The Militant Agnostic 0879759747, 9780879759742

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THE

Militant Agnostic

1US

THE

Militant Agnostic

THE

Militant Agnostic . Haldeman-

Julius Prometheus Books 59 John Glenn Drive Amherst, NewYork 14228*2197

Published 1995 by Prometheus Books 59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, New York 14228-2197. 716-691-0133. FAX: 716-691-0137. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haldeman-Julius, E. (Emanuel), 1889-1951. The militant agnostic / E. Haldeman-Julius. p. cm. — (The freethought library) ISBN 0-87975-974-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Agnosticism. 2. Freethought. I. Title. II. Series. BL2747.2.H35 1995 211'.7—dc20

II Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

95-13673 CIP

THE FREETHOUGHT LIBRARY Featuring Selections from the Haldeman-Julius Collection Over a period of thirty years, publisher E. Haldeman-Julius made available to millions ofreaders inexpensive paperback editions ofclassics of literature and freethought. Prometheus is proud to be reissuing selected numbers of the renowned Blue Books, which provided a broad forum for the discussion of rationalist issues.

Additional Titles in The Freethought Library Classics of Freethought edited by Paul Blanshard

Debates on the Meaning of Life, Evolution, and Spiritualism Frank Harris, Percy Ward, George McCready Price, Joseph McCabe, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Forgery of the Old Testament and Other Essays Joseph McCabe The Myth of the Resurrection and Other Essays Joseph McCabe The Necessity of A theism and Other Essays Percy Bysshe Shelley

Reason, Tolerance, and Christianity: The Ingersoll Debates Robert G. Ingersoll The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents Franklin Steiner

Why I Am an Agnostic and Other Essays Clarence Darrow

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012

http://www.archive.org/details/militantagnosticOOhald

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius was bom Emanuel Julius in Philadelphia on July 20, 1889. After dropping out of school in the seventh grade, young Julius worked at a series of lowpaying jobs; he embarked on an ambitious program of self­ education, however, reading books on philosophy, skepticism, and Marxian economic theory. While still in his teens, Julius was drawn to Philadelphia’s socialist party. Estranged from his family for his socialist leanings, he left Philadelphia in 1906 to pursue a career in journalism, first in Tarrytown, New York (where he interviewed Mark Twain), and later in New York City for the socialist paper the Aew York Evening Call (1911). Meanwhile, Julius’s stories and sketches began appearing in the radical magazine Coming Nation. Foilowing brief stints at the Milwaukee Leader and the short­ lived socialist daily, the Chicago Evening World, Julius moved to California to become editor and then owner of his first h magazine, the Western Comrade (1913-14). In 1915 he returned to New York to resume work at the Evening Call. There he met his wife-to-be, actress and heiress Anna Marcet Haldeman. Marcet Haldeman returned to her hometown of Girard, Kansas, following the death of her mother in 1915, and Julius soon joined her (they were married in 1916: Julius appended his wife’s surname to his own). In 1919, with his wife’s financial backing, Haldeman-Julius began the People’s Pocket series (later renamed the Little Blue Books), inexpensive paperback editions (some for as little as five cents) of literary classics as well as works on atheism and freethought. These Little Blue Books, and the longer, thicker Big Blue Books, were conceived as part of Haldeman-Julius’s dream to bring education to the masses. Over the next thirty years the Blue Books sold in the millions, making HaldemanJulius a wealthy man in his own right. In addition to the Blue Books, Haldeman-Julius published a succession of monthly and quarterly magazines and a weekly

newspaper, all featuring his by-now familiar brand of radicalism and skepticism. In the 1940s Haldeman-Julius infuriated the Catholic Church by publishing a series of articles linking the Vatican with the Axis powers during World War IL An expose of the FBI roused the ire of J. Edgar Hoover and led to an IRS investigation. While awaiting an appeal on a charge oftedHill eral tax evasion, Haleman-Julius drowned in the swimming pool of his Girard estate on July 31, 1951.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page The Freemen ..................................................................................................... 7 The Christian Ideal of Heaven ....................................................................... 7 The Unknowable .............................................................................................. 10 The Upper Dog .......................... 11 The Tie That Binds ......................................................................................... 11 Lack of Belief .................................................................................................... 12 Practical Atheism ............................................................................................. 13 “Good” and “Bad” ............................................................................................. 13 “Why I Quit Going to Church”....................................................................... 14 The Strange Business of Being “Converted”.................................................. 15 A Reply to Mencken ......................................................................................... 16 The Challenge of Print ..................................................................................... 18 A Note on Bells .................................................................................................. 19 Klan Dishonesty ................................................................................................. 19 Consciousness of Sin................. ....................................................................... 20 A Biblical Absurdity................................. 21 The Role of Jesus.............................................................................................. 22 A Teaspoonful Every Two Hours....... ............................................................. 23 The Haldeman-Julius Church........................................................................... 25 Freedom of Education....................................................................................... 26 Churches vs. Schools ....................................................................................... 27 Ku Kluxism in Action....................................................................................... 28 The Poor Man’s God......................................................................................... 29 Too Many Churches—Plus............................................................................... 29 The Church and Peace......................................................................................... 33 Spiritual “Vision” .............................................................................................. 33 Not a Christian Country.................................................................................... 34 Is Religion Necessary?..................................................................................... 35 K-K-K ................................................................................................................ 36 Teaching the Bible............................................................................................. 38 Admitted Stupidity .............................................. 39 Church Progress ................................................................................................ 39 A Revival .......................................... 41 Prayer ................................................................................................................ 44 Booth Tarkington’s Flyer in Metaphysics....................................................... 46 The Deacon Speaks........................................................................................... 50 China’s Revolt Against Quackery..................................................................... 52 Tennessee Churchmen AskTen Questions........................................................ 54 Whose Fault? ................................................................................................... 57 Some Belligerent Notes ..................................................................................... 58 Truth in Dogma?................................................................................................ 64 A Wall Vs. a Void................................................................................... -........ 68

TABLE OF CONTENTS—Continued.

The Miraculous .......................................................... Salvation—All the Way............................................. Praying for Rain....................................................... . Science vs. Religion in China................................... “Blue Laws” in Virginia City.................................... Sham, the Man Jesus, and Other Things............... “Old Time Religion” in Darkest Russia................... Book-Burning in Kansas............................................ A Brief Survey of Bigotry in the Benighted States Churches and Jazz...................................................... Religion’s Waning Influence..................................... Bid Bryan Ever Doubt?........................................... Bryan Stood for Herd Prejudice............................. Give the Devil His Due............................................. Goodness and Happiness............................................. Evolution and Religion............................................. . Upton Sinclair and Jesus............................................. Free Thought and Free Schools............................... God and the War......................................................... Do You Believe in Mermaids^................................... The Danger of Church Rule The Bunk of Sunday Laws.... Evil Days in Dress............... The Rewards of Virtue........ Method and Methodism in Education Devil’s Dances .................................... The New Bogey-Man........................ It’s the Only World We Know........ Mark Twain on the Side of God?...... The Popularity of the Bible The Religion of a Darwinist Notes of Idle Curiosity........ Tired Idealists ...................... The Playfulness of Thought ••

Page ... 69 ... 70 ... 71 ... 72 ••

. 76 . 78 . 80 . 81 . 82 . 84 . 84 . 86 . 88 . 91 . 92 . 93 . 94 . 96 . 98 100 105 107 109 110 112 114 115 117 119 119 122 126 128

AN AGNOSTIC LOOKS AT LIFE THE FREEMEN

HE Church is reaching out its menacing hand for control. It is reestablishing the horrors, the persecution, the intrigues, the treacheries, the bigotry, the hatred and the despicable shams of .the Middle Ages. Culture is being fought and ridiculed. Science is being put on the defensive, its very right to exist being challenged ~by~the Christian Churches of this country. Individuals are

Churches of this country—is but a symptom. It is one of many weapons to deny Freemen the right to think and speak their honest convictions. The Christian Churches of this country are ”a~standing insult to the glorious founders who conceived this nation in the spirit of truth, toler­ ance, freedom and progress. The Churches would have us go back to the Inquisition—perhaps somewhat refined, but an Inquisition neverthe­ less. Men and women who would be Free must be on their guard to resist the tyranny and soul-crushing imposition of the Church organi­ zations. They must fight back—not merely asserting their right to freedom of thought, but challenging their enemies, putting them on the defense, showing them up to the world as dishonest thinkers, frauds, humbugs, scoundrels, tyrants and foul mercenaries. THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF HEAVEN LIMITED imagination and a very poor taste are reflected in the ^Christian ideal of Heaven." I marvel that intelligent Christians did not long ago perceive that this kind of Heaven is really inimical to the idea of immortality, making it ridicu­ lous and undesirable. Suppose there is the possibility of a life after death, or that we wish pleasantly to entertain ourselves with the thought of such a possibility. Isn’t it sensible to imagine such a life in the most delightful and warm and vivid colors? Shouldn’t we picture to ourselves a life that will be full of fun? a life that will have snap and go, and that will not be without the charm of the unexpected, the

- The first thing that impresses me about the kind of Heaven the preachers recommend is the unbearable monotonyof the place. place Nothing ever happens. It is as urifcventful as iF in Girard. One thinks of two jects.Arather, as it is a Kingdom, we are, told) citizens of Heaven (subj~~ ---- ---------------------,-------------meeting in the middle of a hot day—precisely as two citizens of Girard meet on a corner of the square—and in response to the inquiry of the one as to how things go, the other replies wearily, in a flat tone of dejection: “Oh, just the same old seven and six.” Did you ever see or

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An Agnostic Looks at Life

hear any description of the popular Paradise which held so much as a hint that it would ever present any feature or circumstance beyond the same old seven and six ? I haven’t. The fact is I have never been able to imagine any possible occupation for myself in the Heaven where John Calvin and John Wesley and John Knox and all the other renowned theological Johns (not forgetting John the Baptist and the Apostle John who had thenightniare^oi]^tji^_Isle^ of Patmos that only the Freudians can interpret^ presumably reside at this moment of writing^ How such a Heaven would bore me! I know it would. Td rather die—really and truly die, I mean, and not be the sport of my sham translation, as I believe it is called. It was the thought of such a dull, slow-pokey Heaven that moved Ingersoll reaching the apex of fervid sincerity, to exclaim: “Heaven for climate and Hell for society.” There, of course, you have another obvious and terrific disadvantage in the Heaven of sanctified song and story. The social atmosphere is not going to be what you and I would profanely wish. It will be full of preachers and psalm-singers and long-faced, soursouled proselyte^s and prohibitionists: and, in fact, all of the thinly 'cultivated, unimaginative, heavily-animal­ istic people who on earth have not been able to muster up the energy or the brightness to be interestingly bad. All the “good” people will be there: and by good, I certainly do not mean great or high-minded or noble. I don’t mean that the lords of the spirit and the intellect will be found on the streets of the Celestial City. Those true masters of the soul were not “good” enough in the orthodox sense to get by the vigilant, jaundiced eye of old Saint Peter. It will be respectability, not nobility, that is represented in the Great Choir. You will hear the kind of singing and see the kind of faces and, unless you can get off by yourself somewhere, you’ll hear the same kind of conversation that you can fill yourself with any Sunday or any prayer-meeting night by wandering into the dry, stuffy interior of the First Methobaptian Church. I don’t see how any man who consistently stays away from^church can expect to enjoy nimselLJn Heaven—/for • Heaven, undoubtedly, reproduces the atmosphere of church?) It is reasonable to assume that Heaven, as we are supposed to know it, was created by the_ arid imagi­ nation of a preacher. I don’t know that there is any record of^who first drew the picture of Heaven that now fearfully confronts our gaze. But it is certain that his vision was limited by a. row of pewsJand to prevent enlightenment from becoming too dangerously complete. The Chi­ cago preachers say that education is getting out of hand and that what is needed is the restraint (i. e., the dead weight) of the Bible. No admission could be more damaging to the clergy. He who fears education has a very weak case. I say that education, left free, can only be good; and that it can only be worse if confined and corrupt­ ed by any kind of religious predilections, obsessions and inhibitions. CHURCHES VS. SCHOOLS

