It is better to have no God than God and Devil; better to rest in eternal sleep than to be an angel and know that the ones you love are suffering eternal pain; better to live a free and loving life – a life that ends forever at the grave – than to be an immortal slave.

In every orthodox Sunday school children are taught to believe in devils. Every little brain becomes a menagerie, filled with wild beasts from hell. The imagination is polluted with the deformed, the monstrous and malicious. To fill the minds of children with leering fiends – with mocking devils – is one of the meanest and basest of crimes. In these pious prisons – these divine dungeons – these Protestant and Catholic inquisitions – children are tortured with these cruel lies. Here they are taught that to really think is wicked; that to express your honest thought is blasphemy; and that to live a free and joyous life, depending on fact instead of faith, is the sin against the Holy Ghost.

Children thus taught – thus corrupted and deformed – become the enemies of investigation – of progress. They are no longer true to themselves. They have lost the veracity of the soul.

So I say to all fathers and mothers, keep your children away from priests; away from orthodox Sunday schools; away from the slaves of superstition.

They will teach them to believe in the Devil; in hell; in the prison of God; in the eternal dungeon, where the souls of men are to suffer forever. These frightful things are a part of Christianity. Take these lies from the creed and the whole scheme falls into shapeless ruin. This dogma of hell is the infinite of savagery – the dream of insane revenge. It makes God a wild beast – an infinite hyena. It makes Christ as merciless as the fangs of a viper. Save poor children from the pollution of this horror. Protect them from this infinite lie.

– RGI