Politicians and Prayer

THANKSGIVING DAY has come and gone, millions of prayers have been said, and--believe it or not--the war goes on. God, if he heard his petitioners, gave them the blind stare. The reason there wa no response may be simply stated. The Heavenly Father, who is said to be interested in our welfare, does not exist.

A God that can hear prayers for the cessation of war should be able to hear the blast of bombshells, the cries of helpless aged and infants, the groans of the wounded lying in snow-drifts or on hot desert sands. If he hears their cries and does not act, it is because he is quite willing to wait until one side or the other has exausted itself. He is like a father watching his two children knifing each other and twiddling his thumbs.

On Thanksgiving Day, high government functionaries prayed to God, rolled their eyes like geese, sang silly hymns, and behaved like 12th Century numskulls anathematizing a comet. They knew, if they knew anything, that their antics in church would not change the course of the war, or prevent a single enemy bullet from reaching its mark. They knew that for long days to come the holocaust would go on, regardless of their mumblings to God.

Politicians are not always of the first order of intelligence, but none of them can be so dumb as not to observe, time and time again, that prayers are useless. Most of them, by now, must necessarily realize that praying for peace is like spitting in the wind. If prayers could stop the war, the world would be at peace.

The several "freedoms" for which we claim to be fighting are beautiful enough in themselves, but what good is freedom alone, or own own Bill of Rights, if it leads to nothing more than the liberty of men to make asses of themselves? Something more necessary to raise the thinking standards of a people.

And to whom do our political leaders pray for moral guidance and help? To the "Ruler of the Universe", of course, to the one who, if he existed, is responsible for the thousands of criminal assaults to which man has been subjected since he emerged from the ape. If there be a God, who but he sends the lighting's bolt, the avalance and the tidal-wave, the cyclone and the typhoon, the famine and the drought? If the Pearl Harbor attack was an act of "treachery", what is to be said about the eruption of Mont Pelee, the earthquake at Lisbon, the Galveston Flood? What is the "treachery" of the Japs compared to God's assaults on humanity in a single tidal-wave or hurricane, which, in the twinkling of an eye, wipes out an entire community? What can compare with the "sneak punch" of the volcano whose boiling lava descends on innocent noncombatants in the dead of night? God, in his conduct toward men, has descended to acts of violence for which we hang criminals. If the Nazis ever resort to that much-feared means of warfare, the spreading of disease germs, they will be merely following in the footsteps of God, who has been carrying on a never-ending "germ war" against us since early times. "If, indeed, there were a judgment day", remarks Winwood Reade, "it woul be for man to appear at the bar, not as a criminal, but as an accuser."

Our praying politicians present an inglorious spectacle in our national life, because they show to what levels our government leaders will descend in order to curry favor with the custodians of superstition.

Our Gun Powder Survival

THE end of the human race has been variously discussed, from a fanatic invasion from Mars to our extinction by a comet or a collision with another celestial body.

Now come two individuals, a statesman and an historian, and gravely tell us that wars will extinguish the human race. It is utter moonshine.

Lord Halifax, British ambassador to Washington, delivers himself of this poppycock:

"If the nations fail after this war to make the most of their opportunties to forge a lasting peace, the human race may come perilously near to self-extermination."

Mr. H.G. Wells, even more dramatically than Lord Halifax, states:

"If man does not adjust himself very soon to the changes his inventions have wrought in his environment, he will disappear as a species."

Here we have plain rhetoric, with no semblance to anything but the sloppiest thinking. What Lord Halifax and H.G. Wells fail to note is that the human race can breed faster than it can exterminate its members by sword and cannon.

In spite of the fact that wars have been going on from earliest recorded time, that they are getting bigger and and more technical in each succeeding age, and that global conflicts are now the order of the day, the population of the world has steadily increased. There are more people on the globe today than when Caesar conquered Gaul. How long do you think it would take 2,000,000,000 individuals, quarreling by means of gun-powder, to obliterate themselves?

War, as a blood-letting process, is less deadly than disease. Cancer, tuberculosis, and heart disease exact a bigger toll than war. In 1940, these three diseases caused the death of 610,525 persons. This is more than our total casualties in World War I. We survive these afflications as we survive our losses on the battlefield.

Our total casualties in World War I were 364,800. This is equal to the population of a city the size of Indianapolis. We survived World War I, as did every other nation that engaged in it, and had, at the last census, a total population of 131,669,275, the largest in our history. Not even the vaquished nations were obliterated. Germany came back for more, full of fight and fury, and made a nasty mess of things, as she is likely to do again, in World War 3 or even in World War 20, if she finds an opportunity.

