A Quote by Neal Stephenson

A lot of secular, modern people claim to be disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart person is religious. That's applicable to Newton as it is to any other religious smart person
I don't think Mitt Romney is a smart person. I never have thought he was a smart person. But the Mormons are very smart people.
I love reading religious authors. Especially in the sort of circle I move in, people tend to be more secular, and I love reading books by just really smart people of religious faith. It's always a really cool perspective.
I am a very proud Hindu. The foundation of my personality is laid on the teachings of Swami Vivekananda or Sanatan Dharm or the Geeta. And if my religious practices or anybody's religious practices is given any kind of sadistic name, it instills fear about other person's religious practices.
In contemporary society secular humanism has been singled out by critics and proponents alike as a position sharply distinguishable from any religious formulation. Religious fundamentalists in the United States have waged a campaign against secular humanism, claiming that it is a rival "religion" and seeking to root it out from American public life. Secular humanism is avowedly non-religious. It is a eupraxsophy (good practical wisdom), which draws its basic principles and ethical values from science, ethics, and philosophy.
People look at my tattoos, and the majority of them are religious images, so people think, 'Oh, he must be very religious'. I respect all religions, but I'm not a deeply religious person. But I try and live life in the right way, respecting other people.
Many of the religious apologists out there are not stupid people, they are often brilliant. People working in the field of theology and philosophy smart people everywhere. What they are those religious apologists are smart poeple who can build these amazingly intricate rationalizations for whatever weird practice they favor. Whether it's ritual cannibalism, or praying to spirits, or treating women as chattel. And they always building this on terrible shaky foundation of false premises.
Tibet, why is it occupied? For political reasons maybe they have a reason. I don't know. But religiously, why? The fact that the religious community is being oppressed and persecuted is something that every single person in the world who has any religious faith and religious feeling for - for people who have faith should speak up.
No company should depend on one person no matter how that person is smart or genius, whether it's Apple or News Corp, or Citibank or any other company in the world.
The learnin' mind is the livin' mind, Meronym said, an any sort o'Smart is truesome Smart, old Smart or new high Smart or low.
There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.
I think nobody is in a position to react to these big macro-issues. Where is the dollar going to be or what is G.D.P. growth going to be in China? For every smart person on one side of the question, there is another smart person on the other side.
Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.
You have to be closer to religious origins -- the generation of the 20's was truly secular in that it still knew its theology and its varieties of religious experience. We are post-secular, inventing new faiths, without any sense of organizing truths. The truths we accept are so multiple that honesty becomes little more than a strategy by which you manage your tendencies toward duplicity.
Do not be intimidated by a smart person. It is easier to debate a smart person than to argue with an idiot.
I think every religious person should have a deep sense of respect for other people's religious documents and religious symbols just as we were deeply opposed to the Taliban destroying the two historic buddhas which they blew up. So I think we ought to all oppose burning the Koran.
In Holland, they have come to precisely the same conclusion. There they have adopted a system of secular education, because they have found it impracticable to unite the religious bodies in any system of combined religious instruction.
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