I could never understand why anyone would be an enemy of the Gospel.
Why is someone against Good News?
How can someone spit on Jesus?
Today's article looks at these things and warns against those who hate Him.
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1 The first enemy we meet is Herod the Great, 74-4BC, a great builder who spent 42 years building the Temple in Jerusalem, which was the most magnificent building in the world.
He enjoyed the favor of Rome and was ruthless in maintaining his throne, executing his wife and her mother and other family members when he thought they were conspiring to replace him.
His aim was the same when he tried to kill Jesus* (4BC-30AD) and "sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under." Matthew 1: 17-18.
An asterisk* means that person is in SPIRITUAL LIVES.:all 19 enenies are there as well.
The second enemy is the only one who knew Jesus personally. Caiaphas was the High Priest in Jerusalem from 18 BC to 20 AD, the longest tenure of any High Priest in New Testament times. He became the chief antagonist of the Lord Jesus and orchestrated His trial, judgment, and crucifixion. He hated Jesus because he knew his power was challenged.
Nero 37-68 was born in the Emperor’s house and lacked nothing for his entire life.
In 64 a GREAT fire broke out that destroyed half of Rome. Nero decided to put the blame for the fire on the Christians of Rome and began to have Christians crucified, slain with the sword, thrown to the dogs, and burned alive. This began what would be a centuries-long Roman policy of persecuting Christians.
Tradition says that Nero beheaded Paul, and St. Paul* (5-67) certainly knew him, but another view is that he was freed and then went on another missionary trip to Spain. Of Nero’s end, we are certain. At just 30 years of age, he committed suicide after he was deposed as Emperor and forced to flee the soldiers sent to kill him. His last words were, “Qualis artifex pereo” (“What an artist dies in me”). His name became a stench.
Maricon of Sinope 85 - 160 AD was the first major heretic that we know of by name.
Maricon’s idea was that Christianity was in complete discontinuity with the Old Testament, which he felt must be read in an absolutely literal sense. The Genesis account of God walking in the Garden of Eden convinced him that God had a physical body and could not be the Spirit that Jesus said no one had ever seen (John 1:18).
Maricon posited another god, the Demiurge, who created the material universe and punishes men for their sins through suffering and death. He contrasted him with the Father of Jesus, who is loveful and full of mercy and forgiveness for sin. He believed Jesus was the son of this Heavenly Father, but that His body was not material and, therefore, he denied His physical and bodily birth, death, and resurrection. He mutilated the Gospel of Luke by editing out those portions, like the Nativity, that did not support his views. Sadly, his heresy became widespread and lasted for centuries.
Diocletian was the 51st emperor of Rome (284-305). He brought order and stability to the Empire and in doing so created the largest and most bureaucratic government the world had yet known. As he did this, he emphasized himself as a restorer of ancient Roman customs, among them the public and official worship of the traditional Roman gods.
Pagan rites and ceremonies were folded into the ongoing functions of government and made it impossible for Christians to comply. Diocletian had purged the army of Christian soldiers during his first 15 years in charge and, as Emperor, surrounded himself with anti-Christian advisors who wanted to institute harsher sanctions against the Christians whose loyalty to their faith they saw as atheism and treason.
He then published an “Edict Against the Christians,” forbidding believers to meet for worship and ordering the destruction of Christian churches and scriptures throughout the empire.
Riots ensued, and part of the royal palace was burned down. Executions of prominent Christians began, and further edicts demanded that Christians partake in Roman sacrifices and authorized the arrest of Christian ministers. So many were arrested that there were not enough prisons to hold them. Modern historians estimate the number of martyrs to be 3,000-3,500, but older historians place the number much higher.
Diocletian’s persecutions failed to stop the spread of the Gospel. In fact, his reforms to stabilize the empire gave missionaries a solid base from which they could go into the still heathen lands surrounding the Empire and win millions to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Julian the Apostate 331-363 Julian was one of the grandsons of Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor of Rome. As Emperor, he resurrected paganism and personally offered bloody sacrifices that horrified believers. He believed that he was the reincarnation of Alexander the Great and lived an ascetic life, including a largely vegetarian diet. His policy was to drive Christians out of public life and replace them with non-believers. He restored pagan temples and took away the privileges that Constantine had given Christian bishops.
