The deeper our insight into the methods of nature . . . the more incredible the popular Christianity seems to us. - John Burroughs

From the first the progress of man has been slowly but surely from the artificial to the natural, from the arbitrary and chimerical to the simple and scientific. Getting himself and his affairs more and more into natural currents and following them, this is the way man has progressed.

Man’s craving for the supernatural is as natural as our discounting of the present moment... The natural becomes trite and commonplace to us and we take refuge in an imaginary world above and beyond it.

Science has done more for the development of Western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred.