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Deorum injuriae diis curae (the gods
take care of injuries to the gods)
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Emperor Tiberius (42 BC -AD 37), cited
by Tacitus, Annals of Imperial Rome
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Before Christianity, Greek and Roman believers had been content
to allow their gods to take care of themselves if they were
insulted. Early Christians had taken full advantage of this
tolerance to revile those gods. But Christianity was not willing
to extend the same sort of tolerance when it took over the reins
of imperial power. It was no longer permissible to believe in
other gods, and neither was it permissible not to believe in
God at all. No dissent or criticism could be tolerated. All
citizens had to come into the Christian fold, whether they wanted
to or not. To deny Christianity was to blaspheme it, and blasphemy
was a crime against God.
The codification of Roman law carried out by the Christian
Emperor Justinian in the sixth century was clear. According
to his Corpus Juris Civilis, famine, earthquakes and
pestilence were attributable to God's wrath, induced by
a failure to punish blasphemers. This was exactly the opposite
of what had been believed 300 years earlier, when Christians
had been blamed for the wrath of the gods. The difference was
that now the punishment for blasphemy, fixed by the Code of
Justinian, was death. By the time the Holy Roman Empire came
into being in AD 800, ideas such as this were accepted throughout
Europe.
Freethought, the rejection of supernatural religion, along
with its assumptions and authorities, developed slowly. Dissenting
voices were silenced by the threat of death, so they remained
silent through the Middle Ages. The path that led to these voices
being permitted to speak once again started during the Renaissance.
It became possible to deny the doctrines of Christianity step
by step over several centuries. We have seen that various proto-Protestant
groups doubted mainstream Christian teachings from the twelfth
century. Their Protestant successors denied various Roman doctrines
from the sixteenth. Anabaptists and Adventists denied even more.
In this section we will trace the path by which it became permissible
to express even greater degrees of religious doubt, and by which
people in the twentieth century came to enjoy the same freedoms
that their ancestors enjoyed before the advent of Christianity.
Blasphemy
The term blasphemer was applied to anyone who disagreed
with the current line taken by the Church hierarchy. Blasphemers
were liable to a range of punishments that tended to stop them
repeating their offence. For trivial cases they had their lips
cut off, or were burned through the tongue, or had their tongue
cut out, or torn out. For more serious cases they could also
be sentenced to a quick death (execution) or a slow one (imprisonment
on a diet of bread and water). St Thomas Aquinas regarded blasphemers
as heretics, and heretics as blasphemers. For him heresy and
blasphemy amounted to the same thing. Like a long line of influential
theologians before him, stretching back to St Augustine, he
advocated the death penalty for offenders*,
and this was the prevailing view of Protestant as well as Roman
Catholic scholars. The consensus was that there was no choice
in the matter because God had been explicit:
And he that blasphemeth the name of the L ord, he shall surely
be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly
stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the
land, when he blasphemeth the name of the L ord, shall be
put to death.
Leviticus 24:16
The limited nature of the biblical definition of blasphemy
was ignored completely, while the point was taken to be that
to ignore blasphemy would be contrary to the word of God, and
therefore a sin in itself. Many Christians advocated death for
blasphemers by stoning, in accordance with Leviticus, but the
law never adopted this method of execution, despite its being
advocated by bishops and judges. Stoning was, however, frequently
adopted by crusaders and other Christian mobs, who tended to
have more trust in the Bible's requirements.
Since anyone who disagreed with the Church was necessarily
guilty of blasphemy, and therefore liable to the death penalty,
there were few people who would voluntarily come forward to
declare themselves. There were however, over the centuries,
a number of people who were insane, or mentally deficient, or
in receipt of revelation from gods other than the Christian
one, who made blasphemous statements and paid with their lives.
Genuine blasphemers have played little part in the development
of Christian thought, but as we are about to see, alleged blasphemers
have played a major role. All of the following have been regarded
as blasphemers: apostates, humanists, pantheists, Unitarians,
deists and atheists.
Apostasy
An apostate is someone who decides to leave a religion to which
he or she has belonged. Where people had been forcibly converted
to Christianity, they often secretly continued to practise their
original faith. To Christian eyes this constituted abandoning
the Christian Church, and was thus constituted apostasy. Despite
the risks, pockets of people throughout Christendom secretly
managed to hang on to their original religions for many centuries,
even though they must have known that they were likely to be
killed if the Church authorities found out. Well into the Middle
Ages remote European communities were still worshipping the
gods of their Celtic and Teutonic ancestors in private. In public,
everyone was obliged to subscribe to the current version of
Christian orthodoxy.
