against war and religious instruction, in support of the rebel

Those with good memory remember a nitwit described me as having a predilection to violence when in every instances I have written in opposition to war, punishment and violence. I have another reason to oppose war, and I don’t know how best to put it other than to say it is a stupid way to resolve a dispute. That war between nations is only the duel either with gun or sword between individuals that has been transferred to nations and that soldiers are pawns in this game whether they know it or not.

Religious instruction has no value to society other than perpetuating the spread of false ideas as truths. And we must ask with Cohen Chapman

whether we are to permit the priest to hold the future to ransom by permitting this control of the child, or whether we are to leave religious beliefs, as we leave other beliefs of a speculative character, to such a time as the child is old enough to understand them.

And still with Chapman, we must note

it is the function of the true teacher to make his pupil independent of him. The aim of the priest is to keep one eternally dependent upon his ministrations. The final and fatal criticism upon religious instruction is that it is not education at all.

And now finally, in support of rebellion, especially rebellion to received religious dogma.

The Christian church has been tolerant towards the criminal, and has always been intolerant of the heretic and the freethinker. The church could forgive those who were responsible for the horrors of the English factory system but she could never forgive the writer of the Age of Reason.

And we can say finally with Chapman that

history, looking back through the ages, is bound to confess that it is to the great rebels, from Satan onward, that the world mainly owes whatever of greatness or happiness it has achieved.