Alternative Religion/ Library

“STOP! THIEF!”

Ambitious and avaricious Christians who had been unable to get their hands into the “orthodox” Treasury of the Lord, were incited by the vision of the seas of easy money which flowed into it and by the ostentatious opulence of the partakers of the Lord’s Altar, to emulate the zeal for riches displayed by the truly Faithful. A lengthy article under the title Impostors—[or is it “Stop! Thief!”?]—is devoted by CE. to the long line of hypocrites with itching palms who broke away from the True Fold the better to fleece the Faithful by their impostures. The period of the Great Schism of the West, particularly, “was also an epoch when many fanatical or designing persons reaped a rich harvest out of the credulity of the populace.” (CE. vii, 699.) Many thousands left the True Church and flocked after religious Pretenders of every sort, pouring treasures into their uncanonical coffers, to the great pecuniary deprivation of Holy Church. Dozens of these perverters of the Sacred Revenue through the succeeding centuries are catalogued, coming down to our own near-secular times. Invidiously included under the opprobrious designation of “Impostors” are the inspired Prophet of the Mormons, Joseph Smith, and the inspired Prophetess, Mother Mary Baker-Glover-Patterson-Eddy,—the immense financial success of whose respective religions may well excite envy, and bring them within the terminology of Orthodox Odium Theologicum—a “BITTER ENEMY, THE HEAD OF THE RIVAL RELIGION,” as is the approved form, to credit CE. (vii, 620), in speaking of one’s religious rivals. The point of the moral is, that according to Orthodox criteria all these Harvesters in the Vineyard of the Lord are unscrupulous Impostors for revenue only, and batten only by preying on “the credulity of the populace,”—which is the by-product of Religion, as we have seen it exemplified. When Ignorance is ended Credulity ceases, and Ecclesiastical Pelf and Power languishing die. If, as profanely jibed, “Without Hell Christianity isn’t worth a damn,” a fortiori—without Revenue, is not Religion with out Reason to be?

Made wise by the history of the past, in modern times most constitutions and governments, all in which the Church is not still powerful, have put just restrictions on the rapacity of the Church and have forbidden direct subsidies of support to it and its ministers. Indeed, “In most European countries the civil authority restricts in three ways the right of the Church to receive donations: by imposing forms and conditions; by reserving the right ³⁰⁹ to say what institutions may receive donations, and by requiring the approval of the civil authority.” (CE. v, 117.) In this country, Federal and State constitutions ordain separation of State and Church, forbid the establishment of any religion, and prohibit grants of money in support of it. But withal, so inveterate is the force of grafting habit, so prone yet the politicians to cater to “The Church” upon the specious pretext that the Church and religion are of some utility for “moral” purposes and as “the Big Policeman” for the restriction of vice and crime—the politicians not being familiar with the “moral record” of the Church, that the Church evades the principle and often the letter of the law, and is yet largely supported and kept alive by the people through the secular State. Some nine billions of dollars of deadhand and deadhead property thus escapes taxation in the United States, and the idle and vicious priestcraft and its system are supported by the State its constitution and laws notwithstanding. For every dollar of tax-exempt property, the taxpayer pays double. The vast majority of the people supports thus a small but vocal minority, which but for such public favors would soon perish off the land, for its own membership could not and would not keep it going if it had to pay the taxes, the burden of which it now shifts to the unbelieving or indifferent majority. The system is unjust and undemocratic, is immoral. In his Annual Message to Congress in 1875, President Grant pointed out that the tax-free property of Churches was at the time about one billion dollars; that “by 1900, without check, it is safe to say this property will reach a sum exceeding three billions of dollars”; and he added:

”So vast a sum, receiving all the protection and benefits of Government without bearing its proportion of the burdens and expenses of the same, will not be looked upon acquiescently by those who have to pay the taxes. In a growing country, where real estate enhances so rapidly with time, as in the United States, there is scarcely a limit to the wealth that may be acquired by corporations, religious or otherwise, if allowed to retain real estate without taxation. The contemplation of so vast a property as here alluded to, without taxation, may lead to sequestration without constitutional authority and through blood. I would suggest the taxation of all property equally, whether church or corporation.” (Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. vii, p. 334-5.)  

