Aulus
Cornelius Celsus
Before accepting
any belief one ought to follow reason as a guide, for
credulity without enquiry is a sure way to deceive oneself.
Quoted from Antony Flew, Atheistic Humanism, p. 17
This is one of their [the Christians'] rules. Let no man
that is learned, wise, or prudent come among us: but if
they be unlearned, or a child, or an idiot, let him freely
come. So they openly declare that none but the ignorant,
and those devoid of understanding, slaves, silly women, and
children, are fit disciples for the God they worship.
Quoted from John E. Remsberg, The Christ, p. 325
You may see weavers, tailors, fullers, and the most
illiterate of rustic fellows, who dare not speak a word
before wise men, when they can get a company of children
and silly women together, set up to teach strange paradoxes
among them.
Quoted from John E. Remsberg, The Christ, p. 325
More and more the myths put about by these Christians are
better known than the doctrines of the philosophers. Who
has not heard the fable of Jesus' birth from a virgin or
the stories of his crucifixion and resurrection? ... But
the point is this, and the Christians would do well to heed
it: One ought first to follow reason as a guide before
accepting any since anyone who believes without testing a
doctrine is certain to be deceived.... Just as the
charlatans of the cults take advantage of the simpleton's
lack of education to lead him around by the nose, so too
with the Christian teachers: they do not want to give or
receive reasons for what they believe. Their favorite
expressions are "Do not ask questions, just believe!" and:
"Your faith will save you!" "The wisdom of the world," they
say, "is evil; to be simple is to be good." If only they
would undertake to answer my question -- which I do not ask
as one who is trying to understand their beliefs (there
being little to understand!). But they refuse to answer,
and indeed discourage asking questions of any sort.
The True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians,
translated by R. Joseph Hoffmann (1987), p. 54, quoted from
George H. Smith, Why Atheism? (2000)
Richard Dawkins
If death is final, a rational
agent can be expected to value his life highly and be
reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place,
just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive.
At the other extreme, if a significant number of people
convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests,
that a martyr's death is equivalent to pressing the
hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another
universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place.
Especially if they also believe that that other universe is
a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the real
world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicrous and
degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder
that naïve and frustrated young men are clamouring to be
selected for suicide missions?
"Religion's Misguided Missiles"
(September 15, 2001)
Perhaps the best of the
available euphemisms for atheist is nontheist. It lacks the
connotation of positive conviction that there is definitely
no god, and it could therefore easily be embraced by Teapot
or Tooth Fairy Agnostics. It is less familiar than atheist
and lacks its phobic connotations. Yet, unlike a completely
new coining, its meaning is clear. If we want a euphemism
at all, nontheist is probably the
best.
The alternative which
I favor is to renounce all euphemisms and grasp the nettle
of the word atheism itself, precisely because it is a taboo
word carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. Critical mass
may be harder to achieve than with some non-confrontational
euphemism, but if we did achieve it with the dread word
atheist, the political impact would be all the
greater.
-- Richard Dawkins, following a list of
excerpts from hate mail sent to the editor of Freethought
Today, after she won a separationist court battle, in "A
Challenge To Atheists: Come Out of the Closet" (Free
Inquiry, Summer, 2002) ††
By all means let's be
open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop
out.
-- Richard Dawkins, in "Science, Delusion and
the Appetite for Wonder," The Richard Dimbleby Lecture,
BBC1 Television (12 November 1996)
I am against religion because
it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the
world.
-- Richard Dawkins (attributed: source
unknown)
Religion teaches the dangerous
nonsense that death is not the end.
-- Richard
Dawkins, "Religion's Misguided Missiles" (September 15,
2001)
Faith is the great cop-out, the
great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate
evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because
of, the lack of evidence.
-- Richard Dawkins
(attributed: source unknown)
Faith is powerful enough to
immunize people against all appeals to pity, to
forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes
them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's
death will send them straight to heaven.
