Religious tyranny

“ There is nowhere else in the world a tyranny so pervasive and despotic as that which rules in the department of theological opinion. The prevalent slothful and slavish surrender of the grand privileges and duties of individual thought, independent personal conviction and action in religious matters, is at once astonishing, pernicious, and disgraceful. ”

“ Consequently, impositions of every kind, superstitious prejudices, and the long worshipped fabrics of civil and religious tyranny, are daily growing into contempt, and in all probability will soon be torn from their foundations, and consigned to that infamous oblivion which they so highly merit. ”

“ It is not surprising that a pampered priesthood and lordly prelates, whose honours and preferments were based upon a system of ecclesiastical tyranny, should oppose, by every possible means, the establishment of unlimited toleration; although we may well wonder that those who had felt themselves the heavy weight of religious persecution, should commit so great an error, so palpable an inconsistency, as to attempt to deprive others of the inestimable blessing of worshipping God according to the dictates of their own consciences. ”

“ There must be absolute religious liberty, for tyranny and intolerance are as abhorrent in matters intellectual and spiritual as in matters political and material; and more and more we must all realize that conduct is of infinitely greater importance than dogma. ”

“ Having now the passions on their side, they find no difficulty in persuading the voluptuary, or the discontented, that tyranny, actually exerted, or resolved on in future, is the sole origin of religious restraint. He seeks no further argument, and gives himself no trouble to find any. ”

“ The measure of unparalleled tyranny and injustice, in which antipathy to religious orders has found expression, is being favorably and unfavorably commented upon. But since monks, friars and nuns seldom find favor with the non Catholic world, the general verdict is that the religious, like the anarchist, must go; society is afraid of both and is safe from neither. ”

“ The policy by which they are produced, caused for ages religious as well as civil enmities. A patronage of religious classes is yet attended in other countries with mutual hatred. Here, the removal of the cause, is proved to be the best remedy for the evil. If civil enmities, like religious, have every where attended legal partialities, the remedy is before our eyes. ”

“ Begone, Satan; modern civilization is the product of the Catholic Church, and not yours, and not under your protection or jurisdiction; away, hypocrites and conspirators!
Reconciliation with what these conspirators call “modern civilization”? Do men who have their wits about them know what this means? This means the overthrow of the great institutions of society, which have cost nineteen centuries of toil and struggle of the noblest men and women of the race. And for what? Only for the tyranny of a commune of declared atheists, the emancipation of the flesh, and the reign of Antichrist. ”

“ Even the Christian religion can do but little or no good in lands of tyranny, since miracles have ceased; but is made to do infinite harm, by being corrupted and perverted into a deadly engine in the hands of a tyrant and his impostors, to rivet his subjects' chains, and to confirm them thorough wretches, slaves, and ignorants. I cannot indeed say, that they have the Christian religion at all amongst them, but only use its amiable name to countenance abominable falsehoods, nonsense, and heavy oppression ”

“ Now, what can be found here to answer the spirit and precepts of the Christian religion, which is all love, charity, meekness, mutual assistance, and mutual indulgence; and must either destroy tyranny, which destroys all these, or be destroyed by it? A religion given by God, to inspire men with every social virtue, and to furnish them with every argument for social happiness, will never find quarter, much less protection, from a government, which subsists by an unrelenting war against every virtue, and all human felicity. ”

“ The church has resigned a part of her power, the better to retain the remainder; civil tyranny has been shaken to its centre in both hemispheres; the malignity of superstition is abating, and every species of quackery, imposture, and imposition, are yielding to the light and power of science. ”

“ When he has forced his subjects to belie their consciences, or to act against them, he has in effect driven them out of all religion, to bring them into his own; and when they thus see and feel the professed defender of religion overturning all its precepts, exhorting by bribes, rebuking by stripes, confiscations and dungeons, and making Christianity the instrument of fury, ambition, rapine, and tyranny; what can they think, but either that he is no Christian, or that Christianity is not true? If they come to suspect it of imposture, they grow infidels ”

“ Can the imagination conceive a worse fate than your religion predicts for a majority of the race? Why should not every human being be in "abject terror" who believes your doctrine? How many loving and sincere women are in the asylums to-day fearing that they have committed "the unpardonable sin"—a sin to which your God has attached the penalty of eternal torment, and yet has failed to describe the offence? Can tyranny go beyond this—fixing the penalty of eternal pain for the violation of a law not written, not known, but kept in the secrecy of infinite darkness? ”

“ If God resembled those generations of unresisted ecclesiastics, whose chief resort has been the syllogism of violence, and whose main arguments have been the torture-chamber and the stake, what hope could there possibly be for the vast majority of mankind but those endless torments by the terrors of which corrupt Churches have forced their tyranny upon the crushed liberties and the paralysed conscience of mankind? ”

“ They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. ”

“ For, let us not be deceived—Christians, not satisfied with enforcing by violence an exterior submission to the ceremonies of their religion, have invented an art unknown to heathen superstitions, that of tormenting the conscience, and exercising a tyranny over the mind itself. The zeal of the ministers of the church is not limited to exteriors; they steal into the foldings of the heart, and insolently violate the most secret sanctuaries of thought.1 And-for this sacrilege, their justification is a pretended interest in the salvation of souls. ”

“ Unless the Christians abandoned all attempt at meeting together, it was impossible that they could escape the agents of the tyranny which had determined to destroy them as the scapegoat of its own crimes. ”

