Haldeman-Julius--part 2 of 2
HIDDEN GODS
Look at the God idea from any angle, and it is foolish, it doesn't make sense, but extravagantly proposes more mysteries than it assumes to explain. For instance, is it sensible that a real God would leave mankind in such confusion and debate about his character and his laws?
There have been many alleged revelations of God. There have, indeed, been many Gods as there have been many Bibles. And in different ages and different lands an endless game of guessing and disputing has gone on. Men have argued blindly about God. They still argue -- just as blindly.
And if there is a God, we must conclude that he has willfully left men in the dark. He has not wanted men to know about him. Assuming his existence, then it would follow that he would have perfect ability to give a complete and universal explanation of himself, so that all men could see and know without further uncertainty. A real God could exhibit himself clearly to all men and have all men following his will to the last letter without a doubt or a slip.
But when we examine even cursorily the many contradictory revelations of God, the many theories and arguments, the many and diverse principles of piety, we perceive that all this talk about God his been merely the natural floundering of human ignorance.
There has been no reality in the God idea which men could discover and agree upon. The spectacle has been exactly what we should expect when men deal with theories of something which does not exist.
Hidden Gods -- no Gods -- all we see is mans poor guesswork.
TAKE YOUR CHOICE
If the Bible, which Christians believe is the word of God, is inspired and infallible, why does it have two distinctly opposite versions of many things? God's nature and God's opinions and God's wishes are contradictorily reported in Holy Writ.
It is stated, for example, in Genesis i, 31, as follows: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good." But in Genesis vi, 6, it is stated: "And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." Does the good Christian believe both statements?
In Chronicles vii, 12, 16, we read: And the Lord appeared to Solomon by night, and said unto him: I have heard thy prayer, and have chosen this place to myself for a house of sacrifice... For now have I chosen and sanctified this house that my name may be there forever; and mine eyes and my heart shall be there perpetually." Then in Acts vii 48, we read: "Howbeit the Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands."
Whether God preferred the darkness or the light seemed to be uncertain to the Hebrew prophets of the Most High; but if the Bible were thoroughly inspired there should have been perfect agreement. But in I Timothy vi, 16, God is referred to in this manner: "Dwelling in the light which no man can approach." On the other hand, in I Kings viii, 12 this reference is contradictorily made: "The Lord said that he would dwell in the thick darkness." And in Psalm xviii we are told about God: He made darkness his secret place." And in Psalm xcvii, 2 we are told: "Clouds and darkness are round about him."
Such contradictions are common in the Bible. Naturally this happened, as the Bible was a collection of books written at different times by different men -- a strange mixture of diverse human documents -- and a tissue of irreconcilable notions. Inspired? The Bible is not even intelligent. It is not even good craftsmanship, but is full of absurdities and contradictions.
"GOD'S WILL"
Thoughtful men have always observed that "God's will," as that amusing expression has been employed by theologians and by lay Commentators, has been nothing more nor less than a reflection of human impulses and desires and fears and whimsicalities. Whoever interprets this so-called will of God always presents a picture of his own, the interpreter's, way of looking at things.
A sober, devout man will interpret "God's will" soberly and devoutly. A fanatic, with bloodshot mind, will interpret "God's will" fanatically. Men of extreme, illogical views will interpret "God's will" in eccentric fashion. Kindly, charitable, generous men will interpret "God's will" according to their character.
And of course this means that whatever happens in life and in the world of nature, entirely independent of the will of any supposed God, such happenings (of the most immensely variant and complex kind) are ascribed to the will of Gad -- a blanket phrase, and a bombastic one too, which explains absolutely nothing. Back of the phrase "God's will" -- and back of the idea, such as it is, which is reflected by this phrase -- there is the old, sound, and really (to the thinking man) obvious truth that gods and all that appertains to them are fashioned by, man in his own image or, that is to say, by men in the images cast by their fancies and fears. Whit we have under observation, always, are human impulses and schemes of action: to say that "God's will" is behind them, is to say exactly nothing.
