Writers since Enlightenment against the Church

As the power of the Church and religious faith gradually declined, many thinkers since the Enlightenment Age have been writing against religious institutions such as the Church. According to many philosophers and thinkers, powerful institutions do no good, but instead much harm to their defenseless subjects. Support for this can be found in works of Voltaire, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky.
Voltaire in Candide, satirizes organized religion by means of a series of corrupt, hypocritical religious leaders who appear throughout the novel. …