Philip Schaff Quotes

Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York

Al-Maarri’s quotations are not only meaningful in their own right, but they illustrate the openness and free thinking that was allowed in the early days of Islam before about 1100. If anyone wrote such things today in most Islamic countries he would at least be jailed if not executed for blasphemy. And if any Christian in Europe made the same statement, he would have been excommunicated at least if not tortured and murdered.

Although a conservative, he had a great tolerance for and understanding of other points of view. For this some people thought him a radical.

The Creation Museum makes the Christian Fundamentalist Case for their alternative view of the creation of the earth and man. In the process, they make claims that are proven incorrect every day in science, like the earth is only about 6000 years old {641849} , and all the species on earth were then separately created in their immutable form with no evolutionary process. There are many deeply religious Christians who do not take the Bible literally and have no problem with evolution as the mechanism which God selected to create and develop life. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, does not maintain that the Bible is literally true and Evolution did not account for the development of life on earth. The major difference between most modern scientists, philosophers, and theologians, is that some believe that God of other Supreme Being had nothing to do with the evolution and development of life forms and those who believe that Evolution was the mechanism that God created and used. See {641848} for an example of the former.

This is a very important quotation as Kingsley was a precursor of Karl Marx in claiming that religion was used as opium for suppression of people. See Marx {624064} It is probable that Marx had read Kingsley’s quotation but there is no way of knowing for sure. What is certain is that Marx did not originate the idea.

Einstein and his wife gave this bible to an American friend, Harriett Hamilton. In 2013, the Bible sold at auction for $68,500.

Priests at the time were mostly uneducated. They would tend to make up their own Biblical stories that the people would prefer rather than the official church versions. The bishops wanted this practice stopped.

Franklin was a deist. He believed in God and the Creation but not the Bible which is often referred to as “revealed” truth. He did believe that classic Christianity was a positive force as some people were led to good works and a moral life by it.

This view was infuriating to the Rabbis, Priests and Immams of the time. Miracles and Scrip[ture were not determinatve Spinoza taught but the issue was did the docrine of the religion make sense. Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims.

Since all of God’s Truth was in the Bible, any other book was at best unnecessary and at worst blasphemous. The German practice of book burning seems to have started here in Munster. The exact same logic was used by Islamic Caliph Omar I in deciding to burn the great Library of Alexandria. See {627584}

In 1877 Wasburn was dropped from the List of Ministers by the Unitarian Church. He had become very critical of organized and orthodox religion of all kinds. He felt that literal interpretations of the Bible harmed religions as it made a mockery of God to claim His truths were the anachronistic and demonstrable falsehoods of the Book of Genesis. Today most Christians and Jews do not take the Old Testament Literally and in this sense Washburn was one of the early religious reformers of America. There is still a significant number of fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews who still believe in the literal truth of everything in the Bible.