J. P. Dunlop
Berkeley, California
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]
Dear Sir,—Thank you for sending me the proof of Mr. Dunlop’s letter. Mr. Dunlop has evidently rigid convictions which no discussion could modify. He may justly retort that I myself have convictions which I am unwilling to modify. But that would not be true. I am willing to modify any and every conviction that I have, if new evidence and new advances in knowledge make it clear that I have been partly or wholly at fault. But Mr. Dunlop clings fast to what he considers the faith of his fathers, though the thinking world has long discarded the idea of a God of Love who is supposed to punish his children for their faults in this life by consigning them to the flames of hell, in which they will suffer eternally the agonizing torments of fire. It is impossible to reason with the well-meaning and sincere, but utterly ignorant, people who are capable of believing such absurdities.
I am glad that “Christians will try to get on without me.” I shall certainly succeed in getting on without the so-called Christianity which teaches that morality must depend essentially upon the fear of hell, not upon the love of God; and I will cheerfully take the risk of being punished for refusing to believe that God is in reality a fiend.
Mr. Dunlop assumes that I was in a bad temper when I wrote my previous letter. A certain sæva indignatio against lies and hypocrisy, wilful or unwilful, is entirely justified. Was Christ himself icily cold when he swept the money-changers and brawlers from the Temple? Did he speak in measured academic platitudes?
Mr. Dunlop does not realize that he believes what he believes merely because he has never used his brain, never investigated or tried to distinguish between the essential truth and the inevitable accretions of falsehood and folly. If he had been born in pagan times, he would probably have remained a pagan. In one age or country he would have sacrificed to Moloch: in another he would have worshipped Bacchus. But, of course, he cannot understand this.
I used the epithets “stupid,” “disgusting,” etc., because they seemed to me the most appropriate in connection with such a travesty of reason and religion as the tract referred to presented. And Mr. Dunlop is quite wrong when he says that “if these doctrines are false, no one will be hurt by them.” Generations of men, women and children have been hurt by them; hampered and cramped and narrowed by them; prevented from living their full, free lives, and driven from the comprehension and sustaining power of Christ’s Christianity by such grotesque inventions of little minds, striving to measure their God by their own paltry standards.
As I said before, it is time that the narrow-minded reactionaries should be taught that they are not the pillars of the true Church and the pillars of
the ideal society that they have supposed themselves to be; they are neither good, nor pious, nor useful. They are the real enemies of knowledge, reason, Christ and God. They try to murder childhood with ghastly lies about hell-fire; they try to enchain manhood and womanhood in shackles of mediæval, nonsensical, character-rotting superstitions.