Until now the “damning things of the Church” arrayed in these pages, have been known only as the result of laborious research by a limited number: I broadcast them now so that they may be known to all. Even the “Man of God” may plead ignorance heretofore of the frauds of his Church and the falsity of his religion. Here it is demonstrated to him. To beg money now on the plea that the giver “lendeth to the Lord,” that money paid for prayers for the dead relieves the souls in Purgatory,—both these coin-cajoling pleas are now known to be false; obtaining money by these false pretenses, now, is Larceny. This is timely and serious warning, which it may be salutary to heed.

AN APPEAL TO REASON

”If any man is ignorant, let him be ignorant.” Paul.

 ”Where we can understand, it is a moral crime to cherish the un-understood.” Shotwell.   

The ex-Pagan Fathers of Christianity now turned Defenders of the new Faith, and propagandists of it among their fellow Pagans, were very fervid and eloquent in their appeals to the reason of the Pagans as against their mother-inherited superstitions. In his First Apology to the Emperor Antoninus Pius, Father Justin Martyr makes a fine appeal for the use of reason in defiance of tradition and authority,—a fine gesture to the Pagan,—but a principle seldom applied by a Christian in point of his own imposed creeds: “Reason directs those who are truly pious and philosophical to honor and love only what is true, declining to follow the opinions of the ancients, if these be worthless.” (Chap. ii, ANF. i, 63.) As ³¹¹ the preceding review has shown the opinions of the ancient Fathers to be worthless with respect to the “facts” of the Christian religion, and that that religion is quite worthless either as divine truth or effective police, it should therefore be discarded, except for such good moral precepts as are to be found in it as in all religions and all moral systems.

In those times the Christian Church was small and feeble, and had not yet snatched the cynical power whereby, ever since, it “requires the acceptance and practice not of the religion one may choose, but of that which God prescribes ... to be the only true one,” as asserted by His Holiness Leo XIII, in the Encyclical Immortale Dei, of November 1, 1885. (CE. xiv, 764.) Whereupon, the “choosers” of their religion became “heretics,” and were quite “justly burned,” as that same Pope admits. But before the successors of Constantine gave the Church the sword and the stake for persuasions unto faith, it was necessary that the Christian Apologists should appeal to reason with the intelligent classes of Pagans. Father Lactantius uses argument in his great Apology addressed to Constantine and intended for the learned Pagans of the imperial entourage, which I would earnestly address now to those who yet hesitate in their inherited Christianity:

“It is therefore right, especially in a matter on which the whole plan of life turns, that every one should place confidence in himself, and use his own judgment and individual capacity for the investigation and weighing of the truth, rather than through confidence in others to be deceived by their errors, as though he himself were without understanding. God has given wisdom to all alike, that they might be able both to investigate things which they have not heard, and to weigh things which they have heard. Nor. because they (our ancestors) preceded us in time, did they also outstrip us in wisdom; for if this is given equally to all, we can not be anticipated in it by those who precede us.”

 (Lact., Divine Institutes, II, viii; ANF. VII, 51.)   

Father Lactantius has a Chapter entitled “Cicero and Other Men of Learning Erred in not Turning Away the People from Error.” It is a moral crime, as Dr. Shotwell says, to cling to error when we can come to understand it as error. Not only that, urges Lactantius, it is wrong for those who know a vital truth to refrain from striving to turn men away from harmful error. His argument was much applauded by the Church, and is the argument of every missionary to the “heathen” today. Lactantius thus justly chides:

“Cicero was well aware that the deities which men worshipped were false. For when he had spoken many things which tended to the overthrow of religious ceremonies, he said nevertheless that these matters ought not; to be discussed by the vulgar, lest such discussion should extinguish the system of religion which was publicly received. ... Nay, rather, if you have any virtue, Cicero, endeavor to make the people Wise: that is a befitting subject, on which you may expend all the powers of your eloquence ... in the dispersion of the errors of mankind, and the recalling of the minds of men to a healthy state.”

 (Lactantius, Divine Institutes, II, iii; ANF. VII, 43.)   

