Superstition Quotes
One of the reasons that this quotation is so significant is that the Roman Catholic Church had been historically antithetical to science and scientists. It took hundreds of years before the church would admit that Galileo was right and the church wrong about the earth revolving around the sun. But Pope John Paul II, along with his other major accomplishments removed the traditional Catholic hostility in theology and tradition. He even acknowledged the validity of the Theory of Evolution and taught that there was nothing inherent in evolution that denied God or scripture.
This is a very Jeffersonian type statement.
Some of the founding fathers were deeply religious men while others were not so. Some varied in their believes at different times of their lives, and a number were not very facorable towards orthodox religion. At the time, Roman Catholic and Protestant churches were persecuting other religions throughout Europe and people were still being killed for their heretical beliefs. Most important to some of them, kings and other monarchs whom they abhorred, all at the time claimed the Divine Right of Kings and the established churches were the most important support for monarchs. At the time most organized religions were opposed to freedom of conscience and certainly opponents of separation of church and state. American churches tended to take on American values but were never given the chance to dominate the American government they way many had in Europe and the rest of the world.
At the time, Muslim clerics had a great deal of influence and in many cases legal control over all facets of Turkish society much as exists in other Islamic societies today. They even controlled what was taught in the schools. Remarkably, without bloodshed, Ataturk broke both the power and the influence of the clerics on all official and public activities. Many Turkish Muslims even developed a type of reformed Islam with the relationship between the individual and the clerics one of parity much like Protestant churches in the West. At the same time there was a more orthodox part of the population and while they sent their children to religious schools, they also attended public schools so even the orthodox Muslims in Turkey learned science and modern subjects which are still not taught in most Islamic schools and madrassas.
Voltaire had little respect for any organized religion, but found Islam particularly barbaric and absurd. However he was also very negative about Christianity. See {621191} . The Ottoman Empire, centered in Turkey, then controlled all the Islamic countries of the Middle East. Europeans then often referred to all Muslims as “Turks.”
Executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising. His observations seem even more prescient as later theocracies like Iran ruined their societies and progress and twisted the Islamic religion. Ireland’s independence did not separate the state from the control and influence of the Roman Catholic Church despite the warnings of Connolly and others. However, conflict with the Church in 2010 over the church sexually assaulting children and impeding the civil authorities from investigating and protecting the criminals led to a reexamination and a diminution of the role of the church in Ireland.