HAT interesting news do we read, thanking God that we live in a Christian country with nearly tis many churches as public schools? It is that crime is so rampant in the Repub­ lic that one daily newspaper (the Des Moines Register} an­ nounces a “crime page.” It will segregate the rumors, reports and records of crime from the other news, so that the reader can expe­ ditiously peruse (or avoid) the annals of lawlessness even as he who is interested (or not) in sports and comics. It happens that the experiment originates in a desire to be spared the reading of this kind of news, which is not pleasant to the gentle lovers of illusion who sing of the goodness of God. It was the plea of Des Moines clubwomen that induced the Register to try the novelty of a “crime page.” Now Christians and children, reading the Regist er, can skip the dreadful tales of daily Christian practice in a land o’errun with churches and stuffed to the gullet with religion. It may be possible at length for the pulpit to deny the existence of crime, so that the unphilosophic philosophy and the unscientific science of Christian Science may triumph in the land: although this is not, after all, likely to occur— the stock in trade of preachers being denunciation of sin. Well-a-day, we dwell, as I say, in the midst of a Christian world, a Christian country. The years and the ages of effort to spread Jesus’ message of divine redemption throughout the world, “unto every living creature,” have finally brought us to the glory of a “crime page.” There are other evidences of the victory that has perched on the crimson banner of the Lord. The federal prison in Atlanta is full to overflowing, Warden John W. Snook declaring that “a new high mark had been set for the prison.” Yes, indeed, we are breaking all records. And we are told that the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, is so crowded that a number of prisoners must be turned adrift into the cold and cruel world—paroled, whether they will or not, and denied the blessing of comparative safety in a world of crime.

28

An Agnostic Looks at Life

What is the situation, religiously speaking, in this country which is so criminally hell-bent? We just barely miss having an equal num­ ber of churches (temples of superstition) and public schools (tem­ ples of knowledge). According to the Joplin (Mo.) Globe, the Re­ public has 243,578 churches and 271,319 public school buildings. Other figures, redounding to the glory of the land, assure us that we have one-third the number of preachers that we have of school teachers. The preachers are 214,385 strong; while the teachers are,, for a wonder, in the lead and number 679,274. And the Globe quotes Dr. Jay S. Stowell as saying that “There are not too many churches in America, but too few.” The desideratum, presumably, is for the number of churches to equal, if not exceed, the schools. And, again I presume, we should have three times as many preachers as teachers. One hardly needs to dwell* on the importance of education. We depend on it principally for such civilization as we have, and it is to the influence of education and all that is included in real culture that we look for hope of a greater civilized life. It is indispensable, and of infinite importance. We need more education—more schools— more teachers. Yet the Bible bund calls upon us to heed the notion that we are sadly in need of more churches—as many as, if not more than, school buildings. The upbuilding of intelligent, instructed life —that education which is well toward the head of the vital things of a civilized social life—is actually regarded as no more important (if it is even admitted to be as important) than the housing and per­ petuation of the paraphernalia of old, foolish creeds that were born in the darkness of Chaos and Old Night—that, in fact and in essence, hark back to the “black magic” of the savage. The witch doctors want to rule. They want to control the minds of the populace. They cry out upon the tendency of education to loosen the hold of super­ stition. They would fill the country, already crowded by these mon­ strosities, with churches—which, apparently, will not stop the pris­ ons from being filled and may even set a “new high mark.”

KU KLUXISM IN ACTION HE ECONOMICS of Ku Kluxism does not get the attention it leserves. Few seem to realize how frequently persons will join the Ku Klux Klan in order to follow practices that are entirely dishonorable. I have in mind the particular manner in which Klansmen, gaining control of a community, will use the courts to wreak vengeance on the objects of their hatred and persecution. Consider one typical case, in which a New York busi­ ness man shipped goods under contract to a Fort Worth, Texas, con­ cern, which proceeded to return the stock in violation of an agree­ ment When the New York man’s lawyer wrote that, his client would sue, the Texan’s lawyer replied as follows: “We shall welcome a suit as our jurors are usually made up of brothers of the Klan and I am sure a Kike Jew wouldn’t stand much show before a jury. I myself do not try cases in the justice court, confining myself alone to the court of appeals, supreme, court, and federal court, but I would turn

E, Haldeman-]ulius

29

the matter over to some active young Klansman for his attention and when he has finished I am sure your Kike client will have a few dollars in costs to pay.”

The Nation, in printing the above letter, adds that this is but one manner in which the Klan offers its members substantial benefits. I have seen the same thing happen in numerous places. In this county, I learn that in one community the Klan gained control of the public schools and proceeded to discharge the Catholic superintendent, put­ ting in his place a Protestant. However, this Protestant could not stomach everything that came to him, with the result that he too lost his place. His offense was his refusal to obey prominent klansmen who ordered him to see to it that children of Catholics should be made to fail in their grades, thus holding them back for a second year while the children of good, Nordic 100 percent Americans were to be passed on to higher grades. Think of the contemptibleness of such people! Think of taking revenge on the children of Christians who happen to kow-tow to a Pope instead of a 100 percent Baptist or Methodist! Take another case. A 17-year-old schoolboy was employed after school hours in a local drug store, for which he received four dollars a week. But he was a Catholic boy. The knights of the Ku Klux Klan forced the owner, by threats of boycott, to discharge the lad and hire a Protestant. These things are petty, of course, but all great tyrannies are__made up,of numerous acts of small-mindedness. These people become proficient in devising little tortures and then graduate into larger fields. We are going through an astounding period of hatred, prejudice, suspicion, espionage, malice and every other weapon of ignorance and bigotry. Militant Protestantism is using the Ku Klux Klan as its last siege gun. It is doing a vast amount of hurt, but can it continue?

THE POOR MAN’S GOD

HE pastor of a fashionable city temple, addressing a congre­ gation of conventional, boresome Babbitts, recently said: “I tell you what I am afraid of—what I am worried about—it is that we may become so well fed, so well clothed, with such luxurious homes and fine cars and so many holidays on top of Sundays, that we shall utterly forget God.” Whether he realized fully the implications of his warning, the economics and psychology of religion that it revealed, this pastor hit upon a truth that is not flattering to the importance of God in human affairs: that points to the impoverished and ignoble origin of man’s worship of a deity, of something outside himself that is asked to do for him what he cannot do for himself. The thought of God, in a really devout and literal sense, is born of poverty and fear and self­ ishness. God is used to fill the chinks in crude cabins, the emptiness of the larder, the vacancy of undeveloped and uncultured minds, the dreariness and sordidness *of a life devoid of vivid interest, gaiety, worldly hope and ambition. God is felt to be necessary only by the

30

An Agnostic Looks at Life

man who has nothing else around which to build a significant or at least a comfortable and active life. God is a makeshift; a stop-gap; the product, like pellagra, of a restricted diet. It is well known that religion flourishes most intensely and luridly in the backward, poverty-stricken settlements. God—the personal and prodigious Jehovah of the Old Testament—is a poor man’s God. When the^ cupboard is bare, naan-deeds himself on illusions: as melodrama is most enjoyed by those who lead dull lives, so theology is the manna of those who lead empty lives. The narrower the interests of life, the more forlorn and barren, the more God is appealed to as the chief interest and support of existence. ^Filling the hole left by a broken window pane with paper or rags, man also fills the blankness of his life with the image of God. Selfish man, having little, turns to God with a ing prayer: joyless, he finds excitement and diversion in superstition and fanaticism: ignorant, he ignorantly worships: poorly fed, he drinks imaginatively the blood of Jesus: badly clothed, he dreams of saintly robes: rudely sheltered, he entertains himself with visions of mansions in the sky. As the mirage is seen in the desert,"so God and Heaven, are the familiar, favorite apparitions of dullness, ignorance and poverty?) The fear of man—most readily observed in the stupid—also throws him upon his knees to God. When disaster overtakes him, the heritage of his savage forbears leads him to plead with and propitiate his God, as the savage turned imploring hands and frightened eyes to the many gods that controlled his destiny. When man is afraid—when his life or happiness or material interests are in danger—his tendency, in direct ratio to his lack of knowledge and self-reliance, is to cry out for assurance, for assistance, from God. Man at his weakest, man at his poorest, is stricken with the ague of religion. When the Devil was sick, the Devil a monk would be; When the Devil was well, the devil a monk was he.

Such, crude and obvious and materially explainable, is the impulse that favors the religious attitude of mind. Faith and famine, prayer and poverty, sickness and salvation go hand in hand. As civilization advances, God recedes, becoming more and more vague, more and more of an indifferent symbol, less in the thoughts of man. The moment man acquires leisure and knowledge and richer, expanded interests and material well-being, he can find something a great deal better to do than worship God. The growth of a significant and well-ordered life carries with it a practical, if not downright and admitted, atheism. It is not simply that the intellectual man, the man who surrounds himself with the life of culture, forgets God and becomes a skeptic, an unterrified atheist or the courteous, casual bower to a God who is merely a figure of rhetoric, a subject of more or less idle specu­ lation, a decorative device of poetry or philosophy. The ordinary, uncultured, unthinking man, as his life is filled with good things, with a round of excitement and activity, with creature comforts, relegates God to the background of his consciousness: the image of God is put away in the attic, with other things that are unimportant and useless but that may come in handy on a dull, rainy day or in some trifling emergency. In short, a man who can fill his life with realities is less

E. Haldeman-Julius

31

concerned with dwelling upon unrealities. A superstitious image, an insubstantial essence, a bag of speculative wind has less attraction for the man who feels and enjoys and works with solid things. A good table, a comfortable and well-furnished home, a decent wardrobe, a car, the theater, the dance hall, an interesting occupation, the contact with men and things, a view of the immense, real spectacle of life—all these lead easily and naturally (even through imperceptibly to the individual) toward a life without God: toward an atheistic life: toward a life in which actual interests crowd out the cruder illusions of theology. There is no room for God in a full life. There is room for superopeless, starved, cheated, stunted life. The joys of life do not provide the right kind of soil for the cultivation of a religious state of mind: it is on the rocky hillside acres, in the poorer fields of life, that religion has its rankest weed-like growth. God looks bigger to the narrow view: he shrinks and evaporates in the wider, sunlit view that beckons indeed to other views and fields. Skeptjcisxp, agnosticism, atheism is the mental attitude of health and sanity and joy.’ Religion is the gloomy producFoEpoverty and Ignorance and despair. God is an escapefromrgality, a substitute for solid thoughts and things^a paffietic effort oTcompensation. “Faith,” according to the definition of the Apostle Paul, “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” And man, practically if not philosophically a materialist at heart, discovers in the substance and evidence of life a better employment and feeding of his faculties than in the stale, flat and unprofitable faith of religion.