INCREDIBLE INSTANCES
As the Bible is regarded as a holy and inspired book by practically all Christians, a book absolutely without errors by many Christians, and the most important proof (through alleged. revelation) of the existence of a God by many Christians, it is very important to point out incredible instances recorded in the Bible which no man can sensibly believe.
Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll did a very useful. work in exposing the folly of believing that the Bible was inspired. "One can scarcely be blamed," he said, "for hesitating to believe that God met Moses at a hotel and tried to kill him [Exodus iv, 24]; that afterward he made, this Moses a god to Pharaoh, and gave him his brother Aaron for a prophet [Exodus vii, 1]; that he turned all the ponds and pools and streams and all the rivers into blood [Exodus vii, 19] and all the water in vessels of wood and stone; that the rivers thereupon brought forth frogs [Exodus viii, 3]; that the frogs covered the whole land of Egypt; that he changed dust into lice, so that all the men, women, children and animals were covered with them [Exodus viii, 16, 17]; that he sent swarms of flies upon the Egyptians [Exodus viii, 21]; that he destroyed the innocent cattle with painful diseases; that he covered man and beast with blains and boils [Exodus ix, 9]; that he so covered the magicians of Egypt with boils that they could not stand before Moses for the purpose of performing the same feat [Exodus ix, 11]; that he destroyed every beast and every man that was in the fields, and every herb, and broke every tree with storm of hail and fire [Exodus ix, 25]; that he sent locusts that devoured every herb that escaped the hall, and devoured every tree that grew [Exodus x, 15]; that he caused thick darkness over the land and put lights in the houses of the Jews [Exodus x, 22, 23]; that he destroyed all of the firstborn of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh upon the throne to the firstborn of the maidservant that sat behind the mill [Exodus xi, 5], together with the firstborn of all beasts, so that there was not a house in which the dead were not [Exodus xii, 29, 30]."
Do these marvels read like inspiration? Or do they read like superstition? Remember that millions of Christians still base their belief in a God upon the words of the Bible, which is a collection of the most flabbergasting fictions ever imagined -- by men, too, who had lawless but very poor and crude imagination. Ingersoll and numerous other critics have shot the Christian holy book full of holes. It is worthless and proves nothing concerning the existence of a God. The idea of a God is worthless and unprovable.
BLIND ALLEYS
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint and heard great argument
About it and about evermore
came out by the door as in I went.
This well-known stanza by Omar, the agnostic Persian poet, expresses the simple truth that he learned nothing from all the arguments about God -- nothing, that is to say, except that the arguments were aimless and meaningless. The doctors and the saints were floundering amid unrealistic abstractions. God was merely a name. It had scarcely the solid dignity and comprehensibility of an idea -- even a false idea.
This argumentation which taught nothing to Omar -- which left him with as little evidence for a God as before he heard a word of the argumentation -- was a vain, wordy repetition of fears, fancies, assumptions, dogmas and whimsically elaborated nonsense. And so it has always been. The efforts of theism, intellectually speaking, have been a chasing up blind alleys. They have arrived nowhere -- but on the contrary the more argument there has been about the idea of God, the more steadily have men grown in the conviction that the idea is obviously untrue and unrealistic.
Talk of God leads by a direct road to the conclusion of atheism. The only sensible attitude is to dismiss the idea of God -- to get it out of the way of more important ideas. The wide dissemination of this intelligent atheistic attitude is one of the leading features of any program of popular education which is completely worthy of the name.
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With its fears and superstitions and prejudices, religion poisons the mind of any one who believes in it -- and even the best man, under the influence of religion, cannot reason wholesomely. Atheism, on the contrary, opens the mind to the clean winds of truth and establishes a fresh-air sanity.
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Nobody has ever taken notable pains to locate the legendary heaven; but probably that is because nobody ever thought seriously of going to a heaven.
