Okay, now I’m really getting fed up with all the hateful attack letters that our editor chooses to print, and will not publish my rebuttals. In the most recent letter, Mr. Thompson (News-Times, June 14) tells me that “it’s okay to have a thought you don’t express,” and also “she and her family would be dead” if she were in a Muslim country. Is that a threat?

I am glad that certain honorable and intelligent people had the courage to speak out about religion. I will quote just a few:

Albert Einstein: “I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.”

Also, “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

Mark Twain: The Bible is “a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.”

Shakespeare in “Twelfth Night”: “Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian.”

Isaac Asimov: “The Bible must be seen in a cultural context. It didn’t just happen. These stories are retreads. But, tell a Christian that­­— No, No! What makes it doubly sad is that they hardly know the book, much less its origins.”

George Bernard Shaw: “There is not one single established religion that an intelligent, educated man can believe.”

Abraham Lincoln: “I care not for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”

Benjamin Franklin: “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.”

James Madison: “The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.”

George Washington: “There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”

Thomas Jefferson: “I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.”

Ruth C. Pyren

Oak Harbor