We are living in the Twentieth Century of what is called the Christian
Era, and we have not outgrown the superstitions of the First Century.
And worse than this, we have not had the courage to abandon the
fictions of the Book of Genesis for the truths of modern science. Just
what the world is afraid of, that it fears to trust its senses, its
reason, its knowledge, surpasses my understanding.
One of the first things that men and women should learn is, that there
is nothing in the universe to be afraid of; that all the malignant
deities are dead; that the ancient gods that presided over the destiny
of earth and of earthly things have all fallen from the sky; that in
the realm of Nature everything is natural, and that no man is pursued
by a god of wrath and vengeance who would punish him for his unbelief.
Every god that can not hear the truth without getting mad should be
dethroned. Every priest who can not join in singing the songs of
civilization should be warned to look out for the engine while the bell
rings.
This world of ours is a world to be enjoyed, but it can not be enjoyed
if we fear every manifestation of Nature and if we put a cruel god
behind every cloud.
Let us live without fear, without superstition, without religion.
* * * * *
There is nothing above, beneath or around you that cares whether you
are a Christian or an unbeliever. The real reason why a priest hates an
unbeliever is that he can not get a dollar out of him. He damns those
who know better than to swallow his say-sos. But it still remains a
fact that an infidel can raise as many bushels of potatoes to the acre
as can the Roman Catholic. The sun will not wrong an honest man. The
stars will not punish a single human being for telling the truth. The
sky will not persecute a person who gives his thoughts, his talents,
his time, to finding ways to help mankind.
Everything that man believes in that can not be found, that can not be
proved, that can not stand the test of commonsense: everything that
contradicts Nature, that is opposed to established facts, that is
contrary to the laws of the universe, must be given up.
We must have a new man: the man born of woman, not the man made by
God; the man who has been growing better ever since his advent on
earth, not the man who has been growing worse; the man who started
with nothing and has conquered the earth, the sea and the air; not
the man who began perfect and has not got halfway back; the man who
made the telescope, the steam-engine, the power-loom, the telephone and
the wireless telegraph; not the man who made the thumbscrew, the rack,
the ducking-stool and the stocks; the man who has carried the torch
of liberty to enlighten the world, not the man who has carried the
crucifix to enslave mankind.
* * * * *
It is quite common to be told what Moses said or what Jesus said. Now,
if all that these two Hebrew gentlemen (who in my opinion never lived)
said, is preserved in the Bible, I appeal from what they said to those
who know more. I assert that Moses said a lot of stuff that isn't so,
and a lot more that never was so, and that all that Jesus is said to
have said is practically worthless to the world today; that there is
not in all of his utterances a single word that will help man to get a
living, a single word that will aid man in his struggle for knowledge;
that there is not a statement of a single scientific fact, or a plea
for human liberty in all his language. He told his generation nothing
that was not already known, except a mess of superstitious nonsense
about angels and devils, heavens and hells. His so-called gospel of
salvation was to follow him, and he landed on a cross.
The truth is this: the world has outgrown Moses and Jesus. It does
not take commands from either. This age believes in work, not worship;
in deeds, not prayers; in men, not monks; in liberty, not in pious
obedience; in human rights, not in submission; in knowledge, not in
revelation.
For hundreds of years man was bound by a religious faith, and the
priest was his cruel master. He dared not doubt; he dared not rebel;
he dared not dream of freedom; but there came a time when religious
tyranny could no longer be borne. Then Mankind cried out to the Church:
Give back man's brain to man; restore to him the mind you have robbed
him of; take from his head and heart the paralyzing fear that makes him
a coward and a slave, and leave to him the liberty with which Nature
dowered him, that his mind may discover and preserve those mighty
thoughts which make man brave, honest, free and happy.
That cry was heard far. It was heard by glad ears, and liberty sprang
from the ground like the warriors from the fabled dragon-teeth of
Cadmus. The war between liberty and tyranny, between fact and fable,
between truth and falsehood, between man and priest, was on, and for
centuries this war has raged, nor is it yet over. Freedom still lies
bleeding, but victory for the right will sooner or later be won.