-- Richard
Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Yes, testosterone-sodden young
men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be
desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the
next.
-- Richard Dawkins, "Religion's Misguided
Missiles" (September 15, 2001)
If death is final, a rational
agent can be expected to value his life highly and be
reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place,
just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive.
At the other extreme, if a significant number of people
convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests,
that a martyr's death is equivalent to pressing the
hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another
universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place.
Especially if they also believe that that other universe is
a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the real
world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicrous and
degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder
that naïve and frustrated young men are clamouring to be
selected for suicide missions?
-- Richard Dawkins,
"Religion's Misguided Missiles" (September 15, 2001)
My last vestige of "hands off
religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust
of September 11th 2001, followed by the "National Day of
Prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous
Martin Luther King impersonations and urged people of
mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in
homage to the very force that caused the problem in the
first place.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain
(2004)
My point is not that religion
itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist
attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the
most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we"
can be identified at all.
-- Richard Dawkins, The
Devil's Chaplain (2004)
It is fashionable to wax
apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS
virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a
case can be made that faith is one of the world's great
evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to
eradicate.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Humanist, Vol. 57,
No. 1
To describe religions as mind
viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even
hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile
to organized religion.
-- Richard Dawkins, The
Devil's Chaplain (2004)
I don't think God is an
explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the
problem.
We are trying to
understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have
an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we
explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it
all hangs together down to an ultimately simple
world.
Now, God is not an
explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if
he has power to do all the things he is supposed to
do.
-- Richard Dawkins, "Nick Pollard interviews
Richard Dawkins" (Damars: 1999) ††
If people think God is
interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is
anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just
shut up about it.
-- Richard Dawkins (attributed:
source unknown)
[Excerpt (of sorts)]
The
universe we observe has precisely the properties we should
expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no
evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless
indifference.
-- Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden:
A Darwinian View of Life (1995), quoted from Victor J
Stenger, Has Science Found God? (2001)
[Passage (if you
will)]
The total amount of suffering per year in the
natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During
the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence,
thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are
running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are
slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites,
thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and
disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty,
this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in
the population until the natural state of starvation and
misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish
genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some
people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get
lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor
any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the
properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no
design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless
indifference.
-- Richard Dawkins, "God's Utility
Function," published in Scientific American (November,
1995), p. 85
People sometimes try to score
debating points by saying, "Evolution is only a theory."
That is correct, but it's important to understand what that
means. It is also only a theory that the world goes round
the Sun -- it's just a theory for which there is an immense
amount of evidence.
There
are many scientific theories that are in doubt. Even within
evolution, there is some room for controversy. But that we
are cousins of apes and jackals and starfish, let's say,
that is a fact in the ordinary sense of the word.
--
Richard Dawkins, "Nick Pollard interviews Richard Dawkins"
(Damars: 1999) ††
You cannot be both sane and
well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is
so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe
in evolution.
-- Richard Dawkins, in Lanny Swerdlow,
"My Sort Interview with Richard Dawkins" (Portland, Oregon,
1996)
It is absolutely safe to say
that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in
evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or
wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).
-- Richard
Dawkins, quoted from Josh Gilder, a creationist, in his
critical review, "PBS's 'Evolution' series is propaganda,
not science" (September, 2001)
Not a single one of your
ancestors died young. They all copulated at least
once.
-- Richard Dawkins, The New Yorker, "Richard
Dawkins's Evolution" (September 9, 1996), debating "Does
God Exist?" with Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, as reported by Ian
Parker, quoted from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
... Textbooks describe DNA as a
blueprint for a body. It's better seen as a recipe for
making a body, because it is irreversible. But today I want
to present it as something different again, and even more
intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of
ancient worlds in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the
wisdom out of the old days, and I mean very old days
indeed.
...
