Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (50 page)

Censoring Himself . . . for Awhile: Mark Twain

After an autobiography is finished, it’s pretty odd for the author to wait very long to release it. After a lifetime at the mercy of the press and biographers, most public figures are eager for the chance to tell their stories in their own words. But sometimes, concerns about the reaction to their opinions outweigh that eagerness. Such was the case with Mark Twain.

Twain’s concern about revealing his own anti-religious opinions led him to hold back much of his later writing from publication, including some stinging anti-religious commentary.

“I expose to the world only my trimmed and perfumed and carefully barbered public opinions,” he wrote in his final years, “and conceal carefully, cautiously, wisely, my private ones.” As he evolved through his life from practicing Presbyterian to mild Deist to an increasingly sharp religious critic, Twain’s writings begin to show a deepening disgust with religion.

His complete
Autobiography
is thought to include some of his most direct anti-religious views. I say it’s “thought to” include them because I haven’t read his complete
Autobiography
yet. That’s not because I don’t have a library card, but because Twain specified that only an abridged version — “trimmed and perfumed,” you may say — be released upon his death. He then gave instructions (in a Preface titled “As from the Grave”) for new editions to be released every 25 years, each with a little more material:

From the first, second, third, and fourth editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out. There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now. There is no hurry. Wait and see . . . The editions should be issued twenty-five years apart. Many things that must be left out of the first will be proper for the second; many things that must be left out of both will be proper for the third; into the fourth or at least the fifth the whole Autobiography can go, unexpurgated.

At this writing, the century mark has finally passed, though only one of three volumes has so far seen the light of day. But even that is enough to get a good taste of the uncensored Twain to come.

Here’s a passage:

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is — in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree — it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime — the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

Chapter 11

Sampling Important Works: Deep Thoughts, Big Thinkers

In This Chapter

Encountering serious thinkers in every age

Being grateful for the help of unorthodox believers

Clearing the cobwebs of superstition

Creating a new way of thinking

O
ne of the best ways to see the development of atheist thinking through the years is by reading key books that challenge religious assumptions and lay out a vision of a world without gods. That’s a tough nut to crack in the early going, because (as I show in
Chapter 10
) most atheist and agnostic opinion before the Renaissance disappeared not long after it was written.

When the late 18th century clocked in, you started to get the opposite problem: The climate for freethought in Europe improved dramatically, and the result was an avalanche of new thinking and a huge increase in new works. Now the trick was figuring out
what
to read.

This chapter attempts to do the impossible — choose a small number of works that illustrate the development of atheist, agnostic, and humanist thought from ancient times through the end of the 20th century. This list is nowhere near complete, and I even manage to leave out a lot of my personal favorites. I try to make up for that by listing a few additional titles in the sidebars, and I devote
Chapter 12
to the 21st century.

Spotting the Survivors

The books that have survived from ancient and medieval times aren’t necessarily better or more important than those that didn’t. In some cases, they’re just incredibly lucky. I start with two books that are both lucky and important, leaving their mark on the development of ideas in their own time and throughout history — one from ancient Rome, the other from 11th century China.

Musing on the Nature of Things with Lucretius

It’s hard to think of a single book with a greater impact on the world than
De rerum natura
(
On the Nature of Things
). Written by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius in the first century BCE,
De rerum
is an attempt to explain the whole system of thought of Epicurus, who felt the greatest impediment to human happiness was fear, and that the greatest source of fear was the idea of gods.

I introduce materialism in
Chapter 10
, which is the idea that everything in the universe is made of (or derived from) matter or energy. Like many powerful ideas, the materialist point of view appears independently in several different cultures, and Epicurus was one of several Greeks running with it right around the same time as the Indian philosophers — in the third century BCE.

Two centuries later, Lucretius wrote
De rerum natura
to convince a friend that Epicurus was right about the nature of things. The gods, if they exist at all, are too blissful and serene in their perfection to care about what humans do. Gods didn’t create the universe; a natural product of a few physical laws did, acting on a few basic types of particles — mixing and combining them to create everything there is.

