Is Reality Secular? Quotes

“Truth takes no sides and does not bend to human beliefs or desires. Reality simply is what it is; it functions with or without our agreement.”
― Mary Poplin, Is Reality Secular?: Testing the Assumptions of Four Global Worldviews

“For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical re-appropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. . . . Everything else is idle postmodern talk.”
― Mary Poplin, Is Reality Secular?: Testing the Assumptions of Four Global Worldviews

“As award-winning British journalist Melanie Phillips writes, “The correspondences between Western progressives and Islamists are really quite remarkable. Both are attempting to create utopias to redeem past sins; both permit no dissent from the one revealed truth. . . . Both are giving expression to a totalitarian instinct that involves a wholesale repudiation of reason.”
― Mary Poplin, Is Reality Secular?: Testing the Assumptions of Four Global Worldviews