That Christian Appeal to Reason was not with the intelligent classes of Pagandom very effective; more persuasive methods must, therefore, be divised to bring the Pagans to the Altar and Treasury of the Lord. We have read the succession of laws of the now “Christian Emperors,” which at the behest of the Priests proscribed Paganism upon pain of death and confiscation, made outlaws of all who refused to take the name of Christian, or continued to offer incense to the old gods, or became “heretics” to the official Faith; all who were guilty of these “crimes—let them be stricken by the avenging sword.” As the newer “barbarian”’ nations came upon the Christian scene, “the Catholic Faith was spread by the sword” among and upon them, and all who hesitated or backslid were murdered by Christian law and sword. Crass ignorance, credulity and superstition were then imposed and enforced upon Christendom in order to “preserve the purity of the faith” in the unthinking minds of unknowing dupes of the Church and the Priests who waxed in wealth and in dominion over witless Christendom. When after a millennium during which men were too ignorant to be heretic, the light of thought and reason began to dawn upon the horizon of the Dark Ages of Faith, the Inquisition and the Index, the tortures of the rack and the stake, were providentially provided for the further preservation of Faith by augment of Ignorance and Terror. In all these holy Ages of Faith, in this “civilization thoroughly saturated with Christianity,” the Siamese Twins of Creed and Crime, Faith and Filth, popular Poverty and Ecclesiastical Opulence, stalked hand in hand—”the inseparable companions of Religion.” The Renaissance and the Reformation came to enfranchise men from ³¹³ Authority and blind Obedience, and the way was blazed for Rationalism and the Age of Reason. The unquestionable record of all this we have read in the amazing and unblushing confessions of Holy Church itself.

At the time of the Reformation admitted conditions existed which today are infinitely more active and more thoroughgoing: “The Christian religious ideal—[never a matter of practice]—was to a great extent lost sight of; higher intellectual culture, previously confined in great measure to the clergy, but now common among the laity, assumed a secular character. ... Only a faint interest in the supernatural life survived.” (CE. xii, 703.) Education is now becoming universal; the hateful history of the Church and of Religion is becoming general knowledge; the Church, forced by ever-growing Secularism and Rationalism, has lost the power of compulsion and all but that of persuasion to belief in its forged and fatuous creeds, with all but the unthinking minority, and is itself almost secularized, held together as a sort of social center for the masses without other social contacts, and as matter of “good form” for the pretentiously pious, were infantile hymns are vocalized to an empty Heaven, and the unco gude chorus their petitions to the inhering and unheeding Throne of Grace, “beseeching the Lord upon the universal prayer-theme of‘ Gimme!’” Universally, too, as old John Duffy poetizes it, “The rich they pray for pounds, and the poor they pray for pence.”

The utter futility of prayer in objective sense for the obtaining of the subject-matter of the supplication, even of the “Give us this day our daily bread,”—which many do get and many and more others miserably go without, is confessed by CE., which frankly attributes all these things to the operation of the Law of Chance: “The apparent success which so often attends superstition can mostly be accounted for by natural causes, although [it piously adds] it would be rash to deny all supernatural intervention (e.g. in the phenomena of Spiritualism). When the object is to ascertain, or to effect in a general way, one of two possible events, the law of probabilities gives an equal chance to success and failure; and success does more to support than failure would do to destroy superstition, for, on its side, there are arrayed the religious instinct, sympathy and apathy, confidence and distrust, encouragement and discouragement, and,—perhaps strongest of all—the healing power of nature.” (CE. xiv, 341.) There, in a nutshell, is the profound psychology of the priest-instilled “religious instinct,” and of the hit-or-miss “efficacy of prayer” for the cajoling of “heavenly gifts” of earthly benefits and of the eversion of the heaven-sent or devil-inflicted evils whereof suffering humanity is the sport and prey,—to the utter indifference of their Celestial Pater!

