming exclusively from homosexual lobbyists, but from a more sinister international cadre of highly placed secularist social engineers seeking a radical alteration of the foundational ideas of Western Civilization.

Kimberly Winston at the Washington Post: A conference at Georgetown University in Washington this week focused on cleaning up what many Americans consider a dirty word — secularism . . . “(Secularism) is a guarantee of two things: freedom of religion and freedom from religion,” said Jacques Berlinerblau, a Georgetown professor, conference organizer, and author of “How to be Secular.”

Education Views: A quarter of applications to set up free schools in England over the past two years were from faith-based organisations, official data shows.

William Carroll at Public Discourse: Religion isn’t outdated simply because some people claim that we can only know what the natural sciences tell us. Philosophy and theology are the next steps in our search for truth about nature, human nature, and God.

Peter Berger at the American Interest: But I do want to make a general observation: In all these cases the authorities accused of violating the plaintiffs’ rights operate with a definition of religion as a private matter to be kept out of public space. There is here a general issue of government overreach, as clearly illustrated by the (still unresolved) attempt by the Obama administration to force Catholic institutions to provide contraception coverage in their employees’ health plans. Beyond that, though, there is a very ideological view of the place of religion in society. In other words, religion is to be an activity engaged in by consenting adults in private. The attorney for the Judeo-Christian side in the aforementioned American case had it quite right when he compared the treatment of his client’s religion with measures of disease control. This is not an attitude one would expect to find in a Western democracy. It is curiously reminiscent of policies toward religion in Communist countries and toward non-Muslims under Islamic rule.

GoErie.com: There is no doubt that religious liberty is under serious threat in Britain, particularly for Christians,” says Paul Coleman, a lawyer with the Alliance Defending Freedom, which was involved with cases before the European human-rights court. “In the language of ‘equality,’ ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance,’ secularists have found a way to sideline and marginalize Christianity, successfully framing the moral beliefs of Christians as ‘intolerant’ or ‘discriminatory’ and unworthy of protection. Unless a true balance is found, where Christians can be accommodated in the public square and not shut out, we will see many more cases like the four before the ECHR in the headlines.”

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is William Kilpatrick, the author of several books, including Psychological Seduction and Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong. His articles about Islam have appeared in FrontPage Magazine, Investor’s Business Daily, Catholic World Report, and other publications. His most recent book, Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West explores the threat that Islam poses to Christianity and Western civilization. The book also examines the role played by militant secularists in facilitating the expansion of Islam.

Catholic Culture: “There is a real risk that moral relativism, which imposes itself as a new social norm, will come to undermine the foundations of individual freedom of conscience and religion,” the archbishop said.

Ed Stetzer at Baptist Press: Louie Giglio withdrew from the program at President Obama’s inauguration in the face of criticism over a 15-year-old sermon referencing homosexuality as a sin. Many will want to debate and desire to nuance the specific wording he used in the sermon, but his points are largely mainstream evangelical beliefs.

Benjamin Wiker at Catholic World Report: Why the affirmation of religious liberty can lead, ironically, to its extinction at the hands of the secular state.

Rory Gray at Speak Up Movement: Sometimes examining our neighbors helps us to gain a clearer view of ourselves. Do we, as Americans, want a government that defines equality, demands a certain level of uniformity in all walks of life, and enforces a secular, lowest-common-denominator code of morality to which all must pledge allegiance? Or do we still believe that the primary purpose of government is to protect individual liberty, that religious freedom is a fundamental God-given right, and that the family has the right and responsibility to train children in the way they should go? (Proverbs 22:6). Alliance Defending Freedom’s primary purpose is to keep the flame of liberty alive. And we invite you to join us in preserving religious freedom in America before we have a “National Observatory of Secularism” of our own.

Peter Baklinski at LifeSiteNews: The government of Quebec is forcing Catholic schools to replace the Christian religion with the state’s “neutral” alternative based on moral relativism.

Jeremy Tedesco appeared on the Zeb Bell Show to discuss this: Montana strips benefits from disabled preschooler. | MP3 audio 11:27 mins

William Becker, Jr. at American Thinker: When Tuesday (11/19/2012), United States District Court Judge Audrey B Collins delivered a 28-page ruling denying my client the right to continue a 59-year-old tradition of exhibiting Nativity scenes along Ocean Boulevard in the City of Santa Monica this Christmas season, another dagger plunged into the heart of America’s twilight customs and traditions. The sneered-at “war on Christmas” was effectively lost for good.

