AS EVER, BUT ESPECIALLY in our present state of civilizational malaise, there is a need for figures with the power to inspire — men who in less confused and cynical times would have been unabashedly described as heroic. One such figure is Corporal John Alan Coey, a young soldier who has perhaps not yet fully received the tribute he deserves though he has been dead these past 37 years.

In March of 1972 Coey, a young American from Ohio, boarded a flight to white-ruled Rhodesia, a country then facing United Nations sanctions and very soon to find itself beleaguered by the forces of communist-backed black nationalism. Only a day prior to his departure Coey had graduated from Ohio State University with a degree in Forestry. He had also recently been released, at his own request, from the Marine Corps NROTC program he had nearly completed, thereby declining a hard-earned commission as an officer.

Coey’s motives for seeking to enlist in the Rhodesian Army rather than continue his service in the U.S. Marine Corps are probably more readily understandable in retrospect than they were at the time. Like many, he was repulsed by the emergence of the New Left on college campuses and saw nihilism clearly lurking behind its messages of free love and pacifism. Coey also concluded that the newly ascendant radical Left represented neither an authentic grassroots movement nor a bona fide countercultural alternative to the old liberal order. “The left wing has recognized the dehumanizing trends of industrial society,” he wrote, “but its activism to change society has been channeled by the real revolutionaries of Internationalism.”

Though a confirmed Cold Warrior, Coey was not a reflexive supporter of the Vietnam War. He discerned in the handling of that conflict, as well as that of the Korean War before it, the seeds of American overreach and eventual dissolution, a trend that seems to continue unabated today. As Coey’s older brother, Edward, would later write of American involvement in Vietnam, the American people had been given “The Choice Between False Alternatives,” made to choose “between a protracted no-win slaughter and a humiliating surrender.” The younger Coey did not believe this state of affairs could be attributed merely to incompetence or negligence on the part of those prosecuting the war either. The primary threat to the West, Coey concluded, was not Soviet or Chinese Communism but malevolent forces that emanated from within. Coey somewhat quaintly referred to these forces, which he considered more or less amenable to communism, simply as “the Conspiracy.”

While he was an apparent reader of Oswald Spengler and keenly aware of the depth of the civilizational crisis facing the West, Coey was not given to despair. He insisted those of European descent must struggle to the bitter end to save their inheritance, a deeply held conviction that determined his own choices. Coey well understood that “the fight for Western Civilization is not in the battlefield, but in the realm of the intellectual, spiritual, and psychological.” He lamented also “that under present conditions one cannot be a soldier without furthering the aims of the Internationalists, the liberals, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Zionists, or other alien groups.” Still, Coey longed above all else to do his part as a warrior in defense of what remained of his beloved civilization. Rhodesia, he believed, provided him the best and perhaps only opportunity to be of service in a worthy cause. Again, this is in spite of the fact that Coey already new the likely outcome:

“In the eyes of the mass media the black man can do nothing wrong and the white man can do nothing right, for even his sacrifices and help are discredited. The world cares nothing for Rhodesia, not even America, England, or the sister colonies. Rhodesia is to be sacrificed; they will not help Rhodesia. It has already been written off.”

Coey in Africa

Having successfully gained a position with the Rhodesian Special Air Service or SAS (an elite unit approximately equivalent to U.S. Army Special Forces), Coey attempted to communicate — perhaps imprudently — his concerns to the general public in a series of magazine articles and letters to newspapers in Rhodesia and South Africa. One article in particular, provocatively titled “The Myth of American Anti-Communism” and published in the Rhodesian Army journal Assegai, would land him in trouble with Rhodesian authorities despite, or perhaps because of, its appearance in an official publication. As a result, Coey was kicked out of the Rhodesian Army’s officer training program and eventually the SAS, placements he had received only after excelling at a grueling selection and training process. As Coey himself reflected:

“It was brought to my attention today that the article I submitted to Assegai magazine is considered ‘subversive,’ not because it is anti- Rhodesian or criticizes the State here, but because it ‘destroys misconceptions about America being pro-Western, and may lower morale if read by the general public.’ Although what I have written is true, it is feared that the public may not be able to stand the truth. The facts I have presented may make the article appear anti-American to those who do not yet understand how America is ruled by the CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] oligarchy, whose interest is total world power.”

Despite this and other setbacks, Coey would persist in his writing. Throughout his time in southern Africa he kept up an extensive correspondence as well as a journal which would eventually be published posthumously as a book. This book, A Martyr Speaks, would have undoubtedly proven an even more interesting historical document had not vast segments of Coey’s original journals been redacted by Rhodesian authorities following his death. Despite this censorship, Coey and what was left of his writings remained controversial enough that it would take his mother 13 years to find a willing publisher.

Though no longer being considered for a commission and forced to choose another unit to serve with, Coey would also persist in attempting to make a contribution militarily to Rhodesia. Even as he experienced moments of serious doubt and self-recrimination following his unceremonious expulsion from the SAS, Coey completed a medic course and transferred to the Rhodesian Light Infantry. There, despite resistance from some of his superiors, time and again he insisted on accompanying infantrymen into combat at great personal risk to himself, effectively introducing the role of combat medic into the Rhodesian Army:

“When I finish this tour of duty, I think that at least in this battalion [1st Battalion, The Rhodesian Light Infantry], which does the bulk of the fighting, that the medics will become like the Medical Corpsmen in the U.S. forces. I am the first of what are now called ‘Combat Medics’ here. There will be others; so I have accomplished something.”

Again though, Coey’s efforts were not always understood or appreciated. Some — though certainly not all — of his fellow foreign volunteers seem to have been merely adventurers or opportunists who did not share in his motivations or commitment. Among the Rhodesians, Coey’s older brother later wrote that the younger Coey “found some few Rhodesians awake, but generally…found a people too narrowly provincial to fully appreciate the worldwide implications of the savage attack being unleashed against their small country.” Coey himself wrote of the Rhodesians, for whom he came to have a special affection (indeed, he sought and was granted dual citizenship): “Most white Rhodesian families have been here for several generations and have nowhere else they can call home. They will stay and fight, I’m pleased to say. They understand their position racially and historically, but come short politically.”