TOO MANY CHURCHES—PLUS HERE are too many churches in this country. Take, by way of. illustration, Girard, a town of 2,800 population—neither better nor worse than thousands of other towns. And what do you find in the church line in Girard? There are eight churches. Think of it: a church to every 350 persons. That means a church building to every hundred men, more or less. And you should see the real estate. It is possible that the investment amounts to at least a half million dollars. Two churches have been rebuilt completely within the last six months, and now another church, humiliated because it hasn’t the largest church building, is giving dinners, parties, shows, concerts, and special church services, in order to add to the building fund. Com­ mittees are hard at work gathering in the dollars for a church building that isn’t needed, in a town that has too many churches now. Eight churches, about five parsonages, preachers, sextons, committees of lay workers, superintendents of special departments, imported preachers for intensive propaganda—and all in a town of 2,800 men, women and children. The main public school building is so crowded that the lot is being covered with unsightly wooden shacks. Suggest another decent school building and there is a howl. The public library is devoid of books of any value. Suggest a decent number of books and there is a groan. But whoop it up for building a bigger church and there is a rush to tear down the old building and zrect a new one. Too many churches, my lad, too many churches.

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An Agnostic Looks at Life

Nor does this mean the end of my complaints, for I cannot let this subject pass without adding that next to too many churches there are too many lodges. I should like to see some good statistician study the subject—how much time and money our public pays for this childish nonsense. I am sure I could not find time to gather the names of the various lodges and fraternal societies in Girard—Masons, Shriners, Elks, Knights of Pythias, Odd Fellows, Moose, Red Men, Lions, Lambs, Eagles, Kiwanis, Rotarians, are only a few that come to mind as I write this little gem of pure literature. What a waste of time and money! It is appalling, my fellow kleagles, simply staggering. And all of it un­ adulterated bosh. For months the Masons have been gathering funds for a vast temple (which is now being erected in a town close by) and it is going to cost about a half million round dollars of the realm. The result? A beautiful edifice for Babbitts to gather in to exchange news about the weather, about the latest local scandal, the quality of moon­ shine made in this county, smutty stories, profound reflections on batting scores, intricate post mortems on poker hands and the rest of the chatter one hears among fez-wearing nit-wits. Lodge men are perfect bores. I have never met one worth talking to. Only inferior people join lodges and fraternal societies. They get into these orders to “enjoy” a “social” life that intelligent men would pay money to avoid. They join for empty “degrees,” “titles” and “honors” that should not satisfy the glory­ cravings of a ten-year-old boy. They buy idiotic uniforms, swords, helmets, feathers, badges, banners, and a half hundred other signs of their imbecility. And they pay good money for this lunacy. Verily, the inferiority complex works peculiar miracles on the herd. Lots of these brainless victims will explain how they joined because “I want a Masonic funeral when I pass on to the other side.” Imagine the boobery of such a thing! Think of joining such an aggregation because one wants a company of slantheads to march behind his coffin and jabber some highsounding hogwash as the coffin is lowered into the grave. Some join certain societies for “protection.” The sensible thing to do, when one wants life or disability policy is to purchase one from an insurance company. Great insurance com­ panies are run in a business-like way, with all the silly trimmings of benevolent orders swept aside. If you are a doctor, join a medical asso­ ciation. If a printer, join with printers. If a lawyer, get into the bar association. If an engineer, become a member of the engineers’ society. If a scientist, a historian, a teacher, a dentist, an author, an actor, a what not, join with the others of your craft, profession or hobby. There is sense and order to such organizations. There’s intelligent effort made to increase the efficiency and the dignity of one’s trade or profession or hobby. Join such, if you must join things, but in heaven’s name keep out of mumbo-jumbo lodges and fraternal societies. They stamp you as an inferior. Stand out as a man, not as a member of some organi­ zation. Be an individual, not the maker of a quorum. Try to attain the fine dignity of standing aside, out of parades and processions and com­ mittees and delegations. Beware of losing yourself in a crowd and being mesmerized into accepting the crowd’s standards of importance, achievement and standardized processes of thought.

E, Haldeman-Jutius

33

THE CHURCH AND PEACE READER says we should respect the work of the church for un^versa^ Peace. He suggests that the church, though it is marked with sham, is worth saving and even worth loving for its pacificism. One might reasonably suggest that the sentiment against war is not religious and exists independent of the church: and that, were every church turned into a bathhouse, the efforts of man to solve the enigma of universal peace would not notably relax. Note how every human interest is referred to the church, as if out of religion all things proceed and have their significance. As a matter of fact, the greatest work for peace is to be credited to strictly non-religious forces, operating with purely social ends in view. And what is the actual record of the church regarding peace? We have had the Christian religion with us for about two thousand years, during a great part of which time the church has been in power; but the forces of war have never been affected in the slightest perceptible degree by this holy institution in any of its branches or activities. We see indeed that wars and massacres, many and terrible, have cursed mankind in behalf of religion. The hands of the church have spilled blood and have been washed piously in blood. Can an institution, a force of superstition and hate, that is responsible for much of the worst bloodshed in history be held up as an agency of peace that we should lovingly and hopefully support? There is irony in the suggestion. And we recall what Napoleon said: “God is on the side of the heaviest battalions.” Whether he quoted God correctly I do not know: but the ecclesiastical spokesmen of God, folding their robes about them, have always upheld the notion that God is with the battalions—on both sides. The church, in wartime, has always been filled with prayers for victory—that is to say, for the blood of the enemy. The church cannot be depended upon as a peaceful force. Its general record is too bad. Its bloody symbol of the cross Joes not give us assurance of peace. When a preacher, out of place in a church, lifts his voice in favor of peace, we should not be misled into thinking this is the attitude of the church as a whole: and that the preachers—nine out of ten of them—will not be as belligerently patriotic in the next war as they were in the war against the Hun. A John Haynes Holmes is far from representing the religious type of mind that prevails in this age and country. Holmes is not an orthodox churchman, but is regarded as a heretic by the eminently and conventionally churchly. The church may talk of the Prince of Peace, but it also sings “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” SPIRITUAL “VISION”

E ARE often told—we skeptics—that what we lack is spiritual vision. We depend upon reason and common sense—we keep our heads when others let them fly off in all direc­ tions—and thus we are denied a glimpse of divine or diaboli­ cal truth. Now I find in my mail a leaflet with the title, A Remark­ able Vision of Hell, which shows the workings of this spiritual-minded-

An Agnostic Looks at Life

ness (I almost said spiritual-mindlessness) and what we miss in our atmosphere of skeptical calmness. We are told of a young lady who, in the midst of a prayerful assemblage in Olivet, Ill., was suddenly thrown ■out of an ordinary state of mind. The symptoms were: “When urged to pray, the young woman replied: ‘It’s’ too late. God will not hear me.’ In her eyes was a ’look of horror and bitter anguish, which seemed gradually to increase. Presently in a terrified voice, she cried, ‘Oh, they’re coming! They’re coming! Don’t let them take me!’ The whole room seemed permeated with an evil presence. One could feel the very breath of hell and the horrible blighting influence of the prince of darkness. The de­ spairing wails of the terrified girl were enough to curdle one’s blood. She sat there with a look of horror on her face, occasionally wringing her hands’ and tearing her hair, thus giving evidence of the awful agony through which her soul was passing. From time to time she cried out sharply, and seemed to be struggling with an antagonist who was visible only to her. Over and ■over again she moaned, ‘I’m lost! I’m lost!’ or shrieked in a voice shrill with terror, ‘I’m in hell! I hear them wailing! Oh, those wails! those flames!* When urged to pray, to call on God for mercy, she replied, ‘I can’t pray! I can’t even speak His name! She suddenly started up, and tried to get away from those who were tryin to help her. They restrained her, even though et me go home!’” she pleaded, ‘Let me go!

It is not clear what awful sin had dragged this girl — spiritually of course—right to the'flaming edge of hell. We are told merely: “On Sunday evening the Lord deeply convicted her of sin”—sin in general, and in the abstract, we suppose. Generally speaking, “her feet were in the way that leads to destruction.” Yet God struggled with her, until—“she defied the Holy Ghost.” And—“That instant He left her.” She was then in an extremely bad shape, and later is said to have testified: “I do not know how anyone can live, when once the Holy Ghost has left them.” Now although the Holy Ghost had left her, and God had presumably damned her with a determined air, this girl would not submit without a struggle. She knew that God can be talked out of a notion, if the prayer is strong enough. And, surely enough, when “God put such tremendous burden on two of the students that their cries and groans mingled with those of the wretched girl,” God relented, regained his temper, changed his mind —“and the God of heaven hearkened and heard.” This is a story of spiritual-mindedness. Anyone who says that the girl was crazy is not spiritually-minded.

