Word: religion
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...prosecuted by force; 3) Threatened punishment for zealots who broke these rules. But in face of these symptoms of new leniency on the part of Soviet authorities, plans were being made by the Society of Militant Atheists (alleged membership: 3,000,000) to make great mock of religion at Eastertime with bonfires of ikons, satiric drama, lectures, processions, the construction of planetariums to express the materialistic conception of the world...
...want it, we Americans must change completely our economic system. It is amazing how many people blindly assume that this capitalistic commercialism of ours is as ancient and abiding as the very order of nature. . . .* Sanctioned by industrial practice, justified by philosophy, obsessed by so-called religion, this world-wide selfishness is cataclysmic. . . . Our absorption in this process of acquiring more things is as silly as the preoccupation of the middle ages with theological argument. . . . We must learn the secret of doing things not for people, but with people. ... If such an appreciation cannot be built up in the world...
...Parsee lets his sacred flame die out, he is exceedingly upset, for the Parsee's flame is the Parsee's religion. Last week a great U.S. industry, in which Fire is a vital pillar of the structure of Profit, was horrified by the suggestion that it neglect its flames once a week...
Just too late to be included in the latest edition of the Papal Index Expurgatorius appears Iconoclast Henry Louis Mencken's Treatise on the Gods. The next Index will certainly list it. For Mencken, "quite devoid of the religious impulse," makes of religion his unholy hobby, traces its history with ingenuity, learning, logic, comes to the conclusion that Christianity is on the decline, is glad of his conclusion. Says Mencken: "Everything that we are we owe to Satan and his bootleg apples...
...manner that it can be laughed off by many who secretly agree with him. "No one will deny, I take it, that we owe the Rockefeller Institute, at least in part, to certain purely theological tremors in the donor. . . . However . . . this is really not an argument in favor of religion; it is simply an argument against the human race." The U.S. has no Established Church. Says Mencken: "A degenerated form of Calvinism, going under Methodist or Baptist labels, is now the state religion of the United States, but no American of any dignity believes...