Men, Women, and Gods; and Other LecturesGardener, Helen H. (Helen Hamilton)
Religion
Men, Women, and Gods; and Other Lectures
Gardener, Helen H. (Helen Hamilton)
Free thought
2. Of Louis XV., the eminently Christian king of France, Buckle says:
"His harem cost more than 100,000,000 francs, and was composed of
_little girls_. He was constantly drunk," and "turned out his own
illegitimate children to prostitute themselves."
3. "It will hardly be believed that, when sulphuric ether was first
used to lessen the pains of childbirth, it was objected to as 'a profane
attempt to abrogate the primeval curse pronounced upon woman....' The
injury which the theological principle has done to the world is immense.
It has prevented men from studying the laws of nature."--Buckle.
Appendix G.
1. "The narrow range of their sympathies [the clergy's], and the
intellectual servitude they have accepted, render them _peculiarly
unfitted_ for the office of educating the young, which they so
persistently claim, and which, _to the great misfortune of the world_,
they were long permitted to monopolize.... The almost complete omission
from female education of those studies which most discipline and
strengthen the intellect, increases the difference, while at the
same time it has been usually made a main object to imbue them with a
passionate faith in traditional opinions, and to preserve them from
all contact with opposing views. But contracted knowledge and imperfect
sympathy are not the sole fruits of this education. It has always been
the peculiarity of a certain kind of theological teaching, that it
-inverts all the normal principles of judgment and absolutely destroys
intellectual diffidence. On other subjects we find if not a respect for
honest conviction, at least some sense of the amount of knowledge
that is requisite to entitle men to express an opinion on grave
controversies. A complete ignorance of the subject-matter of a dispute
restrains the confidence of dogmatism; and an ignorant person who is
aware that, by much reading and thinking in spheres of which he has
himself no knowledge, his educated neighbor has modified or rejected
opinions which that ignorant person had been taught, will, at least
if he is a man of sense or modesty, abstain from compassionating the
benighted condition of his more instructed friend. But on theological
questions this has never been so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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