NOT A CHRISTIAN COUNTRY T IS of extreme importance to bear in mind that America is not a Christian country, any more than it is a Jewish, a Mohammedan, a Cunfucian or a Holy Roller country. The fathers of our country were careful to make this clear. At the same time they wrote into the living doctrine of the nation the principle that toleration means religious people shall have complete freedom i njelieving anytfifiig-they~pleaseTnomKtterJiqwl npnse n s i cairTTri^hasTeen misconstrued by our churchmen, who wouldmake it appear that those who refuse to believe in theological dogmas are in some manner untrue to the spirit of so-called 100 percent Ameri-

E. Haldeman-]ulius 35 canism. Let us go back to George^W^shtngten, who wrote: “The Government of the United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian religion.” (See “Treaty with Tripoli,” Foreign State Pa­ pers, vol. 2, p. 19.) IS RELIGION NECESSARY? HE WORLD couldn’t get along without religion.” The man who says that means that he could not, as he now thinks, get along without religion. The difficulty is mental, a thing of imagination pure and simple; it is the result of a trainin in superstition, and only appears to be real because its vic­ tim hugs^iEwitEJiO^ackJjirnecLto reality. Face reality, and you— who talk of tHenecessity of religion—will discover that what Ber­ trand Russell calls “ a free man’s worship” is far nobler, and more satisfying to the mind, if not to weak, shrinking emotions. Suppose this man, who cannot do without religion, in a year or two is per­ suaded to see the folly of his belief; suppose that, by some chance of circumstance or contemplation, he loses his religion; will his life therefore be ruined? this world become a miserable, mocking chaos for him? and the end of all things, of all thought and effort and character, be at hand? It is not necessary to speculate; for men have turned away from religion and embraced free thought, and they have found that they could get along quite simply without their former belief. These men indeed have found that they could live better without religion than with it. They have learned to appreciate the joys, the possibilities, the endless discoveries of freedom. They have felt as men who walk from a dungeon into daylight. The effects of this emancipation from religion are absolutely moral in any sense that is valid to the philosopher rather than to the Puritan. The man who gets completely out of the atmosphere of superstition, even of subtle and refined cults, finds that he is able to progress more in knowledge; with no stale texts, no credo, no pious inhibitions to hold him back, he is free to go to school to life, obvi­ ously, the man who is not hedged about with the dogmas of a system, theological or sentimental or pseudo-philosophic, will be more intel­ ligent. The character of the man who turns from vain notions of a God to “the proper study of mankind” will hardly fail to be strength­ ened by the change of purpose and viewpoint; such a change indeed requires strength in the first place; and it means that the man rises from his knees and stands erect—fearless and free, throwing off his chains of delusion, seeing much that has been hidden by the altar before which he has knelt. The man who has the courage to be an individual, and to win to a level of convictions that are really and freely his own, is far the better man for this emancipatory, evolu­ tionary experience. If there is anything admirable, anything moral in a true and philosophic sense, in personal effort — in self-realization and a wise adjustment to the realities of life—then we must say that the man who works out his own philosophy is better than the man who clings to the religion of his fathers; that the man who

An Agnostic Looks at Life

36

thinks, and who by thinking earns, his.wisdom, is better than the man who merely comforts himself with an opiate of beliefj~that~the man who is strong enoughto put fiis~cohyictions to_the_test and throw out a belief that does not appear to be true is better than the man who will not put himself through this ordeal of self-exami.natioru The world can get along better without religion—if free­ dom is better than slavery; better without religion—if reasoned con­ victions are superior to beliefs that are won by no process of reason, that are accepted much as one accepts a fashion of dress; better without religion—if self-developed character is better than a mere habit of conformity. There is no intellectual, ethical or emotional virtue in life that really depends upon the existence of religion; but on the contrary a number of virtues are obstructed in their free development by religion. CThe man who says the world cannot get along without religion is but confessing his own weakness; his own lack of light; his own unwillingness to face reality?) We find that individuals can get along without religion and, witn minds cleared of God-ideas, are grateful for the new, strong, free life; and so man­ kind will yet realize that truth is sufficient for the purposes of life; arid that it can reach higher things when it arises from its knees.

K-K-K

HE KU KLUX KLAN has been in luck ever since Simmons started selling pillow slips. It goes ahead steadily, even rapidly. When it was a movement of law-breakers, it added to its forces. Later, when it became a money-grubbing outfit, the money simply poured in. Then it went in for the “respectable” element, and it has won them. Now it is in politics above everything else, and it is having luck at every turn. Its paper's—like the Menace and the Fellowship Forum—are very poor specimens, badly edited, crudely writ­ ten, obvious in their propaganda of religious intolerance. But even in its journalism the Klan has been lucky, for it now can boast of having won to its support the holiest of newspapers, that purest model of angelic rectitude, that undiluted essence of righteousness and rightthinking—the Christian Science Monitor, The body of the paper belongs to the church, but its soul belongs to the Klan. Here is a good catch and the Imperial Wizard has my left-handed compliments. He is an expert organizer, shrewd and cunning. What he lacks in scholarship he makes up in scheming. Even though he is lacking in intellectuality himself he is intelligent enough to realize that his knights of Christian love and charity must attract or create an out­ standing organ of undisputed godliness, a paper that has on its pages the unmistakable O. K. in the handwriting of God Almighty Himself. The Christian Science Monitor measures up to every possible specifi­ cation. It is not edited by a man, but by the Holy Ghost. Even its type is not set by mortal man. Its typesetters are the Twelve Apostles and their near kin. It is the only shop in the world that is without a printer’s devil. Its “devil” is the Angel Gabriel. Jesus is its consulting editor and Mrs. Eddy takes care of its sports department. The Christian

E. Haldeman-Julius

37

Science Monitor, next to the Holy Bible, is God’s own word. To sub­ scribe for this paper is to tell the wide world that you are right with your Maker. And the Imperial Wizard has the Christian Science Monitor. Some wizard! I lift my topper to him, and tear holes in the blue ether with my hurrahs. Winning over the Christian Science Monitor was divine inspiration. It could not be less than that. The best help given the Klan at the Democratic convention was the word of Bryan on the platform and the Christian Science Monitor's issues intended for convention consumption. Just how long the Chris­ tian Science Monitor has been a Klan paper I do not know, but during the McAdoo-Smith fight the Monitor came into the open once for all. It fought Smith because he is a Catholic, frankly and openly. It was for McAdoo because he stands as the personification of everything noble and good in the sublime doctrines of the Ku Klux Klan. The show was a good one and I read my Monitor with much gusto, let me assure you. I wouldn’t have missed its convention correspondence for a million Little Blue Books. What helped stamp that correspondence as the final utter­ ance of Almighty God was the fact that it was written by the editor himself, Mr. Willis J. Abbott, once of the Hearst yellow journalism but now won over to the Christian Science Monitor. And Mr. Abbott puts on a good show. He tells, with all the tenderness of a tired hero, how he stood at the gate and fought off the enemies of our white, Protestant, native-born civilization. The religious aggression of the Catholics had Mr. Abbott himself to fight. In one of his articles in the Christian Science Monitor of July (1924), he disposes of Smith finally and then hurries to the second line of trenches—the vice-presidency. No Catholic must be the nominee, either for President or Vice-President. Inspired directly by God, Mr. Abbot turns his guns on Senator T. J. Walsh, of Montana, whom he is sure the powers of Satan will conspire to place in nomination for the vice-presidency. But let the angel of the Lord speak in his own words: “It is an insidious and menacing movement. Senator Walsh is in every sense a statesman. His senatorial record has always been marked by a high degree of devotion, intelligence and patriotism, and since his brilliant direc­ tion of the Teapot Dome investigation has attracted national attention and approval. He is a lawyer of high attainments, and to use a hackneyed phrase which expresses something rare in politics he is a gentleman and a scholar. His discharge of the delicate and perplexing duties of the chair in this con­ vention has won nothing but plaudits from both sides. Except for one reason there is no man upon whom all factions could more readily unite. But, he is a Roman Catholic.”

But—he is a Catholic. That settles it. . There is nothing in the Constitution against our voting for a Catholic, but the Christian Science Monitor, being the voice of God, is higher than the Constitution. Walsh is perfect as a statesmen—granted—but he is a Catholic Christian instead of a Methodist Christian or a Christian Scientist, so to the rack with him. Glory be to God! How these Christians love one another! How the message of Christ keeps good Christians from hacking one another to pieces! This Christian world is crazy, my fellow heathens. I mean that literally, not figuratively.

38

An Agnostic Looks at Life

TEACHING THE BIBLE

HATEVER may be the virtue of the Bible as the literature, we know only too well that this manner of teaching is not the object of those who advocate Bible instruction in the schools. They want the Bible imposed upon the chldren as the word of God. Their one desire is to add to the superstitious influences that all too insidiously surround, to this day, the human race. This propaganda for Bible teaching js, too, equivalent^o a .recognition onhe^failurexif the church to win^in-its own^Iield^^~(When State and "Church were first separated^ theChurch began to declme. It could not hold its own in the face of increasing knowledge. As it was brought by the necessity of events to depend more upon the voluntary reason of man, and less upon force, the Church grew less and less important in the scheme of things. Given the choice, many stayed away from church—finding, as did that unimpeachable American patriot, Benjamin Franklin, that a Sunday could be spent far more profitably; others, who sat in the pews, sub­ scribed to creeds with tongue in cheek and were not so valiant in trying to spread the faith. As one reads history, one sees that the Church has prospered in proportion to its power; that as a mere leader of men, in the way of voluntary conversion, it has failed. Smarting under the knowledge of that failure,.the church is today seeking to regain a sem­ blance of its olden power, (it is not willing to compete fairly with other interests and influences in the life of mam It is not willing that the vic­ tory or the defeat should rest with Christian temples and Christian homes. It would, being beaten in its own field, invade the schools. It would go outside the church doors and, with unfair persuasion and the maftice of trickery upon immature minds, enforce its doctrine. InZa^ncld, which Is supposedly reserved for. knowledge, the Church would dishonestly Oteude^With'^eculatioQ, credo amfrituaE It^would’lurn dtrrschoofs into churches— when, as a matter of fact, we have too many churches and too few schools. And what is this propaganda, fairly viewed, but an attempt to reunite the State and Church ? to gain once more for tne Church the particular, invidious, and in this case more subtle and effec­ tive support of the civil powers? We are all agreed -that the Church should not have the power to dictate religious belief. It is very easy for us to see that the ancient (not so far removed) power of the Church to dominate human thinking was in essence vicious and in effect tre­ mendously terrible.' Yet what is this Bible-teaching talk but the old evil in a new disguise ? It is really more insidious, more sinister, more con­ temptuous of human rights. It is not, as of old, a candid employment of force; man is not accorded the right to be a heretic ^nd, under pain pf the stake, to disagreewithlthelmen^FTiO^ The right to use his reason, even rehelliouslyland dangerously and with penalty of the stake, is taken from him. C He is filled with superstition from the earliest moment when his mmeLcan be influenced; cheated of the possibility of using his reason to embrace his own personal idea of life, and, as tnith and in a situation where he cannot unreasonably expect truth, he is given the husks of superstition; In short, by a trick that is absolutely con­ temptible, he is given a preacher instead pt a teacher.

