Secular Bible Quotes

It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview-however heroic the efforts of redactors- is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.

Secular humanists of every type may ridicule the Bible, but they cannot escape it; and in their obsession with change, calls for reform, doomsday warnings, and utopian visions, they continue to steal from it.

For we live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; and our time should be counted in the throbs of our hearts as we love and help, learn and strive, and make from our own talents whatever can increase the stock of the world’s good.

The evangelist is the world's hopeless romantic, and just like a hopeless romantic, he must hope for the miracle of God more than the romance itself.

The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal [secular] concerns of men.

Believing this country to be a political and not a religious organisation ... the editor of the NATIONAL CITIZEN will use all her influence of voice and pen against 'Sabbath Laws', the uses of the 'Bible in School', and pre-eminently against an amendment which shall introduce 'God in the Constitution.

This withdrawal of theology from the world of secular affairs is made more complete by the work of biblical scholars whose endlessly fascinating exercises have made it appear to the lay Christian that no one untrained in their methods can really understand anything the Bible says. We are in a situation analogous to one about which the great Reformers complained. The Bible has been taken out of the hands of the layperson; it has now become the professional property not of the priesthood but of the scholars.

Bible literacy matters because it protects us from falling into error. Both the false teacher and the secular humanist rely on biblical ignorance for their messages to take root, and the modern church has proven fertile ground for those messages. Because we do not know our Bibles, we crumble at the most basic challenges to our worldview. Disillusionment and apathy eat away at our ranks. Women, in particular, are leaving the church in unprecedented numbers.1

Live counterculturally when the culture, baptized or secular, does not affirm truth, love, faith, mercy, and justice.

At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the center of the earth; he weighs nothing himself, but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are catholics with protestant proclivities, or christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to allow each other to do their own thinking. Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight. He should not be compelled to give his opinion as to the inspiration of the bible, the propriety of infant baptism, or the immaculate conception. All these things are private and personal. The people ought to be wise enough to select as their officers men who know something of political affairs, who comprehend the present greatness, and clearly perceive the future grandeur of our country. If we were in a storm at sea, with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion was on the five points of Calvinism. Our government has nothing to do with religion. It is neither christian nor pagan; it is secular. But as long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power. Just so long will the candidates crawl in the dust—hide their opinions, flatter those with whom they differ, pretend to agree with those whom they despise; and just so long will honest men be trampled under foot.

The reverend's sermon that day was beautiful. She approached the Bible with extraordinary acuity, and her interpretation of it was so humane, so thoughtful, that I became ashamed of the fact that I very rarely associated those two things with religion. My entire life would have been different if I'd grown up in this woman's church instead of in a church that seemed to shun intellectualism as a trap of the secular world, designed to shun intellectualism as a trap of the secular world, designed to undermine one's faith.

The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.

Science Class Would you invent some irrational explanation for we lost souls that the glaciers aren’t really melting at all, that they are and will remain just as they always have been? Some rationale that claims the whole climate change scenario is really just a satanic plot, concocted by liberal secular humanists to trick the world into thinking that the glaciers have been melting for twice as long as the Bible says the Earth has been around.

Morals do exist outside of organized religion, and the ‘morality’ taught by many of these archaic systems is often outdated, sexist, racist, and teaches intolerance and inequality. When a parent forces a child into a religion, the parent is effectively handicapping his or her own offspring by limiting the abilities of the child to question the world around him or her and make informed decisions. Children raised under these conditions will mature believing that their religion is the only correct one, and, in the case of Christianity, they will believe that all who doubt their religion’s validity will suffer eternal damnation. This environment is one that often breeds hate, ignorance, and ‘justified’ violence.

From the beginning, Judeo-Christian principles have been the foundation for American public dialogue and government policy. They serve as the solid basis for political activism in support of a better socioeconomic environment. Found in American homes, truth from the Hebrew Christian Bible has enabled individual liberty to prevail over secular empires because it is a practical message about reality from man’s Creator. In their quest for liberty, Americans focused upon the conspicuously self-evident “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It is the governing character of these principles (laws), such as humility, the Golden Rule, and the Ten Commandments, that leads to success. This is the sure foundation upon which man’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” rests. Called “virtue” by America’s Founding Fathers, the impartial and divine element frees man to do what is right. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3:17).

Forget all labels and simply live as a human, and you'll have all the morality in you - this morality is text-less - it is law-less - it is boundless - it's simply your whole being, beyond conditioning, beyond norms, beyond stereotypes, beyond definitions, beyond theories, beyond intellectualism, beyond ideologies, beyond sects and beyond images. That morality has no Naskar in it - it has no Nietzsche in it - it has no Schopenhauer in it - it has no bible, no quran, no vedas in it - nor has it any messiah or prophet whatsoever.

Our duty as we relate to an increasingly secular and ungodly culture is not to lobby for certain rights, the implementation of a Christian agenda, or the reformation of the government. Rather, God would have us continually to remember Paul’s instructions to Titus and live them out as we seek to demonstrate His power and grace that can regenerate sinners.

And among them their satellites, on one of which is a part of nature that mirrors nature in itself,

Skill in secular employments is God's gift, and comes from above, Jam. 1:17.

If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy.

Scriptures do have a role in society, but only as literature, like any other literature, nothing more.

One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.

The Church isn't talking about mental illness. We have amazing secular organizations fighting stigma—and I absolutely love it. But what are we as Christians doing to help those who are hurting? A sermon on God's love won't do the trick. As much as I adore God and love Scripture, a Bible quote isn't going to do the trick. We need hearts poured out for each other. We need true and authentic encounters.

Some take pains to be biblical, but many [Christian financial teachers, writers, investment counselors, and seminar leaders] simply parrot their secular colleagues. Other than beginning and ending with prayer, mentioning Christ, and sprinkling in some Bible verses, there's no fundamental difference. They reinforce people's materialist attitudes and lifestyles. They suggest a variety of profitable plans in which people can spend or stockpile the bulk of their resources. In short, to borrow a term from Jesus, some Christian financial experts are helping people to be the most successful 'rich fools' they can be.

