The Necessity of Atheism Part 8

Anthony, and a mult.i.tude of other saints, the maladies which bear their names.

"In the year 1585, in the town of Embrun, France, the male generative organ of St. Foutin was greatly revered. A jar was placed beneath his emblem to catch the wine with which it was generally anointed; the wine was left to sour, and then it was known as the 'Holy Vinegar.' The women drank it in order to be blessed with children." (_Joseph Lewis, "Voltaire."_)

Enormous revenues flowed into various monasteries and churches in all parts of Europe from relics noted for their healing powers. The ecclesiastics perceived that the physician would interfere with these revenues and gifts of the shrines, and deemed it the will of G.o.d to persecute and condemn physicians. St. Ambrose declared, "The precepts of medicine are contrary to celestial science, watching and prayer." St.

Augustine declared, "All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to these demons, chiefly do they torment fresh baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless, new-born babe." Gregory of n.a.z.ianzus declared that bodily pains are provoked by demons, and that medicines are useless, but that they are often cured by the laying on of consecrated hands. St.

Niles and St. Gregory of Tours gave examples to show the sinfulness of resorting to medicine instead of trusting to the intercession of saints.

Even as late as 1517, Pope Leo X, for a consideration, issued tickets bearing a cross and the following inscription, "This cross measured forty times makes the height of Christ in His humanity. He who kisses it is preserved for seven days from falling sickness, apoplexy, and sudden death."

The Council of Le Mons, in 1248, forbade monks to engage in surgery. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the Council of Rheims forbade monks to study medicine; and shortly after the middle of the twelfth century, Pope Alexander III forbade monks to study or practice medicine.

In the thirteenth century, the Dominican Order forbade all ecclesiastics to have any connection with medicine; and when we remember that the policy of the Church had made it impossible for any learned man to enter any other profession, the only resource left for a scholar was the Church; so effectively did the Church kill all scientific endeavors.

The Reformation made no sudden change in the sacred theory of medicine.

The Church of England accepted the doctrine of "royal touch," and in a prayer book of that period is found a service provided for that occasion which states that "They (the kings), shall lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover."

Pestilences were taught to be punishments inflicted by G.o.d on society for its shortcomings. Modern man has no conception of the ravages of infections and epidemics that swept over Europe in the Middle Ages, and to a lesser extent, until less than fifty years ago. Tacitus described the plague in Rome thus: "Houses were filled with dead bodies, and the streets with funerals.... Alike, slaves and plebeians were suddenly taken off amidst lamentations of their wives and children, who, while they mourned the dead, were themselves seized with the disease, and, peris.h.i.+ng, were burned on the same funeral pyre."

In 80 A.D. an epidemic swept Rome causing 10,000 deaths daily. During the ages until the present century, wave after wave of pestilence swept over Europe. The plague in 1384 A.D. took no less than 60 million lives.

It was estimated that twenty-five per cent. of the population of the then known world perished in that one epidemic. Between 1601 and 1603, 127,000 died of the plague in Moscow. The epidemic of 1630 took 500,000 lives in the Venetian republic; Milan alone lost 88,000. In 1605, London lost 69,000; 70,000 died in Vienna in 1679; the following year Prague lost 83,000, all from this disease. The horrors of such visitations are beyond description, and can scarcely be imagined. For a time, attempts were made to collect and bury the dead. Wagons would pa.s.s through the streets at night collecting the victims. The drivers, benumbed with drink, frequently failed to ascertain whether death had occurred. Living patients, desperately ill, were piled into the wagons with corpses beneath, about, and on them. These gruesome loads were dumped pell-mell into huge pits hastily dug for the purpose. In some instances, living victims crawled out of these pits and survived to tell the tale. As the epidemics progressed, attempts to dispose of the dead were abandoned.

Putrefying bodies were everywhere. Whole cities were left desolate, the few survivors having fled.

It is not to be wondered at that such epidemics swept over Europe when it was taught that these were the vengeance of G.o.d. How could it be discovered that the real causes were the crowded conditions and bad sanitation of the cities, the squalor, the misrule, and gross immorality occasioned by the Holy Wars, when hordes of soldier-bandits plagued the countryside? The devout continued to live in their squalor, to trust in the Lord, and to die by the millions.

In all pestilences down to the present time, the Church authorities, instead of aiding and devising sanitary measures, have preached the necessity of immediate atonement for offenses against the Almighty. The chief cause of the immense sacrifice of lives in these plagues was of course the lack of hygienic precautions. But how could this be discovered when, for ages, living in filth was regarded by great numbers of holy men as an evidence of sanct.i.ty!