The last sentence of the clerical admission above—”the healing power of nature,” bears destructively upon one of the most insistent of religious superstitions, the efficiency of prayers, and saints, and relies, and shrines, and pious mummeries, to which millions of the afflicted and deluded of God’s children resort for the relief of their torments and the cure of their diseases,—which their loving Father God inflicts or prevents. From the earliest times of priestcraft until this very year of grace, the ³¹⁴ priests and parsons and charlatans of every stripe preach and encourage this ancient heathen superstition,—and reap rich rewards through the imposture. The perfectly natural cause and explanation of numerous occasional instances of success at the game, which incites to further superstition and greater abuses, is curiously but truly confessed: “There are few religions in which recourse is not had to supernatural aid for miraculous cures. The testimony of reliable witnesses and the numerous ex-votos that have come down to us from antiquity leave no doubt as to the reality of these cures. It was natural that they should have been viewed as miraculous in an age when the remarkable power of suggestion to effect cures was not understood. Modern science recognizes that strong mental impressions can powerfully influence the nervous system and through it the bodily organs, leading in some instances to sudden illness or death, in others to remarkable cures. Such is the so-called mind cure or cure by suggestion. It explains naturally many extraordinary cures recorded in the annals of many religions. Still it has its recognized limits. It cannot restore of a sudden a half-decayed organ, or heal instantly a gaping wound caused by a cancer.” (CE. xii, 743.)

This thus confesses the huge false pretense of “miracle of God” in such cases of relief or cure of nervous or mental maladies as are claimed for the impostures of Lourdes, St. Anne’s, Maiden, the Calvary Baptist Holy Rollers and all such shrines of religious imposture and superstition. In antiquity, the fictitious Pagan gods did not exist,—the cures attributed to them and paid for to the priests were entirely due to nature, and the claims of the priests were frauds. The Christians now confess the “recognized limits” of their God to do more than Nature did under the Pagan gods: the pretense of “miracle,” of “supernatural intervention” is seen to be as fraudulent in modern times as it is admitted to have been in ancient. The Pagans believed, and prayed, and paid the priests, and some by auto-suggestion found relief or were cured, many others believed, and prayed, and paid—and their natural sufferings were enhanced by their disappointment. But did they cease therefore to believe and pray and pay? Probably then the pious apologetics of defeatism were the same as now. If the thing prayed for cometh to pass—”the gods have—God has—answered our prayers; blessed be their—His—holy name!” and the fortunate results are noised abroad. If by equal chance the prayed-for benefit is unattained, then “God knows better than we what is best for us,” and the less said about the failure the better for childlike Faith. When exposed to danger or death we escape, it is “the wonderful Providence of God,”—nothing being thought or said about those so curiously designated “Acts of God” which permitted or inflicted the disaster; whereas, if we die or continue in suffering, why, “God’s ways are not our ways”; “the ways of God are beyond our finite understanding,” et cetera of pious apologies for the silence and failure of God to help his suffering and neglected children.

It would seem that every fossil of credulity embedded in the ancient Rock of Faith has in the course of this review been picked out and the Rock itself drilled through and through for the easy task of final demolition. For nigh two thousand years it has cast its baleful shadow upon civilization, stunting and dwarfing the minds and faculties of men clouded by its worthless bulk. Though ³¹⁵ vastly undermined and hacked and tottering, the blighting effects of Church and religious superstition are yet in many odious respects persistent; humanity and civilization yet suffer under the lingering disease of priest-imposed delusions and the hateful miasma of religious intolerance in every land cursed yet by priestcraft, parsonate, and the odium of theology.

”When the Devil was sick, the Devil a Saint would be!” The Church is dying now; has been forced despite itself and its enginery of torture and murder, to desist from the worst of its deviltry, to appear a bit civilized; some of its partizans and dupes think it “reformed,” pure-minded and clean-handed. It is only measurably so perforce, and reluctantly. Even today the Law of God, conserved in the latest Edition of the holy Canon Law, commands murder for unbelief; these infamous “principles are in their own nature irreformable; ... owing to changed conditions [forced upon it by secular civilization] are to all practical intents and purposes obsolete ... The custom of burning heretics is really not a question of justice, but a question of civilization”! (CE. xiv, 769.) Thus the Church confesses itself uncivilized; it retains and insists upon the God-ordained justice of burning and murder; but is forced by heretic civilization, acquired in bloody despite of the Church, to conform to the decrees of Civilization. But as—however—Holy Church is impotent, dying, and will soon be dead—then only De mortuis nil nisi bonum!—Speed its hastening Death!