His hostility to Christianity moved him to support all religions that opposed it, including that of the Jews. To show that he was more powerful than Jesus, Who had said of the temple, “And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation,” (Luke 19:44) Julian ordered the Temple rebuilt. But this effort was not successful:
when fearful balls of fire, breaking out near the foundations, continued their attacks, till the workmen, after repeated scorchings, could approach no more: and he gave up the attempt. Ammianus Marcellinus, 330-395
His war in Persia also failed, and he was killed in battle at the age of 32. Pagan and Christian sources reported his dying words to be “νενίκηκάς με, Γαλιλαῖε, or Vicisti, Galilaee ("You have won, Galilean").” He saw at last the truth of the words he must have known:
Mohammed 570--632 While Christianity was expanding in the lands north of Rome, it was being extinguished to the south, west and east. The man most responsible for this was Muhammad. Born in Mecca on April 20, 570 A.D, he was orphaned before he was 6 and subject to epileptic fits.
Muhammad began to preach. He believed that he was sent to the Arabs as Moses* (1571-1421) and Jesus* (4BC-30AD) had been sent to the Jews to teach them the things God revealed to him. These revelations continued for the rest of his life and make up what we now know as the Koran.
It also marked the beginning of military conflict between the Prophet and the Meccans, who were much stronger at first. Soon, Muhammad’s strength grew, and in 630, he marched on Mecca with 10,000 men and was victorious. And so was his new religion.
When he was 40, the Angel Gabriel appeared to him in a cave and told him, “You are the messenger of God.” As he grew stronger, Muhammad began to insist that everyone who wanted to associate with him should be a Muslim.
By his death in 632, most of Arabia was under his control. He lived a luxurious life and had nine wives. He was a master politician and hungered for power. His new religion was one of temporal power that enforced his spiritual views. Today, 49 countries are under Muslim control, and they are trying to take over the rest of the world.
Innocent IV 1195-1254 focused his life on building the power of the Roman Catholic Church and gain control of the Papal States. In the course of his war with HRE Frederick he introduced papal bull Ad extirpanda which legalized the torture of heretics.
This act opened the door to unspeakable horrors and cruelty to people whose beliefs did not conform to official church doctrine. Millions suffered and died as a direct result of Innocent IV’s edict and policy. It is ironic that this man chose such a name and became a leader of those the Lord foresaw and passed judgment upon: They gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood. – Psalm 94:21
How very sad too, that those who claim the authority of Jesus overlook these very plain words of His: Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world:– John 18:36
David Hume 1711-1776 was a brilliant philosopher and a star in the Enlightenment. Although Hume was not an atheist, he rejected the Lord Jesus Christ and any idea of a personal God and His love for us:
All things of the universe are evidently of a piece. Everything is adjusted to everything. One design prevails throughout the whole. This uniformity leads the mind to acknowledge one author. Natural History of Religion, 1757
Despite this observation, Hume did not trust his own thinking and thus rejected God and made agnosticism and deism philosophically and culturally acceptable. Skepticism became one of the hallmark characteristics of the Enlightenment, and its acceptance by many prominent intellectuals, like Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Voltaire, has had a tremendous influence on culture and intellectual history ever since.
Hume’s rejection of the Bible as an authority lay at the bottom of his thought, and that came about because he would not accept the existence of miracles. His idea can be seen in Thomas Jefferson’s “Bible,” in which deist Jefferson struck out every reference to the supernatural, including every miracle of Jesus and all reference to His Resurrection.
These ideas have taken over secular, intellectual life and now reign in our education, politics, and culture. But they are not, of course, the final word, because they are not true. Others have since shown the bankruptcy of these “Enlightenment ideas” and pointed out that there is only one Truth, and that comes by revelation and is, indeed, personified in the Lord Jesus Christ;
To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Jesus in John 18:37
Jean Jacque Rousseau, 1712-1778, was a French-speaking writer, composer, and philosopher born in 1712 in Geneva to a Protestant family. At age 15, he ran away from his harsh master to Savoy, where he met Françoise-Louise de Warrens, a 29-year-old woman who converted him to Catholicism. A key element in this conversion was Rousseau’s objection to the Calvinist doctrine of man's total depravity.
"Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man".
His Universalist views alienated both Catholics and Protestants, and he had to flee France and Geneva to find refuge in Germany. However, these views brought him the friendship of Voltaire and Hume, and he grew famous for his novel Julie, the most popular book of the century. People were overwhelmed by its passion and sentiment, and it made Rousseau the pre-eminent literary/philosophical figure in Europe.
His influence on the church has also been tremendous. Whereas David Hume made skepticism respectable and was a major vehicle in demoting the Bible from its place of authority in the church, Rousseau attacked the idea of original sin and popularized the idea that man is good by nature. He popularized the heresy that all religions lead to God and that everyone will be saved. These ideas soon took over the major Protestant denominations and much of the Roman Catholic clergy.
All of this Rousseau did in the name of liberty, especially for “the common man.” While Hume’s skepticism began with unbelief in the Bible, Rousseau’s rebellion was against all authority, especially in government and society. No idea was too extreme, and every belief was to be respected and honored:
No true believer could be intolerant or persecuted. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Joseph Smith 1804-1844 was born into a New England family that had moved to western New York to farm. At age 16, while he was praying in the woods about which church to join, two "shining personages" appeared to him, later identified as Jesus Christ and God the Father.
When Smith asked which church to join, he was told "all religious denominations were believing in incorrect doctrines, and that none of them was acknowledged of God as his church and kingdom." All the denominations were "corrupt," the revelation continued, and "all their creeds were an abomination in his sight." He was told that "the fullness of the Gospel" would be given to him.
This fullness is described in the Book of Mormon, which relates how Jesus came to America and preached to the Indians. This book is a supplement to the Bible but presents a strange theology that amounts to an update of Arianism.
Joseph Smith's life was dominated by revelation that convinced him that he was being given divine guidance above all earliest revelation and higher than the authority of the Bible and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. How could this be? The Bible says this about those who will not accept God's truth:
because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved.[11] And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: [12] That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12
Sadly, 17 million people believe the lie today.
Charles Darwin 1809-1892 was born in Shropeshire (130 miles NW of London), into a wealthy family of Unitarians. Despite this, his freethinker father Robert had the baby baptized in the local Anglican church, but he attended the Unitarian chapel with his mother and became interested in natural science while at the chapel’s school. When his mother died in 1818, he attended the Anglican boarding school before moving to the University of Edinburgh Medical School.
But he lost interest in becoming a doctor and became acquainted with the work of Lamarck (1744-1829), the French naturalist and early proponent of evolution. Of course, the idea of evolution was originally developed by the ancient Greeks in the 6th century BC. However, Plato and Aristotle, who held that the gods had created the earth, strongly opposed it.
The most significant event in Darwin’s life was a 5-year voyage (1831836) around the world on The Beagle as a “gentleman” observer. There, he made voluminous notes on the varieties of plants and animals and won a job as the secretary of the Geographical Society. He continued his research, study, and writing, culminating in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, published in 1859.
Darwin’s contribution was the idea of “natural selection,” later shorthand to “survival of the fittest. " It at once gained popularity and acceptance among the Victorian elite, notably men of science and unbelievers. Behind his theory, or perhaps in conjunction with its development, Darwin became increasingly alienated from the Bible and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Coming from a family of “free-thinkers” and Unitarians, Darwin went along this path as his study in the natural sciences continued. By age 29, he had concluded that “the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos [sic], or the beliefs of any barbarian.’ Autobiography
Darwin realized the unavoidable conclusions of his unbelief but this led him not to repentance but to a fierce and final condemnation of the Gospel and its Lord: ‘I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.”
Despite his militant anti-Christian views, Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey due to the influence of his friends in high places, who wanted to make it look like a "reconciliation between Faith and Science.” This was an important step toward the corruption of the Church of England, which led to apostasy and irrelevance.
