happened. What did they teach the world! Slavery!

The best country the sun ever shown upon is the northern part of the
United States, and there you will find less religion than anywhere else
on the face of the earth. You will find here more people that don't
believe the bible, and you will find better husbands, better wives,
happier homes, where the women are most respected and where the
children get less blows and more huggings and kissings. We have
improved just as we lost this religion and this superstition.

Great Britain is the religious nation par excellence, and there you
will find the most cant and most hypocrisy. They are always thanking
God that they have killed somebody. Look at the opium war with China.
They forced the Chinese to open their ports and receive the deadly
drug, and then had the impudence to send a lot of driveling idiots of
missionaries into China.

Go around the world, and where you find the least superstition, there
you will find the best men, the best women, the best children. Two
powerful levers are at work; love and intelligence. The true test of a
man is generosity, that covers a multitude of sins.

They have got so now they damn a man on a technicality. You must be
baptized by immersion, sprinkling or pouring. If you come to the day
of judgment and can't show the watermark, you're damned!

What more: That a fellow named Adam, whom you don't know and never
voted for, is your representative. You are charged with his sins.
Equally abused is the doctrine of atonement, that you are created with
the sacrifice of another. If Christ had more virtue than Adam had
meanness, then you are ahead.

Atonement is the corner-stone of the Christian religion. But there is
one great objection. It saves the wrong man, and it is not honest.
(In holding up the atonement to ridicule the orator said: "If Judas
had failed to betray Christ, the mother of Christ would be in hell
today." Then he ridiculed the miracles recorded in the new testament,
pronounced them absurdities. He said that the four apostolic writers
were very contradictory in their statements, and did not even agree as
to the last word of this great man.)

The ascension was the most striking, the grandest of the miracles, if
true, yet the ascension is only recorded by two of these writers. If
He was God, I know he will forgive somebody for not believing the
miracles, unless convinced.

Another contradiction in the book: