Secular Law Quotes

Christianity neither is, nor ever was, part of the common law.

The first amendment makes it clear that we are free to practice religion without government interference. The Constitution also establishes the separation of church and state so that the laws we live by our never guided by religious zeal.

Revealed religion is one thing, revealed legislation, another.

Islam and the Constitution are in clear conflict.

All religions in France are subject to the rules of secularism.

Ministers should share the same protection of the law that other men do, and no more. To proscribe [prohibit] them from seats of legislation, etc., is cruel. To indulge them with an exemption from taxes and bearing arms is a tempting emolument [benefit]. The law should be silent about them; protect them as citizens, not as sacred officers, for the civil law knows no sacred religious officers.

Historically, both religious and secular laws originate from the same source

To me there's nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn't apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn't work.

There's no religious test under the constitution. That's what it says. Period.

The secular law has as its task not to turn the world lying in evil into the Kingdom of God, but to prevent it from turning into hell.

What is considered sinful in one of the great religions to which citizens belong isn't necessarily sinful in the others. Criminal law therefore cannot be based on the notion of sin …

At first, laws evolved out of religious doctrines. It followed that they were recognized only when advantageous to those who practiced the same religion and who appeared equals under the protection of the same gods. For the members of all other cults, there was neither law nor mercy.

People of faith should not invoke the power of the state to decide what everyone can believe or think or read or do. In such cases, like abortion or prayer or prohibition or sexual identity, the proper role of religion is to appeal to the free conscience of each person, not the coercive rule of secular law.

The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not?

Regardless of whether or not you belong to a majority religion, in the United States you may not impose your theology on civil law.

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns in to universal, rather than religion-specific, values... it requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason. Now I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, to take one example, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

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.

Religious doctrines do not and clearly cannot be adopted as the criminal code of a state.

A conflict of values is not a misunderstanding. Islamic orthodoxy and the German constitution are not compatible.

We're in the hands of the state legislature and God, but at the moment, the state legislature has more to say than God.

The Catholic teaching against murder, for example, is largely the same as our secular laws. But as a law, it obviously has a secular rationale at least as strong as its religious rationale.

Christians - at least Christians in a liberal democracy - have accepted, after Thomas Hobbes, that they must obey the secular rule of law; that there must be a separation of church and state.

The law of the land is We do not allow parties on a religious basis. We launch ourselves from our value system … but religion does not belong to any political party.

My position is that since the non-secular status of my garden is not recognised by the law; by the world of the public, then the garden can only be private. So, I closed the garden to the public.

Christian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that all consensual sexual acts are morally equal. That belief is anti-biblical and amoral; to codify it into law is to codify a lie.