In my view, Darwin has been the greatest enemy of the Gospel in history. Not only did he reject Jesus and His great salvation, but he denied the truth of the Bible to millions who believed. Worse still, he replaced God's Book of Life with his Book of Death, "the survival of the fittest."
Julius Wellhausen 1844 1915 was the son of a Lutheran pastor. Although he started out to follow this vocation, he became more interested in scholarship than ministry when he studied theology at the University of Göttingen.
It is a sad and tragic Irony that while studying for the ministry, Wellhausen lost his faith and denied the divine inspiration of the Bible. He began to see this Book as simply a man-made text to be studied only via critical, historical, and scientific methods of inquiry.
Wellhausen readily accepted the evolutionary understanding of Jewish history then current in the Protestant German universities, which denied the traditional and historical view of the Bible as God’s Word.
This teaching denies what the Bible actually says about itself, expels God from authorship, and denies the historicity of Moses’s account of creation and the other prophets’ and chroniclers’ honesty. Worse, it presents the Scripture, which we believe is God’s Word, as a carefully crafted fraud created by priests and editors thousands of years after the times they represent.
What is the evidence for this? There is none. It is a literary hypothesis limited not only by the opinions and thinking of 18th- 19th-century academics but also by the spirit of their age, the inheritance of unbelief and skepticism spawned by David Hume and his followers in the Enlightenment, which actually darkened the minds of many so that they could not accept divine revelation. What is especially troubling is that those who advanced this theory that rejected the Bible and the testimony of Jesus Himself were the heirs of the Protestant Reformation, and their work and unbelief led their denominations and churches into apostasy and rejection of the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for our sins.
Harry Emerson Fosdick 1878-1969 was the son of a high school teacher. Raised in a traditionalist Baptist home, he once said he was “born again,” but as a teenager, he began to rebel against what he called “fundamentalism.” But what he was really rejecting was orthodox Christian doctrine as held by 1900 years of history. In this, he was not alone. Many others had sought to retain an attachment to Christianity without the supernatural elements, much as Jefferson had done before. Many of these people had had their faith in the Bible shaken by Darwinism and others by the scholarship of higher criticism. Their tactic was at first to hide their rejection of the Bible and the deity of Jesus and reinterpret Him as a GREAT teacher and social reformer.
He was a skilled orator and powerful preacher and moved on to the First Presbyterian Church in New York City. It was there that he preached his most well-known sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Fosdick replaced the core Gospel doctrine of salvation for sinners through the blood of Jesus with a focus on social justice and strong anti-war, and pacifist themes.
But defenders of the faith arose and asked this question: “The question is not whether Mr. Fosdick is winning men, but whether the thing to which he is winning them is Christianity.”
Fosdick decried the fundamentalists as being intolerant for demanding adherence to doctrines that science, reason, and a modern world could no longer sustain. In his mind, modernism would triumph and the old traditional beliefs would survive only in areas of ignorance, “Backwaters,” he called them. And it certainly looked as if his predictions would come true.
Fosdick died in New York City on October 5, 1969, but his influence goes on. Liberal modernists like Norman Vincent Peale, Robert Schuller, and John Shelby Spong stayed in the church to preach their new religion. Others, like Martin Luther King Jr., left the church to focus on the social gospel. This false teaching continues to be popular today in many churches and is the only kind of Christianity the worldly culture will abide. But it is wrong on many levels and is not really Christianity at all, especially in denying the authority of the Bible and the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus Christ, who died on the cross to wash our sins away and to save His people from Hell.
Joseph Stalin 1878-1953 was born in Georgia and baptized in the Georgian Orthodox Church. He studied to be a priest but lost his faith when he learned Russian. He became Communist and eventually the head of the Soviet Union. During this time, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Stalin’s “ruinous revolution swallowed up some 60 million of our people.” The primary reason? “I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."