Total American casualties in the present World War, as reported, July, 1944, were 299,474. This is about one-seventh the number of persons born each year. How long, at this rate, do you think it will take our enemies to wipe out the United States?

And what of other countriess fighting in this war? There are 457, 836,475 Chinese. Japan has been at war with China for the past seven years and hasn't even begun to scratch the surface of Chinese obliteration. Yet we are told that the human race will be exterminated by war.

What, too, of India with its population of 388,997,955? Even the bubonic plague and cholera and a high death rate (India is estimated to lose a million inhabitants annually from tuberculosis alone) have not prevented India from increasing its population. That unhappy land, with its cobras and religion, now has 54,000,000 more inhabitants than it had 50 years ago.

You cannot kill off the human race by wars. If you could, it would have been extinguished long ago.

Chameleonic Christianity

SIR RICHARD GREGORY, in a letter to the London Times, punctures the pretentiousness of those who claim that this war, with its world-wide ramifications, is being waged to preserve Christianity. After pointing out that "Mohammedans, Buddhists, Hindus, Parsees, Jews, and other non-Christians, as well as many attached to no particular religious faith, are joined in world fellowship in the cause for which the United Nations are fighting", he adds, "it is, therefore, disconcerting - to say the least - to represent the war as a world conflict between Christianity and paganism".

There are numerous reasons, of course, why we and our allies have joined together in war to crush the opposition, but one thing is certain: the United Nations are fighting to preserve the doctrine that an ancient Jew was born of a virgin, turned water into wine, was crucified on a cross, was buried and rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven like an English Spitfire on its way to Hamburg. Whatever the various reasons are for our united war effort, they do not include the idea that our national existence depends on believing that a Palestinian vagrant fed a multitude of Semites on a few loaves of bread and a few fishes, and had enough left over to fill several bushel baskets.

As for Christianity and its absurd Bible, whoever heard of a modern gentleman picking up a gun, or of a nation going to war in order to prove that a herd of swine, in Judaic times, was possessed by demons? The United Nations are as little concerned in the "truths" of Christianity as they are in the exploits of Jack and the Beanstalk.

What these United Nations are fighting for, as Dr. Gregory points out, is for their own ways of life, their own social ideas, and for self-preservation. They are not sending their youth into battle or spending their substance for the mythology of the Bible. There are, for example, over 400,000,000 Chinese allied with us in the prosecution of the war. These "heathens" are not fighting to defend the Christian religion, nor are they, like Catholic Italy, fighting on the side of Hitler.

But leave it to Christianity to bedeck itself in stolen plumage. After blocking the cultural progress of the world for hundreds of years, it now poses as the champion of civilization, when, in plain truth, its behavior has been like that of the chameleon, changing colors and blending with the background whenever it is expedient. Let a people gather a few crumbs of culture in spite of Christianity and Christianity will claim the credit.

Christianity upheld slavery for over a thousand years, yet no sooner was emancipation achieved than it posed as "the black man's friend". It spat on woman suffrage, then, when woman's rights were won, it posed as the "liberator" of women. It fought tooth and nail the doctrine of evolution, but now assures us (from "liberal" pulpits, at least) that there never was any "real" conflict between science and religion. It opposed anesthesia in child-birth; it now proclaims it as God's "gift" to womankind. Before the war, it worshiped "the Prince of Peace"; it is now singing the song, "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition".

Sociological Pipe Dreams

"IT must be realized once and for all, writes Dr. A.G. Keller, Professor of the Science of Society, Yale University, "that as yet nothing worthy of the name of science exists within the societal range. Every candid student knows that 'sociology' languishes in a well-deserved disrepute."

This should be apparent to anyone who has given serious thought to the question. It should be particularly clear at this time, when our social salvationists and post-war planners are plotting the future of the world. It is their intention to regulate the future by official proclamation.

As a science, sociology is a little better than alchemy. With all its statistical and historical data, it cannot predict what Mr. Hitler will do next, what the United Nations will do after the war, who will doubt-cross whom, what political factions will rise to power, and who will arrive with the next best smile and radio voice. Not knowing this, it cannot foretell what the social set-up will be one year from tomorrow.

History is full of ups and downs and violent upheavals. Civiliations are never secure, and rarely endure for long. You cannot be sure that there will never be another maniac in Germany with global ambitions, or another balcony-boy in Rome to bloat and brag, or that an Asiatic horde may not rise in might and overwhelm the world. Since we cannot be sure of these things, what are catch-phrases with in the light of experience? "History shows us", says the Rockefeller Foundation Report for 1942, "that it is possible to lose a civilization even while armies and navies are triumphant."

