Sea Gulls and Christian Gullibility

OF all the silly news items dished out to the public during the present war, the story of several men on a raft who were saved from starvation by a God-sent sea-gull in answer to their prayers deserves a religious prize. It is even better publicity stuff than the "no-atheists-in-fox-holes" story dispatched from Bataan.

According to the log, as kept by Capt. Edward Rickenbacker himself, he and seven companions had been drifting on a raft for eight days, without water and with no food other than four "scrawny" oranges saved from the wreck of their plane. They were desperately thirsty, and though they had prayed from the beginning, no rain fell for over a week, "We had no rain until the eighth night," says Rickenbacker, and for five days "it was beastly hot." God evidently had turned on the steam.

One of the crew (a boy who later died) had a service Bible in his jumper. Accordingly, they got in touch with the Almighty at once.

"The second day out," says Rickenbacker, "we organized little prayer meetings in the evening and morning and took turn about reading.passages from the Bible, and frankly and humbly we prayed for our deliverance. After the oranges were gone there showed up a terrific lot of pangs of hunger, and we prayed for food."

Here, at last, was the signal for God to get busy--and he did. A sumptuous dinner was prepared for them.

An hour after they prayed, a sea-gull approached the raft, perched conveniently on Rickenbacker's head, and was instantly seized. Raw as it was, it was ravenously eaten by the eight famished men. God, in a burst of generosity, had seen fit to send this lone sea-gull to save them from utter collapse. Why he did not send more, at least one sea-gull apiece, when sea-gulls are so plentiful, and throw in a jug of drinking water besides, will remain a theological mystery; it is enough that the Almighty, after seeing them starve for days, responded at all. But the amount of food he sent did not reflect magnanimity nor the bounty of Heaven. Sending a sea-gull to feed these eight starving men was like a child in a zoo throwing a single peanut to a herd of hungry elephants. And, sending it uncooked was against the principles of sound medical practice. What doctor in a hospital would think of offering raw sea-gull flesh to desperately sick patients ?

But, even at that, the flying lunch-box arrived too late. One of the occupants of the raft, a mere boy, too weak to rally, and sickened by drafts of seawater and exposure, died of starvation after the bird arrived. God, in his infinite knowledge, knew these men had been starving for days, yet he did not trouble himself to send food until they gave him the "go" signal to proceed. He dispatched the bird only when they told him how desperately hungry they were. You can't expect a shipment of food from Heaven until you ask for it.

With millions of people starving in all parts of the world, with convoys risking everything to get food-stuffs to war-shattered countries, with men risking their lives daily in submarine infested waters in aid to stricken humanity, God tells one lone sea-gull out of the thousands that exist, to fly over to the Rickenbacker raft, roost on Rickenbacker's head, and get itself caught. His summoning the bird to go and get itself eaten will long be cited as a striking.example of God's beneficence.

This act of Divine Providence, this act of Heavenly concern, is so touching that the Chicago Daily News features it on its front page with a drawing of the rubber raft and the accommodating bird alighting on Rickenbacker's head. The picture is entitled, "God Still Answers" for the benefit of religionists, it might better be called: "There Are No Sea-Gulls on Atheists' Heads."

The land-gulls who can swallow this sea-gull story, with all its maudlin mush and religious implications, are, properly conditioned to swallow anything; they are the gullible-minded goofs that gobble the Bible whole, swear by Jonah and the Whale, and believe that Joshua stopped the Sun. They will tell you seriously that manna dropped from Heaven and that a raven fed a prophet. They are the elite of God, self-sanctified and smug, who are forever preaching the "spiritual values" of life while they wallow in the gutter of superstition. They have as much brains in their skull as the sea-gull that alighted on Rickenbacker's head.