An additional source of conflict for Coey — even with fellow believers — were his religious convictions. From a reading of his journals, it is evident that Coey’s faith was the primary source of his strength and allowed him to persevere where others often gave up. It also provided a source of comfort to him in his darkest moments — moments which were plentiful in combat in the African Bush. Many on the true Right have abandoned Christianity for a multitude of reasons, citing among other things its universalist pretensions and the tendency toward a dangerous and unhealthy cultural and racial self-effacement prevalent among contemporary Christians. Still, Coey possessed a vital and muscular understanding of the Faith similar to that which must have underlain much past Western dynamism. Coey, a Lutheran, attempted to share his belief with others through quiet example rather than a boorish evangelism and was dismayed at the errors into which many of his fellow Christians had fallen:

“I’ve been going to Baptist church services. The Gospel is preached there, but I have decided to go elsewhere because these Baptists are convinced that the Zionist takeover of Palestine is the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. They believe that the Second Coming of Christ is near, and think that they have the Revelation figured out completely. They expect to be ‘raptured’ away from the coming terror to help Christ rule in the Millennium. I remind them of Christ’s words, ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ and ”No man knoweth the hour when the Son of God shall come again.’ But they choose to ignore that. . . .”

Neither, of course, did Coey abide the paralytic sentimentality of liberal Christians:

“Last night I talked with a Christian man who is convinced that he must never resort to violence to defend himself or fight in any way, even for his life and liberty. He feels that communism should not be opposed by arms, and that the Second Coming of Christ will occur before they could take over the world. He believes that all governments, no matter how evil or corrupt, are ordained by God. Christianity for this man has destroyed his instinct for survival, his will to resist evil. If every Christian were to think this, we would be doomed.”

The Significance of Coey

Coey was only one of a number of foreign volunteers who came from a variety of countries to fight for the lost cause of Rhodesia. Likewise, he was only the first of a total of seven Americans who would eventually die there. Of these foreigners, however, Coey was probably the most driven by principle, as well as the one most successful at communicating to the general public his motives for joining the Rhodesian forces.

Admittedly, at times in his journals Coey comes across as a somewhat fanatical figure — albeit one who is never truly unlikable. Though he presents a fairly consistent worldview in his writings, it is also helpful to remember that Coey did not style himself as an intellectual but instead a man of action. He considered it necessary to complement his words with deeds, and his short life was lived as one of selfless sacrifice in defense of not only a country that he considered to be at the very frontier of the West — but of all peoples of European descent and their shared civilization. Coey, importantly, always sought to lead by example and never played the sectarian:

“…I am helping to unify the Europeans, simply by my presence and association with these people. For they are coming to realize that there is no important difference between Americans, White Africans, or Europeans. The accents, dialects, and languages are superficial; the customs, religion, styles of government, and thinking are the same. I believe that only when all European peoples are unified, can communism and the alien conspiracy be smashed.”

There would be no such triumph of course, either in Rhodesia or elsewhere. Perhaps it was for the best that Coey didn’t live to experience the heartbreak of witnessing his adopted homeland fade into history.

In the final analysis, it was the very things that drove Coey to excel as a soldier that led to his early demise. He was possessed of that fatal combination of youthful idealism and, what is rarer, the will and strength of character to actually put that idealism into practice. As his older brother Edward recalled, Revilo P. Oliver of the University of Illinois had written Coey a letter prior to his death in which Professor Oliver had lauded him for having made “‘…the Choice of Achilles.'” That is, Coey had opted to die with glory in combat rather than to live a long but unremarkable life. Then again, Coey may have simply been following the dictates of fate. “I feel that I have found my historical role here,” he wrote, “and, once that is finished, I don’t know what I will do. . . .”

The anticipated moment came swiftly and unexpectedly. On July 19, 1975, as he was descending into a dry river bed in an attempt to aid two fallen Rhodesian Light Infantry troopers, Coey was struck and killed by terrorist bullets. One wonders if it can really be only a strange coincidence that he was hit in the head and in the heel? Whatever the case may be, his shining example of total selflessness stands in marked contrast to the widespread moral corruption of the modern military of his native United States, a military whose senior leaders obediently serve the alien and transnational forces that Coey believed he was fighting.

Though he is decades gone now, Coey’s timeless words continue to resonate. Yet it is fearful to think that they might outlast the civilization to which they immediately pertain, and perhaps might only serve as a warning to some future people:

“The basis of race, culture, and nation is vital for the survival of Western Civilization. Blood and soil, conservation and nationalism are what make a country and civilization sound, strong, and healthy. But faith is needed, faith in our way of life, our civilization, and faith in a Higher Destiny and the Divine Sanction of God….

“This generation of the West must believe when there is apparently no hope; it must obey, even if it means death; and it must fight to the end, rather than submit. Against the Spirit of Heroism no material force can prevail. Nothing can defeat that except inner decadence.”

Ultmately, Coey’s significance probably resides in whatever ability his memory has to inspire. As Dr. Anthony P. DiPerna, a professor of African history, observed in a letter to the Coey family: “I do not think John’s sacrifice was in vain. There are many episodes in history where those who gave their lives in a losing cause served as an inspiration to others who eventually carried the banner to victory.”

If Coey could join us today, he would not lose hope over the rapid deterioration of Western societies that has occurred in the decades since his death. He would doubtlessly implore us to redouble our efforts at self-preservation, however modest or even futile we may believe our individual contributions to be.

* * *

Reference:

Coey, John Alan. (1988). A Martyr Speaks: Journal of the late John Alan Coey.
CPA Books.

Suddenly, they never mentioned the God of slavery again. The Great Hush.

SHHHHH — We don’t talk about that God anymore.

Can you kill a God?

No.  But you can show it’s so fake that its own believers never mention Him again.  That’s what happened to the Southern “God of Slavery.”

What the South bragged about at the time, our history books don’t even mention now.  Slavery was very much a religious based enterprise, and could not possibly have thrived in the Southern US without it.

In fact, the “Bible Belt” got its start, ironically, from this fierce religious defense of slavery.  As Debow (of Debow’s Review) said in 1843, “God has completely silenced all opposition to slavery by His Holy Word.”

Well, God silenced opposition in the SOUTH — with the help of the draconian “anti-incendiary” laws, which set torture as the punishment for those who wrote openly, or even owned books, that questioned slavery.  Those preachers and people who were against slavery faced physical torture and jail if they spoke out against it.

The antebellum South shaped their world on this God — literally. The president and vice-president of the Confederacy both said slavery was the cornerstone of their nation.  Their wars, their economy, their religion, was based on this idea that God that ordained slavery — and that slavery must spread, like the gospel itself.

