The Logical Atheist

"Where is the grave-yard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a day when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter to-day? And what of Huitzilopochtli? In one year–and it is no more than five hundred years ago–50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried on with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Al...

Is God jealous or tolerant, vengeful or forgiving, a harsh and haughty monarch or a loving father? It is possible to answer these questions any way you choose, and to find revelation to support you. --H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods , 1930

"Every religion of any consequence, indeed, teaches that all the rest are insane, immoral and against God. Usually it is not hard to prove it." --H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods , 1930

[Religion] is essentially a scheme to bend the extraordinary to man's uses--a plan of attack upon the powers which seem to control and condition it. All religions, whatever their superficial differences, have that purpose at bottom, and so all of them are fundamentally alike. What the Bakua medicine-man seeks to accomplish by rattling stones in a cocoanut-shell, or the Tibetan lama  by whirling his prayer-wheel, or the Yakut shaman  by going into a sweat-bath, or the Crow Indian devotee by chopping off a finger is precisely what the Pope seeks to accomplish by saying Mass in St. Peter's. All desire, first, to attract the notice of the gods, and, second, to induce them to be amiable. The differences in method of approach, however radical they may appear superficially, are of little consequence in essence.  --H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods , 1930 

[At some point in the evolution of religion, gods] began to be credited with all sorts of prejudices, weaknesses, tastes, appetites and humours. They were given qualifies and attributes of men--generosity, pride, wrath, resolution, enterprise, perhaps, even a kind of tenderness. And of the beasts that men hunted--the wiliness of the fox, the ferocity of the sabre-toothed tiger, the huge strength of the mammoth, the courage of the lion, the foulness of the hyena. This way of thinking of the gods survives into our own time. The Yahweh of the Old Testament, still worshipped by millions, is called a lion therein, and the Devil, still feared, is a serpent and a dragon. In the New Testament Jesus is both a lion and a lamb. The God of the Episcopalians is an elderly British peer, courtly in manner, somewhat beefy, and, in New York, vaguely Jewish.  --H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods , 1930 

Immortality, as [theologians] teach it in the modern world, is but little more than a handy device for giving force and effect to their system of transcendental jurisprudence: what it amounts to is simply a threat that the contumacious will not be able to escape them by dying. Not many of them, I am sure, can actually imagine the life eternal, and most of them in all probability, waste no effort trying to do so. They leave that feat to the ... metaphysicians, to the class of scientists who try to reconcile science and revelation and to spiritualists, all of whom have greatly damaged the dignity and authority of theology by trying to enrich its ideology. I am  myself a theologian of considerable gifts, and yet I can no more imagine immortality than I can image the void which exists before matter took form. Neither, I suspect, and the Pope. H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods , 1930

Magic or religion: it is all one. Theologians themselves dispose of the matter by calling everything they do an act of religion, including even such operations as bedizening themselves with high-sounding titles and dignities, superior to any ever claimed by Christ, and laying taxes upon the faithful for their own aggrandizement; if that is how they feel about it, let them have their way. Their earliest forerunners, we may be sure, wasted no time upon such bandying with words. They were aware of no difference between magic and religion, but practised both with easy consciences.  --H. L. Mencken Treatise on the Gods , 1930

[Religion] is quite simple at bottom. There is nothing really secret or complex about it, no matter what its professors may alleged to the contrary. Whether it happens to show itself in the artless mumbo-jumbo of a Winnebago Indian or in the elaborately refined and metaphysical rites of a Christian archbishop, its single function is to give man access to the powers which seem to control his destiny, and its single purpose is to induce those power to be be friendly to him. That function and that purpose are common to all religions, ancient or modern, savage or civilized, and they are the only common characters that all of them show. Nothing else is essential. --H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods , 1930

The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us. -- H. L. Mencken

True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them.... They are free to shoot back. But they can't disarm their enemy. -- H. L. Mencken

Once more, alas, I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the World's contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.  True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his child...