The Bear in the Bush
by Revilo P. Oliver
THE CHANGE in the cast of the perpetual comedy staged in the White House was of some minor importance. (ILLUSTRATION: Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush)
Old Ronnie was a stupid galoot. According to Newsweek, he at least once sent a letter of condolence to one of the fictitious characters portrayed on television by actors in one of the drearily vulgar comedies called “soap operas.” Trying to please his Jewish masters, he claimed to have been himself an eye-witness to the fictitious horrors of the Holohoax while he was a warrior in Europe. The lie was a peculiarly stupid one, because records accessible to everyone proved that the drugstore cowboy had spent the war safely ensconced in a motion-picture studio in Hollywood, and when his lie was exposed, bumbling old Ronnie could only claim he had seen those horrors on films that could not have been produced until long after the catastrophic end of the Jews’ War Against the West.
It was only natural that Ronnie, with mentality of that order, believed the hocus-pocus called astrology, delegating to his wife the task of learning what the stars were saying from day to day. It is likely, therefore, that the clumsy and ignorant old actor believed what he said when he babbled about Armageddon and “Bible Prophecy” and the low superstitions associated with those terms. And one was not surprised when he, probably on orders from his director, disgraced the office he nominally held by proclaiming a Year of the Bible, recommending his favorite fiction to the numerous dumb bunnies who did not regard him with condign contempt.
Bush is much more intelligent and so more dangerous, even though he, like Ronnie, has to make his performance on the stage correspond to the scenario of the play and the direction of the impresario (Kissinger?). He is surely too intelligent to be taken in by the childish tales in the Jew-Book.
It was to be expected, of course, that Bush would continue to use the horde of “conservative” witlings who, enchanted by Ronnie’s gabble, were much more effective than “Liberals” in consummating the Judaeo-Communist occupation of the United States. They, delighted by Bush’s persiflage about “prayer in the schools” and the “murder” of unwanted fetus, (1) will help him to tighten further the noose about the necks of the American boobs and perhaps enable him to begin, before long, the rule by open terror that will make him the peer of Stalin and other model rulers of “mature democracy.”
(footnote 1. I hesitantly use the Latin form (both singular and plural), although there is much to be said for the traditional spelling ‘foetus’ in the restricted sense of ‘offspring still in the womb, embryo (at any time before birth).’ The traditional spelling, which alone is recognized in Britain, was (like, e.g., ‘coelum‘ for caelum) the result of an etymological error made by the Humanists of the Renaissance, but will serve to distinguish the restricted sense of the word from its more general meanings, ‘offspring (before, or, more usually, after birth)’ and ‘the process of reproduction (in animals or plants).’)
What is odd is that Bush has gone out of his way to insult persons who have emancipated themselves from Jewish superstitions. In a public letter not long ago, he made clear his animosity toward atheists, adding, however, that he would (reluctantly) concede them their “Constitutional rights.” Although the truth was blurted out three years ago by the mulatto who is a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal that sits in the building that was built for the Supreme Court when we still had one, it is still considered expedient to let the subject population believe that the American Constitution was not effectively rescinded in 1861, and that scraps of it are still legally operative. It would be premature, therefore, for Bush to send in the terrorists of the Federal Bureau of Intimidation to squash rational Americans and enforce the lesson that taxpaying animals must believe in airborne Jewish spooks and whatever other nonsense their masters choose to tell them.
One does not usually waste time reading in the press recitations by actors in the White House, but the American Atheist, January 1990, reprinted a sermon delivered by Bush before a bevy of Cardinals on 12 December 1989. Bush, emulating such great hokum-peddlers as Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts, ranted about old Jesus’s wonderful Drivel on the Mount, and declared that he was a champion of “Catholics’ fidelity to freedom” (doubtless as exemplified by the autos da féÆ and the Church’s desperate attempts to prevent or suppress a rational perception of the real world), adding that he was certain that “one cannot be America’s President [under the Jewish government] without a belief in God [i.e., old Yahweh] and prayer [to spooks in the sky].”
