After the fall of Napoleon, the Roman Catholic Church, with whom Fourier was never reconciled, saw to his persecution.

“Bigger things than the state will fall ... all religion will fall,” wrote Ibsen. His play, “The Emperor and the Galilean,” shows the superiority of paganism to Christianity.

He either believed all religions or none of them. He did not believe in a future life. A fairer estimate of Burton's religion might be that he was an Agnostic.

It makes just as much sense to assign blame irrationally, like the El Paso pea brain, as it does to calculate risk irrationally. That is, it makes none.

What good is a miracle for proving the truth of something? If a religion is true, miracles don’t help; if a religion is false, miracles can’t help.

Said Madison, “Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator… can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.”

The Japanese “accept our material civilization, but they reject our creeds,” wrote Lowell. “At most, Christianity succeeds only in making them doubters of what lies beyond this life.”

Atatürk had great contempt for all religion, and tried to extinguish it. He claimed that his only standard was the good of Turkey.

He always expressed a profound contempt for the Roman Catholic Church, which returned the affection by putting all D’Annunzio’s work on the Index of Prohibited Books.

Newcomb rejected the idea of immortality and made no secret of his Freethinking views. President William Howard Taft attended his funeral.