39

E. Haldeman-Julius

ADMITTED STUPIDITY T is too bad any one should be ignorant. Yet it is charming, once in a while, when such a man admits his ignorance. He may claim the virtue of honesty, at any rate; he does not drive the angels to weeping, as ignorant people sometimes do, by enunciating thus and so with a positive flourish of conviction; and if it so be that he is willing to absorb a measure of intelligence, the man who Owns to his empty mental state is not quite hopeless. The trouble is that the less a man knows, the more certain he may be that the world holds no thought or thing that any one can tell him. There are few traits of man, strangely enough, that are so proud as stupidity. And men will reflect and procliam vainly that they are whole-hearted, whooping patriots, and therefore are unable to analyze events, being deceived by their mere crafty-politic show; that they are good believers in the ancient myths, and therefore have never suspected that their minds were designed for the rather obvious purpose of reasoning; that they belong, in short, to the herd and have not the faintest quality of being individuals. A stupid man, defending his God for example, will dismiss the scientists with a snort of robust, righteous contempt. What do the men of science know about life? Nothing indeed by the side of this yowling yokel, who, if he knows nothing else, knows the very position of the throne of God. What is Voltaire to this man whose head is full to bursting with the innumerable • matters that he doesn’t know ? This fellow Voltaire was an “infidel,” and by that token “in hell they’ll roast him like a herrin’.” Maybe he thought he was smart, did Voltaire, but any habitue of the hysterical mourners’ bench could tell him a number of things. Ignorance may be refreshing. One may enjoy, on rare occa­ sions, a frank ano disarming confession uf stupidity. But ignorance that pretends to be allwise, that cries to high heaven of its knowledge, asks for contempt and receives it in full measure. %

CHURCH PROGRESS. HEN certain readers have told me that there is progress in the church, I have replied that such progress, wherever it is real and not merely a change of rhetoric instead of a change of 1 mind, is in the direction of less religion. A better kind of religion, if one may use the phrase, is a less religious kind: one that simply lops off its foolish beliefs and assumptions. That is to say, the only way.to “improve” religion istoget rid of it entire entirelv. ly^ There is less ofthis fine, sensible progress away from religion than people wish to believe. I mean that there is less evidence of it within the church, although the growing army of free thinkers without the church may well encourage us. Thje church itself is dominated by the Fundamentalully small minority.A ists. The advanced clergy Is a pitifully minority. X preacher who is too liberal will soon lose caste. The majority who sit in the pews want the old-fashioned religion, with perhaps a few modern trimmings that fl

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have you to the teaching in all American pub­ lic schools of the Ten Commandments and of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount? 8. Do you believe that Christ was and is what he claimed to be? 9. What religion or morality would you have taught in our public schools? 10. Will you state the names of your chief officers and directors and the religious belief of each, and denominational affiliation, if any?

The union responded in this manner: “Questions of what Jesus taught are not in our field for interpretation any more than for legislative bodies or public schools. We oppose religious teaching in public schools except under conditions stated for matters of theory. We neither advocate nor oppose moral instructoin. Permanent Chairman is Harry F. Ward, Methodist Episcopal minister and Secretary of Methodist Federation for Social Service.”

I should want to make it clear that I oppose the teaching in all

E. Haldeman-Julius

57

American public schools of the Ten Commandments < monon.th.e Mount for the good reason that they .are botiduU-ofbunk. The Ten Commandments and’ the Sermon are dripping _ _ with _ _ ~ hokum. If one were to thoroughly debunk the Sermon on the Mount he would find, at the end of his labors, that it is really not more than 5 percent sound. The rest is bunk. Do I believe that Christ was and is what he claimed to be? That means the Son of God. I do not believe this. Here is an­ other piece of Jesus’ bunk. He was, granting that he ever lived, the son of a father and a mother, like the rest of us. e didn’t die for our s i n s, b ut .b.ecause he made an all around_nw im Of course, hewas given Tod extreme punishment for his silly con­ duct; he shquld have been locked up, in the hope that in time he might come to his senses. When Jesus ranted about being the Son of God, he was talking bunk. I do not like the answer to the last question. We know that the American Civil Union is made up of a number of enlightened men and women who entertain no religious beliefs or affiliations. They are agnostics, atheists, skeptics and infidels, with possibly the single exception of Mr. Ward, who is a church member. The ques­ tioners asked about all of the officers and directors. The answer told of only one man. Why not tell the whole-story? Why be merely ctever? WHOSE FAULT?

HAVE said it before, and I want to repeat it: The Ku Klux Klan is not a “happenstance.” It came because it was wanted— wanted badly and earnestly by—what ? The Methodist and Bap­ tist Churches! The Klan is the flower of Protestantism; it is the perfect expression of its religion, its philosophy, its technic, its strategy, its ideals, its history. Some of my readers will perhaps remember the correspondence of Stanley Forrest, in a recent num­ ber of The Outlook, shortly after the close of the big Klan Klonvocation at Convention Hall, Kansas City, which is supposed to have been attended by about four thousand officials of this new Black Hundred of Protestant hounds and hyenas. That article said that fully one-fourth of the delegates to this important national conven­ tion were preachers. This does not surprise me in the slightest, for I have had occasion to notice it before. The Ku Klux Klan is the Protestant Church’s fighting arm\ It is the regiment of the Church Militant. It is the jrui^pf_^etnodj^ ajidJBaptist riff-raff. Now and then you heart voice in the^Church against the Rian, but it is feeble; in the main, one hears deep, ominous silence—the silence of myth-mongers satisfied with the organization that has sprung up to advocate their cause. Even granting that the Ku Klux Klan may dissolve into thin air, disappearing because its whole program is unreasonable, impossible and reactionary as not to be able to en­ dure in even these days of shoddy thinking—granting even that, I say, this will merely mean that the good Christian souls that pound

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An Agnostic Looks at Life

pulpits and send sinners to hell will create something new, and per­ haps more efficient, in their effort to turn humanity into a brainless and unreasoning and unquestioning beast. Back of the Klan stands the Church—and so long as it stands, sb long may we expect move­ ments on a par with the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan will go, per­ haps tomorrow or next year—but if the theocrats remain we will still be unsafe from newer and perhaps more formidable attacks. Let there be no mistaking my meaning. I nail the Fiery Cross on the steeples of our Methodists and Baptists. They brought the thing into existence, and they are keeping its fires of intolerance and hatred burning. Here we have only one more proof of the church element’s influences for evil, tyranny, corruption, schism and an­ tagonism along lines that should not exist in a country dedicated to freedom, but rapidly becoming free in nothing but* spooks ana religious twaddle.

SOME BELLIGERENT NOTES

SfiJE are asked to consider seriously the importance of the Church as an agency of’ “spiritual development.” Christian culture! w What are its signs? its slogans? Songs, we are told, have a “ great psychological significance. What are the Christian songs, that express the soul of the religion? As you pass by a church, stop moment and listen. The children are singing,^LJesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”) Sublime assurance of bunk that, sung often enough and firmly imbedded inTthe plastic young brain, requires no .thought, demandsjioinvestigation, and that turns a f right enedor furious face to reason. Therfyou wilTRear: “O you must be a lover of the Lord, or you won’t go to heaven when you die.” Silly, of course, but quite typi­ cal of Christian culture. The worship of a God who is so small-minded, so lacking in “spiritual development,” that he threatens people with re­ jection from heaven if they refuse to love him. Again, you may be uplifted by the refrain: “There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins.” This, too, you perceive is sweet, noble, cultural stuff. Blood—it is smeared all over the Christian religion. Its symbol is the bloody cross. Its votaries sing, with fanatically glad voices, of the power and fascination of the blood. Blessed, beautiful blood! And Christianity does, indeed, owe a great deal to blood. It was spilled freely and unmercifully to maintain the faith in all its blood-baptized purity. Another song that will spiritually develop any one to a point at the farthest remove from sanity is: “Standing on the Promises of God.” What promises? God knows. As Charles Lamb remarked, when somebody spoke of walking on an empty stomach, “Whose stomach?”. And after standing on the promises until they are dizzy, they step down from these tall—but very thin—promises and proceed sadly to “Tell It to Jesus.” Tell it to the marines! So many are telling it to Jesus that, if he hears, it’s all a senseless babel to him. Forget it— that’s better counsel. Just forget it—Jesus and all.

E

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59

II At last the story of Jonah and the whale is put in its true light. We see cold reason applied to it. We see faith and fact married by mental acumen. Who is the man that shows us the utter simplicity and possibility, and ergo actuality, of the story of Jonah’s famous little journey in the belly of a whale? It is the well-known pulpit Pagliacci and altar acrobat, the Rev. Billy Sunday, D. D. It remains only for him to identify the whale. Staining on his head, so that he can see the truth, from just the right angle, Billy roars softly at us: “Now, some man says, ‘I don’t believe in Jonah and the whale.’ The question is not, Did a whale swallow Jonah—that isn’t the question. The question is, Could God make a fish big enough to swallow a man? If He could, then there is nothing more to it. That’s the question; it isn’t whether the fish did swallow him, the question is could God make one big enough to swallow him—that’s the whole thing in a nutshell, I don’t give a picayune who you are. “But listen to me. My friend George Pullen is one of the greatest au­ thors pn whales the world has ever known. He says there are fifty-two species of whales in the seas and fifty of them could swallow a man. In the first place the ’Bible doesn’t say that a whale swallowed Jonah. It says God prepared a great fish. So the question is, could God make a fish large enou to swallow a man—that’s the only question.”

I understand that Billy is a fast talker; and in the fleetness and agility of his discourse, he sped beyond the point that is most at issue. The real question is: Could Jonah have stayed in the belly of a whale —or a specially prepared “great fish”—three days and three nights, and emerge from that experience a well man, thoroughly alive, sound in wind and limb, and able to return to Nineveh and announce the fire­ works ? That’s the funny little question, Billy, picayunes notwithstanding, as you eloquently observe. We might ask: Could God make an ocean big enough to drown a man? That isn’t the question, between scholars. But could a man drown, and stay drowned a few days, and then arise and go about his business? According to the ancient Greeks, Hercules took a ride, similar to Jonah’s, in the lower berth of a whale. But Hercules, although he was a better man than Jonah—a god indeed— wasn’t entirely unaffected by his trip. He came out bald-headed. Say what you will about them, Billy, the Greeks tried to be realistic.

Ill I am surprised. But it appears that God does not see eye to eye with Dr. John Roach Straton, who cries out baptistically against the sins of New York City. Some time ago Dr. Straton drew upon his prophetic spirit and described the annihilation, with appropriate pyro­ technics, of the evil metropolis, which prefers pleasure to piety. Dr. Straton as good as asked God to bring on the avenging fire and flood. And how did God respond to this cry for the destruction of Gomorrahon-the-Subway ? Why, bless you, he waited a few months and then the other day he sent a perfectly fiendish whirlwind tearing through the Bible belt—right across the good Methobaptist States of Missouri, Indiana and Illinois. He let the sinners and skeptics in New York City alone. He turned the hurricane loose upon his own supposedly

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An Agnostic Looks at Life

chosen people out where the campmeetin’ begins. He upset and prac­ tically demolished whole communities, including the churches whose walls had resounded with hymns and prayers and sermons to his glory. At the very time that this twister was laying waste the Christian towns in the Bible belt, and starting hectic excursions of Christian people on the way to heaven, the heathen of New York City were at the play (the “immoral” play, mind you), and free-thinkers were talking about Thomas Paine as if there were no such phenomena as cyclones. I call it odd, to say fhe least. It seems an evidence of divine perversity that is beyond the comprehension of agnostics. If Oscar Wilde is in heaven, it may be that he has infected God with his cynical, paradoxical wit. Certainly this cyclone in the Bible belt was a paradox of God. IV

