5461 lines
258 KiB
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5461 lines
258 KiB
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84 page printout
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Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
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This disk, its printout, or copies of either
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are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold.
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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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**** ****
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Why I Quit Going to Church
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With Answers to Critics and
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Correspondents
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By Rupert Hughes
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Author of "THE OLD NEST," "WITHIN THESE WALLS,"
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EXCUSE ME," Etc.
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Freethought Press Association
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New York
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**** ****
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Copyright, 1924,
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By THE COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE CO., INC.
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Copyright, 1925,
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By RUPERT HUGHES
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Printed in the U. S. A.
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**** ****
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WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
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There was a time in this country when I should have been
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punished for not going to church. In the good old Puritan and
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Pilgrim days, though only a third or a sixth of the citizens were
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church members, the parsons were in power and they fined people and
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||
put them in the stocks if they stayed away or if the pastor did not
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like their expressions.
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||
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They whipped more than one for criticizing a sermon. They
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tried to sell two Boston children into slavery because they could
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||
not pay their fine for staying away from the church. And they would
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have done it, too, if the ungodly shipmasters had not refused to
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carry the children off.
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||
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It is incessantly astonishing how often the laity have had to
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||
restrain the clergy from cruelty. The Puritan elders held that "the
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gathering of sticks on the Sabbath may be punished with death."
|
||
Sometimes a mob would rescue Quaker women from the whips, but in
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Cambridge, Benanuel Bower, a Quaker who obstinately stayed away
|
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from the Puritan church, was fined annually for twenty years,
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hauled down a flight of steps by the heels, kept in prison for more
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||
than a year, and with his wife publicly whipped several times.
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But in these wicked and degenerate times, not only can I stay
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away from church without getting arrested, but I can tell why
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without being any more than reviled.
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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1
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WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
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I did not quit going to church because I was lazy or frivolous
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or poetically inclined to "worship God in the Great Outdoors near
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to Nature's Heart." I don't believe that nature has a heart.
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I quit because I came to believe that what is preached in the
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churches is mainly untrue and unimportant, tiresome, hostile to
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genuine progress, and in general not worth while. As for the
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necessity of paying homage to the deity, I began to feel that I did
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not know enough about God to pay him set compliments on set days.
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As for the God who is preached in the churches, I ceased to worship
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him because I could no longer believe in him or respect what is
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alleged of him.
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I cannot respect a deity who would want or even endure the
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hideous monotony and mechanism of most of the worship paid him by
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hired men, hired prayer-makers and their supporters. When I think
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of the millions of repetitions of the same phrases of prayer and
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song smoking up to a helpless deity I feel sorry for him. No wonder
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he gets farther away each year. No wonder the ex-priest Alfred
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Loisy says (in his "My Duel with the Vatican") that "the eternal
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immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, etc.," who created the universe
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"by a caprice very imperfectly benevolent ... begins to be
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||
conceived with increasing difficulty."
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||
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As for the picture of God in heaven, "sitting on the Cherubim"
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or riding on a cherub (2 Samuel xxii, 11), and listening to
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everlasting praises of himself, it is simply appalling. I can no
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longer adore in a god what I despise in a man.
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I say this in no spirit of cheap defiance, like Ajax defying
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the lightning, for the statement puts me with such an enormous
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majority that it carries no distinction. The God of the Christians
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never has been believed in by as much as a tenth of the world's
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population. Two or three other religions have today far more
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||
followers; and, even in this country, a great many millions less
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than half of the population is even "affiliated" with any of the
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churches. About 40 per cent. of the free population is affiliated
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with one church or another, and about 90 per cent of the criminals
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||
in the penitentiaries. That is the only place where the church
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people have a pronounced majority.
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||
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In our nation of over 110 million inhabitants, the latest
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church census claimed less than 48 million church members of all
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denominations, including all Catholic children over seven years of
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age. all Jews, Mormons, Unitarians, etc.
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Church mathematics is almost as unreliable as church history.
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Some enthusiasts have claimed that the church is gaining on the
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population, having increased 118 per cent. in the last 32 years,
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while the population increased only 68 per cent.
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Thus they say (using their own wild figures for the church and
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the government's censuses for the population) that in 1890 there
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were 21,500,000 church members in a nation of 63,000,000 people; in
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1922, there were all of 47,500,000 church members in a population
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of only 108,000,000.
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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2
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WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
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They overlook the fact that according to their own figures
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there were in this country only 42 million People outside the
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church in 1890 and in 1922 sixty million outside; or practically as
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many outside the church now as there were in the entire nation in
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1890.
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The trick of percentages is dangerous. I joined a club in 1904
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that had only ten members. In twenty years it has increased 3,000
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per cent. while the population has increased only 68 per cent. The
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club now numbers 300 members and the population only 112 million.
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An important point to remember also is that while the
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governmental censuses are fairly accurate, the church figures are
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ridiculous by their own admission.
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The Rector of Trinity Church recently quoted with approval a
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statement that "the membership claims, in all honesty, are about 50
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per cent. too high. In other words, millions of names are on the
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church rolls because the churches keep them there, and not because
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their owners by any legitimate right claim membership."
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This would reduce the membership to 24 million, still
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including all Catholic children over seven.
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||
The Christian Herald recently requested 1200 newspapers to
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gather data on church attendance, and the results indicated that 36
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per cent. of the population are regular attendants, 64 per cent.
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casual or non-attendants.
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Exhaustive studies just made by the Institute of Social and
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Religious Research show that the rural attendance is now only half
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as great as it was a generation ago. In a typical Vermont
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community, in spite of an increase of population, attendance has
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decreased 52 per cent. Reading an old church magazine of 1808 the
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other night, I learned that even back there the churches were
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almost deserted and that the country was in a godless condition.
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||
The World Service Commission of the Methodist Church notes a
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decrease of $4,000,000 in its receipts last year. The gifts to the
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Presbyterian missionary causes decreased $50,000 in the first half
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||
of the year. The deficit for the Methodist publications was nearly
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||
$750,000. In the Christian Advocate, which lost a hundred thousand
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dollars, it was stated that there is not a single Christian left in
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one of the very homes of early Christianity in the Orient.
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||
As for those who are affiliated, I cannot believe that a very
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||
large percentage is sincerely convinced. Recently in New York a
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pastor read the Apostles' Creed through to a large congregation and
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||
asked everybody who believed it to stand up. Not one person arose!
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||
The anonymous author of a recent magazine article called "Why I Go
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to Church" admitted that he did not believe any of the creed.
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||
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||
I once knew that creed by heart, repeated it aloud with
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||
sincerity, and believed that I believed it. Now while I recognize
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||
the music, poetry, and eloquence of it, I do not believe a word of
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||
it, and it offends such intelligence and information as I happen to
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have.
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||
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||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
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||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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3
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||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
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From numberless conversations with church-members and church-
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||
goers I am honestly assured that very, very few of them really
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||
believe in their heart of hearts one-quarter of what their church-
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||
creeds assert -- not to emphasize the fact that nobody really knows
|
||
what most of the high-sounding theological phrases mean. I know
|
||
that countless ministers are driven by all sorts of pressure from
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||
within and without to continue preaching what they no longer
|
||
believe. They do it for the imaginary good of their poor
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||
congregations, as nice people go on telling infants that there is
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||
a Santa Claus.
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||
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||
I do not believe in a Santa Claus for grown-ups, and I do not
|
||
believe that the vast number of church-people are doing the world
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any good by promulgating false ideas and false ideals.
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||
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||
They say, and doubtless believe, that their motives are good,
|
||
but I am of such poor moral fibre that I do not believe in telling
|
||
lies for the glory of God. I am not up to the standard of the
|
||
Apostle Paul who asks (Romans iii, 7): "For if the truth of God
|
||
hath more abounded through my lie, why yet am I also judged as a
|
||
sinner?" Well, I am just mean enough to judge him a sinner and to
|
||
consider Christian lies as peculiarly ugly sins. Furthermore, I
|
||
dislike St. Paul even more than St. Peter did, and I consider him
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||
one of the greatest purveyors of falsehood and mischief that ever
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||
lived.
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||
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||
It seems to my perverted brain not quite honest, for instance,
|
||
to pretend that Christianity has only one God. The Christian
|
||
religion is polytheistic if ever a religion were, for it includes
|
||
God the Father, Christ the Son, the Holy Ghost, Mary the Mother, an
|
||
almost omnipotent God of Evil known as Satan, and an infinite
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||
number of invisible angels and devils with superhuman powers, not
|
||
to mention the saints, who have all performed miracles and are to
|
||
be prayed to for special favors.
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||
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||
The Christian religion is intensely polytheistic. Gods warred
|
||
with gods in heaven as on Mount Olympus, and hosts of angels were
|
||
thrown over the walls. The god Michael fought with the god Devil
|
||
for Moses' body (Jude 9). Christ is quoted as saying that he
|
||
himself saw Satan fall from heaven (Luke x, 18). Yet Satan disputed
|
||
with God the sway over the earth and had the power to pick Christ
|
||
up and carry him to the pinnacle of God's (or Christ's) own temple,
|
||
then to the top of a mountain, and to tempt him until be was
|
||
repulsed. Think of it: Satan offered to give the Son of God what
|
||
already belonged to him! Then the devil left Christ and "behold,
|
||
angels came and ministered unto him."
|
||
|
||
If this was not a duel of wits between two gods, what was it?
|
||
|
||
If there is anything more polytheistic in Greek or any other
|
||
mythology, where is it? If Apollo, Mars, Pluto, and Mercury were
|
||
gods, so were Satan and Michael and Gabriel. It seems to me
|
||
unutterably dishonest for Christians to denounce other religions
|
||
for having many gods and to pretend that the Christians believe in
|
||
only one. The Book of Job (i, 6) refers to the "sons of God" in the
|
||
plural, and I know of nothing in heathendom more pagan or more
|
||
cruel than this story of Job, according to which Satan bets God
|
||
that he can make the "perfect and upright" Job curse his maker. God
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||
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||
Bank of Wisdom
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||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
4
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||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
thereupon takes the bet and delivers his faithful worshiper over to
|
||
all the fiendish cruelty and torture that the devil can devise,
|
||
cruelty involving the burning alive of Job's sheep and shepherds
|
||
and the slaughter of all his children. If this tremendous story is
|
||
only fiction, what is it doing in the Holy Bible? If it is truth,
|
||
how can one deny the existence of two rival gods, and wherein is
|
||
Jehovah any kinder or more reliable than Satan?
|
||
|
||
Is not Jehovah the lesser, feebler god, since Satan wins
|
||
infinitely more victories and prisoners, and constantly makes
|
||
Christ's sacrifice a failure, according to the admissions of the
|
||
Christians?
|
||
|
||
As for idolatry, either Christianity is idolatrous or no
|
||
religion ever was, for the Christian churches are, with certain
|
||
exceptions, full of images and emblems. The Buddhist does not
|
||
believe that each of his innumerable little statues is the real
|
||
god. He prays to it or runs his water-wheel of prayers just as many
|
||
Christians tell their beads or give jewels to Madonnas or burn
|
||
candles or have their prayers said for them by paid clergymen.
|
||
Jehovah was carried in a cart and kept in an ark.
|
||
|
||
As for his omnipresence, it is several times stated that he
|
||
walked in a garden and brought people up on mountains to see him.
|
||
When the rumor of the Tower of Babel finally reached him, he could
|
||
not have been all-knowing as alleged, because he went down to find
|
||
out what was going on, then went back "up" and said, "Go to, let us
|
||
go down and there confound their language."
|
||
|
||
Who were "us"? Where was "up"? Did God not know that the world
|
||
is a globe?
|
||
|
||
The Bible itself destroys the claim of God's omnipotence, for
|
||
in judges i, 19, it states, "The Lord was with Judah and he drave
|
||
out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the
|
||
inhabitants of the valley because they had chariots of iron."
|
||
|
||
The astounding and inconsistent God of the Bible calls Moses
|
||
up into the mountains to see him -- has him brought up on eagle's
|
||
wings. Later he lets not only Moses but seventy-three others see
|
||
him (Exodus xxiv, 9, 10). Still later, forgetting this, God says,
|
||
"There shall no man see me and live." Seventy-four people have seen
|
||
him and he is exactly described, yet a little later he covers
|
||
Moses' face with his hand till he has passed.
|
||
|
||
Yet Christian preachers make fun of the anthropomorphic gods
|
||
of the heathen and prate of the glory of our religion with its one
|
||
God, all-Wise, all-knowing, all-powerful, unchanging and
|
||
ubiquitous!
|
||
|
||
According to the Bible, God was ignorant, a ruthless liar and
|
||
cheat; he broke his pledges, changed his mind so often that he grew
|
||
weary of repenting. He was a murderer of children, ordered his
|
||
people to slay, rape, steal, and lie and commit every foul and
|
||
filthy abomination in human power. In fact, the more I read the
|
||
Bible the less I find in it that is either credible or admirable.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
5
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
I do not go to church because I find no honesty in the pulpit
|
||
toward the religion preached or the religions preached against. I
|
||
am constantly horrified by the extreme unfairness of Christians
|
||
toward men of other religions. There is no distortion or
|
||
concealment that they will not stoop to in their zeal.
|
||
|
||
It is no wonder that the foreign missionaries have such
|
||
difficulties and are losing ground generally all over the world, by
|
||
their own admission. Also the church is losing ground in its own
|
||
countries. It nowhere grows so fast as the population and it is
|
||
torn everywhere by virulent dissensions.
|
||
|
||
As for those who "keep the faith" I know that many of them are
|
||
holding on for dear life by shutting their souls up against any
|
||
appeals to their reason for fear they may be compelled to let go.
|
||
|
||
A man recently told me of a conversation he held with a woman
|
||
who spoke of the Virgin Mary. She expressed amazement when he
|
||
referred to Christ's brothers and sisters. She ridiculed such an
|
||
idea and he asked her to look up Matthew xii, 46, and xiii, 55, 56
|
||
(where it speaks of Christ's mother and his brethren, and names
|
||
James and Joses and Simon and Judas and refers to "all his
|
||
sisters"). But the horrified woman exclaimed:
|
||
|
||
"I don't want to look it up! It might destroy my dear faith.
|
||
And I don't want to lose my belief."
|
||
|
||
Of how many million members must it be true, that they are
|
||
afraid to examine their own Bible?
|
||
|
||
While I think this a hopelessly dishonest and almost
|
||
sacrilegious frame of mind, I sympathize with it completely, for I
|
||
went through just such a mental phase when my own faith was in the
|
||
last throes and I desperately refused to argue.
|
||
|
||
For only a while, however, was my faith able to believe two or
|
||
more contradictory things at once. One simply cannot ride two
|
||
horses going in opposite directions very long.
|
||
|
||
I remember having occasion to quote what Pilate had put over
|
||
Christ's head on the cross. I looked it up in Matthew, and it was
|
||
not as I remembered it. I looked further and found that each of the
|
||
four gospels gives a different version of this inscription.
|
||
|
||
In the matter of the companions in the crucifixion John simply
|
||
says that there were "two other with him, on either side one."
|
||
Matthew and Mark say that they were thieves and that both reviled
|
||
him. Luke, however, makes the striking statement that only one of
|
||
the malefactors railed on him, and was rebuked by the other.
|
||
Whereupon Christ said, "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise."
|
||
|
||
Yet elsewhere it is stated that Christ descended into hell for
|
||
three days, then rose from the dead as he himself prophesied in
|
||
Matthew xii, 40: "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in
|
||
the whale's belly; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three
|
||
nights in the heart of the earth."
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
6
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
This shows that Christ believed the Jonah story and that hell
|
||
was in the earth underneath him.
|
||
|
||
In every detail concerning the birthplace, birth date, and the
|
||
death of the Messiah, the four gospels are in complete
|
||
contradiction. It is not agreed whether Christ was born 3 B.C. or
|
||
6 A.D. In "The New Archaeological Discoveries" by C.M. Cobern,
|
||
D.D., it is stated that recent excavations definitely place
|
||
Christ's birth between 9 B.C. and 6 B.C., and his death on April 3,
|
||
A.D. 33, making him between 39 and 42 when he died. This means that
|
||
he was nearly 40 when he began his ministry of one or three years,
|
||
though his virgin birth was announced by an angel and a star, as
|
||
were most of the twenty-six virgin-born Savors who preceded him.
|
||
|
||
The dates and hour of the crucifixion do not agree in the
|
||
gospels. These four gospels were selected from fifty gospels and
|
||
one of the early fathers, Irenaeus, says that there are four
|
||
gospels because the world has four corners, The Book of Revelation
|
||
says that four angels stood on the four corners of the earth, and
|
||
1 Chronicles xvi, 30, says that "the world also shall be stable,
|
||
that it be not moved." Does Mr. Bryan believe this?
|
||
|
||
The names of the twelve apostles are differently given in
|
||
Matthew x and Luke vi. According to John, Christ was not at the
|
||
Last Supper -- at least the three Synoptic gospels say that he
|
||
celebrated the Passover and was crucified the day after, while
|
||
John, though describing a supper, states that Christ was crucified
|
||
the day before the Passover. This caused a great debate among the
|
||
church fathers.
|
||
|
||
Everywhere I turn I find the same flat contradictions. One
|
||
proverb says, "Answer a fool according to his folly;" the next
|
||
says, "Answer not a fool according to his folly" (Proverbs xxvi, 4,
|
||
5). When a skeptic mentioned this to me as a schoolboy, I laughed
|
||
off the difficulty as mere quibbling. Yet I was terribly disturbed
|
||
to find God giving his children two directly opposite bits of
|
||
advice.
|
||
|
||
An awful task for a believer is a touch of arithmetic. It is
|
||
hard to disbelieve arithmetic. Since there were 600,000 men in the
|
||
throng that Moses took out of Egypt, there would have been about
|
||
three million people all told. And they crossed the opening in the
|
||
Red Sea (the bottom of which was doubtless quickly dried for them)
|
||
in a few hours. They took with them also their flocks of cattle,
|
||
which were incredibly large. It must have made the angels sweat to
|
||
herd that livestock over. Now it took Napoleon, with just 300,000
|
||
trained soldiers, three days and nights to cross the Niemen on
|
||
three bridges in 1812.
|
||
|
||
Of course Napoleon did not have a million miracles worked for
|
||
him, but the miracles required in Moses' case are too numerous to
|
||
face -- especially as they did not accomplish any good and the
|
||
Israelites turned to the golden calf as soon as they were amazingly
|
||
wafted across the split sea. I can't understand a god who would
|
||
fumble things so -- always performing miracles that got him
|
||
nowhere.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
7
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
It is a mere detail that all of Pharaoh's horses were drowned,
|
||
though a plague had previously destroyed them, but it is not
|
||
confusing that God should have had to perform so many miracles to
|
||
persuade Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, since he had peculiarly
|
||
hardened Pharaoh's heart in advance -- so that he could destroy all
|
||
the first-born children in the land except where the kindly angels
|
||
found blood smeared on the door-posts as a sign.
|
||
|
||
Almost stranger than the Mosaic miracles was the fact that it
|
||
took 150,000 of Solomon's workmen seven years to build a little
|
||
temple 96 feet long, 32 feet wide, and 48 feet high -- about the
|
||
size of a moderate Union Depot.
|
||
|
||
In 2 Chronicles xiii it is told that God let his beloved
|
||
people be slaughtered by Abijah, who killed 500,000 chosen men.
|
||
Jeroboam thereupon retreated! At the greatest battle in the Civil
|
||
War Lee had 80,000 men, Meade somewhat more. After three days of
|
||
fierce conflict Lee retreated, having only 2,500 killed, and Meade
|
||
with 3,000 killed dared not pursue for a day. That was the greatest
|
||
battle in the history of this big nation, and we lost only one one-
|
||
hundredth as many men as the half-king of a country whose area was
|
||
about the size of our littlest state, Rhode Island.
|
||
|
||
I am tempted to say rudely that anybody who says he believes
|
||
the Bible to be all true either lies or is ignorant of what he
|
||
says. How can anybody believe contradictory statements, -- and
|
||
there are three hundred downright mathematical contradictions in
|
||
the Bible. Jehoshaphat's death is given sixteen different dates!
|
||
|
||
The God of the Bible punishes all who do not believe,
|
||
including those who never heard of him. Trillions of them must be
|
||
screaming somewhere for mercy. What then must be waiting for me?
|
||
for I have not their excuse. I have heard the gospel. I had it put
|
||
before me. I accepted it, and then let it slip!
|
||
|
||
Still, since I must pass into the flames with no promise of
|
||
being a Shadrach or an Abednego, it is surely better for me to go
|
||
there honestly, having told the truth as I see it, than to sneak
|
||
into hell by the back-door of lip-service or of hypocritical assent
|
||
by silence -- or to enter it by that gate reserved for preachers
|
||
who have preached what they doubted.
|
||
|
||
I am no longer of the Christian faith, but this should not
|
||
affect my standing as a citizen of the American republic which is
|
||
dedicated to a churchless state and so declared by Washington. In
|
||
the Senate treaty made with the Tripolitan Mohammedans in 1796 it
|
||
is specifically announced that "the United States of America is not
|
||
in any sense founded on the Christian religion" and has no enmity
|
||
to the laws or religion of the Mohammedans.
|
||
|
||
Theoretically this nation is free for all; as a matter of
|
||
fact, persecutions are heaped upon those who honestly state their
|
||
doubts and incessant pressure is brought to bear on our law-makers
|
||
to give police power to the special tenets of Christian sects.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
8
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
Because certain gentlemen on this fly-speck of an earth elect
|
||
to play golf on a certain day called the Sabbath (though nobody
|
||
pretends that our Sunday is the actual day on which God "rested"),
|
||
the village constable in many of these non-Christian United States
|
||
must arrest them for "sacrilege!" Pulpits are pounded in horror all
|
||
over the country, and a society for Sabbath observance spends vast
|
||
moneys and efforts and bullies the life out of Congress to deprive
|
||
the free citizens of their freedom once a week.
|
||
|
||
What difference it could possibly make to any imaginable god
|
||
what I do on Sunday, I cannot for the life and soul of me conceive.
|
||
Why I should rest because God rested, I cannot see. Why he should
|
||
want me to be eternally kow-towing to him and praising him, I
|
||
cannot see. And if I fail, isn't it his business rather than a
|
||
clergyman's to punish me?
|
||
|
||
My early life was, however, one of intense religions
|
||
conviction. I had a lot of fun and did a normal amount of mischief,
|
||
but I studied as hard as I played and I prayed and believed with my
|
||
whole soul. I not only said my prayers every night but I prayed
|
||
incessantly throughout the day; and I prayed publicly at prayer
|
||
meetings and tried to convert other people to the faith.
|
||
|
||
At the age of thirteen I joined the Congregational Church
|
||
because I happened to like the boys who went to that church.
|
||
Besides, I enjoyed the Sunday school picnics. Then one of the
|
||
Sunday school teachers got after my immortal soul and "saved" it --
|
||
temporarily. If I had died in my youth I should now be safe in
|
||
heaven; but unless I am one of those elect who cannot damn
|
||
themselves no matter what they do I am on my way to hell "from now
|
||
on."
|
||
|
||
When I was fourteen I went to a preparatory school and was
|
||
swept away by a fiery evangelist of the Methodist persuasion. He
|
||
kindled my faith to great heat and I went up and down the aisle
|
||
night after night pleading with white-bearded old gentlemen and
|
||
others to come to the anxious bench. As I look back upon myself
|
||
now, that solemn little fourteen-year-old looks rather amusing than
|
||
glorious, and I wonder that some of the nice old gentlemen I nagged
|
||
did not spank me.
|
||
|
||
The next year I went to another preparatory school and was
|
||
active in the Y.M.C.A. work, giving public testimonials of my faith
|
||
and praying fervently in the meetings as well as at my bedside.
|
||
|
||
At college I was again an eager church-goer; played the organ
|
||
at the Y.M.C.A. assemblies and I prayed publicly and privately.
|
||
|
||
Then I began to slip in my belief and to get a little dubious
|
||
about the value of my prayers, their value either to me or to the
|
||
infinite intelligence I was annoying with my unimportant chatter.
|
||
It was a terrible step I took when I stopped praying, but I gave it
|
||
up because it ceased to mean anything.
|
||
|
||
My faith in the Bible as an inspired work went from me slowly,
|
||
like sand slipping down a hill. I was reading the Bible from cover
|
||
to cover, and being young and curious I was tempted to dip into the
|
||
Song of Solomon. But I had read that it was considered by the old
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
9
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
Israelites such delicate matter that Hebrews were not permitted to
|
||
read it until they were thirty-five years old, though little
|
||
American boys and girls were given rewards for reading it along
|
||
with the entire Bible. I was sorely troubled, but I did what I
|
||
thought very heroic and virtuous: I refrained from peeking into the
|
||
Song of Solomon until I had read everything preceding it including
|
||
every last one of the "begats" and all the filthy stories. Then I
|
||
read Solomon's Song with what solemnity I could muster.
|
||
|
||
Such literature for a boy to read! a compendium of the most
|
||
lusciously lascivious amorous anatomy that could be devised. And at
|
||
the top of each erotic chapter some such legend as "The Church and
|
||
Christ congratulate one another," "The Church having a taste of
|
||
Christ's love is sick of love," "A Description of Christ by his
|
||
graces." I do not dare quote the text here; it is too voluptuous;
|
||
yet it is given into the hands of children and it is left in the
|
||
rooms of hotels by a society!
|
||
|
||
This now strikes me as the most appalling hypocrisy,
|
||
indecency, dishonesty, and fanaticism, but when I first read it I
|
||
was merely hurt and bewildered.
|
||
|
||
It confused me to find nothing in the early part of the Old
|
||
Testament about a future life and to learn that the Hebrews did not
|
||
apparently consider the matter till after captivity among the
|
||
Assyrians, who did believe in a future life.
|
||
|
||
It terrified me to learn that the heresy of the Egyptians from
|
||
which Moses saved the Israelites was a belief in a future life of
|
||
rewards and punishments. I did not know which way to turn. And the
|
||
Egyptians believed that a god came to earth, was born of a virgin
|
||
and slain for the redemption of the faithful -- not only long
|
||
before Christ but before Moses led his sacred band from the heresy
|
||
of immortality. Here was my beautiful sacred belief in the Divine
|
||
Book destroyed by the Book itself!
|
||
|
||
I read every word of it from cover to cover, but try as I
|
||
would, my feeble mind could not hang on to its early faith. When I
|
||
got to the end of the Bible I was confronted by the 'Book of
|
||
Revelation. That shook me loose with a jolt. It seemed to me that
|
||
its mental chaos matched the physical chaos of the beginning of the
|
||
world.
|
||
|
||
How can anyone defend that picture of graves opening, hells
|
||
yawning, sheep, goats, trumpets blaring, scarlet women riding; a
|
||
city coming down from the sky dressed like a bride with twelve
|
||
gates for the twelve tribes of Jews? How can the Christians hope to
|
||
get into the New Jerusalem since it contains only entrances for
|
||
Jews -- and Christ himself said he came only to the lost sheep of
|
||
Israel?
|
||
|
||
According to Revelation, God wipes away all tears from the
|
||
chosen, but there is a lake of brimstone for the unbelievers; there
|
||
are seven angels with seven vials full of seven plagues, and an
|
||
angel with a reed who measures the city and proves it to be a
|
||
cubical city -- twelve thousand furlongs in length, in height and
|
||
breadth. Just why this measurement should be necessary at that late
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
10
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
date is not explained, Each gate is one solid pearl, the streets
|
||
are gold transparent as glass. There is a bride there called "the
|
||
Lamb's wife." Who was the Lamb and who his wife? Some say that the
|
||
Lamb was Christ and his wife the Church. But Christ is elsewhere
|
||
referred to independently, and there was no church yet.
|
||
|
||
The kings of the nations bring their glory to the city and the
|
||
gates will never be shut; yet only those shall enter whose names
|
||
are written in the Lamb's book of life! A strange Lamb, with a wife
|
||
and a directory! There is a river coming from the Thrones of God
|
||
and of the Lamb; a tree bearing twelve fruits and leaves of healing
|
||
power. Outside are dogs and idolaters and liars, but within there
|
||
is Jesus "the offspring of David," also a Spirit and a Bride that
|
||
say Come, and whosoever will may come, yet plagues await any who
|
||
change the Book.
|
||
|
||
What all this means I can't imagine, and I can't imagine
|
||
anybody else explaining it except by explanations that do not
|
||
explain. I don't believe anybody living believes that the Lamb had
|
||
a wife. And if anybody says he believes it, I don't believe him.
|
||
|
||
The Bible begins with two stories of creation by two different
|
||
gods of two different names in two different orders -- two ill-
|
||
edited clumsy myths told by two ignorant barbarians; and ends with
|
||
the clamorous hysteria of a color-mad, blood-thirsty lunatic with
|
||
a magnificent literary style.
|
||
|
||
Nobody has more admiration for the literary beauties of the
|
||
Bible than I. And nobody has less respect for the Scientific or
|
||
historical value of literary beauty.
|
||
|
||
Between these two extremes is almost every conceivable kind of
|
||
writing, including every known atrocity, indecency, degeneracy,
|
||
nobility, a cyclopedia of anecdotes, genealogy, mythology,
|
||
criminology, stories of incest, of sodomy, of bestiality; of
|
||
angels, "sons of God," coming to earth and taking women; of
|
||
daughters having children by their fathers.
