24 quotes
For the past four decades, the militant religious right has mounted a tireless assault on separation of church and state.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
Dictatorial regimes recognized evidence-based freethought as an enemy.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
As always, war had lowered the level of American tolerance for any kind of dissent.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
Fanatics throughout history have always been convinced of the virtuousness of their visions.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
The period from, roughly, 1875 to 1914 represents the high-water mark of freethought as an influential movement in American society.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
There is also a connection between the antievolution campaign and the lamentable state of American scientific literacy.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
The second explicit secularist constitutional provision is of course the First Amendment to the bill of rights.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
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.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
The Civil War, like most wars, was a bad time for religious skeptics.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
Like so many other freethinkers, Moore originally turned against orthodox religion because of its support of slavery.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
Notions of the depravity of human reason, Allen argued, were cherished by priests because, if ordinary human beings were assumed to be perfectly capable of reasoning for themselves, the clergy would be out of work.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
It is precisely because secularists do understand the power of religion, and the possibility that any intensely felt drive for righteousness may overwhelm dissenters in its path, that they insist on the fundamental importance of separation between church and state.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
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
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
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.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
The one political concern that did unite all freethinkers was their support for absolute separation of church and state, which translated into opposition to any tax support of religious institutions—especially parochial schools.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
It is difficult, in an era in which most Americans acquire their information from packaged sound bites that require almost no effort from audiences, to convey the excitement of a time when people were willing to expend a good deal of energy looking at evidence, and listening to opinions, that challenged the received wisdom of previous ages.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
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.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
What the many types of freethinkers shared, regardless of their views on the existence or nonexistence of a divinity, was a rationalist approach to fundamental questions of earthly existence—a conviction that the affairs of human beings should be governed not by faith in the supernatural but by a reliance on reason and evidence produced from the natural world.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)
There is a particularly strong connection between the revival of antievolutionism since 1980 and the political attack on separation of church and state, because the Christianization of secular public education has long been a goal of the forces of conservative religion.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004)