Before Edgar Allen Poe sold his poem The Raven for $9, or roughly $300 in today's dollars, to The American Review, the owner of Graham's Magazine gifted him $15 after turning Poe down because he thought the poem was a cry for help.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
