It’s no wonder evangelical atheists need to shout so loud
by Barry Cooper
Calgary Herald (Canada), August 27, 2008
p. A16 (editorial)
The shining example of free thinking said to characterize the French Enlightenment was Voltaire. In the face of dogmatic clerics, both Protestant and Catholic, he urged reasonable people everywhere to “crush the infamous thing.”
His argument was as obvious then as it is today: organized religion not only divides humanity into believers and infidels, it authorizes the former, with a beatific smile, to extinguish the latter. Often religion claims to be doing so for the good of the infidel.
That Voltaire had Christianity in mind is indicated by a rather more vulgar expression from his pen: “the people will not be free until the last king is strangled in the guts of the last priest.”