That victory will not be complete until every man will dare to say:
Let come what will come, no man, be he priest, minister or judge, shall
sit upon the throne of my mind, and decide for me what is right, true
or good. I am my own master, my own teacher, my own guide. I will keep
my reason free from control and will never surrender my own convictions
to the dictates of another.
Nature has made every man commander of his own destiny.
* * * * *
But we are yet victims of ecclesiastical villainy. The priest is still
the worst enemy of mankind. His church is like that monster of fiction
which lived on little children. In the name of the children I protest
against the action of the Church in stealing their tender brains, in
making them slaves of superstition before they are old enough to know
to what they are doomed.
The age of consent to a religious faith should be determined by law,
if necessary. Today any boy or girl may be the victim of a designing
priest or clergyman, or of a designing religious system.
No person under eighteen years of age should be allowed to join a
church or consent to a statement of faith. Mental purity should be
guarded and protected as well as physical purity.
While the Church is powerful in numbers and while its religion is
supported by wealth and fashion, the world is becoming more and more
emancipated from its pernicious influence. The light that truth gives
is still ahead of us, but _it is there_, and some day the world will
grow warmer under its rays and men become better and kinder to one
another.
A hundred years ago the God worshiped in orthodox churches went about
drowning little boys and girls who went skating on Sundays. Those were
the "good old days" when men and women had religion for breakfast,
dinner and supper, and took it to bed with them. It takes a long time
to get such a horrible religion out of the system.
Men and women still have a mean faith, a faith which can see others
damned with satisfaction if they can only be saved. Nothing but a mean
religion could make men and women as mean as that. I would rather
starve than preach the doctrine of endless pain for a human being--or
even for a dog. I believe that this world is hard and dark and cruel
enough without borrowing suffering from another world to make darker
and harder the road of life and add torture to the nights of pain and
misery.
A church must be sunk pretty low when it lives on the fears and tears
of mankind; but what lower depths of degradation does it sound when it
can deliberately create fears and tears that it may live and thrive
in its vile and cruel business! A human being without pity should be
shunned and despised; but a human being who can fill the heart with
terror should not be allowed in a civilized community.
The mind today wants to get out into the open, into the free daylight,
wants to walk the earth, look at the stars and sky, feel the warmth of
the sun and smell the odor of the ground; it has become tired of being
shut up in a faith, in a creed, in a church; tired of being kept in
the darkness of the past, in the tomb of dead thoughts, in the moldy
caskets of unreal things, and in the dungeon of fear.
The mind is striving to break the chains of the priest and be free from
the bonds of the Church.
You can not have men free where the priest demands and claims their
obedience. The greatest menace to our national institutions is the
power that controls men; that controls their thoughts, their actions
and their destinies. Liberty can survive only where men are free:
free to think, free to read, free to speak and free to act. The mind
must not be bound by any vow of obedience. One man, no matter what
his office, what his position, what his rank, has no right to compel
another's obedience. This is the worst oppression on earth.
* * * * *
What is needed in this country is more men who dare think and speak
for themselves; who dare belong to no church; who dare work for the
right as they see it, and speak the truth as they understand it; who
dare live their own lives independent of fashion's demands or society's
usages; who dare put liberty above conformity, and who dare defy
customs, law and religion in their zeal to help their fellow-beings.
There is more than one liberty--more than the liberty to do right--that
is partly won for every civilized being. There is another liberty that
is dangerous and that persists even where civilization exists--the
liberty to take another's liberty from him. This liberty is usually
taken from another in the name of God and what is called holy; but
there is nothing on earth so holy as liberty, and he who takes it from
another robs him of the dearest right possessed by man. Binding a human
being with the chains of faith before that being is old enough to judge
whether the faith is reasonable or true is the assassination of freedom.
The greatest danger which confronts our nation today is not political
but religious, and the preservation of our free institutions does not
depend upon our army and navy, but upon the emancipation of the human
mind from ecclesiastical slavery. As Thomas Paine well said, "Spiritual
freedom is the root of political liberty." You can not have free
schools, free speech and a free press where the mind is not free.
