Kersey Graves

“ Almighty God fallen from his burnished, dazzling throne in the lofty heavens, and reduced to helpless, senseless babyhood! Omnipotence shorn of all power but to breathe, and cry, and smile! What! that Omniscient Being, who "leads one world by day, and ten thousand more by night," becoming suddenly transformed into a human bantling, which knows no higher enjoyment that that of being "pleased with a rattle, and tickled with a straw!" ”

“ We cherish no such conception. We cannot for a moment harbor a blasphemous doctrine, which represents the Universal Father as being a bloody-minded and murderous being, instead of a being of infinite love, infinite wisdom, and infinite in all the moral virtues. Such a character would be a deep-dyed stigma upon any human being. And no person actuated by a strict sense of justice would accept salvation upon any such terms as that prescribed by the Christian atonement. ”

“ At his birth a marvelous light illumined the earth. His followers baptised, and performed miraculous cures. And he, when a child, attracted attention by his miracles. While attending the herds with his foster-father a great serpent poisoned the river, which caused the death of cows and shepherd-boys when they drank of it, whom Chrishna restored to life by a look of divine power. His life was devoted to mercy and charity. He left paradise from pure compassion, to die for suffering sinners. He sought to lead men to better paths and lives of virtue and rectitude. ”

“ Will you not, then, give it up that your religion is merely a human production, reconstructed from heathen materials—from oriental systems several thousand years older than yours—or will you continue, in spite of the unanimous and unalterable verdict of history, science, facts and logic, to proclaim to the world the now historically demonstrated error which you have so long preached, that God is the author of your religion, and Jesus Christ a Deity-begotten Messiah? ”

“ Christ and Chrishna both taught the equality of man. Prayers addressed to Chrishna were after this fashion: 'O thou Supreme One! thy essence is inscrutable. Thou art all in all. The understanding of man cannot reach thy Almighty Power. I, who know nothing, fly to thee for protection. Show mercy unto me, and enable me to see and know thee.' Chrishna replies, 'Have faith in me. No one who worships me can perish. Address thyself to me as the only asylum. I will deliver thee from sin. I am animated with equal benevolence toward all beings. ”

“ Men cannot persuade themselves that a Deity and infinity should lie within so narrow a compass as the dimensions of a human body; that omnipotence, omnipresence should ever be wrapped in swaddling clothes, and debased to the homely usages of a stable and a manger; that the glorious Artificer of the whole universe, who spread out the heaven like a curtain, and laid the foundations of the earth, could ever turn carpenter, and exercise an inglorious trade in a little cell. ”

“ There is not a miraculous story or incredible legend incorporated in the New Testament as a part of the history of Jesus, that was not afloat in some shape or form, on the wings of tradition in nearly every religious country, ages before his birth. The model for each and every miracle was already constructed, was already in the market, and already a part of the history or tradition of other and older Gods. And all that was wanted to make it appear as a part of the history of the Christian's deified Jesus, was to fill in names and dates. ”

“ To every observant and unbiased mind a strange contrast must be visible in the practical life of Jesus Christ when viewed in his twofold capacity of a man and a priest. While standing upon the broad plane of humanity, with his deep sympathetic nature directed toward the poor, the unfortunate, and the downtrodden, there often gushed forth from his impassioned bosom the most sublime expressions of pity, and the strongest outburst of commiseration for wrongs and sufferings, and his noble goodness and tender love yearned with a throbbing heart to relieve them. ”

“ Though you may have heretofore honestly believed these doctrines to be true, you can now no longer plead ignorance as an excuse for propagating such gigantic and serious errors, as they are now overwhelmingly demonstrated by a thousand facts of history to be untrue. You must abandon such exalted claims for your religion, or posterity will mark you as being "blind leaders of the blind." They will heap upon your honored names their unmitigated ridicule and condemnation. They will charge you as being either deplorably ignorant, or disloyal to the cause of truth. ”

“ Every bible, every sect, every creed, every catechism, and every orthodox sermon teaches that "religion is the gift of God," that "it is infused into the soul by the spirit and power of the Lord." Never was a greater mistake ever committed. Every student of anthropology, every person who has read any of the numerous modern works on mental science, and tested their easily-demonstrated facts, knows that religion is of natural and not supernatural origin; that it is a natural element of the human mind, and not a "direct gift from God;" ”

“ Can we then believe, or dare we believe, a doctrine so atheistical in its tendencies as that the Infinite Diety was incorporated in the person of the meek and lowly Jesus, when it would thus set at naught, violate, prostrate, and utterly cancel from the world one of God's own fundamental laws, and one of the essential principles of natural science, and banish forever the co-ordinate harmony of the universe, and thus inaugurate a state of universal disorder, incertitude, anarchy, and misrule into the otherwise beautifully law-governed, well-regulated domain of nature? ”

