Chapter IV
Which then shall we accept—Science or the Bible? If it is proven, beyond any reasonable doubt that hey deal with the same subject matter, and that they relate conflicting accounts, it can not be casually dismissed. The human mind that is sufficiently active to make any useful contribution to the community of thought of its generation, is compelled, by its own limitations, to pass some kind of judgment in every matter of controversy. Whether we desire to reach a decision or not, that decision will thrust itself upon us, if we think. If one never thinks and never cares to think, then this attitude will do no harm either way, any more than he helps to consume space and sustenance which could be put to better use if he did not continue to cumber the earth. Our minds and our powers of Reason were intended for use, and most of us put them to some use, we shall, therefore, be bound to accept one view or the other, or else discard both and build one of our own. That will be helpful. Any logical opinion reasonably reached is to be commended.
There is nothing to be gained by trying to evade any effort to refuse to accept any responsibi9lity in the controversy. It is something that vitally touches every human being. The Bible teaches that if you do not believe it, that you will be doomed to eternal misery in a hell that burns with fire and brimstone, with no respite from continuous and perpetual torment—no paroles or time off for good behavior. That you will be associated, throughout an endless eternity, with the old devil and his imps or angels, and be found to endure all the awful punishments which his Satanic majesty is pleased top heap upon you during all the countless ages. Is it then not of immense importance to use the utmost of our faculties in an intelligent effort to determine whether the Bible is of God or whether it is of men? It will not suffice just to say: “Oh, well, I shall not contradict the Bible, I shall let it take its course and will believe it without investigation.” Even if it should be of God and be as authoritative as its most zealous defenders have ever claimed it to be, that kind of passive belief is of no value. It is not faith. When I was a boy, it was impressed upon me from many sources that it was a very dangerous thing to question anything in the Bible; that question and investigation would lead to doubt and doubt to unbelief, and unbelief to damnation. There was a great deal of truth in the first part of the statement. I am convinced that he who questions and investigates the Bible conscientiously for the purpose of determining its origin, and studying its teaching in the light of intelligent research will develop a doubt as to its being the Word of God or whether its threats of damnation are any more alarming than if they were found in any other code of any other religion now or heretofore. That doubt, cultivated by further research, leads to unbelief in the idea that the God created the universe with its perfection in the minutest detail, established the laws which never change and which never have been wrong, with all the wisdom manifested in His every act, with power unlimited to perform His will, and who has been so lavish in beautifying every design and plan of all nature, would give to the man of His creation, whom he so dearly loved, such a conglomeration of conflicting rubbish as the Bible, and consign him to everlasting perdition if he didn’t believe it, and believe it all. “If you fail in one point, you are guilty of the whole.”
I do not mean to infer that there are not a great many places to be found in the Bible that express the highest ideals of morality and the brotherhood of man; nor would I entertain the slightest inclination to wound the sentimental feelings of the tenderest soul who finds so much comfort in what is to him the very essence of life and happiness—the sacred scriptures; but I cannot overlook the fact that thousands of billions of the human race have been just as much dependent, as he is now, for consolation and hope, on what he, too, would call heathenish mythology and dark superstition. It is the beautiful sentiment and the soulful expressions in the Bible that we are most likely to hear quoted from the pulpit; and we are more than apt to form our opinions of the book from what we hear in eloquent exhortations to accept God’s love and blessings, instead of studying it as we would study algebra or biology. One’s education has been sadly neglected if a study of the Bible has been omitted. I have persistently and consistently (I think) opposed the teaching of the Bible in the public schools. When it, if it ever does, become a part of the dead past as Egyptian, Grecian, and Zoroastrian Mythology now are, and it is no longer a source of quarrel and strife among so many denominations all so certain that they rightly interpret God’s holy word, and all the rest are so woefully in error, and liable to be cursed of God, then I would advocate its study in the public schools, just as now I would emphasize the educational value of teaching all the ancient mythologies. It is impossible to get a full comprehensive understanding of the Bible without a general knowledge of the other mythologies. So much of the Bible is borrowed from the older mythologies that it can easily be detected if we compare them as we would the histories of the old and the new in any other phase of man’s activities.