Robert E. Lee himself wrote that abolitionists “are trying to destroy the American Church.” That’s right — CHURCH.  Objections to slavery was met with the same basic response — slavery is “of God.”  Lee said only God could end slavery, because He ordained it.

Please don’t get me wrong — there were many great and kind people in the South.  But slavery was a vile, evil enterprise.  If you grew up as they were raised, you would of course believe much like they did.  Lee, and men like him, never heard a legal sermon against slavery, never read a legal book that contradicted slavery as being from God.  We seem to forget that now.

We all know, and would agree, that power corrupts.  Well, slavery was an astonishing power, and it corrupted the entire system of government and religion.

Books against slavery were banned, of course, ships were searched regularly for “contraband” — meaning books and pamphlets against slavery.  Preachers could not even own books against slavery — or they too were subject to not only arrest, but torture as well.

Stopping free religious speech corrupted everything. With religion unable to fill its moral role, unable to challenge evil, there was no power to stop slavery.  Religion became SUPPORTIVE of not just slavery, but even supported the torture of slaves.

A Southern “best-seller” was Slavery is Ordained of God by Pastor Ross.

The Bible, it said, condoned not only slavery, but the torture of slaves.  You can beat a slave woman to death — as long as she doesn’t die the same day you beat her. If she lives a day or two, and then dies from her injures, that’s fine.

If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property. (Exodus 21:20-21)

The Bible also implies that slave women must submit to the master’s sexual demands.  This is another scripture widely known at the time — but never mentioned now.

And remember, no one could preach otherwise.  There were very strong scriptural arguments against slavery — but such arguments were outlawed.

It was not always that way. Up to 1820, there were more anti-slavery publications in the South than in the North! But, as slavery grew, so did the threat of rebellion and the dangers of runaway slaves.  So slave owners, who took virtual control of all Southern governments, and most of the federal goverment, passed laws outlawing all speech and writing that was against slavery.

If you preached to Blacks, you had to have a special license from the government — and you had to agree only to preach obedience.

So slave owners were eager to “give the slave religion” because the only religion slaves could legally hear about was for total and absolute obedience — even to the violent, sadistic, and sexually perverse slave owners.

When you hear of Lee or Jackson giving their slaves “religious education” — as if it were out of the goodness of the master’s heart — this is what they were teaching.

So the power of religion was only used one way — to enforce slavery.  It was not legal or possible for it to be used to oppose slavery.

Most of us in the 21st century assume that our ancestors had freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press in the South.  Not so.  From 1820 on, slave owners enacted very strong laws against free speech and free religion.  See the book The Other South by Carl Degler.

Lee thought God would never have allowed slavery to prosper if it was not the will of God.  Therefore, because it exists, and because slave owners were the wealthy class, it must be of God.  That is all he was taught, from childhood on. What else could he believe?

To Southern leaders, the proof of God’s wish for slavery was not only in the Bible, it was also in their own wealth — and in the rapid increase of slaves.  As the governor of Florida wrote, the slaves’ “rapid increase in numbers is the highest testimony of the humanity of the owners.”

If you were against slavery, you were “against God and civilization” — said the Texas Declaration of Causes.

Lee said God intended slavery to be painful and cruel to slaves — that is how you teach slaves, Lee wrote.  Pain was “necessary for their instruction as a race,” wrote Lee.

Davis said slavery was a “Divine Gift of God” and that “God delivered the Negro unto us.”

Slavery was “sealed by the blood of Christ.” The “great moral truth” that “God ordained slavery” was the very basis of the the Confederacy said its vice president, Stephens.

…The Confederacy was essentially a government by the religious leaders, for the religious leaders.  There was no distinction between the government and God — very much like radical Islam.  Robert E. Lee accused those who spoke against slavery of “trying to bring down the American Church.”…Yet for all this religious emphasis, virtually none of this is taught in our schools.  Why?

AFTER THE ASS KICKING — A DIFFERENT GOD

Notice, however, that once Lincoln, Sherman, Grant, and the Union Army won — not one Southern leader ever said such nonsense again.

Not Lee; not Davis; not Bedford Forrest. Not Debow. Not any preacher; not any civil war veteran.

Not the most extreme; not the most timid.  In fact, even private citizens, Southern newspapers, Southern books, thereafter never said God told them to enslave Blacks or anyone else.

One day their entire lives, their status, their reason for doing everything — was God telling them to enslave Blacks.  But then Lee surrenders — and they never mention that God again.

Even in their private letters, there was a drastic change.  No more mention of this God that ordained slavery.  No more insistence that they were doing the work of the Lord to spread slavery.  Yet this idea filled their private correspondence before the war.

No one said they had to give up their God of Slavery.  The only condition to end the war was for the South to stop fighting it, and recognize the government in Washington.

But Southerners en masse, without communication, dumped this God of Slavery. Totally, instantly, and forever.

It’s as if a light switch was flipped, and suddenly, no more God of slavery.  What they screamed from the rooftops one day, they did not even whisper in private the next.

LINCOLN’S LASTING IMPACT

Lincoln’s lasting effect is not just the 13th Amendment… his most lasting effect was forever exposing the God of Slavery as a fake….  It’s unthinkable that anyone anywhere will again use the Christian faith to justify slavery….

All other things may change — we may see the U.S. fall into disunion, we may see all kinds of havoc and discord.  Lincoln’s efforts to keep the U.S. together may only last 200 years or less.

But his efforts to discredit the God of slavery will very likely be enduring.

Read the full article at Death of the Southern God

by H.L. Mencken

WHAT the country lacks is obviously an Ingersoll. It is, indeed, a wonder that the chautauquas have never spewed one forth. Certainly there must be many a jitney Demosthenes on those lonely circuits who tires mightily of the standard balderdash, and longs with a great longing to throw off the white chemise of Service and give the rustics a genuinely hot show. The old game, I sus­pect, is beginning to play out, even in the Bible Belt. What made the rural Method­ists breathe hard and fast at the dawn of the century now only makes them shuffle their feet and cough behind their hands. I have spies in such lugubrious regions, and their reports all agree. The yokelry no longer turn out to the last valetudinarian to gape at colored pictures of the Holy Sepulchre and the Mount of Olives, or to hear a sweating rhetorician on “The Fu­ture of America.” They sicken of Service, Idealism and Vision. What ails them is that the village movie, the radio and the Ku Klux Klan have spoiled their old taste for simple, wholesome fare. They must have it hot now, or they don’t want it at all. The master-minds of Chautauqua try to meet the new demand, but cannot go all the way. They experiment gingerly with lectures on eugenics, the divorce evil, women in politics, and other such porno­graphic subjects, but that is not enough. The horticulturists and their wives and issue pant for something more dreadful and shocking–something comparable, on the plane of ideas, to the tarring and feath­ering of the village fancy woman on the plane of manly sports. Their cars lie back and they hearken expectantly, and even somewhat impatiently. What they long for is a bomb.