For the men on the raft there are at least extenuating circumstances, They had endured a tropical sun for days and were burning with thirst. Theirs was an experience of cruel hardship and intense suffering. Men, under these circumstances, frequently have illusions and sometimes go mad. Rickenbacker himself has stated that there were cases of "mental upset" on the raft and that "minds began to crack" May not charity suggest that because of their ordeal these men suffered from distorted ideas and twisted judgment? No one, in a rational frame of mind, believes that, because a sea-gull alights on a raft, it was sent by a Ghost. Sea-gulls quite frequently alight on ships at sea and on small fishing boats.

In his famous work, "Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings", Dr. Henry Maudsley remarks:

"Another condition of things favorable to the generation of hallucinations is severe exhaustion of brain, whether owing to mental or to bodily causes. The shipwrecked sailor, when delirious from long privation of food and drink, has various hallucinations, among others sometimes tantalizing dreams and visions of food and water, which are, the illusive creations of his urgent needs." Starving men see that which is not there.

Capt. Rickenbacker, on his arrival home, announced over the radio that his life had been saved by an act of Providence. If it was, he has Providence to thank also for those hellish days on the raft. And what of the stricken boy with the Bible who died of starvation and whom they buried at sea? Did Providence look on while they cast his body to the waves? If there was a shark in the vicinity, it might well thank God for sending it a meal--a bigger and better meal than the one that alighted on Rickenbacker's head.

Christianity would be funny if it did not encourage so many nasty conceits. Where are more revolting prigs to be found than among those Christians who, having escaped some public calamity, like a fire or an explosion, attribute their safe-being to the favoritism of God ? Let the average Christian fail to catch a train that is wrecked or a ship that sinks at sea and he will hail his deliverance as a special act of Providence.

Who is more obnoxious than the piety-slobbering individual who thinks that the universe revolves around him?

It was my pleasure recently to entertain in my home five British boys of the RAF. These young officers had witnessed death in its grimmest aspects. All had seen companions shot down in the air by anti-aircraft fire, or killed beside them. One of them had participated in 87 bombing raids over enemy territory. When in the course of his narrative, he modestly spoke of his own experiences, the death of crew mates was referred to. I do not know what his religion was, or whether he had any, but there was no elation, no jubilation, no self-centered talk of having been saved by Providence. There were, on the contrary, expressions of noble dignity toward those who had been killed in action and who had fared a fate he had not shared with them. We did not claim that he had been singled out for special consideration while his companions perished. It was in pleasing contrast to the "God-saved-me" attitude of numerous Christians.

Compare this fine-minded attitude with the vulgar notions of classical Christianity. John Bunyan, of "Pilgrim's Progress" fame, was a mental case and an ignorant dolt, but his championship of Christianity made him a moral idol in the eyes of the Church. Like many a Christian, he saw in everything that affected his life the directing hand of God, He may be cited as a typical example of the fool who believes that the universe is centered in him. Bunyan not only believed that he lived under the tender care of Providence but that, as a soldier, he had been saved by miraculous intercession. "All we know of his military career," writes Macaulay, "is that, at the siege of some town, one of his comrades, who had marched with the besieging army instead of him, was killed by a shot. Bunyan ever after considered himself as having been saved from death by the special interference of Providence."

What did it matter to Bunyan if a comrade got shot, for taking his place in battle, if his own hide was saved? Wasn't he more important, in the eyes of God, than the one who was killed?

Such is the "spiritual" life and moral preachment one gets from reading Bunyan or such stories as the Sea-gull on the Raft. What does Providence care for man so long as the favored of Heaven live and others perish?

Christians have never been able to visualize a decent-minded deity.' The God they appropriated from the Jews was a peevish old reprobate, easily annoyed over trifles, vicious and vindictive in his conduct and as cruel as a Hun when he went on a rampage. He was, as John Burroughs remarks, a "heaven-filling despot". We are told in the Bible that he once killed a man for merely touching a sacred image, ordered another killed for picking up sticks on the Sabbath, and sent two she-bears to claw little children for calling an old man "bald head." He stopped at nothing in his nefarious career, from "drowning" the world to ordering the rape of virgins. And he is even less impressive in his modern, guise as the friend and protector of man. A God who sees men starve for twenty-one days on a raft and sends, during all their suffering, one Sea-gull to appease their hunger, is hardly a philanthropist. He is, even as the symbol of an idea, a menace to the mentality of every Christian.

