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Quote by George Agnew Reid

“Probably in all history there is no instance of a society in which ecclesiastical power was dominant which was not at once stagnant, corrupt and brutal.”

Quote by George Agnew Reid

Author

George Agnew Reid

George Agnew Reid was a prominent Canadian artist active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His works are renowned for their unique style and profound depiction of the Canadian natural landscape. more

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“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion.”

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Author:Gregory S. Paul

“This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.”

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“Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who . . . even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.”

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Book:Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

Source: Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

“In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. . . . There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; . . . she was doing in all this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery.”

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Author:Mark Twain

“It [slavery] has exercised absolute mastery over the American Church. . . . With the Bible in their hands, her priesthood have attempted to prove that slavery came down from God out of heaven. They have become slaveholders and dealers in human flesh.”

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“Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the church's opposition to every advance in every field of science. . . .”

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“The establishment of Christianity . . . arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years.”

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“Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas. . . .”

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“Over and over, expanding scientific knowledge has shown religious claims to be false.”

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“The contraction of theological influence has been at once the best measure, and the essential condition of intellectual advance.”

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