Founded in fraud by avarice and ambition, propagated by sword and fire, perpetuated by ignorance and fear; by increase of knowledge and free expression of thought rendered now all but impotent except in will and malice, priestcraft yet grasps for power and dominion over mind and spirit of men. In present default of rack and stake, it struggles yet to impose itself through such unholy means as it can still partially command,—fines and imprisonment under ridiculous medieval laws for the absurd priestly “crimes” of blasphemy and sacrilege, “desecration of the Lord’s Day” by innocent diversions instead of attending dull preachings and paying the priests by the gift upon the Altar or in the contribution plate. Odious laws for the repression of human liberty; for the outlawing of honest men who refuse the superstitious forms of Religious Oath imposed in courts and legal proceedings, of which several shocking instances have recently occurred, depriving men of liberty and property, and potentially of life through refusal of their testimony in court. Religious Intolerance flames through the land, as notorious instances have lately made evident. Good Christians yet cordially dislike and distrust all others of differing brands of Faith, which sentiments Christians and Jews religiously reciprocate in holy hatred and intolerance of each other, while all unite in utter abhorrence and damnation of the Liberal and the Unbeliever, condemned alike by private Christian spite and public obloquy, of a vocal and intolerant minority; by political disqualifications for public office wherever this or that Sect is yet in a majority and can enforce its intolerance by law. “A careful study of the history of religious toleration,” says the historian of Civilization, “will prove, that in every Christian country where it has been adopted, it has been forced upon the clergy by the authority of the secular classes. At the present day it is still unknown to those nations ³¹⁶ among whom the ecclesiastical power is stronger than the temporal power.” In quite half the countries of Latin America and several of Europe—the most backward and poverty-stricken and priest-ridden of them—yet today public office and honors can be attained only by the votaries of the Sect in power, and the free and public practice of any other than the official cult is prohibited by law. I have the codes of these “Christian” countries.

Even in our own “tolerant” country today, religious fanaticism succeeds in its attacks, to impose by law the “sacred science of Genesis” in the universities and schools to the outlawry of the teachings of the truths of Nature. Preachers and teachers who dare express honest opinions of liberalism or unbelief are by pious religionists discharged and their families deprived of bread and support. Religious Pharisees seek to seize the public schools to disseminate their obsolete superstitions in the minds of youth—the hope of the future, and the last chance of the Church. Individual peace and friendliness, public peace and good understanding are often jeopardized and destroyed by Religion. Corrupt and insulting ecclesiastical government is rampant in many of our large cities and in a number of entire States. In a word, and despite all, the Twentieth Century is still under the hang-over spell of medieval theology and an the holy spites and intolerance of rancorous Religiosity.

The fatal work of Church and Priest through the Christian Era—as herein revealed, has wrought ignorance, superstition and vice: it has been and remains a supreme failure. Faith is become obsolete before Facts. Christianity is proved to be a fraudulent Bankrupt; this is its final adjudication before the bar of Civilization.

The Christian Religion—shown to be a congeries of revamped Pagan Superstitions and of Priestly Lies—is not respectable for belief: every honest and self-respecting mind must repudiate it in disgust. We can all “Do good, for good is good to do”!

Faith—fondly called “the most precious heritage of the race,” is not a thing whereof to be proud; it is not Intelligent or of Reason. Not a flicker of intelligence is required to believe: millions of the most illiterate and ignorant of earth’s teeming populations are the firmest in their “faith” in every form of religious superstition known to the priests of the world, the most devout believers of this or that imposture,—”most assured of what they are most ignorant” withal. Indeed, as aptly quoted: “Unbelief is no crime that Ignorance was ever capable of being guilty of.” Buckle truly says, that to the secular and skeptical spirit European civilization owes its origin: that “it is evident, that until doubt began, progress was impossible” (Ch. vii, 242); and CE. has confessed, as is also self-evident,—”Toleration only came in when Faith went out.” What a boon then to humanity to hasten and complete its going!

Disbelief, doubt, inquiry of truth, rejection of superstition, is distinctly an act of Intelligence; it often requires heroic virtue of bravery and independence of mind to disbelieve, to revolt against and reject the creeds and credulities of the ignorant ³¹⁷ community,—as evidenced by the whole holy bloody history of religious rancor and intolerance which has so inadequately but shockingly been reviewed. It is the bravest men and the finest minds, with high courage to dare and defy Holy Church, whom that unholy Hoodlum has murdered, but who have saved and recreated Civilization, as even yet inadequately it has been achieved.

