CHAPTER XXIX.
EVERY MAN HIS OWN GOD.
Writers and thinkers with a strong theological bias, seem to fear that the world would go to pieces if the scriptural God or Gods were deposed. They seem to apprehend that the moral and political economy would seriously suffer, and the moral idea especially be destroyed.
When these gentlemen find it impossible to reconcile the difficulties that overshadow the personal and triple-headed deities—that somehow they cannot make them harmonize with the recent discoveries and the development in natural sciences—they attempt to mold them so as to fit the requirements of the occasion.
Thus, it was discovered that the prime essence of the world is God, or something that pervades all nature; that he is the first great cause, and that this implies some huge mountain of will power, and an immense ocean of intelligence; that he is the creator of all things—that out of him this world emerged and out of the world all the various activities and objects were developed by the life inherent in the substances, etc.
Then again they represent him as a great designer—declare that God designed all things and beings, and put everything in shipshape order; and after the design was finished he set the machinery in motion.
These, and interminable similar pet theories and excuses, are made for God to retain a foothold in the mind of man. Clever brains and prolific imaginations have succeeded in clothing God, or Gods, with all the attributes thus far discovered either in man, beast, planet, or space—extension, contraction, elasticity, etc.—modes, limitation, finite, infinite, absolute—everything, in fact, that has ever been printed in the largest encyclopedia known.
These gentlemen should have had memories that the original doubts in Abraham’s mind were the result of common sense and reason; that he still retained the sensual qualities of the Chaldean gods. The modifications and transitions of that first idea are very marked, as well as very numerous. By the time we reach Christ, he is not the same. It is to be regretted that we have no compliments to waste on this God—alias Jehova—because a more bloody, selfish, monstrous idea cannot be well portrayed, if the story in the Bible be true.
And certainly he, and his triple alliance, does not exhibit one redeeming quality during the centuries of Christianity, because a more hideous, outrageous, criminal monster cannot be constructed, except by human ingenuity and by human devices.
In another chapter we call the attention of the reader to some of the most barbarous abominations of the Roman Catholic church, and such a polluted set of butchering popes as words fail to give any adequate idea of.