Feminism gained popularity as a result of 'secular' work and scholarship, but the line between sacred and secular is man-made. Because God is the source of truth, Christians can still give thanks to God for the good works associated with feminism, such as the gaining of status for women as 'persons' under the law, voting, owning property, and defending themselves in a court of law against domestic violence and rape.

Oh no, we stem from different traditions, all three of us. Monsignor O’Brien is a priest in the tradition of the priests of the Bible, the sons of Aaron. He has certain powers, magical powers, that he exercises in the celebration of the Mass, for example, where the bread and wine are magically changed to the body and blood of Christ. Dr. Skinner as a Protestant minister is in the tradition of the prophets. He has received a call to preach the word of God. I, a rabbi, am essentially a secular figure, having neither the mana of the priest nor the ‘call’ of the minister. If anything, I suppose we come closest to the judges of the Bible.

People who have extremely limited knowledge of The Bible or its implications may still choose to classify themselves as Christians on the basis that their parents do so—they may never even give it a second thought. This phenomenon of our nation’s children inheriting religion is often overlooked because the perpetrator guilty of indoctrination is not a dictator or cult leader, but instead it is most often their own parents or close family members.

1. Those who first set themselves to discover nature’s secrets and designs, fearlessly opposing mankind’s early ignorance, deserve our praise;   2. For they began the quest to measure what once was unmeasurable, to discern its laws, and conquer time itself by understanding.   3. New eyes were needed to see what lay hidden in ignorance, new language to express the unknown,   4. New hope that the world would reveal itself to inquiry and investigation.   5. They sought to unfold the world’s primordial sources, asking how nature yields its abundance and fosters it,   6. And where in its course everything goes when it ends, either to change or cease.   7. The first inquirers named nature’s elements atoms, matter, seeds, primal bodies, and understood that they are coeval with the world;   8. They saw that nothing comes from nothing, so that discovering the elements reveals how the things of nature exist and evolve.   9. Fear holds dominion over people when they understand little, and need simple stories and legends to comfort and explain; 10. But legends and the ignorance that give them birth are a house of limitations and darkness. 11. Knowledge is freedom, freedom from ignorance and its offspring fear; knowledge is light and liberation, 12. Knowledge that the world contains itself, and its origins, and the mind of man, 13. From which comes more know­ledge, and hope of knowledge again. 14. Dare to know: that is the motto of enlightenment.  

Holy scriptures may have been relevant in the Middle Ages, but how can they guide us in an era of artificial intelligence, bioengineering, global warming, and cyberwarfare? Yet secular people are a minority. Billions of humans still profess greater faith in the Quran and the Bible than in the theory of evolution; religious movements shape the politics of countries as diverse as India, Turkey, and the United States; and religious animosities fuel conflicts from Nigeria to the Philippines.

...the terms heterosexual and homosexual originate from a secular anthropology that elevates sexual desires as a legitimate way to categorize humanity...Are we in fact defined by our sexual desires and behaviors?...The Bible does not categorize humanity according to our sexual desires—-or any other sort of desire.

However much he might deny it, then and later, it was clear that Hart had wanted to put some distance between the poor, jug-eared, Bible-toting youth he had been in Kansas and the secular, Yale-educated reformer he later became. But that didn’t make him different from a lot of other Americans who grew up in claustrophobic small towns with overbearing parents and later found themselves caught up in the cultural upheaval of the sixties, where personal identities were always evolving. It didn’t make Hart some shadowy, Gatsby-like figure; the salient facts of his upbringing had been well established since he entered public life.

A Christian has no right to separate his life into two realms... to say the Bible is good for Sunday, but this is a week-day question, or the Scriptures are right in matters of religion, but this is a matter of business or politics. God reigns over all, everywhere. His will is the supreme law. His inspired Word, loyally read will inform us of His will in every relation and act of life, secular as well as religious; and the man is a traitor who refuses to walk therein with scrupulous care. The kingdom of God includes all sides of human life, and it is a kingdom of absolute righteousness. You are wither a loyal subject, or a traitor. When the King comes, how will He find you doing?

While the Bible clearly values the work of raising children that women often undertake, it also greatly values women’s gospel ministry outside the home, and gives us positive examples of women working for pay. The ideal wife described in Proverbs 31 makes money from her work outside the home, and some of the first female Christians held paid jobs.

The Aryans also composed two of the world’s greatest (and longest) epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which is eight times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey put together and three times longer than the Bible—all without the benefit of writing. These Vedic recitations, both sacred and secular, form the bedrock of Indian and Hindu culture. The

The liturgical person discovers who he is in the context of a community that listens to and explains the Bible and acts in accord with it. In this, he stands opposed to those whose identity is shaped by the heroes, ideals, and norms of the environing secular culture and to those whose sense of self is formed by the texts and practices of other religions.

One human life is a thousand times more valuable than a thousand bibles, qurans, suttas and vedas - one human life is a thousand times more valuable than a thousand doctrines and rituals - one human life is a thousand times more valuable than a thousand theories and schools of thought - one human life is a thousand times more valuable than a thousand religions and ideologies.

During the past twenty-five years, well-meaning Christians have founded a number of evangelical activist organizations and put millions of dollars into them in an ill-conceived effort to counteract the secular undermining of American culture. They have used these groups, along with existing Christian publishing houses and broadcast networks, to lobby hard for a “Christian” political viewpoint and fight back against the prevailing anti-Christian culture. Sadly, those believers have often displayed mean-spirited attitudes and utilized the same kinds of worldly tactics as their unbelieving opponents. The problem with this overall approach should be obvious—believers become antagonistic toward the very lost people God has called them to love and reach with the gospel. LESSONS

[On scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss] [Carl Friedrich] Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal on the future of the human soul and speculated on the possibility of the soul being reincarnated on another planet. Evidently, Gauss was a Deist with a good deal of skepticism concerning religion.

