Part 5

In this age, as in the past, a lie made "holy" is allowed to assassinate the truth. Nothing is cursing this nation; nothing is cursing human life; nothing is cursing honest effort and brave striving so much as what is called holiness. It is holy to believe all you are told; holy to wear the robes of hypocrisy; holy to rob the poor in the name of God, and holy to put the poison of faith to the lips of a child. It is holy to repudiate Nature and make a lie of your body, your mind, your life. To purify the dwelling-place of man, it is necessary to drive from the earth everything that religion has made holy.

The only really sacred things were holy before a church was ever built, before there was a priest on the globe.

Human love and the home which human love built for its offspring were the first holy things which men and women knew, and it is this human love of ours which is holier than mosque, temple or church; holier than priestly robe or ecclesiastical rite; holier by far than all the holy things of faith.

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The Church has always lived by robbing the home; the priest has always lived on the wages of the toiler. The gods of religion have never done aught to lighten the heavy load on the shoulders of labor. The priest has said to mankind that his Lord left this consolation to the world: "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden and I will give you rest."

What the priest really means is this: Come unto me and I will do the rest; and by the time he has done it, there is nothing of manhood left.

The priest also teaches that his Lord and Master said, "Ask and ye shall receive," and adds, "The Lord will provide." How many poor wretches have believed those words; but their outstretched hands withered away day by day, and at last dropped empty by their sides. There they lay white and cold, holding not the bread they fondly expected, but holding the hand of death.

It may be pious and it may be beautiful to say, "The Lord will provide," but it is a lie just the same. When, the other day, the bodies of a mother and her two children were being carried to the grave with the words, "starved to death," written on their faces, but not written on their caskets, it was a sufficient refutation of the religious teaching that "The Lord will provide." It is the plain, unvarnished truth that the Lord will _not_ even provide the coffin for the poor victim of such a false, deceptive, religious faith.

In olden times it was customary for the Church to say, God's light lights the world. Not so today. God's light has gone out. It is man's light that lights the world and the Church too. Our enlightenment is human, not divine. No altar of religion burns with the fire of truth. Science carries the torch of knowledge: liberty is the way and truth is the goal.

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On our earth gods no longer make their homes. It was not safe for them to live any more. Their sons may once have married the daughters of men, but they can not get a license to do so today. Parents will not stand for it.

So the gods have gone, bag and baggage. Where they have gone, no one knows. The skies give no sign that they are hiding up there. The telescope has found _seventy million stars, but not one god_.

It is time for the pulpit to stop repeating the old superstitions about God and about what he has done for man. He has never done any more for man than he is doing today; never spoken to man any more than he is speaking today; never revealed himself to anybody any more than he stands revealed to you and me and to every human being everywhere.

Every word that ever came from the mouth of God man put in his mouth, and every book revealed by God was written by man.

Half the work of man for the next one hundred years will be to kill the lies told about what God has done.

Whether there is in all the vast universe a higher and nobler being than man, I don't know. Whether there is in all the vast universe a better place for man to live than on this earth, I don't know. And no one knows any more about these matters than I do.

We have found out much that is not so; now we want to find out all we can that is so. And it is of no use to go to the Church to learn anything. The Church is only a place where falsehoods are kept in cold storage. The man who thinks and studies is the man who is helping the world most, not the man who preaches and prays. To find the truth one needs to get as far from the Church as possible.

Christians of all denominations have lots of pity for the man without a church. Let me assure these persons that the man without a church doesn't want one. As a rule, he is satisfied with what he has. He has a home, which is better than a church. If those persons who are pitying men and women for not having a church would, instead, pity the man without a home, and pity him enough to help him get one, they would show much better sense and manifest a truer sympathy with their fellow-beings.

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I can not see any good in painting a thing white that is black, or calling a thing beautiful that is ugly. There are persons who talk as though they believed that a Northeast storm was sunshine. I am not made that way. I am as ready and as willing as anybody to acknowledge the good in Nature, or the good in life, but I do not believe in lying, in saying that wrong is right, or that suffering is to be enjoyed. There are lots of hard things in our life, and it does not alter facts to call them by some other name. A man dying with a cancer can not be made to believe that he is having a good time.

The most that any man can do who goes through this earthly existence is to use his fellow-mortals right and square; to give them an honest day's work when he works for them and an honest day's pay when he hires them; to say nothing to hurt them and everything he can to assist them; to help them out of trouble and not get them into trouble. If one does this, and does no more than this, he has done what beats every religion on earth.