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IS GOD A JOKER?
A few weeks ago a hurricane struck the little religious community of Bethany, Okla. A number of pious citizens of the little town were killed. Houses were destroyed -- homes in which prayer and devotion reigned. A church was demolished.
Only a few miles away is the large, wicked city of Oklahoma City -- at least we Can certainly assume that, from the religious viewpoint, many sinners live in Oklahoma City. Assuming also (which is a great deal riskier ;assumption) that there is a God, why should he perpetrate this grim and sardonic joke? The sinners in the big city were left untouched. The godly folk in the little nearby village were punished by the evidences of God's wrath. How do the religious people interpret this calamity? Often and often they explain such calamities as flood, fire and storm by saying that God is angry at the sinful people and is warning them or destroying them for their sins. Was the hurricane in Bethany a sign of the love of God for his faithful worshipers?
And God missed an even better chance, if there were a God who wished to punish rebels against his majesty and inscrutability. Just a few hundred miles north and east of Bethany, Okla., is Girard -- the home of The American Freeman: and The Debunker and The Joseph McCabe Magazine and the Little Blue Books -- the center of American free thought where an enormous stream of atheistic literature and. godless modern knowledge pours forth to enlighten the masses. If there were a God directing hurricanes and he wanted to really "get" an uncompromising foe, whom he has no chance of persuading in the ordinary way, it would have been a devastating stroke for him to send his howling Punitive blasts through the town of Girard. It would be a more remarkable suggestion of the avenging act of a God if only the Haldeman-Julius plant were destroyed and the rest of the town left unhurt -- and, as good neighbors, we shouldn't wish the Christian and respectable, people of Girard nor those Who are respectable and not so Christian nor those who are Christian and not exactly respectable to suffer from our proximity and our propaganda of atheism.
Is God a joker? No -- let us whisper it -- the joke is that there is no God. Hurricanes come upon the just and the unjust, the pious and the impious.
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To be true to the mythical conception of a God is to be false to the interests of mankind.
GOD AS A GAMBLE
One of the most amusing arguments, frequently offered in defense of belief in the idea of a God, is that such a belief is a way of Playing safe. It is said that even though a man is not sure of the existence of a God and a future life beyond the grave, it is the part of caution for him to believe; then, as the argument goes, the man believing is safe "Whether there is or is not a God and a future existence; if there is no God, the believer will be no more dead than the unbeliever; while if there is a God, the believer will have preferential treatment in the judgments of the celestial tribunal.
This queer, argument makes the matter of belief in a God an intellectual gamble. It is of course an utter denial of intellectual Integrity. Proceeding on this basis, the appeal to belief is not made on the score of truth. One is urged to consider the God idea not from the standpoint of its reasonableness; but rather, from the standpoint of blind faith and a chance bet on an idea.
Doesn't the religious person who uses this appealing to a particularly low form of intellectual cowardice? What men need is courage in their thinking. They need to be trained in facing facts frankly. They need to learn that all ideas should be judged with strict regard for the evidence. Instead religion harps on the emotion of fear and tells men that they should treat ideas merely as gambling chances and that it is safer (not intellectually the better but the more craven part) to believe in a God.
This argument has other fallacious aspects. it assumes, for instance, that the evidence for and against the idea of a God is equal; whereas the vast preponderance of evidence is against the idea, there being in fact no genuine evidence for the idea. It is overlooked, too, that belief is genuine or it is not; and that a belief which is frankly grounded on a gamble -- a belief affirmed for safety's sake -- cannot be a real belief. One believes or one does not; real belief, can only assert the truth of an idea. In short, the man who bases his belief on such a principle is bordering close to hypocrisy and is certainly revealing a striking lack of mental integrity.