In his doubtless cynical diatribe, Bush added that he had “not yet been tested as Abraham Lincoln was,” i.e., had not yet had an opportunity to marshal armies for the slaughter of Americans who wanted to preserve their Constitutional rights. He also boasted that he spent “time on his knees,” which is credible, if he meant that he knelt while licking the boots of Kissinger or whoever is now the satrap in charge of the country the boobs gave away half a century ago.
Bush dilated on his confabulations with his colleague in Russia, Gorbachev, (2) and waxed lyrical over the conference between the latter and the Chief Dervish in Rome, Papa John Paul II, which suggests that the two will cooperate henceforth in herding their Aryan boobs into the pens prepared for them.
(footnote 2. On their song-and-dance act at their “summit” jamboree and the probable consequences thereof, see Liberty Bell, August 1990, pp. 1-20, 27-42.)
Continually as he preached, Bush deliberately insulted atheists and everyone too rational to take seriously the absurd yarns in the Jews’ story book, and he avoided mentioning the fact that his hero, Lincoln, was an atheist, although only in private after he became a politician and the pawn of sinister forces beyond his control. (3)
(footnote 3. The candid admission, attributed to Lincoln, that he was “bought and sold six times” at the convention that nominated him for President, has been used, in differing contexts, in two stage plays that were based on his early career.)
It is only natural for Bush to make the millions of “conservative” cats purr as they lick up verbal cream, oblivious of their now imminent future, but why should he gratuitously advertise his animus against the small minority of educated and rational Americans? Surely his passions have got the better of his political prudence.
A plausible explanation is given by Dr. Fritz Erik Hoevels in an article in Ketzerbriefe (Freiburg), which is translated in the American Atheist, March 1990.
Dr. Hoevels recommends three books which, taken in conjunction, will, in his opinion, heal minds afflicted with Christian superstitions. The three are:
1. Hyam Maccoby, Revolution in Judaea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance (London, 1973; translated into German under the title König Jesus, Tübingen, 1982). The author is a learned Jew, who exhibits his hatred of our race by denying, as Dr. Hoevels notes, the immeasurable cultural superiority of the civilized Greeks over the barbarous Kikes, but is useful for drawing attention to the parallels between the “New Testament” and the Talmud and thus proving that Jesus was an orthodox Pharisee, but was also a revolutionist, ambitious to become a messiah (i.e., King of the Jews), who sought to organize a Jewish revolt and lead his barbarians to plunder and massacre civilized nations. As Dr. Hoevels remarks, if Jesus was an insurrectionist, he must have been insane to count on support from “heavenly hosts.”
2. Professor Morton Smith’s well-known and fundamental Jesus the Magician (San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1978; German translation, Jesus der Magier, Bonn, List, s.a.). Professor Smith is best known for his discovery of part of a version of the gospel attributed to an unidentified Marcus, written before the revision that was made to permit its inclusion in the inconsistent anthology of wonder-stories called the “New Testament.” In the book in question here, he shows that the historical prototype of the Jesus celebrated in those tales must have been a goës, an itinerant magician and thaumaturge, preying on the credulity of ignorant masses, though perhaps so mentally unstable as to credit himself with some supernatural powers. (4) I would modify that conclusion only by suggesting that there probably were a number of such fakirs, all of whom bore or assumed the very common name of Jesus (5) whose exploits were conflated in the folk-traditions that were the basis of the various “synoptic” gospels.
(footnote 4. This is an odd psychotic condition, said to have been found in some of the “spiritualist mediums” who fleeced the suckers in the last half of the Nineteenth Century and the first decades of the Twentieth. The individual, having an hallucination that he or she has supernatural powers, resorts to more or less ingenious trickery to convince others of those imaginary powers. Some anthropologists suggest that the shamans who impress ignorant savages by crude prestidigitation and similar tricks, may by so crazed as to believe that they are somehow in contact with supernatural beings or forces.)