“ With the word liberty ever on their lips, like the lion's skin on the ass, to deceive, the sects, great and small, from the Church of England down, down, down to the Mormons or Transcendentalists, through the grades of Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, all play the tyrant in their own way. All act the despot, and would exercise spiritual tyranny, if in their power. ”

“ Now the experience of all ages will convince us, that all tyrannical princes will be against the religion which is against them; and either abolish it, or, which is much worse, pervert it into a deadly and unnatural engine, to increase and defend that pride and power, which Christianity abhors ”

“ Laws, dictating the mode of influencing the deity, are declarations, that the deity shall be influenced by law. And the conspiracy between the priest and the proselyte, is founded in the compact, that the priest will learn the proselyte to govern the deity, if the proselyte will suffer the priest to govern him. Besides, true religion will not do the work of tyranny, like an heated and beguiled Imagination. Tyranny wants persecutors, not advocates of truth and virtue; to gain these, it makes gods and religions. ”

“ Such sovereigns find it a shorter way to destroy mankind than reclaim them by mild means. Their haughty despotism will not condescend to reason. Religion assures them that tyranny is lawful, and cruelty meritorious when they are employed in the cause of heaven.
The Christian religion, in fact, always makes despots and tyrants of all the sovereigns by whom it is adopted. It represents them as gods upon earth; it causes their very caprices to be respected as the will of heaven itself. It delivers mankind into their hands as an herd of slaves, of whom they may dispose at their pleasure. ”

“ This sum is considerably more than half of all the clerical revenues of Christendom; and cannot possibly have any other source than the industry of the people, who, in return for their toil and starvation, are robbed of their senses, their judgments, and their liberties. That religion which attempts, through the aid of civil tyranny, to enforce the belief or acquiescence in the truth of its dogmas, virtually gives a premium to falsehood—renders truth injurious in society, and, by these very actions, proves itself false. ”

“ I discovered that the devotees of these various religions do nothing else but hate and anathematize each other, that all these religions have become the instruments of tyranny and oppression in the hands of rulers and governors, and that they are the causes of the destruction of the world of humanity.
'Considering these evil results, every person is forced by necessity to enlist himself on the side of Your Excellency and accept with joy the prospect of a fundamental basis for a universal religion of God being laid through your efforts. ”

“ The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness. Tyranny likes courtiers, flatterers, followers, fawners, and superstition wants believers, disciples, zealots, hypocrites, and subscribers. The church demands worship—the very thing that man should give to no being, human or divine. ”

“ So long as the rulers of earthly governments seek to exercise the authority of religious dictators, you who believe this gospel can expect only trouble, persecution, and even death. But the very light which you bear to the world, and even the very manner in which you will suffer and die for this gospel of the kingdom, will, in themselves, eventually enlighten the whole world and result in the gradual divorcement of politics and religion. ”

“ Instead of the equality, which is the true principle of life, we should have a double tyranny; we should grovel before our gods, whose superstitions would weigh us to the ground; and we should have their professional agents introducing the caprice and imperfection of the human into their yoke. I know not which is the worse: the purely spiritual slavery of timid, startled worship, or the mingled slavery of priestcraft that makes the divine mysterious and terrible in order that the worshippers may bow before it body and soul. ”

“ Lastly, still following the main lines of human culture, the primitive germs of religious institutions have to be traced in the childish faith and rude rites of savage life, and thence followed in their expansion into the vast systems administered by patriarchs and priests, henceforth taking under their charge the precepts of morality, and enforcing them under divine sanction, while also exercising in political life an authority beside or above the civil law. ”

“ That which would domineer over human reason, the sovereign of the world, is tyranny par excellence; this, in truth, is the special mark of Catholicity, and it is this which has ever made it the religion of the ignorant and the cowardly.”
Is, then, the maxim I have just recalled the invention of Catholic theologians? Is it true that the teachers of the ultramontane doctrine alone have contended that the intrinsic worth of a law must be sought beyond and above them, beyond and above the human power which proclaims it? ”

“ For the tyranny of our own lawless passions is the nearest and most dangerous of all tyrannies.
Then as to the other part of our constitution, let us value it, not because it leaves us at liberty to have as little religion as we please, without being accountable to human judicatories; but because it affords us the means and assistance to worship God according to his word; because it exhibits to our view, and enforces upon our conscience, genuine Christianity, free from the superstitions with which it is defiled in other countries. ”

“ But who may recount all the tyrannies with which the troubled consciences of penitent and confessing Christians are daily disturbed, by means of death-bringing "constitutions" and customs, administered by silly manikins, who only know how to bind and place on the shoulders of men burdens grievous and heavy to be borne, which they themselves are not willing to move with a finger? [64] So this most salutary sacrament of penance has become nothing else than a mere tyranny of the great, then a disease, and a means to the increase of sins. ”

“ The barbarism, the ignorance, and the cruelty of the middle ages are set to her count, when, in fact, she was the chief source of civilization, of enlightenment, and of mercy during that period. When she opposes the tyranny of kings, [578] she is called the enemy of the state; when she seeks to restrain the lawlessness of the people, she is proclaimed the friend of tyrants. Against her dogmas and institutions all the sciences are brought to bear—astronomy, geology, ethnology, and the others. Not in politics alone, but in all the physical sciences, men in our day stumble on the Catholic Church. ”