From the mouths of those who attack religion we hear again and again that it is the worst of all evils that burden mankind. This is what the freethinkers, the social democrats, say, and this is what many democrats who do not say it aloud think. Maybe they will once open the books of horrors committed in history and show us that its bloodiest and blackest pages were written by religion. Then we will stand embarrassed. We will try to defend the attacked. We will try to distinguish between the true and false religion and explain that it was false religion that caused all that is being attributed to the true religion.
Leonhard Ragatz in Signs of the Kingdom: A Ragatz Reader, 37 (1917)