We have got to deal with men and women as they are and where they are. The man who is natural; the man who has not been made a fool of by a priest or parson; the man who has not swapped his commonsense for a foolish belief; the man who has not had his mind stuffed with religious dope, knows that this life on earth is the important life, and that it is a higher work to determine his fate here than anywhere else.

There is not a person living who would not be well and strong and happy here rather than hereafter. I would rather have the power to make every cripple straight and whole; every poor, unfortunate man and woman prosperous and contented; every sick person well, every bad person good, and every slave to vice master of his appetite and passions, in this life on earth, than to save the human wrecks, the human unfortunates, the human victims of vice and crime, for another life somewhere else.

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What men and women want is happiness, not Heaven. They want a good home on this globe, not a loafing-place in Abraham's bosom. They want the opportunity to enjoy the good things of this life, not the promise that they will hear the angels sing. They want better wages for their work, better treatment from their employers, and better things to eat and drink and wear. They want better things here, not hereafter. They want to be happy while they are living on earth, not have the assurance of happiness after they are dead. If I ever attempt to write my creed, I shall say: I believe in so much that I can hardly expect to express all of my faith in one statement. I am all the time believing in something new. But there is one thing that I most heartily believe in now and have believed in ever since I was a child, and that is, SUNSHINE--external and internal and eternal sunshine.

Sunshine is the joy of the universe, and joy is the sunshine of the human heart. Let us be bright and cheerful. Let us be happy. Let us give to the world the sunshine of our hearts.

_A male trinity is repulsive; Father, Mother and Child is the sacred triad. The Christian trinity is a monster._

DECAY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY

Nature has no need of a Holy Ghost.--_Lemuel K. Washburn._

All progress has been due to the Devil. He was the first investigator.--_Ingersoll._

God takes care of the weed. Man must take care of the corn.

DECAY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY

There is a great deal of exaggerated rhetoric employed in praising what is called "Christian Morality." I have examined with considerable care everything that may justly come within the meaning of this expression, and I am bound to say, out of respect for the truth, that such morality does not deserve praise and can not be praised by the honest lips of an honest person.

I am perfectly aware that I have made a statement which challenges the sincerity of the Christian pulpit, but every one knows that there is not a minister in Christendom whose practise agrees with his preaching.

While it is common to hear a clergyman in pious ecstasy exhaust the vocabulary of laudation in his praises of the beautiful morals of the "Sermon on the Mount," it is exceedingly rare to see one of these parsons sacrifice his commonsense to the nonsense of Jesus.

We are learning that the theological morality of the Christian faith is not the right kind of morality to make manhood and womanhood. The great weakness of Christian morality is this: It depends upon the Christian idea of Jesus, and when the world has outgrown the superstition about this person, all of his moral precepts will lose their value and their splendor.

Men and women of any intellectual penetration know that the New Testament story is founded upon unreliable tradition; that its heart is a myth.

Where men live independent of the foolish faith of the Gospels, there is a character of self-reliance which towers like a mountain-peak above the dead level of Christian endeavor. The person who accepts the Christian theology is no more in sympathy with the best thought of the age than is the man who wanders about the streets, begging his food and sleeping wherever he can, in harmony with the highest comforts of our civilization.

There is a nobler purpose in a train of cars carrying grain and produce across the continent than in a conference of clergymen trying to keep alive a theology which teaches that God was born of a Jewish maiden who lived and died in Palestine, and devising ways to make the people believe the ridiculous superstition.

Truth is born where men are allowed to think and speak their thoughts. Error can not be maintained where man is permitted to ask questions. The only way to preserve Christianity is to put it in a tin can and have it hermetically sealed.

We are getting a new examination of the universe as a basis for our philosophy. The telescope has afforded man visions far beyond the seventh heaven of the Apocalypse. The genesis of things is found to lie millions of years back of the Genesis of the Bible. The chaos out of which this world was made has been discovered to be a previous state of existence.

Science is laying the new foundation for our faith, and knowledge is building the new temple of the mind.

Men and women everywhere are stating their opinions, and the world recognizes that there is to be a religious controversy upon this earth which will shake to its base everything that is not true. Not one stone of falsehood will be left standing upon another. Every dogma of superstition must find a grave, and truth alone be reverenced by man.

