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I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me […]. Much of this fascination lies in the stunning historical paradox that organized religion has fostered, throughout Western history, both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heartrending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in an occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held great secular power during much of Western history. When my folks held such sway, more briefly and in Old Testament times, we committed similar atrocities with the same rationales.)
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"Non-Overlapping Magisteria", p. 281

 

Stephen Jay Gould

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Now, what about this higher hidden elite or elites, what about it, or them? We get a glimpse of this in organized religion. An organized religion is a sort of sewn-up, finished-off, complete cosmology of the universe at whose apex sits the ruler. Now, this really has little, if anything, to do with one's own personal relationship with what one takes to be God, whatever that may be if it exists for you at all. What organized religion offers instead is a map, a cosmological map, in which there is established a hidden elite that makes the game, that puts the time-space continuum here and keeps it going and adds to the confusion of the ebb and the flow of invented civilizations and destroyed civilizations by somehow insisting that its members undertake certain anti-human activities: cruel crusades, wars, conflicts, efforts to convert the great unwashed and all of that which play such a key role in the history of this planet.

 

Jon Rappoport

 

For democrats, it's as crucial to defend secular culture as to preserve secular law. And in fact the two projects are inseparable: When religion defines morality, the wall between church and state comes to be seen as immoral.

 

Ellen Willis

 

We talk about a secular state in India. It is perhaps not very easy even to find a good word in Hindi for "secular". Some people think it means something opposed to religion. That obviously is not correct. What it means is that it is state which honours all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities; that, as a state, it does not allow itself to be attached to one faith or religion, which then becomes the state religion.

 

Jawaharlal Nehru

 

The separation of church and state is necessary partly because if religion is good then the state shouldn't interfere with the religious vision or with the religious prophet. There must be a realm of truth beyond political competence, that's why there must be a separation of churches, but if religion is bad and a bad religion is one that gives an ultimate sanctity to some particular cause. Then religion mustn't interfere with the state — so one of the basic Democratic principles as we know it in America is the separation of church and state. … A church has the right to set its own standards within its community. I don't think it has a right to prohibit birth control or to enforce upon a secular society its conception of divorce and the indissolubility of the marriage tie.

 

Reinhold Niebuhr

 

What our view of the effectiveness of religion in history does at once make evident as to its nature is--first, its necessary distinction; second, its necessary supremacy. These characters though external have been so essential to its fruitfulness, as to justify the statement that without them religion is not religion. A merged religion and a negligible or subordinate religion are no religion.

 

William Ernest Hocking