There is too much faith in this country and too little sense. Men have
given up about everything they possess to be saved; but it is more
necessary, and more commendable in the workingmen of this nation, to
save their dollars than to save their souls.
* * * * *
A subject that needs to be investigated quite as much as, if not more
than, the high cost of living is the high cost of worship. There may be
some justice in the criticism of the price of meats. We must remember,
however, that we do get something for our money when we buy meat, but
let us not forget that we get absolutely nothing for the money spent
for worship. Money given to the Church is lost to the world. It is
not used to improve homes; to help the poor and needy; to alleviate
suffering; to bring hope to the sick or to give a few comforts to old
age. It goes into the pocket of ecclesiastical greed.
This country just at present is suffering from those twin curses of
humanity--religion and Bull-Mooseism. The priest and Bull-Mooseism
are the two worst trouble-makers in this country. To get rid of this
precious pair of knaves would be to bring peace on earth and hasten the
dawn.
I don't know which is the bigger knave, the priest or the Bull-Mooser,
but I do know that the priest is engaged in the meaner business of the
two.
When a man tries to sell me a mouse-trap to catch elephants, I am
suspicious of his mental sanity; and when a man tells me that eternal
happiness can be won by enlisting in his salvation army, I question
his moral sanity. I know that religion is offered at cut rates, but
there is no discount on morality. You can not have the reward of good
behavior unless you behave. You may save your soul by saying, "I
believe," but you have to _do_ something to save your body.
There is too much of this "believe-in-me" business. You don't want to
believe in any one you know nothing about. The faith of a little child
in its parents is beautiful, but the faith of a grown-up man in a
priest is idiotic. Faith has ruined more than it has saved. With faith
goes obedience, and he or she who obeys is lost.
There is no honest call today to believe, because there is opportunity
to know. Faith is hatched in the nest of imposition. He who yields
obedience is a fool, and he who demands it is a scoundrel.
In this age, as in the past, a lie made "holy" is allowed to
assassinate the truth. Nothing is cursing this nation; nothing is
cursing human life; nothing is cursing honest effort and brave striving
so much as what is called holiness. It is holy to believe all you are
told; holy to wear the robes of hypocrisy; holy to rob the poor in the
name of God, and holy to put the poison of faith to the lips of a
child. It is holy to repudiate Nature and make a lie of your body, your
mind, your life. To purify the dwelling-place of man, it is necessary
to drive from the earth everything that religion has made holy.
The only really sacred things were holy before a church was ever built,
before there was a priest on the globe.
Human love and the home which human love built for its offspring were
the first holy things which men and women knew, and it is this human
love of ours which is holier than mosque, temple or church; holier than
priestly robe or ecclesiastical rite; holier by far than all the holy
things of faith.
* * * * *
The Church has always lived by robbing the home; the priest has always
lived on the wages of the toiler. The gods of religion have never done
aught to lighten the heavy load on the shoulders of labor. The priest
has said to mankind that his Lord left this consolation to the world:
"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden and I will give
you rest."
What the priest really means is this: Come unto me and I will do the
rest; and by the time he has done it, there is nothing of manhood left.
The priest also teaches that his Lord and Master said, "Ask and ye
shall receive," and adds, "The Lord will provide." How many poor
wretches have believed those words; but their outstretched hands
withered away day by day, and at last dropped empty by their sides.
There they lay white and cold, holding not the bread they fondly
expected, but holding the hand of death.
It may be pious and it may be beautiful to say, "The Lord will
provide," but it is a lie just the same. When, the other day, the
bodies of a mother and her two children were being carried to the
grave with the words, "starved to death," written on their faces, but
not written on their caskets, it was a sufficient refutation of the
religious teaching that "The Lord will provide." It is the plain,
unvarnished truth that the Lord will _not_ even provide the coffin for
the poor victim of such a false, deceptive, religious faith.
In olden times it was customary for the Church to say, God's light
lights the world. Not so today. God's light has gone out. It is man's
light that lights the world and the Church too. Our enlightenment is
human, not divine. No altar of religion burns with the fire of truth.
Science carries the torch of knowledge: liberty is the way and truth is
the goal.
