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What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.
--
"Of Modern Faith," The Daily Dish (2008-12-14)

 

Andrew Sullivan

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Intellectual honesty requires that one reflect on the contribution one’s theory makes to the class struggle, and acknowledge it openly. One does not have to accept the specific claim that there are two, and only two, mutually exclusive worldviews, to one of which any theory must commit itself, to accept the general claim that entertaining, developing and propounding a theory are actions, and as such they represent ways of taking a position in the world. This means that any kind of comprehensive understanding of politics will also have to treat the politics of theorization, including the politics of whatever theory is itself at the given time being presented for scrutiny, as a candidate for acceptance.

 

Raymond Geuss

 

We, the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against talking about politics. It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme. We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say.

 

Lawrence Lessig

 

One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.
For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land... and in this country, seeing God's second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash... in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment...
I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV.
Even though I was a believer.
Perhaps because I was a believer.

 

Bono

 

To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one's concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends.
It is for this reason that to the liberal neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

If a beginner may allow himself an observation, then I will say that the reason it seems to me to be so wonderful is that everything revolves around little things that the divine element in marriage nevertheless transforms by a miracle into something significant for the believer. Then, too, all the little things have the remarkable characteristic that nothing can be evaluated in advance, nothing worked out in a rough plan: but while the understanding stands still and the imagination is on a wild-goose chase and calculation calculates wrongly and sagacity-despairs, the married life goes along and is transformed from glory to glory, the insignificant becomes more and more significant by a miracle-for the believer. But a believer one must be, and a married man who is not a believer is a tiresome character, a real household pest. …. Ordinarily we speak only of a married man’s unfaithfulness, but what is just as bad is a married man’s lack of faith. Faith is all that is required, and faith compensates for everything. Just let understanding and sagacity and sophistication reckon, figure out, and describe how a married man ought to be: there is only one attribute that makes him lovable, and that is faith, absolute faith in marriage. Just let experience in life try to define exactly what is required of a married man’s faithfulness; there is only one faithfulness, one honesty that is truly lovable and hides everything in itself, and that is the honesty toward God and his wife and his married estate in refusing to deny the miracle.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard