"The fatwa by Imam Khomeini in regards to the apostate Salman Rushdie will be in effect forever."

That "artificial" stuff humans created to make life longer and better for women and men is all that stands against devastation by overpopulation.

“The establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superceded the exercise of reason,” Gibbon wrote, supplanted Athenian wisdom and, “resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or skeptic to eternal flames."

“Faith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them must take place.”

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469) It was on this date, May 3, 1469, that Niccolò Machiavelli was born Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli in Florence, in what is now Italy. Florence had been ruled by the powerful Medici family since 1434, and was constantly at war with its neighboring city-states when not fending off outside aggressors. But […]

It is only good fortune that those with Bibles and weapons, or with Korans and weapons, for that matter, were so anti-science: imagine what a human holocaust they could have perpetrated!

But for a brutal history of suppressing labor rights, anti-Communist hysteria, the efforts of workers and freethinkers, and the indifference of the churches, the US would be celebrating Labor Day on this day instead.

The Age of Chivalry was steeped in corruption, theft, violence, and every imaginable (and some unimaginable) sexual deviations, including rape, incest, pederasty, prostitution and general sexual license.

Though decrying the secrecy of Freemasonry, the Catholic Church apparently has no problem with its own secret organizations, such as Opus Dei.

The betterment of humankind was not a high priority of Christian Europe, or of the Muslim East. It was never considered that humanity could be improved.