Secularism

As a sensate phase progresses and becomes more pervasive and degenerate, both autocratic governments and democracies resort to bribing the masses in order to stay in power--bread and circuses in the Roman Empire, various forms of entitlements and welfare in the modern democratic welfare states. Subsidies for some of the more exotic elements of society through national endowments for the arts and humanities contribute to chaotic syncretism, which works against the moral consensus needed for democracy to function

-Harold O. J. Brown

It will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteristic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions are laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind.

― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

No matter its boasts or pretensions, a civilization that is stripped of memory and the moral imagination is in jeopardy of collapsing in upon itself, its public world imploding into fragments of private desire and gratuitous brutality. The so-called realistic images that the Great Stereopticon projects onto the screen of the common life do not fortify belief. They may evoke pity for the other and pity for oneself, but they are incapable of leading us to a clear understanding of justice. They may stir the passions, but they do not solidify the virtues.

― Vigen Guroian