* * * * *
On our earth gods no longer make their homes. It was not safe for them
to live any more. Their sons may once have married the daughters of
men, but they can not get a license to do so today. Parents will not
stand for it.
So the gods have gone, bag and baggage. Where they have gone, no one
knows. The skies give no sign that they are hiding up there. The
telescope has found _seventy million stars, but not one god_.
It is time for the pulpit to stop repeating the old superstitions about
God and about what he has done for man. He has never done any more
for man than he is doing today; never spoken to man any more than he
is speaking today; never revealed himself to anybody any more than he
stands revealed to you and me and to every human being everywhere.
Every word that ever came from the mouth of God man put in his mouth,
and every book revealed by God was written by man.
Half the work of man for the next one hundred years will be to kill the
lies told about what God has done.
Whether there is in all the vast universe a higher and nobler being
than man, I don't know. Whether there is in all the vast universe a
better place for man to live than on this earth, I don't know. And no
one knows any more about these matters than I do.
We have found out much that is not so; now we want to find out all
we can that is so. And it is of no use to go to the Church to learn
anything. The Church is only a place where falsehoods are kept in cold
storage. The man who thinks and studies is the man who is helping the
world most, not the man who preaches and prays. To find the truth one
needs to get as far from the Church as possible.
Christians of all denominations have lots of pity for the man without
a church. Let me assure these persons that the man without a church
doesn't want one. As a rule, he is satisfied with what he has. He
has a home, which is better than a church. If those persons who are
pitying men and women for not having a church would, instead, pity
the man without a home, and pity him enough to help him get one, they
would show much better sense and manifest a truer sympathy with their
fellow-beings.
* * * * *
I can not see any good in painting a thing white that is black, or
calling a thing beautiful that is ugly. There are persons who talk as
though they believed that a Northeast storm was sunshine. I am not made
that way. I am as ready and as willing as anybody to acknowledge the
good in Nature, or the good in life, but I do not believe in lying, in
saying that wrong is right, or that suffering is to be enjoyed. There
are lots of hard things in our life, and it does not alter facts to
call them by some other name. A man dying with a cancer can not be made
to believe that he is having a good time.
The most that any man can do who goes through this earthly existence
is to use his fellow-mortals right and square; to give them an honest
day's work when he works for them and an honest day's pay when he hires
them; to say nothing to hurt them and everything he can to assist them;
to help them out of trouble and not get them into trouble. If one does
this, and does no more than this, he has done what beats every religion
on earth.
We have got to deal with men and women as they are and where they are.
The man who is natural; the man who has not been made a fool of by a
priest or parson; the man who has not swapped his commonsense for a
foolish belief; the man who has not had his mind stuffed with religious
dope, knows that this life on earth is the important life, and that it
is a higher work to determine his fate here than anywhere else.
There is not a person living who would not be well and strong and
happy here rather than hereafter. I would rather have the power to
make every cripple straight and whole; every poor, unfortunate man
and woman prosperous and contented; every sick person well, every
bad person good, and every slave to vice master of his appetite and
passions, in this life on earth, than to save the human wrecks, the
human unfortunates, the human victims of vice and crime, for another
life somewhere else.
* * * * *
What men and women want is happiness, not Heaven. They want a good
home on this globe, not a loafing-place in Abraham's bosom. They want
the opportunity to enjoy the good things of this life, not the promise
that they will hear the angels sing. They want better wages for their
work, better treatment from their employers, and better things to
eat and drink and wear. They want better things here, not hereafter.
They want to be happy while they are living on earth, not have the
assurance of happiness after they are dead. If I ever attempt to write
my creed, I shall say: I believe in so much that I can hardly expect to
express all of my faith in one statement. I am all the time believing
in something new. But there is one thing that I most heartily believe
in now and have believed in ever since I was a child, and that is,
SUNSHINE--external and internal and eternal sunshine.
Sunshine is the joy of the universe, and joy is the sunshine of the
human heart. Let us be bright and cheerful. Let us be happy. Let us
give to the world the sunshine of our hearts.
_A male trinity is repulsive; Father, Mother and Child is the
sacred triad. The Christian trinity is a monster._