“ Let us, then, labor to banish the wide-spread delusion believed and taught by a thousand systems of worship—Jew, Pagan and Christian—that "religion is of supernatural or divine origin," and the many ruinous errors; senseless dogmas and deplorable soul-crushing superstitions so thoroughly inwrought into the Christian system will vanish like fog before the morning sun, and be replaced by a religion which sensible, intelligent and scientific men and women can accept, and will delight to honor and practice. ”

“ And would it not prove that Christianity is rather a dreamy religion?
13. Should not the astounding and incredible report of the birth of a God be based on a better foundation than that of dreams and angels and the legends of oriental mythology, to entitle it to the belief of an intelligent and scientific age?
14. Or can any man of science entertain for a moment the superlative solecism of an Infinite God by any special act "overshadowing" a finite human female, especially as modern science teaches us that God is both male and female, and as much one as the other? ”

“ Let a man rise up in society endowed with an extraordinary degree of spirituality and sympathy for human suffering; let him, like Chrishna, Pythagoras, Christ, and Mahomet, spend his time in visiting the hovels of the poor, or consoling their sorrows, laboring to mitigate their griefs, and in performing acts of charity, disinterested alms and deeds of benevolence, kindness and love, and so certain would he sooner or later command the homage of a God. ”

“ There is no "mercy or forgiveness" in putting an innocent being to death for any pretext whatever. And for the Father to consent to the brutal assassination of His own innocent Son upon the cross to gratify an implacable revenge toward his own children, the workmanship of his own hands, rather than forgive a moral weakness implanted in their natures by a voluntary act of his own, and for which consequently he alone ought to be responsible, would be nothing short of murder in the first degree. ”

“ When the evidence lies all around us as thick as the fallen leaves of autumn, clustering on the pages of history, and proclaimed by every principle of mental science, that what is called conversion is nothing but a mental and temperamental or nervous phenomenon—a psychological process—how can we rank those amongst intelligent people who still claim it to be "the power of God operating upon the soul of the sinner"? Ignorance is the only plea that can acquit them of the charge of imbecility. ”

“ All that is wanting to convince us that miracles constitute no part of the real history of Christ, is a cotemporary instead of a posthumous biography—a history written in the age which knew him, and by an unprejudiced writer who witnessed all his movements. And we are perfectly willing to risk our reputation in this life, and our salvation in the next, by stating our conviction that this will be the unanimous verdict of posterity before fifty generations pass away. ”

“ And then, reader, look for a moment at some of the many childish incongruities and logical difficulties this giant absurdity drags with it. It represents Almighty God as coming into the world through the hands of a midwife, as passing through the process of gestation and parturition. It insults our reason with the idea that the great, infinite Jehovah could be molded into the human form—a thought that is shocking to the moral sense, and withering, cramping, and dwarfing to the intellectual mind, imposing upon it a heavy drag-chain which checks its expansion, and forbids its onward progress. ”

“ Then say not that "the man Christ Jesus," though standing at the top of the ladder of moral manhood, and high above the common plane of humanity, was yet a God—"the Infinite Ruler of the infinite universe." Who can believe that that Being, whose existence stretches to an eternity beyond human conception, yea, whom "the heaven of heavens cannot contain," was ever cooped up in a human body, reduced so near to nothing in dimensions as to be susceptible (as was Jesus) of being weighed in scales, and measured with a yardstick? ”

“ It is as if one should imagine the whole world not only represented upon, but also contained in, one of our own artificial globes, or the body of the sun enveloped in a cloud as big as a man's hand, all of which would be looked upon as astonishing impossibilities, and yet is as short of the other as the finite is of the infinite, between which the disparity is immeasurable. ”

“ Among the sin-atoning Gods who condescended in ancient times to forsake the throne of heaven, and descend upon the plains of India, through human birth, to suffer and die for the sins and transgressions of the human race, the eighth Avatar, or Savior, may be considered the most important and the most exalted character, as he led the most conspicuous life, and commanded the most devout and the most universal homage. ”

“ No Christian ever repents in favor of Mahomedan-ism; and no Mahomedan ever lifts up his dying voice in favor of Christianity as being superior to his own religion; and no Hindoo has ever been known to indulge in death-bed lamentation for not having previously embraced either Christianity or Mahomedanism; because their earlier education never turned their minds in that direction. The mind has to be educated over again before it can embrace a new religion, or even condemn a wrong act, which, up to that period, it had always believed to be right. ”

“ No innocent person has a right to suffer for the guilty, and the courts have no right to accept the offer or admit the substitute. An illustration will show this. If Jefferson Davis had been convicted of the crime of treason, and sentenced to be hung, and Abraham Lincoln had come forward and offered to be stretched upon the gallows in his place, is there a court in the civilized world which would have accepted the substitute, and hung Lincoln, and liberated Davis? To ask the question is but to answer it. It is an insult to reason, law and justice to entertain the proposition. ”