[Asked by an audience member at a public Q&A session] Considering that atheism cannot possibly have any sense of 'absolute morality', would it not then be an irrational leap of faith – which atheists themselves so harshly condemn – for an atheist to decide between right and wrong? [Dawkins] Absolute morality...the absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include, what, stoning people for adultery? Death for apostasy? [...] These are all things which are religiously-based absolute moralities. I don't think I want an absolute morality; I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed, and based on – you could almost say intelligent design. [...] If you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people – among 21st century people – we don't believe in slavery anymore; we believe in equality of women; we believe in being gentle; we believe in being kind to animals...these are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Koranic scripture. They are things that have developed over historical time; through a consensus of reasoning, sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy. These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the 'good bits' in religious scriptures, you have to cherry-pick. You search your way through the Bible or the Koran, and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality – and you say, look at that! That's religion!...and you leave out all the horrible bits. And you say, 'Oh, we don't believe that anymore, we've grown out of that.' Well, of course we've grown out of it. We've grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion.

To be sure, for religious Jews, the Bible was God’s revealed word, filled with commandments about how they were to live their lives. For secular Jews, the Bible was one of the greatest works of literature of all time. For all, though, the Bible was the book that told the story of their people: what they had loved, where they had lived, how they had succeeded, and when they had failed. It was the story of their family. And central to the story of that family was the Land of Israel, the land to which Theodor Herzl was now urging them to return.

One of the bad habits that we pick up early in our lives is separating things and people into secular and sacred. We assume that the secular is what we are more or less in charge of: our jobs, our time, our entertainment, our government, our social relations. The sacred is what God has charge of: worship and the Bible, heaven and hell, church and prayers. We then contrive to set aside a sacred place for God, designed, we say, to honor God but really intended to keep God in his place, leaving us free to have the final say about everything else that goes on.

Were it not for Augustine’s “harass, but do not destroy” formula, Christians and Jews would certainly have had much less to do with each other throughout the many centuries before exterminationist anti-Semitism entered the West’s historical consciousness and conscience. Moreover, many Westerners today see Christianity as the beginning of Western proselytizing and do not realize that Judaism itself, in its historical infancy, was a proselytizing religion using tactics, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible, that could sometimes be summed up as “harass and destroy.

When the angels of the Bible spoke to human beings, did they speak in words? I don’t think so. I think the angels said nothing, but they were heard in the purest silence of the human spirit, and were understood beyond words. On a more human scale there are many things beyond. A mother watches her child leave home. Her heart is still. Her eyes are full of tears and prayer. That is beyond. An old man with wrinkled hands is carrying his grandchild. With startled eyes the baby regards his grandfather. The old man, with the knowledge of Time’s sadness in his heart, and with love in his eyes, looks down at the child. The meeting of their eyes. That is beyond. A famous writer, feeling his life coming to an end, writes these words: ‘My soul looks back and wonders – just how I got I got over.’ A young woman, standing on a shore, looks out into an immense azure sea rimmed with the silver line of the horizon. She looks out into the obscure heart of destiny, and is overwhelmed by a feeling both dark and oddly joyful. She may be thinking something like this: ‘My soul looks forward and wonders- just how am I to get across.’ That is beyond.

Monsignor O’Brien is a priest in the tradition of the priests of the Bible, the sons of Aaron. He has certain powers, magical powers, that he exercises in the celebration of the Mass, for example, where the bread and wine are magically changed to the body and blood of Christ. Dr. Skinner as a Protestant minister is in the tradition of the prophets. He has received a call to preach the word of God. I, a rabbi, am essentially a secular figure, having neither the mana of the priest nor the ‘call’ of the minister. If anything, I suppose we come closest to the judges of the Bible.

This is the tragedy of the postmodern age. The things that matter most in life, that are necessary for a humane society—ideals like moral freedom, human dignity, even loving our own children—have been reduced to nothing but useful fictions. They are tossed into the attic, which becomes a convenient dumping ground for anything that a materialist paradigm cannot explain. The Bible teaches that, without God, people are morally lost. But they are also intellectually lost because they are trying to live within the limits of a worldview that is too cramped and narrow to account for their own humanity.

What Kant took to be the necessary schemata of reality,' says a modern Freudian, 'are really only the necessary schemata of repression.' And an experimental psychologist adds that 'a sense of time can only exist where there is submission to reality.' To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane. Literature and history, as we know them, are not like that; they must submit, be repressed. It is characteristic of the stage we are now at, I think, that the question of how far this submission ought to go--or, to put it the other way, how far one may cultivate fictional patterns or paradigms--is one which is debated, under various forms, by existentialist philosophers, by novelists and anti-novelists, by all who condemn the myths of historiography. It is a debate of fundamental interest, I think, and I shall discuss it in my fifth talk. Certainly, it seems, there must, even when we have achieved a modern degree of clerical scepticism, be some submission to the fictive patterns. For one thing, a systematic submission of this kind is almost another way of describing what we call 'form.' 'An inter-connexion of parts all mutually implied'; a duration (rather than a space) organizing the moment in terms of the end, giving meaning to the interval between tick and tock because we humanly do not want it to be an indeterminate interval between the tick of birth and the tock of death. That is a way of speaking in temporal terms of literary form. One thinks again of the Bible: of a beginning and an end (denied by the physicist Aristotle to the world) but humanly acceptable (and allowed by him to plots). Revelation, which epitomizes the Bible, puts our fate into a book, and calls it the book of life, which is the holy city. Revelation answers the command, 'write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter'--'what is past and passing and to come'--and the command to make these things interdependent. Our novels do likewise. Biology and cultural adaptation require it; the End is a fact of life and a fact of the imagination, working out from the middle, the human crisis. As the theologians say, we 'live from the End,' even if the world should be endless. We need ends and kairoi and the pleroma, even now when the history of the world has so terribly and so untidily expanded its endless successiveness. We re-create the horizons we have abolished, the structures that have collapsed; and we do so in terms of the old patterns, adapting them to our new worlds. Ends, for example, become a matter of images, figures for what does not exist except humanly. Our stories must recognize mere successiveness but not be merely successive; Ulysses, for example, may be said to unite the irreducible chronos of Dublin with the irreducible kairoi of Homer. In the middest, we look for a fullness of time, for beginning, middle, and end in concord. For concord or consonance really is the root of the matter, even in a world which thinks it can only be a fiction. The theologians revive typology, and are followed by the literary critics. We seek to repeat the performance of the New Testament, a book which rewrites and requites another book and achieves harmony with it rather than questioning its truth. One of the seminal remarks of modern literary thought was Eliot's observation that in the timeless order of literature this process is continued. Thus we secularize the principle which recurs from the New Testament through Alexandrian allegory and Renaissance Neo-Platonism to our own time. We achieve our secular concords of past and present and future, modifying the past and allowing for the future without falsifying our own moment of crisis. We need, and provide, fictions of concord.