Consistency is not a Christian virtue. God is all powerful, say the Christians. Yet they talk about “helping God” do this and do that. A Kansas lady, writing to T. A. M c Neadfedilo r of the Kansas Farmer and Mail and Breese, laments the .downward trend of the world in pertain matters of behavior and suggests that good Christians “help God to overcome the fault, whatever it is.” Mr. McNeal, who didn’t agree with the lady that the world is generally headed for the bow-wows, also failed to agree that God needs help. He wrote: “I take it that Mrs. Bartlett is a religion woman, but does she not reveal a lack of faith in the power of God when she proposes to ‘help Him overcome’ the evils she talks about? That seems to assume that God wants to overcome the evil but is not able to do it without our help. If that is true, then He is not all-powerful, and if He is all-powerful then evil exists because for some reason He wants it to exist.” I suspect that this lady is not simply proposing to help God but to direct him—tell him what he should do. Advising God is one of the commonest and easiest things Christians do—a habit that must cause God no little worry. He who prays is begging God for something, or informing about something, or urging him to get busy and do something. The truth, as Mr. McNeal suggests, lies between the two alternatives: God is not as big a man as the Christians say he is; or he prefers evil and creates it and lets it flourish to grieve and amaze Christians, who can only murmur that God is “inscrutable.” So he is—and excruciating, no less. V The Christian saves his worst, his feeblest, his most nonsensical argument to the very last—and then he hurls it at you with the air of one who is wiping you, intellectually, off the earth. A desperate and mighty effort to save the day for God is the question, always met in the best circles of holiness, “How would you like to live in a town without churches? Now the Christian expects you to hesitate, and stammer, and get something caught in your throat, and finally admit in a shame­ faced manner that, of course, that’s another question: that while you don’t believe in God, or in the Bible, or in religion, or in any single, small feature of the Sham of Shams, still you want the Church (which is sham through and thTdiighJ toYemain. This shows how very najve Christians are—to imagine that one can disbelieve utterly in the teaching

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of the Church and yet want to hang on to the Church. There may be -such illogical and uncertain people, but I am not one of them. I say, let the churches go. They are pests. They have no valid reason for existence. They are not temples of civilization, but relics of a bar­ barous past. How silly is this question about churches! Any number of other questions would be fully as reasonable. Suppose one should ask: How would you like to live in a town without a Kiwanis Club? Or without a Rotary Club? Or how would you like to live in a town without lodges ? Or, my dear brother—prepare to contemplate a shock­ ing possibility—how would you like to live in a town without a Ku Klux Klan? These institutions, like the churches, are foolish and un­ necessary. They fill a community with bunk and hold up before it pretty ideals. They are not friendly to culture. They do not produce thinkers. They are often quite disturbing factors in a community. Yet not all of them are as harmful as the Church. The Klan and the Church head the list as nuisances. So I say, ask the next Christian who throws the old question at you, what he thinks a town would be without a Klan or a Kiwanis center of light. A town without churches would get along nicely. There would be more human kindness. There would be less of false distinction between man and man. No sin-killing evangelist would descend upon that town with his wild, hysterical preachments and excite the community, frighten_ it, divide Jt. and disgust the civilized portion of it. On the otherhand,~just imagine a town without a good cigar store! That would be a real, downright calamity. Think of the nerves that would suffer! How unpleasant such a town would be, with the people always in a bad humor, unsociable, unhappy, cursing God and man!

VI It is the true Christian view that God overlooks nothing. He has a finger in every pie, as it were. He is interested in football, too, it appears. Whether he would heed a scrub game on a vacant city lot, I am not prepared to say, but at any rate there is presumably divine attention for a larger gridiron battle between the Army and Navy teams. We note that after a game in which West Point defeated Annapolis, the West Pointers piously removed their helmets and, standing on the field of victory, thanked Jehovah on the spot for that victory. This is the way it happened, as told by the captain of the Army team: “We have prayed before every game this season, not for victory, but that we might acquit ourselves like men. At the conclusion of Sat­ urday’s game, when I think our prayers were answered, we jerked off our helmets and thanked God fervently for the victory.” It is not recorded that the Navy team similarly recognized the interven­ tion of God. We are not told that they swore, nor that they prayed. The interesting thing, however, is that God, busy though he may be, can always lay off to watch over a football game. VII. Good books lead us to toleration, as well as to independent thinking. They incline the mind toward broad views. They dispel

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^apatics. On the contrary, bad books sow endless discord.. Judged by its fruits of intolerance, I do not know of any book that is worse than the Bible. I has been a prolific breeder of hatreds, dissen­ sions, calamities of insensate strife. One can mention hardly an injustice that the Bible has not been used by the holy sophists to defend. The book at once lends itself to many different systems of fanatical belief and cultivates the spirit that leads men to perse­ cute and destroy in behalf of their creeds. It is a babel of delusions which has given rise, not simply to a confusion of tongues which has no parallel in the history of man, but to the clashing of swords and the lighting of horrible fires of martyrdom in support of each lingo of ridiculous faith. The Book of the Ages must bear the chief blame of bloodshed and hatred and the intolerance throughout the ages. VIII.

Don’t forget this: Men, as jallible as you and L wrote out our religions jjnen, noL-God^ All men make mistakes, and tell lies, and exaggerate, and bluff, and put on a front, and try to impress. All men mean well, but they are more likely to be wrong than right. If man has a genius for one thing in common, it i&^the^genius for be­ ing wrong, for making poor guesses, for calling notions the word of God. God is very secretive. He doesn’t take man into his confi­ dence, which angers us and makes us put words into His mouth. If there is a God, He keeps his mouth shut, which is godlike. We men gabble too much. Look at me! Look at the good, white paper I use up each week carrying my chatter to my listeners. But one* thing should commend me to God: I never pretend to talk for God. My religious friends (and they are good friends) tell me I cannot talk for God because I am without faith. One must “believe” in the word of God (theology) and then one can “carry on the word.” But I cannot “believe” and that rules me out. I can speak what I know; or rather, what I think I know, for I am frank enough to label my most precious thoughts and ideals as notions. I have a ba# of notions that I play with, while searching for the truth. They are notions, nevertheless. Some of them give one a hint, per­ haps a glimmer of truth, but in essence they are still notions. Some day our theologians will be as honest, branding their God-ideas as notions. How much better it would be if all of us—scientists, philosophers, theologians—were to throw all our ideas into a heap, call them notions and begin all over again. Too manyof ttg-bejong toourTdeas, when really the ideas should belong toj^TBeware^of oeing labeled andTiIed away.Bebigger than labels^ And the best way to begin is to label all your pet ideas notions, IX. Numerous letters come to my desk, in which irritable and sharptongued defenders of the faith warn me against wasting my time, my energy and my substance in attacking the church and its mori­ bund and decadent jumble of idiocies. The favorite argument seems to run like this: Voltaire, Paine and Ingersoll aimed their mightiest

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blows at the church, without leaving so much as a dent in the holy armor of the children of God. So why raise your little voice? Why throw away your feeble strength on the impossible ? Granted that the church survived a hundred Voltaires. Does that mean the rationalists were wrong? Why expect one voice to silence millions of bellowing fanatic^?) The churches have noise­ making machines powerful enough to maEFmy~voice sound like a m^se-squeakTnathunder-storm. Does that mean-the mouse should SFdeprived of his inalienable and constitutional right to deliver him­ self of his squeak? Better one faint chirp for truth than an endless roar of brass-throated clericals. And let me add this: One preach­ er who “converts” a thousand souls to eternal happiness and salva­ tion is considered a good battler for the Lord. If I, with my presses, succeed in keeping a hundred thousand persons ffom the holy clutches of the church (and I am reaching a much larger audience than that) can it be said that this lone mouse squeaketh in vain?

You know, I believe the preachers are the ones who will get the worst of it—who will have the most to answer for—in the Next Life. They are the ones who have misrepresented God. Not that I know anything about God. But neither do the preachers. Speak­ ing out of their ignorance, they have surely put God in the wrong time and again. They are the fellows who have passed themselves off as God’s spokesmen. They have presumed to act in the name of God and to bless, in God’s name, certain acts of other men in peace and war and politics. If I am any judge, the preachers have made no end of trouble for the Most Righ. They have loaded him with all sorts of crazy responsibilities, blamed him for everything under the sun, and praised him for things that, it may well be, were dis­ gusting in his sight. I know very well that I wouldn’t be pleased to have a lot of men setting up in business at every wayside tab­ ernacle as my agents. Yes, I believe God will have a special pun­ ishment for the preachers. I am not worrying. I have never spoken for God nor made a move in his name. I have left him alone. I have minded my own business, and let God mind his business. He probably won’t notice me. But the preachers have forced them­ selves unmannerly upon his attention. God, I suppose, has been on the job and he knows y/hat these frauds have been about. If God has any self-respect and independence and ordinary regard for his reputation, he will certainly not fail to mete out due and drastic rewards to the one bunch of men who have most conspicuously interfered with his affairs. All preachers, please note. And repent while there is yet a little time. XI. As I see it, the wonderful thing about Christian Science is that it has survived a constant, close comparison between Mrs. Eddy’s style and the style of the Bible. The sermon of a Christian Science rally consists of “correlative readings” from the Bible and from Science and Health—no merely human interpretation, you under-

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An Agnostic Looks at Life

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stand, but the “inspired” soul-searchings of Mother Eddy. It’s a queer, though outwardly quite business-like performance: there is a reading of verses from the Bible followed by verses from Science and Health, and nothing could better reveal the faith of the leaders in their ability to hold the flock, for the effect of all this should be the most deadly disillusionment. But the simple fact is that Chris­ tian Scientists have no sense of style. They can listen to the simple, direct, vigorous and exalted language of the Bible and, side by side with it, the banal, pompous, flighty and disjointed style of Mother Eddy—and still believe that the two are equally “inspired.” But nothing is more certain than that if God dictated the Bible, he had no hand in Science and Health. The former book shows God to be 1 good writer if a poor thinker, while the latter reveals a low ca­ pacity of composition that would not be equal to the writing of fair, average newspaper editorials. As I say, an awful contrast, which proves that Mother Eddy, far from being “inspired,” was not even well instructed in high school English, could not have achieved a passing grade on an ordinary theme. Yet Christian Science has not been killed by the comparison, quite the most perilous ordeal to which it could be subjected. It is plain that Mother Eddy did not depend upon divine inspiration but upon human lack of inspiration.

XII.