If we accept the Bible as the product of the highest effort of men, who wrote it for a standard of morals, to elevate citizenship, then we shall be permitted to accept the good and reject the bad. In so doing we may develop a great admiration for some of its excellence, produced, as it was, at a time when nearly all were ignorant, and in an environment that necessitated a presentation of the miraculous and marvelous in order to gain the adherence of the untutored multitude. But if we accept its own contention that it is the Word of God, given by inspiration such that it represents His will for the guidance of man’s conduct in all things, then we must accept it all, and there is no permission to reject any part of it. No matter how silly it seems to us now to argue that the Omnipotent Creator made man in His own image, that He was pleased with His creature, that He loved him with a love as much greater than man, but that the devil stole man completely from his maker almost immediately after his creation, and has had the upper hand in the struggle all the time since—still we must believe it or perish if we take the Bible as God’s Word. We should not doubt God’s word in the least detail. It is but the fool that would do so. If God’s word says “There were giants in the earth because the son’s of God married the daughters of men, and that God was so sorry He had made men that He determined to destroy everything both man and beasts but later decided not to utterly destroy them,” we must accept it as being the truth of God Himself or else be guilty of refusing to believe God.
I have spoken of the Bible as a conglomeration of conflicting rubbish. If it is the Word of God, carrying all the dire punishments and eternal torments with which it threatens the doubter—for “whoever doubts is damned already”—I am certainly standing on a precarious brink. I mention this that the reader may know that I understand that I am not immune from the estate of the damned, just because I am so sincere in my convictions.
However much I adore the Great Architect of this universe; however much I claim that God is the very absolute of all that is great and good, and the veritable essence of Truth and Love, yet if the Bible is God’s word and I am to be judged by my belief in its being such, then I am lost and will have to take my punishment in the lake that burns forever with fire and sulphur, for I cannot so degrade my conception of God as to believe that He would have us believe that the writings of the Bible constitute even any part of His Word.
In another chapter I hope to try to give an idea of my conception of God. It will not be complete since my vocabulary is too deficient to give its expression—the Absolute—The Infinite—is too superlative for accurate description. But here I must examine the Bible rather minutely in order to justify the classification I have accorded it.
Some parts I shall not even try to quote, but shall give chapter or book that whoever may wish to check me may read it in the Bible. If it were quoted here it would make some of those, for whom it is intended, blush. In fact, I consider some of it unfit to read in our homes, but if any shall feel an inclination to read these passages, he certainly has my permission to do so. And if one desires to obtain anything like a knowledge of the Bible, it is necessary to carefully study all of it, and study it a book at a time, and also by subject. Tabulate every feature that harmonizes with our conception of God. In another class place all that one would feel ashamed to charge to Him as its author. Observe the conflicting accounts of the same story. In fact analyze it as you would any other course of study. We certainly shall not be required to accept one of the many systems of religion and discard all the rest without some very definite conviction after investigation.
The Jews borrowed all the jewelry and portable valuables they could from the Egyptians before their Exodus (by direction of Jehovah) with no idea of ever returning them, but they borrowed still more of the mythology of Babylon and other countries, more enlightened than themselves, and the New Testament starts out with the mixture of Zoroastrianism. We must study all these early philosophies including the book of the dead, of ancient Egypt which is very much older than Adam and the Garden of Eden,, if we would be able to comprehend the utter fallacy of calling all this mythological nonsense the Word of God. The philosophy contained in “The Book of the Dead” of ancient Egypt is as high class as the philosophy of the Bible, and some of the best precepts of all other moral philosophies are patterned from it. The Golden Rule, probably the highest conception of man as a moral guide even down to and including our own generation, is taught in the book of the dead, as well as other philosophies which ante-date our Bible, and our New Testament certainly cannot lay claim to its originality. It was probably more directly copied from Zoroaster, since his priests—the Magi—wielded such influence on the basic ideas of the New Testament. Zoroaster’s philosophy was surcharged with the idea of the struggle between light and darkness, our intelligence and ignorance, and the fight for ascendancy between good and evil. Ormuzed, the God, and Ahriman, the devil, blazed forth into the lime-light in the New Testament days to such a preponderant degree as to almost eclipse every other phase of world happenings. God and the old devil went to the combat in person in the presence of earth’s anxious on-lookers. God had come down from the great white throne to redeem his beloved creature, and rectify the sad mistake which was directly traceable to His own failure in the way He started men in the earth in allowing Satan, with nothing but a big blushing pippin, to swipe the whole race from the bosom and loving approbation of the Creator. Again, after many encounters, some of which should have been judged a “draw”, God fell in the struggle, yielding up the ghost, but the enemy was unscathed—left as powerful as ever—and it was conceded that he would continue successful and finally come off with an overwhelming majority of God’s crowning work on his side, to be eternal citizens of his domain.
