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Or that Abraham Lincoln never joined a church, and once wrote a skeptical treatise, which friends burned in a stove, to save him from wrecking his political career.
Or that the motto of Margaret Sanger's birth-control newsletter was: "No gods, no masters."
Or that Clarence Darrow said, in a 1930 speech in Toronto:
"I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose."
Or that President William Howard Taft said, in a letter declining the presidency of Yale University:
"I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."
Or that Luther Burbank told a newspaper interviewer in 1926:
"As a scientist, I cannot help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation.... I am an infidel today. I do not believe what has been served to me to believe. I am a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic. When it can be proved to me that there is immortality, that there is resurrection beyond the gates of death, then I will believe. Until then, no."
Or that Bertrand Russell wrote in 1930:
"My own view of religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race."
Or that George Bernard Shaw wrote, in the preface to one of his plays:
"At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world."
* * *
Many, perhaps most, of the world's outstanding thinkers, scientists, writers, reformers - people who changed Western life - have been religious skeptics. But this fact is little known in America. Why?
Because our nation has one last taboo, one unmentionable topic: religious doubt.
In the daily tumult, it's permissible to challenge any idea, save one. Supernatural religion - invisible gods and devils, heavens and hells - is off limits. It's acceptable to write that Elvis is alive on a UFO, but not that God is a figment of the imagination. A few "freethought" journals do so, but mainstream media mostly stay mum.
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