Ten centuries hence men will look back at the records of our age as we do now at those of earlier times. They may glance at the culture of America and find, in some buried ruins, the recorded story of the Sea-gull on the Raft. Will they smile, or will they have delusions like our own? Who can tell but those who thrive at that distant day.

Christianity and Insanity

ONE of the saddest chapters in human history is that which describes the cruel manner in which the insane were treated in times past. Notwithstanding that it is happily a thing of the past, it will be instructive to inquire from what causes the barbarous usage sprang; for it was not common to all nations and all times; on the contrary, it had its birth in the ignorance and superstition of the dark ages of Christian Europe.
--DR. HENRY MAUDSLEY, Responsibility is a Mental Disease, p 6.

THERE is no bigger blot on the pages of history than Christianity's treatment of the insane. "The insane," says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "were frequently tortured, scourged, and even burned to death."

In ancient Egypt and Greece, the mentally sick were treated as victims of disease. They were cared for kindly and intelligently, while music and art were employed to quiet the nerves. With these sedatives went occupational activities of a diversional or recreational nature. Crude as some of the early methods were, they were nevertheless based on a sane and sober realization of the pathological condition underlying lunacy. It was left to Christianity to introduce an interpretation of insanity as insane as insanity itself. For 1,500 years its despicable doctrine of demon possession ruled Europe, with the result that every madhouse was a monstrous center of brutality.

"The prevailing idea of the pathology of insanity in Europe during the Middle Ages", writes Dr. Frederick Peterson, Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University, "was that of demonical possession. The insane were not sick, but possessed of devils, and these devils were only to be exorcised by moral or spiritual agencies . . . Torture and the cruelest forms of punishment were employed. The insane were regarded with abhorrence, and were frequently cast into chains and dungeons."

Prior to the 19th century there were no real hospitals for the treatment of the insane in the whole of Christendom. There were merely places of restraint, crude prisons where victims of mental derangement were shut up under the most horrible conditions. Christianity had but one method to offer for the treatment of madness: prayer and incantation. Celestial magic alone was depended on, and resorted to effect a cure. Exorcism, visits to miracle shrines, and even floggings were employed to cast out the demons that were supposed to possess the insane. Their plight was pitiful. Some, more fortunate than others, were whipped and driven out of town by the public executioners, and left to wander through the countryside like wild beasts. Shunned and abandoned by those who adored Jesus, these outcasts at least fared better than those who remained behind to endure torment at the hands of pious stupidity. So long as Christendom believed that insanity was due to demon possession there was no hope of reform. And as this belief had divine wisdom and Scriptural authority behind it, it was unthinkable to question it. Had not Jesus cast out demons and driven a legion of them into a herd of swine? If the founder of Christianity had so regarded the insane, what could one expect from his equally ignorant followers but strict conformity to his examples and precepts?

The early Christian fathers were gluttons for superstition. Among the big brains of the Church who believed in demonology were Justin Martyr (150 A. D.), Tertullian (220 A. D.), Clement of Alexandria (220A. D.), Origen (254 A. I), Lactantius (325 A. D.), St. Chrysostom (407 A. D.). They believed, not only that demons caused disease but brought on storms and famines. St. Augustine, in a mammoth work on miracles, solemnly relates the following story, cited by Bronson C. Keeler, in his "A Short History of the Bible" :
"A young man possessed of demons was relieved by the prayers and hymns of some women, but in departing the demons struggled fiercely, so that one, in passing out through the young man's eye, knocked that organ from the socket. It fell on his cheek, and hung there by a vein till one of the women returned it to its place, and, by seven days' praying and singing it was entirely healed."