(footnote 5. One such Jesus flourished c. 75 B.C.; see Liberty Bell, February 1986, pp. 27-34.)
3. Karlheinz Deschner, Der gefälschte Glaube (Munich, 1988). According to Dr. Hoevels, this book, which I have not seen, demonstrates that the Jesus imagined by Christians is a purely mythical figure who never lived. (6) This, then, is one of the fairly numerous books that show that the Christian’s Jesus never existed, but was manufactured by theologians from their tendencious and self-serving interpretations of some discordant passages that were probably inserted in the folk-traditions about the fakir by the Fathers of the Church when they edited the various tales before including them in their motley collection.
(footnote 6. The substance of the German book cited by Dr. Hoevels can surely be found in the latest work by G.A. Wells, Who Was Jesus? (Peru, Illinois; Open Court, 1989), which recapitulates and refines the author’s earlier works on the same subject. It is easy, of course, to demonstrate that the Jesus who is the protagonist of the “New Testament,” like the Robin Hood of the folk-tales systematized in Howard Pyle’s pleasant book for boys, and the Hercules of the Twelve (or Thirteen!) Labors, never existed and never could have existed on this planet. That does not exclude the probable existence of one or more itinerant thaumaturges and political agitators whose activities were the nucleus about which the tales about Jesus were formed, or of various English outlaws who were the prototype of Robin Hood, or of some remarkably strong and courageous man who, for reasons that the loss of the early traditions must make conjectural, was regarded by an Argive people as a hero in the strict sense of that word, i.e., the result of miscegenation between a mortal and a deity, and in some way related to, fostered by, or inspired by Hera, whose ‘glory’ he was.)
It is not my purpose to comment on Dr. Hoevels’ evaluation of these books, or to criticize the sometimes seriously defective English translation, (7) but rather to notice Dr. Hoevels’ ingenious and suggestive analogy.
(footnote 7. E.g., the misleading “expected” in the last paragraph of the third column on p. 49 probably comes from a confusion between entgegenstehen and entgegensehen in the translator’s mind; it might also come from a use of erwarten in the military sense, ‘to await (an attack),’ but a German writer would have made the meaning clear by giving the verb an object of which there is no trace in the translation. The reader, incidentally, will be amused by an editorial footnote that affirms that the great poet who wrote De rerum natura was a “Roman general [!] and epicure [!].”)
It is now virtually certain that an individual’s immune system, like his intelligence, is inherited from his genetic antecedents, but just as native intelligence is exercised and developed by education, so some physiologists believe that the inherited immune system is exercised and developed by the common childhood maladies (measles, etc.), which not only produce immunity to a recurrence of the same infection, but also prepare the immune system to resist more efficaciously other infections in later life. The prophylactic immunity thus established is often called ‘cross-immunity.’
On the basis of this physiological theory, which, though widely accepted, is, so far as I know, not so well established as to be called a fact, Dr. Hoevels formulates a persuasive psychological analogy:
‘An immune system which has become stronger by protecting itself against religion will also, as the statistics show, more radically and successfully cope with other ideological infections. This results, so to speak, in cross-immunities, and is exactly the reason why the state so determinedly protects one religion or a successful group of religions against any kind of criticism or other damage. (8) This is why religion is subsidized and allowed to go about its filthy business in sheltered competition with other ideologies. For exactly this reason the state is suspicious of, and ready to discriminate against, those of its citizens whom it suspects of having established such an immune system, one that has gained strength due to its resistance against the religious virus.’
(footnote 8. The alien government of Western Germany imposes a fine or imprisonment of up to three years for “publicly insulting a church or religion.” This tyrannical prohibition of blasphemy against Judaeo-Christian spooks was discussed in detail by Gottfried Niemietz in the American Atheist, March 1989. Obviously a Sheeny government that extorts trillions of marks from its hapless German victims and tries by open terrorism to ram the Jews’ filthy and absurd Holohoax into their minds, needs to make its subjects mentally stultified, and so naturally promotes belief in other frauds, irrational myths, and barbaric superstitions.)