WHILE THE TERM “Religious Right” is one of the most frequently used terms in the political lexicon, notably since the rise of what is usually referred to as the Evangelical Churches, the Political Left is alive and well and a strong crutch for the Democratic Party… During the first term of the Eisenhower administration, the role of American churches in politics became a major issue and helped precipitate the campaign to defame and censure Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Joseph Brown Matthews (pictured) was an important witness for McCarthy, testifying before Congressional committees and had the advantage of personal experience as an organizer for communist front organizations before World War II. He took pains to explain that naïve and busy people of good will — including many clergymen — were often duped into signing petitions and lending their names to what appeared as ostensibly good causes,  unaware that the leading personalities in these organizations were fronting for the Communist Party.

In June 1953, Matthews was appointed as McCarthy’s research director and in July published an article called “Reds in our Churches“ in the [then] conservative American Mercury magazine. In it, Matthews referred to the Protestant clergy as “The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States.” The result was a public outrage at Matthews as well as “his boss,” Senator McCarthy. Time Magazine led the charge against Matthews and what it called “this astounding and inherently uncheckable statement.”

Reds in Our Churches

His authorship of the controversial article “Reds in Our Churches “exposed sophisticated communist manipulation to promote religious dissension in the United States. McCarthy’s critics seized the opportunity to label his efforts as a “Crusade against all Protestant ministers,” a view that Matthew certainly had not intended.  In his Mercury article, he specifically pointed out that the great majority of all clergy in America were loyal but that a highly visible minority operating under the guise of “social justice” lent the support of the Religious Left to a variety of “liberal” causes. Exaggerated and inaccurate commentaries about his intentions were used to get many U.S. congressmen to lend support to censure of McCarthy as an extremist.

J. B. Matthews was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1894 and attended Asbury College. He became a Methodist missionary in Java after which he returned to the United States and studied in several different seminaries. He then joined the faculty of Scarritt, a Methodist training college in Nashville, Tennessee where he became the center of a “scandal” due to the fact that he had held an interracial party at his home where Whites and Negroes had danced together. He was a brilliant linguist, but as a missionary, his sympathy for Indonesian nationalists made him unpopular with the Dutch administration in the islands and the executives of his own mission. In spite of this background, which would certainly be labeled as “liberal” today, Matthews was pilloried in the press as “a McCarthyite” following his article in the Mercury.

After his tour of missionary work, Matthews settled in New York City where he became an “avowed Socialist” and the executive secretary of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. He wrote that “The policy of a united front with Communism was the way to end the war,” and, due to the popularity of these views with the Roosevelt administration, he was chosen as the first head of the American League Against War and Fascism.

He later would label this organization and his own participation in it as “probably the most successful ‘front’ ever organized by the American Communists.” He wrote a book, Partners in Plunder, in which he attacked several of the mainline Protestant Churches — notably the Episcopal and Presbyterian denominations — as being in the pocket of millionaires J. Pierpont Morgan and Andrew Mellon respectively.

Matthews was regarded by many in the clergy at the end of World War II as the Communists’ No. 1 fellow traveler. A major change in his political outlook occurred soon afterward as a result of an industrial dispute and strike at Consumer’s Research, an organization where he had become a Director and Vice-President.  Employees of the firm went on strike, defying Matthews who had called upon them to reach a settlement. He became embittered, and convinced that the workers’ demands had been fomented by the Communist Party.  For Matthews, the workers’ grievances were a front and morally “they were mutineers.” He also was particularly aggrieved at what he regarded as the automatic “liberal” reactions of some of the same mainline churches he had previously attacked for being subservient to the very wealthy.  Matthews regarded himself as the victim of a Communist plot and went on to become the chief investigator for Martin Dies’ new House Committee on Un-American Activities.

If one wants to understand the censure motion against McCarthy in the Senate, much of it has to do with a backlash of influential politicians, predominantly belonging to the mainline Protestant churches, who were stung by what they perceived to be a wholly irresponsible and demagogic charge that these churches harbored potential traitors. White House operatives close to Eisenhower jumped on an opportunity to eliminate McCarthy for his embarrassing revelations about upper class appointees inherited from the previous Democratic administrations with dubious links to the USSR and the Communist Party that Eisenhower had seen fit to retain.

McCarthy, falsely accused by the Left of anti-Semitism

McCarthy, falsely accused by the Left of anti-Semitism, had taken the lead in demanding to know why the Voice of America had cancelled its Hebrew language broadcasts at precisely the time when anti-Semitism was at the top of Stalin’s agenda and the “doctor’s plot” in the USSR and Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia had pointed the finger at “subversive Jews” within the Communist bloc who had been charged with links to American imperialism….

It is necessary to take a brief detour into the increasingly leftward tilt of the Religious Left among mainline Protestant denominations (The Death of Protestant America by Joseph Botturn in FIRST THINGS, August/September, 2008), and the career of Senator Joe McCarthy to really understand the irrational behavior of so many American Jews, as part of the Religious Left, who court their enemies and spurn their friends and has passed on from one generation to the next since 1932.

Contrary to almost universal opinion among the so called “enlightened” supporters of the American Jewish Left, Senator McCarthy evinced no anti-Semitism whatsoever throughout his career. Their vilification of him is a classic example of “guilt by association,” the same charge ‘liberals’ continually hurl at detractors of Obama. Among Irish-American Catholics who were profoundly anti-Communist and therefore supporters of McCarthy and his role in the Army hearings, there were undoubtedly some anti-Semites incensed at what seemed to them as the preponderant presence of many Jews among Democrats and those who espoused a militant anti-anti-Communism. The American Jewish liberal establishment fell prey to this guilt by association and in 1954 the Conference of American Jewish Rabbis condemned McCarthy and “unanimously” called for him to be stripped of his committee chairmanship.

