Part 20 (1/2)
Protestantism is better than Catholicism, because there is less of it.
Both dread education. They say they brought the arts and sciences out of the dark ages; why, they made the dark ages and what did they preserve? Nothing of value, only an account of events that never happened. What did they teach the world! Slavery!
The best country the sun ever shown upon is the northern part of the United States, and there you will find less religion than anywhere else on the face of the earth. You will find here more people that don't believe the bible, and you will find better husbands, better wives, happier homes, where the women are most respected and where the children get less blows and more huggings and kissings. We have improved just as we lost this religion and this superst.i.tion.
Great Britain is the religious nation par excellence, and there you will find the most cant and most hypocrisy. They are always thanking G.o.d that they have killed somebody. Look at the opium war with China.
They forced the Chinese to open their ports and receive the deadly drug, and then had the impudence to send a lot of driveling idiots of missionaries into China.
Go around the world, and where you find the least superst.i.tion, there you will find the best men, the best women, the best children. Two powerful levers are at work; love and intelligence. The true test of a man is generosity, that covers a mult.i.tude of sins.
They have got so now they d.a.m.n a man on a technicality. You must be baptized by immersion, sprinkling or pouring. If you come to the day of judgment and can't show the watermark, you're d.a.m.ned!
What more: That a fellow named Adam, whom you don't know and never voted for, is your representative. You are charged with his sins.
Equally abused is the doctrine of atonement, that you are created with the sacrifice of another. If Christ had more virtue than Adam had meanness, then you are ahead.
Atonement is the corner-stone of the Christian religion. But there is one great objection. It saves the wrong man, and it is not honest.
(In holding up the atonement to ridicule the orator said: ”If Judas had failed to betray Christ, the mother of Christ would be in h.e.l.l today.” Then he ridiculed the miracles recorded in the new testament, p.r.o.nounced them absurdities. He said that the four apostolic writers were very contradictory in their statements, and did not even agree as to the last word of this great man.)
The ascension was the most striking, the grandest of the miracles, if true, yet the ascension is only recorded by two of these writers. If He was G.o.d, I know he will forgive somebody for not believing the miracles, unless convinced.
Another contradiction in the book: in one gospel the condition of salvation is ”whosoever believeth shall not be d.a.m.ned,” and in another we are promised that if we forgive our enemies G.o.d will forgive us--and there's sense in this last promise. The first I believe a lie--it was never spoken by G.o.d.
Christ said: Love your enemies. n.o.body can do that. The doctrine of Confucius is sound--to love one's friends and to do justice to one's enemies without any mixture of revenge.
If Christ was G.o.d, did He not know on His cross what crimes would be done in His name? Why didn't He settle all disputes about the trinity and about baptism? Why didn't He post His disciples? Because He could no more see into the future than I can. Only in this way can you acquit him of the crimes committed in His name. The way to save our own souls is to save another soul. G.o.d can't turn into h.e.l.l a man who makes on this earth a little heaven for himself, wife and babes.
Any minister who preaches the doctrine of h.e.l.l ought to be ashamed. I want, if I can while I live, to put an end to all belief in this infamous doctrine. That doctrine has done incalculable harm, wrought incalculable injury. I despise it, and I defy it.
The orthodox church says that religion does good; that it restrains crime. It restrains a man from artificial, not from natural crimes. A man can be made so religious that he will not eat meat on Friday, yet he will steal.
Did you ever hear of a tramp coming to town and inquiring where the deacon of the Presbyterian church lived.
The bible says consider the lilies. What good would it do a naked man standing out in the bitter blasts of this night to consider the lilies.
What is the social position of a man in heaven who through all eternity remembers that if he had had a grain of courage he would never have been there.
The realization of our day does not satisfy the intelligence of the people--the people have outgrown it. It shocks us and we have got to have another religion. We must have a religion of charity; one that will do away with poverty, close the prisons and cover this world with homes.
Ingersoll's Lecture on Heretics and Heresies
”Liberty, a word without which--All other words are vain.”
Whoever has an opinion of his own, and honestly expresses it, will be guilty of heresy. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is a name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak. This word was born of the hatred, arrogance, and cruelty of those who love their enemies, and who, when smitten on one cheek, turn the other. This word was born of intellectual slavery in the feudal ages of thought. It was an epithet used in the place of argument. From the commencement of the Christian era, every art has been exhausted, and every conceivable punishment inflicted to force all people to hold the same religious opinions. This effort was born of the idea that a certain belief was necessary to the salvation of the soul. Christ taught, and the church still teaches, that unbelief is the blackest of crimes. G.o.d is supposed to hate with an infinite and implacable hatred, every heretic upon the earth, and the heretics who have died are supposed, at this moment, to be suffering the agonies of the d.a.m.ned. The church persecutes the living, and her G.o.d burns the dead.
It is claimed that G.o.d wrote a book called the bible, and it is generally admitted that this book is somewhat difficult to understand.
As long as the church had all the copies of this book, and the people were not allowed to read it, there was comparatively little heresy in the world; but when it was printed and read, people began honestly to differ as to its meaning. A few were independent and brave enough to give the world their real thoughts, and for the extermination of these men the church used all her power. Protestants and Catholics vied with each other in the work of enslaving the human mind. For ages they were rivals in the infamous effort to rid the earth of honest people. They infested every country, every city, town, hamlet, and family. They appealed to the worst pa.s.sions of the human heart. They sowed the seeds of discord and hatred in every land. Brother denounced brother, wives informed against their husbands, mothers accused their children, dungeons were crowded with the innocent; the flesh of the good and true rotted in the clasp of chains, the flames devoured the heroic, and in the name of the most merciful G.o.d, his children were exterminated with famine, sword and fire. Over the wild waves of battle rose and fell the banner of Jesus Christ. For sixteen hundred years the robes of the church were red with innocent blood. The ingenuity of Christians was exhausted in devising punishment severe enough to be inflicted upon other Christians who honestly and sincerely differed with them upon any point whatever.
Give any orthodox church the power, and today they would punish heresy with whip, and chain, and fire. As long as a church deemed a certain belief essential to salvation, just so long it will kill and burn if it has the power. Why should the church pity a man whom her G.o.d hates?