Christian authorities had to keep a close watch on other categories
of potential defector, since Christians were frequently converted
to other religions if they had the opportunity to find out about
them. This type of apostasy was common on Christendom's territorial borders where ideas were freely exchanged, but rare
in the hinterland where ideas were firmly controlled. Christians
who travelled beyond Europe were at risk from new ideas, and
the Church has long been embarrassed by the fact that many crusaders,
fired by Christian zeal to kill God's Muslim enemies, had
ended their lives as Muslims, killing God's Christian enemies.
Unlike Islam, Judaism did not seek converts from other religions,
so there was less of a threat from Jewish beliefs. Even so,
Judaism won the occasional convert, though such converts were
not likely to enjoy a very full life with their new allegiance.
In thirteenth century England a young deacon fell in love with
a Jewess and converted to Judaism. For this he was degraded
and excommunicated by a Church Council at Oxford in 1222, and
then burned alive*. In
1267 Pope Clement IV ordered the Inquisition to proceed against
Christians who converted to Judaism. Three years later two converts
were killed at Weissenberg in Alsace. Presumably the danger
continued, for the papal bull authorising the Inquisition to
investigate such cases was reissued in 1274, 1288 and 1290.
Since it was the practice in most mainstream Churches to baptise
everyone into the faith as an infant, anyone could be found
guilty of apostasy if they elected either to follow another
religion, or to deny all religion. All apostasy was blasphemy,
and the penalty for it was death, as required by God. Theologians
pointed out that the bible confirmed that death was the appropriate
penalty ”And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which
will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the
people” (Acts 3: 23).
Humanism
Until the Renaissance the Church was able, more or less, to
enforce its monopoly of belief. But during the Renaissance,
humanism flourished. Humanists emphasised the rights, abilities
and achievements of mankind, but did not explicitly deny God.
Indeed many key humanists were clerics. Humanism was the most
liberal position tolerated at the time — though all humanists
still ran the risk of offending their more traditional colleagues,
and ending up being burned alive at the stake. Humanists were
generally highly educated and they soon opened the door to an
idea called pantheism.
Pantheism
According to pantheist ideas there is no personal God. What
is called God is merely the Universe personified. In
other words, the term God is an alternative word for
nature. Pantheism had been known in ancient Greece
and was (and still is) widespread in India. There were a number
of variations on this theme, associating nature with the deity.
Here is Alexander Pope's version:
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul*
  Giordano
Bruno was a sixteenth century pantheist. He identified God with
the Universe. He saw the divine everywhere, in every grain of
sand, in all life, in the stars, in the infinite Universe. For
him, God was the soul of the Universe. He thought that Aristotle
had been wrong, and that existing Christian denominations were
petty and narrow. For such heresies he was kept in prison for
seven years, examined by a number of cardinals, condemned by
a meeting presided over by the Pope, and burned at the stake
in Rome in 1600. The precise charges against him have disappeared
from Church records.
A monk called Lucilio (or Julius) Vanini was also a sceptical-minded
humanist. He made the mistake of referring to nature as the
"Queen of the Universe" and was tried by the Parliament
at Toulouse. He was convicted of atheism and blasphemy in 1619.
His tongue was pulled with pincers and then severed. He was
garrotted and his body burned at the stake*.
In the Netherlands, pantheist ideas were argued by the philosopher
Spinoza , who attracted violent reaction from both Christians
and Jews. Although pantheists would continue to be executed
as blasphemers, Spinoza made pantheism respectable, at least
among educated humanists, who soon started asking themselves
about doctrines such as the Incarnation and the Trinity.
Unitarianism
 During
the Enlightenment, scholars became aware that the concept of
the Trinity had developed over hundreds of years, that its only
explicit mention in the Bible was a fraudulent insertion, and
that many early Christians had denied Jesus" divinity.
These scholars adopted, or returned to, the belief that there
is a single God — or rather (in theological-speak) that
God has one person rather than three persons.
