My Zen Den

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Celebrating Richard Gladwell WXXI

To be secular means, simply, to be without religion. But this adjective applies very differently to countries than it does to people. For a person to be secular means that they do not subscribe to the creed of any existing religion (as in "secular humanist"). A secular person, by the usual and conventional meaning of the term, is therefore a nonbeliever, an atheist. For a state to be secular has a superficially similar meaning: that that state is not ruled by a religious authority, nor are its laws derived from the tenets of a religious creed, nor are its citizens required to give assent to a particular set of religious beliefs. A secular state is one that has no official religion, no favoritism or preference shown by the government for one church over another, or for religious belief in general as opposed to nonbelief. But this does not mean that a secular state must be one that officially bans the holding of religious beliefs among its citizenry or takes positive steps to d

One of my favorite authors (and fellow atheists) Mark Twain wrote a brilliant essay entitled “Letters From The Earth," In it, Satan has been temporarily expelled from heaven and is wandering around the universe. On a lark, he decides to visit earth, an outlying little spot in an outlying galaxy that God had once played around with for a few days. Satan is astounded at what he finds, and writes home: "This is a strange place, an extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the Earth is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God'...if I may put another strain on you - he thinks he is the Creator's pet. He believes the Creator's proud o