While Morse thanked God ("What hath God wrought?") for what the scientific work Hans Christian Oersted, Joseph Henry and Michael Faraday had wrought, the skeptical Edison credited the proper authorities.

Martin Van Buren (1782) It was on this date, December 5, 1782, that the 8th President of the United States (4 March 1837 - 4 March 1841), and the first US President born in the United States, Martin Van Buren, was born in New York. Of Dutch ancestry, he attended the Dutch Reformed Church. A […]

Every sperm is sacred Every sperm is great If a sperm is wasted God gets quite irate.

Carlyle abandoned his Christian beliefs in 1818 after reading Gibbon. After further study... Carlyle gave up the Holy Ghost and immortality, as well, adopting a Pantheism like Goethe's.

Butler wrote, "Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously."

"The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all."

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.

Stephen said he never lost his faith because he never had any and helped to bring Thomas Henry Huxley's newly coined word, "agnostic," into vogue.

"[O]nly in popular education can man erect the structure of an enduring civilization."

Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza (1632) It was on this date, November 24, 1632, that Portuguese-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam to a family settled in Holland. The family were Portuguese crypto-Jews — that is, Jews forcibly converted to Christianity while secretly remaining Jewish. Spinoza was a bright student in the Talmud Torah school and […]