Charlie Sutton

“Lee did not side with Virginia to perpetuate slavery. The accounts of Mary Custis Lee and William Allan reiterate the position he outlined in letters to his family. He considered slavery to be an evil, a curse on white and black alike, that God, in due course, would bring to an end. Precisely how slavery would cease was best left to God and not to human intervention, which would inevitably be plagued by sin—as, in his eyes, Northern abolitionists amply proved. Although he never shared the Custis family’s passion for colonizing freed slaves in Africa, he claimed, after the war, “always to have been in favor of emancipation—gradual emancipation.”24 However self-serving his perspective may have been, and however unrealistic it surely was, he nevertheless hoped for slavery to end.”
― R. David Cox, The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (Library of Religious Biography

“My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in its original might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It doth not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required towards the procurement of any one station among you; much less that men are ennobled on account of their virtue, that priests are advanced for their piety or learning, soldiers for their conduct or valor, judges for their integrity, senators for the love of their country, or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself, continued the king, who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

“We apparently live in a kind of “Goldilocks universe,” where the fundamental forces of physics have just the right strengths, the contingent properties of the universe have just the right characteristics, and the initial distribution of matter and energy at the beginning exhibited just the right configuration to make life possible. These facts taken together are so puzzling that physicists have given them a name—the fine-tuning problem.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the South. So fully am I satisfied of this, as regards Virginia especially, that I would cheerfully have lost all I have lost by the war, and have suffered all I have suffered, to have this object attained.”8”
― R. David Cox, The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (Library of Religious Biography