Such weak arguments exemplify the decline of religion and show its utter intellectual bankruptcy. It has all the air of a desperate and last plea for a set of ideas which, ordinarily and reasonably, cannot be defended. It is, after all, a virtual admission of the charge of the atheist that the idea of a God is merely an assumption and has no ground of truth upon which firmly to plant itself.
CREDULITY -- A CRIME
Credulity is not a crime for the individual -- but it is clearly a crime as regards the race. Just look at the actual consequences of credulity. For years men believed in the foul superstition of witchcraft and many poor people suffered for this foolish belief. There was a general belief in angels and demons, flying familiarly, yet skittishly through the air, and that belief caused untold distress and pain and tragedy. The most holy Catholic church (and, after it, the various Protestant sects) enforced the dogma that heresy was terribly sinful and punishable by death. Imagine -- but all you need do is to recount -- the suffering entailed by that belief.
When one surveys the causes and consequences of credulity, it is apparent that this easy believer in the impossible, this readiness toward false and fanatical notions, has been indeed a most serious and major crime against humanity. The social life in any age, It may be said, is about what its extent of credulity guarantees. In an extremely credulous age, social life will be cruel and dark and treacherous. in a skeptical age, social life will be more humane. We assert that the philosophy of humanity -- that the best interests of the human race -- demand a strong statement and a repeated, enlightening statement of atheism.
"SPIRITUAL REALITIES"
When preachers talk about "spiritual realities," what do they mean? They do not mean the emotions of men. At least they do not mean these emotions as realistically observed and interpreted human emotions. Love, hate, fear, greed, malice, envy, ambition, dreams and desires -- these are human emotions which the rational, scientific mind takes as themes for analysis, They are understood, not in any "spiritual" sense, but in terms of heredity and environment and constitutional (physical and mental) makeup. Their causes and their expressions are, so far as science has been able to trace them, essentially material.
All of mankind's art, mankind, mankind's morality, mankind's experiments with and yearning for beauty, can be and are explained in terms of human cause and effect and are placed in the evolutionary pattern worked out by science. They are not mysterious in the theistic sense; they are not, that is to say, mystic, An emotion in human nature is as realistic a fact as an object in nature: and science deals with both emotions and objects materialisticly, experimentally, analytically.
"Spiritual realities" mean nothing to science. This is the special and unrealistic lingo of the clerical bunk-shooters, who depend upon sweeping (but empty) phrases and pious dogmas and a large spooky and spoofy atmosphere of aimless mystery for the maintenance of their prestige. That their belief is often sincere does not affect the case.
By "spiritual realities," If you probe the phrase, you will discover that the preachers mean some mystic working of the mind of a God in the minds and motives of men. They intend us to believe that human emotions are something more than human -- that back of them is the shadowed and obscure and awesomely immense loom on which is woven a divine pattern.
"Spiritual realities," according to the preachers, are the reflections of the most unreal of all myths, namely, the myth of a God. These so-called "realities," said to be the highest conceivable, are seen to be the most unreal and the most inconceivable.
IS GOD FAIR?
That's a funny question. But still we ask it: Is God fair? The Christians say that God damns forever anyone who is skeptical about truth of bunkistic religion as revealed unto the holy haranguers. What this means is that a God, if any, punishes a man for using his reason.
If there is a God in existence, reasons should be available for his existence. Assuming that such a precious thing as a man's eternal future depends on his belief in a God, then the materials for that belief should be overwhelming and not at all doubtful.
Yet here is a man whose reason makes it impossible for him to believe in a God. He sees no evidence of such an entity. He finds all the arguments weak and worthless. He doubts and he denies.
Then is a God fair in visiting upon such a skeptic the penalty for his inevitable intellectual attitude? The intelligent man refuses to believe fairy tales. Can a God blame him? If so, than a God is not as fair as an ordinarily decent man. And fairness, we think, is more important than piety.
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"Faith," said St. Paul, "is the evidence of things not seen." We should elaborate this definition by adding that faith is the assertion of things for which there is not a particle of evidence and of things which are incredible. |