The course of a star can be predicted for the next thousand years, but you can no more predict the mass movements of men from one year to another, or even from one week to the next, than you can predict the way a jumping-bean will hop. What, then is the value of all the ephemeral big-talk and blue-print plannings for the future of the race? Something more than political resolutions and portfolio promises govern the future. Pretty slogans and fireside chats are not enough.

With 10,000 years of human history behind us, we have not yet learned to eliminate war, to slough off our animal heritage, or to settle our differences amicably. We are still, in spite of our veneer, as primitively brutal as ever, and will revert to savagery when our fighting fibers are tapped. Yet even now, while we are engaged in the bloodiest kill-fest in history, we are told that freedom from fear, and freedom from want, and freedom from tyranny and oppression are just around the corner. The things you fear are soon to be eliminated at an international conference by the stroke of a pen.

If you can believe that, you can believe anything the preachers tell you about a heavenly paradise.

Whitewashing The Infamous

A NUMBER of lectures delivered by Sir. Richard Gregory during his recent visit to this country have been incorporated in a book entitled "Religion in Science and Civilization". As works from Dr. Gregory's pen are deserving of serious attention, I procured the volume, .anticipating that it would measure up to the high standard of his studies in pure science. It did--in all respects save in those portions which treat of the conflict between science and religion. Here, unfortunately, the author loses the historical perspective.

The book, for the most part, in dealing with religion, takes a conciliatory attitude. It is written more in the "appeasement" tempo of a Chamberlain than in the vigorous manner of a Churchill telling the enemy where to get off. Unconsciously, perhaps, though nevertheless with fatal concessions to reactionary beliefs, Dr. Gregory engages in dainty flirtations with the forces of regression; for some unaccountable reason, he hopes to save Christianity from the stigma of being opposed to science.

"The mistake has been, and still is," says Dr. Gregory, "to make the conflict between Christianity and science instead of between obscurantism and enlightenment.

The mistake here is in thinking of Christianity as anything but obscurantism at its worst. If science is opposed to "obscurantism" (as Dr. Gregory holds it is), then science is in deadly conflict with Christianity. Nothing can nullify the fact that without the miracles of Jesus, the claim that he was the Son of God, that he died for men's sins, that he raised persons from the dead, and that only he can salvage us from damnation, the Church is meaningless. Science is in conflict with these ideas as clearly as it is with the claim that Father Divine is God or that the Pope is "infallible".

What is Christianity, in substance, but the reputed doctrines of Jesus? Jesus, if the Gospel stories are true, rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. Is there anything in science today, as known to Dr. Gregory, to support these fantastic teachings? Positively not; Dr. Gregory is aware, as an astronomer and a physicist, that they clash with science; he need only note that they are Christian doctrines hopelessly in conflict with biological and astronomical knowledge.

Works such as Draper's "History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion" and White's "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom" says Dr. Gregory, "are melancholy reading today, for they are largely concerned with problems and influences which no longer exist, though at the time they evoked bitter discussion."

It will be time enough to talk about these books being out of date when the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England go out of business. If there is "melancholy reading today", it is furnished by that type of writer who is blissfully unaware of the mountainous mass of nonsense preached in Christian churches and of the singular devotion which thousands of our clergy display in their work of muddling science.

Dr. Gregory clearly recognizes the fact that "crude and cruel conceptions of religion" are still held by large Christian communities; and are believed to be justified by literal interpretations of Biblical texts." This being so, how can he contend that these are not Christian doctrines or that they are not in conflict with science? It is just here that ill-considered thought leads him to the conclusion that the battle is over, that the works of Draper and White, depicting the struggle, are antiquated and unworthy of consideration at this time. Quite the opposite is true; seldom has there been greater need to emphasize the fact that Christianity and science are irreconcilable enemies, that a Munich peace-pact is out of the question, and that war must go on until one side or the other is vanquished.

The "crude and cruel teachings" against which Dr. Gregory protests are accepted today because they are found in the Bible and form a part of Christian church dogma. Hell is as hot a place today in Roman Catholic theology as ever before; if it simmers in Church of England circles, it is because some churchmen are becoming ashamed of the "gnashing-of-teeth" doctrine taught by the Hell-teaching Jesus. The Church of Rome still employs its purgatory racket over vast areas of the earth; Protestant Christianity still mulcts the public with the idea that it possesses a book of divine "revelation" and has something to offer in the way of personal "salvation" beyond the grave. The swindle goes on in all branches of the Christian Church.