St. Hilarion lived his whole life long in utter physical uncleanliness.

St. Athanasius glorifies St. Anthony because he had never washed his feet. St. Abraham's most striking evidence of holiness was that for fifty years he washed neither his hands nor his feet; St. Sylvia never washed any part of her body save her fingers; St. Euphraxia belonged to a convent in which the nuns religiously abstained from bathing; St. Mary of Egypt was eminent for filthiness; St. Simeon Stylites was in this respect unspeakable--the least that can be said is that he lived in ordure and stench intolerable to his visitors. For century after century the idea prevailed that filthiness was akin to holiness.

Another stumblingblock hindering the beginnings of modern medicine and surgery, was the theory regarding the unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead. The dissection of the human body was prohibited since the injury to the body would prevent its resurrection on the Last Day. Andreas Vesalius was the pioneer in the movement for increased knowledge of anatomy, and in 1543, when his work appeared, he was condemned to death by the Inquisition as a magician. He escaped this fate by undertaking a pilgrimage to Jerusalem only to be s.h.i.+pwrecked on the Island of Zante when he attempted to return, and there died in misery and dest.i.tution.

In the year 1853, cholera, after having committed serious ravages in many parts of Europe, visited Scotland. It was evident to most thinking people that, due to the extreme poverty and squalor of most of the Scottish towns at that time, a great number of people would necessarily succ.u.mb to this disease unless stringent sanitary measures were inst.i.tuted immediately. Instead, the Scotch clergy proposed to combat this scourge with prayer and fasting, which would have lowered the resistance to this disease by producing physical exhaustion and mental depression. They proposed the ordering of a national fast day in which the people were to sit the whole day without nourishment in their churches and retire to their beds at night weeping and starved. Then it was hoped that the Deity would be propitiated, and the plague stayed. To give greater effect to this fast day, they called upon England to help them, and the Presbytery of Edinburgh dispatched a letter to the English minister, requesting information as to whether the queen would appoint a national fast day. The English minister, to his credit, advised the Presbytery of Edinburgh that it was better to cleanse than to fast, and cleanse they must swiftly or else, in spite of all prayers and fastings of a united but inactive nation, the cholera would devastate them.

There are today, in this twentieth century, two pestilences which could be wiped from the face of the earth. "There are two pestilences which thus unfortunately involve moral conceptions. They are the plagues of Syphilis and Gonorrhea. Against them medicine has developed methods of control. They could be eradicated, but as yet civilization has not advanced entirely beyond the ancient idea that disease is imposed by G.o.d as a measure of vengeance for our sins. It still rejects protection, when without it these plagues will continue to exact death and suffering on a scale which probably exceeds that of any one of the medieval plagues. Those who today look upon Syphilis and Gonorrhea as punishment for sin have not progressed beyond the ideas of medieval Europe.

"Ignorance and bigotry are the twin allies of the plagues of Syphilis and Gonorrhea. Medicine and civilization advance and regress together.

The conditions essential to advance are intellectual courage and a true love for humanity. It is as true today as always in the past that further advances or even the holding of what has already been won, depend upon the extent to which intellectual courage and humanity prevail against bigotry and obscurantism." (_Haggard, "Devils, Doctors, and Drugs."_)

As a result of the lack of control of these plagues there are in the world at the present moment thousands of children suffering from congenital syphilis who would never have been born but for the desire of Christians to see sinners punished. With regard to the spread of s.e.x knowledge, the clergy's att.i.tude is dangerous to human welfare. The artificial ignorance of s.e.x subjects which orthodox Christians attempt to enforce upon the young is extremely dangerous to mental and physical health. The young are much less likely to act wisely when they are ignorant, than when they are instructed.

These two venereal diseases are no more controlled under the moral standards of today than they were two centuries ago, and yet medical science offers for these diseases what it can offer for few others; both a prevention and a cure. And it is due to the ignorance and the bigotry of the theists that the spread of s.e.x knowledge is hampered so that a sane conception of s.e.x and the prevention of venereal disease does not eradicate these diseases. The theists have, therefore, without sense or justice, founded their morality on disease; neglecting the fact that all disease is immoral in the widest sense, since it is detrimental to the happiness of man, and that no one disease is more so than another. The morality of the body is health--not disease. So much for the actual facts and reality. In pa.s.sing to the theoretical, we again see the truth of the statement that religion is the last resort of human savagery.

