"If God foreknew whatever was to come to pass, he must have been perfectly well aware that his whole creation, including the scheme of redemption, would be the most stupendous failure imaginable,--as it certainly has been if the Christian religion be true. For what rational or humane man would raise a family of children, if he knew beforehand that they would all be vagabonds and criminals, ending their days in prison or on the scaffold? What prudent farmer would intentionally sow wheat on land certain to produce a bad crop? What sensible business man would knowingly embark in an enterprise sure to prove disastrous, and to involve himself and his family in irretrievable ruin? And yet such conduct on the part of men would be far less irrational and criminal than that of which the Creator is guilty, if the doctrine of his foreknowledge and omnipotence be true. For, according to this doctrine, he alone is responsible for whatever has occurred and will occur, and for all the suffering in the world, since he had full power to prevent it but did not, and does not; and the conclusion to be drawn from this fact is, that he intended all things to be just as they have been in the past, are now and are to be in the future. For, if he possessed absolute power, he might have placed man under entirely different circumstances, and surrounded him by influences which would have led him into the path of perfect rectitude, but did not choose to do so; and we fail to understand how man can be justly held responsible either for his own creation, for the nature with which he is endowed, or for the environment which determines his conduct." (J. W. Stillman's "God and the Universe.") The Idea of God Must Go. "I think it is not a good thing for people to believe in God. I think it is a bad thing for them to do so. I think the belief in God is one of the things that is helping very strongly to keep knaves in power and honest people in weakness; it is one of the things that is preventing the people from thinking for themselves and helping themselves. The human mind will never be perfectly free, and peasants and mechanics and day laborers will never be perfectly fairly treated in this world, until the church is utterly destroyed. I do not want to see the church reformed. I want to see her utterly destroyed, because as long as she exists the ruling classes in society will always have in her a faithful ally to help them carry on their infernal schemes of pillage. I do not want people to have a better idea of God or an idea of a better God. I want the idea of God entirely rooted out of the mind, because I know that as long as any idea of God remains in the mind, the priest and the politician will have something to work upon, and this world will never be free and happy until the priest and the politician are gone.