What a poor ideal it is that religion holds before man! We hear praise of the ideal of a belief, faith, illusion that will infallibly produce a state of mental quietude—and stagnation. The “peace that passeth all understanding” (and that, indeed, is entirely outside the pale of understanding) is supposed to be finer than the living thought that scorns an easy, comfortable, dead-dogmatic certitude. Well, I prefer to be alive, and to keep in lively and agreeable mo­ tion, mentally as well as physically. Better, says Ingersoll, “the tempest of thought and action rather than the dead calm of ignor­ ance and faith.” It is quite characteristic that, in a world of sham, men should glorify with foolish ecstasy the religious ideal of no thought. TRUTH IN DOGMA? HE worst, the wildest, the most shamelessly dishonest and dog­ matic reasoning has always been employed in behalf of relig­ ion: and the worst of this worst is that used by priests and preachers. A flagrant example of such reasoning, which in every phrase denies reason, is furnished by Rev. A. D. Spillard,S. J., Presi­ dent of Rockhurst College (Kansas City, Mo.), who in The Kansas City Star hales evolution and science generally before the bar of Catholic dogma. This Spillard reveals himself as unfit to discuss the issue honestly and intelligently, as he begins and narrowly circumscribes himself with the position that science must kneel, with head uncov­ ered and eyes carefully blindfolded, at the feet of religion: that in­ stead of the speculations of religion being checked by the investiga­ tions of science, the opposite should hold. Frankly, Spillard re­

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gards dogma as superior to fact, and theory in thin air as better than truth resting on the ground of evidence and reality. He throws his cards on the table, showing himself not as a seeker after truth but as a defender of dogma. He does not ask, Is evolution true? is it reasonable? can it bring proofs? is it facing and actually work­ ing toward greater knowledge? Indeed Spillard doesn’t ask nor argue —he simply tells the reader what he should believe. It is "‘material evolution, organic evolution”—that is to say, the kind of evolution upon which the scientific world agrees, the only kind of evolution that has meaning (for without material evolution, no other evolution is possible)—to which Spillard objects. This evolution, which he quaintly calls “extreme Darwinism,” is alleged by Spillard to be “subversive of morality, dangerous to the welfare of the state and unworthy of a philosophic mind.” Why it should be immoral to hold that life has evolved from lower forms to higher, Spillard is in too great a hurry to explain: nor does he so much as indicate the manner in which the study of the age and development of life on the earth threatens the State or social order; and he neg­ lects to show us why it is “unworthy of a philosophic mind” to seek truth, accept facts, and hold any theory that is supported by facts. Spillard’s own mind is “philosophic” in this strange fashion: “A system which would expunge from among its working principles the evident idea of a Creator, and leave out of consideration the spirituality and immortality of the soul of man together at the same time with the freedom of the human will must needs foster in the heart of youth naught but barbarizing tendencies.” In other words, a view of life that does not submit itself, first and last, to the mere assumptions of theology cannot be an intelligent, philosophic view. Spillard refers to dogmas that nobody knows to be true, as if they, were unquestionably true. Whaf aphrase/ for example? is “the evi­ dent idea of a Creator”! How can an idea that lies outside the field of human knowledge be an evident idea? It is characteristic of a preacher to assert that what man cannot know, he must believe— that a notion oftheology is evident, even as a fact of life is evident. And when Spillard refers to the “spirituality and immortality of the soul of man,” he also deals, in an irresponsibly positive manner, with the unknown and the speculative. So far as we know—to the best of our knowledge—the “soul of man” is a fiction: and we do not know of a spiritual man—i. e., something other than material man: and we have not a single proof nor grain of evidence nor hint of a reasonable idea of immortality. These are meaningless words, which Spillard puts up as essential ideas to which science must con­ form and beyond which science dare not venture. The “freedom of the human will” rests on no better foundation: it is not an idea that will bear examination: only the most adroit and involved and unconvincing sophistry can be urged in its defense: the daily, plain circumstances of life show the idea to be false. The doctrine of free will appeals to human vanity, and it is held to be necessary in the scheme of theology: but it has this weakness, that it is contradicted by all that we know about life, and as our knowledge increases the doctrine recedes farther into the dim, superstitious past.

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When he attempts to maintain his point that the view of evolu­ tion has “barbarizing tendencies,” (what a contradiction in terms!), Spillard is dishonest, and dishonest in the silliest fashion imagin­ able. He offers a quotation from Darwin’s Life and Letters: “What can an ape know about such high things?” And he comments as­ tonishingly : “Thus if man be but an ape, and as an ape he cannot know such high things, he cannot lift himself above the brutish life of the ape.” As Spillard puts it in his absurd, false way, evolution appears even more foolish than in the popular view. The popular view is, simply, that evolution holds men have descended from mon­ keys. According to Spillard, the evolutionary view is that man is still an ape and can never be more than an ape! Ages ago, say the records of evolution, man was definitely not an ape: and in his long journey he has won knowledge, culture, art, ethics: yet, says Spillard, evolution means that man has not evolved and cannot evolve! Maybe you have reached .tne conclusion that Spillard is an. tagonistic to science. But he is not. Oh, no! He just wants to keep science in its place. He only wants to set a limit to science: i. e., the knowledge of life. A kind of science that is Christian (what­ ever kind that may be), Spillard is ready to tolerate. The rule that Spillard lays down for science is really very simple: it must inter­ pret facts to fit religious theory, and if it cannot so interpret them, it must ignore them. However, Spillard does not use the term, “religious theory.” He speaks of “the truths of religion.” As re­ ligion is purely and vaguely and bewilderingly nothing but theory, one may wonder ±iow Spillard can find due occasion for the word “truth/’ “Truth,” however, is only a word with Spillard, and is in­ terchangeable with “dogma,” “assumption” or “theory.” The fic­ tions of God, immortality and free will are “truths,” according to Spillard. When the findings of science conflict with such “truths,” science must halt, close its eyes, turn back. He this defines ex cathedra the proper, Christian, Catholic position of science: "Science must be subject to religion, for the truths which religion holds can be no more than certified and enunciated by the honest findings of science. Hence, when the investigable findings of science come into unmis­ takable conflict with the truths of religion it may readily be taken for granted that science in some way or other has been deceived, for as the God of re1igion is the same God of science, He cannot contradict Himself. Since re< igion, therefore, is the supreme factor in life, science as an inferior and sub' sequent factor must be subject to it.”

The duty of science, says Spillard, is to serve and sustain the ignorant beliefs that men held before the age of science^) It is not for science to look carefully and impartially at life, to seek facts, to investigate without prejudice, to work toward honest and sound conclusions. This, of course, is simply to say that science should not be scientific; that theories (which Spillard calls “truths”) are more important than facts; that knowledge must not disturb man in superstitions that he has previously embraced for lack of knowl­ edge. Who but a preacher could apply the name of science to the search, not for facts in their own right, not for all of the facts, not

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for facts as leading to wider knowledge and changing, sounder, more truthful and verifiable conceptions of life, but to the search for a handful of facts that can be bolster up a preconceived, art____ ___ theory! What sense, what value, is in a limited science, a Christian science, a “limited field of evolution,” such as this Catholic dogmatist would honor with his hierophantic blessing! Science as the servant of superstition] Facts to fit fallacies ! The search, not for what we can know, but for what we desire to believe! Priestly indeed and pre-scientific is this view of the rights and duties and safe, timid, virtuous functions of science! It is curious, too, that the “truths” of religion are to be “certified and enunciated” by science. What then is the matter with religion, that it cannot certify and adequately enunciate its own “truths”? Science is inferior to religion, we are told—yet religion must call upon science to gather evidence for, and prop up (rather than check up), the “truths” of religion. That is to say, science must surrender its integrity’and independence and must uphold such nonsense as the following: “Christian teaching and sound philosophy require him to hold that man's soul is spiritual and that it consequently differs essentially from the soul of a brute. Hence, he is bound to maintain that no evolution of the soul of an Further­ more, his Christian belief demands of him that he hold the human soul as the direct effect of God’s creative power. . . . “As to the body of man, a Christian is obliged to accept the inspired word in Genesis (2:7): The Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth.”

Yet Spillard is willing to concede that “God’s manner of opera­ tion” in making man “is, as St Augustine regards it, wrapped in mystery.” God may have made the first man promptly and per­ fectly, right out of and right down to the ground, or he may have evolved him slowly. “But no matter whether God formed the body of Adam immediately of the earth, or mediately, that is, caused it to pass through a number of stages of development, such as in­ organic, vegetable and finally animal life, the inspired word in Genesis still would be true.” When you add to emphasis on “the inspired word” an insistence upon “a fixed attitude,” then you have before you the completely unscientific attitude of Spillard. What can be more inconsistent in a man of science .than a “fixed attitude”! And what attitude is more appropriate to a preacher! We are as­ sured by Spillard that “the Christian man of science ought to main­ tain a fixed attitude towards evolution. Wherever the theory of evolution clashes unmistakably with Christian teaching, there he is bound to reject it.” Yes, absolutely bound—regardless of facts. He must reject it, because he has already decided that it isn’t true or that, at any rate, it ought not to be true. Naively, Spillard adds: “This manner of procedure would seem to limit the freedom of the Christian in the field of scientific re­ search.” It would seem to, indeed, inasmuch as to prescribe any kind of limits is apparently to limit the investigator. But, bless you, Spillard is equal to this dilemma. Neatly, he caps one sophistry with another. “Considered more deeply, however,” he says, “it will

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be seen to enlarge his sphere of progress, for knowledge broadens only in proportion as it measures up to the truth.” Thus* it appears, in this odd Catholic view, that truth is not a product of knowledge, but is something (what! only God and Spillard can tell) greater than and uniquely independent of knowledge; and it is for knowl­ edge to “measure up to the truth” that—mighty and mysterious es­ sence!—was in possession of the field long before the arrival of knowledge. In other words, what man knows is not true: truth is what man doesn’t know. A WALL VS. A VOID ELIGION, writes Lydia W. Sternberg (New York City) is the expression of the highest in man. Theology and the institutions of religion are but the “tawdry rags of opinion.” As Ingersoll, Paine and Voltaire were truly religious men, so am I a defender of true against false religion. I must refuse the intended honor. When one speaks of religion, one means a theory of a God and another life; one means, in very truth, theology and superstition. The highest in man is expressed in art and_science ^and* the life of “c^ture^ These Things have nothing to do with re­ ligion. Artist, scientist, cultured man, expressing the very highest “ahd iinest, may be an utterly irreligious man: that is, a man who has no theory of a God or another life. Mrs. Sternberg accuses me of being “as one-sided as Mr. Bryan in a way.” She illustrates her point as follows: “Of course when we look at any object (one side of & ^one wall, for ex­ ample) we actually see only the side turned toward us, and we would of course consider any one crazy who would affirm that the particular side of the wall that he could see was the only side. We who are so wonderfully intelligent are perfectly sure that there is another side to the wall, even though we do not actually see it—but we do make a mistake sometimes in taking for granted that the other side of the wall will present the same aspect as the side turned to us. We forget that the other fellow (on the other side) may be seeing something very different on his side: and he may also think (even as you and I) that his side presents the perfect or more desirable view. We cannot know just why these two sides of the same wall should present dif­ ferent views, but they do, and it seems to me the rational and the scientific procedure is not to tear down the other fellow’s side of the wall (to the detri­ ment of your own) but to endeavor to discover why his side is different from yours.”

