Wrote Thomas Jefferson, “I know that Gouverneur Morris, who pretended to be in his secrets and believed himself to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more in [Christianity] than he did.”

Paine wrote, “the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world” and that “religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.”

Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest... is worth enquiring into.

Some of the better-known Fabians include atheist-turned Theosophist Annie Besant, the virulently anti-Christian dramatist George Bernard Shaw, the atheist novelist H.G. Wells, and Rupert Brooke, the Agnostic poet.

Cicero may have adopted only a public profession of belief in immortality. “On the Nature of the Gods” gives the arguments for and against, but like a politician he takes neither side.

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.

"The fable of a god or gods visiting the earth did not originate with Christianity."

In a work called Anarchist Morality, Kropotkin recognizes the foundation of morals has nothing to do with religion.

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 […]

"On no account should the church allow infidels to have power over the faithful or to be set above them in any way. ... The church is above the state ... kings must be subject to priests." (Thomas Aquinas)