To postulate that a supreme being is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving, and then to a.s.sume that he inflicts disease on his children as punishment for sin is a s.a.d.i.s.tic mental aberration. In his omniscience he full well knows beforehand what each of his children will do. He foreordains their sins and then punishes his children for sins that he wills them to commit. It is just as if a syphilitic father should punish his syphilitic child because the child has that congenital disease for which the father is responsible. If the theist insists that his deity is all that he claims him to be, then it is only logical that instead of man asking his G.o.d for forgiveness, what actually should be is that G.o.d should ask the forgiveness of man for his bungling and error.

Christianity has attempted from its inception to eradicate the s.e.xual instinct and in so doing has antagonized an instinct that is as fundamental as that of self-preservation. All it has accomplished is a distortion. The church, by claiming that it alone was privileged to regulate s.e.xual desires, has done one of two things to each of its adherents. It has either made him a hypocrite or driven him insane. Much of the insanity in this country could be overcome were religion and s.e.x permanently divorced; and an immediate amount of inestimable good could be accomplished when one considers that fifteen per cent of all mental disease is caused by syphilis.

Physical disease having been considered as a malicious trick of Satan, it was but natural that the disease of the mind was also attributed to satanic intervention. The conception that insanity was a brain disease, and that gentleness and kindness were necessary for its treatment, was throttled by Christian theology for fifteen centuries. Instead the ecclesiastic burdened humanity with a belief that madness was largely possession by the Devil. Hundreds of thousands of men and women were inflicted with tortures both physical and mental. It was not until 1792 that the great French physician Penel, and William Tuke in England, placed the treatment of mental disease on a rational and scientific basis. And this, in spite of such ecclesiastical attacks as were seen in the _Edinburgh Review_ of that period. These two men, Penel and Tuke, were the first acknowledged victors in a struggle of science for humanity which lasted nearly two thousand years.

The clergy resisted Jenner when he introduced vaccination, and yet the application of this measure of defense against disease has probably saved more lives than the total of all the lives lost in all wars. The clergy maintained that "Smallpox is a visitation from G.o.d, and originates in man, but Cowpox is produced by presumptious, impious men.

The former, heaven ordained, the latter is perhaps a daring and profane violation of our holy order."

In the seventeenth century, the Jesuit missionaries in South America learned from the natives the value of the so-called Peruvian Bark in the treatment of ague. In 1638, quinine, derived from this bark, was introduced into Europe as a cure for malaria. It was stigmatized as "an invention of the Devil." The ecclesiastical opposition to this drug was so strong that it was not introduced into England until 1653.

The medieval Christians saw in childbirth the result of a carnal sin to be expiated in pain as defined in Genesis. Accordingly the treatment given the child-bearing woman was vastly worse than the mere neglect among the primitive peoples. Her sufferings were augmented by the fact that she was no longer a primitive woman and child-bearing had become more difficult. In these "Ages of Faith" which could be better called the "Ages of Filth," nothing was done to overcome the enormous mortality of the mother and child at birth. Attempts, however, were made to form intra-uterine baptismal tubes by which the child, when it was locked by some ill chance in its mother's womb, could be baptized and its soul saved before the mother and child were left to die together. But nothing was done to save their lives. No greater crimes were ever committed in the name of civilization, religious faith, and smug ignorance than the sacrifice of the lives of countless mothers and children in the first fifteen centuries after Christ among civilized mankind.

Approaching our own time, we have the example of Dr. James Y. Simpson, professor of obstetrics at the University of Glasgow about 1850, first administering an anesthetic to alleviate the pain of childbirth. He was bitterly opposed by the clergy on the ground that it was impious to attempt to escape from the curse p.r.o.nounced against all women in Genesis. It was Dr. Simpson who, in defending this humanitarian practice, a.s.serted that opposition, particularly on theological grounds, had been presented against every humane innovation in the past.

When Paul Ehrlich, in 1910, announced his discovery of salvarsan for the treatment of syphilis, the clergy again were horror-struck that man should interfere with a visitation of the Lord.

The resistance to the spread of information concerning contraception, commonly known as birth control, is an example of the Church's dominance of government today; and yet this information is as vital to the welfare of humanity as is the control of cancer.