In the old mythologies it was impossible to keep one of the gods dead. They were frequently slain, and although they were torn to bits, as was Osiris, the supreme god of Egypt, they managed to continue to exist. It is, therefore, not unexpected to find that the God of the New Testament continued to live like all the rest. He was somewhat different, an indication of the process of evolution in the nature of the gods, all of whom had been created by the alert and progressive minds of men, and everyone after man’s own image and in his likeness. The new departure in the nature of the resurrected New Testament God was that he was a spirit or a ghost. He could enter a room, the doors being shut, or vanish and reappear in quick succession, but in the enthusiasm of the writer, who was strong for gods with human habits, he is found partaking of square meals of every-day material food. Verily the gods were great for fancy viands and nectars. Most of them were regular guests at the big parties staged by one of their group—Bacchus by name who was usually very much polluted. The nearest to the bacchanalian house-party style that the New Testament God ever approached, according to the record, happened one night in Cana up in Galilee, where He was one of the guests at a wedding. The indulgence in wine had been even a little more than had been anticipated, and while they were “pretty well drunk”, the immaculate mother suggested that they call on her son for a replenishment of the stock, and while it is claimed to be His first effort at the miraculous, he was remarkably successful and in a few minutes He had produced something like one hundred and twenty gallons of better vintage than they had been imbibing all evening. Thus at one fell stroke he had outdone anything Bacchus had ever been credited with. But, of course, this miracle is not popular any more in America, and it may be partially excused since it was His first, and He argued, at the time, that it was somewhat premature.
I mention these things—not to appear arrogantly sacrilegious, not even to be humorous—but to emphasize how ludicrously ridiculous it is to set this up as the very Word of God. And yet it has been so persistently instilled into our mental make-up from our infancy that even in this generation of education and serious reflection, many of our leaders in the realm of the intelligentsia pass it along as a matter of fact. In the most important thing to be connected with human activities, we are prone to be content with whatever was “good enough for grandmother, who departed this life happy in the consoling experience of a living faith.”
People in highly civilized parts of this little old earth have quit casting girl babies into the river or otherwise sacrificing human beings to appease their favorite god. They have discontinued the weeping and wailing and wallowing in a pile of straw, provided at the sacred alter of the temple of worship, for the purpose of “getting religion”, but they still hold tenaciously to the sweetly satisfying dogma that “A part of men and angels were predestined to eternal life, and this number is so certain that it can not be changed; but the rest of men and angels, by virtue of belonging to the elect are doomed to eternal damnation.” I have not claimed, and do not now claim, that there is any part of the teachings of the Bible, but millions have so claimed the Bible—God’s Word—to maintain such trash, as a foundation for much praise and adoration of a loving and beneficent Father who loves us all without respect of persons. How easy it is to be inconsistent in such vital matters, and praise God, all the time, for originating inconsistency!
The mountains have, in most of the mythologies, been the favorite rendezvous of the gods—and not to be outdone in any of the spectacular, the Jehovah God of the Old Testament descended upon the summit of quiet old Sinai with thunder and lightning and loud trumpeting. After a great deal of display of magnificence, He wrote, on stone slabs, the Decalogue, which served as the national constitution of Judaea and all Israel as long as they maintained their nationality. And by the way, Jehovah God took pains to explain, while holding this personal interview, that the reason for keeping the seventh day holy was that He had created everything in six days and had hallowed the seventh as a day of rest. This noise attending this volcanic demonstration must have been way out of the ordinary, for the people saw the thunder and saw the noise of the trumpets. The trumpeting was done by the ten thousand saints that had come down with Jehovah (it is enigmatical how the saints had ever gotten up to heaven since the atonement had not yet been accomplished, but a little thing like that would not be sufficient to prevent the writer from making this visit, from this God, eclipse anything the gods of neighboring nations had ever staged).
The God of the New Testament also did a great deal of wonders in the mountains. The devil kidnapped Him on one occasion and took him into the hills back of Jerusalem where the view was so magnificent that they could see Greece, Rome, Egypt, Carthage, and I suppose, Ireland, but this particular contest between Ormuzd and Ahriman was a “draw”—there being no decision from the referee. His greatest record, made in the mountains, was recorded as a sermon. He had had a multitude for an audience—“great multitudes from Galilee, from Decapolis, and from Jerusalem, and from Judaea, and from beyond Jordan”.—what an opportunity to spread the good news! But he left the anxious, perishing multitude, went up into a mountain, alone, but when He was set, His disciples came to Him and He is credited with the longest talk of His career. Only one of the little audience ventured to record it; so we have no contradictions. The multitude had to wait another century before it was written, and their descendants had to wait until crusading missionaries went back from Western civilizations with the message and the sword and forced them to hear what the loving creator had refused to say to their assembled fathers.
