Naomi Sherer reviews...

WOMEN
WITHOUT
SUPERSTITION
Collected writings of
Women Freethinkers

Here are exerpts from
a one-penny pamphlet published 1885

Is Christianity A Success?
by
Annie Besant

"Take again, glancing over history, the fashion in which Christian nations have ever dealt with savage tribes. Charlemagne Christianised the Saxons with fire and sword, breaking them into the obedience of the Church. The Spaniards Christianized the Peruvians in similar fashion, turning the happy flowery land of the Sun into a slave-filled shambles. The English have Christianised Indians and Africans, Maories and Australians, in good old historic manner by murder and fraud and theft. Look where we will at the treatment experienced by the savage at Christian hands, and we find ever the same old story--cruelty that sickens, treachery that disgusts, brutality that appals.

"Christianity is the nursing mother of social evil, for it winks at all oppression by the wealthy, and condones every crime in the believer.

"The new creed which is arising in the place of Christianity gains a hearing very largely because of the failure of the religion which it is seeking to destroy. Instead of meeting poverty with a benediction, it regards it as a curse to be abolished by better social arrangements. Disease to it is not the scourge of God, but the scourge of dirt and ignorance, to be broken by cleanliness and knowledge. Sin to it is not an object of divine wrath, but a subject for human skill, to be cured by healthy environment."

Quoted from "Women Without Superstition"

Annie Laurie Gayler
editor
WOMEN WITHOUT SUPERSTITION

The book jacket declares: "Women of today owe an enormous debt to the freethinking founders and foremothers of the women's movement, who dared question and confront the religious status quo which demanded women's silence, subjection, servitude and unquestioning obedience. It is thanks to the freethinking women who challenged religious sway over civil laws and practices that women have the rights they possess today."

WOMEN WITHOUT SUPERSTITION
"No Gods--No Masters"
is the collected writings of women freethinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries

Buy It Now

Published by Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. PO Box 750 Madison WI 53701 ISBN: 1-877733-09-1