|
||
|
||
There is the sainted patriarch Abraham, whose ancient wife was
|
||
so pretty that he was afraid her admirers would fancy her and kill
|
||
him, so he told her to pretend to be his sister, whereupon Pharaoh
|
||
enjoyed her and loaded Abraham with presents (Genesis xii). Pharaoh
|
||
was horrified when he learned what Abraham had done.
|
||
|
||
There is only one dirty word in our language for this man, in
|
||
whose bosom the blessed rest. After this experience the foul old
|
||
creature played the same trick on Abimelech, but the Lord warned
|
||
him in a dream just in time (Genesis xx). Abimelech was disgusted,
|
||
but Abraham lost none of the Lord's favor and his name is holy in
|
||
all Christian teachings.
|
||
|
||
There is the story of the brother pretending to be sick in
|
||
order to rape his sitter; of the harlot who saves spies and is
|
||
sanctified for it; of chosen people who commit all known
|
||
abominations; of a man Onan who is cursed for refusing to beget
|
||
children upon his brother's widow (and ever since wears a bad name
|
||
for what he did not do) of a giant who carries off a gate and slays
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
11
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
a multitude with a bone, loses his strength when his hair is cut,
|
||
and is able to pull down a crowded temple when his hair grows out
|
||
again; of children eaten by bears sent by God because they merely
|
||
made fun of a bald man; of a runaway prophet who is brought back
|
||
inside a fish -- in short, an utterly amazing gallimaufry of events
|
||
and fancies presided over by a god who does not know his own mind,
|
||
is constantly defeated by his own cast-out angels and by his
|
||
stubborn worshipers; who performs miracle after miracle only to
|
||
fail of his purpose, and whose total record of infamies staggers
|
||
the imagination.
|
||
|
||
This Israelitish god calls Moses up into the mountains and
|
||
lets Moses see his "back parts" (Exodus xxxiii, 20-23). Think of
|
||
it, the god of this infinite universe has back parts! But then he
|
||
also sits on a throne, he has bowels, eyes, ears, nostrils, hair,
|
||
loins, lips, tongue, feet. He begets, drinks, eats, smells, walks,
|
||
rides, grows tired, is afraid, jealous, loves, hates, lies, cheats,
|
||
enjoys wine, makes coats and shoes, laughs, sleeps and gets tired.
|
||
And how he changes his mind! This god actually exclaims, in
|
||
Jeremiah xv, 6, "I am weary with repenting."
|
||
|
||
These Biblical accounts of God are not metaphor or poetic
|
||
symbolism, as many pretend. They are given out as inspired fact,
|
||
and it was once fatal to question them.
|
||
|
||
This god writes his laws on pieces of stone and gives them to
|
||
Moses to govern the people for whom God has destroyed numberless
|
||
Egyptians after annoying them with the most cruel plagues, and all
|
||
in vain. These children whom he brought through a divided ocean, go
|
||
back to heathen worship in spite of all the miracles they have
|
||
seen, and Moses is so angry that be spitefully breaks the stone
|
||
book he has received in God's own autograph!
|
||
|
||
When I realize that I once accepted this, and that millions
|
||
still say they accept it and are horrified if it is spoken of with
|
||
doubt, I am tempted to think that in this silly world only the
|
||
impossible can win belief.
|
||
|
||
If you give up Adam's apple and his Fall and the sin of all
|
||
his posterity, you rob Christ of his mission of atonement. Christ
|
||
is repeatedly claimed to be of the seed of David; and to prove it,
|
||
two genealogies are given, each contradictory of the other and of
|
||
itself. But it was Joseph and not Mary who descended from David,
|
||
and the Bible repeatedly states that Joseph was Christ's father.
|
||
Yet it also states that Mary was a virgin, There is absolutely
|
||
nothing in the Bible of religious importance that it does not
|
||
itself annul by its own contradictions.
|
||
|
||
And this David! He was such a villain as I should never dare
|
||
use in the most melodramatic novel. His crimes are peculiarly
|
||
despicable and versatile, from his earliest exploits to his later
|
||
sex-manias, including the foul treatment of a soldier whose wife he
|
||
desired, and his habit of warming his chill frame with a fresh girl
|
||
every night. He was a traitor, an indefatigable liar, he drove
|
||
women and children through burning brick kilns or tore them to
|
||
pieces with harrows, he sawed them in two, and on his death-bed
|
||
left instructions to kill a devoted man whom he had sworn to
|
||
protect.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
12
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
Yet this infamous perjurer, murderer, adulterer, butcher, was
|
||
chosen for the peculiar favor of God, who in 2 Samuel vii, 14,
|
||
adopts him as his son and promises that his house and his kingdom
|
||
shall be established forever. It is a small matter, of course, that
|
||
this promise, was forgotten and the kingdom perished. Where are his
|
||
house and his kingdom now? "Where are the snows of yesteryear?"
|
||
|
||
At times even God could not stomach David. Once God grew so
|
||
angry that he slew seventy thousand Jews by a pestilence just for
|
||
spite; then suddenly, as on many other occasions, he "repented" and
|
||
let David die "in a good old age, full of days, riches and honor;
|
||
and Solomon his son reigned in his stead."
|
||
|
||
Solomon was the son of a murderous adulterer. His mother was
|
||
Bathsheba, wife of Uriah. David saw her washing herself, fell in
|
||
love with her and sent for her. She bore him a child and went back
|
||
to her faithful husband, a brave and religious soldier whose death
|
||
David treacherously arranged. Then David added Bathsheba to his
|
||
group of wives and concubines and eventually she bore Solomon, who
|
||
improved on his father's mania for women and became an idolater --
|
||
after the Lord had chosen him and "magnified him exceedingly."
|
||
|
||
And these two terrible creatures were the particular stars of
|
||
the history of the chosen people!
|
||
|
||
My college studies taught me that the Bible was absolutely
|
||
unbelievable as a book of fact. Its astronomy, geology, zoology,
|
||
geography, hygiene, ethnology -- what not? were simply ludicrous.
|
||
It does not claim to be a text book, but it claims to be the
|
||
inspired word of an all-knowing God, and there is ferocious
|
||
pressure to put it in our public schools as a text book and to
|
||
drive out all scientific treatises that contradict it. Mr. Bryan
|
||
has fought for this purpose; but would even he trust himself on a
|
||
ship whose captain believed in a four-cornered earth, as did the
|
||
authors of Revelation and other portions of the Bible?
|
||
|
||
As one who intended to be an author, I was dazed by the facts,
|
||
admitted by all honest theologians, that practically none of the
|
||
books of the Bible were written by the authors ascribed to them;
|
||
that the texts are infinitely corrupt and contradictory and far
|
||
distant copies of copies of copies, with never an original in
|
||
existence. The oldest manuscript of the New Testament dates from
|
||
the fourth century after Christ; the oldest manuscript of the Old
|
||
Testament dates from the tenth century after Christ! And the
|
||
ancient texts differ so much that they are almost original.
|
||
|
||
Reading such a book as "The God of the Early Christians," by
|
||
Dr. A.C. McGiffert, reveals to an honest mind that Christ himself
|
||
was uncertain of his identity and mission and that the doctrines
|
||
now preached were arrived at after centuries of groping and
|
||
disputation in which the rival theorists often butchered each
|
||
other.
|
||
|
||
In a fascinating volume recently published by the Oxford
|
||
Press, "The Last Journey of Jesus to Jerusalem," the learned
|
||
author, a doctor of theology, Wm. H. Cadman, minutely examining and
|
||
comparing the texts, comes to the conclusion that Christ did not
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
13
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
know what was before him and that his intended mission was thwarted
|
||
by the unforeseen betrayal of Judas; he did not die for our sins;
|
||
be died in vain: History confirms this view.
|
||
|
||
Such a book as Symes' "The Evolution of the New Testament,"
|
||
written by a believer, reveals the chaos and conflict among the
|
||
apostles, and the amazing condition of the manuscripts. I cannot
|
||
see how any honest man can read Remsburg's fine work "The Bible,"
|
||
Doane's "Bible Myths," or Robert Blatchford's beautiful "God and my
|
||
Neighbor," and continue to preach the Bible as a divine work.
|
||
|
||
Always devoted to Greek art, history, and literature, I was
|
||
dazed to find that hundreds of years before Christ there were
|
||
people who believed more in brotherly love and gracious kindliness
|
||
and democracy than many of the Christians did -- or do. It somehow
|
||
humiliated me to learn that the Greeks knew that the earth was
|
||
round; that they had figured its circumference out almost exactly.
|
||
They knew that the insane are only sick people to be treated
|
||
kindly, though Christ apparently believed the earth to be four-
|
||
cornered and flat and that insanity was caused by intrusive devils
|
||
who could be evicted or transferred to somebody's convenient drove
|
||
of swine. Greeks had advanced far in surgery, and the temples of
|
||
AEsculapius were true hospitals.
|
||
|
||
There is an impediment in my soul that has always prevented me
|
||
from believing in devils or ghosts. I never did as a child, though
|
||
I tried to pretend I did and I prayed the Lord nightly not to
|
||
commit the astounding cruelty of leading me into temptation, Yet
|
||
Christ believed in devils and not only cast them out but gave his
|
||
apostles and seventy others the power to cast out devils. On the
|
||
other hand, he implies in Luke xi, 24-26, that it is unwise to cast
|
||
a devil out of a man, since after a time the devil will decide to
|
||
go back and finding the man's soul "swept and garnished, taketh to
|
||
him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in
|
||
and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the
|
||
first."
|
||
|
||
I say in all meekness that if Christ really said this, he
|
||
spoke as arrant nonsense as was ever uttered. For eighteen
|
||
centuries because Christ said that they were inhabited by devils,
|
||
the Christians treated the insane with devilish cruelty. As late as
|
||
1810 George III, King of England, was horse-whipped daily by his
|
||
butler because of his devilish insanity. Because of this devil-
|
||
theory, Christianity gave the poor deluded wretches torture,
|
||
whippings, revilings, neglect, while other religions gave them
|
||
either superstitious deference or at least gentleness. What an
|
||
infinity of undeniable kindnesses Christians must show to atone for
|
||
this inconceivable torture of innumerable invalids!
|
||
|
||
Liberal clergymen and believers protest against a literal
|
||
reading of the Bible and speak of the sublimity of Christ's wisdom
|
||
and the glorious model of his life.
|
||
|
||
But what is that model? Shall each of us forbear to marry,
|
||
hate his family, gain a reputation as a wine-bibber, deny the value
|
||
of industry, neither toil nor spin nor save, and utter alternately
|
||
protestations of lowliness and boasts of equality with God? Yet
|
||
that was exactly "the Christ-life."
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
14
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
And where is there a saying of Christ's that is possible and
|
||
important and new? Where is a vital utterance that he did not
|
||
himself contradict? What hid he really know about himself? In one
|
||
saying, he was the only one that ever rose from the dead; yet the
|
||
dead were raised before him, and he raised them himself. He
|
||
promised in Matthew xix, 28, that his twelve apostles should sit on
|
||
twelve thrones in heaven and judge the twelve tribes. This gives
|
||
Judas a throne in heaven. Yet in John vi, 70, he said, "Have I not
|
||
chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?"
|
||
|
||
How much did he know? In Mark v, 8, Christ said to a devil,
|
||
"Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit." And he asked him, "What
|
||
is thy name?" and he answered, saying, "My name is Legion; for we
|
||
are many." Thereupon the devils filled a whole herd of swine and
|
||
ran into the sea. No wonder the herdsmen besought Christ to depart.
|
||
|
||
But how did it come that Christ thought the poor man had only
|
||
one devil in him when he really had two thousand?
|
||
|
||
In spite of all Christ's healing of the sick, the halt, the
|
||
blind, and his highly remarkable gift of raising the dead, he grew
|
||
increasingly unpopular and was more or less lynched. Nowadays a man
|
||
who really cured people of even the disease of death would be
|
||
exceedingly popular.
|
||
|
||
There are many good people who can say that these things do
|
||
not matter. But I cannot accept as an infinite eternal god a man of
|
||
such ignorance, impotence, and uncertainty as to his own nature.
|
||
How can any honest soul deny that Christ was guilty of promulgating
|
||
an odious savage superstition contrary to science as to humanity?
|
||
And what can we say of Christ's celebrated tenderness and mercy
|
||
after we read what he says in Mark iv, 12, that be used parables in
|
||
order to deceive those "without the mysteries" lest they should
|
||
understand them and "lest at any time they should be converted and
|
||
their sins should be forgiven them"? I was taught that the parables
|
||
were beautiful stories told in that form so that simple souls could
|
||
understand. But Christ says he told them in order to hoodwink those
|
||
whom he didn't want to save. It is ghastly! It makes my blood run
|
||
cold! And then there grows a wonder at the whole existence of the
|
||
tremendous industry of Christianity among the Gentiles. In spite of
|
||
all the atrocities committed upon the Jews by the Gentiles, only
|
||
the Gentiles are Christians. They rely upon Christ as the Savior of
|
||
the world though Christ definitely stated that he came only to save
|
||
the Jews and considered all others dogs!
|
||
|
||
What could be plainer? In Matthew xv, 24, it tells how a woman
|
||
of Canaan came to Christ and he refused to be bothered with her (as
|
||
he often refused to be bothered with the throngs imploring his
|
||
miracles). He said: "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of
|
||
Israel. It is not meet to take the children's bread and to cast it
|
||
to the dogs."
|
||
|
||
Didn't Christ himself know what he was here for? The Jews
|
||
would not have him, and Paul rearranged his gospel to convert the
|
||
Gentiles. Yet Christ said he came only to Israel.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
15
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
And in the Book of Revelation, to repeat, it is plainly stated
|
||
that the New Jerusalem has only twelve gates, one for each of the
|
||
tribes of Israel.
|
||
|
||
Where do the Gentiles come in? How is it possible that this
|
||
incredible building of churches, waging of crusades, butchery of
|
||
millions, expenditure of billions for centuries, should have been
|
||
carried on by Gentiles whom Christ was not interested in? If he
|
||
was, where and when did he say so?
|
||
|
||
The whole matter of Christ was a spiritual crucifixion for me
|
||
at first. In spite of his cursing a fig-tree for not bearing fruit
|
||
out of season and in spite of his running away from the crowds that
|
||
besought him for cures; in spite of his implying that Gentiles are
|
||
dogs not worth healing (Mark vii, 27), there is something so
|
||
adorable about his gentler moods and his poetic promises and his
|
||
pitiful fate that I clung to a kind of frantic belief in him long
|
||
after I lost the ability to accept the Old Testament. But finally
|
||
I yielded to the appalling contradictions in his two genealogies,
|
||
in the accounts of his mother's estate and his birth, and his own
|
||
ideas as to his divinity.
|
||
|
||
Hell went next. I simply could not stomach a god who could
|
||
devise and conduct such an infamous institution. Yet Christ
|
||
believed in hell, in actual fires and eternal torments.
|
||
|
||
Whatever my fault may be, the cogs of my poor brain simply
|
||
lock when I try to understand the central theme of Christianity:
|
||
the theory of vicarious atonement. I can't even understand the
|
||
beginning of it. God created a man, then a woman, and forbade them
|
||
the fruit of a certain tree, which when his children ate with
|
||
childish curiosity and at the suggestion of a snake (which God
|
||
never warned them against) eternal damnation was apportioned to
|
||
them and to all their descendants for thousands of years. I could
|
||
not tolerate such a god and his revolting sense of persecution. I
|
||
could not understand his logic: because Adam sinned, we are all
|
||
born in sin and as Cotton Mather says, "man's best works are a
|
||
stench in God's nostrils."
|
||
|
||
After 4004 years of almost universal damnation, something
|
||
happened in heaven, the details of which the churches have never
|
||
quite agreed upon: God decided to beget a son upon a virgin. It
|
||
makes a pretty picture, but why a virgin is better than an honest
|
||
wife I can't see, though there is alleged to be such peculiar
|
||
virtue in female sterility that according to certain creeds Mary
|
||
not only was a virgin but always will be one to the final eternity
|
||
and beyond.
|
||
|
||
There is much confusion among theologians as to whether Christ
|
||
was in heaven originally or was begotten for a special purpose. If
|
||
Christ existed from primeval times I can not see how God could
|
||
beget him again. In fact, I cannot find any two Christians who
|
||
agree on all the details of this infinitely important matter.
|
||
|
||
Furthermore, why was Christ born as an infant and why did he
|
||
live thirty or forty years before he began saving the world, and
|
||
then only spend a year or two at it, leaving it so unutterably
|
||
bewildered that one of his disciples betrayed him and one of them
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
16
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
denied him? Why is it that Christ himself was not a Christian and
|
||
that St. Paul, who never saw him, had to invent Christianity? Why
|
||
did Christ say he was coming back in the life-time of his apostles
|
||
and let them all die without seeing him again? Why has he never
|
||
come back?
|
||
|
||
But waiving all these stupefying riddles, I could not
|
||
understand how it helped God's sense of justice to put his own and
|
||
only son on earth and let him be condemned to a shameful death so
|
||
painful that Christ himself thought that he was abandoned on the
|
||
cross and died long before the two thieves died. In any case, I
|
||
could not, and I cannot, see what Christ's death has to do with the
|
||
salvation of the human race.
|
||
|
||
Beyond that difficulty lies another: only those are saved who
|
||
believe that he saved them. This implies that belief is a voluntary
|
||
matter and disbelief a thing of malicious meditation.
|
||
|
||
Christ said he came to save the Jews; yet to this day they are
|
||
not saved. Since the World War among the Christians a few Jews are
|
||
going back to Palestine, but as Jews, not as Christians. The number
|
||
of Jews who accepted the sacrifice of God's own son was so small
|
||
that Paul decided to take the religion to the Gentiles, which
|
||
brought about a furious quarrel with Peter. The Romans had to save
|
||
Paul from the Jews. Christ was a circumcised Jew, and yet
|
||
circumcision is not practiced by the Christians.
|
||
|
||
The doctrines of election and of infant damnation struck me as
|
||
absolutely perfect logical deductions from the Bible, and yet as so
|
||
intolerably revolting to any idea of justice or mercy that I would
|
||
rather reject a dozen religions than believe them.
|
||
|
||
I began to wonder if it were not a higher compliment to God to
|
||
let him alone altogether than to ascribe to him such fiendishness
|
||
as no maniac in human history ever approached.
|
||
|
||
They say that if you find a watch, you are sure it had a
|
||
maker; therefore the universe must have had a maker. Even if it
|
||
had, it could not have had such a maker as the Christian God. And
|
||
after that one must still ask, who made the maker? It is no
|
||
solution of a mystery to call it God. It is a vast increase of the
|
||
mystery.
|
||
|
||
It is easy enough to laugh this off as beyond finite
|
||
understanding. All right. So it must be. Then so is the whole
|
||
problem, and I will drop it from my thoughts.
|
||
|
||
While I was still a troubled youth the Revised Version of the
|
||
Bible came along and met with ferocious hostility. It seemed that
|
||
religious people not only disagreed in their interpretations but
|
||
resented correct translations. The revisers tried to keep as close
|
||
as they could to the King James Version, but they had to make one
|
||
hundred thousand changes! And the English and the American
|
||
committees got out separate versions.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
17
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
When I left college I was in a state of collapse as a
|
||
Christian. I did not know what to believe but I had a vast baggage
|
||
of disbeliefs that I could not shake off. I went out into the world
|
||
and found that a man's religion had no apparent relation to his
|
||
character. I learned of the huge amount of crime committed by
|
||
religious people. I met with a huge amount of goodness among
|
||
irreligious people.
|
||
|
||
I simply let religion slide and went about my business, trying
|
||
to be as decent and honest and kindly as I could. Finally a
|
||
tremendous thing came to me: the offer of a job as assistant editor
|
||
of a great history of the world in twenty-five volumes. I was
|
||
actually paid a salary to sit at a desk and read or go to a great
|
||
library and delve among books. For four years I read history from
|
||
9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. The history of every nation went through my
|
||
head. It was paradise on earth. But a serpent seems to be part of
|
||
the furniture of every paradise.
|
||
|
||
So now I had to read the religious history of every country.
|
||
And I was unutterably dismayed to find that the worst crimes in
|
||
every nation were committed in the name of religion by religious
|
||
people. In every country the blackest pages were the religious
|
||
pages, and of all the religions, savage or civilized, the Christian
|
||
religion had the most horrible record.
|
||
|
||
By "religion" I do not mean the ingrained instincts of
|
||
goodness, bravery, love, and loyalty that influence all mankind and
|
||
many of the animals. I mean the belief in and obedience to a
|
||
definite superhuman power. It seems to me as dishonest to use the
|
||
word "religion" for everything decent as it is to pretend that
|
||
"God-fearing" people are any more honest, pure, or kindly than
|
||
anybody else.
|
||
|
||
I know and love and revere many intensely religious people,
|
||
priests, clergymen, and church-workers, but I know, detest, and
|
||
despise many in tensely religious people, priests, clergymen and
|
||
church-workers, and life has deeply convinced me that religion is
|
||
not to credit for the humanity of good people, but is to blame for
|
||
the worst inhumanities of mankind.
|
||
|
||
Where in all the grisly records of human cruelty is there
|
||
anything to match the Inquisition of Spain, the Crusade against the
|
||
Albigenses, and the religious tortures of all the Christian
|
||
nations? I shudder and ache to think of the screams of tortured
|
||
myriads, the smell of burning flesh, the crackle of broken bones,
|
||
the mad appeals for mercy, the vain protestations of belief.
|
||
|
||
In the name of Christ, Christian potentates sat with their
|
||
women and children and watched helpless Christians burn; great
|
||
vicars of Christ sat and gloated while Christians bound to stakes
|
||
shrieked amid slow flames purposely kept at a distance. They
|
||
screamed as their flesh seared and cackled: "In the name of the
|
||
sweet Jesus whom I worship, bring the fire closer." But their
|
||
appeals were mocked. Not once, not twice, but tens of thousands of
|
||
times!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
18
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
The preachers do not preach of this nowadays. It is old-
|
||
fashioned, old stuff. But it must have hurt to be burned alive even
|
||
in the name of Christ.
|
||
|
||
There were good women of pure life who were enmeshed in the
|
||
infamous nets of doctrinal dispute and after hours of loathsome
|
||
ritual and pious humiliation were seated in public squares and
|
||
cooked over slow fires that gradually consumed the hinder parts
|
||
first. Carefully handled, a strong woman would live for two hours
|
||
as she baked.
|
||
|
||
This was not the work of illiterates in the jungle. It was the
|
||
careful, prayerful work of the most enlightened Christians, and the
|
||
infamy was committed not upon one or two poor souls but upon
|
||
thousands, upon myriads. It was committed in all the cities and
|
||
towns of Christendom.
|
||
|
||
Voltaire, who ardently believed in a God though not in
|
||
Christianity, quotes the remarkable summing up of arguments against
|
||
Christianity by Freret:
|
||
|
||
"His most terrible argument is, that if God had deigned
|
||
to make himself a man and a Jew, and to die in Palestine by an
|
||
infamous punishment, to expiate the crimes of mankind and to
|
||
banish sin from the earth, there ought no longer to have been
|
||
any sin or crime on the face of it; whereas, says he, the
|
||
Christians have been more abominable monsters than all the
|
||
sectaries of the other religions put together.
|
||
|
||
"He brings, for an evident proof of this, the massacres,
|
||
the wheels, the gibbets, and the burnings at the stake, in the
|
||
Cevennes, and near a hundred thousand human creatures that
|
||
perished under our eyes in that province; the massacres in the
|
||
valleys of Piedmont; the massacres of the Valteline, in the
|
||
time of Charles Borromeo; the massacre of the Anabaptists,
|
||
massacred and massacrers; the massacres of the Lutherans and
|
||
Papists, from the Rhine to the extremities of the North; the
|
||
massacres in Ireland, England, and Scotland in the times of
|
||
Charles I who was himself massacred; the massacres ordered by
|
||
Mary and by her father Henry VIII; the massacres on St.
|
||
Bartholomew's, in France, and forty years more of other
|
||
massacres between Francis II and the entry of Henry IV into
|
||
Paris; the massacres by the Inquisition; massacres, perhaps,
|
||
yet more execrable as being judicially committed; in short,
|
||
the Massacre of twelve millions of the inhabitants of the new
|
||
world, executed crucifix in hand; and this without reckoning
|
||
all the massacres previously committed in the name of Jesus
|
||
Christ, without reckoning above twenty schisms and twenty wars
|
||
of Popes against Popes and Bishops against Bishops; without
|
||
reckoning the poisons, the assassinations, the rapines of the
|
||
Popes John XI, John XII, John XVIII, John XXII, of a Gregory
|
||
VIII, of a Boniface VIII, of an Alexander VI, and of so many
|
||
other Popes who exceeded in wickedness a Nero or a Caligula.
|
||
|
||
"In short, he claims that this horrid and almost
|
||
uninterrupted chain of religious wars for fourteen centuries
|
||
never subsisted but among Christians, and that no people but
|
||
themselves ever spilt a drop of human blood for theological
|
||
dispute."
