There never yet was any truth or principle so irresistibly obvious, that all men believed it at once. - Thomas Paine

Later times have laid all the blame upon the Goths and Vandals, but, however unwilling the partizans of the Christian system may be to believe or to acknowledge it, it is nevertheless true, that the age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.There was more knowledge in the world before that period, than for many centuries afterwards; and as to religious knowledge, the Christian system, as already said, was only another species of mythology; and the mythology to which it succeeded, was a corruption of an ancient system of theism.

It is owing to this long interregnum of science, and to no other cause, that we have now to look back through a vast chasm of many hundred years to the respectable characters we call the Ancients. Had the progression of knowledge gone on proportionably with the stock that before existed, that chasm would have been filled up with characters rising superior in knowledge to each other; and those Ancients we now so much admire would have appeared respectably in the background of the scene. But the christian system laid all waste; and if we take our stand about the beginning of the sixteenth century, we look back through that long chasm, to the times of the Ancients, as over a vast sandy desert, in which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision to the fertile hills beyond.

Leo Tolstoy says, “Love, truth, compassion, service, sympathy, tenderness exist in the hearts of men, and are the essence of religion, but try to encompass these things in an institution and you get a church – and the Church stands for and has always stood for coercion, intolerance, injustice, and cruelty.

Reason obeys itselt; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.