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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SOROS who wrote (20915)	9/28/1998 6:32:00 PM
From: Sam Ferguson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39621

The Christian scheme, if true, could only lead to eternal wretchedness all round, torments in heaven far worse than all the miseries of hell. Who could be selfishly happy in heaven with a knowledge of everlasting hell? A Hindu commentator on this creed remarks:--"One of their teachers said to me lately that all my people, about 800,000,000 every fifty years, must assuredly go to hell; and at the same time placed before me a picture of their heaven, asking me to 'flee from the wrath to come!' and escape the horrible vindictiveness of their 'God of Love!'" The profoundest appeal made by the Christian creed has ever been made to fear. The bogies of the human childhood have been continued by it and applied to prevent our growing up into women and men. Fear of eating of the Tree of Knowledge. Fear of hell-fire, or the flames of earthly martyrdom. It is fear still even when it has dwindled down to fear of Mrs. Grundy! From first to last the appeal has always been to fear. Whereas all the fear in the world could never get from human beings any more than the affection of a dog that licks the hand of its tyrant at feeding time, when there is no whip to be seen! Religion, for ages, has been a reign of terror, under the oppression of which it was impossible for so tender a flower as love to flourish. It did not dare to breathe forth its natural sweetness to its own maker. The deepest religious sense that myriads have ever developed all through life has been a mortal dread of death. The burden of religion in the past has been--"Prepare to die." And this is preached with damnable iteration to those who have never yet lived, have not yet begun to live, and do not know how to begin to realise the glorious possibilities of living. And what is the spiritual result of all this fearful teaching, according to the good old faith? Is it such a sense of another life, and a better world that the concerns of this world are dwarfed and rebuked in its majestic presence? Not at all! The mass of people who are called religious do not want to believe in a spirit-world, save in the abstract, as a necessary article in their creed. They are mortally afraid of the other world. Their foremost feeling is to draw down the blinds against any light breaking in on the subject from another world. They accept a second-hand belief in it on authority as a grim necessity! It's best to believe, in case it does exist after all. As the old woman said--"Ah, Sir! it's best to be polite, for you may go to the devil." But you must know that a great deal of Belief on the subject is like that of the Scotch woman who was asked how she felt when the horse ran away with her cart. She said she "put her trust in Providence till the breechin' broke, and then she gave up." She relied upon the visible and tangible link of connection. Her Providence was the breechin'; when that was gone, her faith collapsed altogether. For eighteen hundred years they have pretended to teach men how to die. But the first duty of men who have to die is to learn how to live, so as to leave the world, or something in it, a little better than we found it. Our future life must be the natural outcome of this; the root of the whole matter is in this life. The founders of Historic Christianity began with an utterly false theory of life. They mistook the anti-physical for the spiritual; the anti-natural for the divine. Life was a disease, and death the only cure. Worldly blessings were curses in disguise. Belief would work miracles, and Doubt ensure damnation. Sense was the natural enemy of the soul, and had to be suppressed. The most beautiful human body was a dungeon of sin and death in the prison-house of a doomed world. More spirit than common manifested by the youngster was the very devil in revolt against authority, and had to be put into manacles; all nature was un-hallowed, all flesh defiled, until they had pawed it over with priestly rites of regeneration. The Christian scheme of salvation is a false method of dodging the devil at last. People will no longer believe this lying delusion when once they learn that there is nothing to be got out of it; no good to be gained by it. Its success hitherto has depended on the appeal to selfishness. Next to fear, the chief appeal has been made to the desire for gain. What are considered to be the supreme expressions of Christliness in the Gospels too often denote a low and vulgar type of morality, or they become immoral in their appeal to selfishness. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." Blessed are the poor who are content to give up this world, their's is the promise of felicity forever in the world to come. He that giveth to the poor is making a safe investment, because he is lending to the Lord. "Be ye good bankers" is one of the most significant sayings. The appeal is continually made to the sense of personal gain, none the less selfish because it is applied to the next world instead of this; on the contrary, it is increased because the promised gain is to be eternal. You are invited to invest your capital in a bank above that offers you an eternal interest, and like all bankrupt concerns deludes the gullible by promising too much profit. Your alms are to be given secretly, and he that seeth in secret will recompense you. Isn't that calculated to fix one eye on the reward with a leer of cunning in it, as of knowing a good thing when you do see it? One almost expects to see an image of the winking Christ as well as the winking virgin. Such a promise is security for at least a profit of cent. per cent. as the rate of eternal interest. But we shall not catch a whale by merely offering a sprat in that way; nor receive a hundred-fold in heaven for all that we may have consciously given up and forgone on earth. All that is but a survival of primitive teachings--the doctrines of the human childhood--an inducement for the individual not to be at war with society or the Church, no matter what laws of nature may have to be sacrificed and violated. And the fact remains to be faced that the teaching is not true. The meek do not inherit the earth, and are not going to. We are not forgiven because we are forgiving. Nature does not keep her books of account in that way. Nor are we allowed to cook the accounts in any such fashion.