McCarthy’s close associates and advisers were Jewish — Roy Cohn, G. David Schine, Alfred Kohlberg and columnist George Sokolsky. McCarthy’s investigation aimed toward exposing communists and their sympathizers did not single out Jews. No anti-Semitic statement or act has ever been alleged to have been committed by Senator McCarthy. Much of the anti-McCarthy sentiment that resulted in his being censured by the Senate and President Eisenhower had to do with his revelation that among the most prominent subversives his research correctly uncovered, were a high percentage of major figures who were appointees of the Roosevelt and Truman administration and were arch-WASPS — with Ivy League educations and representing some of the most elite families at the top end of American society, including several notable Protestant clergy of the mainline churches.

McCarthy’s attack on Left-wing activists

Jews were not involved at all in this controversy but many had been upset at the sight of Jewish writers, film producers and directors who had also appeared before the House un-American Activities Committee and easily believed that McCarthy’s anti-Communism had run amuck and defamed American Jews as a group as well as the Protestant clergy. It is simply impossible for many liberal Jews today to accept that there was more than a grain of truth in McCarthy’s attack on Left-wing activists (in the same vein as the charges against Reverend Wright and Father Pfleger today) who hid behind their clerical collars, nor can many of these same Jews believe that there was considerable prejudice against McCarthy by refined, wealthy and polished Ivy League types in Congress and the White House — for his Catholicism, Irish-Midwestern background, frequent grandstanding, boorish behavior, and hard drinking….

The aftermath of the Matthews incident still casts a long shadow over American politics. The Religious Left today, as then, is so determined to support what it perceives as the pursuit of “social justice” that it has often lent support to those whom it automatically regards as the “oppressed and downtrodden” — whether illegal immigrants who defy the law and even pro-Jihadi Muslims anxious to win additional privileges and special considerations under the guise of tolerance.

Read the full article at Canada Free Press

A CHRISTIAN PREACHER in Gainesville, Florida wants to burn Korans, citing the ninth anniversary of 9/11. Muslims around the world are upset and some are taking to the streets to demonstrate their anger that anyone would want to burn what they consider the word of God.

From the start of the Abrahamic “revealed” religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, violence has been a key factor promoted by all three of them. For example, Numbers 31:15-18 has Moses instructing the Israeli army, “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the female children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” This repulsive instruction to murder all the little boys and the women who were not virgins and to keep all the virgins for themselves is even worse than what is being reported out of the Congo, of using rape as a weapon. And to make it even worse, in verse 31 the priest Eleazar claims this order Moses gave originated with God. As the Deist Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason, “Is it because ye are sunk in the cruelty of superstition, or feel no interest in the honor of your Creator, that ye listen to the horrid tales of the Bible, or hear them with callous indifference?”

Christianity has shown through the Inquisition, the 30 Years War, ad nauseam, that violence against those who disagree with them is their chosen path whenever possible. Due to their lack of real power in secular governments, the last person they were able to murder via the Inquisition was the Deist, Cayetano Ripoll. They murdered Ripoll for his Deism.

Islam’s “holy” book, the Koran, also contains disgusting calls to violence but seems less centered on murdering “little ones” than the Bible is. For example, Surah 3:151 says, “We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve because they ascribe unto Allah partners, for which no warrant hath been revealed. Their habitation is the Fire, and hapless the abode of the wrong-doers.” Surah 9:5 says, “Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.” There are many other instructions in the Koran to wage war against nonbelievers.

The reason the Abrahamic “revealed” religions all need to resort to violence whenever possible to deal with nonbelievers is due to the incredible lack of God-given reason in all of them. They can’t stand the application of God-given reason on their doctrines and false claims to having received divine revelations. Even the celebrated Christian classic by C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, falls flat on its face when confronted with reason.

If the Gainesville, Florida Christians could defend the claims of Christianity and their Bible, they would not burn the Koran, they would debate it. However, debating the Koran would open up their Bible to debate. There is no way to defend either the Koran or the Bible in a way which satisfies our God-given reason.

God Gave Us Reason, Not Religion

Read the rest at this link.

Illustration: Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan (The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 9, 1925)

ON THE EVE of the great contest Dayton is full of sickening surges and tremors of doubt. Five or six weeks ago, when the infidel Scopes was first laid by the heels, there was no uncertainty in all this smiling valley. The town boomers leaped to the assault as one man. Here was an unexampled, almost a miraculous chance to get Dayton upon the front pages, to make it talked about, to put it upon the map. But how now?

Today, with the curtain barely rung up and the worst buffooneries to come, it is obvious to even town boomers that getting upon the map, like patriotism, is not enough. The getting there must be managed discreetly, adroitly, with careful regard to psychological niceties. The boomers of Dayton, alas, had no skill at such things, and the experts they called in were all quacks. The result now turns the communal liver to water. Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke.

I have been attending the permanent town meeting that goes on in Robinson’s drug store, trying to find out what the town optimists have saved from the wreck. All I can find is a sort of mystical confidence that God will somehow come to the rescue to reward His old and faithful partisans as they deserve – that good will flow eventually out of what now seems to be heavily evil. More specifically, it is believed that settlers will be attracted to the town as to some refuge from the atheism of the great urban Sodoms and Gomorrahs.

But will these refugees bring any money with them? Will they buy lots and build houses, Will they light the fires of the cold and silent blast furnace down the railroad tracks? On these points, I regret to report, optimism has to call in theology to aid it. Prayer can accomplish a lot. It can cure diabetes, find lost pocketbooks and restrain husbands from beating their wives. But is prayer made any more efficacious by giving a circus first? Coming to this thought, Dayton begins to sweat.

The town, I confess, greatly surprised me. I expected to find a squalid Southern village, with darkies snoozing on the horse-blocks, pigs rooting under the houses and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I found was a country town full of charm and even beauty – a somewhat smallish but nevertheless very attractive Westminster or Belair.

The houses are surrounded by pretty gardens, with cool green lawns and stately trees. The two chief streets are paved from curb to curb. The stores carry good stocks and have a metropolitan air, especially the drug, book, magazine, sporting goods and soda-water emporium of the estimable Robinson. A few of the town ancients still affect galluses and string ties, but the younger bucks are very nattily turned out. Scopes himself, even in his shirt sleeves, would fit into any college campus in America save that of Harvard alone.

Nor is there any evidence in the town of that poisonous spirit which usually shows itself when Christian men gather to defend the great doctrine of their faith. I have heard absolutely no whisper that Scopes is in the pay of the Jesuits, or that the whisky trust is backing him, or that he is egged on by the Jews who manufacture lascivious moving pictures. On the contrary, the Evolutionists and the Anti-Evolutionists seem to be on the best of terms, and it is hard in a group to distinguish one from another.

