J. M. Wheeler

“ If this picture of heaven and hell is true, God and his saints are monsters of infamy. If false, what other "revealed" doctrine can be credited, since this is so devised for the benefit of those who trade in terrorism? If hell is a metaphor, of which there is no indication in the narrative, so also is heaven. Give up material fire and brimstone, you must resign the bodily resurrection, the visible coming of Christ, and the New Jerusalem. Allegorise hell, you make heaven unreal. A figurative Devil suggests a figment God. ”

“ This sublime gift of transmitting life—fatal perogative, which man continually forfeits—at once the mainstay of morality by means of family ties, and the powerful cause of depravity—the energetic spring of life and health—the ceaseless source of disease and infirmity—this faculty involves almost all that man can attain of earthly happiness or misfortune, of earthly pleasure or of pain; and the tree of knowledge, of good and evil, is the symbol of it, as true as it is expressive. ”

“ You look upon the gospel as it stands as the divinest truth: but even a voice from heaven would not convince me that water burns and fire quenches, that a woman conceives without a man, and that a dead man can rise again. ”

“ Things which had chained and enslaved the mind for ages, dissolved and faded into nothing at the dawn of day, and objects that once held the most unbounded sway over the belief, proved to be unreal beings, creatures of superstition, if not of fraud, placed like the lions in the path of the pilgrim, to deter him from proceeding on the way that leads to the heavenly city of truth. ”

“ Hell ever burning will consume the accursed, and a devouring punishment of lively flames; nor will there be that from whence their torments can ever receive either repose or end. Souls with their bodies will be saved unto suffering in tortures infinite. There that man will be seen by us for ever, who made us his spectacle here for a season; what brief enjoyment those cruel eyes received from the persecutions wrought upon us will be balanced against a spectacle eternal." And the savage saint backs up his pleasant prospect with "Holy Scripture." ”

“ I am not one of those who find in phallicism the key to all the mysteries of mythology. All the striking phenomena of nature—the alternations of light and darkness, sun and moon, the terrors of the thunderstorm, and of pain, disease and death, together with his own dreams and imaginations—contributed to evoke the wonder and superstition of early man. But investigation of early religion shows it often nucleated around the phenomena of generation. The first and final problem of religion concerns the production of things. Man's own body was always nearer to him than sun, moon, and stars ”

“ John Stuart Mill in his “Autobiography” declares with truth that “the world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue are complete sceptics in religion.” Many of these, as Mill points out, refrain from various motives from speaking out. The work I have undertaken will, I trust, do something to show how many of the world’s worthiest men and women have been Freethinkers.
My Dictionary does not pretend to be a complete list of those who have rendered services to Freethought. ”

“ To me it appears that the best way to do this is to show what the doctrine has actually been in the days when Christianity was unquestioned. Christians are becoming ashamed of their hell—which they rarely realise as possibly the fate of themselves or their friends; that way madness lies. They cannot get rid of the definite statements in the New Testament, but they avoid dwelling on them, or attempt to construe them figuratively. Hell was hot enough when religion was powerful. As it declines it is discovered that hell is not so terrible after all. ”

“ We have thus far seen that the five earliest Fathers of the Christian Church have no claim to be considered Apostolic, and that, so far from bearing testimony to the authenticity of our canonical Gospels, their own age and authorship are disputed. We have noticed that their works never mention by name any of the writers of the New Testament with the exception of Paul; that the sayings they ascribe to Jesus, while often similar to those found in our Gospels, are never identical with them, and that they contain much that is evidently derived from other sources. ”

“ The widespread custom of blood-covenanting illustrates most clearly, as Dr. Tylor points out, "the great principle of old-world morals, that man owes friendship, not to mankind at large, but only to his own kin; so that to entitle a stranger to kindness and good faith he must become a kinsman by blood."* That any sane man seated at a table ever said, "Take eat, this is my body," and "Drink, this is my blood," is ridiculous. ”

“ On the one hand we have seen that it has been customary to kill the human or animal god in order to save his divine life from being weakened by the inroads of age. On the other hand we have seen that it has been customary to have a general expulsion of evils and sins once a year. Now, if it occurred to people to combine these two customs, the result would be the employment of the dying god as scapegoat. ”

