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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 1

1. I Impeach Christianity in the Name of Human Intelligence—

1. I Impeach Christianity in the Name of Human Intelligence

Because it is the great organized Superstition of the Western world, perpetuating in modern times the false beliefs, the degrading fears, and the benumbing influences of the Dark Ages—in proportion to its power over men paralyzing their intellectual faculties, keeping them in t he bondage of childish fancies, and governing them by means of an utterly irrational religious terrorism.

Because it is the great enemy of science, retarding the spread of natural knowledge, opposing new truths and discoveries as irreligious, perpetuating popular ignorance on all but permitted subjects in order that its own empire may be unshaken, and making blind faith in impossible doctrines the highest virtue of the human soul and the only protection against terrible yet purely imaginary dangers.

Because it is the greatest stumbling-block in the pathway of civilization, inasmuch as it withdraws attention from the natural affairs of this life, concentrates all its earnest thought on a future life that is to be eternal bliss or eternal misery, makes a merit of neglect of this world's riches in order "to lay up treasures in heaven," frowns on active enterprise page 3 as a dangerous devotion to "carnal things," and thus unfits men for attention to all those objects of honorable ambition on which the progress of civilization so largely depends.