  1. Do not be proud of any excellence that is not your own. If a horse should be proud and say, ‘I am handsome’, it would be supportable.   2. But when you are proud and say, ‘I have a handsome horse’, know that you are proud of something that belongs not to you but to the horse.   3. What, then, is your own? Only your reaction to the appearances of things.   4. Thus, when you react to how things appear in true accordance with their nature, you will be proud with reason; for you will take pride in some good of your own.   5. Consider when, on a voyage, your ship is anchored; if you go on shore to get water you may amuse yourself along the way with picking up a shellfish.   6. However, your attention must also be towards the ship, waiting for the captain to call you on board;   7. For when he does so, you must immediately leave all these things, otherwise you will miss the ship as it sails.   8. So it is with life. Whatever you find while, so to say, wandering on the beach, is fine.   9. But if necessity calls, you must run to the ship, leaving these things, and regarding none of them. 10. For there is a proper time for all things, including a proper time to grieve, and to prepare to die. 11. The question to be asked at the end of each day is, ‘How long will you delay to be wise?

I'd be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history. ... I will remind readers that the idea of the end of time comes out of one of the most ambiguous passages of John's text, chapter 20... This approach, which isn't only Augustine's but also the Church Fathers' as a whole, casts History as a journey forward—a notion alien to the pagan world. Even Hegel and Marx are indebted to this fundamental idea, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pursued. Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It's possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible—so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation... But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian view of history whenever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed. The simple knowledge of how to judge history and its horrors is fundamentally Christian, whether the speaker is Emmanuel Mounier on tragic optimism or Gramsci on pessimism of reason and optimism of will.

There is a similar system of discrimination, extending far beyond a small geographical region to the entire globe; it touches every nation, perpetuating and expanding the trafficking in human slaves, body mutilation, and even legitimized murder on a massive scale. This system is based on the presumption that men and boys are superior to women and girls, and it is supported by some male religious leaders who distort the Holy Bible, the Koran, and other sacred texts to perpetuate their claim that females are, in some basic ways, inferior to them, unqualified to serve God on equal terms. Many men disagree but remain quiet in order to enjoy the benefits of their dominant status. This false premise provides a justification for sexual discrimination in almost every realm of secular and religious life.

When Christians write and speak about racial issues, they sound much like their secular counterparts. Instead of initiating our own solutions to the problem of racism, we merely copy the solutions offered by the rest of the world. We use the Bible to support our own biases and presuppositions rather than looking to the Bible to transcend our moral limitations. Christians argue with other Christians about racial issues as much as non-Christians argue with each other because the solutions we propose are based not on intrinsic Christian values but on more worldly presuppositions. Because of the way we mimic the rest of society, Christianity does not appear to offer any unique solution to racism. It appears that the best Christians can do is to pick and choose from the ideas of the larger society. Christians can get on board with the best of these solutions, but we will never be leaders in the search for solutions.

If you are preaching on the first commandment (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me”) or Ephesians 5:5 (which calls greed idolatry) or any of the several hundred other places in the Bible that speak of idols, you could quote David Foster Wallace, the late postmodern novelist. In his Kenyon College commencement speech he argues eloquently and forcefully that “everyone worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”32 He goes on to say everyone has to “tap real meaning in life,” and whatever you use to do that, whether it is money, beauty, power, intellect, or something else, it will drive your life because it is essentially a form of worship. He enumerates why each form of worship does not merely make you fragile and exhausted but can “eat you alive.” If you lay out his argument in support of fundamental biblical teaching, even the most secular audience will get quiet and keep listening to what you say next.

The fact was, as a story—even leaving out the supernatural, especially leaving out the supernatural, taking it all as metaphor, I mean—the Bible made perfect sense to me from the very beginning. I saw a God whose nature was creative love. He made man in his own image for the purpose of forming new and free relationships with him. But in his freedom, man turned away from that relationship to consult his own wisdom and desires. The knowledge of good and evil was not some top-secret catalogue of nice and naughty acts that popped into Eve’s mind when a talking snake got her to eat the magic fruit. The knowledge was built into the action of disobedience itself: it’s what she learned when she overruled the moral law God had placed within her. There was no going back from that. The original sin poisoned all history. History’s murders, rapes, wars, oppressions, and injustices are now the inescapable plot of the story we’re in. The

Sure, we can hear the reverberating echoes of the Big Bang. Yet that cosmic vibration tells us nothing about what was before the Big Bang, or what was before that, or how or why there was even a bang to be binged at all. This mostly wet ball full of ptarmigans, ponytails, and poverty is floating in space among a billion other balls, and there are galaxies swirling and there is a universe expanding, which itself may actually just be an undulating freckle on the cusp of something we can’t even conceive of, amid an endless soup of ever more unfathomables. And I find such a situation to be utterly, manifestly, psychedelically amazing—and far more spine-tinglingly awe-inspiring than any story I’ve ever read in the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas, the Upanishads, Dianetics, the Doctrine and Covenants, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So smell that satchel of tangerines and nimbly hammer a dulcimer or pluck a chicken and listen to your conscience or master a new algorithm or walk to work or hitch a ride. Because we’re here. And we will never, ever know why or exactly how this all comes about. That’s the situation. Deal with it. Accept it. Let the mystery be.