What changes is the long
programs that natural selection has written using those 64
basic words. The messages that have come down to us are the
ones that have survived millions, in some cases hundreds of
millions, of generations. For every successful message that
has reached the present, countless failures have fallen
away like the chippings on a sculptor's floor. That's what
Darwinian natural selection means. We are the descendants
of a tiny élite of successful ancestors. Our DNA has proved
itself successful, because it is here. Geological time has
carved and sculpted our DNA to survive down to the
present.
-- Richard Dawkins, in "Science, Delusion
and the Appetite for Wonder," The Richard Dimbleby Lecture,
BBC1 Television (12 November 1996)
It really comes down to
parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your
car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it
looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and
performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible
working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine. Telepathy
and possession by the spirits of the dead are not ruled out
as a matter of principle. There is certainly nothing
impossible about abduction by aliens in UFOs. One day it
may be happen. But on grounds of probability it should be
kept as an explanation of last resort. It is
unparsimonious, demanding more than routinely weak evidence
before we should believe it. If you hear hooves
clip-clopping down a London street, it could be a zebra or
even a unicorn, but, before we assume that it's anything
other than a horse, we should demand a certain minimal
standard of evidence.
-- Richard Dawkins, in
"Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder," The
Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1 Television (12 November
1996)
Either it is true that a
medicine works or it isn't. It cannot be false in the
ordinary sense but true in some "alternative" sense. If a
therapy or treatment is anything more than a placebo,
properly conducted double-blind trials, statistically
analyzed, will eventually bring it through with flying
colours. Many candidates for recognition as "orthodox"
medicines fail the test and are summarily dropped. The
"alternative" label should not (though, alas, it does)
provide immunity from the same fate.
-- Richard
Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)
[Alternative medicine is
defined as] that set of practices that cannot be tested,
refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests.
--
Richard Dawkins, quoted from Carl E Bartecchi, "Be Wary of
Alternative Medicine" (Denver Business Journal: January 10,
2003) ††
Each week The X-Files poses a
mystery and offers two rival kinds of explanation, the
rational theory and the paranormal theory. And, week after
week, the rational explanation loses. But it is only
fiction, a bit of fun, why get so hot under the
collar?
Imagine a crime
series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a
black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one
turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my
point is that you could not defend it by saying: "But it's
only fiction, only entertainment".
-- Richard
Dawkins, in "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for
Wonder," The Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1 Television (12
November 1996)
Are science and religion
converging? No. There are modern scientists whose words
sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination,
turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who
straightforwardly call themselves atheists.
--
Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)
To an honest judge, the alleged
convergence between religion and science is a shallow,
empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.
-- Richard
Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)
I believe that an orderly
universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which
everything has an explanation even if we still have a long
way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more
wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious
ad hoc magic.
-- Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the
Rainbow (contributed by Ray Franz)
Blindness to suffering is an
inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is
neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.
-- Richard
Dawkins, on describing how one need only look upon nature
where the wasp lays her eggs inside the body of a living
caterpillar in order to dispense with the idea that the
Universe is supervised by a benevolent deity, in The
Devil's Chaplain (2004)
The feeling of awed wonder that
science can give us is one of the highest experiences of
which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic
passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can
deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth
living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it
convinces us that the time we have for living is quite
finite.
-- Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow:
Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1998), p.
x., quoted from Victor J Stenger, Has Science Found God?
(2001)
Science boosts its claim to
truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy
jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will
happen and when.
-- Richard Dawkins, from "What is
True?" in The Devil's Chaplain (2004)
Our leaders have described the
recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless
cowardice. "Mindless" may be a suitable word for the
vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for
understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those
people were not mindless and they were certainly not
cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective
minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us
mightily to understand where that courage came
from.
It came from
religion....
-- Richard Dawkins, "Religion's
Misguided Missiles" (September 15, 2001)
To fill a world with ...
religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the
streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are
used.
-- Richard Dawkins, "Religion's Misguided
Missiles" (September 15, 2001)
The present Luddism over
genetic engineering may die a natural death as the
computer-illiterate generation is superseded.... I fear
that, if the green movement's high-amplitude warnings over
GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously
disinclined to listen to other and more serious
warnings.
