I always remember that in the time of the French Enlightenment the enemy in the battle for freedom was not so much the State as the Church. The Catholic Church, with its arsenal of weapons—blasphemy, anathema, excommunication, as well as actual weapons of torture in the hands of the Inquisition—was in the business of placing its rigid limiting points on thought: This far and no further. And the writers and philosophers of the Enlightenment made it their business to challenge that authority and break those restrictions. Out of that struggle came the ideas Thomas Paine brought to America and which formed the basis of the essays Common Sense and The American Crisis, which inspired the independence movement, the Founding Fathers, and the modern concept of human rights.
~Salman Rushdie
~Salman Rushdie
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"
