Mark Twain, in his _mysterious stranger_, makes no bones about his
sentiments towards Christianity and the God illusion. Speaking of
Christian progress he says, "It is a remarkable progress. In five or six
thousand years five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished,
commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out and disappeared; and
not one of them except the latest ever invented any sweeping and
adequate way to kill people. They all did their best--to kill being the
chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its
history--but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be
proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all
the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to
school to the Christian, not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The
_turk_ and the _chinaman_ will buy these to kill missionaries and
converts with."
Again, in speaking of God, comparing the God conception to an impossible
dream, he continues, "Strange, because they are so frankly and
hysterically insane--like all dreams: a God who could have made good
children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could
have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one;
who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who
gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other
children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his
other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who
mouths justice and invented hell--mouths mercy and invented hell; mouths
Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and
invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself;
who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without
invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon
man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and
finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused
slave to worship him!"
One wonders what the Christian Ethiopians thot when the Christian
Italians playfully, and undoubtedly with the sanction of the Holy Mother
Church, began to spray them with liquid fire, blast their cities, and
mutilate their children with the newest Christian improvements on the
Christian weapons of war. They probably couldn't quite understand the
logic or the fairness of it, but we must not blame the Ethiopians for
failing to comprehend, as they haven't had the benefits of Christian
civilization for as long a time as the Italians.
Let's put a stop to this shilly-shallying. Let's put these destructive
Atheists in their place. The Christians KNOW that God DOES exist. That
God _is_ all powerfull. So it would be only a simple matter to arrange
an appointment with God, (we don't exactly know what his office hours
are,) and prevail upon him to write a message in fire saying, "YOU BET,
GOD IS THE REAL MCCOY" or something similar, and spread it all over the
sky. That'll convince even the most reluctant Atheists, and it should be
a rather simple trick for a God who once stopped the sun (sic!), created
a universe in 6 days, and engineered an immaculate conception.
Clarence Darrow, world famous criminal lawyer, the man who made the
Silver-Tongued and Godly Bryant appear the verbose addlepate he was,
beneath his platitudinous phrases, during the Scopes trial, said, to an
interviewer, "All my life I've been an Agnostic. But I am no longer an
Agnostic, I am now an Atheist."