If Jesus of Nazareth was the son of Joseph or any other human father, I have the highest admiration and respect for his effort toward the elevation of his race. He should be classed among the great reformers of all history, and credited with having done as well as any other man could have done, handicapped by the ignorance and superstition of one of the most ignorant of all the peoples of the civilized world at that time. But if He were the God that created “everything that was made”, and after losing man, wholly, to the devil, came down for the express purpose of redeeming the lost world, and to again head his Kingdom among men, I can but designate it as a monstrously puny effort. He preached to His disciples “not to hide their light under a bushel” nor “bury their talents in a napkin”, but confined His own life work to a few square miles in Judaea and Galilee, and a good part of that time in hiding and seclusion from the populace. Pulpit orators have, throughout the generations, exhausted splendid vocabularies in telling the importance of His preparation. The renewal of His courage and strength by prayer, His sturdy moral character in the presence of temptation, what He had forfeited in heaven to come to earth at all, and finally, His being made perfect through suffering. And how they do rave at the sinfulness of poor old Iscariot and Governor Pilate, who were fulfilling a part of His mission just as important as any other agency employed in the age-long plan for the redemption from Adam’s sin. How he prayed that the “cup might pass”, and He could escape the very thing He had planned and fixed from the foundation of the world to do. Can we hold a good conscience toward God and continue to belittle the Great Architect of the universe with such puerile piffle? He came to die. The plan and manner of His coming, His life, his buffeting, His death, had to be carried out as a set program. If it had not been thus there would be nothing to preach, and there would have been nothing during the past two thousand years, to give employment to millions of priests and preachers. The trillions in money that have rendered such valuable assistance to the omnipotent would have been of no use whatever. (It might have aided science in the discovery and promulgation of what should be denominated God’s Word.)
I sincerely feel that all the tears, all the published pathos, all the terrible heart-aches that have been engendered by sympathy with the dying gods has been a woeful waste of energy. If the God of the New Testament was what it claims He was, His death was nothing in the world but premeditated suicide. There is no way around that conclusion, and if it was the plan devised in heaven, before man was created—“From the foundation of the world”—the only conclusion in that premise is that God contemplated the creation of a man that would be so unstable that he would fall and go to the devil, and that he would, in the fullness of time, at His own pleasure, and of His own volition, come down and die for man’s rescue. Then why weep over one of God’s own deliberate preferences? Why so much expression of sympathy over terrors which represented the free desire of Him who knoweth everything, has power to perform his every wish, and who could, just as easily have had it as delightful as resting a weary head upon a downy pillow, surrounded by every luxury? The idea that man could crucify God is too mythological to have any credence in the twentieth century if we would only think. It is not fit for juvenile bed-time stories, partly because it would offend the intelligence of small children. Furthermore, the very foolishness of having the God of the universe, with the attributes already enumerated, deliberately plan such a man, with the full knowledge that said man would have to be followed up in the way the Bible promulgates the chain of facts, and still persist in his creation would wound the good sense of all men. Why, we would not waste any sympathy on a man, full of frailties, subject to erroneous deductions, if he persisted in a similar course after its absurdity had been even suggested, much less known as if by omniscience.
The God of the Bible is the same God in both the Old and the New Testaments, except that in the New he adopts the plan of Gaul and is divided into three parts. This triple-headed monster’s creation had been suggested earlier, but the finishing touches and decorations were applied when stalwart Athanasius and many venerable emissaries were spell-binding the Council of Nicaea more than three centuries after the Nazarene was born in Bethlehem. After heated debates among the most learned of the age, the council passed on the nature of our God, and the decision of the majority (by no means unanimous) opinion was set before the world, for all the future generations to believe or disbelieve, as God’s own description of Himself, and whosoever refuses to accept and believe this Nicene conclusion shall spend all eternity in hell. Ever since Constantine’s notable council, above mentioned, it has been a crime, punishable by eternal damnation, to believe in a God like the one we started out with for the Old Testament (Monotheism). The debates waxed furious at Nicaea. Many other important things were to be settled for all time. Different ideas of God were not all. What was the Word of God was probably causing more trouble than the Nature of God. There was little unanimity of opinion, so the divinely-appointed but self-seeking Constantine called this caucus to fix a uniform line of dope, and put an end to the wrangling.
