Fortunately, there are old terrors and powers that religion no longer can exercise so effectively as it did only a few score years ago. But the atmosphere and the attitude of bigotry remain. If religion cannot ordinarily invoke the armed force of law to punish heretics, it still plays upon the psychology of fear and predominantly its influence is to frighten men and distort their views and poison every process of their reasoning.
E. Haldeman-JuliusWe are well aware that religion is not as bad an influence as it was a short time ago, as history is counted. But it is a sufficiently bad influence even in modern times, and its reduced viciousness (in practice) is due plainly enough to its reduced power.
E. Haldeman-JuliusIt is natural that people should differ most, and most violently, about the unknowable . . . There is all the room in the world for divergence of opinion about something that, so far as we can realistically perceive, does not exist.
E. Haldeman-JuliusTo be true to the mythical conception of a God is to be false to the interests of mankind.
E. Haldeman-JuliusDon't take our word for it. Read the Bible itself. Read the statements of preachers. And you will understand that God is the most desperate character, the worst villain in all fiction.
E. Haldeman-JuliusThe influences that have lifted the race to a higher moral level are education, freedom, leisure, the humanizing tendency of a better-supplied and more interesting life. In a word, science and liberalism . . . have accomplished the very things for which religion claims the credit.
E. Haldeman-Julius