Word: secularist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when the children of Israel inhabit their whole homeland. Despite their near-constant presence in newsprint and political media, evangelical Christians constitute only 26.3 percent of religious adults in America. Yet, if Bill Maher’s recent film “Religulous” and a wave of secularist polemics are any indication, extreme religious views are being used to justify the wholesale abandonment of all religion...
...Recognition that Atatürk was all too human is hardly taboo-breaking, but the film has the secularist establishment, which sees itself as the guardian of Atatürk's legacy, up in arms. Critics have accused director Can Dundar, a popular and well-respected journalist, of lying, insulting Turkishness and even being part of an Islamist plot to weaken the staunchly secularist military...
...Filmmaker Dundar, a well-known secularist, says he is shocked by the criticism. "I'm being lynched," he said in an interview in daily Hurriyet. "Now I know what a taboo is." At the film's premiere, he said he wanted to "show a more real Atatürk - a man who fought difficulties, loved women, who made mistakes, who was sometimes scared and achieved things." (See pictures of movie posters...
...looking out my window at Kings College chapel [the iconic building at Cambridge University, which Rushdie attended]," he says. "And its hard not to believe in the capacity of religion to create beauty" with that sight in his memory. He then expressed wonder that, as a non-Christian secularist, he was invited in 1993 to preach a sermon in that same chapel and did. "There are moments in your life that surprise you," he said...
...Turkey can ill afford a repeat of the court saga or continued and potentially explosive polarization; it would seem that Erdogan has little other option. Building broad social consensus may also be his only real guarantee against the secularist old guard, who have stepped in with military coups and judicial decisions against elected governments in the past, and may yet do so again. So while today's verdict was a victory for the government, it was also a warning...