We see amazing statistics, such as the number of churches dropping from 54,000 in 1917 to less than 500 in 1939. 100,000 priests, nuns, and other religious leaders were murdered in 1937-1939. Official government records cite just under 800,000 executions during Stalin’s reign, many of which he signed off on personally. Cynicism was his trademark: The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic. Death solves all problems - no man, no problem. Joseph Stalin.
Stalin died alone, feared and hated in 1953. His quotes stand in sharp contrast to the Bible: And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment. Hebrews 9:27 Fearful words for Joseph Stalin!
1931 demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in order to make way for the planned Palace of the Soviets Public Domain Margaret Sanger 1879-1966 was born in 1879 in Corning, New York, the 6th of 11 surviving children (7 others did not survive). She spent her youth caring for her siblings and mother who died at age 49. Her father was a former Catholic who became an atheist and an advocate of women’s rights and free public education.
When she found no public information on contraception in the libraries, she wrote her own newsletter promoting what she called “birth control.”
She founded the American Birth Control League, and, supported financially by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. became the champion of birth control in the United States. Her primary focus was in delivering easy contraception to black women. She worked through black ministers to do this:
“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." Margaret Sanger
Although she used ministers to advance the birth control agenda, she was a committed Darwinist and enemy of Christ: “Birth control appeals to the advanced radical because it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian churches. I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tyranny of Christianity no less than Capitalism.”
She was a racist and a believer in the idea of a super race of white Aryans. She was a champion of eugenics and a strong advocate for the control of inferior races and the weak and sickly. She called such people, "...human weeds,' 'reckless breeders,' 'spawning... human beings who never should have been born." Although she posed as a friend of the family, her underlying motives were anti-family, anti-Christian and anti-life. Her outlook was one of “survival of the fittest: “the most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.” Margaret Sanger
60 million abortion were performed 1973-2022. Margaret Sanger would rejoice.
Lo, children are a heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. – Psalm 127:3
Madeline Murray O'Hare 1919-1995 was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 13, 1919. Her parents were well-off descendants of a chaplain who came to Jamestown in the 1600’s. She lived a life of controversy and strife and said so many contradictory things about her background and her family that it is nearly impossible to ascertain the truth. This thread of dramatic and contradictory statements dominated her life and the lives of her children. One son said that his grandmother had jumped out of a second-floor window to abort the baby, Madalyn. She hated both her father and mother.
Whence all this hatred? It is hard to tell. She was baptized in a Presbyterian church and given a sound Sunday school education, but at 12 or 13 she rejected the Bible immediately when she spent a weekend reading it cover to cover.
“I came away stunned with the hatred, the brutality, the sado-masochism, the cruelty, the killing, the ugliness. Oh, I suppose that words like ‘sado-masochism’ were not in my vocabulary at the time, but I could see the obvious lies, the disgusting stories.”
When her son refused to participate in the public school’s daily Bible readings, she filed a lawsuit against the Baltimore City Public School System in 1960. She won the case, which made it to the Supreme Court in 1963. The court banned mandatory Bible reading in public schools. This suit brought her national attention, and soon after, she sued NASA unsuccessfully over the astronaut’s reading from Genesis.
She began appearing on national television shows and founded the American Atheists, "a nationwide movement which defends the civil rights of non-believers, works for the separation of church and state and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy".
There was a GREAT public outcry over her campaign to drive Christianity from the public forum. She became the target of harassment, intimidation, and death threats. She was forced to leave Baltimore which she had sued for granting tax-exemptions to the Roman Catholic Church. Undaunted, O’Hair started a radio program denouncing religion and later hosted an American Atheist Forum carried on over 140 cable television channels.
She was outraged when her son became a Christian in 1980: "One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times ... he is beyond human forgiveness."
By the 1990’s she and her son and granddaughter were the core of this atheist organization, and Madalyn began calling herself, “the most hated woman in America.”
In 1995, the three disappeared from their home in Texas. They were reported kidnapped and later found murdered and dismembered in a shallow grave. A former employee of the American Atheists was convicted of the crime and sentence to two consecutive life sentences.
