HOW CAN WE "TAKE" CHRIST?
All that is good in our civilization is the result of commerce, climate, soil, geographical position, industry, invention, discovery, art and science. The Church has been the enemy of progress, for the reason that it has endeavored to prevent man from thinking for himself. To prevent thought is to prevent all advancement except in the direction of faith.
—Robert Ingersoll.
HOW CAN WE "TAKE" CHRIST?
receive many letters from various people telling me that Christ is mine if I will only take him. I am always amused at the solicitations of these people and feel as President Taft did when Peary "laid the Pole" at his feet. Taft replied he had no idea what he should do with it. I should not know what to do with Christ if I took him.
What can they mean by taking Christ? The word Christ is used to designate a certain individual who died, if he ever lived, nearly two thousand years ago. Now to take this person we should have to take him from the earth where he was buried. I am at a loss to comprehend what Christians mean when they offer Christ to any one. What right has an individual today to offer another a person who has been dead two thousand years? I fail to see any sense in such an offer.
Certain men and women go about the world asking people to come to Christ, to accept Christ. What do they mean—do they know?
In my opinion the supreme dogma of Christianity is the divinity of Jesus. If Jesus was a man, all that was related of his divine acts in the four Gospels is false. How would a person like the Nazarene peasant be accepted today were he to play the part of a god?
Suppose a person who had lived in our neighborhood should come to us and say, "I am God, and I want you to help me save the world; quit your work and follow me." What would you think of him? Would any one pay the least attention to him, except to think he was insane and have him placed in an asylum for safety?
The people who are preaching the divinity of Jesus know nothing about him except what they read in a book that was written by unknown authors. Jesus is the last hope of Christian theology. He is the only solution of the divine problem that Christianity has to offer. Is not the direction of the world's most rational thought away from the Christian notion of Jesus? In my opinion it is.
Let us look at the once famous stronghold of New England Orthodoxy, the Andover Theological Seminary, which was chartered on June Nineteenth, Eighteen Hundred Seven, and opened for instruction on September Twenty-eighth, Eighteen Hundred Eight. I think it was about seven years ago that it was transferred to Cambridge and became a part of Harvard University. At that time the school consisted of seven instructors, twelve students and a library of sixty-five thousand books, with an endowment of eight hundred fifty thousand dollars in productive funds and an annual income of thirty-five thousand dollars.
It has been said that the highways were scoured every Summer for students, and enticing scholarships held out, but to no avail. No students materialized.
Why is this? In my opinion it is the rising generation's dissatisfaction with traditional theology; they have outgrown it. Ingersoll said that once in five years the President of the Seminary summoned his professors before him to make oath that they had learned absolutely nothing during the preceding five years and would not learn anything for the next five years. And that promise was not subject to recall.
But even Andover couldn't remain in that condition. In Eighteen Hundred Eighty-six it announced its new system of "progressive orthodoxy." This created a division between the Old School and the New, and marked the beginning of the end of Andover; and after much litigation it consented to be "gathered in" by Harvard or "swallowed," or perhaps they would say "merged."
They have now a new building located upon land adjacent to that of Harvard University, and the last account from the "Great Seminary" was that they had twenty-four pupils. The library of the Seminary and that of the Harvard Divinity School have been combined and are housed together in Bartlett Hall.
The defenders of the Gospel of Christ don't seem to be increasing; on the contrary, there seems to be great depression in matters ecclesiastical these days, even in puritanical New England. It plainly shows that the young men of the present day are not anxious to wear the "Dog-Collar of Christianity," and as far as I've heard no Christian arose to remark that the morals of the "Reverend" Clarence Richeson were contaminated by reading the words of Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll, Elbert Hubbard or Lemuel K. Washburn. The Reverend Clarence seemed to be a product of the Christian Bible, and talked to the last of his God and his Bible.
What is left of Christianity? Who wrote the Christian Bible? The smallest child in a Sunday School would answer the question by saying "God," but the most learned person on the globe would say, "I do not know." It is being admitted by thinking persons that answers to religious questions possess nothing more than a religious value. When a person is graduated from a Sunday School he is wiser than he will be after he has lived forty years, provided he learns anything by living.
"God" is a term used to express what man does not know, but it does not seem to me necessary to assign to the Bible divine authorship, as it can be accounted for on other grounds. It is certain that men and women have written books. It is not certain that there is a God and, if so, that he has written a book. If man could write the Bible, there seems to be no need for God to do so. It is a fact that no one knows who wrote a word of the Bible, and yet it will require many more years to kill the foolish superstition that God inspired certain men to write this book.
Nothing grows slower than truth, and nothing faster than superstition. Falsehood was never known to commit suicide. Unknown men wrote the Christian Bible, not an unknown God.
Not many years ago I saw that a teacher in the Holyoke (Massachusetts) High School was dismissed for saying that Jesus was one of a family of ten. Jesus is a word that paralyzes the mental faculties. As to the accuracy of the statement we have only the Gospels for authority. At any rate, if Matthew and Mark are reliable he had four brothers and sisters.
In Matthew xiii: 54 we read: "Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary, and his brethren, James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us?"
Mark confirms Matthew about the size of Mary's family.
I tried to learn something concerning this case, but silence a yard wide lay all about it. I fancy the teacher was silenced in some way. Leastwise I could learn nothing.
It doesn't take much to silence a teacher, or it didn't fifty years ago, especially if she were dependent upon teaching for her bread and butter, which I was.
I, at one time, tried to substitute one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's books to be read in school in the morning instead of the Christian Bible. I was informed by one of the committee that the Bible must be read every morning and the Ten Commandments repeated. The next morning I selected the "truthful" and startling account of Jonah whilst he was sojourning at the Submarine Hotel. I at that time made up my mind that if I were ever financially independent I'd say what I thought concerning the Christian religion, and no one doubts that I've done so.
Jesus is the last hope of Christian theology. It can be but a few years at most when faith in Jesus as God will be the mark of intellectual stupidity. It seems to me that mankind will soon be sensible enough to dismiss this dogma to eternal oblivion.
It is the last relic of heathen mythology that clings to modern civilization. The Christian church is put to its utmost ingenuity to hide the absurdity in this dogma.
The dogma of the divinity of Jesus rests upon fictitious events, and hence its fate is sealed.
Many persons regard any one that calls Jesus a man as a blasphemer. There is a great amount of pious nonsense in the world, and there is more connected with Jesus than with any other character whom Christendom honors.
The reverence paid to Jesus by Christians is the homage of idolatry.
The first thing for people to do is to get rid of the silly notion that there is anything holy in the name of Jesus any more than in the name of Hercules, Bacchus or Adonis. All the gods of the past are myths to the present. Jesus stands in the way of the world's advancement. The path of civilization is over his grave. The mind has been fettered by worship of this myth. We want to get rid of the Christian superstition.
Isn't it astonishing that many children should be taught about the "resurrection" before they can spell cat?
Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God, there is in that man no spirit of compromise. He has not the modesty born of the imperfections of human nature; he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance. Believing himself to be the slave of God, he imitates his master, and of all tyrants the worst is a slave in power.
When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing to be happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to insure eternal joy, there is in that man no spirit of concession. He divides the whole world into saints and sinners, into believers and unbelievers, into God's sheep and Devil's goats, into people who will be glorified and people who will be damned.
—Robert Ingersoll.