Susan Jacoby Quotes

Without downgrading the importance of either the establishment clause or the constitutional ban on religious tests for officeholders, one can make a strong case that the omission of one word—God—played an even more important role in the construction of a secular foundation for the new government. The Constitution’s silence on the deity broke not only with culturally and historically distant precedents but with proximate and recent American precedents—most notably the 1781 Articles of Confederation, which acknowledged the beneficence of “the Great Governor of the World.” With its refusal to invoke any form of divine sanction, even the vague deistic “Providence,” the Constitution went even farther than Virginia’s religious freedom act in separating religion from government.

As always, war had lowered the level of American tolerance for any kind of dissent.

Like so many other freethinkers, Moore originally turned against orthodox religion because of its support of slavery.

The conservatives’ accusation was quite accurate: to say that a woman’s voice should count equally with a man’s in public decisions was to assault centuries of theological teachings and social assumptions about the innate inferiority of women.

In January 2002, Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia made a major speech so sweeping and extreme in its contempt for democracy, and so willfully oblivious to the Constitution’s grounding in human rather than divine authority, that it might well, in an era when American secularists were less intimidated by the forces of religion, have elicited calls for impeachment.

The twenties also marked the end of the freethought movement as a distinct intellectual force in American life….Freethought ideals did survive the disappearance of the freethought movement, but—unlike religious evangelism—they were ill suited, because of their emphasis on facts rather than emotion, to the new mass communications media.

However, bread-and-butter feminism was not so fundamentally threatening as to arouse the full ire of the religious right. It took the legalization of abortion, with its negation of sacred rationales for strict social control of women’s childbearing decisions, to join the battle between conservative religion and secularist feminism.

The Christian right would like today’s public to forget exactly where religious conservatives stood on civil rights forty years ago. One of the more repellent ironies of modern religious correctness has been the attempt by fundamentalists to wrap themselves in the mantle of those men and women of faith who risked their lives to fight racism. In the sixties, right-wing fundamentalists were, almost without exception, hard-core segregationists. The attacked the twentieth-century civil rights movement as their spiritual and often physical ancestors had attacked the nineteenth-century abolitionist and feminist movements. What they saw was what their predecessors had seen—not a struggle for justice but a conspiracy of atheism, political radicalism, and sexual libertinism.

Dictatorial regimes recognized evidence-based freethought as an enemy.

The Civil War, like most wars, was a bad time for religious skeptics.

The attack on science is a prime secularist issue not because religion and science are incompatible but because particular forms of religious belief—those that claim to have found the one true answer to the origins and ultimate purpose of human life—are incompatible not only with science but with democracy.

The growing knowledge and acceptance of evolutionism—even though it bypassed important segments of American society—contributed significantly to a major expansion of the freethought movement in the United States in the 1870s and 1880s

For the past four decades, the militant religious right has mounted a tireless assault on separation of church and state.

Throughout their presidencies, Jefferson and his successor, Madison, never ceased to uphold the separation of church and state they had conceived as a model for the new nation.

Free public education for the many rather than the few was essential to the secularist vision of a society in which every individual, unhampered by gatekeepers who sought to control the spread of dangerous knowledge, could go as far as his or her intellect would permit. In the view of freethinkers, the most pernicious gatekeepers were religious authorities; thus, education must be both secular and publicly financed.