Do you believe that? I do not believe one word of it, and I have the right to say to all the world that this is false.
If there be a good God, the story is not true. If there be a wise God, the story is not true. Ought an honest man to be sent to the penitentiary for simply telling the truth?
Suppose we had a statute that whoever scoffed at Science—whoever by profane language should bring the Rule of Three into contempt, or whoever should attack the proposition that two parallel lines will never include a space, should be sent to the penitentiary—what would you think of it? It would be just as wise and just as idiotic as this.
And what else says the defendant?
"The bible-God says that his people made him jealous" "Provoked him to anger."
Is that true? It is. If it is true, is it blasphemous?
Let us read another line—
"And now he will raise the mischief with them; that his anger burns like hell."
That is true. The bible says of God—"My anger burns to the lowest hell." And that is all that the defendant says. Every word of it is in the bible. He simply does not believe it—and for that reason is a "blasphemer."
I say to you now, gentlemen,—and I shall argue to the Court,—that there is not in what I have read a solitary blasphemous word—not a word that has not been said in hundreds of pulpits in the Christian world. Theodore Parker, a Unitarian, speaking of this bible-God, said: "Vishnu with a necklace of skulls, Vishnu with bracelets of living, hissing serpents, is a figure of Love and Mercy compared to the God of the Old Testament." That, we might call "blasphemy," but not what I have read.