Queen Elizabeth I (1533) It was on this date, September 7, 1533, that the first Queen Elizabeth, monarch of the "Golden Age" of English history, was born at Greenwich Palace. She was a disappointment to her father, King Henry VIII, who desperately wanted a son. Henry had gone so far as to break away from […]

Montaigne was a Deist, but refrained from candor about his beliefs due to the mutual slaughter between Catholics and French Huguenots of the time. "It is setting a high value upon our opinions," he wrote, "to roast men and women alive on account of them."

“But my doubt would not be overcome,” wrote Brandes. “Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both.”

"Since I am an atheist, and do not believe that either God or Satan, Heaven or Hell, exists, I can only suppose that when I die, there will only be an eternity of nothingness to follow."

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.

As his own end drew near, Berlioz maintained his disbelief in God and immortality. In one of his last letters, written shortly before his death, Berlioz wrote his creed: "I believe nothing."