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940948b
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I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. , , , , are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God. [ ]
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baron-d-holbach
condorcet
d-alembert
jean-le-rond-d-alembert
marquis-de-condorcet
platonic-christianity
d-holbach
denis-diderot
diderot
paul-henri-d-holbach
protestant
platonic
deism
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Thomas Jefferson |
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e6d3d72
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...Turn our thoughts, in the next place, to the characters of learned men. The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, we shall find that priests had all the knowledge, and really governed all mankind. Examine Mahometanism, trace Christianity from its first promulgation; knowledge has been almost exclusively confined to the clergy. And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes. [ ]
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chaldeans
persians
priesthood
protestant
sect
teutons
clergy
romans
hindu
reformation
hinduism
greeks
priests
monopoly
science-vs-religion
muslim
islam
knowledge
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John Adams |
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0cbaa7a
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With the growth of civilisation in Europe, and with the revival of letters and of science in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ethical and intellectual criticism of theology once more recommenced, and arrived at a temporary resting-place in the confessions of the various reformed Protestant sects in the sixteenth century; almost all of which, as soon as they were strong enough, began to persecute those who carried criticism beyond their own limit. But the movement was not arrested by these ecclesiastical barriers, as their constructors fondly imagined it would be; it was continued, tacitly or openly, by , by , by , and especially by , in the seventeenth century; by the English Freethinkers, by , by the , and by the German Rationalists, among whom stands out a head and shoulders taller than the rest, throughout the eighteenth century; by the historians, the philologers, the Biblical critics, the geologists, and the biologists in the nineteenth century, until it is obvious to all who can see that the moral sense and the really scientific method of seeking for truth are once more predominating over false science. Once more ethics and theology are parting company.
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criticism
science
baruch-spinoza
d-holbach
denis-diderot
diderot
gotthold-ephraim-lessing
gotthold-lessing
jean-jacque-rousseau
jean-meslier
lessing
meslier
paul-henri-d-holbach
thomas-hobbes
hobbes
rousseau
protestant
spinoza
science-vs-religion
civilization
geologists
europe
science-and-religion
persecution
descartes
galileo
galileo-galilei
rene-descartes
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Thomas Henry Huxley |