She was raised as a Unitarian and her religion made her ask aloud to turn to the Bible for guidance, but she also believed that the Bible was not the word of God. Her religion allowed flexibility by allowing her to combine her scientific beliefs and reformist interests with her faith. Following the escape from determinism through the education of reason, Martineau stated with great certainty that "the great obstacle to the true understanding of the purposes of human life is the prevailing ignorance or error with respect to the primary laws of sensation and thought" (p. .47), and thus this “ignorance perpetuated “great social evils”” (p. 46). In other words, studying the social world empirically gives humans the right to “change oppressive conditions”