The analogy is, I believe, valid. Critical intelligence is strengthened and acuminated by exercise, and a mind that has liberated itself from one vulgar error by its own efforts will have the acumen to detect others. Dr. Hoevels is doubtless right in claiming for atheism a “cross-immunity” that protects the individual from other fictions to which the populace is predisposed and susceptible. (9) But the atheism has to be thoroughgoing and complete.
(footnote 9. One remembers the famous aphorism of Champfort, that every belief widely held by the populace is almost certainly foolish: “Il y a parier que toute idée publique, tout convention reçue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre.”)
Many of the Biblical myths, beginning with the absurd tale about Adam and his Spare Rib, are incredible to anyone who thinks about them, and became ridiculous, when the revival of rational observation and understanding of natural phenomena abated religious awe of uncomprehended and therefore mysterious forces. The Protestant Reformation, based on the premise that the tall tales in the Bible were historical records, thus became indubitably fallacious, and Christendom was prepared for the Marxian Reformation, which revived the “social gospel” of primitive Christianity and became the gospel now preached by the various cults that belong to the World Council of Churches and, indeed, by far the great majority of all Christian churches today, which differ from the Communists only by prudently retaining nebulous references to Yahweh and Jesus for the comfort of the unthinking dupes on whom their incomes depend.
Many persons who are intellectually or emotionally dissatisfied with the vapid gabble of contemporary Christianity, but who have not considered the unsubstantiality of all evidence for the supernatural, are apt to yield to their emotional need for mystical mummery and flop over from Christianity to some more acceptable cult, such as Buddhism, Theosophy, Baha’i, Wicca, (10) Satanism, the hodgepodge called “New Age,” or even another Judaic cult. (11)
(footnote 10. This is the official designation of the cult in The Witch’s Bible, by Gavin and Yvonne Frost. It is a little odd, because in Anglo-Saxon a wicca is a warlock, while a witch is wicce, witchcraft is wiccecraeft, and the generality of practitioners of the religion is wiccedom.)
(footnote 11. The most remarkable religious conversion of which I know personally was that of a lady with whom I was acquainted in the early 1950s. She had some social standing in Washington (she was listed in the Social Register), and was an aviatrix, who had the distinction of having been the first woman to fly to Saudi Arabia (if I remember correctly her Islamic destination), where she had something of a career, flying as a pilot for various persons of importance. She was converted to Islam and learned enough Arabic to read the Koran, of which she carried with her an india-paper edition, which she, like persons who carry with them an edition of the “New Testament,” would produce, on the slightest provocation, to cite (and translate) some passage that proved the Truth of her adopted religion. Courtesy prevented me from asking whether she followed the strictly orthodox doctrine of the Moslem theologians who, like many Fathers of the Church, held that women have no souls and will therefore be dissipated at death, but, unlike the misogynist and ideologically homosexual Fathers, provided that women will be replaced in Paradise by much improved models of femininity, specially created for the delectation of male True Believers. (This doctrine is scarcely affected by the concession that four women and one dog were transported to Paradise by special dispensations.) Oddly enough, she predicted that Islam would become a major religion, first in England, and later in the United States. At that time, no one would have thought it even remotely possible that effete Englishmen would admit several million Moslem Semites to their little island, would have to listen daily to the din of electronically amplified yells from muezzins in six hundred mosques, and would humbly consent to be kicked around by the invaders, who already dream of eventually reversing the results of Charles Martel’s decisive victory at Tours.)
There is another kind of religious conversion that is seldom noticed as such. Many persons, more intelligent than those who flop over from Christianity to an equally illusory religion, do emancipate themselves from belief in overtly supernatural beings and forces, becoming atheists, but incompletely, since they retain in their minds the residue of that religion without being aware of it.