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
19
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
How can a Christian hold his head up and admit that myriads of
|
||
women were burned alive for witchcraft? John Wesley said that if
|
||
you give up witchcraft you must give up the Bible. He is right. The
|
||
choice is easy for me.
|
||
|
||
I do not believe in Buddhism, yet it is older and purer than
|
||
Christianity and has made enormously more converts without
|
||
bloodshed or persecution.
|
||
|
||
Wherein lies this so much trumpeted beauty of Christianity,
|
||
when it is plain, indisputable fact that no other religion ever
|
||
approached or attempted to approach the unbearable beastliness of
|
||
Christianity? It stings me to think of it. I could break down and
|
||
sob with pity for the poor dear people that were caught in those
|
||
traps of theology and tormented slowly into their graves. Yet these
|
||
things happened at the very zenith of the power of the Christian
|
||
religion.
|
||
|
||
Montezuma was a heathen and his religion included, like the
|
||
early Christian religion, human sacrifices and hideous cruelty. Yet
|
||
when the Christians conquered him their cruelties made him seem
|
||
merciful by contrast. This American continent of ours, discovered
|
||
and colonized by Christians, was largely depopulated by the lust
|
||
for murder that seemed inherent in the faith. The pages of Las
|
||
Casas can hardly be read without agony; yet according to Lea's
|
||
"Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies" the whole object of the
|
||
Spanish conquest of America was the propagation of the Christian
|
||
faith, and it was so stated in a bull of Pope Alexander VI.
|
||
|
||
After the New World was rid of its primitive peoples, after
|
||
the beautiful civilization of the Incas was destroyed, after the
|
||
Mayas and all their books were annihilated and their country
|
||
restored to the jungle, the Christians had only themselves to
|
||
practice on.
|
||
|
||
Then I read what my own Congregationalists did in this country
|
||
-- those noble Pilgrims and Puritans of whom so much good is spoken
|
||
and so little truth told. My historical research led me to an
|
||
acquaintance with their fiendish brutality. Tears filled my eyes
|
||
for the anguishes of harmless old Quaker women stripped and whipped
|
||
and driven through the snow of village after village with their
|
||
blood freezing on their half-flayed backs. I read of Baptists
|
||
lashed "till their skin hung in bloody rags," of all manner of
|
||
cruel tyranny inflicted on the minds and bodies of their own people
|
||
and their visitors.
|
||
|
||
Believing that freedom of soul, mind and body is the most
|
||
important privilege of humanity and the one hope of progress, I was
|
||
stunned to find on reading the history of the world that the
|
||
religious mind has always been opposed to liberty and equality.
|
||
|
||
Religious men as individuals have lived and fought and died
|
||
for liberty, but the various churches have never failed to oppose
|
||
it until it was established, then tried to seize on the new reins
|
||
of power.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
20
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
The United States of America was inspired and led by men of
|
||
little or no religion, and the clergymen protested fiercely against
|
||
the republic as godless. John Wesley in 1777 wrote that letters
|
||
from New York showed him that all the Methodists there were firm
|
||
for the government and on that account persecuted by the rebels. He
|
||
preached against our forefathers as rebels against God. When
|
||
Washington drove the British out of Boston, every Episcopal
|
||
clergyman there sailed away, except one who was persuaded to
|
||
remain.
|
||
|
||
After the war was won, Patrick Henry led a successful movement
|
||
to prevent clergymen from being eligible as members of the Assembly
|
||
of Virginia. Long debates over the mention of God in the
|
||
Constitution ended in a negative decision. For fifty years vain
|
||
efforts were made to force it in by amendment.
|
||
|
||
Of the first Presidents, Jefferson was a notorious Infidel.
|
||
Washington was vestryman in a church because he had to be as a tax-
|
||
payer; but he never was a communicant and would not stay in the
|
||
church during communion. The story of his kneeling in prayer on the
|
||
battlefield is an admitted fable; he never would kneel in church,
|
||
never recognized Christ in any statement, made contracts on Sunday
|
||
and went fox-hunting.
|
||
|
||
Lincoln wrote an atheistic essay as a young man and was called
|
||
"the atheist Congressman." His widow said "he lived and died
|
||
without faith or hope."
|
||
|
||
Yet only recently a clergyman broadcasted a sermon in praise
|
||
of prayer and credited the successes of Washington and Lincoln to
|
||
the fact that they were "men of prayer." The clergymen may be slow
|
||
to accept a new scientific truth, but they never let go of an
|
||
ancient fable. Where can one find fearless honesty or scientific
|
||
candor in a pulpit? Every historian expects to find the minimum of
|
||
truth in an ecclesiastical historian. As Renan says in his preface
|
||
to the 13th edition of his "Life of Jesus": "There is one thing
|
||
that a theologian can never be -- a historian."
|
||
|
||
The whole principle of human equality has always been fought
|
||
by priestcraft. As the French republic was opposed by the
|
||
religious, so were all the American republics. Only a few months
|
||
ago the Turkish republic found it necessary to banish the sacred
|
||
Caliphate. The other day the Persians trying to found a republic
|
||
were told that it was a sacrilege to the Persian religion.
|
||
|
||
In the United States state churches clung to the revenue until
|
||
they were pried off. My Congregational Church could not be shaken
|
||
loose from state appropriations in Massachusetts until 1817. The
|
||
Church of England still taxes the people. The churches of this
|
||
country are immense and extravagant edifices, yet they pay no taxes
|
||
though they meddle with politics at every turn.
|
||
|
||
The churches fought male suffrage, fought female suffrage,
|
||
popular education. When a visiting countess introduced forks into
|
||
France, a great churchman denounced her in a sermon, since God
|
||
invented fingers. When she died a little later, he said her death
|
||
was a judgment of God. What a multitude of things have been called
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
21
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
"judgments of God," from boils to earthquakes! Every Sunday the
|
||
preachers howl nonsensical diatribes against fashions and passing
|
||
whims. What cyclones of wind they have wasted reviling youth and
|
||
all its amusements, and all the arts and sciences!
|
||
|
||
Though churches have always been peculiarly liable to
|
||
lightning, clergymen preached against lightning-rods as impious,
|
||
because lightning was God's particular missile as thunder was his
|
||
voice. They opposed quinine for malaria, and anesthetics for women
|
||
in travail, since it was God's good pleasure that women should cry
|
||
aloud at that time.
|
||
|
||
Today William Jennings Bryan goes about like a raging lion
|
||
getting laws passed forbidding the teaching of evolution and
|
||
demanding that Genesis be accepted as the final authority on the
|
||
creation of man -- Genesis, that amazing chaos which tells how God
|
||
created light four days before he made the "two great lights," the
|
||
sun and the moon. Even Mr. Bryan knows that the moon is not a
|
||
light.
|
||
|
||
Then God split the waters and put the sky in between. Surely
|
||
Mr. Bryan does not believe that there is another ocean above the
|
||
sky. In Genesis i, 27, it states that God created male and female
|
||
in his own image and gave them "every tree." In Genesis ii, 5, it
|
||
states that God found there was "not a man to till the ground." So
|
||
he formed one out of dust and breathed life into its nostrils and
|
||
made a garden for it and put in that garden the tree of life and
|
||
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, also some rivers that
|
||
cannot now be traced. Then God told Adam not to eat of the tree of
|
||
knowledge, "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt
|
||
surely die." The snake knew better, it seems, for he told Eve that
|
||
she would not die if she ate, and she did not. Adam did not die for
|
||
nine hundred and thirty years after he ate the fruit (Genesis v,
|
||
5). Did Jehovah ever guess right?
|
||
|
||
As someone has said: "The first lie man ever heard was spoken
|
||
by God, and the first truth by the devil."
|
||
|
||
I cannot find when Eve died, but she lived till Cain and Able
|
||
were grown up; for a hundred and thirty years after the Fall she
|
||
bore Adam a son Seth, who, like Cain, found somewhere a wife in a
|
||
world in which Eve the first woman had never borne a daughter. Cain
|
||
after killing Able was afraid that "everyone that findeth me shall
|
||
slay me," though there was nobody else in the world but his father
|
||
and mother. He took a wife -- where? Some say he married his
|
||
sister, but Adam begat no daughters till after Seth was born. It is
|
||
all insanely mixed.
|
||
|
||
This incredible matter is what Mr. Bryan and millions of
|
||
others insist upon as the sufficient mental pabulum of our
|
||
children. It renders geology and biology and astronomy unnecessary
|
||
and perilous, and the theory of evolution a thing to be mocked at
|
||
and lied about outrageously. Mr. Bryan is so stubbornly unfair in
|
||
his statements about evolution that he must be guilty of two sins:
|
||
he is either ignorant of what he denounces or he is wilfully
|
||
mendacious. I should like to know just what books he has read on
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
22
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
the glorious and impregnable theory of evolution. Yet laws are
|
||
being passed or urged all over the United States to force school
|
||
teachers to accept what the intellect of man rejects with contempt
|
||
as soon as the fear of churchly persecution is removed.
|
||
|
||
That fear is incessant. The ancient persecutions will come
|
||
back the moment the religious fanatics recapture power. This very
|
||
year a clergyman in New jersey made a bonfire of books -- they
|
||
happened to be religious books, Unitarian and Christian Science
|
||
books; but the spirit is there.
|
||
|
||
In this very year a Congressman from Brooklyn introduced a
|
||
bill making it a penal offence to cast aspersions on any man's
|
||
religion. If the bill had passed I might have had not only hell
|
||
here-after, but several years in the penitentiary for writing this
|
||
statement of views I can't help holding. It is hard to keep up a
|
||
republic!
|
||
|
||
On May 21, 1924, the Presbyterian Church in its general
|
||
assembly officially announced its belief that "Adam and Eve were
|
||
created body and soul by immediate acts of almighty power" and that
|
||
"any doctrine at any variance therewith is a dangerous error."
|
||
Other churches followed suit.
|
||
|
||
Dr. John Roach Straton, the sweet-souled Baptist who thunders
|
||
at nearly everything and everybody and who says even worse things
|
||
of Baptist clergymen who are not Fundamentalists than be has said
|
||
about the wicked theater and its vicious people -- Dr. Straton
|
||
accuses the Museum of Natural History in New York of "treason to
|
||
God Almighty and libel against the human race." He says: "It has
|
||
been my terrible and woeful experience to witness thousands of
|
||
little children flocking to the museum to have their juvenile minds
|
||
poisoned by the foul miasma of evolution."
|
||
|
||
And all this typical pulpit-music because of a row of actual
|
||
skulls of men of different periods tending to confirm the theory
|
||
modestly and honestly recommended by Darwin and all other
|
||
scientists as an explanation of what their researches disclose!
|
||
|
||
The pulpit bullies the politicians. The North Carolina Board
|
||
of Education, headed by the Governor of the State, has this year
|
||
barred from the State high schools "all books which in any way
|
||
intimate an origin of the human race other than that described in
|
||
the Bible."
|
||
|
||
Many people who doubt the creeds of Christianity have been so
|
||
impressed by its prolonged and ingenious advertisements and the
|
||
peculiar pressure brought upon them in their childhood that they
|
||
say: Even if Christianity is not true, who would want to live in a
|
||
town without a church? would you dare contemplate the closing of
|
||
all the churches? what would happen if Christianity were removed
|
||
from the nation?
|
||
|
||
For answer, consider the facts.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
23
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
If you could prove by statistics that there are 68,000
|
||
Atheists and Infidels in the prisons of this country and only 150
|
||
church members, you would have marvelous evidence of the moral
|
||
value of Christianity, wouldn't you? You would hear of those
|
||
figures from the pulpit, in all probability.
|
||
|
||
Did you ever hear from any pulpit the true statistics?
|
||
Franklin Steiner has compiled the figures obtained from the
|
||
authorities concerned and they may be found in his book "Religion
|
||
and Roguery" with its shocking appendix listing "Crimes of
|
||
Preachers" and showing their addiction to murder and sex-crimes.
|
||
|
||
In the penal institutions of the United States and Canada he
|
||
found 68,863 persons with church affiliation, 8,134 with no church
|
||
preference, 5,389 Jews, and 150 Infidels, Atheists, and pagans. In
|
||
29 states there were only 15 downright unbelievers.
|
||
|
||
Curiously in striking confirmation of these figures, even as
|
||
I revised this text (on November 8, 1924), the Crime Commission of
|
||
Los Angeles completed a survey at the county jail and was surprised
|
||
to find that "out of 200 prisoners interviewed, 184 professed
|
||
adherence to some religious faith, only nine denied having any
|
||
religious faith. Seven declined to answer the question."
|
||
|
||
Everywhere we turn we find just that proportion. In Europe as
|
||
well as in America the churches that are represented by the most
|
||
criminals are the ones that are most rigid in their creed and most
|
||
evangelic in their nature. Try this on your own county jail or your
|
||
state penitentiary or reform schools.
|
||
|
||
The most ruthless of the pirates and buccaneers observed the
|
||
Sabbath and often shot dead the irreverent who interrupted divine
|
||
service. They had their own churches. But the vilest pirates never
|
||
approached the bloodiness, the perjury, the confiscatory frauds and
|
||
treacheries of the Christian churches in certain times of power.
|
||
|
||
There is much of passion in religion as in crime; and even
|
||
those religious people who keep out of jail are apt to be
|
||
distinguished by a persecuting tendency, a meddlesome tyrannical
|
||
spirit either to make rules or to break them. The Bible exploits a
|
||
god of cruelty, rapacity, heathen ruthlessness, and makes saints of
|
||
foul criminals. How could it save men from crime?
|
||
|
||
Furthermore, does not religion itself commit a crime whenever
|
||
it endeavors to coerce a soul or a nation? Is not the crime of
|
||
crimes the hostility to spiritual freedom and expression? Is there
|
||
any influence today that so retards frank and honest study and
|
||
facing of the facts of existence and of human welfare as the
|
||
religious influence? Every time a scientist or philanthropist
|
||
investigates the truth for its own sake, he encounters abuse from
|
||
the defenders of dogma, which might be described as petrified
|
||
theory.
|
||
|
||
In the words of Jacolliot's "The Bible in India" in which he
|
||
shows the horrible effects of Hindu religion as well as of
|
||
Christianity:
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
24
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
"We have seen human hecatombs on the burning piles of faith
|
||
and the altar reddened with blood. Ages have passed away; we are
|
||
but wakening to the progress of Freethought. But let us expect
|
||
struggles without end, until the day when we shall have the courage
|
||
to arraign all sacerdotalism at the bar of liberty."
|
||
|
||
In sober reason, then, one might argue that if Christianity
|
||
were to disappear overnight from the hearts of the citizens, the
|
||
prisons would be almost entirely emptied and crime would almost
|
||
disappear.
|
||
|
||
I do not press this argument, but has it not far better
|
||
foundation than the tremendously trumpeted falsehood that morals
|
||
depend on religion and that Christianity is the only salvation?
|
||
Does it not render ludicrous the plea that children should be
|
||
taught to read the Bible -- the greatest collection of crime-
|
||
inspiration and justification ever compiled?
|
||
|
||
How can we say that Christianity benefitted this continent --
|
||
especially when we read the appalling denunciations all the
|
||
preachers make of the spiritual state of this continent today? If
|
||
they would admit that we are good today -- if preachers had even
|
||
once admitted that their own times were good -- there might be some
|
||
argument. But they never did. They don't. They never will.
|
||
|
||
Yet they continue to insist that they have saved the world in
|
||
the only way it can be saved. Offering a religion filled with
|
||
Orientalism, modified by Greek principles, and full of stories
|
||
forcibly borrowed from the worship of Mithra, they dare to pretend
|
||
that Christians are somehow mystically better than the Greeks or
|
||
the Orientals; that Christians of evil life are infinitely superior
|
||
to non-believers however virtuous.
|
||
|
||
To sustain this outrageous and immoral doctrine they stop at
|
||
nothing. They attack school-books that tell the children the truth.
|
||
They commit the infamy of attacking the very souls of the infants
|
||
and staining them with legends that can never be quite forgotten.
|
||
|
||
In California this year the clergy made an onslaught on the
|
||
State Board of Education in an endeavor to drive from the schools
|
||
no less than fifty text-books. All over the nation the same holy
|
||
crusade is preached by fanatics. In one of the states school-
|
||
teachers are compelled to take an oath annually that they believe
|
||
in a literally inspired Bible, a personal devil, and a real hell.
|
||
|
||
The pulpiteers don't want researches made. They won't have the
|
||
Bible examined or its interpretation or its manuscripts or its
|
||
evolution considered. They won't have the rocks and the waters
|
||
looked into. The won't have microscopes and telescopes believed.
|
||
They have it all written down once for all in a book of which there
|
||
are no two similar translations, and concerning which the
|
||
pulpiteers themselves are at eternal war.
|
||
|
||
And not one of them obeys Christ's definite instructions not
|
||
to pray in public (Matthew vi, 6) not one of them sells all his
|
||
goods and gives to the poor; not one of them is meek and
|
||
indifferent to blows.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
25
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
One of my greatest reasons for giving up going to church is my
|
||
belief that the pulpit is the greatest power ever known for
|
||
persecution, bigotry, ignorance, dishonesty, and reaction.
|
||
|
||
It is well said that "eternal vigilance is the price of
|
||
liberty," and I am confirmed every day in my intense conviction
|
||
that the church as the church is the enemy of freedom. While
|
||
protesting loudly its faith in the Truth with a capital T, "the
|
||
truth that shall make us free," it fights at every step every
|
||
effort to learn the truth and publish it and be guided by it.
|
||
|
||
I find that crime is encouraged by these haters of truth and
|
||
freedom. Believing in, or at least proclaiming, the all-
|
||
righteousness of such a criminal god, the list of infamies
|
||
committed by clergymen is appalling. Clergymen are represented in
|
||
the penitentiaries by far more than their quota and for every crime
|
||
imaginable. I have a list of over six thousand crimes by clergymen,
|
||
which I shall not attempt to quote.
|
||
|
||
Many of the newspapers suppress or minimize the crimes of the
|
||
clergy. When recently a Detroit clergyman committed a murder and
|
||
was tried and convicted for it, a Detroit paper devoted to the
|
||
entire story one-quarter of a column, though it had published 114
|
||
columns concerning the still unexplained murder of a moving-picture
|
||
director.
|
||
|
||
When the moving pictures were shaken up by this mysterious
|
||
death and by the trial and acquittal of a comedian, nearly every
|
||
pulpit in the land throbbed with demands for an investigation and
|
||
governmental control of the pictures, for the expulsion from them
|
||
of everybody whom scandal touched, and the suppression of all
|
||
pictures in which anybody appeared against whom a charge should
|
||
ever be made. Steps were taken, slanders shouted, and great injury
|
||
done to the whole art and industry.
|
||
|
||
A little later, in the East and the West, two clergymen were
|
||
shot dead with women known for some time to be their mistresses. I
|
||
waited in vain to hear one clergyman mention this from the pulpit
|
||
or in an interview. Not a synod or assembly called for
|
||
investigation of all churches and choirs, not a step was taken for
|
||
the censorship of the lives and utterances of preachers. I wrote an
|
||
article about this and an editor said he would not dare to publish
|
||
it, true as it was. Why must the religion of the infinite God fear
|
||
fair play and the truth?
|
||
|
||
When the two young men Loeb and Leopold kidnapped and murdered
|
||
a boy in Chicago, the reporters announced that the boys believed in
|
||
evolution. That was enough. From almost every pulpit there rose a
|
||
trumpeter who cried that this proved the horrid influence of the
|
||
theory of evolution and the need of belief in the Bible. Almost all
|
||
the ministers demanded the lives of these wretches and called their
|
||
quite common-place atrocity "the unparalleled crime of the
|
||
century." Always they want somebody's blood.
|
||
|
||
At the same time the far more appalling deeds of a Methodist
|
||
minister, also of Illinois, came to light. He had indulged in long
|
||
illicit relations with the wife of a miner. From his very pulpit he
|
||
had exchanged signals with her for their rendezvous. He persuaded
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
26
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
her to poison her husband and as the victim died, the minister
|
||
prayed over him and announced that the miner had died "redeemed,"
|
||
the clergyman had saved his soul from hell. Later the clergyman's
|
||
wife fell ill and he held her up in bed to drink the coffee in
|
||
which he had put poison enough to kill her. She died, and
|
||
investigations started. Confessions were dragged at last from the
|
||
paramour and the parson and he begged to be made a chaplain in the
|
||
penitentiary so that he might "save" other souls.
|
||
|
||
Did the preachers confess from their pulpits that one of their
|
||
venerable number had far outdone the viciousness of the two young
|
||
"evolutionists"? They did not! They never do! They never will!
|
||
|
||
Yet they continue to proclaim the unfailing merits of their
|
||
cure-alls. They publish great advertisements in the papers
|
||
announcing that the only way to be washed white is in the blood of
|
||
the lamb. They struggle to keep from their natural victims, the
|
||
ignorant children, all books of true knowledge, and fight
|
||
incessantly to place in their hands as a divine model the Bible
|
||
which showers the blessings of a heartless deity on the most
|
||
frightful and contemptible scoundrels.
|
||
|
||
Innumerable sermons are preached, laying the blame for crime
|
||
on the love of amusement. But there is silence concerning the
|
||
crimes of people driven mad by religious ecstasy. A girl in Florida
|
||
recently stamped her father to death as a religious offering; just
|
||
as that unspeakable dog Abraham had the knife at the throat of his
|
||
son (whom he had ordered to gather wood for his own funeral pyre)
|
||
when the whimsical Lord told him to sacrifice a poor ram instead.
|
||
I have a sermon in my library in which a minister denounced an
|
||
Infidel as a man who would never have followed the beautiful
|
||
example of Abraham even if God told him to!
|
||
|
||
A few months ago a young man burned his family alive in a
|
||
gasoline-soaked bed because they were anti-Christ. No preacher
|
||
pointed to his act as the result of religious training. We call him
|
||
a maniac and feel sorry for him. Yet he did exactly what thousands
|
||
of Christian potentates did publicly with prayers to tens of
|
||
thousands of other Christians.
|
||
|
||
The conventions of clergymen are appallingly expensive and
|
||
appallingly futile. They have recently gone in for a war against
|
||
war; they will "outlaw war" because Christ was the Prince of Peace
|
||
(though he truly boasted that he brought a sword into the world).
|
||
Yet the Sunday School Times for November 8, 1924, calls upon
|
||
"countless thousands of God's children throughout the world" to
|
||
pray for the military success of the Chinese general Feng, not
|
||
because they know anything about the war but because Feng is a
|
||
Christian convert and his soldiers sing Christian hymns with Feng's
|
||
own words. Feng has been called a traitor, a Benedict Arnold,
|
||
because he betrayed his own allies, "but those who have followed
|
||
the consecrated and sacrificial life of this Christian general
|
||
cannot but believe that he acted in accordance with his own deepest
|
||
convictions of God's will and after much prayer." So all Christians
|
||
"who know how to pray" are asked to "be faithful to Feng." This is
|
||
surely the very vomit of hypocrisy.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
27
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
Indecency is the pulpiteer's prerogative. Every preacher
|
||
discusses morals from the pulpit in a way that no one else is
|
||
allowed to approach.
|
||
|
||
One of the best sellers of the day is Papini's "Life of
|
||
Christ," in which he pronounces the Sermon in the Mount (which is
|
||
made up of old proverbs and which no one understands, believes
|
||
literally, or acts upon) to be the very highest achievement of
|
||
divinity in mankind. Yet Papini refers to the Protestants as "the
|
||
hemorrhoids of Luther" and calls them various other names of equal
|
||
grace and Christian charity. Papini was once a violent Atheist and
|
||
if I believed in prophecy I would prophesy that he will soon be
|
||
denouncing his own Christianity. He is of the violent weather-wane
|
||
type.
|
||
|
||
The churches talk glibly today of Christianity as the
|
||
foundation of the brotherhood and equality of man, though the
|
||
Greeks had a democracy hundreds of years before Christ, and all
|
||
absolute monarchs, from Constantine to the Kaiser, have claimed to
|
||
take their dominion from God.
|
||
|
||
The Christian church supported slavery for centuries. At a
|
||
time when England forbade slavery, one of the greatest slave-
|
||
traders to foreign ports was the head of the English church.
|
||
|
||
The Methodist, Baptist, and other churches in the United
|
||
States took official steps to forbid their clergymen from favoring
|
||
abolition. American clergymen used to stand at the auction block
|
||
and tell the negro merchandise that it was God's will that they
|
||
should be slaves and that they should find comfort in obedience.
|
||
The Bible indeed is full of slavery with never a word against it.
|
||
God himself told his people just how to put the slave against a
|
||
door and drive a hole through his ear with an awl to mark him for
|
||
life.
|
||
|
||
The present equality and freedom of women was secured in
|
||
defiance of the orders of the Bible and the frantic opposition of
|
||
all the churches. To this day eminent clergymen denounce women for
|
||
throwing off their scriptural servitude.
|
||
|
||
In all my lifetime of history reading I find not one instance
|
||
where the Christian creed of itself prevented a cruelty or an
|
||
atrocity, but I find innumerable instances where it provoked the
|
||
vilest evils and the most fiendish cruelties.
|
||
|
||
A year or two ago I read that the Presbyterian Church had
|
||
voted from its funds $175,000 for the conversion of Jews to
|
||
Christianity. This is absolutely amusing, and yet it is ghastly to
|
||
realize that nearly two thousand years after Christ came to save
|
||
the chosen people, after thousands of them were tortured to death,
|
||
it should seem ridiculous to try to convert a Jew to Christianity.
|
||
|
||
The Christians have found it easier to convert them to the
|
||
graveyard, and pogroms still break out and will break out.
|
||
Chesterton, who is an ardent believer in Christianity, said that
|
||
the crimes of Christianity must sicken the very sun.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
28
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
I read recently that the church architects this year were to
|
||
meet and consider the best way to take care of this year's budget
|
||
of $200,000,000 which is to be devoted to building and rebuilding
|
||
churches. Add to this the salaries of the church armies and the
|
||
billions on billions invested in church property and tell me if it
|
||
is a paying investment. It pays no taxes. Does it pay anything
|
||
real?
|
||
|
||
No population is so at grips with poverty that its church
|
||
element does not extract enough money to build some temple of
|
||
worship and support a religious institution more expensive than it
|
||
can afford and serving no really useful purpose. Servant girls,
|
||
scrubwomen, poor farmers and half-starved villagers are everywhere
|
||
frightened and cajoled into sacrificing their scant savings for the
|
||
construction of vast edifices where superstition rears its gorgeous
|
||
head.
|
||
|
||
General Grant in a presidential message to Congress in 1875,
|
||
strongly urged "taxation of all property equally, whether church or
|
||
corporation," and he gave the warning that there might be
|
||
"sequestration through blood" if church property were not
|
||
peacefully taxed. In a speech that same year he cried, "Keep the
|
||
church and the state forever separate."
|
||
|
||
The churches ought either to be forced to pay taxes, or to
|
||
allow their empty edifices to be used as schools during the week.
|
||
This would save billions of taxpayers' money and save tens of
|
||
thousands of children from going to school in tents or not at all.
|
||
|
||
The churches do not tell the truth and are not interested in
|
||
facts as facts. They claim to be superior to facts. As if anybody
|
||
could be! Surely if there is a God, facts are his most definite
|
||
statements.
|
||
|
||
In the course of my four years' work as a historian I learned
|
||
that no religious historian is reliable on a religious topic. The
|
||
Protestant accounts of the Catholics are even fiercer than the
|
||
Catholic accounts of the Protestants. If the outsider believes
|
||
either of them, he must be afraid of both of them. Even when a
|
||
theologian tries to include the crimes of his church, he veils them
|
||
in language that conceals their horror, saving his strong words for
|
||
the evils of his opponents.
|
||
|
||
Much that I attack here is also assailed by the more liberal
|
||
and advanced among the clergy. They will feel that they are
|
||
unjustly ignored. But they are themselves ferociously abused by the
|
||
fundamentalists of their own sects and by the preachers of other
|
||
sects. The peril from the fanatics is manifest; it is daily; it is
|
||
everywhere.
|
||
|
||
The liberal theologian is chained to a corpse by a short chain
|
||
that rattles as he struggles and drags him back when he would
|
||
progress. I agree with the fundamentalists in their claim that the
|
||
Bible must be taken entire or let alone; that you must take all of
|
||
Christ or give him up as a supreme teacher and as a savior.
|
||
|
||
As for living the Christ life, it cannot be done, and it ought
|
||
not to be done. Too much ugliness is included in the sweetness.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
29
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
The church papers are always asking why people do not go to
|
||
church. They have always been asking that. I will guarantee to find
|
||
the query in any given year of the Christian history of which there
|
||
is liberal record.
|
||
|
||
People do not go to church in large numbers, because, for all
|
||
they may say and think they think, they know it is a waste of time.
|
||
|
||
In staying away from church I can't believe that I miss much.
|
||
In the Monday morning papers I read the subjects of the sermons
|
||
preached in many cities, and sometimes I read excerpts from the
|
||
sermons. They seem to me to be mostly unimportant when true and as
|
||
a rule appallingly false. The claims made by the various sects for
|
||
their peculiar brands of cure-all; the amazing contradictions and
|
||
inane recommendations; the ferocious injustices to one another, to
|
||
fact, to the unbelievers, make the pulpit anything but a source of
|
||
reliable information or of practical inspiration.
|
||
|
||
If "the supreme happiness of salvation" is an argument for
|
||
belief, then happiness is as legitimate a pursuit as our
|
||
Declaration proclaims. I do not find happiness in religion any
|
||
more. I simply cannot believe any longer. I haven't the brain for
|
||
it. To my perverted and muddy soul that sublime utterance of
|
||
Tertullian's "I believe it because it is impossible" (Credo quia
|
||
impossible est) would belong in "Alice in Wonderland" if it were
|
||
not silly without being funny. The vast literature of the Church
|
||
Fathers and their arguments on the subjects they chose simply
|
||
disgust me with the human race.
|
||
|
||
I am so constituted that it strikes me as disgraceful for
|
||
Christians to claim that their religion is so superior to others
|
||
when the facts are plain that Christian countries are no better
|
||
than other countries. In this country, for example, crime of all
|
||
sorts exceeds that in all other countries to an overwhelming
|
||
degree.
|
||
|
||
Nobody honestly believes that church-members are less likely
|
||
to embezzle, flirt, or be brutal than non-church-members; or that
|
||
Christians are more honest than Chinamen. On the testimony of the
|
||
missionaries life is as safe in the African jungle as it is in the
|
||
most Christian cities, and so is a woman's virtue. Before the
|
||
Christians destroyed the Incas, a woman could walk the whole length
|
||
of Peru without peril. Everybody knows that a man's creed has
|
||
nothing whatever to do with his character or his conduct. To deny
|
||
this is to deny everyday experience.
|
||
|
||
In my own case I know the loss of religion has not made the
|
||
least difference in my character, either for good or evil, for
|
||
sorrow or for happiness. People often say, "If I ceased to believe
|
||
in God and a future life, I'd go mad." I say, "Oh no, you wouldn't.
|
||
I didn't. I don't feel any change."
|
||
|
||
For if you believe in the Christian future life you must
|
||
believe that hell is infinitely more crowded than heaven. I can't
|
||
see how a decent human being could endure heaven knowing that most
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
30
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
of his family and friends are in everlasting woe. Good old
|
||
Christians used to say that the chief bliss of the saved will be in
|
||
watching the tortures of the damned. That's good Christianity, but
|
||
as humanity it is outrageous beyond endurance.
|
||
|
||
I do not believe that all I believe is true. Deeply as I am
|
||
convinced of certain things, I am utterly afraid of my own
|
||
opinions. I would not enforce them on any other person. I would not
|
||
silence his contradictions of me. I want to keep my mind open to
|
||
new aspects of truth and new opinions, I want my opponents to have
|
||
every freedom to express everything whatsoever.
|
||
|
||
Sincerely as I dread and abhor the teachings of most of the
|
||
churches and churchmen, I would not lift my little finger to
|
||
prevent one of them from absolute freedom of utterance.
|
||
|
||
I do not believe in censorship of others or of myself. I could
|
||
wish as much freedom as I grant. It seems to me that this republic
|
||
has no more important task than to remember that it was the first
|
||
nation, whose first government put the church out of political
|
||
power. The church is always trying to get back in. In spite of the
|
||
fearful history of religious power the ardent churchmen still will
|
||
meddle with the government of men. This country has been spared the
|
||
most horrible experiences of other nations. It can escape
|
||
permanently only by an unceasing fear of letting religion acquire
|
||
a foothold in the government, for the moment the churchman comes in
|
||
at the door with power, that moment freedom flies out of the
|
||
window.
|
||
|
||
The church has shown what it can do to its subjects: the gag,
|
||
the thumbscrew, the dungeon, the fiery stake, excommunication, hell
|
||
here and hereafter for those who question the divine will. Let us
|
||
never forget, or we are lost.
|
||
|
||
The true freeman, the true American, realizes that his right
|
||
to liberty and equality compels him to grant liberty and equality.
|
||
He dreads above all things the coercion of another soul, the
|
||
suppression of free thought and free speech.
