CONCLUSIONS OF A MAN GONE TO THE DEVIL
If there is anything in religious inheritance, or in the influence of a religious environment, I should be, if not an actual Pastor of a flock, at least one of the most devout of the faithful, a snooping Brother concerned only with good works. But instead of carrying on the work of my forefathers I find myself full of contempt for the Church, and disgust for the forms of religion. To me such things are silly; I cannot understand how grown people can believe in them, or how they can repress their giggles as they listen to the ministerial platitudes and perform such mummeries as are the rule in all churches.
Never since the night of my “conversion” have I gone into a church to worship. I have frequently entered such dens of righteousness, but my visits, except for a few that I made soon after Brother McConnell’s revival meeting to please my father and mother, have been on newspaper assignment or out of curiosity. I have inquired into the doctrine of almost every sect that has adherents in America, but in none of them have I been able to find any sign of a true and beneficent God. I can see only groups of sanctimonious, self-seeking Little Jack Horners chasing about poking their fingers into someone else’s pie, and then shouting gleefully: “Lookat me, God! Look what I found! Ooooh! Ain’t it nice and smutty?” They cannot practice their religion without prancing and cavorting before the public eye; they are constantly showing off. They are not so much concerned with the glory of God as with the glory of the front page. And what time they are not whirling giddily in such imbecilities, they are engaged in disgusting squabbles among themselves as to who shall have the local agency for purveying religion; they want to copyright salvation in the name of their particular sect.
On all sides we hear that religion is the greatest thing in the world and that mankind’s chief need is more of it. But it is my conviction that mankind would be infinitely better off with less of it, and probably best off with none of it. Nothing has ever caused more trouble. The whole history of religion is a record of war, murder, torture, rape, massacre, distrust, hypocrisy, anguish, persecution and continual and unseemly bickering; it is a rare church that has not been the scene of disorderly brawls. It has divided towns and nations into bitter factions; it has turned brother against sister and father against son; it has blighted romances; it is a prime cause of insanity; there is hardly anything harmful to the human race that it has not done as it pursued its meddlesome, intolerant way down the ages. Its followers proclaim loudly that their particular belief is synonymous with love, and bawl threats and epithetsagainst anyone who denies it; but in truth religion comes more nearly to being synonymous with hatred and revenge, with each sect praying to God to grant it special privileges and to damn the others.
I have never at any time regretted my complete withdrawal from all forms of religion and churchly ceremony. During many years of my childhood, while mental and physical habits were forming, these things kept me in constant terror; I was horrified by the thought of the awful things that God was preparing to do to me; I was fearful and miserable lest I give birth to an idea that was not perfectly righteous and in keeping with His commands as laid down by His agents. The Bible, which I necessarily interpreted in the light of what I had been taught, caused me more nightmares than any other book I have ever read, and I was vastly more alarmed by the tales of the fires of Hell related to me by the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters than I was in later life by the thunder of German artillery or the crackle of machine-gun bullets.
Since I left Farmington I have been near death many times, both as a soldier in France and from the natural illnesses incident to civil life. At least three times I have been told that I had but a few hours to live. Yet even then I did not feel the need of religion, nor for a preacher or a priest to pray over me to a God that neither of us knew, and perform ceremonies founded on paganrites. How can an intelligent God pay any attention to a last-minute deathbed repentance that it is so obviously the result of fear and nothing else? The religionist expects God to wash all his sins off the slate merely because, when he is about to die, he says he is sorry. If there be a God, cannot He look into such a shrunken little soul and see that there is nothing in it but a fear of death and a horror of the unknown?
I am not an atheist, because for all I know to the contrary there may be a God, or any number of Gods, but to me the God worshiped by my forefathers and by the religionists of to-day is a cruel, preposterous creation conceived by a people who felt the need of chastisement. He is a celestial traffic cop, hounded by whimpering weaklings who beseech Him to tell them they are on the right road, and yet keep trying to show Him which way the traffic should go. In the Christian and Jewish conceptions of the Heavenly Father I can see nothing that is fit for a civilized man to worship; indeed, the nearer a man approaches civilization and intelligence, the less need there is for him to worship anything. Conversely it is the stupid, illiterate man, knowing neither how to read nor how to think, who is most often the religious fanatic. He understands nothing and is afraid of everything; he goes through life as a small boy goes past a graveyard at night, whistling to keep up his courage. He requires religion and itstwin, superstition, to give him strength to contemplate the wonders of the sunset and the falling rain.
For my part, I simply refuse to worry about God. If there is a God, I hope that I may in time find favor in His sight and obtain my share of the spiritual loot; there is nothing that I can do about it. And if there is no God, there is nothing I can do about that, either. I profess neither knowledge nor theory about the Supreme Being and the heavenly wonders; knowing nothing, I believe nothing, and believing nothing, I am prepared to believe anything, asking only reasonably correct information and authentic signs. These I fail to find in selfish prayers, constant squabbling over the wishes of the Lord and the building of magnificent temples within sight and hearing of the ramshackle tenements of the poor. I do not believe that I shall ever find them, for
“Wherefore and whence we are ye cannot know,Nor where life springs, nor whither life doth go.”
“Wherefore and whence we are ye cannot know,Nor where life springs, nor whither life doth go.”
“Wherefore and whence we are ye cannot know,
Nor where life springs, nor whither life doth go.”
Without religion I thoroughly enjoy the business of living. I am oppressed by no dreadful taboos, and I am without fear; I set myself no standards save those of ordinary self-respect, decent consideration of the rights and privileges of others, and the observance of the laws of the land except Prohibition. To my own satisfaction, at least, I have proved that religion and theChurch are not at all necessary to a full and happy life. And if I am thus a sinner and my chance of ultimate salvation forfeit, then the fault lies at the door of those fanatics whose method of teaching religion to a child was, and is, to hammer it into his head by constant threats of terrible punishment, by drawing torturing word pictures of Hell, by describing God as a vicious, vindictive old man, by scolding and tormenting and laying down taboos until the poor child’s brain whirls in an agony of fright and misery. I know of no better way to salute them than to refer them to certain words of their own Savior, to be found in the thirty-fourth verse of the twenty-third chapter of the Book of St. Luke.
If I ever have a son, which now seems unlikely, his boyhood will be quite different from my own. For him Sunday shall be a day of rest and pleasure; there shall be no taboos, and no attendance upon church and Sunday school unless their performances are more interesting than other available entertainment. They now rank just below the moving pictures, and are therefore last. I shall bring my son in contact with the sacred books of the Christians, the Jews, the Buddhists and of all the other religions as rapidly as he is able to comprehend them, and he shall be permitted to choose his own religionif he decides that a religion is necessary to his happiness and peace of mind. But if he shows any signs of becoming a preacher, priest or rabbi, or even a Brother, I shall whale hell out of him. I am that intolerant.
THE END