Based in part on Jennifer Michael Hecht's "Doubt: A History" ch10

1. “Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent.”

2. It would be an awful universe if everything
could be converted into words, words, words.

5. Believing with you that religion is
a matter which lies solely
between Man & his God, that he
owes account to none other for
his faith or his worship, that the
legitimate powers of government
reach actions only, & not
opinions, I contemplate with
sovereign reverence that act of
the whole American people
which declared that their
legislature should
"make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting
the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between
Church & State. Thomas Jefferson

6. "The United States is not a
Christian nation any more than
it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan
nation." And as for those who
would ban questioning the
Bible's allegedly divine origins?
"I think such laws a great
embarrassment, great
obstructions to the
improvement of the human
mind.“ John Adams

7. All national institutions of
churches, whether Jewish,
Christian or Turkish, appear
to me no other than human
inventions, set up to terrify
and enslave mankind, and
monopolize power and profit.
Belief in a cruel God makes a
cruel man.
I believe in the equality of
man; and I believe that
religious duties consist in
doing justice, loving mercy,
and endeavoring to make our
fellow-creatures happy.
Thomas Paine

8. I think the System of Morals and
his Religion, as he left them to us,
the best the world ever saw or is
likely to see; but I apprehend it
has received various corrupt
changes, and I have, with most of
the present Dissenters in England,
some Doubts as to his divinity…
Ben Franklin on Jesus

9. John Dewey
Philosopher
Educator
Class of '79
“The things in civilization we most prize
are not of ourselves. They exist by grace
of the doings and sufferings of
the continuous human community in
which we are a link. Ours is the
responsibility of conserving, transmitting,
rectifying and expanding the heritage of
values we have received, that those who
come after us may receive it more solid
and secure, more widely accessible and
more generously shared than we have
received it.”

10. In the face of knowledge,
science, and of the whole
extent of radiant
civilization, I cannot
accept the presence in
Turkey's civilized
community of people
primitive enough to seek
material and spiritual
benefits in the guidance
of sheiks. Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk

11. “Have faith and go forward,” he said, but faith in what
exactly? “I cannot see any use of a future life.”

12. Hubert Henry Harrison, “the black
Socrates,” was a great scholar, orator, and
writer. He was a champion of labor, a foe
of superstition, and an avowed atheist.
At one of his lectures he was asked why
he rejected Christianity; he replied that
any rational Black man who accepted
Christianity must be crazy. As Harrison
pointed out, the Christian Bible is a slave
master's book.

13. “It should seem that Negroes, of all Americans, would be
found in the Free-thought fold… the religion taught to slaves
stress[ed] the servile virtues of subservience and content…
Nietzsche’s description of Christian ethics as slave ethics
“would seem to be justified in this instance.” JMH

14. The negation of gods is also an affirmation of humanity, an
“eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty. Emma Goldman

15. “No Gods, No Masters.” Margaret Sanger

16. Her father asked her why she had spoken to the bread. She
said she was thanking God for it, and he asked if God was a
baker.
“It was not pleasant, but father had taught me to think...
Unceasingly he tried to inculcate in us the idea that our duty
lay not in considering what mighjt happen to us after death,
but in doing something here and now to make the lives of
other human beings more decent.” JMH

17. For the 1992 season finale,
the creators of Star Trek:
The Next Generation chose
to transplant their cast of
characters to San Francisco
in 1893. The choice of
locations is not nearly as
interesting as the man they
meet in San Francisco--
Samuel Clemens, aka Mark
Twain. In his fiction, Mark
Twain often wrote of He described the size of the
frontiers… continues universe, our place in it… we are
as a vial of microbes would be
to the Emperor of China. JMH

18. Governor petitioned to veto "monkey bill“
April 6th, 2012
A petition urging the veto of House Bill 368, signed by
thousands of concerned Tennesseans, was delivered to
Governor Bill Haslam's office on April 5, 2012, MSNBC
reports(April 5, 2012). Nicknamed the "monkey bill," HB
368 would, if enacted, encourage teachers to present the
"scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses" of topics
that arouse "debate and disputation" such as "biological
evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and
human cloning.“ (continues)

19. I claim a small “degrees of separation”
connection to the infamous Tennessee Scopes
“monkey trial” of 1925: I lived under the same
roof, for a short time, with one of Clarence
Darrow’s expert witnesses who was not
allowed to testify in Dayton, Tennessee on
behalf of John Scopes. (210 Westmount)
I remember Winterton Curtis, my first
landlord, as a kindly, charming old man who
mysteriously pulled dollars from my ear. (The
Dayton judge would’ve seen that as proof of
his Satanic nature, no doubt.) He was also very
respectful of the locals H.L. Mencken derided
as “boobs.”

20. A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial - from D-
Days at Dayton: Fundamentalism vs Evolution at Dayton,
Tennessee by Winterton C. Curtis (1956)
I was met at the station by one of my fellow scientists and
driven through the town to the house where we were to be
quartered… (continues)

21. Damned Yankee
Winterton Curtis, the Scopes expert who
pulled dollars from my ear and provided
my first solid roof, recalled a much
more southern Columbia, Missouri than
mine, in these notes published in
the Columbia Missourianin 1957. (I
matriculated in 1975, he arrived in 1901.)
This reprint, one of the treasures from
Dad’s memory chest, is full of small
surprises and delights. WCC’s old New
England mother drew the line well north
of Mason-Dixon. “No. I cannot give my
consent to Winnie’s going to such a place
as Missouri.” continues

25. If you want to
learn more about Scopes, Dayton,
and Friendly Atheism, read
Matthew Chapman’s
Trials of the Monkey. Chapman,
great-great-great-(great?)
grandson of Charles Darwin
himself, went down to Dayton to
try and understand the curious
breed of human known as
Young Earth Creationist [more].

26. He still doesn’t get it (any more
than I do), but he actually
confesses to liking many of the
Darwin Deniers he met and spoke
with– including one (Kurt Wise)
who studied with
Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard,
before being hired to teach biology
(!) to Bryan University
undergraduates.

27. And if you want to see an entertaining dramatic rendition of Scopes, watch
Spencer Tracy and Frederic March in Inherit the Wind.
Scopes trial images Edward Larson’s Summer of the Gods