-- Richard Dawkins, from "Science, Genetics
and Ethics," in The Devil's Chaplain (2004)
That there is a continuous link
from humans to gorillas, with the intermediate species
merely long dead, is beyond the understanding of
speciesists. Tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny
piece of insensible embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly
leaps to infinite, incomputable
value....
Self-styled
"pro-lifers," and others that indulge in footling debates
about exactly when in its development a foetus "becomes"
human, exhibit the same discontinuous mentality. "Human,"
to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There
can be no half measures. And from this flows much
evil.
-- Richard Dawkins, from "Gaps in the Mind," in
The Devil's Chaplain (2004)
Society bends over backward to
be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to
other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive
to religious people, I'll be universally censured,
including by many atheists. But if I say something
insulting about Democrats or Republicans or the Green
Party, one is allowed to get away with that. Hiding behind
the smoke screen of untouchability is something religions
have been allowed to get away with for too long.
--
Richard Dawkins, quoted in Natalie Angier, "Confessions of
a Lonely Atheist," New York Times Magazine, January 14,
2001
Over the centuries, we've moved
on from Scripture to accumulate precepts of ethical, legal
and moral philosophy. We've evolved a liberal consensus of
what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as
the idea that we don't approve of slavery or discrimination
on the grounds of race or sex, that we respect free speech
and the rights of the individual. All of these things that
have become second nature to our morals today owe very
little to religion, and mostly have been won in opposition
to the teeth of religion.
-- Richard Dawkins, quoted
in Natalie Angier, "Confessions of a Lonely Atheist," New
York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001
I suspect the reason is that
most people ... have a residue of feeling that Darwinian
evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything
about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the
feeling disappears progressively the more you read about
and study what is known about life and evolution. I want to
add one thing more. The more you understand the
significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away
from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex,
statistically improbable things are by their nature more
difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable
things.
-- Richard Dawkins, from The New Humanist,
the Journal of the Rationalist Press Association, Vol 107
No 2
I became a little alarmed at
the number of my readers who took the meme more positively
as a theory of human culture in its own right -- either to
criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention)
or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought
justified. This was why I may have seemed to
backtrack.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain
(2004)
It's been suggested that if the
supernaturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd
win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they
could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental
physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way,
why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on
television?
-- Richard Dawkins, in "Science, Delusion
and the Appetite for Wonder," The Richard Dimbleby Lecture,
BBC1 Television (12 November 1996)
Certainly I see the scientific
view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that
is not what is interesting about it. It is also
incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth
stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world
view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it
unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single
heading.
-- Richard Dawkins (attributed: source
unknown)
More generally it is completely
unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that
religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting
itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural
presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively
different kind of universe from one without. The difference
is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make
existence claims, and this means scientific
claims.
There is something
dishonestly self-serving in the tactic of claiming that all
religious beliefs are outside the domain of science. On the
one hand, miracle stories and the promise of life after
death are used to impress simple people, win converts, and
swell congregations. It is precisely their scientific power
that gives these stories their popular appeal. But at the
same time it is considered below the belt to subject the
same stories to the ordinary rigors of scientific
criticism: these are religious matters and therefore
outside the domain of science. But you cannot have it both
ways. At least, religious theorists and apologists should
not be allowed to get away with having it both ways.
Unfortunately all too many of us, including nonreligious
people, are unaccountably ready to let them.
--
Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, "When Religion Steps on
Science's Turf," Free Inquiry 18 no. 2 (1998): pp. 18-9,
quoted from Victor J Stenger, Has Science Found God? (2001)
In childhood our credulity
serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary
rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and
our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the
fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target
for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks.
We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood
with the constructive skepticism of adult science.
