Bertrand Russell
“One is
often told that it a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion
makes men virtuous. You find as you look around the world that every single bit
of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every
step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the
colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there
has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches
of the world.”
Philip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs
“Extreme
and bizarre religious ideas are so commonplace in American history that it is
difficult to speak of them as fringe at all. To speak of a fringe implies a
mainstream, but in terms of numbers, perhaps the largest component of the
religious spectrum in contemporary America remains what it has been since
colonial times: a fundamentalist evangelicalism with powerful millenarian
strands.
The
doomsday theme has never been far from the center of American religious
thought. The nation has always had believers who responded to this threat by a
determination to flee from the wrath to come, to separate themselves from the
City of Destruction, even if that meant putting themselves at odds with the law
and with their communities or families. We can throughout American history find
select and separatist groups who looked to a prophetic individual claiming
divine revelation, in a setting that repudiated conventional assumptions about
property, family life, and sexuality. They were marginal groups, peculiar
people, people set apart from the world, the Shakers and the Ephrata community,
the communes of Oneida and Amana, the followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham
Young.”
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