Margaret E. Knight Quotes

• Ethical teaching is weakened if it is tied up with dogmas that will not bear examination.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Teaching, Atheism, Examination

  113 Copy quote

• One of the best ways to improve men's behaviour is to enlighten their minds: and today, against the strong opposition of the Church and the Establishment, Scientific Humanism is attempting to do just that.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Strong, Men, Mind

  31 Copy quote

• It is a mistake to try to impose Christian beliefs on children and to make them the basis of moral training. The moral education of children is much too important a matter to be built on such foundations.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Christian, Children, Mistake

  39 Copy quote

• This hideous doctrine of eternal torment after death has probably caused more terror and misery, more cruelty and more violation of natural human sympathy, than any belief in the history of mankind. Yet this doctrine was taught unambiguously by Jesus.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Jesus, Religion, Atheism

  27 Copy quote

• I was convinced that, besides millions of frank unbelievers, there are today large numbers of half-believers to whom religion is a source of intellectual and moral discomfort.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Numbers, Intellectual, Atheism

  23 Copy quote

• It is difficult, none the less, for the ordinary man to cast off orthodox beliefs, for he is seldom allowed to hear the other side... Whereas the Christian view is pressed on him day in and day out.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Christian, Men, Views

  26 Copy quote

• I want here to make three suggestions: first, that the doubts the ordinary man feels about religion are justified, and need not be stifled or concealed; second, that there is no ground for the view that Christianity is the only alternative to communism, or that there can be no sound character training that is not based on religion; and, third, I want to make some practical suggestions to the parents who are not believers, on what they should tell the children about God, and what sort of moral training they should give them.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Children, Character, Men

  17 Copy quote

• There is no justification for the common claim that Christianity was responsible for the abolition of slavery. The Negro slave trade - a far more infamous practice than slavery in the ancient world - was initiated, carried on and defended by Christian men in Christian countries.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Christian, Country, Men

  21 Copy quote

• My chief aim was to combat the view that there can be no true morality without supernatural sanctions. So I argued at length that the social, or altruistic, impulses are the real source of morality, and that an ethic based on these impulses has far more claim on our allegiance than an ethic based on obedience to the commands of a God who created tapeworms and cancer-cells.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Real, Cancer, Views

  16 Copy quote

• Jesus, in fact, was typical of a certain kind of fanatical young idealist: at one moment holding forth, with tears in his eyes, about the need for universal love; at the next, furiously denouncing the morons, crooks and bigots who did not see eye to eye with him. It is very natural and very human behaviour. But it is not superhuman.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Jesus, Eye, Tears

  13 Copy quote

• There is no ground whatever for the claim, so often made by religious apologists, that these ideals are specifically Christian and originated with Jesus. What were specifically Christian were some of the less enlightened teachings, which have done untold harm. Christians claim that organised Christianity has been a great force for good, but this view can be maintained on one assumption only: that everything good in the Christian era is a result of Christianity and everything bad happened in spite of it.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Christian, Religious, Jesus

  20 Copy quote

• During the ages of faith the Church argued, not illogically, that any degree of cruelty towards sinners and heretics was justified, if there was a chance that it could save them, or others, from the eternal torments of hell. Thus, in the name of the religion of love, hundreds of thousands of people were not merely killed but atrociously tortured in ways that made the gas chambers of Beslen seem humane.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Names, People, Atheism

  14 Copy quote

• One of the most persistent fallacies about the Christian Church is that it kept learning alive during the Dark and Middle Ages. What the Church did was to keep learning alive in the monasteries, while preventing the spread of knowledge outside them... Even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, nine-tenths of Christian Europe was illiterate.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Christian, Dark, Europe

  10 Copy quote

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