M. M. Mangasarian

“ The man who is offended at freedom of speech, can be dispensed with more safely than the man who avails himself of this divine privilege. If my freedom of speech offends my neighbor, his fear of freedom is a greater offense to me. Which of us deserves most to be drowned?
But in the next place the suggestion that people who rob their weaker fellows of their illusions should be drowned, even when it does not lead to persecution, is an encouragement to hypocrisy and imposture, as the story of the composition of the Bible which will now be told, shows. ”

“ Could we ask for a stronger proof that the Bible is the work of men—and not of honest men, at that? But is it fair to include the whole Bible in this accusation? I wish I could feel that some portions of the Bible are free from suspicion, but I cannot. Alas! it is impossible to point to a single [Pg 22] book in the Bible of the authorship of which we may speak with assurance. The marks of political and theological imposture in the Bible are like leopard's spots, they cannot be removed. ”

“ Having discovered a truth, and yearning in my soul to express it, suppose I were to say, that if any man in this audience shall scare me into silence,—shall cheat me out of the joy and duty of imparting that truth to my world, by threatening to be offended, or to be unsettled by it,—he ought to have a millstone tied to his neck and be cast into the sea. ”

“ I feel the wrong, the shame, and the crime of it, deep in my bones—when I picture to myself an Asiatic scribbler, a sectarian, a clown, a rogue, a cheat, tampering with the works of a dead master,—pushing and squeezing his imposture into the mouth of the mighty dead,—defiling the thought of the philosopher with the foulness of his superstition! ”

“ The noblest literature of the world will be its bible. Love and labor, its holy sacraments—and instead of worshipping one saviour, it will gladly build an altar in the heart for every one who has suffered for humanity. ”

“ They have still a powerful weapon left with which to defend the Bible: Suppose Ezra did compose or compile the Book! Is it not, nevertheless, true that the Bible teaches righteousness? The argument is something like this: The Bible may not be true, but it is very moral. In our opinion, however, it is even less moral than it is true. A book which commands murder, plunder, persecution for opinion sake, slavery and credulity of the most abject kind, can not very well be recommended as a moral text-book. ”

“ Psychologists tell us that there is great power in suggestion. With all my love and reverence for whatever is sweet and sane in the Gospels, I must protest against this text, because it is a suggestion to violence and persecution. If Jesus suggests a millstone for the neck of the heretic who upsets people's illusions and makes inquirers out of believers, and intimates further that drowning is too good for them, why not take the hint and act upon it? ”

“ When a man is accused, it is his privilege to defend himself. If Jesus suggests that the investigator who unsettles people's beliefs should be drowned, before the suggestion is acted upon, the disturber should be given a chance to be heard. Would that be asking too much? Let us see, then, just what it means to command a man to suppress whatever might disturb a neighbor's faith: It means that if I am announced to speak on the Bible, I must say nothing to which the weakest or the most credulous among my hearers might object. If I do, I shall deserve to be tied to a millstone and drowned! ”

“ Those of you who support these lectures, as well as those of you who only hear them, know that our position is the very reverse of what Jesus and the Church recommend. We do not believe in persecution. We do not even suggest that anybody should be drowned; but if our human nature is so depraved that persecution and murder are inevitable, then, in our humble opinion, it will be more economical to drown the people who will not permit a Darwin to give his thought to the world, than to drown a Darwin. ”

“ Lovers paired, and children, like a flock of swallows, visited our earth. They toiled, grew old and died—without any Book of the Law.
There is a third chapter in the biography of the Bible. Three hundred and fifty years after Solomon had fallen asleep with his fathers, one morning,—I cannot tell whether it was on a fair or on a foul day, Hilkiah,—remember that name,—Hilkiah! the high priest, knocked on the door of Shaphan, King Josiah's private secretary, and begged for a private interview,—a tete-a-tete, as the French would say. ”

“ If he was not, how can Moses' inspiration help us since his writings were burned by the Persians, even if they were not stolen from the ark and revised by Hilkiah? The inventor of the Old Testament was Ezra, "a scribe of the words of the commandment of the Lord," that is to say, the clerk or amanuensis of God, a title which aptly describes not the interpreter, but the author of the Book of the Law. What kind of a man was this compiler or inventor of the Book of the Law? What does Christian Scholarship think of his character? Let us hear the doctors of divinity on Ezra. ”

“ To overthrow its tyranny and to prove that a book can not be the master of living and growing men, to make man free, to raise him from his knees, to bring back the color to his cheeks white with fear, and to give to his arrested mind movement—is my aim and my joy! ”

“ People tell a falsehood, either to protect themselves, or to hurt others. God needed not to resort to this means to protect himself. Paul tells us he does this to hurt others. "God shall send them strong delusion, that they might believe a lie that they all might be damned." How could Paul, an exceptionally intelligent man, be guilty of such blasphemy? How could he so damage the character of the God he loved? My answer is that he was an Asiatic, and he did not look upon lying in the same light that Europeans do. The Asiatic conscience for veracity has never enjoyed a very high reputation. ”

“ Do you think the Church will let a man close his eyes and open his mouth and say whatever comes into his head? Indeed, not! He must pray by the book. In the protestant denominations there is the creed, to which you swear your allegiance before you can open your mouth in one of their churches, and the moment you are caught talking beyond what the creed allows, your ordination is taken from you and your mouth is shut. ”

“ If you approve of this sentiment, attributed to the founder of Christianity, then the work which we are doing here, every Sunday, is quite wicked; a millstone around our necks is what we deserve, and the bottom of the sea is where we belong. ”