|
||
|
||
The strangest, saddest thing about religious opposition to the
|
||
freedom of the soul is the ferocity, the ruthlessness of it. Men
|
||
dispute earnestly about many things and are good sports after the
|
||
fight. Democrats, Republicans call names, make wild charges and are
|
||
good friends afterwards. Scientists, historians, business men,
|
||
artists wrangle violently and yet observe the code of the duel.
|
||
|
||
But religious disputes and wars are to the death and to hell
|
||
afterwards. The truth is never sough regardless of consequences.
|
||
The dogma is not based on examination and proof, with a day in
|
||
court for the opponent. But faith is fanatic, conscienceless, and
|
||
fatal. Where the clergy are all-powerful, liberalism is doomed in
|
||
advance.
|
||
|
||
They even oppose those they should help most. When certain men
|
||
tried to free the slaves in this country -- when earlier men tried
|
||
to free this country, almost all the pulpits assailed them with
|
||
anathema.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
31
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
When Golden Rule Jones was Mayor of Toledo and tried to put
|
||
the Golden Rule into practice the churches were solid against him.
|
||
When the true saint Judge Ben Lindsey organized a children's court
|
||
where he could suffer the little children to come to learn justice
|
||
in words of one syllable, he began a lifelong martyrdom under the
|
||
assaults of the churches. The politicians were bad enough, but the
|
||
clergy almost unanimously waged unscrupulous war.
|
||
|
||
There are good, brave, glorious clergymen, and almost all of
|
||
them are sincere, but most of them are prisoners on the treadmill
|
||
of their own set creeds and rituals. I should think they would
|
||
drive God mad with the eternal repetitiousness of their services,
|
||
their groveling flatteries and insulting servilities. As a class
|
||
they dread progress.
|
||
|
||
The thing that makes churchmen such dangerous citizens is
|
||
their belief that they have a god directing them and that those who
|
||
oppose them are opposing God. This is the secret origin of all the
|
||
horrors. A man alone is subject to evil impulses enough, but a man
|
||
and a god are a thousand times as dangerous.
|
||
|
||
Surely, surely the world has lived long enough and poured out
|
||
enough blood and piled up enough corpses to make this one lesson
|
||
final: that religion in power is the greatest curse of mankind.
|
||
|
||
And now for my lastly: If in anything I have written I have
|
||
hurt or shocked any gentle soul or any cruel fanatic, let them both
|
||
realize that I speak with simple sincerity, with ardor only for the
|
||
truth, with doubt only of oppression.
|
||
|
||
It is because I am weak and silly that I fear those who are so
|
||
confident of their beliefs that they will act upon them ruthlessly.
|
||
I am afraid of the Christians because I have read too much about
|
||
them and pondered them too long. I am so myopic that they look to
|
||
me like the very devils in which I do not believe.
|
||
|
||
I am so womanish that I sicken at the very thought of the
|
||
millions of poor, charred, broken, and slaughtered men, women, and
|
||
children whom the Christians and the priests of other creeds have
|
||
put to utter torment of flesh and spirit.
|
||
|
||
Christians have done and do beautiful, beautiful things. But
|
||
so it is with savages and dogs and apes.
|
||
|
||
Christ is much praised for driving from the Temple the money-
|
||
changers and them that sold doves; but he made no protest against
|
||
the heartless slaughter of doves, the burning of lambs and all the
|
||
age-long horror of cooking animals in order that the sweet savor of
|
||
their flesh might tickle the nostrils of a god whom he imagined
|
||
sitting within reach of the fragrant smoke, and willing to accept
|
||
the death of a goat, an ox, or a child as an atonement for a sin.
|
||
He even accepted the death of his own son as an expiation for the
|
||
sins of all mankind!
|
||
|
||
God watches the sparrow fall, but does not rescue it from the
|
||
hawk. If he is such a being as the Bible describes, he will put me
|
||
in that inconceivably vast multitude of the damned whose cries must
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
32
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
surely drown the harp music and the hallelujahs of the few whom he
|
||
has elected to serve about his throne. He has a throne and sits on
|
||
it with Christ at his right hand. Yet he is everywhere and hears
|
||
everything. So he will hear me howl.
|
||
|
||
Many good souls protest against a destructive criticism of
|
||
Christianity and demand a substitute. I do not feel any obligation
|
||
to substitute a new god for the old ones. I should gladly let them
|
||
all go. I do not approve of cancer, and yet I do not feel that I
|
||
have no right to attack a quack who promises a false cure until I
|
||
have a real cure to propose. As someone said: he who helps destroy
|
||
the bollweevil has done as constructive work as he who plants the
|
||
seed.
|
||
|
||
As for those who protest that I am robbing people of the great
|
||
comfort and consolation they gain from Christianity, I can only say
|
||
that Christianity includes hell, eternal torture for the vast
|
||
majority of humanity, for most of your relatives and friends.
|
||
|
||
Christianity includes a devil who is really more
|
||
powerful than God, and who keeps gathering into his furnaces most
|
||
of the creatures whom God turns out and for whom he sent his son to
|
||
the cross in vain.
|
||
|
||
If I could feel that I had robbed anybody of his faith in
|
||
hell, I should not be ashamed or regretful.
|
||
|
||
For the present I am happier than any Christian I know. Now I
|
||
have a wonderful peace of soul in letting the universe run itself
|
||
and in trying to ride on it and keep out from under the wheels
|
||
without trying to talk to the Motorman. If I have offended your
|
||
God, your God is quick to punish when he is ready. He has room for
|
||
me in his hell and fuel to spare. So let us go our separate ways:
|
||
you to bliss, and I to blister.
|
||
|
||
If it shall prove to be true that my failure to believe is
|
||
itself a crime against God; if my failure to pay him the kind of
|
||
worship which I cannot, to save me, make sure he wants, is an
|
||
offense against him, as against you, then you can surely leave my
|
||
punishment to him.
|
||
|
||
Believers call me a Materialist and say that I miss the
|
||
"spiritual significance," the loftiness of religious yearnings. But
|
||
the true "materialist" seems to me the man who believes that a
|
||
sprinkling of baptismal water has an effect on sins and on
|
||
encircling devils; that sin can be washed in the blood of a lamb;
|
||
that eating bread and drinking wine called the flesh and the blood
|
||
of a god can have a cannibalistic virtue; that words and music can
|
||
please the ears of god, and sweet smells, costly robes and loud
|
||
shoutings can win his favor.
|
||
|
||
Browning said: "There may be heaven; there must be hell:
|
||
meanwhile there is our earth here -- well?"
|
||
|
||
Our earth here! that is parish enough for us. Knowledge
|
||
relieves miseries, brings comfort, saves lives, spreads beauty
|
||
within the reach of the poorest. If the billions spent in huge
|
||
empty buildings were devoted to housing the sick and the poor; if
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
33
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
the billions spent on the wages of myriads of clergymen who waste
|
||
their lives in calling aloud to their god Baal or whatever they
|
||
call him, were spent in really useful human works, these often
|
||
well-meaning and often gifted men would not squander so much
|
||
history, so much power, so much eloquence on the hideous folly that
|
||
"the fear of god is the beginning of wisdom" and the secret of
|
||
virtue.
|
||
|
||
Two hundred million dollars spent this year in this country to
|
||
adding to the number of half-empty warehouses of piety! Thousands
|
||
of Ministers warring with one another and with common sense. If
|
||
there is a god such as they insist on immortalizing from the
|
||
fancies of ancient and ignorant nomads, what need has he of these
|
||
innumerable dollars?
|
||
|
||
If there is a god and he is a god of love, God knows he must
|
||
wish that his children's treasure and their toil and their fervor
|
||
should be spent upon one another and on the countless miseries of
|
||
this unhappy world, which might be made so beautiful. Instead of
|
||
sanctifying piety, let us make a religion of pity, of mutual help,
|
||
of the search for truth and power, and the increase of freedom.
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
PART II
|
||
|
||
Answers to Critics and Correspondents
|
||
|
||
I never heard or read of an Infidel who protested against any
|
||
religion because it hampered his evil instincts and made vice
|
||
difficult; or because religious people were too good, too pure, too
|
||
sweet, too honest to be endured.
|
||
|
||
Every attack on religion I ever encountered was inspired by a
|
||
revulsion against the corruptions, the cruelties, and the shameless
|
||
lies of religious people. We who attack are revolted by the
|
||
dishonesty of their documents, the trickiness of their politics,
|
||
the hypocrisy of many of their followers, the bloodthirstiness and
|
||
greed of their priests and their history, their outrageous
|
||
pretensions, their hostility to mercy, to friendliness, to peace
|
||
and to progress.
|
||
|
||
One thing religious people seem never to understand; one thing
|
||
for all their imagination they seem incapable of imagining: and
|
||
that is that the man who speaks against their religion may be
|
||
actuated by just as great a fervor, just as warm a conviction of
|
||
eternal truth, just as keen an eagerness for the welfare and
|
||
nobility of humanity, as the best of them can feel.
|
||
|
||
Christians never hesitate to revile other religions, or to
|
||
send among them missionaries generally ignorant and often insolent.
|
||
They freely revile the innumerable other sects of their own church.
|
||
They assail and ridicule the most sacred tenets of alien faiths.
|
||
But when their own is attacked they are struck with horror.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
34
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
The motive of the attack is the first thing they suspect. It
|
||
must always be base, though their own motives are always lofty.
|
||
This is particularly true of one who attacks not a mere phase of
|
||
religion, but religion itself.
|
||
|
||
The purposes of Infidels and Atheists are of course always
|
||
infamous, ruthless, and heartless.
|
||
|
||
For years I hesitated to write the article which is the first
|
||
part of this book and which has caused my name to be held up to
|
||
obloquy in countless pulpits, countless articles, countless
|
||
letters.
|
||
|
||
But my heart was so enraged by the ancient atrocities still
|
||
being committed incessantly today against honesty, history,
|
||
science, common sense, common decency and the duty of mankind to
|
||
itself, that I could keep silent no longer.
|
||
|
||
I am by nature the most amiable of men, a sentimentalist whose
|
||
sense of the ridiculous does not always save him from the
|
||
accusation of mawkishness. I hate nobody and would harm nobody,
|
||
least of all good people of beautiful hope.
|
||
|
||
It does not amuse or stimulate me to be insulted or to insult.
|
||
But I could not forever contain my wrath against mountainous
|
||
deception. I felt it my solemn inescapable duty to make what
|
||
protest I could against the unbounded ambitions, the craft and the
|
||
subtle poisons of professional religionists.
|
||
|
||
And so I proposed to the editor of The Cosmopolitan an article
|
||
telling the truth about the evils of Christianity and its marked
|
||
decline in power throughout the world. He answered that he felt it
|
||
would be more interesting and less perilous if I wrote it in the
|
||
form of a personal experience.
|
||
|
||
I did, and he published it, omitting for reasons of space and
|
||
other considerations which the publisher of a general magazine must
|
||
keep in mind, those portions of the article which I have here
|
||
restored and revised.
|
||
|
||
Immediately on the appearance of the magazine the storm broke
|
||
about my head -- a storm of gratitude and approval from innumerable
|
||
anti-Christians of every age and condition; a storm of abuse and
|
||
protest ranging from the hard-shelled parsons (who demanded that
|
||
the magazine be forever debarred from circulation and all my works
|
||
consigned to hasty oblivion) to the liberal parsons and pulpit
|
||
evolutionists (who said I was attacking long-exploded beliefs, a
|
||
procession that had long since passed, a devil, a god, a hell, a
|
||
heaven, a Bible that nobody believed in literally any more).
|
||
|
||
From the religious laity came letters ranging from anonymous
|
||
promises of hell-fire to promises of prayer and hope for my
|
||
eventual redemption. One sent me my picture with added horns, tail
|
||
and pitch-fork; another called me her little baby and wanted to
|
||
take me in her lap and teach me my early piety again.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
35
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
Some pious souls must forever be making new Christs, and it
|
||
may be my fate to be added to the numberless Messiahs. I have
|
||
already been nominated as John the Baptist and my mother as the
|
||
Mother of the Universe. On December first, a woman called me on the
|
||
telephone (the modern voice from the sky) and told me that she had
|
||
a revelation from heaven, a clear voice stating that I had paved
|
||
the way for him who died on the cross to return -- he would come
|
||
again soon to correct the errors with which wicked men had filled
|
||
the Bible in order to frustrate his first advent.
|
||
|
||
She added the interesting detail that Christ was really a
|
||
woman who had taken a man's form in his previous incarnation
|
||
because of the world's hostility to women. The voice from heaven
|
||
told her that my mother was really the Mother of the Universe, the
|
||
true Virgin Mary.
|
||
|
||
When I explained that I was too busy for a personal call and
|
||
asked her to write me the rest, she promised to do so, saying that
|
||
her pen was controlled by the deity, but that the people around her
|
||
were hostile to her.
|
||
|
||
Harsh critics will make certain remarks about this fervent
|
||
soul, but, after all, is not her evidence as good as much of the
|
||
Christian doctrine -- is her inspiration any more hallucinatory? Do
|
||
not the loudest preachers display the same logic, the same trust in
|
||
voices, impulses, and inspirations?
|
||
|
||
The attention my article received from the pulpits of all
|
||
sects amazed me. It would seem that hardly a city or village in the
|
||
land failed to hear of me from one or more pulpits, sometimes two
|
||
or three a Sunday in the same town. Our unfailing shouting parson,
|
||
Dr. John Roach Straton, devoted two sermons to me in New York,
|
||
after flaying me alive in Kentucky.
|
||
|
||
One evangelist advertised in large type: "Do you believe Jesus
|
||
Christ or Rupert Hughes?" To which my answer was: I advise you to
|
||
believe neither. I do not offer my own writings as gospels, and the
|
||
only writing Christ was ever known to do was on sand when he
|
||
annihilated the law against adultery by the beautiful but
|
||
devastating principle that only the absolutely innocent could begin
|
||
the punishment: a principle which Christian law-makers and judges
|
||
have never seen fit to follow.
|
||
|
||
The more liberal clergymen ridiculed me less as a vile and
|
||
infamous liar than as a poor ignoramus who was not aware of the
|
||
fact that most clergymen believed in an evolution of religion and
|
||
conceded that the Bible was only folk-lore and that the virgin
|
||
birth, the trinity, the vicarious atonement, etc., were obsolete
|
||
fossils of outworn faiths. But as I see it now, if you let go all
|
||
these ancient pretensions, Christ becomes simply one of countless
|
||
erring philosophers and deserves no more than his fair share of
|
||
consideration.
|
||
|
||
One clergyman preached: on "Rupert Hughesism -- its Cause,
|
||
Cure and Prevention." The headlines howled, "Rupert Hughes Driven
|
||
to Religious Suicide by Unreasonable Theology."
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
36
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
A few clergymen wrote me letters revealing great kindliness,
|
||
sympathy, and tolerance, and endeavored to reason with me. I could
|
||
imagine that these preachers were really beautiful souls; but the
|
||
ferocity, dishonesty, and slander of most of them did not enhance
|
||
my opinion of the individuals or indicate that their religion had
|
||
sweetened and hallowed them as much as the advertisements would
|
||
indicate.
|
||
|
||
Few of them seem to realize how much they belittle their all-
|
||
powerful god when they grow so excited over the fact that a tiny
|
||
worm has reared its head against Him. They seem to fear that their
|
||
god cannot take care of Himself if questioned.
|
||
|
||
Almost without exception the clergy denounced my article as an
|
||
insult, an outrage, something that had no right to publication.
|
||
Which is curious in our alleged republic, with its boast of
|
||
religious freedom and its sacred constitutional guaranty of free
|
||
speech and free press.
|
||
|
||
In 1546 an archbishop of Naples fastened to his palace door an
|
||
edict absolutely forbidding the laity to discuss creeds. This
|
||
sounds medieval as one finds it in Lea's "Inquisition in the
|
||
Spanish Dependencies," but the edict seems to be still in force if
|
||
the response of the cloth to my impertinence is any test.
|
||
|
||
As a cross-section of American religious opinion I think the
|
||
responses to my article have a vivid value and are worthy of the
|
||
large space I give them. It would take volumes to include all the
|
||
sermons and letters.
|
||
|
||
The letters completely convince me of one thing: that genuine
|
||
fervent Christian faith occupies an exceedingly small number of
|
||
American hearts, minds, and lives.
|
||
|
||
Sermons by many of the most ferocious preachers against me
|
||
were sent by members of their congregations who ridiculed their
|
||
pastors unmercifully and expressed a disgust with them and their
|
||
doctrines.
|
||
|
||
Of the minute percentage of Americans who attend church
|
||
regularly, it is evident that a large number go because they have
|
||
formed the habit from childhood compulsion, neighborhood custom,
|
||
and a dearth of other entertainment.
|
||
|
||
The warmth of the letters from the multitudinous unbelievers
|
||
has heartened me greatly. But the irreligious people are
|
||
unorganized. They have no tremendous vested interests, no meeting-
|
||
places, tax-exempt and almost exempt from criticism, no priesthood
|
||
devoted to keeping the cause aglow and the salaries alive. Yet the
|
||
unbelievers constitute an immense power, a silent mass. They are
|
||
that unexpected rock that ministers run against so frequently when
|
||
they combine for political action and find their divine activities
|
||
unsupported, find the men they have denounced triumphantly elected.
|
||
The unbelievers say little, but think deep.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
37
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
It is gratifying to find that the letters in approval of my
|
||
article far outnumber those in disapproval. I had in fact many
|
||
telegrams of enthusiastic praise, some of them signed by a group of
|
||
names. Naturally, many of my religious critics are abusive and
|
||
vicious, but it is interesting to note the chaos of their
|
||
contradictions of one another. It was painful to note how many of
|
||
the religious zealots were anonymous.
|
||
|
||
Though it may look like vanity, I include a few, and only a
|
||
few, of the letters of approval as an indication of their general
|
||
tone and of the cordiality of modern skepticism.
|
||
|
||
The editor of The Cosmopolitan was deluged as I was with
|
||
letters of terrific denunciation, but also with letters of most
|
||
cordial gratitude for his courage. A great many readers went so far
|
||
in their approval as to send in subscriptions!
|
||
|
||
Perhaps other editors will take heart from his experience and
|
||
realize that it is not absolutely fatal to give occasional space to
|
||
the enormous longing for expression of honest religious doubt in
|
||
this vauntedly free country.
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
(Anonymous)
|
||
|
||
DEAR RUPERT: Stick to the novel -- fiction allows so many
|
||
ridiculous and impossible vaporings to pass unchallenged.
|
||
|
||
When I read your "Why I Quit Going to Church" I found you to
|
||
be a bigger jackass than your dry, driveling, unoriginal novels
|
||
have already sufficiently indicated.
|
||
|
||
A CHURCH GOER,
|
||
(More Than Ever.)
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
(Anonymous)
|
||
|
||
WEST NEWTON, MASS.
|
||
|
||
To RUPERT HUGHES: From your story in Cosmopolitan you lead me
|
||
to believe that you are somewhat of a nut. Even your picture on
|
||
page forty-five shows that your not a human being but you like to
|
||
be in the publicly. A man that talks like do should be cremated to
|
||
find out what your brain looks like. Try reading a Bible that has
|
||
some facts. You read all this junk the Protestants have. They never
|
||
had a bible. Every Protestant church has a different fraze for the
|
||
bible and your one of them. I think your perverted brain needs
|
||
attention by some specialist. There seems to be a lot of nuts like
|
||
you but they general winds up in asylums.
|
||
|
||
THE WRITER ABOVE,
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
Oh, Rupert Hughes, "how have the mighty fallen!"
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
38
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
I'm not a religious fanatic. I seldom go to church because my
|
||
family won't go with me. Our boy was educated at one of the big
|
||
universities. It was there he got your ideas. I never discuss the
|
||
subject because it breaks my heart. It cost us $10,000 to get him
|
||
to doubt the Bible. Perhaps you would say: "Would you have me a
|
||
hypocrite to cover up what I believe?" No. But you have a
|
||
tremendous influence. No matter what you or anyone else says, there
|
||
is a God, and the Bible will stand as long as the world. If I had
|
||
no faith I might as well be a cat or a dog.
|
||
|
||
I believe as firmly as I believe I see the mountains from my
|
||
window, that your popularity will now be on the wale. Even though
|
||
you have told the truth as you see it, there are thousands who will
|
||
say as I do. "Poor Rupert Hughes! I'm so sorry!" I'll never feel
|
||
that glow of pride again as I read your stories. Something fine has
|
||
gone away. Poor Rupert Hughes. I'm so sorry.
|
||
|
||
JUST A READER..
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
NEEDHAM, MASS.
|
||
|
||
DEAR LITTLE RUPERT HUGHES: Dear little boy of mine, I am
|
||
writing this with The Cosmopolitan, containing your article and
|
||
picture, right by me, and I look at your dear "little boy" face,
|
||
and in spirit I am holding you fast in my arms the while I gently
|
||
rock you to and fro as my dear mother used to do for me when my wee
|
||
heart was broken, and when she found sometimes the break was hard
|
||
to mend she'd say, "Well, dear, if you can't be happy, then mother
|
||
must cry too, because unless you can stop you're going to break
|
||
your mother's heart." And that always "fetched" me, for I never
|
||
could bear to see my mother weep.
|
||
|
||
So, dear babe of mine, I read your piece and smiled also, and
|
||
even laughed at your expression; but oh, the tears were very near,
|
||
and I say to you "If you cannot be happy you will break my heart."
|
||
Now I am going to try to make you happy, and myself dear to you.
|
||
... I do believe I can guide you to the light again and something
|
||
will sing in your heart and will never more be still. It sings now
|
||
in mine, the while I rock you, poor little lost boy of mine --
|
||
mother's right here." ... I have a curious little "doll" I'd love
|
||
to let you play with -- a faith, in other words, that is so
|
||
immovable and so sure that no sorrow, no evil, no treachery, no
|
||
wrong, no injustice can do more than make me say, "Oh, I'm so sorry
|
||
for everything in all the world that isn't beautiful and good and
|
||
happy" or in other words, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in
|
||
him." And never have I failed to look up and smile through tears to
|
||
say to my "doll:" "Thank God, you're a gentleman."
|
||
|
||
With all my heart I am "little mother" of yours, Rupert boy,
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
(From a Baptist Evangelist)
|
||
|
||
THE ENLISTMENT DEPARTMENT, GEORGIA BAPTIST
|
||
CONVENTION, ATLANTA, GA.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
39
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
Evangelists: T.F. Callaway, E.C. Cowan.
|
||
|
||
Of all the jackassical (apologies to the jack ass) articles I
|
||
ever wasted time in wading through, your illuminating effusions as
|
||
to Why you don't go to Church had about the loudest brag. As if
|
||
anybody cared.
|
||
|
||
I am sure your presence at church is greatly missed.
|
||
Furthermore, you have completely annihilated the church and I am
|
||
sure that even God is duly squelched.
|
||
|
||
I know Moses, Paul, and even Jesus have been highly
|
||
enlightened by your super-wisdom and will henceforth correct all
|
||
errors.
|
||
|
||
No, Bud, the reason you don't go to church is because of that
|
||
SIN in your life and you don't want to be reminded of it. What sin
|
||
is it? Honest, is it Adultery? Is it Booze? Is it Poker?
|
||
|
||
Get your back on that sin, accept Christ as your Saviour; then
|
||
the church won't be so continually pricking your heart.
|
||
|
||
Bud, you might as well try to dig down Gibraltar with a pen
|
||
knife as to attempt to blast at the Rock of Ages. God, the Bible,
|
||
and the church were here thousands of years before you ever
|
||
contributed the light of your wisdom to it, and will be here
|
||
thousands of years after you have made your exploring expedition
|
||
into hell and found out that there is a Hell.
|
||
|
||
Excuse me while I vomit,
|
||
|
||
Yours for Christ and His Church,
|
||
|
||
T.F. CALLAWAY.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
ANSWER TO A METHODIST BISHOP
|
||
|
||
(In the Atlanta Journal for October 12, Bishop Candler of the
|
||
M.E. Church contributed an article of extraordinary violence, and
|
||
Dr. C.B. Wilmer another of much less ferocity. I wrote the
|
||
following reply, which the journal published November 23, 1924.)
|
||
|
||
I do not know whether the heading "Why This Senseless Scream?"
|
||
carried by Bishop Candler's ferocious assault on me, refers to his
|
||
article or to mine. In either case, his tone would justify the
|
||
headline.
|
||
|
||
He invites me to take up my abode in another country since I
|
||
am dissatisfied with this Christian land. But in the first place my
|
||
ancestors on both sides came to Virginia before there was a
|
||
Methodist Church; and in the second place, I might ask Bishop
|
||
Candler if he remembers that John Wesley, the founder of Methodism
|
||
and its leading light, preached two sermons denouncing the
|
||
Americans for rebelling against their royal and divine master the
|
||
king of England. The sermons are to be found in Volume I of his
|
||
Collected Sermons as published by the Methodist Book Concern.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
40
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
In Volume VI of that work there are two pamphlets, written in
|
||
1775, again opposing the American claims to independence.
|
||
Furthermore in Volume VII will be found a letter to Joseph Benson,
|
||
dated London, January 1, 1777, in which John Wesley says:
|
||
|
||
"I have just received two letters from New York. They
|
||
inform me that all the Methodists there were firm for the
|
||
government, and on that account persecuted by the rebels only
|
||
not to death; that the preachers are still persecuted, but not
|
||
stopped."
|
||
|
||
Bishop Candier belongs to the Methodist Episcopal Church; and
|
||
he can learn that when Washington drove the British out of Boston,
|
||
eighteen Episcopal clergymen also left, but sent one of their
|
||
number back so that the church might not be entirely unrepresented.
|
||
|
||
This Republic was founded by men who were almost unanimously
|
||
denounced for their Infidelity, and many of them, like Thomas
|
||
Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and various others were
|
||
notoriously or gloriously unchristian.
|
||
|
||
I cannot therefore permit even a Methodist bishop to order me
|
||
out of the country. He advises Russia, but I decline to go there
|
||
also. Russia has suffered horrible tyranny in the past from vicious
|
||
monarchs who were also religious men supported by the Russian
|
||
Christians. The Czar was in a sense the Pope of the Greek Church.
|
||
|
||
The atrocities of the Bolshevists win no approval from me,
|
||
although it is not hard to understand the excesses of men who saw
|
||
the hideous cruelty and tyranny of monarchs supported by the
|
||
church. After the French Revolution the reaction against the church
|
||
was similarly vicious.
|
||
|
||
As for the sweetness, tolerance, and gentle persuasiveness of
|
||
Bishop Candier's article, I might quote another sentence from
|
||
Wesley's sermons, Vol. II, p. 439: "Why has Christianity done so
|
||
little good, even among the Methodists?" Surely it ought to be
|
||
possible in this free country whose Constitution guarantees
|
||
religious liberty, for a man to come out with a statement of his
|
||
reasons for disbelieving the churches as conducted, without being
|
||
assailed as a combination of criminal and imbecile.
|
||
|
||
I do not object to his calling me "a novelist of the second
|
||
class." He may be a critic of the second class.
|
||
|
||
I do not mind his dubbing my article "flippant and foolish."
|
||
It does not hurt me that he accuses me of telling lies both in my
|
||
article and "daily elsewhere." But I do object to his statement
|
||
that I do not "advance one single objection to the Bible that has
|
||
more force than the common talk of coarse and ignorant men who in
|
||
former days resorted to saloons and gambling dens to pour forth
|
||
such ribaldry. ... It is amazing that such a respectable magazine
|
||
will lay such offal before its readers."
|
||
|
||
The article had no ribaldry in it; and "offal" is not a polite
|
||
term.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
41
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
The Bishop asks what would happen to this country "if all the
|
||
people should quit going to church and the structures of worship
|
||
should be torn down." He asks: "Would life, liberty, and property
|
||
be secure in it?"
|
||
|
||
Life, liberty, and property were just as secure in ancient
|
||
Greece before Christianity and without Christianity as they have
|
||
ever been in any Christian country. Before the Christians ever
|
||
arrived in Peru theft was practically unknown, and it was a boast
|
||
that a woman might walk from one end of the land to the other
|
||
without being insulted. I have a book written by a missionary woman
|
||
who states that she spent about fifty years in Africa walking alone
|
||
through the jungles and never suffered molestation but once, when
|
||
a drunken native was impertinent to her until she slapped his face.
|
||
|
||
It is generally admitted that never in times of peace have
|
||
life, liberty, and property been so insecure as they are at present
|
||
in America, which Bishop Candler calls "our Christian nation."
|
||
These things are facts, and even a Bishop with the ferocity of
|
||
Bishop Candler cannot overthrow them. He assails Voltaire and
|
||
blames him for "anarchy, misery, and bloodshed of ceaseless
|
||
revolutions." Voltaire risked his life incessantly by advocating
|
||
human freedom and opposing the unspeakable tyrannies, murders, and
|
||
confiscations of the only Christian church he knew. He pleaded for
|
||
human mercy and brotherly love, and was a strong believer in a
|
||
living God, though he did not believe in the Christian God. To
|
||
accuse Voltaire of causing anarchy, misery, and bloodshed is simply
|
||
outrageous slander.
|
||
|
||
The Bishop asks "why all such attacks upon the Bible and
|
||
Christianity have failed so ignominiously in the past; why must
|
||
they always fail in the future?" The answer to this is that the
|
||
first statement is untrue; and the second is wild prophecy.
|
||
|
||
The Bishop takes the credit for all the colleges, hospitals,
|
||
orphanages, benevolence, heroisms, and beauties of human existence.
|
||
But hospitals were founded by King Asoka two hundred and fifty
|
||
years before Christ came to earth. Christian ministers fought
|
||
quinine, anesthetics, education, the kindly treatment of the
|
||
insane, and practically every other form of progressive mercy.
|
||
|
||
The Christian Church is diminishing in this country. The
|
||
reports of the churches themselves show this. The cause of
|
||
righteousness does not depend upon Christianity. There were just as
|
||
good men before Christ came to earth as there have ever been since.
|
||
There are just as good men who do not believe in Christianity as
|
||
there are Christians. Atheists and Infidels have never persecuted
|
||
or tortured people for their beliefs.
|
||
|
||
Bishop Candler quotes Dr. J.G. Holland with high approval,
|
||
when he utters what Bishop Candler well calls "those weighty
|
||
words".
|
||
|
||
"Whether true or false, the Bible is our all -- the one
|
||
regenerative, redemptive agency in the world -- the only word
|
||
that ever sounds as if it came from the other side of the
|
||
grave. If we lose it, we are lost."