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a complaint Friday with the Montana Superintendent of Public Instruction on behalf of a hearing-impaired preschooler denied disability benefits for tuition payments because her parents chose to enroll her in a Columbus faith-based preschool.

Paul Coleman at the Bell Towers: “A secular society is not an anti-religious one. Rather, it is one where fundamental beliefs that we disagree about – beliefs that provide strong motivation to some but mean little or nothing to those who do not hold them – are left aside in public debate about communal decisions.” So says the European Humanist Federation. Such a statement is no doubt intended to comfort the religiously minded that often hold the sneaking suspicion that the secular vision for society is, a contrario, anti-religion. But do the secularists really practice what they preach, and is secularism really neutral in matters of religion and belief, as it is claimed.

Christian Institute: Highland Council has removed prayer from its formal meeting agenda after secularists threatened legal action.

TribLive.com: A series of Supreme Court decisions took the United States from its founding on Christian principles to its current state of secularism, a Pittsburgh lawyer said Sunday at a symposium sponsored by the Catholic Diocese of Greensburg. Featured speaker Brad Tupi said that has resulted in conflicts such as those unfolding in Fayette County over a Ten Commandments monument outside a public school. Tupi, a shareholder in the Tucker Arensberg law firm Downtown, is an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom and a member of the Federalist Society and the Christian Legal Society. The symposium on religious freedom was held in the Bishop William G. Connare Center near Greensburg.

Christian Today: The failure of multiculturalism to integrate communities, he argued, had left them isolated and exposed to radicalisation.

CBC News (includes video): Winnipeg’s incoming police chief says he is surprised by the strong public reaction to statements he made about prayer to a Christian publication.

BBC: Andrea Williams, chief executive of Christian Concern at the Christian Legal Centre, said: “There are people from Lancashire who have come to the Christian Legal Centre because as a result of living and speaking out about their faith they have they have found themselves in trouble with the law.”

Anthony Bosnick at the Washington Post: In his pastoral letter, “Disciples of the Lord: Sharing the Vision,” Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington writes, “While it is true that this country is marked by a genuinely religious spirit, the subtle influence of secularism can nevertheless color the way people allow their faith to influence their behavior…Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted. Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel.”

Naomi Schafer Riley at the NY Post: ‘I’m spiritual but not religious”: Our secular elites love to utter the phrase. But don’t assume it means something harmless like “I don’t go to church, but I love hot Yoga.” Washington socialite par excellence Sally Quinn let the cat out of the bag on a New York visit last week.

Washington Post: Her son and heir apparent, Prince Charles, has said he’s planning a symbolic change if and when he becomes king by taking the title “Defender of Faith” or “Defender of the Faiths” to reflect Britain’s multicultural and multifaith society.

Detroit Free Press (includes video): Rebecca Cardone, 21, who grew up Methodist in Texas, is president of the student body at California Lutheran University. But don’t call her Protestant or even Christian. Cardone is one of the new “Nones” — atheists, agnostics and folks like her who believe “nothing in particular.”

CBS: The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a fast pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.

Benjamin Bull at Townhall: As the effects of Christianity have steadily eroded, the tentacles of secularization (its proponents would call it an “enlightened” secularization) has taken hold. It is marked by egalitarianism and utopian fantasies, but especially tolerance. Tolerance for …

LifeNews reports and carries video of the vote

CBN: God’s name has been removed from the Democratic National Committee platform. This is the paragraph that was in the 2008 platform . . .

CBS ConNecticut: The National Atheist Party is canceling its secular convention due to a lack of funding.

CBC.ca: A prominent constitutional lawyer says a plan by the Parti Quebecois to restrict certain religious symbols in public institutions would be shredded up in court.

Montreal Gazette: Under a Parti Québécois government, civil servants won’t be able to wear a hijab or any other overt religious symbol, but the Catholic crucifix will remain displayed in the National Assembly, the PQ announced on a campaign stop Tuesday.

Catholic Culture: Of the 29,135 marriages that took place in 2011, there were 15,092 civil weddings, 5,557 Church of Scotland weddings, 2,486 humanist weddings, 1,729 Catholic weddings, 865 Assembly of God weddings, and 694 Anglican weddings.