"The tendency among enlightened leaders in the Church of England," writes Dr. Gregory, "is to ask for nothing more than belief in a Supreme Being.... These are advanced views, and professing Christians condemn them as almost blasphemous."

There is the rub; it is precisely because "advanced views" are condemned by "professing Christians" that we have the conflict.

Who but "professing Christians" today fight evolution and the Darwinian doctrine of our monkey descent? I can assure Dr. Gregory, on the best of authority, that a delegation of Catholic priests once called at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, to protest against its exhibit in the Hall of the Age of Man. It was a Christian attempt to intimidate its officials into withdrawing the exhibit.

Again, I can assure Dr. Gregory that, at Christmas time each year, the mythical "Star of Bethlehem" is played, up in an imbecilic exhibit at our Planetarium in New York, against the better judgment of its officials. Christians "like" it---and flock to get in. They cannot distinguish between stars shown in juxtaposition, shining brightly as a single Star, and the fake luminary in the Bible.that "went before them" and "stood over" a stable. The teachings of Jewish folklore still have most of our Christian population gaping at the stars with the intelligence of Cows.

It is useless to point out that some high-ups in the Church of England would be satisfied with just a simple faith in God on the part of their congregations. If they were, what would become of all the religious trappings, the mystical pomp, the anointing with oil, the miraculous element in Church rituals? Whatever may be the private beliefs of high churchmen concerning the Fall, the Virgin Birth, the Redemption, the Resurrection and the Ascension of Jesus; it is the Church which is responsible for indoctrinating the multitude with these silly beliefs; it is too late now for the clergy to pull from under; they must ride along on the wave of infantile belief which Christianity is responsible for and which now, as before, constitutes the rank-and-file faith of those who looked to them for cultural leadership. Having filled them with superstition, the Church can survive only by keeping them that way; it will collapse like a house of cards once the people learn that they have been grossly deceived by Bible legends and mythology.

My learned friend Dr. M. Davidson of London, who reviews the book in "The Journal of the British Astronomical Association," very aptly observes, "It is difficult to see how Christianity could build a civilization and culture full of material wealth and rich in scientific attainments; it has never been able to do so, and there are good reasons for the view that the spread of Christianity undermined the foundations of the old Roman Empire."

There is no question that Dr. Davidson is right. The downfall of pagan Rome was followed by a thousand years or more of Christian "civilization," the like of which the World may hope never to see again. It was an era of moral debasement and intellectual coma in which the human animal reached an all-time low in cultural prostration. From the days of Constantine to the time it burned Vanini at the stake, Christianity marks the most brutalized period in the history of the world.

Christianity gave us the Dark Ages and the honors of the Holy Inquisition. If all "the loving kindness" which the pulpit prates about as of Christian origin could be put in a balance, it would weigh as nothing against the abysmal ignorance and stark brutality engendered by the Church. Who, by searching history, can find a glimmer of satisfaction in the dark days of Christianity's "triumph," with its bestial autos-da-fe, its witchcraft epidemics, its unspeakable atrocities?

In educated circles, Christianity is doomed. In the inner sanctum of scholarship it has failed to withstand even the serious onslaught of critical churchmen. Its doctrines have been riddled by science. On every side, it has been battered to a pulp by historical criticism. Those who wish to snatch a few crumbs of comfort from the debacle, can do so only by stooping intellectually, by truckling to the gutter level of popular ignorance. Only the political vote-snatcher and the tent revivalist will sink that low.

Christianity has never ceased to be an impediment to the world, fighting every advance in science and still standing as a recrudescence of crass superstition. The Bible still teaches the same nonsense it did in the days of Draper and White. Whether it is believed in today as much as it was before, is beside the point: the lip-service still goes on and it is this lip-service that makes for substantial opposition to the teachings of science. The obsession of Bible worship and Jesus adoration still has many of our professors frozen in their chairs; they dare not treat it, at least in public, with anything but Obsequious flattery or fawning servility.

Fundamentalism, both Catholic and Protestant, still exerts an enormous pressure on public and press. It is a bold editor or a careless politician who will utter a peep against entrenched Christianity. In spite of cultural progress, the rabble rules. Legislation is frequently enacted in deference to the mob. In some states of the Union it is illegal to teach the evolution of man in our public schools.