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
42
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
If I cared to use Bishop Candier's tone I might call this the
|
||
ravings of a maniac or the testimonial of a patent medicine man.
|
||
His principle is to claim everything and admit nothing.
|
||
|
||
If the Bible is such a marvelous agency and the Methodist
|
||
Church so important to the redemption of the world, will he please
|
||
tell me why there has been such an orgy of crime recently and
|
||
always among Methodist ministers? why Methodists and their
|
||
ministers fill so large a space in our penal institutions? Here are
|
||
facts for the Bishop to explain. They are not slanders of mine, nor
|
||
wild statements; they are statistics. Let the Bishop devote himself
|
||
to keeping more of his parishioners out of crime and more of his
|
||
preachers out of slander, and he will do more to adorn the church
|
||
which he will not permit me even to stay out of in peace.
|
||
|
||
The Bishop's claims for the Bible are in great contrast with
|
||
the attitude of Dr. C.B. Wilmer, whose attack on my article was
|
||
published on the same page of the Atlanta Journal. Dr. Wilmer is
|
||
apparently as much disgusted with the Fundamentalists as I am; and
|
||
I judge that Bishop Candler is a Fundamentalist of the deepest
|
||
fundament. Dr. Wilmer admits that the Bible is full of
|
||
contradictions and inconsistencies of all sorts, but he is
|
||
satisfied with it even though he has many unpleasant things to say
|
||
of my article. I could answer his criticisms in detail, but I have
|
||
already taken up space enough. It is sufficient for me that the
|
||
Atlanta Journal publishes on the same page the attacks of two
|
||
clergymen who are frankly attacking me from opposite directions.
|
||
The important thing is that they are flatly opposed to each other
|
||
in things that I consider essential to the divinity of
|
||
Christianity.
|
||
|
||
I have no objection whatever to their attacks. I expected to
|
||
be denounced quite as violently as I have been. It may surprise
|
||
these gentlemen, however, to know what an enormous majority of the
|
||
letters I receive concerning this article comes from people who
|
||
approve of it and denounce the ministers in far stronger terms than
|
||
any editor would publish.
|
||
|
||
The one thing I wish to reaffirm is that this country was
|
||
founded on a rock of religious freedom, and that it ought to be
|
||
possible for a man to state as vigorously as he can his opinions on
|
||
any religious topic without personal attack upon his other articles
|
||
or his "infamous impudence."
|
||
|
||
One would never suspect, from Dr. Wilmer's article, that I
|
||
have studied the religious question all my life and have documented
|
||
every statement I made in my article with the most powerful
|
||
authorities. From Bishop Candler's storm of abuse one might think
|
||
that an American citizen has no right whatever and an American
|
||
editor no right whatever to criticize preachers or their sacred
|
||
text.
|
||
|
||
This is peculiar in a country whose independence was in such
|
||
great debt to Thomas Paine and in a section of the country which
|
||
always votes the Democratic ticket and accounts Thomas Jefferson as
|
||
something less than God. Thomas Jefferson was so horrified by a
|
||
vast part of the Bible that he made an edition of his own. And
|
||
incidentally, the first chaplain of Congress, in his autobiography,
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
43
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
which I possess, comments upon the fact that the Infidel Thomas
|
||
Jefferson was the only man in Congress who was respectful to him
|
||
during his prayers; the others, including the highly religious
|
||
members, paid no attention to him during the solemn invocations.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
ANSWER TO AN EPISCOPALIAN
|
||
|
||
(Among the numberless attacks on my article was one in The
|
||
Living Church, called the leading weekly of the Episcopal Church,
|
||
for October 11, 1924, to which I made the following reply, which
|
||
was published in a later issue.)
|
||
|
||
A clergyman has sent me a copy of your editorial denouncing me
|
||
in the most scathing fashion. I note that on the next page, Dr.
|
||
Fosdick, who considers himself an ardent Christian, is handled with
|
||
equal though briefer contempt.
|
||
|
||
The author of the diatribe against me ridicules my lack of
|
||
conception of the language of symbolism. I admit I am impatient of
|
||
symbols in a work handed down to us as the divinely inspired gospel
|
||
direct from the hand of God and necessary to our salvation.
|
||
|
||
So I must plead guilty to bewilderment at the astounding
|
||
picture of a young sheep and his spouse standing up in heaven while
|
||
flocks of goats are driven down to eternal fire amid a fanfare of
|
||
trumpets blown by angels standing on a four-cornered earth. Your
|
||
critic may speak of this as "the chaste symbolism of a rhapsody,"
|
||
but while I admit its chastity I cannot see its veracity.
|
||
|
||
When your critic speaks of my "misstatement of passage after
|
||
passage from, probably, his deficient memory of the Bible," I wish
|
||
to call him a falsifier. My deficient memory was in each case
|
||
bolstered by the exact quotation of the text and the reference to
|
||
the text in question.
|
||
|
||
Your critic refers to the Bible as "the product of fallible
|
||
men whom Almighty God used as the instrument of his revelation ...
|
||
a progressive revelation of himself from primeval times, through a
|
||
religion first anthropomorphic, then local, then tribal, then
|
||
national, then racial, then catholic," and adds, "Of all of this
|
||
Mr. Hughes knows nothing at all."
|
||
|
||
In answer I may say that I know a great deal more than nothing
|
||
at all. I am quite in touch with the liberal interpretation of the
|
||
scriptures and the theories of religious evolution. But in my
|
||
article I was not referring to the Modernist point of view. I was
|
||
referring to the enormous and ferocious multitude of religious
|
||
people who call themselves Fundamentalists and threaten the liberty
|
||
not only of non-Christian people like me, but of the very believers
|
||
who take the point of view of your critic. He says that be is no
|
||
more impressed than I am with the figure of William Jennings Bryan,
|
||
and asks if I have "observed that there are other Christians who
|
||
are not 'raging' in the same way." I know many of these clergymen
|
||
intimately, as personal friends, and sympathize with the
|
||
persecutions they have undergone. On the other hand, I feel a
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
44
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
certain logic in the attitude of those who insist that the Bible
|
||
must be taken entire or not at all, and who realize that the theory
|
||
of evolution, if accepted, destroys the perfect man Adam who fell
|
||
and whose fall required the coming of Christ.
|
||
|
||
Your critic easily explains my attack on Christian crimes by
|
||
saying that the Christians sinned "because they were men and had
|
||
not applied the sacramental power -- of which Mr. Hughes knows
|
||
nothing. But every time a Christian resists the impulse to do wrong
|
||
and does right instead, he disproves Mr. Hughes' contention."
|
||
|
||
Your critic is a trifle over-fond of accusing me of ignorance.
|
||
I confess that I know nothing of the sacramental power. I read much
|
||
about it and I hear much boasting of it, but I fail to see that any
|
||
Christian has ever done loftier or nobler things, for all his
|
||
sacramental power, than have been done by men who preceded
|
||
Christianity or who have known nothing of it or disbelieve in it.
|
||
|
||
I cannot follow him in his statement that "every time a
|
||
Christian resists the impulse to do wrong, he disproves my
|
||
contention," because I am firmly convinced, and history and
|
||
present-day statistics abundantly prove, that Christians are no
|
||
better than non-Christians.
|
||
|
||
Your critic is really a pitiful instance of pharisaism. He
|
||
refers to my youthful ardent acceptance of the Apostles' Creed and
|
||
the Congregational doctrine as "the parody upon Christianity which
|
||
once he accepted," and "the absurdly unintelligent faith" I once
|
||
adopted. Can he not realize that it is just his attitude which
|
||
drives so many people out of the Christian church and keeps so many
|
||
people from ever joining it? The calm way in which certain sects
|
||
lightly dismiss the solemn beliefs of other sects is almost more
|
||
maddening than the bloody sincerity With which certain sects
|
||
denounce and endeavor to destroy certain other sects -- all within
|
||
the bounds of Christianity and all in the sweet name of Christ.
|
||
|
||
It is outrageous for your critic to try to foist the two
|
||
pitiful youths Leopold and Loeb upon me as an evidence of the
|
||
fruits of my disbelief. It would be cheap and easy for me to retort
|
||
with the Rev. Mr. Hight, who was an ardent Christian minister and
|
||
prayed at the beside of the man whose murder he connived at for his
|
||
adulterous purposes. What a really disgraceful frame of mind your
|
||
critic confesses when he wastes ink on an argument that because
|
||
Leopold and Loeb rejected Christianity, therefore my arguments
|
||
against Christianity are weakened!
|
||
|
||
What a waste of irony to imply that I ever suggested that
|
||
materialists were a "swarm of angels." How does he prove me a
|
||
materialist? I maintain that the baptismal rites with actual water
|
||
for the scattering of actual devils and the washing in the actual
|
||
blood and the drinking of the actual blood and the eating of the
|
||
actual flesh of Christ are the crudest forms of materialism.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
45
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
ANSWER TO A PRESBYTERIAN SERMON
|
||
|
||
(A Presbyterian minister in Macon, Georgia, denounced my
|
||
article from the pulpit, and my reply was published in the Macon
|
||
News as follows.)
|
||
|
||
The Rev. Dr. George Stanley Frazer denounced me before "the
|
||
largest crowd to attend the First Presbyterian Church in months" as
|
||
one who "has so far forgotten himself as to invade the sanctities
|
||
of our hearts and there commit outrages and abominations that are
|
||
unworthy of one who calls himself a man."
|
||
|
||
This is typical of the pulpit abuse that greets everybody who
|
||
approaches a religious subject either from another sect of the
|
||
Christian Church or from outside the Christian Church.
|
||
|
||
Dr. Frazer is typically dishonest and crooked in his method of
|
||
answering my statements of the reasons that led me to lose my faith
|
||
in Christianity.
|
||
|
||
For instance, he speaks of "the fall of Rome" and "the
|
||
salvation of the world by the sweet faith of the simple peasant
|
||
from the Galilean hills." He neglected to tell his congregation (if
|
||
the lengthy clipping from the newspaper report does him justice)
|
||
that Rome did not fall until it had been Christianized for about a
|
||
hundred years. One of the most abominable butchers and fiends of
|
||
cruelty that ever lived was the Emperor Constantine, who
|
||
annihilated his own family and made Christianity the official
|
||
religion of the Roman Empire, though he retained numerous pagan
|
||
institutions and Christianity calmly adopted numerous pagan
|
||
holidays. The kind and gentle emperor who followed him, known as
|
||
Julian the Apostate, abhorred the persecutions that began
|
||
immediately upon the Christian accession to power, and has ever
|
||
since been slandered and misrepresented.
|
||
|
||
So since Rome fell nearly a century after it became Christian,
|
||
who was to blame?
|
||
|
||
In my four years' work on a history of the world I found no
|
||
sectarian work by a Christian minister which revealed even the
|
||
ordinary principles of honesty in its treatment. Everything is
|
||
propaganda. Since historians themselves laboriously twist history,
|
||
it is not surprising that pulpit-pounders both twist it and ignore
|
||
it.
|
||
|
||
Dr. Frazer calmly wipes out my statement that, according to
|
||
John, Christ was not at the Last Supper, by referring his
|
||
congregation to the 13th to the 17th chapters of that gospel. He
|
||
was not honest enough, even to his own parishioners, to state that
|
||
this is in flat contradiction to the three other gospels. I quote
|
||
from Remsburg's magnificent book "The Bible" (p. 132), which I
|
||
recommend to all believers who wish to see the Bible honestly and
|
||
frankly analyzed and examined, and its contradictions,
|
||
impossibilities, and cruelties referred to by chapter and verse.
|
||
|
||
"The Synoptics state that Jesus celebrated the Passover
|
||
with his disciples, and was crucified on the following day.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
46
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
The author of John states that he was crucified on the previous
|
||
day, and therefore did not partake of the Paschal supper. In the
|
||
second century a great controversy arose in the church regarding
|
||
this. Those who accepted the account given in the Synoptics
|
||
observed the feast, while those who accepted the account given in
|
||
the Fourth Gospel rejected it. Now, we have the testimony of
|
||
Irenaeus that John himself observed this feast: 'For neither could
|
||
Anicetus persuade Polvcarp not to observe it, because he had ever
|
||
observed it with John, the disciple of our Lord' (Against Heresies,
|
||
iii, 3). As John accepted the account which appears in the
|
||
Synoptics and rejected that which appears in the Gospel of John, he
|
||
could not have written the Fourth Gospel."
|
||
|
||
In T.W. Doane's splendid work. "Bible Myths," it is stated on
|
||
p. 312, Note 3:
|
||
|
||
"According to the 'John' narrator, Jesus ate no Paschal
|
||
meal, but was captured the evening before Passover, and was
|
||
crucified before the feast opened. According to the Synoptics,
|
||
Jesus partook of the Paschal supper, was captured the first
|
||
night of the feast, and executed on the first day thereof,
|
||
which was on a Friday, If the 'John' narrator's account is
|
||
true, that of the Synoptics is not, or vice versa."
|
||
|
||
While these books are hostile to Christianity, in John E.
|
||
Symes' "The Evolution of the New Testament," written by an ardent
|
||
believer, it is stated (on p. 264) concerning the Gospel according
|
||
to John.
|
||
|
||
"Allowance must also be made for mistakes. An old man's
|
||
memory is not always trustworthy, but we have no right to
|
||
assume that wherever there is a difference the earlier writers
|
||
were correct. Take, for instance, the apparent contradiction
|
||
as to the date of the Death of Jesus. From the Synoptic
|
||
Gospels we gather that it took place on the fifteenth day of
|
||
the month Nisan. This is on the face of it impossible, for on
|
||
the afternoon of the fourteenth, the Paschal lambs would be
|
||
slain that they might be eaten after sunset, from which time
|
||
all men would keep twenty-four hours with Sabbatical rigor. Is
|
||
it likely that the Arrest, Trial, and Crucifixion took place
|
||
within these twenty-four hours? No doubt the responsibility
|
||
for the law-breaking might be thrown upon the Roman
|
||
authorities; but even if this were so, the women would not
|
||
prepare ointments, nor would Joseph buy a linen cloth, nor
|
||
would the Jewish authorities send out an armed band on the
|
||
Feast day. In the Fourth Gospel the Death of Jesus is made to
|
||
take place on the fourteenth of Nisan. This removes the
|
||
difficulty, and the date is remarkable, because indirectly
|
||
confirmed by Paul's representation of Christ as our Passover,
|
||
and as the First Fruits (1 Cor. v, 7, and xv, 20). If he was
|
||
crucified, as the Fourth Gospel says, on the very day and at
|
||
the very time when the Paschal lamb was being slain; if he
|
||
arose again on the very day on which the First Fruits were
|
||
offered, Paul's expressions have an added significance; and
|
||
Paul is, of course, an earlier authority than the Synoptics.
|
||
If it be asked whether the latter were likely all to be
|
||
mistaken on such a point, the answer must be that Matthew and
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
47
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
Luke take over the date given by Mark, and that Mark himself,
|
||
writing more than twenty years after the Crucifixion, was not
|
||
unlikely to be led astray by an error in one of his
|
||
authorities."
|
||
|
||
Will Dr. Frazer explain to his congregation that the problem
|
||
of Christ's presence at the Last Supper is an ancient one, and not
|
||
an invention of my own?
|
||
|
||
Dr. Frazer quotes Blackstone, "the acknowledged authority on
|
||
evidence," where he says: "No event in history is so amply
|
||
substantiated by competent testimony as the resurrection of
|
||
Christ." This is characteristically crooked; for Blackstone was a
|
||
master of legal evidence, of evidence that would convince a jury.
|
||
But legal evidence and historical evidence are entirely different
|
||
things, and there is just as much historical evidence for Buddha,
|
||
Osiris, and the miracles of Mohammed as for the resurrection of
|
||
Christ. In fact, there is no historical evidence whatever of a
|
||
strictly historical character that Christ ever rose from the dead,
|
||
and such documents as we have are not only so distant from the time
|
||
referred to, but so contradictory in themselves, that they are
|
||
worthless in any strict court of history.
|
||
|
||
Dr. Frazer says that "the name of Jesus did not emerge in the
|
||
calendar until five centuries after his death. Had Christ been an
|
||
impostor, he would have been forgotten by that time." How about the
|
||
Virgin-born son of God who died to save mankind and was worshiped
|
||
in Egypt long before Moses (if there was such a man) led his three
|
||
million Israelites across the Red Sea, with all their cattle, in a
|
||
few hours?
|
||
|
||
Dr. Frazer does not refer to the fact that the 25th of
|
||
December, which is accepted as the birthday of Christ, was a
|
||
heathen holiday centuries before Christ's birth, and that the day
|
||
of Christ's resurrection on Easter was the subject of centuries of
|
||
battling among Christians, who finally settled on a day which not
|
||
even a preacher would be reckless enough to claim as the real date
|
||
of Christ's resurrection.
|
||
|
||
If Christianity were true, Christians would be the mildest and
|
||
sweetest of people and the most gentle toward those who contradict
|
||
them. They have been unspeakably cruel not only to those who
|
||
contradict them but to those inside their churches who disagree
|
||
with them on small points of doctrine.
|
||
|
||
Dr. Frazer is quoted as saying: "The church is not afraid of
|
||
truth, and it has been the agency and means throughout the ages for
|
||
the preservation of the truth and growth of knowledge. The church
|
||
kept the flame of learning lighted during the darkest ages." Dr.
|
||
Frazer ought to know that classic learning was destroyed as far as
|
||
possible by the Christian church; that Rabelais, for instance, was
|
||
compelled to stay in hiding for two years to save his life because
|
||
it was learned that he was merely studying Greek; that the vast
|
||
scientific achievements of the Greeks were suppressed until they
|
||
were restored mainly through Arabian sources and in recent years
|
||
have been given to light again through mummy-wrappings in Egypt. We
|
||
are just now turning up in the North American wilderness the
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
48
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
wonderful civilization of the Mayas, whose sacred books and
|
||
histories were utterly destroyed by the Christians. The
|
||
universities of the middle ages did not keep science alight, but
|
||
burned books and heretics and taught nonsensical dogmas and insane
|
||
squabblings over ridiculous points of doctrine.
|
||
|
||
The Christian Church is fighting tooth and nail against the
|
||
teaching of evolution in our schools. It has already gained great
|
||
headway in its effort to drive our people back to the dark ages,
|
||
when their minds were filled with the ridiculous, outrageous, and
|
||
contradictory nonsense put forth under the name of Moses.
|
||
|
||
If evolution is banned, the next victim will be geography
|
||
which teaches that the earth is round instead of four-cornered and
|
||
that the sun is a vast and distant body around which the world
|
||
revolves. Now that American fliers have just circumnavigated the
|
||
globe, let us remember the desperate debates that Christopher
|
||
Columbus had with the churchmen who ridiculed and threatened him
|
||
and all others who taught that this world is a sphere.
|
||
|
||
Numberless sermons have been preached against me, and from the
|
||
reports I receive not one of them has honestly met any of my
|
||
arguments and not one of them has been preached with that sweet
|
||
gentleness so much advertised as a fruit of Christianity and so
|
||
rarely observed.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
To this Dr. Frazer replied in the Macon 'News of October 20th,
|
||
as follows:
|
||
|
||
I do not care in this brief statement to more than refer to
|
||
the embittered attack which Mr. Hughes has made upon me and
|
||
Christian ministers in general. I have not the slightest fear that
|
||
thoughtful, earnest people will give his charges one moment of
|
||
serious consideration. Its very spirit will consign it to its
|
||
rightful place in the catalog of infamy.
|
||
|
||
I do not regret the fact that Mr. Hughes read the article and
|
||
felt that it merited his consideration and reply. Perhaps it will
|
||
cause him to think more deeply and to speak less glibly. There is
|
||
no great probability that his supplementary statements in his reply
|
||
to my address will make the slightest impression on thoughtful
|
||
people. They will be quick to recognize his arguments as a jazz
|
||
edition of a discarded and discredited Infidelity. He seeks to
|
||
substantiate them by references to authorities who do not and can
|
||
not speak with authority.
|
||
|
||
We should pity Mr. Hughes. In my address I said that I did not
|
||
know, neither would I undertake to say, what were his motives in
|
||
writing the first article; that if it were because some bitterness
|
||
had come into his heart, as Christian people we should pity him,
|
||
and if his attack were due to ignorance we should be ready to
|
||
pray, "Father forgive him, for he knows not what he does."
|
||
|
||
I am interested in Mr. Hughes. My sincere desire and prayer is
|
||
that his entire life may be transformed by the power of the spirit
|
||
of Christ. And every Christian should earnestly desire this, for it
|
||
is one of the glories and wonders of our Lord that he can turn lips
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
49
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
of blasphemy and hearts of stone into instruments of love and
|
||
praise. Mr. Hughes need not wonder that his utterances have caused
|
||
a feeling of resentment in the hearts of Christian people. Our
|
||
religion is dear to our hearts. It is and should be a sacred thing.
|
||
In all ages of the Christian era men and women have given their
|
||
very lives in the service of Christ, and when vandal hands seek to
|
||
despoil the very holy of holies, it is not to be wondered that
|
||
Christian people should cry out in protest.
|
||
|
||
I have received many letters from people who felt deeply
|
||
grieved because of Mr. Hughes' attack. Young and old alike have
|
||
told me of their concern that an article of this kind should appear
|
||
in any paper or magazine in this country. It is but another
|
||
evidence of the fact that unabashed Infidelity is abroad in the
|
||
land,
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
To Dr. Frazer's reply I made a final reply published in the
|
||
Macon News for November 9th.
|
||
|
||
If it is infamy to use what reasoning power one has concerning
|
||
the essentials of the religion that is more or less forced upon me;
|
||
if it is infamy to inquire if certain documents are genuinely the
|
||
word of God or if they are unworthy of God and suspicious in their
|
||
sources; if it is infamous to question the statements of men in
|
||
pulpits; if it is infamous to discuss one's religion; if it is
|
||
infamous to publish one's disagreement with religious authority --
|
||
then I am indeed infamous.
|
||
|
||
But so is Dr. Frazer. And so is the Presbyterian Church. As he
|
||
well knows, and doubtless boasts, the Presbyterian faith was
|
||
illegal. and contrary to religious authority in its origins. The
|
||
Presbyterian Church is proud of its martyrs who suffered even unto
|
||
death. for their faith -- being put to death by men who called the
|
||
Presbyterians even harsher names than Dr; Frazer applies to me.
|
||
|
||
Some Presbyterians, when they got into power, began
|
||
persecutions of others and one of my chief reasons for disbelief in
|
||
the so much advertised virtue of Christianity is the fact that the
|
||
Christians turn and rend each other at every opportunity.
|
||
|
||
In everything that Dr. Frazer finds fault with in me, the
|
||
Christian missionaries have been at fault in attacking the
|
||
sanctities of other religious beliefs.
|
||
|
||
It is both pitiful and hideous that the Christian religion
|
||
should at the same time make such loud avowals of mercy and
|
||
sweetness and love, and choose the lamb for its emblem, while
|
||
drenching its history in blood, torment, lies, and slander.
|
||
|
||
When Dr. Frazer says that my honest and serious article
|
||
belongs in the category of infamy, I could easily retort that his
|
||
own belongs in the category of idiocy. But why is it that the
|
||
Infidels and Agnostics must monopolize the gentle and questioning
|
||
methods of inquiry and honest doubt, and the ministers of the
|
||
numberless sects must all scream and hurl hateful epithets? Why
|
||
does the history of their own churches not teach them the
|
||
sacredness of doubt and the holiness of inquiry?
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
50
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
I have had many letters from Macon, Ga., and the vicinity,
|
||
praising me in the highest terms for my article and announcing that
|
||
Dr. Frazer made a fool of himself. Whatever he may think of me or
|
||
my reasons, he has written himself down as a cheap and dishonest
|
||
arguer when he reaches for the word "jazz" as a missile. I know all
|
||
too well what a fool I am, and how ignorant and misguided. But
|
||
surely Dr. Frazer is a poor shepherd when he goes after a stray
|
||
sheep with rocks and shrieks. When Christian ministers announce how
|
||
beautiful a life Christ led and how beautiful a soul he had, I
|
||
wonder that there was so little contagion in his sweetness and
|
||
gentleness.
|
||
|
||
Let this Presbyterian minister read over again the history of
|
||
the martyrs of his church and the horrible accusations leveled at
|
||
the men whom he most admires; then read over his response to my
|
||
statement, and see if he is as proud of himself and as satisfied
|
||
with himself as he announced himself to be.
|
||
|
||
Dr. Frazer says: "I have not the slightest fear that
|
||
thoughtful, earnest people will give his charges one moment of
|
||
serious consideration." What silly shifty argument! I have been
|
||
fairly deluged with letters of the utmost enthusiasm from people
|
||
whose language and manner show them thoughtful and earnest, giving
|
||
my article superlative praise. I have been deluged by other letters
|
||
from religious people whose feelings I have shocked and who have
|
||
argued with me with earnestness and thoughtfulness, though all too
|
||
many of them have resorted to cheap abuse and that intolerance
|
||
which one would like to call unchristian if it were not so
|
||
characteristic of Christians.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
ANDES, NEW YORK
|
||
|
||
Your article in the October issue of the Cosmopolitan on "Why
|
||
I Quit Going to Church" just came to my attention. It would be a
|
||
matter for silent amusement on the part of anybody who really knew
|
||
God were it not for its far-reaching effect in influencing minds
|
||
and hearts who follow your leadership and because it reveals the
|
||
pitiful dearth of your own spiritual life.
|
||
|
||
There are two suggestions one might make unasked. In the first
|
||
place it is always a good idea to write about something with which
|
||
you are cognizant and leave the unknown things alone. In the second
|
||
place, two or three trips to Sara Wray's mission in New York city
|
||
might enlighten you concerning the Word of God. I mention Miss Wray
|
||
not at all because I know her personally but because she is at
|
||
least sincere. Your indictment of the professing Church is none too
|
||
strong but you have never met the possessing Church. And you have
|
||
never met Jesus Christ. If you seek Christ you will find Him.
|
||
Cordially,
|
||
T. LeRoy Muir, Evangelist.
|
||
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
51
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
REPLY TO EVANGELIST MUIR
|
||
|
||
I suppose I should consider it an honor to hear from one who
|
||
not only knows God but has met Jesus. I should receive your
|
||
communication with more awe if I were more assured of your
|
||
credentials.
|
||
|
||
Having gone through religious experiences, I know how
|
||
sincerely your emotions are aroused; but exactly the same claims
|
||
have been made by the priests and worshipers of all the gods.
|
||
Enthusiasts have been equally possessed by Apollo, and the devotees
|
||
of all the gods have gone to the stake or to other tortures with
|
||
just as much assurance of eternal reward as the followers of
|
||
Christ.
|
||
|
||
Personally it is extremely distasteful to me to read these
|
||
cant expressions of sheer enthusiasm. I know what they are,
|
||
and I get them, as you probably get them, from a trombone as
|
||
well as from religious thought. But they are not arguments;
|
||
and I defy you to show from the Bible any definite
|
||
uncontradicted and uncontradictory statement of just what this
|
||
Jesus that you know really was and meant.
|
||
|
||
You refer to the pitiful dearth of my spiritual life. You say
|
||
also: "If you seek Christ you will find him." These are mere forms
|
||
of evangelical speech, rubber stamps of enthusiasm which are
|
||
disproved in experience incessantly and infinitely.
|
||
|
||
I should like to know what difference there is between your
|
||
spiritual consolation in knowing Jesus and the comfortable
|
||
ecstasies of a child who knows Santa Claus. The documents in favor
|
||
of Santa Claus are really much more authentic because they are much
|
||
more material; they appear every Christmas and they have the
|
||
immediate authority of one's own revered parents.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
OPEN LETTER TO RUPERT HUGHES
|
||
|
||
(From a Clergyman in Michigan, N.D.)
|
||
|
||
My DEAR RUPERT: A friend of mine has just called my attention
|
||
to your recent article in The Cosmopolitan under the head "Why I
|
||
Quit Going To Church." This friend undoubtedly thought he was doing
|
||
me a favor, but sincerely I regret ever having seen the article or
|
||
anything in similar strain from your pen.