Bedlam, the first lunatic asylum in England, has long symbolized all that was vile and vicious in the treatment of the mentally deranged. "It became," says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "famous and afterwards infamous for the brutal ill-treatment meted out to the insane." Here in what was known as Bethlehem Hospital, Christian ignorance and Christian cruelty inaugurated a reign of horror that was surpassed only by the Spanish Inquisition.

A quarter of a century after the great reformer Piner had unchained lunatics in the asylums of Paris and pleaded for humane treatment of the insane, his pupil, Esquirol, writing of conditions throughout Europe, said:
"These unfortunate people are treated worse than criminals, reduced to a condition worse than that of animals. I have seen them without clothing, covered with rags, and having only straw to protect them against the cold moisture and the hard stones they lie upon, deprived of air, given to mere gaolers and left to their surveillance. I have seen them in their narrow and filthy cells, without light and air, fastened with chains in these dens in which one would not keep wild beasts. This I have seen in France, and the insane are everywhere in Europe treated in the same way."

Nor is belief in demonology entirely discarded by the Christians of our time. To this day, the Roman Catholic Church regards "demon possession", not as a medieval superstition or a survival of savage culture, but as a fact, recurring at times in isolated cases throughout the world. Turn to your Catholic Encyclopaedia (article "Exorcist") and you will find precise instructions given as to the procedure a priest should follow in casting out devils. He is told even how he must dress while exhorting the demons to depart :
"In Christian countries authentic cases of possession sometimes occur, and every priest . . is liable to be called upon to perform his duty as exorcist. Each case is to be carefully examined and great caution to be used in distinguishing genuine possession from certain forms of disease. If expulsion of the evil spirit is not obtained, at once, the rite should be repeated, if need be, several times. The exorcist should be vested in surplice and violet stole."

And how was the reform brought about? By the work of the Materialists, by the efforts of that despised body of men who rejected the existence of spirit and who believed only in the activities of matter.

If religious writers have ever used the word "crass" to decry anything they detest more than they do the doctrine of Materialism, we have yet to hear of it. It is always "crass Materialism" they berate, that feared and wicked doctrine, which, in spite of being constantly assailed and "exploded"' by theologians, returns to plague them with its resplendent record of humane and beneficent accomplishments in every field of endeavor.

And it was this materialism, repudiated and besmeared by every lackey of religion, that stood for the sane treatment of the insane and for the inauguration of an era that was to supplant the driveling idiocies of Christian faith. It.was men like Diderot and Pinel, materialists both, who made war against the monstrous evils of demoniacal belief.

"It is certainly true as a historical fact", writes Viscount Morley in his "Diderot and the Encyclopaedists", vol. 2, p. 175, "that the rational treatment of insane persons, and the rational view of certain kinds of crime, were due to men like Pinel, trained in the materialistic school of the eighteenth century. And it was clearly impossible that the great and humane reforms in this field could have taken place before the decisive decay of theology."

To sum up, it was crass Christianity, with its vulgar notions and gross ignorance concerning insanity, that alone was responsible for the ill treatment of the insane and for the unspeakable barbarities committed against thousands of supposed victims of demon possession. Chained to staples in a wall and left to rave out their misery in fetid dungeons, these victims of Christian brutality found no escape except through their release by death. Christianity, in every sense of the word, was as crazy as those it had in its care. It had forgotten -- if it ever knew -- all that the great Greek Galen had taught the world hundred of years before.

And it was precisely our much-maligned and religiously-scorned "Eighteenth Century Materialism" that recognized insanity as a pathological disturbance of the brain rather than as a possession by devils, and which sought, by medical means, to lessen the suffering of those whose mental affliction had been aggravated by priestly stupidity.

Such, in brief, is the story of Christianity's treatment of the insane, a record of infamy that came to an end only through the triumph of Materialism and by the overthrow of a priesthood that had long usurped the province of science. With the downfall of demonology came the brilliant discoveries of clinical medicine, with the biologist, the bio-chemist and the neuropathologist replacing the Christian quack.