The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
It's interesting to note that all revolutionary literature was written by pastors. These guys were involved in a revolution against the mightiest power that the world had ever seen.
My church's antics were such that we were constantly at odds with the world. That reinforced our 'otherness' on a daily basis.
Heretics cannot themselves appear good unless they depict the Church as evil, false, and mendacious. They alone wish to be esteemed as the good, but the Church must be made to appear evil in every respect.
It has been religious people, often within the organized church, who have been the most critical of and even hostile to my relationship with God.
The pastoral labours of the archbishop of Constantinople provoked and gradually united against him two sorts of enemies; the aspiring clergy, who envied his success, and the obstinate sinners, who were offended by his reproofs. When Chrysostom thundered from the pulpit of St. Sophia against the degeneracy of the Christians, his shafts were spent among the crowd, without wounding or even marking the character of any individual.
God's friend, priests' foe
The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.