|
||
|
||
Never having read any of your stories, I am not in a position
|
||
to say that I enjoyed them, but I am very free to say that I have
|
||
greatly enjoyed some of your scenarios; and was more than casually
|
||
interested, I assure you, in those finely phrased paragraphs, in
|
||
honor of your parents, in recent numbers of the American Magazine.
|
||
How I wish that I might have been permitted to go on to the end of
|
||
life's chapter thinking of you only in connection with "The Old
|
||
Nest," or your more recent contributions to the American to which
|
||
I have just alluded. But alas, alas! I am fated to be disillusioned
|
||
almost to the point of doubting your sincerity as a writer of any
|
||
sort.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
52
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
I must say, and frankly so, however, that I am not only
|
||
shocked but saddened beyond words to express, to know that one who
|
||
was capable of penning so beautiful a tribute to one's mother as
|
||
you are credited with doing, should turn around and stab to the
|
||
heart hundreds of thousands of other mothers, just as worthy as
|
||
your own, and just as dear to their sons, by holding up to ridicule
|
||
those ideals which they have cherished so long and so fondly,
|
||
however much of merit or justice you might have thought there was
|
||
in such a stab. I do not question a man's right to be a pagan in
|
||
belief if he is sincere, neither would I question his right to pose
|
||
as one, but I do challenge any man the right to outrage decency,
|
||
almost if not quite to the point of criminality.
|
||
|
||
Moreover, I am surprised beyond surprise that any man of sane
|
||
mind who has been a pensioner on the bounties of the Christian
|
||
faith for so many years as so many of your readers well know you to
|
||
have been, should at this late period in your life, essay so
|
||
blatant and blasphemous a literary role. If, at this time, you
|
||
sincerely take the attitude toward the Bible and the Christian
|
||
church which you assume in the article in question, why, in the
|
||
name of all the gods at once, do you not take the next boat for
|
||
Soviet Russia, since that is very evidently where you belong?
|
||
|
||
No doubt there are those to whom it seems that your attack (if
|
||
such hodgepodge of false statement, innuendo, and blasphemy is
|
||
worthy to be called an attack) was not only blatant and blasphemous
|
||
in the extreme, but brutal even to the extent of cruelty -- cruelty
|
||
to Christian belief in general, I mean. Not so, however, whatever
|
||
may have been your motive. Unsuspectingly, but none the less truly,
|
||
you have turned the weapon in upon yourself. And the coming years
|
||
are bound to reveal how deadly the thrust you have dealt, not to
|
||
the Bible, not to the Christian church (it is to laugh), but to
|
||
Rupert Hughes. History has a very quiet but effective way of
|
||
consigning such iconoclastic upstarts to oblivion.
|
||
|
||
Surely, friend Rupert, you must have been joking. But if not
|
||
then permit me to say further that as a psychopathic study your
|
||
case strikes me as one of more than passing interest. Presumably
|
||
you are aware how important is this matter of motive in all
|
||
psychopathic analysis. I fancy that if you were turned over to some
|
||
institution where examinations are in order that the reaction of
|
||
the examiner as to this matter of motive would be something after
|
||
the following:
|
||
|
||
(1) Mercenary -- lure of lucre.
|
||
|
||
(2) Itch for further notoriety, regardless of the kind or
|
||
expense incurred.
|
||
|
||
(3) A possibility that some representative or representatives
|
||
of the Church have been treading on his "corns" of late, and this
|
||
is an attempt on his part to get back at them, so to speak.
|
||
|
||
(4) It is quite likely that some of his story or scenario
|
||
successes have gone to his head and that he imagines himself to be
|
||
a second Bob Ingersoll; or there is a further possibility that the
|
||
patient takes himself seriously enough to imagine that he is going
|
||
to be classed with Voltaire.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
53
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
(5) The more charitable view of the case is that a sudden
|
||
lesion has taken place in the patient's brain (?) and that
|
||
spiritually considered his condition is not unlike one afflicted
|
||
with locomotor ataxia. His recent wobbly movements in connection
|
||
with the article in question would indicate that.
|
||
|
||
And we should expect that any psychopath would follow up a
|
||
diagnosis of this character with some advice as to the disposition
|
||
of the patient. I should expect that at least he would express the
|
||
hope that one so seriously afflicted ought to be consigned to the
|
||
tender mercies of a special lunacy commission under appointment of
|
||
the governor and that ultimately you would be placed in confinement
|
||
but supplied with reams upon reams of white paper on which to give
|
||
free rein to your iconoclastic mania. Always fraternally,
|
||
|
||
Oscar F. Davis.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
REPLY
|
||
|
||
When you say I "stabbed hundreds of thousands of mothers to
|
||
the heart," you talk nonsense. To say that I "outraged decency to
|
||
the point of criminality" is to outrage sanity to the point of
|
||
idiocy. I have had far more letters of gratitude and approval than
|
||
of blame. And numbers of mothers have thanked me for assailing your
|
||
hell-fire faith.
|
||
|
||
I have never been "a pensioner on the bounties of the
|
||
Christian faith." As a youth I was taught certain things that
|
||
investigation proved to me to be false, contradictory,
|
||
unsubstantiated, and horribly evil in their influence. I said so
|
||
frankly and earnestly and was neither blatant nor blasphemous, for
|
||
I blasphemed no real god but only denied the existence of the
|
||
cruel, inept monster that Jews and Christians concocted from other
|
||
superstitions.
|
||
|
||
To advise me to go to Russia is silly, for Russia is in the
|
||
grip of tyranny, and. I do not believe in tyranny, though I must
|
||
say that the outrages inflicted on humanity by the present regime
|
||
in Russia are the results of the greater outrages inflicted on the
|
||
Russian people by their Christian czars and priests.
|
||
|
||
When you speak as a prophet and say that I am destined for
|
||
oblivion, you may be correct, though neither of us will know the
|
||
answer. I can assure you that I did not write to revenge any
|
||
"corns" that anybody stepped on. I have no corns.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
REPLY TO A CLERGYMAN
|
||
|
||
DEAR DR. GRAFTON: Thank you for sending me your very
|
||
interesting sermon.
|
||
|
||
You call me a fool frequently; I admit it. I am a worse fool
|
||
than you know me to be. But when you say that I want to be a fool,
|
||
you say what is not true. My doubts are due to my efforts to apply
|
||
such reasoning faculties as I have to the Bible and Christianity in
|
||
exactly the same spirit that I should apply them to anything else.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
54
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
What you say about Puritan history and my taking my
|
||
information from a book by some bigot is also untrue. I made my
|
||
references to the Puritans from very elaborate research in the best
|
||
histories of the Puritans and in their own laws and records, many,
|
||
of which I have in my very large library on early American
|
||
institutions. If you will read the Rev. Cotton Mather's "Magnalia
|
||
Christi" you will find far more than I have been upbraided for
|
||
quoting. Or, if you will read James Truelove Adams' recent history
|
||
on the "Founding of New England," which is accepted as a work of
|
||
the greatest scholarship, you will find what a stupid and wicked
|
||
thing the Puritan church was.
|
||
|
||
You say I have not knocked over the church, any more than
|
||
"Bob" Ingersoll did. I had no such hope or intention. It is
|
||
impossible to conquer my own ignorance and frailty, to say nothing
|
||
of overwhelming the vast stupidity and illiteracy of the world.
|
||
|
||
The opinion you ridicule, as to the Virgin Mary. being the
|
||
mother of God, is held by all good Catholics, and they constitute
|
||
the enormous majority of Christians.
|
||
|
||
Your personal references to me and my stinkpots and slush are
|
||
entirely aside from the question. They may or may not be true, but
|
||
they have nothing to do with the truth of the Word of God.
|
||
|
||
I am quite well acquainted with the enormous efforts to
|
||
harmonize the contradictions of the Bible. They strike me as among
|
||
the most dishonest efforts in human history.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
A LETTER FROM A PRIEST
|
||
|
||
WASHINGTON, D.C., Oct. 26, 1924.
|
||
|
||
I am a Catholic priest and I teach Scripture in the College
|
||
whose name appears on this letter-head; it is one of the
|
||
institutions situated at and affiliated with the Catholic
|
||
University of America in Washington. I menton these uninteresting
|
||
details simply for purposes of identification.
|
||
|
||
to take a few of your criticisms, then, in the order in which
|
||
you write them: Your friend who reported his conversation about the
|
||
Virgin Mary referred glibly enough to Matthew xii, 46, and xiii,
|
||
55-56, but apparently he did not know that in Matthew xxvii, 56,
|
||
another Mary is called the mother of James and Joses; he did not
|
||
know that in Luke vi, 16, Judas (or Jude) is called "the brother of
|
||
James" (a different James); that in his own Epistle, this Jude
|
||
calls himself "the servant of Jesus Christ and the brother of
|
||
James" (Jude i, 1). A little fact that you, Mr. Hughes, and most
|
||
other people who criticize the Bible, seem to forget, is that it
|
||
was written a long time ago, in a language and in an environment
|
||
totally different from ours. The texts about the "brethren of
|
||
Christ" constitute a case in point. In the best Hebrew-English
|
||
lexicon we have, by Gesenius, the Hebrew word that is translated in
|
||
our English versions (Catholic and Protestant), by "brother" has at
|
||
least eight different meanings; eg., "kinsmen," "one of the same
|
||
tribe," even "fellowman" -- and the Author gives Scripture
|
||
references for all these different uses of the same word. You
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
55
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
cannot seriously imagine, Mr. Hughes, that for all these centuries,
|
||
Scripture scholars who call Mary the Virgin Mary have been so naive
|
||
as to dodge reading Matthew xii, and xiii, like your lady in the
|
||
story! We have very excellent historical and critical grounds for
|
||
believing that the "brethren" of Christ were his cousins. Perhaps
|
||
I bore you with these linguistic technicalities. Let us pass on.
|
||
|
||
If you had taken the pains to consult any kind of a commentary
|
||
on the Epistle to the Romans -- there are a dozen of them, popular
|
||
and scholarly -- you would have been saved from the error of
|
||
accusing St. Paul of lying. Nothing was further from the mind of
|
||
the Apostle. If you take five minutes in which to read the context
|
||
in which the verse is set you ought to be able to see that he did
|
||
not mean to accuse himself of lying and then defend the lie. But if
|
||
you can't see it yourself look up the Anglican Bishop Elliott's
|
||
"Bible Commentary for English Readers," or if you want something
|
||
more scholarly, Dr. Sanday's in "The International Critical
|
||
Commentary" series.
|
||
|
||
I find it difficult to be patient with your absurd statement
|
||
that Christianity "includes five major gods." When you wrote the
|
||
objectionable paragraph in which that gem of wisdom occurs you
|
||
evidently had in mind the Catholic Church for that is practically
|
||
the only church that even permits veneration of the Mother of
|
||
Christ and the invocation of saints. It manifests quite an abysmal
|
||
ignorance of the fundamental teaching of all Christianity,
|
||
including Catholic Christianity, namely that there is but one God.
|
||
Every book from the smallest child's catechism to the most
|
||
elaborate theology reiterates that truth. Of course, the doctrine
|
||
of the Holy Trinity does offer intellectual difficulties, but that
|
||
is no excuse for misstating it. And nothing can excuse linking the
|
||
Mother of Christ and Satan with the Persons of the Trinity; the
|
||
most ardent devotee of Mary knows that she is infinitely beneath
|
||
God. As for Satan --
|
||
|
||
Again you have quite missed the point of the tempting of
|
||
Christ by Satan. You say, "This means that two gods had a duel of
|
||
wits, or it means nothing." You have forgot your logic, Mr. Hughes;
|
||
those two alternatives by no means exhaust all the possibilities of
|
||
the case.
|
||
|
||
The anthropomorphism in the Old Testament cannot be denied,
|
||
but it can easily be explained. It is not God who is "astounding
|
||
and inconsistent," it is Moses who is forced by the character of
|
||
the people for whom he wrote to represent God as speaking and
|
||
acting as man does. The Hebrews were a primitive people; you must
|
||
not judge them or their ideas by our twentieth century standards.
|
||
I might write a great deal more on these two paragraphs in your
|
||
article, but I must be brief, or you will stop reading -- perhaps
|
||
you have already stopped.
|
||
|
||
"In every detail," you say, "concerning the birth and death of
|
||
the Messiah, the four Gospels are in complete contradiction. I
|
||
can't find anything in the Bible where two authorities agree. Who
|
||
can?"
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
56
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
Why, you can, Mr. Hughes. Someone has said, "All general-
|
||
izations are false including this one." It is not false, however,
|
||
to say that most generalizations are dangerous. Yours is absolutely
|
||
wild. The Bible on my desk has 1383 pages; according to the Theory
|
||
of Probabilities it is almost inconceivable that no two authorities
|
||
in all those pages should agree sometimes; even by accident they
|
||
would have to hit on the same facts occasionally. But fortunately
|
||
we have more to depend upon than a Theory of Probabilities: we have
|
||
the Bible. And even you, Mr. Hughes should have known before you
|
||
undertook to write a criticism of the Bible, that there are scores
|
||
upon scores of incidents not only concerning the birth and death of
|
||
the Messiah, but concerning the rest of his life -- I confine my
|
||
remarks to the gospels -- where two, sometimes three, and even all
|
||
four Gospels, are in complete and almost verbal agreement. The fact
|
||
of the matter is, of course, that the contradictions" are in a
|
||
hopeless minutity, and can be explained readily by anyone who will
|
||
take a little time to study the question at issue.
|
||
|
||
This letter begins to assume undue proportions -- and I am
|
||
still on the first page of your article! Even so, I cannot pass
|
||
over, without a brief word, two or three other observations on this
|
||
same first page. Then I shall hurry to a conclusion with a hasty
|
||
comment on a few other points picked here and there. (a) It is
|
||
hardly fair to blame the Gospels for our lack of knowledge as to
|
||
whether Christ was born 3 B.C. or 6 A.D.; it is a little too much
|
||
to expect the Evangelists to foresee that several centuries after
|
||
their death someone was going to draw up a calendar -- and make a
|
||
mistake in it. (b) If Christ was not at the Last Supper in the
|
||
Gospel of St. John in your Bible, you must have an abridged edition
|
||
-- Van Loon's perhaps. Certainly in all the Bibles I ever saw,
|
||
Catholic and Protestant -- I have both -- Christ was at his own
|
||
Last Supper. Sounds like a ridiculous insistence on the obvious,
|
||
doesn't it? (c) The names of the Apostles certainly are given
|
||
differently in Matthew x and Luke vi. But the same Twelve Apostles
|
||
are meant by both writers. Can't an Apostle have more than one
|
||
name, even as you and I? Peter is sometimes called simply Peter,
|
||
other times Simon (John xxi, 15) and by St. Paul, Cephas (Gal. ii,
|
||
9). St. Paul himself was called Saul before his conversion. In the
|
||
texts you have picked out for comment, "Judas the brother of James"
|
||
in Luke is identical with "Lebbeus, whose sumame was Thaddeus" in
|
||
Matthew.
|
||
|
||
To skip to the bottom of page 146. Did you chuckle silently
|
||
when you wrote the question: "Why is it that Christ himself was not
|
||
a Christian, and that St. Paul had to invent Christianity?" That
|
||
brilliant witticism is worthy of George Bernard Shaw. Christ could
|
||
not possibly be a Christian, for the completely satisfactory reason
|
||
that "Christian" means, as you will find in any dictionary, Mr.
|
||
Hughes, a follower of Christ. I belong to an association of priests
|
||
named at the head of this page: the Paulist Fathers or, more
|
||
formally, the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle. We
|
||
consider St. Paul our model and patron. In our estimation he holds
|
||
a high place among the heroes of Christianity. But to say that St.
|
||
Paul "invented" Christianity is simply to read the history of the
|
||
first century with your eyes closed and your mind hopelessly
|
||
biased. St. Paul would be the last one in the world to claim any
|
||
such honor. But of course, you do not intend to give him any honor;
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
57
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
in your opinion Christianity is such an abomination that you ought
|
||
to invent a special hell for the "inventor" of it.
|
||
|
||
I hold no brief for Mr. Bryan or his anti-evolution campaign.
|
||
But I am interested in the Book of Genesis. It may astonish you,
|
||
Mr. Hughes, to be told that your "glorious and impregnable theory
|
||
of evolution" (I love that!) contradicts nothing in the Book of
|
||
Genesis. Mr. Bryan certainly must know, as you credit him with
|
||
knowing, "that the moon is not a light." But we call it a light,
|
||
don't we? At least most people do. I venture to say that even you
|
||
have done so, or called it something equivalent to a light. Genesis
|
||
is not a text book of Astronomy. It uses a terminology that is
|
||
familiar. You label the account of the creation of light four days
|
||
before the two great lights, "an amazing fairy story." Permit me to
|
||
point out to you, Mr. Hughes, that it is your ignorance that is
|
||
amazing. Incredible as it may seem to you, Genesis is perfectly
|
||
right in putting the creation of light before the creation of our
|
||
sun and moon. The evolutionary theory of creation, whether you call
|
||
it the nebular-hypothesis, or anything else you choose, demands the
|
||
existence of luminous gases surrounding the more solid masses, as
|
||
the process of evolution works itself out. That means "light," Mr.
|
||
Hughes, and if you want the thing in terms of your "glorious and
|
||
impregnable theory," it means there was light in this cosmos aeons
|
||
before the final evolution of the center of our solar system.
|
||
|
||
Just one other of your difficulties with Genesis: it is so
|
||
trite and oft-repeated that I wish I had some way of broadcasting
|
||
the information -- that anyone can read for himself in Genesis v,
|
||
4, viz., that Adam had a number of sons -- and daughters. Cain and
|
||
Seth married their own sisters; there wasn't anyone else for them
|
||
to marry. Terribly mysterious, isn't it?
|
||
|
||
Surely I have written more than enough. Oh, there are plenty
|
||
more errors and misstatements in your classic article. But if you
|
||
are really eager "only for the truth" I hope, I have been able to
|
||
point out the truth to you on just a few points on which you must
|
||
admit you were at least slightly mistaken. It is nobody's business
|
||
but your own, Mr. Hughes, whether you go to church, and I do not
|
||
know how many people were so intensely interested in why you quit
|
||
going that they wanted the reasons thereof -- in The Cosmopolitan
|
||
of all places. But when you rush into print with those reasons, and
|
||
in doing so make dozens of serious errors as to facts, you must
|
||
expect to be called to account for those errors. You may have a
|
||
perfectly well-deserved reputation as a novelist and a playwright;
|
||
I don't know; I never read any of your novels or plays - my loss.
|
||
If you have such a reputation, it does not give you the right to
|
||
set forth your ideas in a popular magazine on a subject about which
|
||
you know little or nothing, and think that you can "get away with
|
||
it" because of your reputation. It was Josh Billings, who said: "It
|
||
is not people's ignorance that makes them ridiculous; it's the
|
||
knowing so many things that ain't so." Mr. Rupert Hughes, you know
|
||
a powerful lot about Christianity and about the Sacred Books of
|
||
Christianity, "that ain't so."
|
||
|
||
I am sending a copy of this letter to The Cosmopolitan and
|
||
enclosing to you a copy of my note to the magazine.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
58
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
THE PRIEST'S LETTER TO THE EDITOR
|
||
|
||
I would like this letter to reach the man who is responsible
|
||
for the publications in The Cosmopolitan. No hint is given, so far
|
||
as I can find, on the title page of the magazine as to the identity
|
||
of that person. I am not a subscriber to Cosmopolitan, but recently
|
||
the October issue was sent to me, and I was surprised to find there
|
||
such an article as Mr. Rupert Hughes has written on "Why, I Quit
|
||
Going to Church." I have embodied some few criticisms of that
|
||
Article in a letter to Mr. Hughes of which I am enclosing a copy to
|
||
you Needless to say it is not for publication.
|
||
|
||
I have been trying to puzzle out since reading the article a
|
||
few days ago, why Cosmopolitan published it. There is a vague hint
|
||
of an apology contained in the heading, put there, evidently, by
|
||
the person who does the work of an editor in your staff; but surely
|
||
that man was not simple enough as to think that anyone reading the
|
||
article and unequipped to answer the specious arguments there,
|
||
would be irritated into going back to church.
|
||
|
||
Do you think it is a wise policy to destroy the religious
|
||
faith of the people of this country? We have a vivid example of
|
||
what that means in Russia at the present time. Perhaps The
|
||
Cosmopolitan would like to see that situation duplicated in these
|
||
United States? Mr. Hughes is ready to "break down and sob with pity
|
||
when he thinks of those poor dear people who were caught in those
|
||
traps of theology" -- whatever they were -- "and tormented slowly
|
||
into their graves" (page 147). I have studied, and even been so
|
||
base as to teach theology, for a number of years and I do not know
|
||
anything in it that could possibly torment people slowly into their
|
||
graves. But I do know, and Mr. Hughes knows, and you know, what is
|
||
done by people who hold the same views about Christianity and its
|
||
theology as Mr. Hughes does, who have thrown off all the moral
|
||
restraints that religion supplies, -- What these people have done
|
||
and are doing in Russia. I wonder how many sobs Mr. Hughes gave the
|
||
innocent victims there?
|
||
|
||
Do you think you were justified in publishing Mr. Hughes'
|
||
attack on Christianity when everyone who thinks in the country
|
||
today is convinced that the greatest need for our children, the
|
||
greatest need for all men and women in all walks of life, is
|
||
religious training? Only a week ago our Chief Executive here in
|
||
Washington in a public speech, insisted upon the "necessity of our
|
||
reliance upon religion rather than upon laws." If you do not
|
||
altogether disagree with that sane opinion, then you owe some
|
||
explanation to your readers for the unscholarly and unfair attack
|
||
on Christianity in your October number. That attack was utterly
|
||
destructive in its purpose; the author did not even make a
|
||
suggestion in the way of a constructive criticism. There ought to
|
||
be an article in The Cosmopolitan in the very near future by a
|
||
representative layman who does go to church, and who will set forth
|
||
a constructive and true estimate of what Christianity really stands
|
||
for, what it has meant to the civilization of the past, and what it
|
||
means to the individual and to society in the present.
|
||
|
||
I am enclosing a copy of this letter to, Mr. Hughes.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
59
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
MY ANSWER
|
||
|
||
Not so fast, dear Father: Don't you prove a little too much
|
||
when you prove that the Hebrew word translated "brother" means also
|
||
seven other things, including even "fellow-tribesman"? Doesn't this
|
||
render all translations too uncertain for acceptance as divine?
|
||
Wouldn't the God who gave his Word to the small nation, the Jews,
|
||
give some help to the translators into other languages?
|
||
|
||
Of course Jesus said, or the English translators make him say
|
||
that he came only to the lost sheep of Israel, but that saying had
|
||
to be ignored or Paul would never have been able to spread his
|
||
remarkable versions among the Gentiles.
|
||
|
||
Furthermore, why do you refer to Hebrew anyway, in dealing
|
||
with Christ's brothers? It is generally believed that the earliest
|
||
New Testament manuscripts, such as they are, are all Greek. Do you
|
||
deny this? The words for "brother of Jesus" in the Bible are
|
||
adelphos tou Kuriou.
|
||
|
||
As for Christ having no brothers, why did the neighbors say he
|
||
had; also sisters? What is the Hebrew for "sisters" in this case?
|
||
Why does Luke in ii, 7, refer to Mary's first-born son and in ii,
|
||
27, to Christ's parents, and in 33 to his "father" and mother? Why
|
||
was Mary herself astonished at Christ's wisdom and why did she
|
||
refer to Joseph as "thy father" in Luke ii, 48?
|
||
|
||
Two impossible and contradictory genealogies try to prove that
|
||
Christ was of the line of David, both tracing through Joseph,
|
||
though some assert (what others deny) that one leads to Mary. Luke
|
||
ii, 4, says that Joseph was of the house of David. Paul himself
|
||
says, Romans i, 3, that Christ was of the seed of David.
|
||
|
||
You ask if I think "that for all these centuries Scripture
|
||
scholars who call Mary the Virgin Mary have been so naive as to
|
||
dodge reading Matthew xii and xiii."
|
||
|
||
In the first place, I think nobody on earth has ever been so
|
||
naive, has dodged so nimbly, or been so indifferent to fact, logic,
|
||
and contradiction, as "Scripture scholars."
|
||
|
||
That is one reason why Christianity has been so drenched in
|
||
blood. That is why your church defined a heretic as one who doubts
|
||
the church's teaching and why your church tried to curb heretics by
|
||
fiendish exterminations.
|
||
|
||
Do you know the horrible and bloodthirsty decree Ad Abolendam,
|
||
of A.D. 1184? In 1108 Archbishop Arundal decreed that "all are
|
||
heretics who misinterpret or question things determined by the
|
||
Church, namely in Decrees, Decretals, or our own Provincial
|
||
Constitutions."
|
||
|
||
When Luther declared that it was against the will of the Holy
|
||
Ghost to burn heretics, Pope Leo X in 1520 proclaimed this a
|
||
damnable error. Do you know how many people the Catholic Church put
|
||
to death slowly for heresy? Do you consider burning at the stake
|
||
"slow torture"? Do you know the history of the Inquisition in
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
60
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
Louisiana and Spanish America? Do you know that it was only in 1917
|
||
that the Catholic Church in its new Codex quietly abrogated its
|
||
obligation to punish heresy by force? Yet in 1921 Cardinal L.
|
||
Billot, S.J., states that "material force is rightly employed to
|
||
protect religion; nay, force can have no more noble use than this."
|
||
|
||
In your letter to The Cosmopolitan protesting against the
|
||
publication in this free country of an attack on the church (which
|
||
attacks everything else voluminously) you ridicule my reference to
|
||
people who were caught in the traps of theology and tormented
|
||
slowly into their graves. You twist it to make me say that theology
|
||
tormented them to death and shiftily ridicule that. But you
|
||
blithely ignore the hideous record of persecutions, crusades, and
|
||
inquisitions based on points of dogma. I need not refer you to the
|
||
thousands of volumes on the subject. I wonder how much of that part
|
||
of Scripture history you teach your trusting pupils, and how
|
||
frankly and honestly. Do you teach them Americanism or Romanism?
|
||
|
||
My statement that Christianity contains five major gods is not
|
||
"absurd" but exact. Did you ever hear Mary called the Mother of
|
||
God? Did you ever hear of the legends giving her miraculous power
|
||
over air, earth, fire, water, hell, and the grave?
|
||
|
||
Did you ever read "The Book of 110 Miracles by Our Lady Mary"
|
||
edited by Wallis Budge, translating from the Coptic the infamous
|
||
legends which in Oriental communities were read on Mary's Day?
|
||
There were thirty-two festivals a year, none of them on Sunday but
|
||
all of them as sacred as the Sabbath, and it meant excommunication
|
||
to slight them.
|
||
|
||
In one of them Mary protects a woman having incestuous
|
||
relations with her young son for ten years, because the woman was
|
||
constantly praising Mary. In another Mary tells an angry wife that
|
||
she cannot punish the harlot living with the husband because the
|
||
harlot was always praising Mary. In another Mary takes a man out of
|
||
hell. Surely this is god-like power. And it was offered for
|
||
centuries to Christians as their religion.
|
||
|
||
If it is fair to say that the Greek gods were gods though
|
||
Jupiter was supreme; if it is fair to say that Mars and Apollo were
|
||
gods, it is only decent honesty to admit that when Satan carried
|
||
Christ about and tempted him, it was one god offering bribes to
|
||
another. What are your saints but gods, whose very bones and
|
||
clothes perform miracles?
|
||
|
||
So it is not "abysmal ignorance of the fundamental teaching of
|
||
all Christianity" to say that Christianity has more than one god.
|
||
The Trinity, which was developed after and outside the Bible, is
|
||
sheer nonsense except to one inside the faith who twists three into
|
||
one and has one part accept crucifixion of another part as
|
||
atonement, and all without losing the common sense significance of
|
||
the word "one."
|
||
|
||
When I call Mary a god and the devil a god, I mean just that;
|
||
for a god is a superhuman being with superhuman powers. And
|
||
Christianity is polytheistic and idolatrous, or no religion ever
|
||
was either. The idolater believes that his idol is only an image of
|
||
the god, and images of Mary weep, speak, shed blood and even milk.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
61
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
It would do neither of us any good to argue earnestly about
|
||
the Virgin Birth (which your founder Paul himself did not suspect),
|
||
since what is ridiculous to me is sacred to you.
|
||
|
||
To me the Virgin Birth is a silly fable and Mary's claim is no
|
||
better than that of numberless other virgins who bore gods. The
|
||
Egyptians had a virgin-born redeemer before the legendary Moses
|
||
left Egypt. You have perhaps read the book "Sixteen Crucified
|
||
Saviors before Christ" by Kersey Graves.
|
||
|
||
As for Mariolatry, I cannot even be polite about it, so I had
|
||
better say nothing. Like you, "I find it difficult to be patient."
|
||
|
||
You object, as other clergymen have done, to my query, "Who
|
||
can find two authorities in the Bible agreeing on anything?" You
|
||
call this absolutely wild. But, like the others, you fail to quote
|
||
an instance.
|
||
|
||
The four gospels disagree as to the thieves on the cross, as
|
||
you know. Christ, in one gospel, says to one of them, "Today thou
|
||
shalt be with me in Paradise" -- then calmly goes to hell for three
|
||
days to fulfill his previous statement in Matthew xii, 39, that he
|
||
would be in the heart of the earth three days just as Jonah was in
|
||
the belly of the whale three days and nights. Do you believe that
|
||
Jonah was actually in the belly of a fish that long? and do you
|
||
believe that Christ was in the heart of the earth at all?
|
||
|
||
Your evasive comment concerning the birth-date of Christ is
|
||
unworthy of you. It is no question of changes of calendar; it is a
|
||
matter of one gospel saying that Christ was born in one place under
|
||
one ruler, and another saying that he was born in another place
|
||
under another ruler.
|
||
|
||
Some of the early Church fathers thought that Christ was fifty
|
||
when he died. A book on recent archeological discoveries places his
|
||
birth at 9 B.C. To me it seems important when the Savior of the
|
||
world was born and began his ministry and ended it, promising to
|
||
come back shortly, and never returning.
|
||
|
||
As for Christ being at the Last Supper, you dismiss my point
|
||
more airily than did the early Church fathers, since John is in
|
||
vital disagreement with the other three gospels as to the date of
|
||
that feast.
|
||
|
||
My statement that Christ was not a Christian and that Paul
|
||
invented Christianity is not original with me. It is simply a brief
|
||
way of emphasizing the tremendous alterations Paul made in Christ's
|
||
ideas (as we receive them in the garbled gospels). The Bible itself
|
||
describes the fierce battles between Peter and Paul.
|
||
|
||
Your defense of Genesis simply won't do, for Genesis
|
||
constantly contradicts itself within itself, and it is silly to
|
||
speak of the "author" as being aware of luminous gases. Do you
|
||
believe that Moses wrote it or that there ever was a man named
|
||
Moses who led three million through the Red Sea, with all their
|
||
cattle?
