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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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Why I Quit Going to Church
With Answers to Critics and
Correspondents
By Rupert Hughes
Author of "THE OLD NEST," "WITHIN THESE WALLS,"
EXCUSE ME," Etc.
Freethought Press Association
New York
**** ****
Copyright, 1924,
By THE COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE CO., INC.
Copyright, 1925,
By RUPERT HUGHES
Printed in the U. S. A.
**** ****
WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
There was a time in this country when I should have been
punished for not going to church. In the good old Puritan and
Pilgrim days, though only a third or a sixth of the citizens were
church members, the parsons were in power and they fined people and
put them in the stocks if they stayed away or if the pastor did not
like their expressions.
They whipped more than one for criticizing a sermon. They
tried to sell two Boston children into slavery because they could
not pay their fine for staying away from the church. And they would
have done it, too, if the ungodly shipmasters had not refused to
carry the children off.
It is incessantly astonishing how often the laity have had to
restrain the clergy from cruelty. The Puritan elders held that "the
gathering of sticks on the Sabbath may be punished with death."
Sometimes a mob would rescue Quaker women from the whips, but in
Cambridge, Benanuel Bower, a Quaker who obstinately stayed away
from the Puritan church, was fined annually for twenty years,
hauled down a flight of steps by the heels, kept in prison for more
than a year, and with his wife publicly whipped several times.
But in these wicked and degenerate times, not only can I stay
away from church without getting arrested, but I can tell why
without being any more than reviled.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
I did not quit going to church because I was lazy or frivolous
or poetically inclined to "worship God in the Great Outdoors near
to Nature's Heart." I don't believe that nature has a heart.
I quit because I came to believe that what is preached in the
churches is mainly untrue and unimportant, tiresome, hostile to
genuine progress, and in general not worth while. As for the
necessity of paying homage to the deity, I began to feel that I did
not know enough about God to pay him set compliments on set days.
As for the God who is preached in the churches, I ceased to worship
him because I could no longer believe in him or respect what is
alleged of him.
I cannot respect a deity who would want or even endure the
hideous monotony and mechanism of most of the worship paid him by
hired men, hired prayer-makers and their supporters. When I think
of the millions of repetitions of the same phrases of prayer and
song smoking up to a helpless deity I feel sorry for him. No wonder
he gets farther away each year. No wonder the ex-priest Alfred
Loisy says (in his "My Duel with the Vatican") that "the eternal
immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, etc.," who created the universe
"by a caprice very imperfectly benevolent ... begins to be
conceived with increasing difficulty."
As for the picture of God in heaven, "sitting on the Cherubim"
or riding on a cherub (2 Samuel xxii, 11), and listening to
everlasting praises of himself, it is simply appalling. I can no
longer adore in a god what I despise in a man.
I say this in no spirit of cheap defiance, like Ajax defying
the lightning, for the statement puts me with such an enormous
majority that it carries no distinction. The God of the Christians
never has been believed in by as much as a tenth of the world's
population. Two or three other religions have today far more
followers; and, even in this country, a great many millions less
than half of the population is even "affiliated" with any of the
churches. About 40 per cent. of the free population is affiliated
with one church or another, and about 90 per cent of the criminals
in the penitentiaries. That is the only place where the church
people have a pronounced majority.
In our nation of over 110 million inhabitants, the latest
church census claimed less than 48 million church members of all
denominations, including all Catholic children over seven years of
age. all Jews, Mormons, Unitarians, etc.
Church mathematics is almost as unreliable as church history.
Some enthusiasts have claimed that the church is gaining on the
population, having increased 118 per cent. in the last 32 years,
while the population increased only 68 per cent.
Thus they say (using their own wild figures for the church and
the government's censuses for the population) that in 1890 there
were 21,500,000 church members in a nation of 63,000,000 people; in
1922, there were all of 47,500,000 church members in a population
of only 108,000,000.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
They overlook the fact that according to their own figures
there were in this country only 42 million People outside the
church in 1890 and in 1922 sixty million outside; or practically as
many outside the church now as there were in the entire nation in
1890.
The trick of percentages is dangerous. I joined a club in 1904
that had only ten members. In twenty years it has increased 3,000
per cent. while the population has increased only 68 per cent. The
club now numbers 300 members and the population only 112 million.
An important point to remember also is that while the
governmental censuses are fairly accurate, the church figures are
ridiculous by their own admission.
The Rector of Trinity Church recently quoted with approval a
statement that "the membership claims, in all honesty, are about 50
per cent. too high. In other words, millions of names are on the
church rolls because the churches keep them there, and not because
their owners by any legitimate right claim membership."
This would reduce the membership to 24 million, still
including all Catholic children over seven.
The Christian Herald recently requested 1200 newspapers to
gather data on church attendance, and the results indicated that 36
per cent. of the population are regular attendants, 64 per cent.
casual or non-attendants.
Exhaustive studies just made by the Institute of Social and
Religious Research show that the rural attendance is now only half
as great as it was a generation ago. In a typical Vermont
community, in spite of an increase of population, attendance has
decreased 52 per cent. Reading an old church magazine of 1808 the
other night, I learned that even back there the churches were
almost deserted and that the country was in a godless condition.
The World Service Commission of the Methodist Church notes a
decrease of $4,000,000 in its receipts last year. The gifts to the
Presbyterian missionary causes decreased $50,000 in the first half
of the year. The deficit for the Methodist publications was nearly
$750,000. In the Christian Advocate, which lost a hundred thousand
dollars, it was stated that there is not a single Christian left in
one of the very homes of early Christianity in the Orient.
As for those who are affiliated, I cannot believe that a very
large percentage is sincerely convinced. Recently in New York a
pastor read the Apostles' Creed through to a large congregation and
asked everybody who believed it to stand up. Not one person arose!
The anonymous author of a recent magazine article called "Why I Go
to Church" admitted that he did not believe any of the creed.
I once knew that creed by heart, repeated it aloud with
sincerity, and believed that I believed it. Now while I recognize
the music, poetry, and eloquence of it, I do not believe a word of
it, and it offends such intelligence and information as I happen to
have.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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WHY I QUIT GOING TO CHURCH
From numberless conversations with church-members and church-
goers I am honestly assured that very, very few of them really
believe in their heart of hearts one-quarter of what their church-
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
within and without to continue preaching what they no longer
believe. They do it for the imaginary good of their poor
congregations, as nice people go on telling infants that there is
a Santa Claus.
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
any good by promulgating false ideas and false ideals.
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
one of the greatest purveyors of falsehood and mischief that ever
lived.
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
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.
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
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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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
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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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
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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.
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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
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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."
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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.
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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
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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.
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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!
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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."
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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.
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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
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"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
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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.
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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:
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"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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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,
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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?
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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