The best educated at the council contended that Jesus Christ was not of the same substance as the father, that he had the power, by his own volition, to choose between right and wrong. This idea was very logically founded on the fact that his mother was human, and, that by all known means of computation that would make him half human. This human, while it has been very useful in millions of pulpit exhortations, full of sentiment and pathos, to create sympathy for the poor, mistreated God, was eliminated by one of the most astute of all tricks of the business of god-making, since history has kept a record. This new God of the New Testament was not man. Although his mother had been known as an ordinary Jewess, her offspring, in this birth, was no more kin to her than to Joseph, the “step-father”. It had been decided that his conception was not from fertilization of a human ovum, it was immaculate. It was all so mysterious! God just happened to occupy a human womb, without human intervention, either male or female. And still we claim that we are lawfully seized of Reasoning power.
There were numerous books and manuscripts, whose authors were reputed, by earnest admirers, to have written by inspiration, and, therefore, there works should be canonized, but after much sparring and debating the twenty-seven books, which we now revere and almost worship, were voted, by a majority of all delegates present, to be the very Word of God, belief of which was essential to gaining admission through the pearly gate. All other books were voted to be spurious counterfeits of the holy inspiration. What will happen to us if this crowd of delegates happened to canonize the wrong library, and discarded and burned the ones which would have saved our souls if we would only believe them? How careless God has been with His Word! Left its writing, transcribing, copying, printing,, and publishing to men, some of whom have not believed it to be God’s Word. Just because a man is a good type-setter is no reason that he believes what he types. And for centuries His word was not published from a printing-press, it was copied by hand, and the old manuscripts differed in many many places. What if the one which served as copy for our volume contained some serious errors! Then the translations—oh what chances for mistakes! It is impossible to translate two or three times—from Hebrew to Greek or Latin, and then to some modern language, for instance our English, without doing more or less damage to the meaning. Modern scholars may not know any more about translating from the dead languages (God let the only languages which contained His word die so dead that no person on earth could even pronounce them.) but later, or revised, translations change the meaning entirely in some places. There may be worse than the others so far as we know, but if our eternal happiness depends on our believing the right God’s Word, we have good reason to fear that we are doomed. An example of what differences in the literature of the world might arise from one of these little conflicts of translation is seen in the report of Paul, explaining the reason of his apprehension and trial, to king Agrippa—Acts:26. The authorized version which has served the people since the days of King James of England, records Agrippa, the king, as saying: “Paul, thou almost persuadest me to be a Christian,” and our songs and sermons on that theme have had a wondrous influence for many generations. How often have we been able to account for the gaining of souls at the “big meetings” by the strains of that old heart-touching revival song “Almost Persuaded”! But after the idea had pervaded our sacred and secular literature the revisers spoil it all with the more perfect translation: “Paul, with little persuasion thou wouldst fain make me a Christian.” The meaning entirely changed. No foundation at all for the effectiveness it had held for millions. Agrippa was only poking fun at Paul, and Paul didn’t know it. Festus had just before interrupted Paul with the loud proclamation that he was crazy. So it seems very likely that the revised translation is more true to the fact—if not to the original.
Don’t we understand enough of God’s nature to know that His Word is not subject to change by poor, weak, or dishonest men? Why should we believe that the Great Spirit—the God of the universe—ever resorted to the use of the purely artificial in anything? Does it not appear somewhat unreasonable that God created all the eternal laws and placed them entirely beyond the power of man to change in the least detail, fixed everything but the means of expressing His law for man’s moral and spiritual guidance—the most important of all—and left that to be expressed in artificial language, wholly of man’s manufacture, and subject to whimsical changes, obsolescence or even complete annihilation? Do we believe that God talked Hebrew to all the Old Testament characters for who such conversations are claimed, and that He talked to people all the way down till the last few generations, resorting to artificial instead of natural language? Why did he quit talking as education and general enlightenment increased? We now discredit anybody—no matter who he is or what he claims to be—who reports conversations with God. The usual modern matter of dealing with them is to commit them to an insane asylum, where they will have good care and be safe from themselves.
The Bible is not worthy of being called God’s word because it is so full of foolish and frivolous things attributed to God. God was simply a great big powerful man, capable of doing just what the imagina