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
62
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
You are again far too clever when you explain Cain's reference
|
||
to other people by saying that Cain and Seth married their own
|
||
sisters. This is a pretty thought but unavailable. Genesis tells us
|
||
that it was after Cain killed Abel that Eve bore Seth; and after
|
||
that, that Adam lived eight hundred years and begat sons and
|
||
daughters. Surely Cain would have had to wait several years after
|
||
the murder to get a sister: born and grown up to marry, and still
|
||
longer to populate the earth. Yet he was afraid immediately after
|
||
Abel's death that every man who met him would slay him,
|
||
|
||
Oh, father, dear father, why will, you waste, your life and
|
||
skill trying to justify that shuffled pack of contradictory
|
||
idiocies, ignorances, obscenities, and savageries called Genesis?
|
||
Of that truly I can say what you say of Cain's marriage, with his
|
||
sister: "Terribly mysterious, isn't it?"
|
||
|
||
Admitting that my article has "plenty more errors and
|
||
misstatements," it can never equal your Holy Writ, which was writ
|
||
by the unholiest of men and the most ignorant; and which has been
|
||
used ever since to keep men as ignorant, as cruel, and as false as
|
||
they were.
|
||
|
||
You are a teacher of the young. You have a solemn
|
||
responsibility to them to give them both sides. Otherwise you are
|
||
not a teacher, not an instructor, but a deluder and an enemy of
|
||
truth -- let us say, of God's truth, because if God ever reveals
|
||
himself, facts must be his most indubitable manifestations actual
|
||
history must be his scriptures.
|
||
|
||
Like Josh Billings's man, I undoubtedly "know" many things
|
||
that "ain't so," but I dismiss my ignorance as fast as I can. I try
|
||
to keep my mind open and to change my beliefs as new facts appear
|
||
to alter them.
|
||
|
||
Can you say as much for yourself? Did you not put your young
|
||
soul in the keeping of an organization to fill with its own dogmas?
|
||
Are you not solemnly pledged to retain Such beliefs as were pumped
|
||
into you when you were young and ignorant and to consider as sinful
|
||
all further investigation of them? Have you not chained yourself to
|
||
a rock and are you not trying to chain other young souls to that
|
||
same rock while the procession passes by? To "question" the
|
||
Church's dogmas is heresy and worthy of destruction here and
|
||
hereafter, Do you dare either to think or to speak?
|
||
|
||
Greatly as I abhor the crimes Christianity has committed
|
||
against humanity, and the obstacles it has put and is putting in
|
||
the way of progress and of liberty, I would not in the slightest
|
||
limit anybody's liberty of belief and of proclamation of belief.
|
||
Can you or any Catholic say as much?
|
||
|
||
It was not enough for you to answer my criticisms. You had to
|
||
write to the editor and abuse him for allowing me the use of his
|
||
pages. How very Christian, how peculiarly Catholic! but how un-
|
||
American!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
63
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
I thank -- not your god, but the Infidels who helped found
|
||
this country, that they gave us the constitutional right to our own
|
||
thoughts and that you have the power only to scold me, not to scald
|
||
me to death or toast me as once you would have done on earth and as
|
||
you boast of doing hereafter.
|
||
|
||
Yours for freedom of soul and body.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
FROM A CONGREGATIONAL MINISTER
|
||
|
||
(The Rev. Allen A. Stockdale of Toledo, Ohio, in a sermon had
|
||
the following to say:)
|
||
|
||
Mr. Hughes does not know what he is talking about when he says
|
||
that "countless ministers are driven by all sorts of pressure from
|
||
within and without to continue preaching what they no longer
|
||
believe."
|
||
|
||
That may apply to the weak man in the pulpit just as
|
||
subserviency applies to a weak man anywhere in all professions,
|
||
trades, and walks of life, but the real truth is that the pulpit
|
||
was never freer than it is today and preachers never more willing
|
||
and able to speak the whole truth to intelligent congregations who
|
||
understand and appreciate. Rupert Hughes ought to remember that
|
||
spiritual things are spiritually discerned, and it is the part of
|
||
modesty to refrain from claiming authority where lack of ability
|
||
makes it impossible for him to understand.
|
||
|
||
He speaks frankly of how things seem to his perverted brain.
|
||
|
||
The trouble with Rupert Hughes seems to be that he does not
|
||
know anything about the historical method of Bible interpretations.
|
||
He proceeds to call all people fools who believe in a literal
|
||
interpretation of the Bible, and then gives the results of the
|
||
literal interpretation as his reason for lack of faith in the Bible
|
||
and in church.
|
||
|
||
Rupert Hughes closes his article with a clear revelation of
|
||
the complete selfishness of his soul when he claims that his
|
||
happiness consists in letting the universe run itself. The worth of
|
||
the world has been made by the souls who were willing to work,
|
||
suffer, and sacrifice for others, not by those who could escape all
|
||
responsibility.
|
||
|
||
Rupert Hughes is a disgusting social sponge, absorbing all the
|
||
benefits of a Christian civilization, but being unwilling to give
|
||
the Consecrated efforts that are needed to maintain it. He ought to
|
||
live where there is no church and have all his dealings with people
|
||
as selfish and unchristian as himself
|
||
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
64
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
REPLY
|
||
|
||
To A MAN FROM FALL RIVER, MASS.
|
||
|
||
Dear Mr. ----: I had a good laugh over your calling me an old
|
||
Iowa sod-buster; but you were wrong in that, as in everything else.
|
||
It was the Missouri sod I busted.
|
||
|
||
I am sorry to see that a man of such wit can believe the
|
||
ridiculous lies about the death-bed weakening of Thomas Paine,
|
||
Robert Ingersoll, and other "Atheists." These fables are as false
|
||
as the stories that George Washington prayed at the battle of
|
||
Valley Forge, and that the "Infidel" Abraham Lincoln was a man of
|
||
prayer.
|
||
|
||
I never said that the remarks I made were new, and I never
|
||
expected to stop the sale of the Bible, though I imagine its sale
|
||
would be materially lessened if it were not bought in vast
|
||
quantities to be given away by zealots of wealth. The fact that the
|
||
Bible still circulates proves no more than the fact that wise
|
||
hotel-keepers still omit numbering the thirteenth floor 13. Homer's
|
||
"Iliad" is still being printed in large quantities, and the heathen
|
||
gods are still very much referred to in literature. Furthermore the
|
||
Christian religion is still celebrating a number of heathen
|
||
holidays such as the 25th of December, and the days of the week are
|
||
still immortalizing the names of heathen gods.
|
||
|
||
But all this proves nothing. It would prove nothing if I
|
||
should get softening of the brain and howl for mercy on my death
|
||
bed. This would simply prove that I was howling for mercy. Dr.
|
||
Osler, who had perhaps the largest practice of his day, said that
|
||
he had never known a single patient of his to be worried about the
|
||
future life on his death bed. Cling to your religion, if you will,
|
||
but do not disgrace it and yourself by stale slanders and lies
|
||
about Atheists -- who are, after all, simply honest men frankly
|
||
stating their bewilderments instead of pretending to know what they
|
||
could not possibly know.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
To MRS. ---- QUEBEC, CANADA
|
||
|
||
I am in hearty agreement with you as to the self-sacrifice of
|
||
many of the missionaries and many of the clergy. In fact, my short
|
||
story "When Cross-roads Cross Again" has been distributed by a
|
||
church in tens of thousands of copies, and even dramatized for a
|
||
campaign to provide homes for superannuated and penniless
|
||
ministers. I wrote of their hardships with intense sympathy and
|
||
cheerfully gave all rights to the story to the churches making the
|
||
campaign. I have been told that the results have been so
|
||
extraordinary that when I cross to the other side I shall be met by
|
||
a huge band of grateful old ministers!
|
||
|
||
As for cruelty and my omission to mention that non-religious.
|
||
wars were carried on with equal cruelty" your use of the word
|
||
"equal" is the heart of my whole argument. Why should religion
|
||
claim so much and carry itself on at such vast expense of treasure,
|
||
persecution, and pretense, when the result is that it simply wages
|
||
its wars with no more cruelty than the savage?
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
65
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
You say that the Indian has never been excelled in cruelty. I
|
||
disagree with this. Indian tortures were horrible; but they were
|
||
never so prolonged nor so intellectually contrived as the tortures
|
||
practiced in Christian Europe at the same time, and practiced upon
|
||
the Indians themselves by the Christians.
|
||
|
||
The works of Las Casas describe the treatment by which the
|
||
Catholics absolutely annihilated whole populations of Indians, and
|
||
are about the most heart-breaking pages to be read. You will find
|
||
that the Puritans paid a bounty for the scalps of Indian women and
|
||
children, and Parkman tells of one white man who killed and scalped
|
||
his Indian wife and their five children, in order to sell their
|
||
scalps for the bounty. There was one sturdy Christian woman, whose
|
||
name escapes me at the moment, as I am dictating at some distance
|
||
from my library, who killed and scalped and made a fortune out of
|
||
the scalps of a dozen or more Indians who had taken her captive.
|
||
|
||
My argument is simply this: wherever Christians fail to show
|
||
themselves vastly superior to non-Christian mankind, they destroy
|
||
their claims to superiority.
|
||
|
||
I cannot think that belief is a voluntary matter for which one
|
||
should be punished or rewarded. Belief, in me, is automatic and
|
||
self-adjusting. The reason my beliefs have changed is that I have
|
||
encountered vastly more facts than I knew when I thought I
|
||
believed.
|
||
|
||
As a last word you say, ironically: "You were speaking of
|
||
Christian cities -- presumably in the great United States. Find me
|
||
one!" I was using the word "Christian" in the usual Christian
|
||
sense: those who believe that everything good is Christian, and who
|
||
insist that the United States is a Christian nation. If in the year
|
||
1924 you are convinced that there is no such thing as a Christian
|
||
city in the United States, are yon not dealing your sacred cause a
|
||
much harder blow than you realize? Are you not admitting that God's
|
||
only son died to so little purpose that 1900 years after his death
|
||
a nation of 112 millions does not contain one Christian city?
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
To MISS -----, WINCHESTER, KY.
|
||
|
||
Your letter makes me less willing than ever to backslide into
|
||
Christianity. I thank you for your pity; but I do not believe that
|
||
I am pitiful, for exactly the reasons you give.
|
||
|
||
You say that I lack close companionship with God. I might say
|
||
that you probably also lack the same thing. You say that the human
|
||
mind is too small to even understand the very first problem in the
|
||
first book in his school. Then why do you attempt to say exactly
|
||
what it means, and feel sorry for people who admit that they cannot
|
||
understand it?
|
||
|
||
You explain the Trinity very easily by saying that "a man may
|
||
speak of his wife as Helen, her given name, as Mrs. Johnson or as
|
||
simply my wife." But that is no explanation of the Trinity. The
|
||
Trinity consists of God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy
|
||
Ghost. Of course the doctrine of the Trinity arose long after
|
||
Christ died, and is not found in the Bible. But the Trinity does
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
66
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
not imply three names of one God, since one part of the Trinity
|
||
begot another part of the Trinity on an earth-born woman. Therefore
|
||
if your Mrs. Johnson spoke of herself as being both the mother and
|
||
father of her own daughter, and the father and the daughter, all as
|
||
one and the same, you might arrive at the absolutely idiotic
|
||
nonsense of the theory of the Trinity. Nobody ever did explain the
|
||
Trinity in words that anybody could understand. Your definition
|
||
cancels itself at every step.
|
||
|
||
You say that Jesus Christ is the lamb that was slain for your
|
||
sins and mine, and that by simply trusting on him we shall be saved
|
||
from destruction. I cannot see why God should kill a lamb in order
|
||
to atone for my sins, nor why, however much I sin, if I believe
|
||
that the lamb was killed for me, I am saved.
|
||
|
||
Thank you for your admission that church members are often
|
||
just as wicked as others.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
To MR. -----, PITTSBURGH, PA.
|
||
|
||
Our point of departure in thought seems to lie somewhere about
|
||
here: you think there must be a God who created this wonderful
|
||
universe. All right. Suppose there is. I say: what then? You say,
|
||
I must reverence him and believe in his kindliness and wisdom.
|
||
|
||
I can cheerfully believe anything I see; but how can I believe
|
||
in his kindness and wisdom when I see so much cruelty and folly in
|
||
the management of the world? The fact that everything exists in a
|
||
state of sublime order, even if it were true, and due to the
|
||
activity of a watchful Engineer, seems to me no more reason for
|
||
kneeling in reverence than there is for bowing down and worshiping
|
||
Mr. Henry Ford every time I see one of his interesting contraptions
|
||
clatter by.
|
||
|
||
You say that Einstein's science is too much for the general
|
||
public to understand, so "What would we do with the science that
|
||
God knows?" My answer is, God knows. I cannot see what that has to
|
||
do with the case.
|
||
|
||
You say that you want to reverence him and believe in him so
|
||
that you can "enable him to give us something better in the
|
||
future." Why must we help God help us? If he is infinite and wants
|
||
us to understand, the power is in his hands, not ours.
|
||
|
||
Nothing dazes me more than the attempt to prove that God is
|
||
lovable because he is big or because he built the Universe. I do
|
||
not expect my child to kneel and revere me simply because I was
|
||
instrumental in his existence. My right to his affection and
|
||
reverence depends upon my daily activity in earning them.
|
||
|
||
You compare me to Judas selling Christ for thirty pieces of
|
||
silver. I admit that I got considerably more than that for my
|
||
article. But it is not selling a friend when I merely examine
|
||
certain historical pretensions. And will you kindly explain to me
|
||
why you dislike Judas so much, since if it had not been for Judas
|
||
Christ could not have been betrayed and put to death to fulfil
|
||
alleged prophecies? Was not Judas as essential to your salvation as
|
||
Christ himself?
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
67
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
You are very severe on Catholics, but inasmuch as they vastly
|
||
outnumber any other sect and insist that they are the only true
|
||
Christians, how can you refuse to accept the responsibility for
|
||
their doings, if Christianity has really a good influence on
|
||
character?
|
||
|
||
It is news to me that the Baptists gave America religious
|
||
freedom. It would have doubtless surprised such disbelievers as
|
||
Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and various others.
|
||
|
||
Finally you say that "men of your Atheism never give a dime
|
||
toward unfortunates -- do you?" The answer is, I do. I have given
|
||
many dimes, and many thousands of dollars. That is one of the
|
||
reasons why I cannot send you a hundred dollars for your shop for
|
||
the blind. But surely the moment you announce to your religious
|
||
friends the fact that the blind people are in need, they will
|
||
deluge you with money. Or more simply still, you have only to pray
|
||
with faith and the blindness will be instantly cured.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
To MR. -----, DE RIDDU, LA.
|
||
|
||
You say that prayer will cure my irreligion. But I do not
|
||
believe in prayer. I do not see how a man who believes in an all-
|
||
wise and all-loving God, does anything else but insult him when he
|
||
attempts to plead with him from the standpoint of his own pitiful
|
||
ignorance and weakness. It has been well argued that he who
|
||
believes in the power of prayer, makes his God his servant. So I am
|
||
afraid I am beyond cure by that method.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
To MRS. ----- DENVER, COL.
|
||
|
||
Your letter is beautifully and entirely false.: When you say
|
||
that Christ was the one teacher who reverenced woman and that
|
||
woman's elevation in the world is due to Christianity, you are
|
||
gorgeously untrue to history, Many of the great prelates of the
|
||
Christian Church are at this moment in utter opposition to the
|
||
freedom of woman, and St. Paul was bitterly against giving them any
|
||
liberty whatsoever. What women owe to Christ I cannot see from any
|
||
reported statement of his.
|
||
|
||
As to revering one's mother, that is characteristic of every
|
||
country I ever heard of, and most beautiful examples of it are
|
||
recorded long before Christ came to earth. It is done in the most
|
||
savage regions.
|
||
|
||
You refer to the Turkish massacres of the Armenians, but you
|
||
do not mention the Christian massacres of the Turks during the
|
||
recent war, and the general admission by impartial observers that
|
||
the Christians were far more brutal to the Turks than the Turks to
|
||
the Christians. During the Crusades, also, even the Christian
|
||
historians admit that the Christians were far more merciless than
|
||
the Mohammedans.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
68
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
You accuse me of "egotistical ridicule of God and his word."
|
||
If you can prove to me that the Bible is God's word and that I have
|
||
ridiculed an actual God, I shall feel very differently in the
|
||
matter. But are you not quite as egotistical as I in insisting that
|
||
your God and the word you are convinced that he wrote are as actual
|
||
as you say they are, in spite of the fact that I say they are not?
|
||
|
||
Similarly you refer to my "heartless lack of appreciation for
|
||
the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus." In the first place, I do not
|
||
believe that Jesus was or is our Lord or that he made the
|
||
sacrifice. And if he did, I cannot think that my lack of
|
||
appreciation can be anywhere near as heartless as the cruelty of
|
||
God who permitted him to make the sacrifice, especially as the
|
||
sacrifice does not seem to have accomplished much.
|
||
|
||
You say further: "We all know what is right." Again I take
|
||
issue with you. I do not think you have the faintest idea of just
|
||
what is right. As far as sympathy to human kind" goes I am not at
|
||
all lacking in that.
|
||
|
||
You say that I "would not care to live in a country without a
|
||
Christian religion." Again you get everything wrong. Nothing would
|
||
delight me more than to have the Christian religion banished from
|
||
this and every other country. I cannot believe that we should be
|
||
any the worse off for its loss.
|
||
|
||
You assure me finally that "Jesus' blood washes white as
|
||
snow." How do you know this? How can blood whiten anything? What is
|
||
it that the blood washes? If I sin it is not from any desire or
|
||
evil intention of my own. If I am washed -- but I am so greatly at
|
||
a loss to understand what you mean by washed in blood" that I
|
||
cannot go any further. You use words that mean nothing, or in any
|
||
known sense mean nonsense.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
To MRS. -----, NEWARK, N.J.
|
||
|
||
I agree with you that the Bible contains extraordinary bits of
|
||
thought and characterization, much wisdom and much virtue. But it
|
||
would seem to me rather difficult to collect as vast an amount of
|
||
literature from any other nation, without letting a good deal of
|
||
these qualities slip in.
|
||
|
||
Furthermore, if the Bible had been destroyed, all of these
|
||
apothegms and sweetness would be found in other and older works of
|
||
all nations. You quote "A soft answer turneth away wrath." I am not
|
||
quite sure that this is true; but it has evidently been believed by
|
||
many of the animals -- I have had dogs that understood it -- and
|
||
can be found among the proverbs of other nations, civilized or
|
||
savage, as the Golden Rule has been found in at least fifty places
|
||
before Christ, and numberless places that never heard of him. So it
|
||
is with practically all of the truths of the Bible.
|
||
|
||
The early Christian father's used to answer the argument that
|
||
the Christian religion resembled many of the Greek rites and
|
||
beliefs by saying that the devil, foreseeing Christ's arrival on
|
||
earth, inspired the Greeks to steal his thoughts and deeds in
|
||
advance.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
69
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
Then why should Jesus Christ, or those who wrote about him
|
||
long after his contradictorily-described death, be given the credit
|
||
for what they merely restated and often misstated? As for Jesus
|
||
Christ "going about doing good," we should not forget that he also
|
||
went about doing evil, casting out alleged devils into suicidal
|
||
swine, spitting on clay and putting it on eyes and claiming other
|
||
miraculous cures which can be duplicated in the statements of all
|
||
the savage medicine-men and all the modern patent medicines.
|
||
|
||
I cannot see how we are to find an ideal religion in a Bible
|
||
describing a God so cruel, so helpless, so vicious, so ignorant,
|
||
and so blood-thirsty. I have made a life-long study of the uses of
|
||
Christianity and have come to the conclusion that they are among
|
||
the most horribly over-advertised and dishonestly advertised
|
||
nostrums in human history.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
To MR. -----, BETHLEHEM, PA.
|
||
|
||
You ask if we possess souls. That of course depends very
|
||
largely on how you define soul. We certainly have personalities and
|
||
a strong sense of individuality. Where that comes from or where it
|
||
goes, is more than I can understand. It is so difficult to
|
||
understand how one soul enters one body and departs from it -- if
|
||
indeed it is not merely a part of it -- that I find reincarnation
|
||
only a multiplying of difficulties. That implies somebody, who not
|
||
only stands over us and gives us our souls, but afterwards takes
|
||
our souls and judges them and passes them on to another body. As a
|
||
serial writer, this strikes me as getting pretty complicated,
|
||
especially as I cannot explain anything at all -- not even how I
|
||
say "explain."
|
||
|
||
Naturally, then, I cannot understand Christian Science. I have
|
||
known many Christian Scientists who have suffered and died of
|
||
diseases of which they claimed to have been cured. Though Christian
|
||
Science is alleged to be a religion of peculiar joy and
|
||
satisfaction, I have known a striking number who were eventually
|
||
reduced to acute melancholia and even to suicide.
|
||
|
||
As for the cures of Christian Science, many of them are
|
||
remarkable if true; but every patent medicine that is advertised
|
||
has claimed equal miracles and every savage medicine-man has
|
||
demonstrated his own miraculous powers. The trouble is with human
|
||
testimony. I do not believe that a man can tell very much truth
|
||
even if he wants to. If a man imagines he has a disease and you can
|
||
convince him that he has not, you will have performed a miraculous
|
||
cure, in his opinion. But my answer is that, in the first place, 80
|
||
per cent. of the people who get well would have got well anyway; in
|
||
the second place, even Christian Scientists do not often claim the
|
||
ability to cure broken bones. Mother Eddy died miserably, as other
|
||
people die, in spite of her elaborate statements that she was going
|
||
to conquer death.
|
||
|
||
I utterly distrust human testimony wherever it is not
|
||
supported by the most reliable documents; and these documents must
|
||
satisfy the skeptic as well as the believer.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
70
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
The only reason I disbelieve in telepathy is that nobody can
|
||
work it twice, and it is not taught in the schools or sold in the
|
||
shops. It is no more wonderful than wireless telegraphy. Wireless
|
||
telegraphy only became a fact when it became a fact. When it did
|
||
become a fact it was taken up by commerce, and even schoolboys can
|
||
study and practice it.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
PERSONAL
|
||
|
||
ROSEAU, MINN.
|
||
|
||
I have read with interest your article in The Cosmopolitan
|
||
Magazine, and can fairly well perceive the road you have been
|
||
traveling. Excuse me for my presumption, but I am not a minister
|
||
nor the son of a minister but have lived sufficiently long to have
|
||
bucked up against the eternal verity of things.
|
||
|
||
As a test of your sincerity with yourself concerning spiritual
|
||
matters I would suggest that you do without all meats in your diet,
|
||
live to the highest within you for ninety days, and on the approach
|
||
of the new moon or the approach of the full moon I or some of your
|
||
living friends will appear to you in your sleep.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
REPLY
|
||
|
||
I cannot believe that my trouble is due to consumption of
|
||
meat, and your combination of meatlessness and fullmoonfullness
|
||
strains my credulity.
|
||
|
||
Pardon this seeming discourtesy, but I really have no desire
|
||
that either you or any of your living friends should appear to me
|
||
in my sleep.
|
||
|
||
Further, I do not know, and I do not think you know, what you
|
||
mean by "living to the highest within you." Honestly, the words are
|
||
nonsense; or at least they seem so to me.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
INDIANA, PA.
|
||
|
||
My mother, unlike yours, cannot read Spanish novels in the
|
||
original, but she can make the best apple pies in the forty-eight
|
||
states and the five dependencies. My father, being a newspaper man,
|
||
did not have any $50,000 fees, and his only heritage to me was a
|
||
sense of humor and a sense of fairness. The American Magazine has
|
||
always been a welcomed visitor in our home and my mother read "My
|
||
Mother" and "My Father" with a great deal of interest and
|
||
appreciation. The Cosmopolitan was, until the last issue, also
|
||
welcomed, but since reading "Why I Quit Going to Church," my mother
|
||
has banned it from the reading table. Here then is a premise -- Dr.
|
||
Robert Wilson, a native of Indiana and professor of Old Testament
|
||
Exegesis in Princeton Theological Seminary for the past thirty-six
|
||
years, recently made the statement that after those years of
|
||
intensive study of the Bible, during which he examined and digested
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
71
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
every known authority and commentary, he came to the conclusion
|
||
that, despite Percy Stickney Grant, Harry Emerson Fosdick (and in
|
||
this instance Rupert Hughes) there are no contradictions in the
|
||
Bible.
|
||
|
||
Making an appeal to my mother for the restoration of The
|
||
Cosmopolitan to general circulation in the Smith home, I asked her
|
||
what could be done. She naively replied:
|
||
|
||
"You might write to Mr. Hughes and ask him to reread and
|
||
carefully digest My Mother and My Father and then write a new
|
||
article, entitled, 'My God.'"
|
||
|
||
Do I keep on reading The Cosmopolitan in my home, or do I
|
||
peruse that periodical in the club room?
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
REPLY
|
||
|
||
If Dr. Robert Wilson studied the Bible for three million years
|
||
and came to the conclusion that there are no contradictions in it,
|
||
I should simply come to the conclusion that Dr. Wilson had not yet
|
||
arrived at the faintest idea of what a contradiction is.
|
||
|
||
Please tell your mother that I wrote my articles on my mother
|
||
and father as the result of a long and close acquaintance with
|
||
them. I promise her that when I know God as well and as definitely
|
||
I will write an article entitled "My God" -- if I am in a position
|
||
to write it and if the ink does not boil faster than I can put it
|
||
on the asbestos.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
SAYREVILLE, N.J.
|
||
|
||
You have told the readers of The Cosmopolitan Magazine what
|
||
you do not believe. Will you please tell me what you do believe.
|
||
|
||
Why cannot you lie? What is moral fibre? What principles do
|
||
you rely on to make your moral fibre, and where did they come from?
|
||
|
||
I wonder if you are like my ancestor -- Thomas Paine -- who
|
||
told the world what he did not believe; and every day living a good
|
||
life founded on the principles of the philosophy of Christ.
|
||
|
||
I believe a distinguished writer like yourself, Mr. Hughes,
|
||
owes it to the public to give something tangible to work on.
|
||
|
||
Believe me, an interested admirer.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
REPLY
|
||
|
||
In reply to your letter, I beg to say that it would take a
|
||
long while, to state what I do believe. It is my intention to write
|
||
further on this subject. But I believe millions of things, such as
|
||
that water is wet and that sugar dissolves in it and that the force
|
||
of gravity is exerted in a certain definite degree, etc., etc.,
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
72
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
etc. I do not know where my moral principles come from, but I find
|
||
the same principles in savages just as in Christians and to an
|
||
extent in animals. They are known to be far older than the
|
||
Christian or the Jewish religion and exist quite as completely in
|
||
places never reached by these religions.
|
||
|
||
I am afraid that, like most other Christians, you are devoted
|
||
to slandering poor Thomas Paine. You say, he "told the world what
|
||
he did not believe -- and every day living a good life founded on
|
||
the principles of the philosophy of Christ." Thomas Paine was a
|
||
very great man as well as a very small man. He suffered intense
|
||
persecution for telling what he did believe and his beliefs were
|
||
hideously misrepresented by Christians. But if he lived according
|
||
to the principles of the philosophy of Christ it was only because
|
||
the good principles of Christ's philosophy far antedated Christ and
|
||
have been largely contradicted both by him and by the Christians.
|
||
|
||
I do not at all feel under an obligation to present the world
|
||
with a new religion because I find this one bad, any more than I
|
||
feel called upon to offer a substitute for every patent medicine
|
||
that I find fraudulently advertised. I should like to be able to
|
||
cure consumption and cancer, but I do not feel that I must wait
|
||
until I can, before I denounce any of the nostrums.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
LOUISVILLE, KY.
|
||
|
||
Were I in your place I would not attempt to write on a subject
|
||
about which I knew nothing.
|
||
|
||
One who is spiritually dead certainly is not in a position to
|
||
speak on spiritual things. One who is not born of the Spirit cannot
|
||
understand spiritual things. Try reading the seventh chapter of
|
||
John's gospel. It was not intended that your finite mind should
|
||
comprehend the things of God. Wiser men than you have accepted
|
||
Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, as their personal savior,
|
||
and the Bible as the inspired Word of God.
|
||
|
||
I am much afraid that your study of history has benefitted you
|
||
little if it has left you under the impression that the Bible
|
||
contradicts itself. Scholars who have spent their lives in the
|
||
study of the Bible have found no contradiction in it, and were you
|
||
to spend as much time in actual study of the Book as you do in
|
||
trying to defend your opinion of it and helping to destroy the
|
||
faith of the youth of this land you might have your valued opinion
|
||
changed.
|
||
|
||
I am well aware that the ultimate recipient of this letter
|
||
will be the waste basket.
|
||
|
||
May God forgive you, for "you know not what you do."