“ It is not because the Asiatics are wickeder than European nations, for in other respects they are as good, if not better, than ourselves. The average of morality is perhaps about the same in all countries. But the notorious vice of all Asiatic peoples is lying. They lie with a freedom and a fluency,—with such plausibility and so straight a face,—that one can hardly distinguish their lie from their truth. Curious though it may seem, people who are given to lying are often the first to be deceived by their own lies. They
"Keep on till their own lies deceive them. ”

“ Sleep, seems to be his quest, intellectual as well as physical, "and he is forever looking forward to the time when he shall go to his 'long rest.'" He looks forward to a future of inactivity. All effort, especially intellectual effort, is distasteful to him, and is apt to offend and unsettle him. Hence the intellectual life must not be real; what must be real is the sleep. ”

“ A woman is given a ring with a stone in it. Not being herself a connaisseur of precious stones, she is easily made to believe that her jewel is the most costly in the world. This is told her in order to make her happy, and to fancy herself as the possessor of a gem of great value. ”

“ It appears that when Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Persians, the city was pillaged, the temple destroyed, and the Book of the Law which Hilkiah had discovered, was burned. Once more, Israel is without a book. Driven into captivity, the Jews lived among the heathen without a temple and without a bible. Then Cyrus, the King of Persia, is represented in the book of Ezra, as issuing a proclamation to the Jews to return to their country and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. ”

“ One of the drivers, Uzzah, instinctively, put forth his hand to steady the sacred chest. He was instantly killed. He touched the ark, and that was a crime. One must not even touch the box to save it from falling, much less read and investigate the book hidden therein. Every precaution was taken to protect the Bible from being investigated. God did not guard the tree of [Pg 17] knowledge more zealously than did the priests the book of the law. ”

“ And you, whose love and genius give us [Pg 5] our daily victory over disease and error,—whose thought is our daily bread and beauty,—you, too, must hush, you must become sterile, or be content to speak by rote, lest you should disturb the repose of the believer who has laid himself down to sleep. The theological babe must not be awakened. It will bawl and cry if aroused, and better than cause one of these babes to cry, let there be no intellectual life in the world! ”

“ Jesus, himself, is made the author of a treatise in his own behalf; the Virgin Mary writes the story of her wonderful child; Adam, even, testifies to the truth of the Christian religion, though he is supposed to have lived nearly four thousand years before Jesus. There is no end to the list of inventions.
But one of the most daring forgeries is the following passage in Josephus:
[Pg 13]
"About that time appeared Jesus, a wise man, if indeed it be right to speak of him as a man, for he was a performer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. ”

“ My object in speaking of this is to show that even as our Oriental-born religion, brought over into Europe the germ of monasticism, religious intolerance, the practise of burning men and women alive,—absolutism in matters of faith, determining by authority of councils what shall and what shall not be the truth,—not one of which institutions previously existed in Europe ”

“ What better evidence could they desire in their controversy with the Jews than to point to this wonderful confession of their principal author and historian, that the Jesus whom they crucified was the Christ, and that he rose from the dead! But in the Josephus with which they were acquainted there was no such text. Origen, the Christian Father, admits in his writings that Josephus was not a believer in Christ. How, then, did this passage creep into the works of the Jewish historian? ”

“ Yes, yes, pause and think of how an organization must have become gangrened with imposture to have successfully resisted every claim of truth and honor for two thousand years! This is a question of conscience as well as a question of knowledge. Why did the translators suppress the fact until a few years ago that, "Some other authorities have a different ending to the Gospel"?, and that "the two oldest Greek manuscripts and some other authorities omit from verse 9 to the end"? ”

“ And, I promise to retract and apologize for the position I have maintained in this lecture, if the theologians, who are at home on this subject, will prove that there were no spurious gospels, no impostures, no lying manuscripts thrown upon the religious market as soon as the pagan state embraced Christianity, I will also listen to any arguments which may be produced to show that the Apostles' Creed was written by the apostles; that Constantine abdicated in favor of the pope; that the Pagan Sibyls prophesied of Christ, and that Josephus acknowledged Jesus to have been the Messiah. ”

“ Moreover, the practice of the Church during the early centuries, confirms the criticism of such representative writers as Mosheim, Ellicott, Warburton, Lecky, Gibbon, Jortin, Gieseler, and other equally reliable authorities, that "The pernicious maxim that those who make it their business to deceive with a view of promoting the cause of truth, were deserving rather of commendation than of censure." ”

“ The authors of the Encyclopedia Biblica whom we nave already quoted, admit that the man who bears the name of Ezra manipulated, if he did not invent, the narrative which he tells in the Bible:—"He partly mutilates it by removing a portion, partly makes it almost unintelligible by placing it in a connection to which it does not belong, and by making interpolations, etc." ”

“ In view of all these facts, reflect upon the intelligence of the man who, Sunday after Sunday, holds up the Gospels as the infallible word of God. He does so because he is speaking by the creed, to which he has sworn allegiance for the rest of his life. ”

“ Our American author, Thoreau, was right when he said that, "The modern Christian is a man who has consented to say all the prayers in the liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to bed and sleep quietly afterward." ”

“ Quoting the words of Paul to the Romans, where he says, "For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory, etc.," Spencer condemned Paul for this; the religious Weekly objected that Paul was only speaking ironically. And Mr. Spencer generously admitted that such a supposition was quite possible. We are ourselves willing to give Paul every opportunity to exonerate himself, and will not press the charge too vehemently against him. ”