They consider and reject tales about such impossible events as virgin births, walking on water, resurrection of the dead, floating up into the clouds like a hot-air balloon, and ferocious Saviours who can and will smash up the whole universe, including the most distant galaxies, but they never ponder the equally absurd social superstitions that were authorized by, and depend on, the god whose existence the tales about impossible events were devised to prove.
Atheists who do not perceive that the supernatural tales they disdain were devised to authorize a revolt against civilization retain so much of a residue of Christianity in their minds that they are apt to flop over into Communism, the ostensibly but spuriously atheistic form of the Marxist Reformation of the religion they think they are rejecting. It dispenses with gods but retains all the Bolshevik venom the Jews’ god was supposed to have sanctioned. As Philip Wylie (12) justly observed, “Communism is the most successful religion yet evolved.” In place of traditional Christianity, they adopt an ersatz Christianity and, forgetting their atheism, have an emotional and unreasoning faith in their new religion. (13)
(footnote 12. The Innocent Ambassadors (New York, 1957).)
(footnote 13. I speak only of persons who believe in Communism. This, of course, excludes the leaders of the Judaic cult, from Lenin to Mao Tse-tung, and the ruling bureaucracy of a Soviet state. They are too intelligent to be taken in by the sucker-bait they use to enlist mass support. Recent events suggest that Gorbachev may intend to make some superficial changes in the Soviet religion, which has always included the Greek Orthodox churches in its territories as subsidiaries, and unofficially recognized and even promoted the up-to-date churches of the West as allies. Decades ago, when there was a pretense that the government in Washington was opposed to Communism, thousands of American clergy-men were officially listed as “Communist-fronters,” and many were known to have been recruited into the Communists’ conspiratorial apparatus for low-grade converts.)
The True Believers of the Communist faith think they are atheists, but they deceive themselves. That is obvious from the fact that their revolt against civilization differs in only a few unessential trimmings from the subversion practised as “social gospel” in the great majority of Christian churches today. The link between Communism and traditional Christianity is so close that when Communists lose their faith, they usually and naturally flop over into Roman Catholicism. Whittaker Chambers was only the best known of the Marxists who, when disillusioned, reverted to an earlier form of his ruling superstition.
Would-be atheists who do not become converted to the Marxist cult often retain in their minds the Christian residue that makes them susceptible to drivel about “all mankind,” “One World,” and the “humanitarian” sentimentality of do-gooders and similar pests — all of which find no confirmation in the facts of nature and the real world. There are even self-styled atheists who evidently think that the god in whom they do not believe stopped the biological evolution of anthropoids a hundred thousand years ago to make all talking species equal in some mysterious way that transcends the obvious and great difference between extant races in intelligence, character, and instincts, perhaps because the non-existing god equipped the several species with exactly equal souls. Minds which have progressed to that stage of muddled thinking probably have their critical powers so far in abeyance that they will even take seriously the Jews’ inherently preposterous Holohoax, regarding it as a religious certainty which it would be impious to doubt.
