In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes.
The union of church and state put the church under a political control.... The church was thoroughly subordinated to the state.
In the early 1800s, religion was often used as a way to keep slavery in place. Slaves were forced to attend the church of their owners, listen to selective dogma that kept them obedient and subservient.
This religion and the Bible require of woman everything, and give her nothing. They ask her support and her love, and repay her with contempt and oppression.
It is through the perversion of the religious element in woman, playing upon her hopes and fears of the future, holding this life with all its high duties in abeyance to that which is to come, that she and the children she has trained have been so completely subjugated by priestcraft and superstition.
The dhimmi were also required to follow institutionalized codes of behavior. Armenians, for example, had to be deferential before Muslims in public; they could not ride a horse when a Muslim was passing by, they were to wear dress that made them easily identifiable; they were forbidden to own weapons.
Describing the Trukish Ottoman Empire of the last half of the 19th century
Women from earliest times have been used as conveniences of communication with unseen, inaccessible powers, but always in the sense that such exposing of self to dangerous mysteries, such destruction of the understanding as was required to become the slave of unseen powers, did not matter because the communicant was only a woman, in herself an undetermined cipher - a nothing.
I belong to that degraded race called woman – who whether her lot be cast among Jew, or Turk, heathen or Christian is yet a slave.
Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion.But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.
As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man. The bible was not written by a woman. Within its leaves there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her.