The conflict between religion and science is as deadly today as ever before. Tell the average group of Christians that they are descended from an ape, and see how far you get; they will deny their animal ancestry with more vehemence than if they are told they are descended from barbarians, or that their grandparents were horse-thieves. No one knows this better than our American paleontologist, Dr. W. K. Gregory, "Imagine the effect," says he, "of telling one-hundred-percent Americans that they are not the descendants of the god-like Adam but are sons and daughters of Dryopithecus, or of some nearly allied genus of anthropoid apes that lived in the Miocene age; --and that before that they had long tails and ate grubs and beetles !"

Every Catholic today is taught by his Church to believe that evolution is false. In its article on "Adam," the Catholic Encyclopaedia (Vol. 1, Rev. ed., 1936) teaches that the first man was created in an adult state. This is good biblical doctrine--and in conflict with science.

Dr. Gregory is as much interested in the social sciences as in the science of the stars. In what way, then, can the teachings of Jesus lead to the betterment of the world? Where would we be today if we followed the maudlin dictum of Jesus: "Resist not evil"? Our pacifists, our turn-the-other-cheekers, and our sentimental poltroons would have us face the aggressions of Hitler with the Christian doctrine of non-resistance. In judicial affairs, too, where would Christianity lead? No judge, sitting on the bench, could mete but justice if he took Jesus seriously, for fear of the teaching: "Judge not, that ye be not judged." No society, believing in Divine Providence and the crazy Jesus teaching of "take no thought for your life, what ye shall.eat or what ye shall drink" could survive for long. Such a teaching, if put into practice, would reduce a country to impecunious vagrants and tramps. Of what use is it to teach people to pray for what they want, on the promise that their prayers will be answered or that they will be clothed like the lilies of the field ?

The historian Buckle well recognized the futility of prayer, "We still see," said he, "the extraordinary spectacle of prayers offered up in our churches for dry weather or for wet weather; a superstition which to future ages will appear as childish as the feelings of pious awe with which our fathers regarded the presence of a Comet, or the approach of an eclipse."

Has the Church of England improved since Buckle wrote It has not. Its clergy still call for national days of prayer for the winning of the war, when every thoughtful Englishman knows the absurdity of prayer; yet the hypocrisy goes on as if the repetition of the act will in some way alter events. Only the final campaign, of course, will determine which side wins the conflict. Yet what would the Archbishop of Ganterbury do, for his £15,000 per year, if prayer were ditched?

Our medicine-men in America are not different from their British brethren of the cloth, Here prayers are offered up with the same degree of silly genuflection for the triumph of our arms; our last prayers for Peace were immediately followed by the Pearl Harbor disaster and the loss of Manila. Yet we are asked to assume a respectful attitude toward the leaders of the Church and of an institution whose charlatanism and appeal to magic belong to a medieval age.

Dr. Gregory commands an influential and honored position in the world of science. All the greater, therefore, is his obligation to make clear the attitude of science in relation to Christianity. Surely, as an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association of England, he is conversant with the literature of rationalism and of the tremendous part it has played in the long-drawn-out struggle between science and religion. He cannot, by any conceivable intent, wish to palliate, much less conceal, the debasing influence that Christianity has exerted in its befuddlement of the world and its enslavement of mankind. Yet his disposition, here and there, to defend the.indefensible, or to look the other way while the battle is on, is hardly in accordance with his own standards of scientific precision.

Dr. John W. Draper (whose book Dr. Gregory feels is tragically out of date) fully realized the struggle that is before us--a struggle that must enlist the very finest fiber of intellectual soldiery. And, no one, by natural endowment, belongs more fully to that army than Dr. Gregory himself.

"As to the issue of the coming conflict," wrote Dr. Draper, "can any one doubt? Whatever is resting on fiction and fraud will be overthrown. Institutions that organize impostures and spread delusions must show what right they have to exist. Faith must render an account of herself to Reason. Mysteries must give plate to facts. Religion must relinquish that imperious, that domineering position which she has so long maintained against Science. There must be absolute, freedom of thought."

These are the words of one whose intellectual vision permitted him to see the conflict as a whole a conflict that is still with us, and which by the spread of culture, can end only in the demolition of Christianity.

Years ago, writing in the "Fortnightly Review", Viscount Morley stated the outcome with singular precision :-

"You have so debilitated the minds of men and women that many a generation must come and go before Europe can throw off the yoke of your superstition. But we promise you they shall be years of strenuous battle . . . The great ship of your church, once so stout and fair, has become a skeleton ship; it is a phantom hulk with warped planks and sere canvas; and you who work it are not more than the ghosts of dead men; and at the hour when you seem to have reached the bay, down your ship will sink like lead or stone to the deepest bottom."

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.