They are thus known as Unitarians (as opposed to mainstream
Trinitarians). But to question either the Incarnation
or the Trinity was regarded as blasphemous, and therefore deserving
of death, a position held by Roman Catholics and Protestants
alike. Michael Servetus (1511-1553), the famous anatomist, was
perhaps the first Unitarian to be burned to death for his views.
He had narrowly escaped the Inquisition, only to be arrested
by Protestants in Geneva. Despite a safe conduct, he was sent
to the stake by Calvin.
The burning of Unitarians caused public unease in England,
even in the sixteenth century. Further disquiet was expressed
in 1612 when Unitarians were burned in London and Lichfield.
But the established Church, the Church of England, was adamant.
Unitarianism was blasphemous. In 1648 an Act was passed that
specifically prescribed the death penalty for Unitarian and
atheist beliefs, both of which were again classified as blasphemous*.
Few prosecutions were brought because Unitarians tended to be
thoughtful and well educated — which meant that they were
generally also rich, influential and intelligent enough to be
discreet.
Religious doubt was by now common amongst the educated classes.
Thomas Hobbes came as close to being an unbeliever as was then
possible while keeping his life. He seems to have been largely
responsible for an explosion of atheism among the upper classes
in the mid-seventeenth century — and some who could not
countenance outright atheism became pantheists. Voltaire was
surprised by widespread atheism in England in 1730. Unitarianism
also flourished in the upper reaches of society. Men like Isaac
Newton (1642-1727), who lived while the 1648 Act was still on
the statute books, were obliged to conceal their Unitarian leanings.
John Locke (1632-1704) was fortunate to escape prosecution in
1695 for his Unitarian views. The poet John Milton (1608-1674)
also kept his Unitarian views to himself during his lifetime.
Joseph Priestley had his laboratory destroyed by a mob shouting
“for Church and King”. He left England for North
America , where Unitarianism was the religion of the educated
élite. Harvard University, for example, was largely Unitarian,
prompting the sneer that its preaching was limited to the fatherhood
of God, the brotherhood of man and the neighbourhood of Boston.
 In
England, a new Blasphemy Statute was passed in 1698 to protect
Christianity from criticism. Under the Act it was an offence
to deny the truth of Christianity or any of the persons of Trinity.
Penalties included loss of civil rights and imprisonment. Prosecutions
continued. In 1763 John Wilkes, the parliamentary reformer,
was charged with blasphemy, along with a number of other offences.
In continental Europe the Church had a stronger grip than in
Britain. In 1766 a young Frenchman, Jean-François
de la Barre, was accused of singing irreligious songs, mocking
a religious icon, damaging a crucifix, and failing to remove
his hat while a religious procession passed in Abbeville. He
was sentenced to "the torture ordinary and extraordinary",
to have his tongue cut out, to have his right hand cut off,
and to be burned at the stake. Voltaire fought for his life
and the case was referred to the French Parliament. The clergy
insisted on the death penalty. The boy was tortured, then beheaded,
and his body was burned along with a copy of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary.
Deism
In the late seventeenth century philosophers developed a theory
known as deism, the most important form of which asserted that
God did indeed exist, and had created the world, but he had
simply set it going, and then left it to its own devices. In
particular, he no longer interfered with human affairs. It was
as though he had wound up the Universe like a clockwork toy,
then gone away and left it running. This has been described
as atheism with God. To conventional churchmen it was
atheism cleverly dressed up to avoid prosecution. Whether or
not its proponents honestly believed it, and whether or not
they were really atheists, we have no way of knowing. If it
was a ruse, it didn"t work, because early deists were burned
at the stake or otherwise executed as blasphemers. In 1697 an
18-year-old medical student called Thomas Aikenhead was hanged
in Edinburgh for holding deist views, and specifically for denying
the Trinity. He was denied counsel and despite recanting was
condemned to death. There seems to have been no legal basis
for this sentence*, but
he swung from the gibbet anyway, the last person in Britain
to be executed by the State for his religious beliefs.
Rich, educated and powerful deists flourished while others,
less well connected, went in fear of execution. In the 1720s
Thomas Woolston was put under house arrest for the remainder
of his life for voicing doubts about the Resurrection and other
Bible stories. The deist Thomas Paine, who was not so well connected,
was obliged to flee the country after being outlawed in 1792
(following the publication of his Rights of Man). He
was therefore not personally available for prosecution for blasphemous
libel when The Age of Reason was published.
