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THE DANGERS OF THE HOUR-excerpts from an essay
by Marilla M. Ricker
| There are more than one thousand religions. They are founded mostly on fraud. All their saviors had virgins for mothers, and gods for fathers. |
The churches own…billions of property, and they are all too dishonest to pay honest taxes. |
The churches claim all the distinguished people, especially after they are dead and cannot deny their claims. They have many times claimed that Abraham Lincoln was a churchman. The Honorable H.C. Deming, of Connecticut, an old friend of Lincoln, said it is false. Lincoln belonged to no church, and at one time said, "I have never united myself to any church, because I have found difficulty in giving my assent without mental reservation to the long, complicated statements of Christian doctrine…" |
No institution in modern civilization is so tyrannical and so unjust to women as is the Christian church. The history of the church does not contain a single suggestion for the equality of woman with man, and still the church claims that woman owes her advancement to the Bible…History…tells us that the condition of women is most degraded in those countries where Church and State are in closest affiliation and most advanced in nations where the power of ecclesiasticism is markedly on the wane…whatever progress woman has made in any effort, she has accomplished independent of, and in opposition to, the so-called inspired and infallible Word of God… |
The business of trading in slaves was not immoral by the estimate of public opinion in Colonial times. A deacon of the church in Newport esteemed the slave trade…as home missionary work. It is said that on the first Sunday after the arrival of his slaves he was accustomed to offer thanks that an overruling Providence had been pleased to bring to this land of freedom another cargo of…heathen to enjoy the blessings of a Gospel dispensation…John Bacon of Barnstable directed in his will that his Indian slave Dinah be sold and the proceeds used "by my executors in buying Bibles." |
I…went to Italy, and became conversant with the outside doings of the Roman Catholic Church. I visited many of them, saw the beggars eating crusts at the doors, and the well-fed priests saying masses inside; saw the white hand of famine always extended, in bitter contrast to the magnificent cathedrals; saw well-dressed, intelligent-looking men and women going upstairs on their hands and knees, and saw hundreds of them kissing the toe of the bronze statue of Saint Peter…and all begging for the Holy Catholic Church!… |
History tells us that John Wesley preached a sermon entitled, The Cause and Cure of Earthquakes. He said that earthquakes were caused by sin, and the only way to stop them was to believe in his theology and teachings… |
…Teach children that no amount of so-called religion will compensate for rheumatism; that Christianity has nothing to do with morality; that "vicarious atonement" is a fraud and a lie..that the Bible is no more inspired than the dictionary; that sin is a transgression of the laws of life…And, above all, teach children that prayer is idiotic. I am not afraid, and no priest or parson can make me believe that my title to a future life, if there be one, is defective. And the great and good man Thomas Paine, who wrote the Age of Reason, said "The world is my country, and to do good my religion…" |
Born in March 1840, Ricker became a trail-blazing attorney, abolitionist, humanitarian and suffragist. |
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