en.wikipedia.org
“Why I am not a Christian,” a 1927 speech reprinted as an essay.
“ . . You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact.
You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, “This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children.”
Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.
“That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church,
by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. . “
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I remember reading this when I was 18 years old and thinking, Wow, this guy cares more about good ethics than most Christians do.
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ironically, the above is listed by the University of Notre Dame, to their credit!