The basic issues of the case, indeed, seem to be very little discussed at Dayton. What interests everyone is its mere strategy. By what device, precisely, will Bryan trim old Clarence Darrow? Will he do it gently and with every delicacy of forensics, or will he wade in on high gear and make a swift butchery of it? For no one here seems to doubt that Bryan will win – that is, if the bout goes to a finish. What worries the town is the fear that some diabolical higher power will intervene on Darrow’s side – that is, before Bryan heaves him through the ropes.

The lack of Christian heat that I have mentioned is probably due in part to the fact that the fundamentalists are in overwhelming majority as far as the eye can reach – according to most local statisticians, in a majority of at least nine-tenths. There are, in fact, only two downright infidels in all Rhea county, and one of them is charitably assumed to be a bit balmy. The other, a yokel roosting far back in the hills, is probably simply a poet got into the wrong pew. The town account of him is to the effect that he professes to regard death as a beautiful adventure.

When the local ecclesiastics begin alarming the peasantry with word pictures of the last sad scene, and sulphurous fumes begin to choke even Unitarians, this skeptical rustic comes forward with his argument that it is foolish to be afraid of what one knows so little about – that, after all, there is no more genuine evidence that anyone will ever go to hell than there is that the Volstead act will ever be enforced.

Such blasphemous ideas naturally cause talk in a Baptist community, but both of the infidels are unmolested. Rhea county, in fact, is proud of its tolerance, and apparently with good reason. The Klan has never got a foothold here, though it rages everywhere else in Tennessee. When the first kleagles came in they got the cold shoulder, and pretty soon they gave up the county as hopeless. It is run today not by anonymous daredevils in white nightshirts, but by well-heeled Free-masons in decorous white aprons. In Dayton alone there are sixty thirty-second-degree Masons – an immense quota for so small a town. They believe in keeping the peace, and so even the stray Catholics of the town are treated politely, though everyone naturally regrets they are required to report to the Pope once a week.

It is probably this unusual tolerance, and not any extraordinary passion for the integrity of Genesis, that has made Dayton the scene of a celebrated case, and got its name upon the front pages, and caused its forward-looking men to begin to wonder uneasily if all advertising is really good advertising. The trial of Scopes is possible here simply because it can be carried on here without heat – because no one will lose any sleep even if the devil comes to the aid of Darrow and Malone, and Bryan gets a mauling. The local intelligentsia venerate Bryan as a Christian, but it was not as a Christian that they called him in, but as one adept at attracting the newspaper boys – in brief, as a showman. As I have said, they now begin to mistrust the show, but they still believe that he will make a good one, win or lose.

Elsewhere, North or South, the combat would become bitter. Here it retains the lofty qualities of the duello. I gather the notion, indeed, that the gentlemen who are most active in promoting it are precisely the most lacking in hot conviction – that it is, in its local aspects, rather a joust between neutrals than a battle between passionate believers. Is it a mere coincidence that the town clergy have been very carefully kept out of it? There are several Baptist brothers here of such powerful gifts that when they begin belaboring sinners the very rats of the alleys flee to the hills. They preach dreadfully. But they are not heard from today. By some process to me unknown they have been induced to shut up – a far harder business, I venture, than knocking out a lion with a sandbag. But the sixty thirty-second degree Masons of Dayton have somehow achieved it.

Thus the battle joins and the good red sun shines down. Dayton lies in a fat and luxuriant valley. The bottoms are green with corn, pumpkins and young orchards and the hills are full of reliable moonshiners, all save one of them Christian men. We are not in the South here, but hanging on to the North. Very little cotton is grown in the valley. The people in politics are Republicans and put Coolidge next to Lincoln and John Wesley. The fences are in good repair. The roads are smooth and hard. The scene is set for a high-toned and even somewhat swagger combat. When it is over all the participants save Bryan will shake hands.

To be continued

I

SUCH OBSCENITIES as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone – that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized – though I should not like to be put to giving names – but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons and usufructs modern medicine may offer – that is, provided he is too poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of the air.

On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man’s possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.

II

The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders – that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous – by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law.

Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala often attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states. Their followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the pack is on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their puissance cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to the mob as surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely the mob’s hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the level of their comprehension is of the devil. A glass of wine delights civilized men; they themselves, drinking it, would get drunk. Ergo, wine must be prohibited. The hypothesis of evolution is credited by all men of education; they themselves can’t understand it. Ergo, its teaching must be put down.

This simple fact explains such phenomena as the Tennessee buffoonery. Nothing else can. We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as of something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive – and a few are enough to carry on.

III

The inferior man’s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex – because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged – and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple – and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him.

The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.

Politics and the fine arts repeat the story. The issues that the former throw up are often so complex that, in the present state of human knowledge, they must remain impenetrable, even to the most enlightened men. How much easier to follow a mountebank with a shibboleth – a Coolidge, a Wilson or a Roosevelt! The arts, like the sciences, demand special training, often very difficult. But in jazz there are simple rhythms, comprehensible even to savages.

IV

What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera – a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.

That is why Beethoven survives. Of the 110,000,000 so-called human beings who now live in the United States, flogged and crazed by Coolidge, Rotary, the Ku Klux and the newspapers, it is probable that at least 108,000,000 have never heard of him at all. To these immortals, made in God’s image, one of the greatest artists the human race has ever produced is not even a name. So far as they are concerned he might as well have died at birth. The gorgeous and incomparable beauties that he created are nothing to them. They get no value out of the fact that he existed. They are completely unaware of what he did in the world, and would not be interested if they were told.

The fact saves good Ludwig’s bacon. His music survives because it lies outside the plane of the popular apprehension, like the colors beyond violet or the concept of honor. If it could be brought within range, it would at once arouse hostility. Its complexity would challenge; its lace of moral purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement to put it down, and Baptist clergymen would range the land denouncing it, and in the end some poor musician, taken in the un-American act of playing it, would be put on trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers, and railroaded to the calaboose.

To be continued

Deism was the religion of America’s Founding Fathers, and their wisdom in embracing it should not be forgotten today.

