The Idea of God Must Go.
“I think it is not a good thing for people to believe in God. I think it is a bad thing for them to do so. I think the belief in God is one of the things that is helping very strongly to keep knaves in power and honest people in weakness; it is one of the things that is preventing the people from thinking for themselves and helping themselves. The human mind will never be perfectly free, and peasants and mechanics and day laborers will never be perfectly fairly treated in this world, until the church is utterly destroyed. I do not want to see the church reformed. I want to see her utterly destroyed, because as long as she exists the ruling classes in society will always have in her a faithful ally to help them carry on their infernal schemes of pillage. I do not want people to have a better idea of God or an idea of a better God. I want the idea of God entirely rooted out of the mind, because I know that as long as any idea of God remains in the mind, the priest and the politician will have something to work upon, and this world will never be free and happy until the priest and the politician are gone.
“One man will tell you that God is a Roman Catholic, another that he is a Presbyterian, another that he is a Baptist, and so on. One man will say that he is a Republican, another that he is a single taxer, another that he is a Socialist, and so on. What we must come to see is, that nothing is done in human society that is not done by men. Poverty must be destroyed, not because it is God’s will that it should be, but because it is best for the human race that it should be. And general wealth must be achieved, not because it is God’s will that it should be, but because it is best for the human race that it should be. Beware of those men who tell you what is or what is not the will of God. In every case you will find a person who is intellectually asleep, or half asleep, or mentally dishonest, or else you will find—and this is more likely—a priest or a politician, a person who wants to get you to not think about what he is teaching you. We have been dragged through enough mire and blood and darkness doing things according to the will of God. It is now time we began to think things out for ourselves.”—Pentecost.
“Mr. Barnum said that Christians had a different way of thinking about God now from that of fifty years ago. ‘When I first heard of the doctrine of the Universalists,’ said he, ‘I felt so utterly astonished that I thought I’d drop dead in my boots. The orthodox faith painted God as so revengeful a being that you could hardly distinguish the difference between God and the Devil. If I had almighty power and could take a pebble and give it life, knowing beforehand that fifty-nine seconds out of every sixty would be extreme misery, I would be a monster. Yet this is how God was described, and people talk about loving such a being.’” (Newspaper clipping.)