Although famous and influential people tended to escape prosecution,
they were still persecuted in various ways. Adam Smith and David
Hume, for example, suffered for their known scepticism. Hume
was denied the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow because
of "the violent and solemn remonstrance of the clergy".
In France, Denis Diderot was imprisoned in 1749 for his Lettre
sur les Aveugles and lived under constant threat of persecution
for his Encyclopédie.
Explicit Atheism
Outright atheism had been known in ancient Greece. Some of
the best known philosophers in the ancient world had been atheists.
Before Christianity appeared, many educated Romans were also
atheists, regarding all gods, including the Christian one, as
man-made. Christianity would not countenance such ideas. Atheism
was plainly blasphemous, which meant that atheists could expect
to die unpleasant deaths if they admitted to their lack of belief.
Those original enough to work out their own atheist ideas were
generally intelligent enough to keep their ideas to themselves,
although there were occasional exceptions. In Ireland Adam Duff
O"Toole espoused views that had been common in early times
but seemed blasphemous in the fourteenth century: he denied
the Trinity, doubted the Virgin Birth, and regarded Bible stories
as fables. For these beliefs he was burned alive in Dublin in
1327.
The Church had suppressed many beliefs that had been held by
early followers of Jesus, or by his critics. Somehow these beliefs
survived and emerged again and again throughout the centuries.
These claims struck conventional Christians as highly offensive:
the Bible was a fiction; the Trinity was an unwarranted innovation;
Jesus had been not God incarnate but an ordinary, if illegitimate
and homosexual, man; far from being divine his father was either
a Roman centurion or a pimp; Mary had not been a virgin but
a prostitute; conventional Christianity was an imposition. All
of these views dated from early times, and survived down the
centuries, even though those caught repeating them could expect
death. Christopher Marlowe, the poet and dramatist, was one
of many who echoed the ancient charges. He commented that the
angel Gabriel had been a bawd (i.e. pimp) for the Holy Ghost.
He held that Jesus had been a bastard and a homosexual, and
noted that the New Testament was "filthily written".
He was facing a charge of atheism when he was murdered in mysterious
circumstances in 1593.
Sir Walter Raleigh, a suspected atheist, was condemned to be
hanged, drawn and quartered in 1604, not only for treason but
also for holding "the most heathenish and blasphemous opinions".
In fact, he was beheaded instead. Alexander Agnew of Dumfries
(known as Jock of Broad Scotland) held that the Bible was false.
There was no God, no Christ, no Heaven or Hell, and no human
soul. There was only nature. For these beliefs he was hanged
from a gibbet on 21 st May 1651. In 1675 John Taylor of Surrey
was accused of blasphemy and brought before the House of Lords.
He had uttered a number of blasphemies, including the ancient
charge that religion was a cheat and "the virgin Mary was
a whore and Jesus Christ was a bastard". The Lords were
reluctant to be heavy-handed because of memories of the James
Naylor case twenty years earlier, when the Commons had harshly
punished an eccentric Quaker (see page 341). Naylor's treatment
had generated public sympathy, and the Lords did not want to
make the same mistake. They locked John Taylor up in Bedlam
on a diet of bread and water, supplemented by "bodily corrections".
In 1676, he was sent to trial before the King's Bench,
where he received a relatively lenient sentence from Matthew
Hale, the Lord Chief Justice (a fine of 1000 marks, which he
could not possibly pay, ensuring that he would spend the rest
of his life in prison). This case established that Christianity
was part of the laws of England. From now on blasphemy would
be recognised as a common law offence, and Rex v Taylor
could be cited as a precedent in any jurisdiction that recognised
the English common law.
Atheism was something of an intellectual problem for Church
scholars. Although men like Hobbes, Spinoza and Paine never
claimed to be atheists, Christian apologists nevertheless described
them as such. This seems to have been the first time that the
Church had fully countenanced the reality of atheism since it
had eliminated it from the educated classes of the Roman Empire
many centuries earlier*.
The idea of it was apparently seen as such a threat that Christians
in the eighteenth century started to proclaim that there could
be no such thing as atheism. It was literally unthinkable that
there was no God. Scholars debated whether there were, or had
ever been, any genuine atheists. Atheism seemed so perverse,
so bizarre, that a prevalent view in Britain was that atheism
simply could not exist*.
