Stuff like this is why I’m more and more disillusioned with the current state of secularism.
We need stronger protections for the secular state, even if it requires the arrest of some religious leaders stepping over their line.
And of course religion likes to prey on the disenfranchised. That’s why a lot of churches do charity, not out of their good heart, but to recruit even more people into their ranks, as they’re tying it to various other prerequirements (e.g. prayers).
My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
When we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest every thing that is cruel.
Stuff like this is why I’m more and more disillusioned with the current state of secularism.
We need stronger protections for the secular state, even if it requires the arrest of some religious leaders stepping over their line.
And of course religion likes to prey on the disenfranchised. That’s why a lot of churches do charity, not out of their good heart, but to recruit even more people into their ranks, as they’re tying it to various other prerequirements (e.g. prayers).
Thomas Paine#Part II (1794)
The Age of Reason
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine#Part_I_(1794)