DEISM VS. REVEALED RELIGION

REVELATION, or revealed religion, is defined in Webster’s New World Dictionary as: “God’s disclosure to man of Himself.” This should read, “God’s alleged disclosure to man of himself.” For unless God reveals to each of us individually that a particular religion is truly His disclosure to us of Himself, then, by believing that religion, we are not taking His word for it, but we are instead putting our belief in the person or institution telling us it is so. This is what we are doing when we believe in any revealed religion, and that’s all Christianity is. It’s a revealed religion like many others such as Islam and Judaism. Revealed religion gets dangerous however, when it crosses over the line into politics. This is the admitted goal of the Christian Coalition. God allegedly revealed to Pat Robertson and his Coalition, that He wants them to take over America and eventually the world with “His Word,” so the laws of the nations will mirror the laws in the Bible, which, if you know what’s in the Bible, is terrifying. This, too, is what the Ayatollah’s goal was, only his “revealed word of God” was the Koran, an other revelation. Are we to believe Pat when he says the Bible is revelation of God’s Word?…

Thomas Paine, the man who elucidated Deism for the masses and who is the primary personal impetus for  the World Union of Deists, wrote:

“The Calvinist, who damns children of a span long to hell to burn forever for the glory of God (and this is called Christianity), and the Universalist who preaches that all shall be saved and none shall be damned (and this also is called Christianity), boasts alike of their holy [reveled] religion and their Christian faith.

“Something more therefore is necessary than mere cry and wholesale assertion, and that something is TRUTH; and as inquiry is the road to truth, he that is opposed to inquiry is not a friend to truth. “The God of truth is not the God of fable; when, therefore, any book is introduced into the world as the Word of God, and made a groundwork for religion, it ought to be scrutinized more than other books to see if it bear evidence of being what it is called. Our reverence to God demands that we do this, lest we ascribe to God what is not His, and our duty to ourselves demands it lest we take fable for fact, and rest our hope of salvation on a false foundation.

“It is not our calling a book holy that makes it so, any more than our calling a religion holy that entitles it to the name. Inquiry therefore is necessary in order to arrive at truth. But inquiry must have some principle to proceed on, some standard to judge by, superior to human authority.

“When we survey the works of creation, the revolutions of the planetary system, and the whole economy of what is called nature, which is no other than the laws the Creator has prescribed to matter, we see unerring order and universal harmony reigning throughout the whole. No one part contradicts another. The sun does not run against the moon, nor the moon against the sun, nor the planets against each other. Everything keeps its appointed time and place.

“This harmony in the works of God is so obvious, that the farmer of the field, though he cannot calculate eclipses, is as sensible of it as the philosophical astronomer. He sees the God of order in every part of the visible universe.”

“Here, then, is the standard to which everything must be brought that pretends to be the work or Word of God, and by this standard it must be judged, independently of anything and everything that man can say or do. His opinion is like a feather in the scale compared with the standard that God Himself has set up.”

Since we know we did not create the creation or ourselves, yet we and the creation do exist, it is logical to believe that God, or an Eternal Cause or Creator created us. This belief has absolutely nothing to do with revealed religion. In fact, all the absurdities of revealed religion are responsible for many sincere thinking people to reject and close their minds to natural religion/Deism. The priests, ministers, and rabbis need to suppress, or at least complicate, the pure and simple belief and realization of Deism for their own job security. And the power elites have no use for Deism because they can’t use Deism to “inspire” mankind to wage war against itself for the elitists’ own selfish purposes. In fact, Deism, by focusing on the first creed of all religions, belief in God, could frustrate the war/money machine permanently.

The following quote from Thomas Jefferson points us in a direction free of the confusion of priest-craft and revealed religion:

“I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the universe, in its parts, general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces; the structure of the Earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere; animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles; insects, mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth; the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe, that there is in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a Fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their Preserver and Regulator, while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regeneration into new and other forms. We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power, to maintain the universe in its course and order.”

Because Deism is based on nature, the laws of nature, and the creation, it is a natural religion as opposed to revealed or man-made artificial religion.

DEISM VS. ATHEISM

In George H. Smith’s book ATHEISM – THE CASE AGAINST GOD, it is stated that rationality will not lead to God. That instead, God can only be brought about by rationalization. The book describes rationality as first finding evidence, then arriving at the idea, like Newton seeing the apple fall to the ground and then discovering the law of gravity. It then describes rationalization as first accepting an idea and then searching for evidence to support it, like someone inventing the idea of God and then saying God created the universe. Deism says it is rationality and reason that leads to God. To the Deist, the evidence is the creation and the idea of what brought about the evidence is the Creator. There is absolutely nothing known to man that created itself. For example, if someone shows us a computer, and tells us that all the individual parts that make up the computer just came about by chance, that they somehow just formed into a perfectly working computer system all by themselves, we would be foolish to believe that person. Reason, if we use it, won’t let us believe a statement like that. Likewise, if someone tells us the ever growing creation and its perfect order “happened” by pure chance, we are under no obligation to believe them. From our own experience we know everything created has a creator. Why then should the creation itself be different? There is, however, one quality the creation has that makes leaving its existence to chance even more remote. That quality is motion.

Turning again to Thomas Paine we find the following pertinent observation he made regarding atheism in a speech to the Society of Theophilanthropists in Paris, France, shortly after the French Revolution:

“In the first place, admitting matter to have properties, as we see it has, the question still remains, how came matter by those properties? To this they will answer, that matter possessed those properties eternally. This is not solution, but assertion; and to deny it is as impossible of proof as to assert it.

“It is then necessary to go further; and therefore I say – if there exist a circumstance that is not a property of matter, and without which the universe, or to speak in a limited degree, the solar system composed of planets and a sun, could not exist a moment, all the arguments of atheism, drawn from properties of matter, and applied to account for the universe, will be overthrown, and the existence of a superior cause, or that which man calls God, becomes discoverable, as is before said, by natural philosophy.

“I go now to show that such a circumstance exists, and what it is.

“The universe is composed of matter, and, as a system, is sustained by motion. Motion is not a property of matter, and without this motion, the solar system could not exist. Were motion a property of matter, that undiscovered and undiscoverable thing called perpetual motion would establish itself.

“It is because motion is not a property of matter, that perpetual motion is an impossibility in the hand of every being but that of the Creator of motion. When the pretenders to atheism can produce perpetual motion, and not till then, they may expect to be credited.

