Ian McEwan - Jonathan Miller TV - Martin Amis - Christopher Hitchens - Richard Dawkins -
I suppose in the real world in which we have to rub along, the only issue here is tolerance. And who will grant tolerance to the six-thousand religions of the world? Well surely only the secular spirit is able to do this. You cannot put religious tolerance in the hands of one religion. You have to put it in the hands I think of the secular authority which either believes all or none of them, and says they all must thrive along with each other. They have mutually exclusive world-views ... Only the secular state, only a sort of supervening uncaring about religion, that will allow us all the freedoms to be as rational or as crazy as we want to be. Ian McEwan, interview Professor Richard Dawkins
By the middle of the nineteenth century there were more than forty secular societies in Britain. Dr Jonathan Miller: A Rough History of Disbelief III: The Final Hour, BBC 2004
Secularism contains no warrant for action. One can afford to be crude about this. When Islamists crash passenger planes into buildings, or hack off the heads of hostages, they shout, ‘God is great’. When secularists do that kind of thing, what do they shout? Martin Amis
There is no guarantee of religious freedom without a secular system. Christopher Hitchens v John Haldane, debate Oxford University
Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that. Richard Dawkins