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.

"Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism, extermination and tyranny."

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.

It is characteristic of the teaching of European history that it assumes the general populace acquiesced in all the ideas of a church that diverged radically from the organization founded under the original gospels.

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.

If a man has a right to find God in his own way, he has a right to go to the devil in his own way also.

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

"If there really is a Holy Virgin or anyone up in the air, tell them to send lightening to strike me down or let the stones of the vault fall on my head. If you are unable to do that Mr. Priest, you're nothing but a puppet taking money from stupid old women."