"And that is true of the whole range of science. Science is, in fact, atheistic or nothing. It knows nothing of God, it does not bother about God, its triumphs are achieved by leaving God out of account." (C. Cohen.)
What has heretofore been mentioned is but a mere trifle when one considers the vast number of similar incidents in which religion has played the rôle of barrier to progress. These examples, though few, are sufficient to impress the mind of any clear-minded, intelligent individual with the conviction, in spite of all the sophistry and casuistry of the ecclesiastical apologies, that progress in this world has taken place in direct proportion to the degree that the mind of man has liberated itself from the control of theology and the myth of religion.
CHAPTER XII
RELIGION AND WITCHCRAFT
Better that a man's body should be destroyed than his soul. The worst death of the soul is freedom to err.
St. Augustine.
It would be hard to calculate the perilous import of so treacherous an utterance, an utterance the latent sentiment of which has been responsible for I know not how much human agony. Menacing indeed to human happiness was such a claim, and in the course of time when the corporate body of the church became all-powerful in Christendom, it put into tyrannical practice what had been but a theological theory.
Llewelyn Powys.