Word: seculare
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...whether Glass had slipped away from his captors unaided, as he contended, or had been allowed to escape. In either case, Glass had become a pawn in the growing power struggle in Lebanon between Syria, which for its own purposes is trying to restore order and ensure a secular, religiously diverse Lebanon, and Iran, whose fanatical revolutionary rulers are attempting to transform the country into a vessel of the Islamic revolution. Arabic Syria and non-Arabic Iran are allies on many matters, including the gulf war, but they are fiercely at odds over Lebanon's destiny...
Almost too late, Assad realized that Iran and Hizballah posed a threat to Syria's position in Lebanon. He also came to understand that an Islamic stronghold in Lebanon might eventually undermine Assad's own secular Baath ; Party government in Damascus. In 1984 Assad threw his support to Amal, the mainstream Lebanese Shi'ite organization and militia led by Nabih Berri, but Hizballah's influence continued to spread. One reason Assad sent his army into West Beirut in February was to bring the Iranians to heel...
...premise of our society is the right to privacy and personal belief. This is not to say that religion should be taught as a science in this secular world. We're living in a secular world, which all too often seems to cater to atheism and agnosticism. While those fundamentalists who proselytize mercilessly and are violently intolerant are wrong, not all religion should be weeded out of our society. There is plenty of room in the middle ground...
...would be crude and misleading to say that Jefferson's ideas about building illustrate the ideas of the American Constitution. But they certainly grew from the same origin -- the secular humanism that, despite the gaudy bleatings of today's religious right, was their common moral root. Thus the calm, measured, lucid interior of Jefferson's Rotunda, the focus of his "academical village" (the University of Virginia), declares the value of reason and persuades us that humane analysis, not blind faith, is the true measure of a decent society. We sentimentalize Jefferson and his colleagues if we suppose they were...
...religions, or prefer one religion over another." In addition, no tax money should support "any religious activities or institutions." In 1971 the court developed a new threefold test: laws must avoid "excessive government entanglement with religion," have a "principal" effect "that neither advances nor inhibits religion," and have a "secular" purpose. Last week the high court decided that this test is not violated by a law that permits the Mormon Church to discriminate religiously to fill nonreligious jobs...