“Human society is born in the shadow of religious fear, and in that stage the suppression of heresy is a sacred social duty. Then comes the rise of a priesthood, and the independent thinker is met with punishment in this world and the threat of eternal damnation hereafter. Even today it is from the religious side that the greatest danger to freedom of thought comes. Religion is the last thing that man will civilise.”

Quoted in The Freethinker, Vol. 84 (G.W. Foote, 1964), p. 215.

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Chapman Cohen8

British atheist and secularist writer and lecturer 1868–1954

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