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The world has taken a step forward of Christianity, and in its march of advancement has left behind the Christian God, the Christian Savior, the Christian Bible, and the Christian Faith. But the world will not stop here. It must go further. The question which the human mind wants answered today is this: Is the decay of Christian theology to be followed by the decay of Christian morality?

I think that it is, and I also think that this morality is about as near dead now as it can be.

It is true that the author of this morality is painted in divine colors for human adoration Sunday after Sunday, and that his other-world ethics are inculcated by the pulpit; but beyond these attempts to give the peculiar moral teachings of Jesus the show of life, there is absolutely no sign of them in the world of man.

The morality of the Christian system is not designed for humanity in its present condition, nor does it possess the elements necessary to make man into the image of any higher virtue. It is, in fact, an unreal, unnatural morality which Jesus taught, and the notion that men and women do not practise it because it is too far above them, depends upon an estimate of this morality which we are not willing to allow.

I do not wish to be misunderstood on this point. I want to say that the general moral duties of man, as they have been taught for ages by teachers of every race and of every religion, are not Christian, and that Christian ethics are found in the code of moral duties taught by Jesus _which are different from the recognized standard of morality adopted by mankind generally_. Christian morals are Christian _only wherein they differ from all other morals_.

It is because they are peculiar to Christianity that they are Christian.

Because I do not believe in Christianity--in the Christian theology and in Christian morals--I do not wish it said that I do not believe in morality, for I do. I believe that man can be good and true and that he can do right, and I believe that he ought to do right.

I do not say that every one can reach the same moral altitude. I do not even say that every individual can be good and true. Some persons do not seem to be morally adjusted. I think, however, that we do not trespass beyond the domain of truth when we predicate the power of man to be moral.

The notion that man can not be good has been the apology of half the criminals of the world. It is the creed of all crime. If we affirm the idea of human depravity, we may as well erase our statutes, for, if man can not be good, it is the height of folly to expect him to be so.

The healthy faith of man is faith _in_ man.

The theology which has been preached for the past few centuries is not calculated to make men moral. Those ministers who have shouted themselves hoarse for the salvation of the soul, and who have made no account of man's behavior in their scheme to save the race, are the ones who have rubbed humanity in the dirt and undermined the moral foundations of the world.

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Every ethical principle that supports our social structure is independent of ecclesiastical relations, and it is not essential that we recognize any theology in order to comprehend the necessity of moral obedience.

There is no sympathy between right, truth and justice, and the "Apostles' Creed." We may go so far as to say that the attempt to establish a perpetual union between Christianity and morality would result in an absolute divorce of these two forces.

I wish to make it plain beyond a question that the Christian faith, in itself, is entirely distinct from all moral effort on the part of man.

To believe that Jesus was the Christ does not carry any obligation to do right; does not make it incumbent upon the believer to do a single moral action.

It is sufficient to establish our predication that not a single church in Christendom makes moral character the condition of membership, or good behavior the way to Heaven.

There is a code of Christian morals which has been taught, but never practised. The special duties which Jesus enjoined upon his followers have never been reduced to conduct. It is not too much to say that the moral precepts of Jesus, if carried into action, would cause social revolutions beyond precedent, and produce a state of existence compared with which anarchy would be government, and confusion would be order.

But, before we undertake to examine the Christian morals, let us shed a few tears of rejoicing upon the grave of Orthodox theology. We do not ask to have a coroner's jury decide what caused the death of this theology. We bless the cause, whatever it was. We only wish to feel assured that it is really, truly dead, and the fact that "not a single treatise written by a New England Puritan is a living and authoritative book" seems to prove it beyond a question. The persons who still preach this theology and profess to believe it are only "sitting up with the corpse."

While it is asserted that a wrong interpretation of this theology sent it out of the world, it is pretty evident that a right understanding of it inspires no wish to have it back. Much of the superstition in morals sprang from fear of God, which the Christian church has inculcated as the highest incentive to right doing.

The truth, broadly and frankly stated, is this: God is no longer the inspiration of morality. Fear of God does not check the actions of man today, nor is the attempt to make human and divine interests identical sufficient to insure obedience to moral laws. The ancient basis of morals is gone, and another and better one must be found to inspire a freer life, a fuller life, a better life, and a higher.

We who have rejected the Christian theology are looked upon as orphans. But, if I understand the position of freethinkers, the question of a supreme power is neither affirmed nor denied by those who wish to have no further business with the God of Orthodoxy.