“The natural state of matter, as to place, is a state of rest. Motion, or change of place, is the effect of an external cause acting upon matter. As to that faculty of matter that is called gravitation, it is the influence which two or more bodies have reciprocally on each other to unite and be at rest. Everything which has hitherto been discovered, with respect to the motion of the planets in the system, relates only to the laws by which motion acts, and not to the cause of motion.

“Gravitation, so far from being the cause of motion to the planets that compose the solar system, would be the destruction of the solar system, were revolutionary motion to cease; for as the action of spinning upholds a top, the revolutionary motion upholds the planets in their orbits, and prevents them from gravitating and forming one mass with the sun. In one sense of the word, philosophy knows, and atheism says, that matter is in perpetual motion.

“But the motion here meant refers to the state of matter, and that only on the surface of the Earth. It is either decomposition, which is continually destroying the form of bodies of matter, or recomposition, which renews that matter in the same or another form, as the decomposition of animal or vegetable substances enters into the composition of other bodies.

“But the motion that upholds the solar system, is of an entirely different kind, and is not a property of matter. It operates also to an entirely different effect. It operates to perpetual preservation, and to prevent any change in the state of the system.

“Giving then to matter all the properties which philosophy knows it has, or all that atheism ascribes to it, and can prove, and even supposing matter to be eternal, it will not account for the system of the universe, or of the solar system, because it will not account for motion, and it is motion that preserves it.

“When, therefore, we discover a circumstance of such immense importance, that without it the universe could not exist, and for which neither matter, nor any nor all the properties can account, we are by necessity forced into the rational conformable belief of the existence of a cause superior to matter, and that cause man calls GOD.

“As to that which is called nature, it is no other than the laws by which motion and action of every kind, with respect to unintelligible matter, are regulated. And when we speak of looking through nature up to nature’s God, we speak philosophically the same rational language as when we speak of looking through human laws up to the power that ordained them.

“God is the power of first cause, nature is the law, and matter is the subject acted upon.”

In addition to motion acting as a perpetual preserver, it also acts as a continual source for the universe’s constant expansion. Every second the universe is expanding at the speed of light (186,282 miles per second). According to Astronomy Magazine, 2/14/92, page 49, “Astronomers presently believe there isn’t enough mass in the universe, even with dark matter, to stop its expansion.” This exciting realization should fill everyone with unlimited appreciation when we realize we are a part of this amazing and spectacular universe! The Creator is immeasurably generous!

In ATHEISM – THE CASE AGAINST GOD, the author writes, ” . . .when I claim not to believe in a god, I mean that I do not believe in anything “above” or “beyond” the natural, knowable universe.” Deism teaches that the Creator is knowable and discoverable through the creation itself. It is very understandable how people could be turned off by man-made religions and superstitions with their bombings and financial beg-a-thons, and confuse artificial or revealed religion with God. However, the atheist attitude of accepting things simply as not knowable is dangerous to the progress of humanity. Many things were not knowable in the past that are knowable today. At one time Europeans believed it was impossible to know what was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean: but they were wrong. As we learn more about the sciences, we are learning more about the Power that put those principles in place. An eternal Being, as Thomas Paine said, “whose power is equal to His will.”

DEISM AND DEATH

Revealed religions all teach different opinions on death. Even the different denominations of the same umbrella religion preach different dogmas. A good example is Christianity. Some of the Christian denominations say an essential qualification to get into heaven (of course they all agree dying is a key requirement) is that you have to be baptized “by submersion,” while others say just a “sprinkling” is fine. Which is it? Sprinkling or submersion??

The fear of death is a big motivator for many people to support a particular religion. We all know, without the possibility of doubt, that a day will come for absolutely all of us when we will die. This realization brings fear to many people. It also brings money to religious charlatans who aren’t ashamed to prey on this fear. In fact, it can be truthfully said that the revealed religions of the world all use the fear of death to put cash in their own pockets.

Contrary to this self-serving attitude of the revealed religions, Deism teaches that no one knows for certain what happens after death, if anything at all. It teaches that, based on the creation we are all a part of, we shouldn’t worry about it. That instead, we should be concerned for the present and future of planet Earth and humanity. That we should work hard to improve life and also enjoy it here and now. Why should we worry about death when we have so much to do in life? And do we think so little of Nature’s God that we don’t trust Him with our future? Ethan Allen, a Deist from America’s Revolutionary War era, wrote, “Ungrateful and foolish it must be for rational beings in the possession of existence, and surrounded with a kind and almighty Providence, to distrust the author thereof concerning their futurity, because they cannot comprehend the mode or manner of their succeeding and progressive existence.”

Another Deist that had interesting thoughts on death was Benjamin Franklin. One quote of Franklin’s was, “Take courage mortal, death cannot banish you from the universe.”

Ben Franklin’s epitaph on himself provides a look at his belief that our life on earth is not the beginning and end of a personality. He, like Ethan Allen above, seems to have believed that the state of our spirits or souls is of an evolutionary nature. Franklin’s epitaph reads, “The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding, lies here, food for worms. But the work shall not be lost; for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the Author.”

In Thomas Paine’s The Age Of Reason, we read on pages 177 and 178 the following: “But all other arguments apart, the consciousness of existence is the only conceivable idea we have of another life, and the continuance of that consciousness is immortality. The consciousness of existence, of the knowing that we exist, is not necessarily confined to the same form, nor to the same matter, even in this life.

“We have not in all cases the same form, nor in any case the same matter that composed our bodies twenty or thirty years ago; and yet we are conscious of being the same persons. . .

“That the consciousness of existence is not dependent on the same form or the same matter is demonstrated to our senses in the works of the creation, as far as our senses are capable of receiving that demonstration. A very numerous part of the animal creation preaches to us, far better than Paul, the belief of a life hereafter. Their little life resembles an Earth and a heaven – a present and a future state, and comprises, if it may be so expressed, immortality in miniature.

“The most beautiful parts of the creation to our eye are the winged insects, and they are not so originally. They acquire that form and that inimitable brilliancy by progressive changes. The slow and creeping caterpillar-worm of today passes in a few days to a torpid figure and a state resembling death; and in the next change comes forth in all the miniature magnificence of life, a splendid butterfly.”

In an essay Mr. Paine wrote the following short and to the point passage:

“I consider myself in the hands of my Creator, and that he will dispose of me after this life consistently with His justice and goodness. I leave all these matters to Him, as my Creator and friend, and I hold it to be presumption in man to make an article of faith as to what the Creator will do with us hereafter.”

Read the original article at Deism.com