The Necessity of Atheism

by David Marshall Brooks

And in pre-revolutionary France, the Church saw unmoved a state of affairs almost unimaginable, so far as the masses of the people were concerned, in their misery and demoralization. And this at a time when half the land of France, in addition to palaces, chateaux, and other forms of wealth were possessed by the nobility and clergy, and were practically free from taxation.

A contemporary observer writes, "Certain savage-looking beings, male and female, are seen in the country, black, livid, and sunburnt, and belonging to the soil which they dig and grub with invincible stubbornness. They stand erect, they display human lineaments, and seem capable of articulation. They are, in fact, men. They retire at night into their dens, where they live on black bread, water and roots. They spare other human beings the trouble of sowing."

In pre-revolutionary France, the clergy, counting monks and nuns, numbered, in 1762, over 400,000, with total possessions estimated at two thousand million pounds, producing an annual revenue of about one hundred and forty millions. The clergy were free from taxation and the higher members of the order possessed all the rights and privileges of the feudal nobility. To the end the Church in France, as in our day, in pre-revolutionary Russia, remained the champion of privilege and misgovernment.

In England, during the latter half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, developed the English manufacturing system. Woman-and child-labor were common in both mines and factories. The regular working hours were from 5 A.M. to 8 P.M., with six full days' labor per week. One investigator remarks: "It is a very common practice with the great populous parishes in London to bind children in large numbers to the proprietors of cotton-mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire, at a distance of 200 miles. The children are sent off by waggon loads at a time, and are as much lost for ever to their parents as if they were shipped off for the West Indies. The parishes that bind them, by procuring a settlement for the children at the end of forty days, get rid of them for ever; and the poor children have not a human being in the world to whom they can look up for redress against the wrongs they may be exposed to from these wholesale dealers in them, whose object it is to get everything they can possibly wring from their excessive labor and fatigue."

In the mines conditions were still worse, and a report in 1842 states: "Children are taken at the earliest ages, if only to be used as living and waving candlesticks, or to keep rats from a dinner, and it is in pits of the worst character, too, in which most female children are employed. It would appear from the practical returns obtained by the commissioner, that about one-third of the persons employed in coal mines are under eighteen years of age, and that much more than one-third of this proportion are under thirteen years of age." In certain mines there was no distinction of sex so far as underground labor was concerned. The men worked entirely naked and were assisted by females of all ages, from girls of six years to women of twenty-one, who were quite naked down to the waist.

But if oppression was rife, education at a low ebb, and misery prevalent, the religion of the people was receiving attention. The period was, in fact, one of revival in religion. The Wesleyan revival was in full swing, and Evangelical Christianity was making great advances. Between 1799 and 1804 there were founded, "The British and Foreign Bible Society," "The London Missionary Society," and "The Mission To The Jews."

When the Education Bill of 1819 came before the House of Lords, out of eighteen Bishops who voted on the measure, fifteen voted against it! Thus the religionists were most active during the period when a condition approximating white slavery existed. And why should this not have been so, when the Church is not interested in the social and economic status of its adherents during their existence on this planet, but is avowedly concerned with deluding its devotees into a mythical belief in a life hereafter? The greatest number of slaves and the greatest degradation of workers is to be found in those times and places where religious superstition is most powerful.

In our own country, as well as in England, the labor movement has developed not merely outside the range of organized Christianity, but in the teeth of the bitterest opposition to it. Christianity, since it came into power, has always preached to the poor in defense of the privileges and possessions of the rich.

In a recent publication by Jerome Davis, which is entitled "Labor Speaks for Itself on Religion," the author has compiled the opinions of labor leaders in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Russia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, China, Austria, Australia, Belgium, and Japan. It is a terrific indictment by labor against organized religion. The author tells us, "Here is labor speaking for itself, and in the by and large it feels that the Church has not understood or helped it to secure justice. The majority believe that the Church has a capitalistic bias. It is a class institution for the upper and middle classes." This is putting the matter rather mildly when one considers their grievances expressed in their own words. Again Jerome Davis asks, "Is it possible that our Church leaders are to some extent blinded by current conventional standards? Are they so busy sharing the wealth of the prosperous with others in spiritual quests that they fail to see some areas of desperate social need? Do they to some degree unconsciously exchange the gift of prophecy for yearly budgets and business boards?"

James H. Maurer, the president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, speaks for labor and the title of his subject is, "Has the Church Betrayed Labor?" Mr. Maurer's opinion follows: "A worker living from hand to mouth, and lucky if he is not hopelessly in debt besides, working at trip-hammer speed when he has work, with no security against enforced idleness, sickness, and old age, can hardly be expected to become deeply interested in, or a very enthusiastic listener to sermons about Lot's disobedient wife, who because she looked back was turned into a pillar of salt. He is far more concerned about his own overworked and perhaps underfed wife who, due to the strain of trying to raise his family on a meager income that permits of no rest or proper medical care, is slowly but surely turning into a corpse. To go to a church and listen to a sermon about the sublimeness of being humble and meek, that no matter how desperate the struggle to live may be one should be contented and not envy the more fortunate, because God in His infinite wisdom has ordained that there shall be rich and poor and that no matter how heavy one's burdens on this earth, one should bear them meekly and look for reward in the world to come and remember that God loves the poor—such sermons naturally sound pleasing to the ears of the wealthy listeners, and the usual reward is a shower of gold and hearty congratulations by the sleek and well-fed members of the congregation. But to an intelligent worker such sermons sound like capitalistic propaganda, upon which he is constantly being fed by every labor-exploiting concern in the country, and quite naturally he tries to avoid getting an extra dose of the same kind of buncombe on Sunday....