arrived in Cambridge, and made an appointment to meet the formidable Krister Stendahl, a Swedish scholar of fierce intelligence, now to be my first adviser. We met in his office. I was nervous, but also amused that this tall and severe man, wearing a black shirt and clerical collar, looked to me like an Ingmar Bergman version of God. After preliminary formalities, he abruptly swiveled in his chair and turned sternly to ask, “So really, why did you come here?” I stumbled over the question, then mumbled something about wanting to find the essence of Christianity. Stendahl stared down at me, silent, then asked, “How do you know it has an essence?” In that instant, I thought, That’s exactly why I came here: to be asked a question like that—challenged to rethink everything. Now I knew I had come to the right place. I’d chosen Harvard because it was a secular university, where I wouldn’t be bombarded with church dogma. Yet I still imagined that if we went back to first-century sources, we might hear what Jesus was saying to his followers when they walked by the Sea of Galilee—we might find the “real Christianity,” when the movement was in its golden age. But Harvard quenched these notions; there would be no simple path to what Krister Stendahl ironically called “play Bible land” simply by digging through history. Yet I also saw that this hope of finding “the real Christianity” had driven countless people—including our Harvard professors—to seek its origins. Naive as our questions were, they were driven by a spiritual quest. We discovered that even the earliest surviving texts had been written decades after Jesus’s death, and that none of them are neutral. They reveal explosive controversy between his followers, who loved him, and outsiders like the Roman senator Tacitus and the Roman court historian Suetonius, who likely despised him. Taken together, what the range of sources does show, contrary to those who imagine that Jesus didn’t exist, is that he did: fictional people don’t have real enemies. What came next was a huge surprise: our professors at Harvard had file cabinets filled with facsimiles of secret gospels I had never heard of—the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Truth—and dozens of other writings, transcribed by hand from the original Greek into Coptic, and mimeographed in blue letters on pages stamped TOP SECRET. Discovered in 1945, these texts only recently had become available to scholars. This wasn’t what I’d expected to find in graduate school, or even what I wanted—at least, not so long as I still hoped to find answers instead of more questions

There are many who profess to be religious and speak of themselves as Christians, and, according to one such, “as accepting the scriptures only as sources of inspiration and moral truth,” and then ask in their smugness: “Do the revelations of God give us a handrail to the kingdom of God, as the Lord’s messenger told Lehi, or merely a compass?” Unfortunately, some are among us who claim to be Church members but are somewhat like the scoffers in Lehi’s vision—standing aloof and seemingly inclined to hold in derision the faithful who choose to accept Church authorities as God’s special witnesses of the gospel and his agents in directing the affairs of the Church. There are those in the Church who speak of themselves as liberals who, as one of our former presidents has said, “read by the lamp of their own conceit.” (Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine [Deseret Book Co., 1939], p. 373.) One time I asked one of our Church educational leaders how he would define a liberal in the Church. He answered in one sentence: “A liberal in the Church is merely one who does not have a testimony.” Dr. John A. Widtsoe, former member of the Quorum of the Twelve and an eminent educator, made a statement relative to this word liberal as it applied to those in the Church. This is what he said: “The self-called liberal [in the Church] is usually one who has broken with the fundamental principles or guiding philosophy of the group to which he belongs. . . . He claims membership in an organization but does not believe in its basic concepts; and sets out to reform it by changing its foundations. . . . “It is folly to speak of a liberal religion, if that religion claims that it rests upon unchanging truth.” And then Dr. Widtsoe concludes his statement with this: “It is well to beware of people who go about proclaiming that they are or their churches are liberal. The probabilities are that the structure of their faith is built on sand and will not withstand the storms of truth.” (“Evidences and Reconciliations,” Improvement Era, vol. 44 [1941], p. 609.) Here again, to use the figure of speech in Lehi’s vision, they are those who are blinded by the mists of darkness and as yet have not a firm grasp on the “iron rod.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, when there are questions which are unanswered because the Lord hasn’t seen fit to reveal the answers as yet, all such could say, as Abraham Lincoln is alleged to have said, “I accept all I read in the Bible that I can understand, and accept the rest on faith.” . . . Wouldn’t it be a great thing if all who are well schooled in secular learning could hold fast to the “iron rod,” or the word of God, which could lead them, through faith, to an understanding, rather than to have them stray away into strange paths of man-made theories and be plunged into the murky waters of disbelief and apostasy? . . . Cyprian, a defender of the faith in the Apostolic Period, testified, and I quote, “Into my heart, purified of all sin, there entered a light which came from on high, and then suddenly and in a marvelous manner, I saw certainty succeed doubt.” . . . The Lord issued a warning to those who would seek to destroy the faith of an individual or lead him away from the word of God or cause him to lose his grasp on the “iron rod,” wherein was safety by faith in a Divine Redeemer and his purposes concerning this earth and its peoples. The Master warned: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better … that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Matt. 18:6.) The Master was impressing the fact that rather than ruin the soul of a true believer, it were better for a person to suffer an earthly death than to incur the penalty of jeopardizing his own eternal destiny.

The modern teachings of Christianity often preach of a peaceful, merciful, and loving God/Creator. Culturally, this concept of a God of peace is well liked and accepted amongst clergymen and the Christian community alike; however, some scriptural evidence gives us a contradictory and seemingly destructive version of our Creator.

Bible hope implies assurance and confidence but the secular world uses hope with uncertainty and doubt. I think this is true.

While the church as church refrains from entering secular forms, its influence is felt in these forms through the influence of individuals who have been transformed by the Word. The member of the church lives not only in the church but in the secular forms of the world. In these structures of human society he is called to a supernatural life, witnessing to the world the reality of the power of the gospel to change the characteristics of this fallen life into those of the life to come. Through every member’s attitudes and actions in the world, so different from those of the world that the supernatural is required for their explanation, the church bears witness to her Lord. The effect of this witness is described as being-light to the world and salt to the earth (Mt 5:13-16; Phil 2:15). As such, it will most certainly have a beneficial effect upon society. But the transformation of the world is not the ultimate goal. Neither the Lord in His ministry nor the apostles in theirs set about to reform society as an end in itself. As a matter of fact, if the reformation of the world was envisioned, the injunctions to be separate from it would be pointless. The final end of the church’s witness of good works is revealed everywhere in Scripture as that of causing others to acknowledge God and glorify Him (Mt 5:16; 1 Pe 2:12; 3:1). In this function good works are linked to evangelism in the fulfillment of the Great Commission. Thus the total church witness is born when the Word is proclaimed in all its fullness and application to all areas of men’s lives, and then lived by each believer in the contacts with the world in which the Lord of the church has stationed him for a witness.

