Marsha’s Reviews > Atheism: A Reader > Status Update

The clergy in general oppose the Sunday opening of museums, mainly because it encourages people to stay away from church. Of course they put another face on the matter, saying they are concerned for the Sunday rest of the workers or the showing of proper respect for the First Cause--anything but their own interests, their own power, their own pocket.

I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.

The pope appointed Kramer and Sprenger to write a comprehensive analysis, using the full academic armory of the late fifteenth century. With extensive citations of Scripture and of ancient and modern scholars, they produced the Malleus Maleficarum, the "Hammer of Witches".

I know that Christians in the present day often declare that Christianity had a large share n bringing about the abolition of slavery, and this because men professing Christianity were ABolitionists. I plead that those so-called Christian Abolitionists were men and women whose humanity...was, in this, in direct conflict with Christianity.

Pleasant tot eh clerical flesh under such circumstances is the arrival of Sunday! Somewhat at a disadvantage during the week, in the presence of working-day interests and lay splendours, on Sunday the preacher becomes the cynosure of a thousand eyes.

Ever since that time there have been men who were not content to accept passively the religious opinions of their neighbors, but endeavoured to consider what reason and philosophy might have to say about the mater. In the commercial cities of Ionia, where philosophy was invented, there were free-thinkers in the sixth century B.C. Compared to modern free-thinkers they had an easy task.