Quote

It is easy to forget, since the Catholic Church is now the only large American religious denomination whose ecclesiastical hierarchy continues to oppose birth control, that only a century ago the leaders of nearly all churches were united in their resistance to any public discussion of the subject.

Susan Jacoby

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Susan Jacoby
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: June 4
Author
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
United
Control
Leaders
Oppose
Easy
Public
Subject
Hierarchy
Since
Large
Churches
Religious
Subjects
Continues
Forget
Birth
Discussion
Church
Whose
Nearly
Denomination
American
Leader
Resistance
Ecclesiastical
Religion
Century
Catholic
Denominations

More quotes by Susan Jacoby

Image
I'm not saying that I think atheists are better than other people. God, no. What I am saying is I do feel that this an integral part of who I am. And it's not something that I could comfortably think of not sharing with the person I loved most in the world.
Susan Jacoby
Image
I can no more imagine falling in love with someone who believed that than I can imagine falling in love with someone who believes that blacks shouldn't be able to vote and are inferior to whites.
Susan Jacoby
Image
It's something fundamental to me, human rights that people are equal under law simply because they are human beings. And I can no more imagine falling in love with someone who believed, for instance, as Orthodox Jews do, that women are unclean during their menstrual periods.
Susan Jacoby
Image
I can't imagine falling in love with a devoutly religious person.
Susan Jacoby
Image
The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.
Susan Jacoby
Image
one of the great weaknesses of the women's rights movement over the past two hundred years has been the tendency of its history to disappear, so that it must be resurrected for each new generation.
Susan Jacoby
Image
Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who . . . even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.
Susan Jacoby
Image
More than half of Americans have changed religions at least once in their adult lifetime. This is - the rate of religious conversion here is much, much higher than it is anywhere in Europe, for example.
Susan Jacoby
Image
The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization
Susan Jacoby
Image
I wanted to know how much of conversion was forced - that is, forced in the sense that the Inquisition forced people to choose - forced Jews, let's say, and Muslims to choose conversion to Christianity or death. I wanted to see how much of conversion historically was forced in that way and how much of it was really a kind of persuasion.
Susan Jacoby
Image
This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
Susan Jacoby
Image
I don't deny that religion is very healthful to a lot of people. And as long as they don't try to convert me, I have, you know, nothing - and to interfere with the rights of people to believe other religions or to not believe in any religion at all - as long as they mind their own religion - perfectly all right with me...
Susan Jacoby
Image
That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.
Susan Jacoby
Image
I feel Jewish in the sense of culturally Jewish, I suppose the way Bernie Sanders feels Jewish, but not Jewish in a religious sense.
Susan Jacoby
Image
Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck.
Susan Jacoby
Image
The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.
Susan Jacoby
Image
Feminists who want to censor what they regard as harmful pornography have essentially the same motivation as other would-be censors: They want to use the power of the state to accomplish what they have been unable to achieve in the marketplace of ideas and images. The impulse to censor places no faith in the possibilities of democratic persuasion.
Susan Jacoby
Image
People think that, that conversion to Judaism is just a modern phenomenon. But there was an era in the late Roman Empire Judaism was not a proselytizing religion. It didn't go out looking for converts, but it accepted converts.
Susan Jacoby
Image
I don't see why any president has to talk about his belief in God.
Susan Jacoby
Image
If during the Reformation you were a Catholic who lived in a part of Germany in which Lutheranism was the ascendant religion and the ruler of the province or the region was Lutheran, to stay a Catholic, you either had to be a dissenter or you had to leave.
Susan Jacoby