“I told my kids I just want three words on my tombstone, if I have one. I'll probably be cremated. One is "woman." I'm very comfortable in that role. I've loved being a woman, I've loved being a mother, I've loved being a grandmother. I want three words: Woman, Atheist, Anarchist. That's me.”
Her legacy has been significant. She has made atheism not only acceptable from respectable by casting it in a new light: “Oh, one of the things that I am most proud of is that people can say, "I am an atheist," in the United States today, without being called a Communist atheist, or an atheist Communist.” This has proven true, and generations of young people have adopted this position. The United States is today the only Western nation without a religious element in public education, and the moral life of millions has been corrupted.
What a terrible instrument of evil Madalyn Murray O’Hair has been. How sad and hateful was her life. How horrible her death and what awaits her after. The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. (Psalm 14:1). However, Christians have responded by removing millions of our children from public schools and reviving home schooling and private Christian schools.
Final word on enemies of the Gospel
These enemies of the Gospel are agents of the Enemy of our souls, who goes about as a roaring lion seeking who he may devour. (1 Peter 5:8) Roaring is not his only mode of attack:: St. Paul warns of false apostles and "ministers of righteousness," (2 Corinthians 11:4), and later warns us to Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. (Ephesians 6:11) He tells us, too, that the Word of God is our offensive weapon, and the Bible stands today as it has forever.
These enemies will attack our Faith, which the apostle calls our shield. As we stand up for Jesus, He will help us overcome the Enemy and enemies and teach us to love them! Our faith will give us victory every time. Praise God!
FAITH IS THE VICTORY
Encamped along the hills of light,
Ye Christian soldiers, rise.
And press the battle ere the night
Shall veil the glowing skies.
Against the foe in vales below
Let all our strength be hurled.
Faith is the victory, we know,
That overcomes the world.
Refrain
Faith is the victory! Faith is the victory!
O glorious victory, that overcomes the world.
His banner over us is love,
Our sword the Word of God.
We tread the road the saints above
With shouts of triumph trod.
By faith, they like a whirlwind’s breath,
Swept on o’er every field.
The faith by which they conquered death
Is still our shining shield. Refrain
On every hand the foe we find
Drawn up in dread array.
Let tents of ease be left behind,
And onward to the fray.
Salvation’s helmet on each head,
With truth all girt about,
The earth shall tremble ’neath our tread,
And echo with our shout. Refrain
To him that overcomes the foe,
White raiment shall be giv’n.
Before the angels he shall know
His name confessed in Heav’n.
Then onward from the hill of light,
Our hearts with love aflame,
We’ll vanquish all the hosts of night,
In Jesus’ conqu’ring name. Refrain
John H. Yates, 1891
This is the victory that overcometh
the world, even our faith. 1 John 5:4
Abut the image/artwork
An 1871 caricature following publication of The Descent of Man was typical of many showing Darwin with an ape body, identifying him in popular culture as the leading author of evolutionary theory.[149]
Unknown author - Originally published in The Hornet magazine; this image is available on University College London Digital Collections (1886)
"A Venerable Orang-outang", a caricature of Charles Darwin as an ape published in The Hornet, a satirical magazine
File:Editorial cartoon depicting Charles Darwin as an ape (1871).jpg
Created: 22 March 1871
Uploaded: 15 June 2009
A good point. Attacking the Bible always backfires. kk
"But in the past decade, without much notice by general audiences, a more wide-ranging debate has arisen from different areas of biology as well as from history and philosophy of science, about whether and in which ways evolutionary theory is affected, challenged or changed by the advances in biology and other fields. As usual in such cases, more conservative perspectives and more progressive ones are in conflict with each other, with differences ranging from minor to intense. A rising number of publications argue for a major revision or even a replacement of the standard theory of evolution [2–14], indicating that this cannot be dismissed as a minority view but rather is a widespread feeling among scientists and philosophers alike."
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2017.0015
"I have lately read Morley’s Life of Voltaire & he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force & vigour of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow from slow & silent side attacks."
"Lyell is most firmly convinced that he has shaken the faith in the Deluge &c far more efficiently by never having said a word against the Bible, than if he had acted otherwise."
https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-9105.xml