Lord Hardwicke's Act of 1754, which did away with traditional
secular marriages in England, made no provision for the marriage
of atheists.
Christians continued to assert that atheism could not exist
during the entire course of the century, although it became
increasingly possible for influential people to admit to being
atheists without suffering the full force of the law. Atheism
became a sort of open secret. In 1770 Baron d"Holbach had
become the first person in Christendom to dare to publish an
openly atheistic work*.
When David Hume mentioned at a dinner given by d"Holbach
that he had never seen an atheist, the Baron pointed out that
there were fifteen of them among the eighteen at the table.
By 1781 a man called William Hammon felt safe enough to try
to publicly dispel remaining doubts in Britain about the existence
of atheists: " ...as to the question whether there is such
an existent Being as an atheist, to put that out of all manner
of doubt, I do declare upon my honour that I am one"*.
It was not until around 1830 that more than a few isolated
people dared to profess open and explicit atheism at all. Early
claimants included Feuerbach, Nietzsche and Marx. All suffered
from Christian intolerance in various forms. It might be possible
to be an atheist and live, but publicising the fact could still
invite problems. As an undergraduate at University College,
Oxford, the poet Shelley had published a pamphlet entitled The
Necessity of Atheism in 1811. He escaped prosecution because
of his family background and the fact that the pamphlet was
successfully suppressed, but he was sent down from the university
for it.
Publishing radical ideas was also felt to warrant severe punishment.
When a publisher reprinted some of Thomas Paine's writings
in 1812, he was imprisoned and pilloried. But times were changing:
instead of attacking him in his pillory, the public applauded
him. The public would not now tolerate death sentences for atheism,
and using the law at all to curb free thought often resulted
in positive publicity for the cause of the godless. Prosecutions
of sceptics for blasphemy were almost always successful, but
the prosecution of men and women for honestly held views only
served to propagate their arguments. As more and more people
heard the evidence, more and more became sceptical. As it has
always done, the creation of martyrs helped their cause enormously.
Each new case put one or two sceptics out of circulation but
resulted in the conversion of hundreds or thousands.
Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason has never been
out of print, and is still seen as a danger by the mainstream
Churches. In the nineteenth century William Wilberforce, Vice-President
of the Society for Suppressing Vice, organised prosecutions
against both publishers and sellers of it. Richard Carlile was
prosecuted in 1819 for republishing the works of Paine and others.
He suffered huge fines that he could not possibly pay and was
imprisoned as a result. Despite his business premises being
repeatedly ransacked, his wife Jane continued to edit his magazines
and publish his books, until she was also imprisoned (along
with her baby) in 1821. Carlile's sister Mary Anne then
took over. When she was imprisoned as well, a succession of
others took over. Scores were prosecuted, but support came from
all over the country. The law was falling into disrepute.
Without the fear of torture and death people were now more
willing to break the law. Most who did so used pure reason,
but some were more liberal in their approach. Charles Haslam
described the Bible as a vile compound of filth, blasphemy and
nonsense; as a fraud and a cheat. It would, he said, disgrace
orang-utans, let alone men. Its author must have been a random
idiot, and people should burn it "in order that posterity
may never know we believed in such abominable trash". When
the authorities investigated, the author could not be found,
so his publishers were prosecuted in his stead*.
Despite the combative position of people like Haslam, public
opinion continued to become more liberal and sympathetic to
secular ideas. After voicing uncomplimentary views about Christianity
and colonisation in 1842, George Holyoake was imprisoned. While
he was in gaol his daughter died of starvation. The public had
by now had enough, and prosecutions dried up. Christian vigilante
organisations tried private prosecutions, but they failed to
win the verdicts they wanted. No serious work of literature
would be successfully prosecuted in England for blasphemy for
well over 100 years — until 1979, when the Christian cause
found a new champion in Mrs Mary Whitehouse.
The British authorities still had the option of using the Press
Acts, which had been framed to suppress radical publications
like those of Carlile. In the 1860s the government acted against
Charles Bradlaugh, requiring large sureties against the possibility
that his weekly publication National Reformer might
print something blasphemous or seditious — although he
had never published material warranting prosecution. He soon
incurred penalties of millions of pounds for failing to raise
the required sureties. Once again the law was falling into disrepute,
and as a result the Press Acts were repealed in 1869.