A really critical mind will not be content to remark the patent absurdity of the tales about supernatural beings and events in the “New Testament,” but will go on to examine the purposes those tales were devised to serve. It requires no great critical acumen to perceive the appalling malice shown in Bolshevik promises that “the last shall be first”; the proletarian rancor of almost continual (14) harping on the threat that rich men will be fried forever hereafter if they do not give all that they have to the poor and become paupers themselves (15); the frantic hatred of reason evinced by hostility to “the Greeks” who “seek after wisdom” and try to understand nature and the real world instead of drugging themselves with narcotic fantasies; the frightful malevolence of a god “who has made foolish the wisdom of this world” to profit a squalid and mindless rabble; and the hatred of all culture and civilization implicit in the election of illiterate boors as apostles and the insistence in the Drivel on the Mount on the need for bird-brains that “take no thought for the morrow” and, indeed, emulate the intellectual processes of vegetables. (16)
(footnote 14. “Almost continual” because this is another example of the inconsistency that appears everywhere in the carelessly edited collection of tales. It is noteworthy that when Jesus was in the presence of a prosperous and influential man who sought supernatural therapy for his sick slave, Jesus commended him warmly and tactfully not only said nothing about the evil of owning property, but implicitly sanctioned slaves as property. The two gospels, one by a Jew named Matthew (8, 5-13) and the other by the unnamed man from Lucania (7, 2-10), which recount the incident differ very considerably in important details, but concur, almost verbatim, in reporting Jesus’s praise of the slave-owner. Everyone who has read the “New Testament” knows, of course, that Jesus and the early Fathers of the Church explicitly endorsed slavery as a social institution. That is in itself an inconsistent approval of wealth, for slaves were valuable and expensive property, and while an average citizen might own one or two slaves, only the very wealthy could afford large numbers of them. It is also noteworthy that when Jesus, on a different tack, admonishes rich men that they must sell all their property if they hope not to be broiled perpetually after death, he evidently instructs them to sell all of their slaves, not emancipate them, as the rich at that time often did to reward faithful service or from vanity.)
(footnote 15. The threat has often induced madness in credulous men of means, e.g., Peter Waldo, reputedly a wealthy citizen of Lyons, who, c. 1176, gave away his property and tried to restore Apostolic Christianity by attracting ignorant peasants and laborers to form the sect known as Waldenses (Pauperes Lugdunenses in the contemporary ecclesiastical writings). There is a curious anti-Christian instance of such mental alienation in the conduct of the protagonist of Jakob Wasserman’s once famous and subtly nihilistic novel, Christian Wahnschaffe (1919), which probably owed its extraordinary vogue in the United States to the dramatically seductive title under which it was translated, The World’s Illusion.)
(footnote 16. It is simply amazing that Thomas Jefferson, who was an intelligent man and privately considered Christianity an injurious superstition, was nevertheless able to take seriously the preposterous Gabble on the Mount attributed to Jesus in the “New Testament”; see my ‘Populism’ and ‘Elitism’, pp. 13f., and especially note 17. Jefferson must have been aware that that balderdash would make impossible an organized society and was fit only for a rabble that hoped for and expected the proximate destruction of the world.)
A real atheist, needless to say, will disregard what the dervishes think it expedient to say about the “New Testament” when they make their pitch to the ignorant. He will read the myths for himself and objectively consider and appraise them as a whole, including the social gospel that is, indeed, the most important and operative part of them. And he will shudder at the Judaic malevolence that inspires them, the vicious hatred of culture and civilization. They were designed to create a foul and squalid world in which every instinctive value of our race is negated and aborted — a world in which the natural ties of family and property have been severed, leaving only rootless and helpless individuals, isolated and lost in the terrible loneliness of crowds — a world without history, without philosophy, without science, without reason — a world without beauty of any kind, without art, without literature, without culture — a world without real love, the love that unites men and women, and without even the Aryan’s instinctive feeling for the beauty of women (17) and physical health. (18)
(footnote 17. The importance, both cultural and biological, of feminine beauty is admirably stated in Richard McCulloch’s Destiny of Angels (s.l., 1986; I am told that the book is available from Howard Allen Publications, P.O. Box 76, Cape Canaveral, Florida). He notes that physical beauty is genetically recessive; the same may be true of intellect. The extent to which Christianity has eaten into our minds is shown by the common pejorative dismissal of man’s admiration of beautiful women as sexual and biological — as though religion (i.e., fear of the unknown) in human species were not equally the product of the biological forces that have shaped all mammalian life.)
(footnote 18. It will be remembered that the first work of Christianity after it gained control of the ancient world was the abolition of all baths, public and private, and promulgation by the Fathers of the Church of the doctrine that cleanliness and hygiene were sinful and that personal filth was a proof of piety. Admiration was reserved for the diseased and malformed dregs of mankind, prone to holy hallucinations. One amusing instance of Christian thinking is found in the Mediaeval tradition that Plato located his academy in a particularly miasmic spot to keep his disciples sickly and weak and thus prevent physical health from distracting them from spiritual concerns.)