Some people are ignorant of the world but educated in Scripture, and are therefore prone to missing the relevance of Scripture - these sometimes, later, amidst life's challenges and doubts, turn from the faith; other people are ignorant of Scripture but educated in the world, and are therefore prone to missing the truth of Scripture - they are often those who ridicule the faith. The apologist stands somewhere in the center. He articulates where some are prone to understanding the truth in beauty, others the beauty in truth - that of a spiritual Creator in relation to his scientific creation.

Question: Will there always be a church upon earth? Answer: Yes. This is evident, first of all, from the promises of God. "Upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matt 16:18). If ever the church would be eradicated, the gates of hell, that is, the might of the devil, would have prevailed against her. This, however, will never occur, and thus the church will always remain. This is also evident in Matt 28:20, where we read, "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." The apostles would not live that long, but their spiritual seed (that is, their children, the one generation after the other), and the Holy Scriptures recorded by them, would remain. Christ promises His assistance to these all the days until the end of the world, and in these children and by their writings they still live and speak. Thus the church continues to exist and will always remain in existence. Secondly, this is also confirmed by the offices of the Lord Jesus. As Prophet, Priest, and King, He will endure forever. There can, however, be no body without a head, no king without subjects, no teaching prophets without pupils, no priest without a people for whom he prays, and no bridegroom without a bride. "Thou art a priest for ever" (Ps 110:4); "And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed" (Dan 2:44); "For He must reign, till He hath put all enemies under His feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (1 Cor 15:25-26). Thirdly, add to this experience that the Bible reveals to us the church from Adam to Christ, and after Christ, during the time of the apostles. Both church and secular history bear witness to the fact that the church has existed from the time of the apostles until now. Since she still exists, we therefore conclude that she will continue to exist in spite of all those who wish the contrary.

Both prophets are faced with the same problem — the presence of child sacrifice understood as obedience to a sacred decree — and both want the same solution — that child sacrifice should stop, and that God should no longer be associated with such things. Yet they have recourse to entirely different strategies of interpretation to get the same result: one holds to a proto-Marcionite “wrong god” solution, the other holds to a proto-fundamentalist “same God, serious mental gymnastics” solution. Yet what is interesting is that, had you been an ordinary, traditional observant Israelite or Judaean of the period, you would have assumed that God wanted child sacrifice, and that both Ezekiel and Jeremiah, each in their own sweet way, were the ancient equivalents of the leader writers of the Guardian newspaper. In other words: dangerously secularizing proto-atheists who are not God-fearing people at all. Good, straightforward God-fearing people will have known right away that religion is a serious business, and it involves sacrificing children. “If you don’t go along with sacrificing children, then you can’t really be serious about respecting God.” So, let’s remember that over time it turned out that the word of God was being spoken by these prophets, the very ones who would have appeared to be insufficiently religious to their contemporaries. In other words, in the Bible, it is the dangerous secularizers who win out in the end.

the fatal tendency to divide Christians into two groups-the religious and the laity, exceptional Christians and ordinary Christians, the one who makes a vocation of the Christian life and the man who is engaged in secular affairs. That tendency is not only utterly and completely unscriptural; it is destructive ultimately of true piety, and is in many ways a negation of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is no such distinction in the Bible.

The irony of having had such a secular upbringing is that I now live in Texas. Oh, the irony. Here in Texas, it is not only acceptable to go to church and have the mythic belief structure of an eleven-year-old—no, we are considered the odd ones out because we don’t go to church... at least that was how it seemed to us in the beginning.

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization. ― Robert Anton Wilson Some

If the operations of the universe, even their very existence, are controlled by the command of God, that means we are, too. And that’s offensive: to be told we are not God and are subject to his word whether we like it or not. Genesis 1:1 is more than a statement. It’s more than the beginning of the greatest book of all-time. It’s an assault on every other religious and secular ideal apart from the knowledge of the God of the Bible. But

AMAZING GRACE IS A SWEET SOUND Hatred stirs up conflict, but love covers over all wrongs. Proverbs 10:12 Wherever you look, Christians are being abused—whether it’s the ridicule, marginalization, and stigmatization that Christians receive from the media and liberal elites here, or the torture, imprisonment, beheadings, and slaughter Christians suffer abroad. So-called progressives in the West treat Christians with snobbish contempt. Radical Islamists kill us. In both cases, morality has been turned upside-down. The Bible warns of such crumbling morality in 2 Timothy 3:2. It’s all been prophesized. This passage reveals that people will be lovers of themselves, arrogant, abusive, and wicked. The line separating right from wrong has been blurred by the worldly influences of humanism, secularism, and religious doctrines not based on the Word of God. The outcry of the age is for “tolerance,” yet how tolerant is it for people to attack Christians who simply want to live their lives by biblical principles? The very heart of Christianity is to love our enemies, as tough as that may be. What does that love look like now that so many are labeling us “intolerant”? Our example is found in Jesus. If He showed such amazing strength and mercy in the face of horrendous treatment coming at Him, how can we, being recipients of His mercy, refuse to exercise whatever strength we can muster? We can’t refuse it. The daunting nature of required mercy and grace makes it seem impossible to implement, especially when we see hatred around us. All the more reason to tap into God’s amazing grace and ask Him to show us how. He’ll be delighted to teach us. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Pray to God for strength and understanding, and for the grace to endure.

When the gospel has been eclipsed (whether by repression, false religion secularism, humanistic philosophy, or spiritual decay within the church), the status of women has declined accordingly.