Christian Institute: Churchgoers in Woking can continue to park in the town’s off-street car parks for free on Sundays following an unsuccessful challenge by secularists.

Christian Science Monitor: This seeming contradiction in Libya belies Western stereotypes about the incompatibility of Islam and democracy – that a constitutional role for religion in public life can only curtail individual freedoms, especially for women and minorities. That is not how many Muslims think.

Telegraph: Christians will be able to wear crosses to work under changes to the law promised yesterday by David Cameron.

Philip Tartaglia at Public Discourse: One prominent response came from the Equality and Human Rights Commission Chief, Trevor Phillips, who said that religious beliefs end “at the door of the temple.” This was a far cry from the Prime Minister’s praise of the positive and essential role of Christianity in public life. But how can Christianity have a positive role in public life, one wonders, if it begins and ends at the door of the temple? And if religious freedom is limited to the interior of the temple, how different will Britain be from places like Saudi Arabia where there is freedom of worship behind closed doors? . . . So the view expressed by Trevor Phillips that religious faith should not be allowed to enter the public square raises huge questions about the nature of the state. Phillips appears to endorse the notion of a state that fills all civic space and reaches out to control other institutions present within the state. It is a notion of the state with a rather limited understanding of subsidiarity. It is Big Government at its worst. It appears to have no respect for institutions, such as the family and the Church, which pre-exist the state, which straddle the private-public domain, and which have their own internal constitution. This is a state moving toward a kind of soft totalitarianism.

George Weigel at EPPC: In both its hard and soft forms, the secular project was wrong. Above all, it ignored the deep truth that it takes a certain kind of people, living certain virtues, to make democracy and the free economy work properly. People of that kind do not just happen. They must be formed in the habits of heart and mind, the virtues that enable them to guide the machinery of free politics and free economics so that the net outcome is human flourishing and the promotion of the common good. There is no such formation in the virtues of freedom available at the empty shrine.

Christian Concern: The General Medical Council’s Investigation Committee has today (14 June) reprimanded a Christian doctor for sharing his faith with a patient at the end of a private consultation.

BeliefNet.com: Turks are being prosecuted for publishing “tweets” on Twitter that are “insulting to Islam,” despite the Turkish constitution’s guarantees of religious freedom. Christians are increasingly marginalized. Bureaucrats routinely block the building of churches.

Religion Clause Blog: National Journal reported yesterday that the Secular Coalition for America has launched a drive to create state chapters of the organization in all 50 states.

Christian Post: “There has to be a wall institutionally between the government and the church or religious groups,” he said. “But many have taken that law of separation to think that it means separating religion from politics, which is precisely the opposite of what the Founding Fathers wanted.”

Ross Douthat at the NY Times: … the more purely secular liberalism has become, the more it has spent down its Christian inheritance—the more its ideals seem to hang from what Christopher Hitchens’ Calvinist sparring partner Douglas Wilson has called intellectual “skyhooks,” suspended halfway between our earth and the heaven on which many liberals have long since given up. Say what you will about the prosperity gospel and the cult of the God Within and the other theologies I criticize in Bad Religion, but at least they have a metaphysically coherent picture of the universe to justify their claims

LifeSiteNews: Dismantling of the family, attacks against parental rights and times of trouble for faith-based, mainly Catholic schools are looming large in French politics since France’s new socialist president, François Hollande, took over office from Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday morning at the Elysée, in Paris.

Christian Concern: The UK’s most senior Roman Catholic said yesterday that “tolerance is being abolished” as secularists seek to wipe out the Christian faith in Britain.

Religion Clause Blog: Haaretz reports today that in Israel, the Public Council for Soldiers’ Commemoration will recommend to Defense Minister Ehud Barak that in Memorial Day ceremonies at military cemeteries the service use a remembrance reading that does not mention God.

Christian Institute: When Tony Blair was Prime Minister, his officials warned him not to end one of his speeches with the words “God bless Britain”.

WNDU.com: The ACLU says Indiana allows religious groups to perform marriages, but marriages performed by a non-religious group that trains and certifies secular celebrants are not recognized. | ACLU press release

Telegraph: The Sunday Telegraph has found that at least 40 councils have decided to either stop or “water down” prayer sessions held at the start of business after the High Court controversially backed the complaints of secularists that the ancient custom was “illegal”.

