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"As always, war had lowered the level of American tolerance for any kind of dissent."
Susan JacobyIt is precisely because secularists do understand the power of religio — Susan Jacoby
"It is precisely because secularists do understand the power of religion, and the possibility that any intensely felt drive for righteousness may overwhelm dissenters in its path, that they insist on the fundamental importance of separation between church and state."
Susan Jacoby
Susan Jacoby
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Susan Jacoby is an American author. Her 2008 book about American anti-intellectualism, The Age of American Unreason, was a New York Times best seller. She is an atheist and a secularist. Jacoby graduated from Michigan State University in 1965. She lives in New York City.
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"What the many types of freethinkers shared, regardless of their views on the existence or nonexistence of a divinity, was a rationalist approach to fundamental questions of earthly existence—a conviction that the affairs of human beings should be governed not by faith in the supernatural but by a reliance on reason and evidence produced from the natural world."
Susan JacobyQuote
"The second explicit secularist constitutional provision is of course the First Amendment to the bill of rights."
Susan JacobyQuote
"Notions of the depravity of human reason, Allen argued, were cherished by priests because, if ordinary human beings were assumed to be perfectly capable of reasoning for themselves, the clergy would be out of work."
Susan JacobyQuote
"Throughout their presidencies, Jefferson and his successor, Madison, never ceased to uphold the separation of church and state they had conceived as a model for the new nation."
Susan JacobyQuote
"The period from, roughly, 1875 to 1914 represents the high-water mark of freethought as an influential movement in American society."
Susan Jacoby