If there is anything in religious inheritance, or in the influence
of a religious environment, I should be, if not an actual Pastor of
a flock, at least one of the most devout of the faithful, a snooping
Brother concerned only with good works. But instead of carrying on the
work of my forefathers I find myself full of contempt for the Church,
and disgust for the forms of religion. To me such things are silly; I
cannot understand how grown people can believe in them, or how they can
repress their giggles as they listen to the ministerial platitudes and
perform such mummeries as are the rule in all churches.
Never since the night of my “conversion” have I gone into a church to
worship. I have frequently entered such dens of righteousness, but my
visits, except for a few that I made soon after Brother McConnell’s
revival meeting to please my father and mother, have been on newspaper
assignment or out of curiosity. I have inquired into the doctrine of
almost every sect that has adherents in America, but in none of them
have I been able to find any sign of a true and beneficent God. I can
see only groups of sanctimonious, self-seeking Little Jack Horners
chasing about poking their fingers into someone else’s pie, and then
shouting gleefully: “Look at me, God! Look what I found! Ooooh! Ain’t
it nice and smutty?” They cannot practice their religion without
prancing and cavorting before the public eye; they are constantly
showing off. They are not so much concerned with the glory of God as
with the glory of the front page. And what time they are not whirling
giddily in such imbecilities, they are engaged in disgusting squabbles
among themselves as to who shall have the local agency for purveying
religion; they want to copyright salvation in the name of their
particular sect.
On all sides we hear that religion is the greatest thing in the world
and that mankind’s chief need is more of it. But it is my conviction
that mankind would be infinitely better off with less of it, and
probably best off with none of it. Nothing has ever caused more
trouble. The whole history of religion is a record of war, murder,
torture, rape, massacre, distrust, hypocrisy, anguish, persecution and
continual and unseemly bickering; it is a rare church that has not
been the scene of disorderly brawls. It has divided towns and nations
into bitter factions; it has turned brother against sister and father
against son; it has blighted romances; it is a prime cause of insanity;
there is hardly anything harmful to the human race that it has not
done as it pursued its meddlesome, intolerant way down the ages. Its
followers proclaim loudly that their particular belief is synonymous
with love, and bawl threats and epithets against anyone who denies
it; but in truth religion comes more nearly to being synonymous with
hatred and revenge, with each sect praying to God to grant it special
privileges and to damn the others.
I have never at any time regretted my complete withdrawal from all
forms of religion and churchly ceremony. During many years of my
childhood, while mental and physical habits were forming, these things
kept me in constant terror; I was horrified by the thought of the awful
things that God was preparing to do to me; I was fearful and miserable
lest I give birth to an idea that was not perfectly righteous and in
keeping with His commands as laid down by His agents. The Bible, which
I necessarily interpreted in the light of what I had been taught,
caused me more nightmares than any other book I have ever read, and I
was vastly more alarmed by the tales of the fires of Hell related to
me by the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters than I was in later
life by the thunder of German artillery or the crackle of machine-gun
bullets.
Since I left Farmington I have been near death many times, both as a
soldier in France and from the natural illnesses incident to civil
life. At least three times I have been told that I had but a few hours
to live. Yet even then I did not feel the need of religion, nor for a
preacher or a priest to pray over me to a God that neither of us knew,
and perform ceremonies founded on pagan rites. How can an intelligent
God pay any attention to a last-minute deathbed repentance that it
is so obviously the result of fear and nothing else? The religionist
expects God to wash all his sins off the slate merely because, when he
is about to die, he says he is sorry. If there be a God, cannot He look
into such a shrunken little soul and see that there is nothing in it
but a fear of death and a horror of the unknown?
I am not an atheist, because for all I know to the contrary there may
be a God, or any number of Gods, but to me the God worshiped by my
forefathers and by the religionists of to-day is a cruel, preposterous
creation conceived by a people who felt the need of chastisement.
He is a celestial traffic cop, hounded by whimpering weaklings who
beseech Him to tell them they are on the right road, and yet keep
trying to show Him which way the traffic should go. In the Christian
and Jewish conceptions of the Heavenly Father I can see nothing that
is fit for a civilized man to worship; indeed, the nearer a man
approaches civilization and intelligence, the less need there is for
him to worship anything. Conversely it is the stupid, illiterate man,
knowing neither how to read nor how to think, who is most often the
religious fanatic. He understands nothing and is afraid of everything;
he goes through life as a small boy goes past a graveyard at night,
whistling to keep up his courage. He requires religion and its twin,
superstition, to give him strength to contemplate the wonders of the
sunset and the falling rain.
For my part, I simply refuse to worry about God. If there is a God, I
hope that I may in time find favor in His sight and obtain my share
of the spiritual loot; there is nothing that I can do about it. And
if there is no God, there is nothing I can do about that, either. I
profess neither knowledge nor theory about the Supreme Being and the
heavenly wonders; knowing nothing, I believe nothing, and believing
nothing, I am prepared to believe anything, asking only reasonably
correct information and authentic signs. These I fail to find in
selfish prayers, constant squabbling over the wishes of the Lord and
the building of magnificent temples within sight and hearing of the
ramshackle tenements of the poor. I do not believe that I shall ever
find them, for
“Wherefore and whence we are ye cannot know,
Nor where life springs, nor whither life doth go.”
Without religion I thoroughly enjoy the business of living. I am
oppressed by no dreadful taboos, and I am without fear; I set myself no
standards save those of ordinary self-respect, decent consideration of
the rights and privileges of others, and the observance of the laws of
the land except Prohibition. To my own satisfaction, at least, I have
proved that religion and the Church are not at all necessary to a full
and happy life. And if I am thus a sinner and my chance of ultimate
salvation forfeit, then the fault lies at the door of those fanatics
whose method of teaching religion to a child was, and is, to hammer it
into his head by constant threats of terrible punishment, by drawing
torturing word pictures of Hell, by describing God as a vicious,
vindictive old man, by scolding and tormenting and laying down taboos
until the poor child’s brain whirls in an agony of fright and misery.
I know of no better way to salute them than to refer them to certain
words of their own Savior, to be found in the thirty-fourth verse of
the twenty-third chapter of the Book of St. Luke.
* * * * *
If I ever have a son, which now seems unlikely, his boyhood will be
quite different from my own. For him Sunday shall be a day of rest and
pleasure; there shall be no taboos, and no attendance upon church and
Sunday school unless their performances are more interesting than other
available entertainment. They now rank just below the moving pictures,
and are therefore last. I shall bring my son in contact with the sacred
books of the Christians, the Jews, the Buddhists and of all the other
religions as rapidly as he is able to comprehend them, and he shall be
permitted to choose his own religion if he decides that a religion is
necessary to his happiness and peace of mind. But if he shows any signs
of becoming a preacher, priest or rabbi, or even a Brother, I shall
whale hell out of him. I am that intolerant.