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
73
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
REPLY
|
||
|
||
You calmly advise me not to write about subjects on which I
|
||
"know nothing." You call me "spiritually dead" and not "born of the
|
||
Spirit." You inform me that it was not intended that my "finite
|
||
mind should comprehend the things of God."
|
||
|
||
How do you know all these things?
|
||
|
||
You say that wiser men than I have accepted Jesus Christ.
|
||
While I am quite willing to admit this and have frequently stated
|
||
it, may I ask how you know who is wiser than I? Who told you just
|
||
who is the wisest person?
|
||
|
||
You should ask your God to forgive you, for you know not what
|
||
you are doing and talking, And that is probably why you are so
|
||
positive about it.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
SAVANNAH, GA.
|
||
|
||
In connection with the general subject of religious
|
||
misbeliefs, I thought you might be interested in an anecdote of
|
||
Robert Toombs, a Georgia orator and statesman and an enemy of
|
||
organized religion. He tells of a dream of his in which he applied
|
||
for admission to Heaven. God asked him if he had forgiven those who
|
||
had sinned against him. He replied that he had not. Admission being
|
||
denied him, he asked God if he had forgiven those who had sinned
|
||
against him. God replied affirmatively, whereupon Toombs asked why,
|
||
then, God had sent so many people to hell.
|
||
|
||
I hope that your article will be an inspiration to a little
|
||
more honesty and tolerance in religious views.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
GLENDALE, CAL.
|
||
|
||
My husband was a minister for more than thirty years, but he
|
||
became more and more dissatisfied with the creeds and tenets of the
|
||
different religious denominations and finally withdrew from the
|
||
ministry. He was always a close student of all religious beliefs
|
||
and a few years ago wrote a book. Thinking you might be interested
|
||
in reading it I am sending you a copy of it. I think that after you
|
||
read the prelude you will be interested to read the book. We lived
|
||
together lacking just one day of fifty-three years. I wish that you
|
||
and he might have become acquainted. He would have loved to talk
|
||
with you.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
----, ALABAMA.
|
||
|
||
I thought you might be interested in a little experience I had last
|
||
night, in connection with your glorious paper in Cosmopolitan for
|
||
October.
|
||
|
||
There were twelve gentlemen at a dinner table in the home of
|
||
a Baptist minister, among them myself. The guests were mostly
|
||
Baptists and Methodists, and at least half of them were Babbitts.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
74
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
There was one T. Marmaduke Hicks (see Sam Blythe's novel). The
|
||
conversation at my end of the table soon turned to your paper. I
|
||
was interested to note how horrified some of the speakers were.
|
||
|
||
The smug banker: "Did you see that dreadful thing of Rupert
|
||
Hughes's? It was the most horrible example of blasphemy I ever saw.
|
||
It was defiant. Blah! It was -- ah-blasphemous. I am astounded that
|
||
a magazine should have printed it. I shall never again read one of
|
||
Hughes's novels."
|
||
|
||
The pompous jurist, sometimes regarded a splutterfuss: "Hughes
|
||
was bred in a Christian home, to Christian ideals. He had a good
|
||
start in life. I explain this horrible thing he has done on the
|
||
theory that as he prospered as a writer he migrated to New York.
|
||
Now in New York one drifts into a society where he cannot possibly
|
||
hope to retain his youthful ideals. The influence of his social
|
||
environment made Hughes an Atheist (sic). it is a ruinous thing,
|
||
this society of the New York crowd that Hughes runs with."
|
||
|
||
Another jurist, a good-hearted man, but given to the use of
|
||
double negatives: "oh, Hughes is just a thrifty literary demagogue.
|
||
He couldn't have sold his article if he had written from the
|
||
orthodox point of view.
|
||
|
||
I ventured to remark: "I haven't read the article; but I do
|
||
not think Mr. Hughes is insincere. No man is insincere who publicly
|
||
declares a lack of faith, Men do not trifle with their immortal
|
||
souls in that way. No literature is so sincerely written as
|
||
confessions of unfaith."
|
||
|
||
Chilling stares. Silence on my part.
|
||
|
||
T. Marmaduke Hicks, office holder, lawyer, and prospective
|
||
candidate for governor of Alabama: "It was a shocking article. Now,
|
||
I believe in men taking liberal views of religious questions; but
|
||
it is dangerous, unpardonable, to veer too far away from the
|
||
landmarks."
|
||
|
||
The minister-host, who had an American Mercury on his reading
|
||
table (to my surprise), said nothing. I said nothing more. There
|
||
was a third jurist to my right who said nothing. A big lawyer said
|
||
nothing. I wanted to get up and cuss a little; but it wasn't the
|
||
time or place, so I held in. I wanted to say "Dang it! You're all
|
||
fools, Pharisees, and hypocrites," but I didn't. I ate some more
|
||
salted peanuts and wished they'd hurry up with the coffee and
|
||
cigars.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
PITTSBURGH, PA.
|
||
|
||
Your paper in the October Cosmopolitan is great. I thank The
|
||
Cosmopolitan so much for publishing it. I am seventy-seven years
|
||
old, and my religious experiences and beliefs are exactly the same
|
||
as yours. I was born and reared a strict Presbyterian, was
|
||
"converted" when very young, was active in prayer meeting, church
|
||
and Sunday school and all that, but about fifteen years ago I
|
||
commenced to unload the bunk, and to-day I am happy to say I am a
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
75
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
free-thinking man. I cannot account for the many otherwise sensible
|
||
and wise men who swallow the Bible, but the fact is, the older I
|
||
grow the more overwhelmed I am with the irrationality of the human
|
||
race, especially as to religion. I feel like framing your picture
|
||
for the walls of my library. I envy you for your courage and
|
||
ability for expression.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
ROSWELL, N.M.
|
||
|
||
"A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind." I have just read
|
||
your article in the October Cosmopolitan, and it reached my heart.
|
||
I had a similar experience to yours -- born and educated in
|
||
orthodox environment.
|
||
|
||
It was the thirty-first chapter of Numbers that finally broke
|
||
the backbone of my religion and made me despise the Jehovah of the
|
||
Jews and repudiate the whole superstition of "Faith." I enclose you
|
||
some of my sentiments, which I presume you will appreciate. I was
|
||
expelled from the Masonic Order because I openly said and wrote
|
||
that the God of Moses (who instigated the thirty-first chapter of
|
||
Numbers) was an infinite Demon.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI.
|
||
|
||
In cogency, forcefulness, comprehensiveness, and
|
||
attractiveness of presentation, it is the best thing I believe I
|
||
have ever seen. I have studied this subject seriously ever since I
|
||
was a boy and, like thousands and millions of others, have been
|
||
greatly disappointed and impatient that the people generally did
|
||
not realize the menace to our civilization through hanging on to
|
||
all these old worn-out, discredited myths and dogmas of the dark
|
||
ages.
|
||
|
||
You have expressed in a splendid way the thoughts of millions
|
||
of your fellow citizens and I know your ideas will have a
|
||
tremendous influence in placing this question in the proper light
|
||
before our citizens.
|
||
|
||
The Cosmopolitan is entitled to the gratitude of all fair-
|
||
minded citizens for lending its great circulation and powerful
|
||
prestige in placing this subject before our people.
|
||
|
||
I hope this article may be published in pamphlet form so that
|
||
it may have the widest possible circulation.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
GREENWOOD, MISS.
|
||
|
||
I am a man, 45 years old. I joined the church last Spring. I
|
||
did so because my wife wanted it. There was no insistence and no
|
||
nagging on her part, but I could see that she was taking the matter
|
||
very much to heart, and to please her I became a church member. In
|
||
addition to this, I steadily attended a revival held here by a
|
||
nationally known evangelist. Therefore, my attention to things
|
||
religious has been greater for the past six months than for the
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
76
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
past twenty years of my life. I read your article in The
|
||
Cosmopolitan today. Its fearlessness would make it one of the
|
||
outstanding masterpieces of modem literature if it had no other
|
||
attribute. Some of the things you write of had occurred to me and
|
||
some of the questions you ask had been asked by me, but most of the
|
||
article brought on new thoughts from a new angle. All Christian
|
||
propaganda leads up invariably to "God so loved the world that he
|
||
gave his only begotten Son," etc. Why was such a gift necessary? If
|
||
it was necessary then why did the Christian God allow the world to
|
||
get in a predicament of that kind? Waive that and admit that it was
|
||
necessary to save the world, that Jesus Christ came here, and for
|
||
the sake of argument admit the immaculate conception and the virgin
|
||
birth, then where is the sacrifice that the Christian God made for
|
||
this mundane sphere? It was nothing but a thirty year separation
|
||
from his son, and any grammar school graduate will tell you that in
|
||
its relationship to eternity, thirty years is less than infinite.
|
||
"Jesus Christ died that sinners might live." Let us suppose there
|
||
was a reason for his doing it; a need for his doing it, what
|
||
sacrifice has he made for the human race? What did he give up by
|
||
living in misery for thirty years on this earth, as compared with
|
||
infinite and perfect happiness forever on the right hand side of
|
||
his Father in Heaven? John D. Rockefeller would be making a far
|
||
greater sacrifice than either by dropping a penny in the hat of an
|
||
undeserving beggar.
|
||
|
||
The most genuinely religious people down here are the negroes.
|
||
The most universally superstitious people down here are the
|
||
negroes.
|
||
|
||
In the last six months I have been absolutely convinced of
|
||
something that I have believed for a long time, and that is the
|
||
more genuine faith the average man has in the Christian religion
|
||
the less that man has actually studied; the more that man really
|
||
believes the less that man actually knows.
|
||
|
||
You are without doubt receiving a volley of abuse from the
|
||
people who differ with you. It may help you some to know that the
|
||
great majority agree with you.
|
||
|
||
I fully agree with all you said in your article, and am of the
|
||
opinion that your disbelief, like mine, goes much farther than you
|
||
have indicated in your article. I believe and think you are
|
||
inclined to do the same, that Jesus of the New Testament is purely
|
||
a mythological character and that nearly all the other characters
|
||
surrounding him are as mythical as himself. This belief of mine has
|
||
been strengthened by confirmation from some of the men I know who
|
||
are specialists on history and say the same thing.
|
||
|
||
Churches are a horrible curse to a country and if they are not
|
||
curbed in their damnable work, it is only a question of time when
|
||
they involve the world in a conflict which will make the last one
|
||
look tame.
|
||
|
||
You explained the reason why you dropped all this bunk when
|
||
you said you had read the Bible from one end to the other. If all
|
||
people would do that, there would not be enough believers in it to
|
||
justify the printing of another edition of that popular but unread
|
||
work.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
77
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
You have burned your bridges and I hope you will keep up the
|
||
good work. If I could write as you can I would give them hell all
|
||
the time, but unfortunately where the intentions are the best the
|
||
ability is lacking.
|
||
|
||
I have read nearly every work you have written in the last ten
|
||
years, but shall take more pleasure in reading your works now that
|
||
I know that your religious ideas are sound.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
DETROIT, MICH.
|
||
|
||
Notwithstanding I was born and raised a Quaker, a study of the
|
||
human problem has been a hobby of mine for more than forty years,
|
||
and the older I grow and the more I study, the farther I get away
|
||
from the Bible as of any value in solving life's problems.
|
||
|
||
For the past ten years it has been our privilege to reach men
|
||
and women in prisons, getting results that are not only amazing,
|
||
but "will stand the acid test."
|
||
|
||
We discovered early in our existence that if we were to reach
|
||
all nationalities, colors, tongues, and creeds, we must not quote
|
||
the Bible nor permit the discussion of religious subjects from any
|
||
theological point of view; and church authorities are so jealous
|
||
over the results we are getting that they have fought us all the
|
||
way.
|
||
|
||
For the past three years, in spite of their protests, we have
|
||
been operating in the public schools with even greater results, as
|
||
you will see by copies of letters attached.
|
||
|
||
If this letter reaches you and you are interested we would
|
||
like to send you more detailed information, as to what can be done
|
||
in moral training of children, without the Bible or Church. More
|
||
power to you.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
BELLINGHAM, WASH.
|
||
|
||
You will be delighted to learn that one person agrees with you
|
||
in every word of your article, "Why I Quit Going to Church."
|
||
|
||
It saves me the trouble of writing exactly the same thing
|
||
before I die. I would like to be rich enough to mail a copy of your
|
||
article to sixty or seventy million people.
|
||
|
||
Within the year about five million readers will know about
|
||
your message, and I hope the seed will drop fast and spread until
|
||
America as a whole is awakened.
|
||
|
||
Should every reader of this article call attention to a non-
|
||
reader, the message will reach more people than your publishers can
|
||
guess. We non-Christians have no boycotting, black-balling,
|
||
blackmailing organizations behind us, nor do we ever threaten the
|
||
Christians with death nor torments, but we are watchdogs just the
|
||
same.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
78
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
The Cosmopolitan Magazine will undoubtedly receive countless
|
||
cowardly back-stabs during the next few years as a result of your
|
||
daring to tell the truth.
|
||
|
||
Religious persecution today is more refined than it was when
|
||
Fox dared to print the Book of Martyrs, but we have all had the
|
||
opportunity of tracing the Church sluggers to their lair. I am not
|
||
afraid of the Church, nor should the rest of the world fear its
|
||
power.
|
||
|
||
Christians who never read a line of your literary achievements
|
||
will now painfully write you that hereafter not a copy of your
|
||
books shall ever enter their home again.
|
||
|
||
The Cosmopolitan Magazine will be warned that no more copies
|
||
of the magazine shall be bought -- especially persons not guilty of
|
||
spending 35 cents for any magazine will take the trouble to scare
|
||
the publishers. Tell them for me that the financial boycotting of
|
||
Church people is a myth.
|
||
|
||
I have been a bookseller for 33 years and have been boycotted,
|
||
black-balled, and all but blackmailed by the Church, but the truth
|
||
remains I am unafraid of being destroyed by loss of income from
|
||
this class of spenders.
|
||
|
||
Thanks sincerely to yourself and publishers for the great
|
||
thrill received.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
CHATTANOOGA, TENN.
|
||
|
||
I wish to express my gratification for your splendid article,
|
||
and to congratulate you for your courage in writing it. I am glad
|
||
to know that you are definitely in the ranks of those who are
|
||
making war on the most abominable superstition and bold and
|
||
oppressive graft that have ever cursed humanity. We need pens like
|
||
yours, that know how to write words that burn.
|
||
|
||
For a few days after the delivery of The Cosmopolitan it
|
||
appeared openly on all newsstands in this city, then it became
|
||
known that there was "some thing in it," when instantly every copy
|
||
disappeared. Some of the holy brethren had evidently given warning
|
||
to the dealers, and they no longer dared display the magazine to
|
||
the public; but anyone could get it by asking for it. The dealer
|
||
would bring it out from some hidden place, but only one copy at a
|
||
time as it is asked for. How shameful it is that such conditions
|
||
should exist in a so-called free country! The publishers of The
|
||
Cosmopolitan deserve the greatest possible credit for their courage
|
||
in printing your article, and I hope the liberal-minded public will
|
||
back them in it.
|
||
|
||
I am writing this to extend to you my modest encouragement in
|
||
the great work that lies before you, and hope that no amount of
|
||
abuse or intolerance will induce you to turn back.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
79
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
LOS ANGELES, CAL.
|
||
|
||
You certainly cleaned up on General Hypocrisy and his aides,
|
||
Censure, Cant, and Humbug, in your article in October Cosmopolitan.
|
||
It has been many moons since I read anything that gave me such a
|
||
cheering up.
|
||
|
||
I have written some five hundred stories, and have been
|
||
trimmed up by editors until there was no guts left. Constantly have
|
||
I been admonished, "Don't say anything about religion."
|
||
|
||
I was beginning to think the average American editor was a
|
||
pussy-footing coward, afraid of his own shadow, until The
|
||
Cosmopolitan published your smashing article, The editor of that
|
||
magazine must be a real editor.
|
||
|
||
Of course I was not surprised at the article coming from you,
|
||
as I had read many of your stories, and noted between the lines
|
||
rebellion against the Methodist control or any control by a set of
|
||
fanatics and soft-headed morons. What astounded me was that there
|
||
was any publisher who had the courage to print it. My friend -----,
|
||
of ----, for whom I have written many stories, will not let me peep
|
||
about religion, race, sex, or any subject that really means
|
||
anything. He won't even let me put in an honest cuss-word -- runs
|
||
it in blanks. He says he is doing what his readers want. But why
|
||
shouldn't a writer discuss anything under the sun? What is so
|
||
damned sacred it can't stand the light of day?
|
||
|
||
The Christian religion has made the white man a blood-thirsty,
|
||
cowardly, low-minded hypocrite, justifying all his foul acts with
|
||
a Cross. Nothing but a club will keep the Christian fanatic out of
|
||
government, out of the schools, out of control of press, theater,
|
||
and police. Your article was a smashing blow at the curse of the
|
||
world.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
UTICA, PA.
|
||
|
||
I greet you and extend you my hand. You have done mankind a
|
||
service. And the service you have just rendered is not of the
|
||
mediocre, perishable kind. It will strike home and do good. Too
|
||
many of our writers seem satisfied with their own disbelief of the
|
||
popular superstition but make no effort to help those who are
|
||
floundering in the mire to reach solid ground. But you have
|
||
surpassed them all in that you have written for popular consumption
|
||
an irrefutable article -- irrefutable because of its analytical
|
||
basis.
|
||
|
||
From the dawn of history priestcraft has been a necessary
|
||
evil. Goethe said: "He who has science and art has religion; he who
|
||
has not these two had better have religion." I need no priestly
|
||
interpretation of this to understand his meaning. Man's mind is
|
||
about where it can grasp science and art -- if it is not first
|
||
poisoned with superstition. You have materially helped deal with
|
||
the latter.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
80
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
For your trouble you will receive great vilification from the
|
||
pulpit and all true believers. Many will feel the desire to put you
|
||
to death however much your last paragraph ought to dispel that
|
||
feeling.
|
||
|
||
I see a new day dawning when these things shall be gone and
|
||
man will be free in the arts and sciences. Then the fulfillment of
|
||
Nietzsche's dream of the superman (intellectual over-man) will be
|
||
on the way. This one article has done the masses more good than the
|
||
priests of all time. Come again.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
DETROIT, MICH.
|
||
|
||
A photo-portrait of me seated at my desk would reveal only two
|
||
buttons on my coat sleeve, a cigarette clamped in my fingers, white
|
||
stockings, too -- and we certainly think alike.
|
||
|
||
Not having a public that can be held at arm's length, so to
|
||
speak -- in other words having to address any remarks whatsoever to
|
||
my immediate family -- I have long since ceased to discuss the
|
||
futilities of religious creeds except with my own inner self while
|
||
out walking on sunny afternoons.
|
||
|
||
I was a somewhat more than ordinarily emotional boy and, like
|
||
yourself, went long on church and Sunday school. I taught a Sunday
|
||
school class fervently.
|
||
|
||
But heavens! what could I do when required to say today that
|
||
God is merciful and just and tomorrow that (in furtherance of what
|
||
seems a selfish end) God destroyed a whole country full of people
|
||
whose only offense was an earnest effort to do what they believed
|
||
was the right thing at the moment. (A number of instances in the
|
||
Bible.)
|
||
|
||
Like yon, I cannot tolerate a religion that includes both
|
||
Heaven and Hell. The God who conceives and perpetuates one of these
|
||
institutions cannot possibly conduct the other, and do it justice.
|
||
|
||
Early in my pursuit of religion I became a convert to the
|
||
Roman Catholic church. Since it is the oldest Christian
|
||
organization, why not? Because it is a sham; an idolatrous,
|
||
incense-burning, miracle-preaching sham.
|
||
|
||
Catholics go to church and to confession avowedly to dump off
|
||
some of their load of scheduled sin so they can take on more. They
|
||
enter their churches on Sundays, slump to their knees in attitude
|
||
of devotion, and while thus disguised bandy words and scandals with
|
||
others apparently equally devout. A religions form 1600 years old
|
||
has not the authority to receive ten minutes really serious
|
||
attention from its communicants. Meanwhile several plaster gods
|
||
specifically prayed to before God is prayed to gloom from their
|
||
niches in spite of the well-known fact that God will not tolerate
|
||
idolatry.
|
||
|
||
Protestant churches are frankly three-ringed circuses designed
|
||
to support the preacher and extend the real estate holdings of the
|
||
parish, and hot-beds of jealousy and clique-claque.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
81
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
Consider the fact that none of the Bible was other than a
|
||
tribal saga, transmitted by word of mouth from father to son for
|
||
years after the events described took place, and consider the many,
|
||
many differing translations of the original texts. As well believe
|
||
Mother Goose tales!
|
||
|
||
And yet, what causes the sprout of a seed to turn upward no
|
||
matter how it falls in the earth; what has enabled men to fly
|
||
better than birds and travel in the ocean's depths better than the
|
||
fish who live there? To what do we owe every good thing we have
|
||
ever known? Perhaps we should worship the sun.
|
||
|
||
I believe that a good and conscientious headhunter, or
|
||
gambler, or what you will, reaps the same reward as the good
|
||
Christian. It's all a question of doing what you believe in to the
|
||
top of your game. If it's inconvenient for others they restrain you
|
||
-- after a while.
|
||
|
||
Men strive continually because they are egotistical -- or is
|
||
it the urging of an immortal soul?
|
||
|
||
I firmly believe that the man who declares himself a lost
|
||
sinner is a fat-head fishing for applesauce.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
STAMFORD, CONN.
|
||
|
||
I want to thank you for your fine article in Cosmopolitan for
|
||
the current month. Like yourself, I was brought up in an old-
|
||
fashioned home, and for many years led the kind of a life you have
|
||
described, but little by little I became better acquainted with the
|
||
great facts of science and of life, and little by little I
|
||
discovered that they did not "jibe" with things as set down in
|
||
Genesis.
|
||
|
||
This must not be a long letter, so I will not exhaust your
|
||
patience with the story of my "discoveries" except to say that they
|
||
correspond with those you have made. What I want to suggest in this
|
||
letter is, that you write another article on "Evidences of
|
||
Priestcraft in the Bible." You have referred to one "Yet plagues
|
||
await any who change the book."
|
||
|
||
Scattered all through the New Testament are sayings of that
|
||
sort, in connection with things laid down as fundamental to
|
||
salvation. A study of these statements will reveal the hand of
|
||
priestcraft. Somebody, in the long ago, was not content with
|
||
quoting Christ, but added words of his own. "Whoso believeth not
|
||
shall be damned," for instance. As though it were a sin for a man
|
||
to think for himself; a sin for him to use his brains, his
|
||
intellect, God-given, but must needs "believe" something his mind
|
||
rejects, just because this somebody in the long ago said he must.
|
||
It is safe to contend that some of the teachings of Paul have also
|
||
been twisted to suit some priestly mind, or else Paul himself was
|
||
a narrow-minded bigot. (Not necessary here to go into this.) Once
|
||
started along this line, you will note very many decidedly human
|
||
things woven into the scriptures, strongly suggesting the hand of
|
||
the early church.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
82
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
It is high time that men like yourself, and others like-
|
||
minded, give thought to these things, to the end that a newer and
|
||
more sensible religion that can fully satisfy thinking men and
|
||
women, be given to the world. Religion is needed by humanity. There
|
||
seems to be no doubt about that. Must it be forever a lying,
|
||
deceitful religion? Are the people boobs" that they love that sort
|
||
of thing? Sometimes I think they are. Still I do believe there are
|
||
thousands of thinking people, who might be gotten together in some
|
||
way, to the end that discussion might be had, and a start made,
|
||
toward a more rational religion for a world sadly in need of it
|
||
just now.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
CHICAGO, ILL.
|
||
|
||
I was quite amazed that a writer of your standing actually had
|
||
the "guts" to tell the world what he thought of the Bible and the
|
||
Christian religion.
|
||
|
||
May I congratulate you on your courage, Mr. Hughes?
|
||
|
||
It is indeed a pleasure to find out that my favorite writer is
|
||
not a hypocrite.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
TULSA, OKLAHOMA.
|
||
|
||
We are three traveling men, of different denominations, who
|
||
happen to entertain the liberal views which you so ably expressed,
|
||
and want to commend you on your courageous stand on a matter which
|
||
so vitally affects the millions of this world.
|
||
|
||
We find you giving expression to ideas which, we discovered in
|
||
our discussion, have been harbored by each of us in various forms.
|
||
We have been brought up in strict orthodox religious teaching, in
|
||
our different creeds, thoroughly imbued with the idea that our
|
||
religion, and ourselves, was infallible. Would that this world
|
||
contained more "sinners" such as you, and if it were possible to
|
||
convert some of the religious fanatics of all beliefs to your
|
||
creed, this would indeed be a better world to live in.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
ALBANY, GA.
|
||
|
||
I have read your reply to the Rev. ----- and I like the way
|
||
you handled him. I am satisfied that you won't hear from him any
|
||
more and I want to say to you that you have made thousands of
|
||
friends and admirers all over Georgia and your friends are all of
|
||
the better class. They rank among the judges of our courts, and the
|
||
best women of the State are praising Rupert Hughes for having nerve
|
||
enough to say what you think and think what you please, regardless
|
||
of the opposition of the army of sky-pilots.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
83
|
||
|
||
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
|
||
|
||
CAPE MAY, N.J.
|
||
|
||
Why take the trouble to knock those dear ridiculous old Bible
|
||
tales that used to give us so much delight in youth -- and still
|
||
do? You'll be coming out pretty soon and saying you don't believe
|
||
that the adventures of Puss in Boots are strictly true.
|
||
|
||
You remind me of the Lord Chancellor in "Iolanthe." When they
|
||
told him that the lady was 18 and the lad 23 he remarked with
|
||
ponderous judicial gravity. "I don't believe she is his mother!"
|
||
|
||
Have a heart.
|
||
|
||
I like you and I like your books.
|
||
_____
|
||
|
||
ST. LOUIS, Mo.
|
||
|
||
It is certainly cheering to come across such an article as you
|
||
have been permitted to give to the world. In these days when the
|
||
hypocrite and liar is over-running the land, especially in these
|
||
United States, it is heartening to see recorded, and on the pages
|
||
of a non-concurring journal, the honest conviction of a searcher
|
||
for the truth.
|
||
|
||
To me the Christians' creed is a hideous jangle of fables,
|
||
filthy legends, and lies, a creed that should put to shame even
|
||
such a god as the Christians pretend to worship. Church membership
|
||
is now merely a commercial asset.
|
||
|
||
The Christians have never lifted themselves up even to that
|
||
god in whom they pretend to believe, but have consistently dragged
|
||
down even him to their (the Christians') level. Destroying, in
|
||
their brazen effrontery, the idols of other peoples, they have
|
||
erected in their stead thousands much more vicious, malignant, and
|
||
hideous.
|
||
|
||
The Christians' god is to me non-existent. He is an idol
|
||
fabricated in a brain enmeshed in the cobwebs of religious
|
||
superstition. If he were the ideal spirit which they pretend to
|
||
believe him, if he were all-wise, all-good, then every prayer
|
||
uttered by a Christian is a blasphemy. If he were omniscient,
|
||
omnipresent, omnipotent, he should need no guidance or control in
|
||
the management of the little sphere on which we crawl from those
|
||
who crawl. Does not the life of the pretender to a religious belief
|
||
in almost every instance belie this pretended belief? If he were
|
||
honest would he not shrink in horror at the fate which, according
|
||
to his pretended belief, awaits the hypocrite and liar?
|
||
|
||
The Christian creed is tottering. It is tottering because it
|
||
is built on a foundation of falsehood and degrading fable --
|
||
tottering because the walls of its super-structure are soaked in
|
||
the blood of the victims of its fanaticism -- tottering because it
|
||
has fostered Superstition and Selfishness, the cardinal vices of
|
||
the human race.
|
||
|
||
More power to your pen.
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
84
|
||
|