France once said, "Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest," and "Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin."

It’s up to us, the “extreme middle” at “American Heathen,” to bring balance back.

This deathbed conversion, by so critical a thinker as Leonardo, who would have nothing to lose by professing piety all his life, can only mean that during his prime years he was a secret freethinker.

Christians were more concerned with saving souls than freeing bodies, and in took the rise of Rationalism and Freethought, and the realization that without a social policy they would become irrelevant, before the churches found their voice.

"Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds."

Hitchens says, "I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself."

“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever… All men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.”

The existence of God is irrelevant to Jain doctrine, making Jainism the oldest atheistic religion.

Conrad of Marburg, first Inquisitor of Germany, memorably vowed, "We would gladly burn a hundred if just one of them was guilty."

QUOTE: Since it was Christian doctrine that animals have no souls, there was no Church prohibition against ill-treatment throughout the Middle Ages.