The purpose of
De rerum
was to explain how this could be, and it does so with incredible grace and conviction — in 7,400 lines of poetry, no less. Sitting down and writing a book that explained everything in a time when pretty much everything still lacked explanation may have been daunting. But that’s exactly what Lucretius set out to do.

He started by going after superstition with all his rhetorical guns blazing. Humans everywhere lay crushed beneath religion, which he depicts as a hideous, glowering beast. Then, he said, Epicurus “raised his mortal eyes” to confront and tame the terror so that humankind could live without fear.

Lucretius often empathized with the reader, acknowledging for example that talking or thinking about such things is hard. A person tends to shiver a bit at the idea of stepping on holy ground with a hammer in hand. But was it really holy ground? Isn’t it true, he asked, that religion has been the author of at least as many profane horrors as holy goods? He had a particular disgust with the stories in many religions of parents sacrificing their children to please the gods. He cited a story from Greek mythology — the slaying of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon as a sacrifice to the gods so his ships could have favorable winds toward Troy — but would also have been familiar with the story of Abraham and Isaac. Though Abraham’s knife (unlike Agamemnon’s) didn’t quite find his child’s throat, Abraham’s willingness to murder an innocent child without questioning the order is rightly held up by religious critics as an act of insane immorality, one directly endorsed by God. (Had Lucretius lived a century later, after Christ, he would have known yet another religious story in which a father sacrifices his son to high praise.)

Lucretius found such acts to be such a perfect illustration of the evil religion contains that he put them front and center in
De rerum.
“Such are the crimes to which religion leads,” he warned.

Lucretius continued assailing religion and superstition, stanza after stanza, citing Epicurus at every turn. “Religion now is under foot,” he said. Thanks to the efforts of Epicurus and others, humanity can find its way out from under the weight of religion and turn to understanding the world as it really is.

One of the most common questions atheists are asked, even today, is why they have to criticize religion — why they can’t simply believe what they believe and leave religion alone. Lucretius attempted to answer this question. Seeing and exploring the universe as a natural, material place is impossible without first addressing and removing the supernatural assumptions that overlay so much of human culture and the human mind. (Scan the sections near the end of this chapter and you can see the same thing at work in this book: First I present “
Clearing the Way
,” then “
Building a New Vision
.”)

After getting religion out of the way, Lucretius described the world as seen by Democritus and Epicurus, a natural world that operates without the intervention of gods. Matter can’t be created or destroyed, he said, anticipating the law of conservation of mass by 2,000 years. The universe is full of atoms — “the seeds of things,” he called them — which combine and split apart in endless combinations to make everything.

He tackled the fear of death by arguing as a materialist that the soul (or consciousness) is a product of the body. After the body dies, consciousness goes with it. That leaves no sensation of any kind after death, which means no possibility of suffering or torment at the hands of the gods.

De rerum natura
goes on, page after remarkable page, spelling out theories of the senses, sex, love, sleep, dreams, the changing seasons, social order, politics, planetary motion, weather, earthquakes, disease, and emotions — an incredible and comprehensive catalog of everything a curious person might conceivably wonder about the universe. In doing so, Lucretius got an astonishing number of things right.

It’s an arresting thought that the Scientific Revolution ends up simply confirming a lot of things that occurred off the top of a few observant and curious Greco-Roman heads.

Correcting the Unenlightened with Chang

By the Middle Ages, the practical, secular philosophy of Confucianism was groaning under the weight of superstitious beliefs that had accrued since Confucius’s time. That’s the fate of any system of thought that isn’t constantly discussed, re-examined, and renewed. Nonsense and sloppy thinking gradually crept over it like vines over a wall, until you couldn’t even see the bricks underneath. By the ninth century, supernatural ideas and rituals from Chinese folk religion had strangled the secular usefulness out of Confucianism.