Typhoid Mary’s story is not only an argument in favor of good sanitation, something unknown in the Bible, the Qu’ran or any other holy book – it is also an answer to the question, What’s the harm in a little superstition?

King of Siam's Eclipse (1868): Churches and Eclipses It was on this date, August 18, 1868, that a total solar eclipse, called the King of Siam's Eclipse, Saros Series 133, was seen in what is now Thailand. This was during the reign of the very same King Mongkut who figures in the book by Anna […]

Church opposition to surgery, dissection and the study of anatomy slowed the development of medicine.

Freethinkers such as Voltaire in France and John Locke in England pushed back the night of superstition with the light of reason.

Churches in Switzerland continued to persecute mainly women for the imagined crime of witchcraft.

Alse Young (1647): First American Execution for Witchcraft It was on this date, May 26, 1647, that the first witch was hanged in America for the crime of witchcraft. Alse Young was arrested, tried for this capital offense in Windsor, Connecticut, and hanged at Meeting House Square in Hartford, on what is now the site […]

It would seem to the less credulous that, if God were really opposed to the new calendar, He might have taken more direct action against it.

Buddha (560 BCE) It was on this date, April 8, 560 BCE, according to tradition, that Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, was born in what is now modern Nepal. He grew up in a royal family, so he was sometimes called Prince Siddhartha, and at the age of twenty-nine, he left the kingdom, his […]

Anesthesia was denounced from pulpits across the land as impious and contrary to Holy Writ - until Queen Victoria needed to use it.

In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally ... an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.