today, to hear the preacher and to listen to the music.
They would come to worship God.

H. L. MENCKEN

Alone among the great nations of history we have got rid of religion as
a serious scourge, and by the simple process of reducing it to a petty
nuisance. For men become civilized, not in proportion to their
willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances,
the heavier his load of faith. When Copernicus proved that the earth
revolved around the sun, he did not simply prove that the earth revolved
around the sun, he also proved that the so-called revelation of God, as
contained in the Old Testament, was rubbish. The first fact was
relatively trivial: it made no difference to the average man then, as it
makes no difference to him today. But, the second fact was of stupendous
importance, for it disposed at one stroke of a mass of bogus facts that
had been choking the intelligence and retarding the progress of humanity
for a millennium and a half....

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to
mankind; that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the
ethical side have been more than overborne by the damage it has done to
clear and honest thinking.

HORACE M. KALLEN

It is a significant trait of history that the times and nations most
distinguished for piety are also most distinguished for backwardness.
Czarist Russia, and contemporary Spain are near examples, but
illustrations may be drawn from any part of the world; the Southern
States of the United States of America, for instance. Everywhere the
scope and intensity of belief in the supernatural seem to be directly
proportional to the misery and weakness of the believer (one compensates
for the other). Freedom of speech and of press and discussion which
means generally restraint of all interference in the amicable threshing
out of conflicting opinions, means, with respect to religious beliefs,
refraining from talking, writing or discussing candidly at all. In every
society belief in the supernatural is privileged belief, and there
accrue to it all the advantages and disadvantages of privilege.... But
mystics and religionists are not silent. On the contrary, they become,
having passed through a religious experience, voluble.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

I do not believe we can have any freedom at all in the philosophical
sense, for we act not only