--
Richard Dawkins (attributed: source unknown)
To show how real astronomical
wonder can be presented to children, I'll borrow from a
book called Earthsearch by John Cassidy, which I brought
back from America to show my daughter Juliet. Find a large
open space and take a soccer ball to represent the sun. Put
the ball down and walk ten paces in a straight line. Stick
a pin in the ground. The head of the pin stands for the
planet Mercury. Take another 9 paces beyond Mercury and put
down a peppercorn to represent Venus. Seven paces on, drop
another peppercorn for Earth. One inch away from earth,
another pinhead represents the Moon, the furthest place,
remember, that we've so far reached. 14 more paces to
little Mars, then 95 paces to giant Jupiter, a ping-pong
ball. 112 paces further, Saturn is a marble. No time to
deal with the outer planets except to say that the
distances are much larger. But, how far would you have to
walk to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri? Pick up
another soccer ball to represent it, and set off for a walk
of 4200 miles. As for the nearest other galaxy, Andromeda,
don't even think about it!
Who'd go back to astrology when they've sampled the real
thing -- astronomy...?
-- Richard Dawkins, in
"Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder," The
Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1 Television (12 November
1996)
I had always been scrupulously
careful to avoid the smallest suggestion of infant
indoctrination, which I think is ultimately responsible for
much of the evil in the world. Others, less close to her,
showed no such scruples, which upset me, as I very much
wanted her, as I want all children, to make up her own mind
freely when she became old enough to do so. I would
encourage her to think, without telling her what to
think.
-- Richard Dawkins, in a letter to his
daughter, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)
We are going to die, and that
makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die
because they are never going to be born. The potential
people who could have been here in my place but who will in
fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains
of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater
poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know
this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA
so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth
of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our
ordinariness, that are here.
-- Richard Dawkins,
excerpt from Chapter I, "The Anaesthetic of Familiarity,"
of Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the
Appetite for Wonder (1998)
After sleeping through a
hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes
on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful
with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again.
Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief
time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and
how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer
when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I
bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way
round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever
wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought,
would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the
world and rejoicing to be a part of it?
-- Richard
Dawkins, excerpt from Chapter I, "The Anaesthetic of
Familiarity," of Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion
and the Appetite for Wonder (1998)
Benjamin
Franklin
When a religion is good, I
conceive it will support itself; and when it does not
support itself, and God does not take care to support it so
that its professors are obliged to call for help of the
civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad
one.
Letter to Richard Price, October 9, 1780, quoted from
Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping
of the American Experiment and a Free Society, New York:
George Braziller, 1965, p. 93.
Robert
Ingersoll
We have already
compared the benefits of theology and science. When the
theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and
hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few. To
nearly all the children of men, reading and writing were
unknown arts. The poor were clad in rags and skins -- they
devoured crusts, and gnawed bones. The day of Science
dawned, and the luxuries of a century ago are the
necessities of to-day. Men in the middle ranks of life have
more of the conveniences and elegancies than the princes
and kings of the theological times. But above and over all
this, is the development of mind. There is more of value in
the brain of an average man of today -- of a
master-mechanic, of a chemist, of a naturalist, of an
inventor, than there was in the brain of the world four
hundred years ago.
These blessings did not fall from the skies. These benefits
did not drop from the outstretched hands of priests. They
were not found in cathedrals or behind altars -- neither
were they searched for with holy candles. They were not
discovered by the closed eyes of prayer, nor did they come
in answer to superstitious supplication. They are the
children of freedom, the gifts of reason, observation and
experience -- and for them all, man is indebted to man.
"God In The Constitution"
John
F. Kennedy
Whatever
one's religion in
his private life may be, for the officeholder, nothing
takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution
and all its parts -- including the First Amendment and the
strict separation of church and state.
Interview, Look, March 3, 1959, from Albert J.
Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious
Freedom
Thomas
Paine
Persecution is not an original
feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly
marked feature of all religions established by law. Take
away the law-establishment, and every religion re-assumes
its original benignity.
The Rights of Man, 1791