Think to what Civilization might have attained by this Twentieth Century. For nigh two thousand years Christianity has held sway and thrall over the most dominant part of the world and portion of the human race. In each generation for most of the two thousand years there have been hundreds of thousands of men and women—Priests, monks, nuns, and “religious” nondescripts, devoted through life to the unrealities of “Other-worldliness” to the utter neglect of the world in which they lived, resolved, all too oft, “to make of earth a hell that they might merit heaven.” In the pursuit of such impracticalities, and to force all others to believe, doubtless millions of books and sermons of sophistry have been their output, not to mention ignorance, wars, famines, plagues and bestialities innumerable that they have brought about to the destruction of civilization. Thus, in aggregate, millions of human beings—many of them of very high mental capacity, have devoted some millions of years of labor or of sloth to Theology and Religion,—lives, years and labor wasted! If these years and labors had but been devoted to pure and applied Science, to the discovery and conquest of the powers of Nature, to Knowledge of the Worth While—medicine, surgery anesthetics, antiseptics, sanitation—the catalogue is endless; to the outlawry of War and the establishment of universal Peace; the abolition of Crime, Poverty, and Disease—in a word, to the Social Sciences and Service, to Humanism and the Humanities, instead of to Theism and Theology—to what glorious heights would not Civilization and Humanity have scaled!

The timorous Religionist—affrighted at the threatened loss of the “opiate” and “crutches” of Faith, often asks: “What are you going to give us in its place?” A cure!—so that you will not need these artificial aids. When the surgeon excises a dangerous tumor, or the physician heals a mental or physical disease,—he restores to health of body or mind,—does not inflict some other form of disease in place of the one cured. So with the fictitious mental disorder of Religion,—for that it is a mental disorder of most malignant kind is proved by the inveterate hates and crimes it has caused the sufferers from it to be guilty of through all the Ages of Faith, as disclosed in this review. The sufferer goes through life, actually—or what is the same thing, under the delusion of disability,—hobbling on crutches, or with frequent injections of “dope” to allay real or imagined pain. Either by material means or by “mind cure” he is healed of the real or imaginary ailment: he throws away his crutches, discards his daily narcotic; health and strength come to his members and his whole body; the faculties of the mind are freed from the inhibitions of disease and disability. The sufferer goes through life, actually—or what is the same thing, under the delusion of disability,—hobbling on crutches, or with frequent injections of “dope” to allay real or imagined pain. Either by mental means or by “mind cure” he is healed of the real or ³¹⁸ imaginary ailment: he throws away his crutches, discards his daily narcotic; health and strength come to his members and his whole body; the faculties of the mind are freed from the inhibitions of disease and disability. The grandest cure ever wrought in the man and in humanity is free the mind from Superstition, to release all the energies of mind and body for the glorious work for Mankind. The noblest and most blest worker for Humanity is the Humanist.

Religious Toleration and freedom of thought and of beneficent research, came in only as religious Faith went out; Civilization began only as the Dark Ages of Faith came to an end. The Church has had its long Night—those Dark Ages of Faith. Therein it shed its boasted refulgence of “sweetness and light”—in the Dark. The Church is very like the fire-fly—the homely lightning Bug,—it needs darkness in which to shine. But the Day is come; the supernatural Light of the Cross is faded and paled before the luminous truths of Nature discovered now and exploited by free men for the good of mankind.

It remains yet to complete the good work for civilization and humanity by destroying the last lingering works and delusions of decadent and decayed priestcraft; through the universal triumph of Rationalism to fully and finally Ecraser l’Infame. Truly and prophetically spoke Zola: “Civilization will not attain to its perfection, until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest!”

A new and free Civilization rises from the ruins of the Ages of Faith; with heart aglow and high purpose set on the attainment of the ancient “Supreme Good,” it hails the glorious possibilities of the scientific Age of Reason, which will redeem humanity from the blight of the centuries of Unreason. Men may now know and freely and unafraid make known the truth: and the Truth shall make mankind Free.

In the fine imagery of Dr. Trattner, his autobiographic God looks into the now not so distant Future, and thus communes: “Before Me is the Scroll of Destiny. See! Man has already scaled the foot-hills. Not one man alone, or two, or three, but all the nations. Everywhere men and women together are now leading their children forward consecrated to the Ideal. ... I am satisfied. It is the day—the day of complete Emancipation!”

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