An atheist who has thought the problem of Christianity through to its ineluctable conclusion will be immune to derivative hoaxes, such as the Jews’ Holohoax and oleaginous gabble about “Equality,” “Human Rights,” “One World,” and “World Peace,” and will not be befuddled by “democracy” and other negations of the responsibly organized society on which the survival of his kind depends.
The test of Dr. Hoevels’ theory of “cross-immunity” will be atheists’ relative immunity to fallacies that have no immediate relation to religion and social structure. We expect atheists to dismiss, after searchingly sceptical consideration, Extrasensory Perception and other attempts to smuggle in spooks through the back door, and to observe that the current vogue of the “Big Bang” among physicists eager to be fashionable assumes a creation of the universe that is suspiciously similar to absurd and long discarded myths. But what about matters that have no such connection with dead gods? For example, do the statistics of which Dr. Hoevels speaks show that atheists are far more likely than religious persons to estimate accurately, at any given time, the chances that “flying saucers” are illusions or hoaxes, or to smile at exertions of misguided ingenuity, such as attempts to find cryptograms in the plays or sonnets of Shakespeare. (19) Are atheists far more immune than others to such frauds as “modern art” and the substitution of trading stamps for money? I do not know where the statistics are to be found, but I am confident that they will prove the general efficacy of “cross-immunity.”
(footnote 19. The best known example is Ignatius Donnelly’s The Great Cryptogram, which is an expenditure of great diligence that is pathetic, rather than ridiculous, when we remember that the author was a highly intelligent but self-educated man, who undertook the heroic task because he was uninformed about the methods of printing in Shakespeare’s time. The itch to find cryptograms in literature is a cacoëthes that will probably last as long as literacy. I have glanced at William Pötters’ Chi era Laura? (Bologna, Il Molino, 1987). He exercises his ingenuity on Petrarch’s Canzionere, mangling the lines of the sonnets until he can construct arithmetical sequences which, when divided by pi or an approximation thereof, can be made to disclose wonderful secrets about the identity of Petrarch’s ideational mistress.)
Integral atheism will always be confined to a small minority. It requires not only implacable logic and lucidity in cogitation, but extraordinary courage. The atheist must confront the horrors of reality in a universe in which we and all organic life are only transitory epiphenomena produced by a chance chemical reaction on a minor satellite of our insignificant sun, which is but one of many thousands of balls of incandescent gas in a galaxy that is one of thousands and perhaps millions that are equally lost in an infinite void vast beyond comprehension. Even the bravest may be daunted by the realization that we belong to a species that is alone in a world not made for man, with no hope of succor except from our puny selves. Even the bravest may quail at perception of our dolorous and perilous plight in a world on which incompatible and necessarily hostile races will now have to fight it out for survival on an overcrowded planet.
To ease the boobs into the slave-labor camps we need more prayer to imaginary ghosts — more prayer in the schools, in the churches, and everywhere. But it will not be long before the prayers will be simplified and made practical.
It is obviously futile to try to attract the attention of old Jesus, who did not even keep his solemn pledge to return “like a thief in the night” with a hundred battalions of tough and ruthless archangels before the end of the First Century, and who, for nineteen centuries thereafter, has never given the slightest sign of his existence. To try to address him is a waste of effort.
In the coming century, moppets in the schools and their parents will learn to be practical and pray to Yahweh’s living favorite, the local Sheeny, who determines all the circumstances in which they live, and who, if they can persuasively flatter him, may ease the burden of their slavery and even take a whim to bestow on them some of the blessings that are otherwise reserved for God’s People.
* * *
Source: Liberty Bell magazine, September 1990
This is the most beautiful affirmation of atheism and the power of independent thought I have ever read.