Church Opposition Quotes

For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums.

After the devil himself, there is no worse folk than the pope and his followers.

The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

Liberal Catholics are the worst enemies of the Church.

I liked the name of the amendment. I couldn't help feeling uneasy that the church was opposing something with a name as beautiful as the Equal Rights Amendment.

The church has stood, a rock colossus of bigotry, in the path of ten thousand proposed reforms. Sane efforts to legalize birth control information, the manufacture of proper birth control appliances, appliances for the inhibition of the spread of venereal disease, public instruction in sex hygiene, free clinics for the treatment of venereal disease, the inspection and treatment of prostitutes, controlled prostitution itself, the publication of psychological and physical sex information, aid for unwed mothers—myriad attempts by sane men acting sanely on real problems—have been fought down by church-frightened legislatures and church-dominated courts.

Everyone in Spain follows the church: half with a candle, the other half with a club.

This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.

It's troubling for me as a Catholic to be at odds with the church.

The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir

Women should unite upon a platform of opposition to the teaching and aim of that ever most unscrupulous enemy of freedom--the Church.

Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the church's opposition to every advance in every field of science. . . .

My father was strict, but he recognised my ability and got a lot of flak from the church for supporting me.

It is not necessary to have a broad understanding of history to realize that the church is the foe of knowledge….In every branch of learning, our gains have been made through secular agencies; and, naturally, this has been so, for the church has never been interested in the development of knowledge, regarding (in this showing its shrewdness of self- interest, at least) the spread of culture and free thought and realistic curiosity as unfavorable to the purposes of the church.

The 20th century was a turning point; it freed and emancipated women, broke the back of segregation, and began the struggle to give justice to gay and lesbian people. But the Christian church, in both Catholic and Protestant forms, resisted every one of those humanizing developments. The church was on the wrong side of all three of those fights.

[The church] is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.

I do further declare him or her, father or mother, brother or sister, son or daughter, husband or wife, uncle or aunt, nephew or niece, kinsman or kinswoman, master or mistress, and all others, nearest or dearest relations, friend or acquaintance whatsoever, accursed, that either do or shall hold, for the time to come, any ecclesiastical or civil power above the authority of the Mother Church; or that do or shall obey, for the time to come, any of her, the Mother of Churches' opposers or enemies

It has been religious people, often within the organized church, who have been the most critical of and even hostile to my relationship with God.

Every step which the intelligence of Europe has taken has been in spite of the clerical party.