The Necessity of Atheism

by David Marshall Brooks

Luke was a Greek physician living somewhere on the shores of the Ægean Sea. He had been a friend of Paul, just as Mark had been with Peter. Luke had no personal acquaintance with Jesus and had to get his information from what others said, or from what the friends of "eye-witnesses" had seen.

The Gospel of "Matthew" is an anonymous composition which, on analysis, has been found to incorporate nearly fifty per cent of what is found in Mark. It is now believed by many scholars to have been written between the years 75 and 80 A.D. at Antioch not, of course, by the Apostle Matthew, but by some unknown editor.

The Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John, is vastly different in style, arrangement, and in the description of the words, actions, and general spiritual character of Jesus. Many scholars believe that it was written in the city of Ephesus, somewhere around the year 100 A.D. "Church tradition ascribed it to the Apostle John, the son of Zebedee, one of the fishermen whom Jesus called to be a disciple. Years ago this view was easily entertained, but there now exists too much refractory evidence against assigning this Greek Gospel to an Aramaic-speaking Galilean. That an untutored fisherman could have written so elaborate and so highly philosophical an account of Jesus has always presented a thorny problem. And so to most scholars John's authorship of the Fourth Gospel is unthinkable."

Not one of the Gospels is the work of an eyewitness, and the four Gospels do not complete each other; they contradict each other; and when they do not contradict, they repeat each other. The Christ of John is a totally different person from the Christ of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Loisy, in his "Quelques Lettres," states, "If there is one thing above others that is obvious, but as to which the most powerful of theological interests have caused a deliberate or unconscious blindness, it is the profound, the irreducible incompatibility of the Synoptical Gospels, and the Fourth Gospel. If Jesus spoke and acted as he is said to have spoken and acted in the first three Gospels, he did not speak and act as he is reported to have done in the fourth."

The Martian is forced to the conclusion that the New Testament, with its version of the Virgin Birth, Elizabeth, the cousin of Mary, Zacharias and the Angel Gabriel, Jesus and the Sinner, are on par with the eroticism of the Old Testament. The interpolations, the myth, and fable also compare with the first revelation, and, in his opinion, he prefers Andersen's Fairy Tales, or Æsop's Fables.

Meanwhile, a Protestant Brother mentions the name of Luther, and the conclusions he draws are that the exciting cause of the Reformation was an extravagant sale of indulgences conceded to the German Dominicans. The Augustinians grew jealous of the Dominicans, and an Augustinian Monk, Martin Luther, affixed to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral ninety-five articles against the abuse of indulgences. This started the fray in Germany with Luther at the head of this heresy. The gravest difference of opinion had to do with the Communion. "Luther retained one-half of the mystery, and rejected the other half. He confesses that the body of Jesus Christ is in the consecrated element, but it is, he says, as fire is in the red-hot iron. The fire and the iron subsist together. This is what they called impanation, invination, consubstantiation. Thus, while those they called Papists ate God without bread, the Lutherans ate God and bread; soon afterwards came the Calvinists, who ate bread and did not eat God." In short, Luther was in harmony with the Roman Church in nothing but the doctrines of the Trinity, Baptism, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection. Luther thought it was time to abolish private mass. He pretended the devil had appeared to him and reproached him for saying mass and consecrating the elements. The devil had proved to him, he said, that it was idolatry. Luther declared that the devil was right and must be believed. The mass was abolished in Wittenberg, and soon afterwards throughout Saxony; the images were thrown down, monks and nuns left their cloisters, and, a few years later, Luther married a nun called Catharine von Bora. This tale did not greatly impress our guest.

A Catholic Brother, not to be outdone, extols the glories of his Universal Church, and the Martian again sets out to investigate. This time he finds:

The quotations in the New Testament which the Catholic creed interprets as giving divine authority to its representatives on earth is a late interpolation; the Trinity as stated above is a paradox which no rational being can understand, and its dogmas and idolatry are consistent with a civilization of 4000 years ago.

A study of the lives of its popes put to shame the statement that they could possibly be the earthly representatives of a Benevolent Being. "In the ninth and tenth centuries the papacy passed through a period of shameful disorder. The Rome of John X was a cloaca in which the Popes set the example of the worst misconduct." (For a good short account of the lives of the popes, see Draper's, "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe.")

During the complete control by the Church of civilization in Europe, it has retarded the progress of humanity for at least 2000 years, and its precepts and fundamental principles are today detrimental to the advance of mankind. It has to its credit a long series of judicial murders for differences of opinion. The Crusades, instigated by the popes and seconded by the monks, cost millions of lives and exhausted the resources of Christian Europe; they aggravated fanaticism, exaggerated the worship of saints and relics to the point of mania, and encouraged the abuse of and traffic in indulgences. There had never been a single opinion persecuted by the Church in the Middle Ages the adoption of which would not have brought about a diminution of her revenues; the Church has always primarily considered her finances. The papacy was responsible for the Inquisition, and it actively encouraged and excited its ferocity. It gave birth to the Witchcraft Mania. The first Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada, received the congratulations of the Pope. It diabolically applauded the St. Bartholomew Massacre, and instigated the numerous religious wars that tore Europe asunder, and was the cause of the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and incalculable suffering. With such savage alacrity did it carry out its object of protecting the interests of religion that between 1481 and 1808 it had punished three hundred and forty thousand persons, and of these, nearly 32,000 had been burnt.