“ The good, really good, bishop tells us the bodies of the damned shall be crowded together in hell like grapes in a wine press, which press one another till they burst. "Every distinct sense and organ shall be assailed with its own appropriate and most exquisite sufferings." Surely the creed is accursed which led so worthy a man as Taylor to paint with unction this description of the Pains of Hell. ”

“ It is alleged that he voluntarily courted death by giving himself up as a Christian to Trajan when that emperor was at Antioch, and that he was sent by a circuitous route all the way to-Rome in order to be devoured by wild beasts there, or, apparently, rather in order to write his epistles while a prisoner on his journey. But no reference to this legend is to be traced during the first six centuries of the Christian era. This absurd story is now generally discredited. The life and writings of Ignatius must be classed in the vast catalogue of Christian myths and fabrications. ”

“ The modern priest, who is supposed by muttering a formula to change the nature of consecrated elements or by his prayers to bring blessings on the people, betrays his lineal descent from the primitive rain-makers and sorcerers of savagery.
The Bible is full of magic and sorcery. Its heroes are magicians, from Jahveh Elohim, who puts Adam into a sleep and then makes woman from his rib, to Jesus who casts out devils and cures blindness with clay and spittle, and whose followers perform similar works by the power of his name. The most esteemed persons among the Jews were magicians. ”

“ In regard to the Fathers, as to much else, the Catholic is the most consistent of all Christian Churches. The men who established the Church, and fixed what was and what was not Canonical Gospel, are surely entitled to some authority on the part of believers. When Protestants wish to prove the authenticity of their infallible book, they have to fall back upon the witness of the fallible Fathers whose authority they are at other times always ready to repudiate. ”

“ When we consider how few Christians are really believers, and how scarcely any of them attempt to carry out the precepts of their Master, it must be allowed that the population of hell is out of all proportion to that of heaven.
The doctrine of the church has been "He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned." The idea of this text has probably done more harm to humanity than it has benefited from the rest of the gospel, for it has countenanced all the ill-will and persecution that has everywhere followed in the train of Christianity. ”

“ So strange, so repugnant to reason as such a doctrine is, it was quite consonant to the thoughts of those who held the belief in salvation by similars. If Paul said, since by man came death by man came also the resurrection of the dead, the development of the doctrine necessitated that if it is God who damns it is also God who saves. Any casual reader of Paul must have been struck by the antithesis which he constantly draws between the law and the Gospel, works and faith, the fall of man, and the redemption through "the second Adam." ”

“ Mark or Marcus was an extremely common name in the early Christian period.
In the first place, our Gospel is no more like a man's preaching than it is like an epic poem. It has, moreover, no Petrine characteristics. Mark does not give the important passage about Christ's church being built upon Peter (Matt, xvi., 18) ; nor the distinguishing addition "called Peter," in the calling of Simon; nor the narrative of Peter's miraculous draught of fishes; of his walking on the sea; his being sent to prepare the Passover, or the reproachful look of Jesus when Peter denied him. ”

“ The same holy Christian says of the damned: "For ever harassed with a dreadful tempest, they shall feel themselves torn asunder by an angry God, and transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings, terrified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by the weight of his hand, so that to sink into any gulf would be more tolerable than to stand for a moment in these terrors." ”

“ In the Jewish Church no one under the age of thirty was permitted to read the Song of Songs, a prohibition which may have assisted to give it its sacred character. It is, nevertheless, not more indelicate than many other portions of God's Holy Word, and viewed in its proper light as an Oriental dramatic love poem, although it cannot be acquitted of outraging modern notions of decency, it is not, I think, so much, as some other portions of the Bible, open to the charge of teaching immorality. ”

“ It will also be noticed that Papias no more mentions a Gospel of Mark than he does of Matthew. What he speaks of is not an inspired narrative, but records written from memory. Now if Mark wrote from memory he did not write from inspiration. The argument for the genuineness of the Gospel is at the expense of its inspiration. But the evidence from the numerous passages in which Mark agrees with Matthew and with Luke is overwhelming that it is not an original document written from memory at all, but with the writer having other documents directly before him. ”

“ According to the Westminster Confession, ch. xxxiii.: "The wicked who know not God and obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast into eternal torments." And the Larger Catechism, A. 29, declares: "The punishments of sin in the world to come are everlasting separation from the comfortable presence of God, and most grievous torments in soul and body, without intermission, in hell fire forever." "They that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil into everlasting fire," is the doctrine of the Book of Common Prayer. ”