The treatment of Bradlaugh showed up other problems with the
law. According to a judgement handed down by Lord Justice Sir
Edward Coke (1552-1634) unbelievers ("infidels") had
no rights at all in law. Thus for example, contracts with them
need not be kept and debts need not be paid. "All infidels
are in law perpetui inimici; for between them, as with
devils whose subjects they be, and the Christian, there is perpetual
hostility.... ". This still represented the law in the
nineteenth century. When Bradlaugh had been prosecuted in the
1860s, his atheism had been held to amount to sedition. Since
he did not believe in God he was not permitted to give evidence
in court. This problem was resolved by the Evidence Amendment
Act of 1869, which allowed atheists to affirm. But a similar
problem arose when Bradlaugh was elected to the House of Commons
in 1880. When he tried to take his seat, he was prevented from
taking the oath that all new Members of Parliament were required
to take, and excluded from the House. Several times he was re-elected
and each time the Speaker excluded him from the House, even
though he was willing to take the oath. He finally took his
seat years later under a new Speaker, and the law was subsequently
changed by the Parliamentary Oaths Act of 1885. Similar restrictions
in Scotland were removed by another Oaths Act in 1888.
The last vestiges of persecution and discrimination were disappearing.
Open agnosticism also became possible. T. H. Huxley coined the
word in 1868 , originally to express the idea that if there
was a God, he was unknowable, but agnosticism has now
come to denote the state of being undecided about whether God
exists. In the twentieth century, for the first time since pre-Christian
times, anyone could safely espouse agnosticism or atheism, although
the Blasphemy Statute of 1698 survived until recent times. The
clause about the Trinity had already been rescinded in 1813
, and the rest of Act was quietly repealed in 1967.
Many Christians now espouse views that were once blasphemous
and that people were burned for. Examples are denying the inerrency
of the Bible, denying the Virgin Birth, and doubting the Resurrection.
Many clergymen share these views but most are wary of expressing
them too freely. Blasphemy is still an offence at common law,
and sceptics still run the risk of prosecution. It was only
in the most indirect way that Monty Python's Life of
Brian, a film released in the 1980s, could hint at the
ancient traditions concerning Jesus" parentage.
Blasphemy laws exist in many European countries and in some
states of the supposedly secular USA. The founding fathers of
the USA had been heavily influenced by eighteenth century deism
and rationalism, and these influences ensured that the Constitution
of the USA was firmly secular. Even so, the Constitution could
easily be circumvented. As already mentioned, the case of Rex
v Taylor in 1676 stated that blasphemy was a common law
offence, and this precedent was to be cited not only in England
but also in America — since the English common law carried
over to the common law of the USA. Courts in New York, Pennsylvania
and Delaware have all agreed that blasphemy was a criminal offence
under the common law.
Like England, colonial America had blasphemy statutes as well
as the common law. They punished atheists and blasphemers in
much the same way as the mother country. Offenders were sometimes
executed, sometimes flogged. Sometimes they were pilloried as
well. Their tongues were bored with hot irons, bodkins or stilettos.
Ears were cropped, noses split, and faces branded. In Maryland
profane words concerning the Holy Trinity were punishable by
torture, branding and ultimately death. As in England, atheists
were not permitted to testify in court, and so were effectively
debarred from filing both civil suits and criminal charges,
and were thus denied access to justice. The Supreme Court of
Tennessee made the following statement in 1871:
The man who has the hardihood to avow that he does not believe
in a God, shows a recklessness of moral character and utter
want of moral responsibility, such as very little entitles
him to be heard or believed in a court of justice in a country
designated as Christian*.
Atheists have been denied not only legal redress themselves
but also the right to sit on juries. The underlying idea is
that people cannot be trusted unless their morality is conditioned
by a fear of God. This sort of view survived, even among influential
people, into recent times. Ronald Reagan, while President of
the United States, observed that one could not believe anything
the Soviets said because they did not believe in God.
Atheists are still discriminated against in the courts, for
example in child custody cases where Christian judges have taken
the view that a Christian parent is more likely to be moral
than an atheist one, despite the available evidence*.
Theologians still wonder whether atheists really exist, though
they tend to be more circumspect in their words than one Jesuit
who opined just a generation ago "…the man who does
not fear God somehow does not exist, and his nature is somehow
not human"*.
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