I bow graciously to the spirit of toleration in Mrs. Sternberg’s letter. It is a spirit that 1 admire and try, as far as humanly pos­ sible, to express. And for dogma, the stiff and pompous position of certitude, I have as little affection as my would-be kindly critic. I would not even put the matter as simply, as flatly, as she puts it. Life is not just a two-sided wall, at which we look, from one side or the other, according to our points of view and our temper­ aments. Life is many-sided, and permits any number of views. Our views of people, of ourselves, of conduct, of personal relations, of the weather or a good meal or an opera or a book or a member of the- opposite sex—our views of any number of things in life cannot .seem alike nor can they be quite -alike, from une day or

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moment to the next, in the eye and mind of the individual. I speak of realities, however: of things that we can know and to which we can relate ourselves, even though we know them, so to speak, differently. But when Mrs. Sternberg applies her analogy of the two-sided wall to the subject of religion, she is using a concrete and therefore deceptive image for something that is unreal. Certainly she does not believe that Mr. Bryan, let us say, actually saw a side of this mystery of God and immortality that is not apparent to me. She cannot believe that my only trouble is that I am not sitting in the right position to see the truth of this mys­ tery. It happens not to be a wall, or any subject so real, at which we are looking. It’s a blank space—a totally blank space. And w'hat, I ask, shall I do to accommodate my view of total blankness to Mr. Bryan’s view? If Bryan was on one side of a wall and I am on the other, I am willing to admit that we may really have things on our two sides. The illustration does not hold when we confront, not something real, not something that has two actual, visible sides, but unreality and blankness. In a word, the Un­ knowable was not better known to Bryan than to me. And so I say, when he handed out dogmas about the Unknowable, he was dealing in sheer bunk. Even the astronomer, who can read the sky as Mr. Bryan and I cannot, is not able to read the mystery that lies (and perhaps lies and lies) at the farthest beyond.

THE MIRACULOUS WONDER how many people believe the ridiculous tales of miraculous intervention that are occasionally reported by men of God as examples of God’s tender and true watchfulness over his own. It is disgustingyto see how the newspapers solemnly put the.s.e yyirhsbeforejheir r e a d'e'fs7~~(Tfiie press, which is run largely by skeptics, is always ready to print silliness in favor of religion. There is hardly a lie of any descrip­ tion or degree of absurdity which a preacher can tell that the papers will not print, without investigation, and indeed knowing it to be false. It is the social policy of the press, regardless of the personal beliefs of editors and reporters, to uphold the Church to the limits of sensationalism and superstition.) The tales of God as an extremely erratic rescue worker have not even the merit of being interesting, of being dramatic or unique: they are old stuff, dreary and silly—yet amusing, too, if one’s intestines feel the need of a good shaking dose of laughter. In the reports of the earthquake that hit Santa Barbara, Calif., a news item prominently displayed on the front page told of the escape of a priest who was rescuing another bedridden priest from a room in the second story of the old Santa Barbara mission build­ ing. This priest was dropped through a hole to the ground floor, with the other priest on his back: both escaped injury, says the story, and the opinion of the priestly party of the first part is given, without comment, that this was “a miraculous delivery.”

______________________An Agnostic Looks at Life

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Religious people can believe, anything, ^without thought, and I suppose many will swallow this tale whole^ But how utterly non­ sensical I God dashes a city into ruins (or lets it be dashed, he be­ ing on hand with power to prevent or save) and a number of good, innocent people are killed and injured along with the sinners. A score of important buildings collapse. The city is completely stricken. The streets are choked and impassable with debris. And we are told that God, letting others die and disaster have its way, interfered merely to save these two priests. The righteous ignore the general calamity; that is the Deyil’s or nobody’s work; or, if an act of God, it is “inscrutable.” \Tl3e good, credulous jnorons fasten popping eyes only upon the report of an jinsignificaht,-indi­ vidual escape in the midst of the death and terro£) God smites ter­ ribly (or neglects monstrously to save) with one hand, and saves pettily and picayunishly with the other hand. Of such is the order of “miracles,” senseless and making God more ridiculous than any human being could possibly be. And the press reports this as “news.” And people will believe this fooTishnessr who will resort td every kind of miserable dodge to keep from recognizing a fact or being impressed by any show of reason. God is a great joker and the human race is his supreme effort of humor. SALVATION—ALL THE WAY ALVATION is no halfway matter, shouts an itinerant gospel ballyhooer with frantic gestures to the crowd on the street corner next to the popcorn wagon. Glory be! You must be all lost or all saved] ” As theology, that statementTnay be logical, although it is not sensible; if salvation or damnation mean anything, this idea of the oneHiundred per cent thoroughness of either condition may mean something. It would be true, I suppose, that a m£n couldn’t have his shins toasting in hell and a gentle breeze fanning his curly locks in Paradise: he couldn’t be flourishing a pitchfork in hell with one hand, and twang­ ing a lyre in heaven with the other hand: part of him couldn’t be in one place, and part of him in another—physically, that would seem impossible. As a matter of sound, intelligent ethics, however —as a matter of character that is clearly enough within the obser­ vation of man—this preacher and all like unto him, in the pulpit or out, are utteringijiQnsense if they would assert that_anyunan_is_ very man is a mixwholly bad or good, wholly sinTiZT or sinlesi. ture, and God alone (or the Devil) knows what sort of actions he is likely to commit. Any man is capable of a pretty wide range of good and bad actions within the space of twenty-four hours. And then we differ so in our notions of what is good and bad, that one man will do with a childishly simple and sinless conscience what another may condemn as evil. Intelligence abhors an absolute,Jn 5w that the theologians, the gospel ethics or p hilosophy; but we shouters an FTKeTnoralists generally do not deal in sound ethics or philosophy: one can expect only foolish statements from them, and 4

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as a rule their hearers do not know any better. A preacher who doesn’t know his own nature, tells what God is: and another fellow who doesn’t know his nature, readily believes the impudent piece of nonsensE?; PRAYING FOR RAIN

DRY spell has recently made life unpleasant, and the harvest reluctant, scarce and unprofitable in Colorado. It was not the kind of drought for which Mr. Volstead could manfully be cursed, nor which could be overcome by the relatively simple method of law violation. Nature was at fault. Or was it God? Appar­ ently Christian sentiment held God to be, if not blameworthy, at least responsible—a distinction with which ingenious thinkers may be left to wrestle at their leisure. In big, black letters on the front page, The Denver Post cried: “Let Us Pray for Rain.” The following was the complete appeal issued in this dire God-sent emergency: “Let us all pray for rain today, Sunday, at exactly 12 o’clock, high noon. Let every man, woman and child who believes in God and His Goodness and His mercy and His love, who believes that He is our Father, our Saviour, our Master and our Best Friend, and who believes that God is all-powerful, and that He controls the earth and the waters thereof, and that He does answer the prayers of His helpless and needy children, that He does give with a bountiful hand to those who love Him, believe in Him and trust in Him— “Pray that he may send us rain for our parched and withering fields, to replenish our diminishing rivers, lakes and reservoirs, to gladden our hearts and make fruitful our farms, ranches and gardens, and to reward the hopeful and industrious toilers throughout all the parched sections of our beloved country. “And God will answer the prayer.”

I do not know whether God made the right answer, or an imme­ diate answer, or an entirely satisfactory answer. What strikes me, in this viewpoint of direct divine responsibility, is God’s wilfulness or negli­ gence in letting matters come to such a pass. He withers and saddens these hearts—and then, in such a situation, the good people are urged to fall upon their knees in prayer, believing in “God and His Goodness and His mercy and His love.” It is a belief that, I should think, would be rather difficult under the circumstances; 4inless_4hese people hold that God is doing right in thus stopping the rainfall, in which case they are hardly exhibiting the proper attitude of devotion and submission by plead­ ing with God to alter his righteous course} ItJgemsJhinny tn me-that God must have this business called to his attention. Tbis implies that God is ^t taLin^care_jofJais^job; that he doesn’t know what is needed, in the way of rain, in Colorado; perhaps that God has'too bigTTjbl) and for awhile has been forced to remove his eye from Colorado while attending to other parts cf the universe. There is no doubt about it, if we want to be logical: such a^rayetycan be of fered oply on the assumption that God is an indifferent or an unin formed, or an overwikeiLGQd.: or that he is a touchy, temperamental God whoxin aJit of pique, resolves that he’ll close thFheavenly waterspouts until the people oF Colorado pay more attention to him and flatter his vanity, call him “Mister” and say “Please.” Such are the contradictions and the comedies involvedJn the idea of a personal Grand Panjandrum of the Universe.

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An Agnostic Looks at Life

SCIENCE VS. RELIGION IN CHINA GREAT deal has been written in the past, with a plentiful language of cant, about the “awakening” of China. The Western nations, and particularly the Christians boards and bunds, have for long assumed that they were charged with the duty of civilizing the Chinese. They were more eager to Christianize and exploit the Chinese: and the missionaries and traders were equipped for their great work of enlightening by an almost total ignorance of Chinese culture and traditions—scarcely conscious, and certainly not sufficiently appreciative, of the civilized past of China, of the antiquity and dignity of background possessed by the yellow people. The mission­ aries, talking platitudes about Jesus, know little and understand less about the significance of a thinker named Confucius who flourished five centuries before the Christ of Christian mythology. These missionaries are ill educated, trained chiefly in a narrow religious way, and not sympathetic to culture. They want to persuade the Chinese in behalf of the superstition that is fashionable in the West. Now it appears that Christianty is not civilized, intelligent, modern enough for the so-called “heathen Chinee.” The students and intel­ lectuals in China are leading a revolt, which has been developing for some time, against the “conservative and traditional” influence of Christianity which, say the Chinese thinkers, is an obstacle to the prog­ ress of their country. Side by side with Christianity is the menace of foreign exploitation which is hated no less by the Chinese who wish to develop their own country for their own purposes. It is a very intelligent anti-Christian movement that is seriously challenging the power of the missionaries in China today. It is backed by an elaborate and persistent propaganda. It opposes scientific ideas to the superstitious ideas of all religions, Christianity included as being no less imbued with superstition than the most heathenish belief. And this attack upon Christian influence is not a resistance to culture and civilization. It is not that the Chinese prefer to remain what we vaguely denominate as “heathens.” It is their desire for real culture, real and free civilization, that inspires their fight against Christianity. They are influenced by the best of Western thought as against the worst of Western superstition. They reject the Christian missionaries as spurious in their assumed role of civilizers, and turn for genuine enlightenment to the thinkers and artists of the West. The Chinese (says Stanley High, of the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions, writing in The Nation) are animated by the spirit of modern thought and science, and their anti-Christian propaganda is based solidly upon a familiarity with Darwin, Bertrand Russell, Ibsen and Kropotkin. It is the incompatibility of ^ChristiaXLity with science, its hostility to the most thoughtful life of West or East,~thaFTias~disgusted the intelligent workers for enlightenment in China. They say, in the words of a Chinaman, that Christianity is “antagonistic to science. The. young Chinese are prag­ matic in their attitude. They believe in science and experimentation. The existence of God is, to their way of thinking, incompatible with laboratory experience. The Holy Bible, with its numerous miracles

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and parables, seems to them very childish and exceedingly superstitious.” Against religion in toto, the Anti-Christian Federation of China ex­ presses itself soundly as follows: “1. It is conservative and traditional and it doesjiot make for intellectual progress. wZ/It encourages denominationaljjrejudice and_hatrfid. It does not make for unity anTTiarmOliy of the human race. “3V‘ It develops superstition in super-human beings. It does not make for scientific ehlighlenment. ' ~ ’ ,l4. It cultivates the attitude of dependence as over against the development