Baker again, telling me something I didn’t know, the part about the older/est profession of the goddess.

Poster children for the early beginnings of secularization theory might include Diderot, who rejoices at the though of “strangling the last priest with the guts of the last king,” the French revolutionaries who enthroned a young woman (actually a prostitute) as the goddess of Reason in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and Comte, who envisioned the death of traditional religion to be replaced by a new order based on reverence toward the powers of human rationality.