What enraged the clerics of Dickens' day was not capitalist excess, but that Dickens took Christ out of Christmas. Scrooge is shamed into changing his narrow, grasping, capitalist ways by being shown for the first time their human cost.

Those who believe prayer will help them and know they are being prayed for may indeed get better, thanks to the placebo effect. The same could be said of giving pets to the elderly who like animals.

Most of the pagan cults are exterminated now, thanks to the love of Christ, but the celebrations continue under new management. It seems that the pagan spirit, minus the bloodshed of the executed-then-resurrected redeemer-god, lives on.

Just as it was freethinkers who made the world safer for children, decreased crime, ensured the right to divorce, revived education, equalized marriage, and ended slavery and torture; it was freethinkers who revived law and carried it forward to the institution we know today.

What is seldom admitted is that the Church was hurting from the loss of income to the Protestant churches, and stipulated a meeting in an Italian town — so that the Inquisition could finish off the heretics.

Averroës, in his own beliefs, substituted a vague Pantheism or World-Soul for the impersonal God of Aristotle. He did not believe in personal immortality.

What Pius IX condemned generally as "Liberalism" is today seen as general principles of modern civilization.

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.

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.

In his Christian conquest, Cortes committed perhaps the greatest crime to history: he nearly obliterated the Aztec culture in his zeal. So when Cortes died, on this date in 1547, he died a good Catholic, if not a good man.