Susan Jacoby - Freethinkers (2004)

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Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who... even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.

Susan Jacoby
It is easy to forget, since the Catholic Church is now the only large American religious denomination whose ecclesiastical hierarchy continues to oppose birth control, that only a century ago the leaders of nearly all churches were united in their resistance to any public discussion of the subject.

Susan Jacoby
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.

Susan Jacoby
Every brand of religion maintains, and is, a permanent mechanism for transmitting ideas and values - whether one regards those values as admirable or ridiculous. Secularist organizations, with their generally looser, nonhierarchical structures, lack the power to hand down and disseminate their heritage in such a systematic way.

Susan Jacoby
There could be no more powerful argument against mixing religion and government than the success of independent African American churches in placing racial segregation and discrimination on a reluctant nation's social agenda. Would black churches have been able to take the lead in the struggle had they been dependent on funds doled out for 'faith-based initiatives'... ?

Susan Jacoby