Augusto Zimmermann and Lael Daniel Weinberger, “Secularization by Law? The Establishment Clauses and Religion in the Public Square in Australia and the United States,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 10 (2012): 208-241. http://icon.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/1/208.abstract While there is an enormous body of …

Telegraph: The Roman Catholic Church contacted its secondary schools in England and Wales asking them to enourage pupils to back the campaign against gay marriage.

National Secular Society: The American religious right continues its advance into Europe. Our representative at the Fundamental Rights Agency Hans Christian Cars reports that Roger Kiska, Senior Legal Counsel at the Alliance Defence Fund, is based in Europe and disturbingly has been elected to the Advisory Panel 2012-2013 of the Fundamental Rights Platform (FRP).

Religion Clause Blog: The Gloversville (NY) Leader-Herald reported Sunday that the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs has turned down a tourism grant from Montgomery County (NY) after the county’s Economic Development and Planning Committee voted to add a requirement that all tourism grant funds be used only for secular purposes.

Francis J. Beckwith at The Catholic Thing: My chapter, tentatively titled, “Fides, Ratio et Juris: How Some Courts and Some Legal Theorists Misrepresent the Rational Status of Religious Beliefs,” addresses the claims of courts and legal theorists who argue that religiously informed policy proposals have no place in a liberal democracy because the religious worldviews from which they herald are at their core unreasonable, for they are dependent on irrational beliefs.

PR Web: More than 800 people from 60 countries and six continents will gather in Dominican Republic April 24-26 to explore the impact of ‘radical secularism’ and other forces that are eroding religious freedom protection around the world.

R. Albert Mohler, Jr. at Baptist Press: What we see at Vanderbilt University is secularism with its gloves off. In the name of tolerance, it will not tolerate orthodox Christian conviction. The university now comes full circle and forces off campus the only organizations that hold to the Christian beliefs of the school’s founders. Look carefully at Vanderbilt’s intolerance. Be assured that it is coming soon to a campus near you.

Christian Institute: A secular bias in the public sector means faith groups don’t have equal access to public funding for community projects, academics say.

Religion Clause Blog: Billed by supporters as “the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history,” yesterday between 10,000 and 20,000 people gathered on the National Mall in Washington . . .

Telegraph: Hundreds of new Church of England schools are to be opened to spread Christianity and combat “aggressive secularism”, it emerged today.

Dave Landrum at The Guardian: But what we have today is a human rights industry that exists as a totalising creed for a secular humanist agenda in which rights are no longer universal, but subjective. They favour some minority identities and disfavour others . . . Historically, freedom of religion or conscience is not an add-on to some imagined pre-existing rights. It is foundational.

Washington Post: Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s claim that U.S. colleges drive young Christians out of church is facing scrutiny from Protestant and Catholic experts.

Minneapolis Star Tribune: “The forces of the secular left believe passionately and deeply, and with frankly a religious fervor, in their world view and they will regard what I am saying as a horrifying assault on what they think is the truth,” Gingrich said. “Because their version of the truth is to have a totally neutral government that has no meaning.”

Washington Post: Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum called Monday for a wider role for religion in public policy as he battled for conservative votes ahead of Tuesday’s Michigan primary.

Religion Clause Blog: Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum spoke at length about church-state issues yesterday on the ABC News program This Week (full transcript). Here is the relevant part of George Stephanopoulos’ interview with Santorum . . .

One News Now: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says President Barack Obama’s administration has “fought against religion” and has sought to substitute a “secular” agenda for one grounded in faith.

Hunter Baker at ActonInstitute PowerBlog: The primary point of my first book, The End of Secularism, was to demonstrate that secularism doesn’t do what it claims to do, which is to solve the problem of religious difference.

NYTimes.com: The insults were furious. “Infidel!” and “Apostate!” the religious protesters shouted at the two men who had come to the courthouse to show their support for a television director on trial on charges of blasphemy. Fists, then a head butt followed.

Catholic Culture: I am especially scandalized by some “Catholic” politicians who willingly collaborate with efforts to restrict the civil liberty of the faith tradition from which they were originally sprung.

Catholic Culture: An Irish Labor Party leader told the Irish Catholic that “religious ethos has no place in the educational system of a modern republic.”