The poet always takes account of humanism before everything.

The secular world is full of holes.

But, of course, our secular religion is technology.

Think of it as a kind of secular church.

But the secular minded people can be influenced by that.

There are secular kooks there are smart kooks, dumb kooks.

Now education is a field the secular world really believes in.

And far from being a coldly materialistic view of nature, it's a new humanism, it's a new enchantment.

Now art is something that in the secular world, we think very highly of.

But compassion is also equally at home in the secular as in the religious.

What's the difference between a sermon and our modern, secular mode of delivery, the lecture?

In the secular world we think, If an idea is important, I'll bump into it.

On the one hand was my mother, a well educated, secular, modern, westernized, Turkish woman.

The second largest group, with nearly 30 million, is the one described as non religious or secular.

This secular non religious vote, if properly mobilized, is nine times as numerous as the Jewish vote.

I would say that there are many, many gaps in secular life and these can be plugged.

And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual.

The Industrial Revolution started in the Renaissance with the rise of humanism, then got a little jump start along about the French Revolution.

Well, one thing to notice is that we do something different when talking about morality especially secular, academic, scientist types.

What's missing is that we are Homo duplex, but modern, secular society was built to satisfy our lower, profane selves.

And everybody was amazed when the refrigerator opened, and millions of young, mainly secular people stepped out to do the change.

But where, in our increasingly secular and fragmented world, do we offer communality of experience, unmediated by our own furious consumerism?

I was fully aware that for someone as secular as I am, just asking it could be seen as pure chutzpah.

I'm going to talk about compassion and the golden rule from a secular perspective and even from a kind of scientific perspective.

Turkey's effort to join the E.U., has been supported inside Turkey by the Islamic pious, while some secular nations were against that.

In the secular world, you can come through the university system and be a lousy speaker and still have a great career.

With passion and enthusiasm we pay profound respects to TED for its outstanding humanism, the scope of its principles, for its open and generous promotion of young values.

In 1950, Turkey had the first free and fair elections, which ended the more autocratic secular regime, which was the beginning of Turkey.

Another point about education we tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it.

That Iran was once a secular society, and we had democracy, and this democracy was stolen from us by the American government, by the British government.

That is, when we get girls in school, we'll get an impact 15 to 20 years later, which is a secular trend which is very strong.

Because Egyptians are more optimistic than they have been in years, far less divided on religious secular lines than we would think and poised for the demands of democracy.

But the pro E.U. sentiment in Turkey in the past decade has become almost an Islamic cause and supported by the Islamic liberals and the secular liberals as well, of course.

And I think the West, at least some powers in the West, particularly the United States, made the mistake of supporting those secular dictators, thinking that they were more helpful for their interests.

The people in the modern world, in the secular world, who are interested in matters of the spirit, in matters of the mind, in higher soul like concerns, tend to be isolated individuals.

I should say that Interval is really a humanistic institution, in the classical sense that humanism, at its best, finds a way to combine clear eyed empirical research with a set of core values that fundamentally love and respect people.

The basic idea of humanism is the improvable quality of life that we can do good things, that there are things worth doing because they're good things to do, and that clear eyed empiricism can help us figure out how to do them.

And when the colonial period ended, what you had in place of that was, generally, secular dictators, which say they're a country, but did not bring democracy to the country, and established their own dictatorship.

The women s movement in Morocco which now bridges secular and religious communities is setting an example of the power of social thought in a traditional society. Re visiting traditional interpretations of Scripture is not the end of the story.

Let me give you an example in Turkey where I come from, which is a very hyper secular republic, until very recently we used to have what I call secularism police, which would guard the universities against veiled students.

In so doing, the guardians of secular democracy in effect yield the connection between education and values to fundamentalists, who, you can be sure, have no compunctions about using education to further their values the absolutes of a theocracy.

And now as we confront that shallowness and the failures that derive from our inability to get the depths of who we are, comes this revolution in consciousness these people in so many fields exploring the depth of our nature and coming away with this enchanted, this new humanism.

I would just sum up the way things look, at least from this secular perspective, as far as compassion and the golden rule go, by saying that it's good news that compassion and the golden rule are in some sense built into human nature.