The current plethora of psychotherapeutic approaches can offer temporary relief from emotional pain, but they can never meet the deepest need of the human heart. Therefore, all secular counseling approaches fall short of truly meeting a hurting person at the deepest level of their need for God. Secular approaches cannot meet sacred needs.

Obama affected to explain how Christianity guides his politics. But a close reading of the speech reveals that the influence is all in reverse: his liberal politics guide his Christianity. Doctrinal Christianity is a disposable proposition for him, while political liberalism represents an organizing, not-to-be-doubted-or-changed truth for society. Indeed, liberalism is so obviously true and authoritative that the traditional understanding of Christianity must give way to it, according to Obama’s thinking. Though he would never dare question the Koran, he has implied the Bible’s condemnation of homosexual behavior is in need of an interpretational overhaul under the light of modern liberalism. Obama appears to assume that while the Bible is a fallible document, the doctrines of modern liberalism are beyond any questioning, which is why he seems so confident, even arrogant, in dismissing his critics. He knows the truth; they represent error and ignorance. For him, secularism is synonymous with “reason” and religion synonymous with “mere opinion,” which explains why Obama regards his “evolving” views as infallible and Christianity’s changeless principles as disposable.

For much of the first 100 years of the public school system, religious conflicts centred on intense anti-Catholic sentiments with tensions occasionally reaching violent levels. The Philadelphia Bible riots in 1844 ignited over the use of anti-Catholic books in public schools and the requirement that children read from the Protestant King James version of the Bible rather than the Catholic Douay version. Protestants, fearing that Catholics wanted to remove their Bible from schools and convert their children to Catholicism, rallied in the streets and violently rioted in Catholic neighbourhoods. The devastation resulted in the death of eighteen people and destroyed fifty homes, a church, and a convent.

Both the false teacher and the secular humanist rely on biblical ignorance for their message to take root, and the modern church has proven fertile ground for those messages. Because we do not know our bibles, we crumble at the most basic challenges to our worldview.

I don't care whether you follow science, I don't care whether you follow the bible, all I care is how you behave with the everyday, ordinary people around you.

It also doesn’t mean that “progress” divorced from God is progress at all. In fact, progress can become very dark in a secular context, without a biblical understanding of human fallibility and without the God of the Bible as the author of history and the judge of the earth.

The church is safe from vicious persecution at the hands of the secularist, as educated people have finished with stake-burning circuses and torture racks. No martyr’s blood is shed in the secular west. So long as the church knows her place and remains quietly at peace on her modern reservation. Let the babes pray and sing and read their Bibles, continuing steadfastly in their intellectual retardation; the church’s extinction will not come by sword or pillory, but by the quiet death of irrelevance. But let the church step off the reservation, let her penetrate once more the culture of the day and the … face of secularism will change from a benign smile to a savage snarl.12

The Bible teaches that, without God, people are morally lost. But they are also intellectually lost because they are trying to live within the limits of a worldview that is too cramped and narrow to account for their own humanity. They are forced to place their entire hope for dignity and meaning in an upper-story realm that they themselves regard as irrational and unknowable—nothing but necessary falsehoods.

Humans awake with humanity need no bible, quran or gita to tell right from wrong - they don't need humanitarian institutions to tackle crisis of human rights. They just stand up and act as human, and the whole planet is revolutionized.

At the messy, lovable, chaotic potluck that is life in the church, transgender Christians have a lot to bring to the table. We can help the church see Scripture through different lenses; we can help other Christians understand their own gender identities; we can help to break down barriers created by sexism and misogyny; we can remind people of the diversity of God’s creation, and of God’s unlimited nature; we can stand in the gaps and bridge middle spaces where others may be uncomfortable or uninformed; we can help make connections between the sacred and the secular, making the church more relevant for the world, and we can provoke people into asking questions about themselves and about God that they may never have thought to ask before.

The Bible and The Koran are so confusing and vague that thousands interpret them in many different ways, for both good and bad purposes. Does this sound the work of an omniscient, all-powerful, all good deity? How can any rational human being determine the truth when there are so many versions of it?

The Francis Schaeffer of the Uffizi, who hiked with me and told me that he had doubts about many things, even God, gradually disappeared, and the absolutist defender-of-the-Bible and father-of-the-religious-right took his place. The young painter I had been was gone, too. And even the young idealistic pro-life activist was fading away, to be replaced by a pain-in-the-ass upstart earning great book royalties and speaking fees from hanging onto his father’s coattails and shrilly denouncing “secular America” and the evils of liberals. I

Dad and Mom were tough on intellectual ideas they disagreed with, but not on people. Ideas interested Dad, not theology per se. If he was lecturing on art, music, cultural trends, he stuck to the subject. He hated circular arguments that depended on the Bible when used against secular people who didn’t acknowledge biblical authority. He believed that you should argue on a level playing field, where both people stay on common ground. “What’s the point of quoting the Bible to people who don’t believe it’s true?” Dad would say. In

Agnosticism, Atheism, secularism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam or any other counter belief to Christianity is not the greatest threat facing Christianity in the west. The biggest threat facing Christianity in the west is Scripture illiterate believers. People who are asleep, all while the world waits to here the Gospel...” 

What we need today is men who take a stand on the Word of God and stop trying to fit in or preach a socially acceptable gospel...We need men like Caleb, when they see the giants of Atheism, Political Correctness or other secular social pressures demanding the message of the bible be altered to fit in with their views declare “we will not shrink back – and we are well able to overcome it!

The line between sacred and secular is man-made.

The dominant ethos of the twenty-first century consists of an intermingling of the sacred and the secular.

Mom could not ignore the sorts of people who were most certainly not fundamentalist: the artists, composers, and choreographers she so admired, or the sorts of secular people she might bump into at concerts and in museums. So I think my mother spent a lifetime trying to change the image of Bible-believing Christians.

Until the 1800s, most people from the Middle East to the Western World believed what the Bible records about creation and the global Flood. The secular idea of millions of years did not gain extensive popularity until the 1830s, under the influence of a man named Charles Lyell — who opposed a global Flood!

