It used to be, it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier.

The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach.

I shall never be a heretic; I may err in dispute, but I do not wish to decide anything finally; on the other hand, I am not bound by the opinions of men.

The New Right, in many cases, is doing nothing less than placing a heretical claim on Christian faith that distorts, confuses, and destroys the opportunity for a biblical understanding of Jesus Christ and of his gospel for millions of people.

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the Gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.

Aten, a minor solar God ? a red disc from which long rays emanated and reached down to earth ? was converted into the supreme God, in fact the one and only God, by Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh. Aten evolved into Jehovah, and Akhenaten's religion evolved into Jewish monotheism. Akhenaten, or someone very close to him, is the true Moses of the Bible, standing up for the One God against Egyptian polytheism, and leading a mass Exodus of his monotheistic followers away from pagan Egypt to a new Promised Land. Jehovah, therefore, is just a modification of a minor Egyptian sun God.

The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals. Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists. The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise.

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.

The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach.

I shall never be a heretic I may err in dispute but I do not wish to decide anything finally on the other hand I am not bound by the opinions of men.

The New Right in many cases is doing nothing less than placing a heretical claim on Christian faith that distorts confuses and destroys the opportunity for a biblical understanding of Jesus Christ and of his gospel for millions of people.

To try to fashion something from suffering to relish our triumphs and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.

The biggest danger to the European Union comes not from those who advocate change but from those who denounce new thinking as heresy. In its long history Europe has experience of heretics who turned out to have a point.