We read that, "the fool hath said in his heart there is no God," but we prefer to say nothing about the matter. Theologies may come, and theologies may go, but humanity goes on forever, and so we do not deem it as important to worship the fleeting shadows of the universe which are cast upon the minds of men as it is to hold fast to those realities which make human existence a blessing and "a joy forever."

We are called "infidels" and denounced as "unbelievers" because we will not march in the ranks of hypocrisy, and dance to the music of Orthodoxy. We believe no statement which our reason can not approve; we accept no doctrine which is contrary to commonsense; we have confidence in human nature; we believe in truth, justice and love; we accept life as a blessing, and try to make it so; we believe in taking care of ourselves, in helping others and in being just and kind to all, and we say to the Christian Church, "If this be Infidelity, make the most of it."

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It is suggested by some that if man's exact relation to the Deity were understood, the whole question of morals would be settled at once. But would it not be truer to say that if man's exact relation to his fellowmen were understood and respected, the highest individual welfare, no less than the general good, would dictate the morality which the world needs? And is not this the grand task for the human race, to rightly interpret the effect of human action upon the individual and the community, and to deduce from human experience the rules for human conduct?

I do not know that I owe to God any duty. I do know that I owe a duty to my neighbor. I plead total indifference to the demands of divine ethics, but I trust that I am not completely callous to the wants of my fellow-beings. I owe it to myself to be moral. I owe it to my race, to every man and woman that I meet in life, to be as honest, as true, as upright, as my nature will permit. I can comprehend and appreciate obligations to humanity, but moral indebtedness to the Deity I know nothing about.

The Christian morals are founded upon the assumption that the work of man here is to do something that he may escape punishment hereafter, and hence the morality of the Christian Church has had little reference to the concerns of the present life.

Christian morality is based upon the Christian faith that the human race is under the curse of God, and that, to evade the penalty pronounced upon him, man must perform certain duties--these duties being taught as paramount to all we owe to self, to family, to society, and to the world.

But an almost universal disbelief of the Christian dogmas prevails today, and, consequently, a new morality, with man's welfare for its supreme object, is fast supplanting the outworn and valueless performances of Christian duties.

The moral teaching of the New Testament may be the highest and purest of its kind of teaching, but it is not the kind which is needed today. It is a false morality, yea, a dead morality for the most part, which the Christian Church demands of men. The general conviction is that no salvation is needed by man, and that all the virtues advertised as requisite for such safety as the Church is prepared to secure, are spurious virtues.

Those actions which advance man along the way of general prosperity, which make it easier to live and get a living on the earth, which have their value determined by their respect for human beings, are what the world needs.

The generally acknowledged author of Christian morals offers no salient points for criticism, as he can not be regarded as a historical person whose career has been carefully followed and marked by the biographer. He is a mythological man, with a little less of the fabulous and a little more of the real than attaches to the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.

The name of Jesus adorns an anatomy of words. It pictures a person, not of flesh and blood, but of faith and fancy. Jesus is a man of the imagination; but mythical as he is, certain men and women believe in him in their own way, and are not over-tolerant of those who are disposed to ask for the proofs of his life and works.

This person has left no more marks of his living upon the earth than have the birds the marks of their flight through the air. The New Testament is no more history than is Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_. We can not make any positive assertions in regard to the life and character of a man when we do not know who was his father, where or when he was born, with whom he lived, nor when he died. The only historical fact connected with Jesus which is not disputed is that Mary was his mother. This is a very important point in his history, but it is not sufficient to constitute a biography.

Notwithstanding the fact that the entire narrative of Jesus is without a single chronological date, and the vastly more significant fact that not a single incident connected with the career of Jesus is mentioned in contemporaneous history, we must perforce speak of him as a person whose life was watched and noted from his miraculous advent to his miraculous ascension, and look upon his disciples as so many Boswells ready to mirror to the world his every speech and act.

We must do this--Why? Because the world will not candidly and critically study the gospel-story.

For the present, then, we will speak of Jesus as a man, and accept him as the author of the moral code in the New Testament. But a word or two about the man. The Christian world sets him apart as the model of the race, as the masterpiece of Nature, as the utmost which earth can produce. Every man must here fetch his word of praise, and every word be a mountain to meet the demand of the Christian Church for reverence of Jesus.

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