The Bible does not define faith as a leap to something that has no logical ground within its own worldview—a useful falsehood. When Paul writes, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7), some Christians seem to think he is speaking metaphorically and means “by faith, not reason.” But Paul is speaking literally and he means sight. Non-material realities are invisible. They cannot be seen. Faith is “the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1 KJV). It can take tremendous faith to act on the basis of realities we cannot see, but it is not a logical contradiction. Given the evidence, such actions can even be eminently reasonable, just as it is reasonable for physicists to count on the reality of forces and fields that they cannot see.

This is not a book of truth, but simply a book that attempts with as little bias as humanly possible, to understand truth. In reality, there can be no book of truth, because truth does not rise from books. Truth rises from the human mind - truth rises from the deepest fathoms of your soul.

But if we see happiness in our Bibles, isn’t it self-evident that it’s a God-centered and God-honoring happiness, not a general, secular one? Don’t all Bible readers know that when Scripture speaks of peace, hope, justice, and love, it routinely attaches deeper and more Christ-centered meanings to those words than our culture does? One commentator says that makarios “is a deeper word than ‘happy,’ implying that deep and lasting joy that comes only as a gift from God.”[30] How does using blessed instead of happy convey a deep and lasting joy to readers? Arguably, to the great majority of people, it conveys no joy or happiness at all.

At first glance the Bible appeared to be a collection of unrelated books of history, poetry, rituals, philosophy, biography, and prophecy held together only by a binder’s stitch and glue. But I only had to read Genesis 11 and 12 to realize that seemingly unrelated and different books of the Bible had a clear plot, a thread that tied together all the books, as well as the Old and the New Testaments. Sin had brought a curse upon all the nations of the earth. God called Abraham to follow him because he wanted to bless all the nations of the earth through Abraham’s descendants.6 It didn’t take long to realize that God’s desire to bless human beings begins in the very first chapter of Genesis and culminates in the last chapter of the last book with a grand vision of healing for all nations.7 The implication was obvious: The Bible was claiming that I should read it because it was written to bless my nation and me. The revelation that God wanted to bless my nation of India amazed me. I realized it was a prediction I could test. It would confirm or deny the Bible’s reliability. If the Bible is God’s word, then had he kept this word? Had he blessed “all the nations of the earth”? Had my country been blessed by the children of Abraham? If so, that would be a good reason for me, an Indian, to check out this book. My investigation of whether God had truly blessed India through the Bible yielded incredible discoveries: the university where I was studying, the municipality and democracy I lived in, the High Court behind my house and the legal system it represented, the modern Hindi that I spoke as my mother tongue, the secular newspaper for which I had begun to write, the army cantonment west of the road I lived on, the botanical garden to the east, the public library near our garden, the railway lines that intersected in my city, the medical system I depended on, the Agricultural Institute across town—all of these came to my city because some people took the Bible seriously.

Penicros answered, ‘A bad man quarrelled with a good man, saying “For every word of abuse I hear from you, I will retort ten.” 9. ‘The good man replied, “For every ten words of abuse I hear from you, I will not retort one.” 10. ‘That is the difference between a bad man and a good; and between a foolish man and a wise.

The Bible says that every person who puts their faith in Christ receives a spiritual gift. According to Pastor JD Greer, “A spiritual gift is usually just a special empowerment—an unusual effectiveness —in an assignment given to all believers.

Why do people suppress the evidence for God? The God described in the Bible goes against the grain of today’s popular notions of spirituality. Many people may be receptive to the idea of a non-personal spiritual force that they can tap into. They might be willing to consider a great pantheistic pool of spirituality of which they are a part. But they are far less comfortable with the concept of a living, active, personal God who knows them, wants to interact with them, and has his own views about what they are doing with their lives.

The larger point is that abolitionists, whether popes or evangelists, spoke almost exclusively in the language of Christian faith . . . Although many Southern clergy [in America] proposed theological defences of slavery, pro-slavery rhetoric was overwhelmingly secular—references were made to “liberty” and “states’ rights,” not to “sin” or “salvation.”26

Devout Roman Catholics who hate secular nationalism but do not appreciate biblical nationalism have fueled the recent reaction against nationalism and the yearning for a united continent in Europe.

….that witches should not be suffered to live; that those who violate the Sabbath should be killed; that women should not be permitted to speak in church; that slavery is to be condoned; perhaps the very existence of hell. Let it pass that all these things have now become embarrassing only because of the advance of secular knowledge; the true question is whether this kind of procedure – picking and choosing which parts of the Bible to believe in, and brushing the loathsome or embarrassing parts under the rug and hoping no one will notice – has any legitimacy beyond that of practical expediency.

The spiritual starvation diet offered by secularism made people so hungry that they now eat anything.

I didn’t blame Curtis for coming to what was nominally a Protestant church and expecting to hear about the Bible. I’d also had to adjust to the AUUCC’s staunch secularism. Having been drawn there to grieve my mother, I would have loved some divine reassurance, but during my very first visit Sparlo said, “There are no answers, only the eternal questions,” and I remember thinking, Damn, one more time, nobody’s offering any certainty.

Little difference exists between gay Christian theology and gay secular humanist presuppositions, other than the use of "God-talk" in an attempt to sanctify gay sex.' The gay Christian movement is both in the world and of the world. Homoerotic behavior is ultimately a profession of atheism and a declaration of war on Western society's heterosexual norms inherited from historic Christianity. Homosexual sex is indeed a revolutionary act seeking to overthrow all constraints imposed by traditional Christianity. Christianity is the opposition, from the secular humanist perspective, and this conclusion is legitimate, for homosexual practice is antithetical to everything Scripture and the Christian tradition teach about men and women, who are created by God for each other. The gay Christian movement chooses to obscure the truth and has deluded itself into embracing the fantasy that God blesses homosexual practice.

Third, in coming to understand Biblical symbolism, we may receive some clues from other ancient literature, but we must always have clear-cut Biblical indication for any symbol or image we think we have found. We don't want to read the modern secular worldview into the Bible, but we don't want to read the corrupt worldview of ancient Near-Eastern paganism into it either.