Susan Jacoby

Quotes

• “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.”
• “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.”
• “The second explicit secularist constitutional provision is of course the First Amendment to the bill of rights.”
• “Although there were numerous attempts by state ratifying conventions to amend the Constitution, and subvert the intent of the preamble, by declaring that governmental power was derived from God or Jesus Christ, the proposed religious amendments were defeated. In the end, the economic necessity for a federal union trumped all other concerns.”
• “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.”
• “The Civil War, like most wars, was a bad time for religious skeptics.”

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Image

Susan Jacoby at CFI WIS-May 18 2012.JPG

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