In 1926, our newspapers carried conspicuous headlines, "Episcopal Church Joins Catholic to Gag Birth Control"; four years later, 320 bishops of the Episcopal Church met in London, and by a majority of 3 to 1 voted in favor of contraception when "there is morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence." The bishops had by this time become well aware of the insistence of secular opinion towards this movement, and having done their best to prevent this progressive movement for the past one hundred years, they finally accepted defeat, proving once again that religion has never accepted anything that science has shown to be a fact or of benefit to humanity until it was compelled to do so to save its face.

The infallible Church, however, still persists in its opposition and in the Encyclical of Pope Pius XI, published in January, 1931, it is said, "The conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children. Those who, in exercising it, deliberately frustrate its natural power, and purpose, are against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious." So speaks the infallible Pope, but the great majority of physicians hold that there are few things more perilous to mental health, intellectual efficiency, moral equanimity, and physical well-being than prolonged denial of the s.e.x urge for the average, normal human being. Every physician can furnish numerous case histories to substantiate the statement that continual s.e.xual abstinence is prejudicial to the health and happiness of the man and woman, and is the causation of hundreds of semiderelicts and psychoneurotics.

Furthermore, the rising tide of insanity in this country would be stemmed were religion and s.e.x permanently divorced.

Today the modern clergy still endeavor to explain natural phenomena by supernatural theories, and while they do not a.s.sign preternatural powers to witches and demons, they yet persist in attempting to pervert facts of science, and delude themselves with faith in some supernatural force.

The clergy state that the physician cures disease through the mediation of G.o.d, the physician merely playing the part of the agent of G.o.d, through whom the real cure is effected. Is anything more ridiculous and at the same time more contradictory, than to suppose that an all-powerful G.o.d should have to appoint an intermediary to perform his work? And if it is only by G.o.d's will and aid that a cure takes place, then it follows that G.o.d must be willing for the individual to be cured; why in the name of reason, did He not prevent the initial step, the contracting of the disease? What a ma.s.s of suffering, of mental anguish might thus have been spared us! Thus, this omnipotent being either did not desire to spare us this misery and suffering, in which case he must surely be a monster incarnate; or, on the other hand, he is powerless to halt it, and thus cannot be omnipotent.

While the clergy maintain that a cure is only effected by G.o.d's will, the physician knows otherwise. The physician accomplishes his cures alone, and definitely cures and saves the lives of human beings by his own skill, intelligence, and application of methods which have been developed by the exercise of secular knowledge, not theological nonsense. When man is so unfortunate as to contract an infection of the appendix, and that inflammation succeeds to pus-formation so that this diseased and non-essential part of the human anatomy is on the point of rupturing and causing a fatal peritonitis, it is not by G.o.d's will and intervention that a cure is effected, but by the intervention of the surgeon who removes the diseased part. If man depended upon G.o.d's will to save him, as he did in the past, the appendix would rupture, peritonitis would set in, and despite prayers and sacrificial offerings, the Deity would exact his life.

When an innocent infant, in the first few weeks of life, develops an intussusception (an infolding of the bowel which causes an acute obstruction), the prayers and supplication of the parents avail not a particle; if the surgeon did not save the infant's life by operating and removing the obstruction, the benevolent being would allow the child to die.

The adult who develops a hernia, which is due to a defect in the construction of the human body, which is a.s.signed to an omniscient being who still persists in forming bodies that are defective, and this hernia becomes strangulated (twisted), the deity sits calmly by in omnipotent inaction, while the prompt interference of the surgeon saves the individual's life.

When the surgeon observes a superficial cancerous growth, or an internal growth which can be removed in its entirety, does he trust to the Lord to halt this pernicious development? No, the surgeon does not consult G.o.d, but resorts to his own knowledge and skill to save a human life.

The diphtheritic child who is strangling to death with a diphtheritic membrane in its throat is not permitted by the physician to be left to the benevolent being's will, nor to the prayers of the parents. The physician's prayer is the diphtheria ant.i.toxin, which in his hands is the life-saving device.

When the physician administers quinine for malaria, or salvarsan for syphilis, he effects cures for these diseases by using agents to which the clergy strenuously objected when they were first introduced. And when the ecclesiastic attributes to the Deity whatever laws man has been able to evolve out of his own experience and wisdom, he establishes, fallaciously, the corollary that if G.o.d is responsible for the cures, He is also responsible for the non-cures. Then what of the countless number that died of disease before man evolved those cures, and what of the wholesale murder of His children in the past ages?

Do certain diseases still baffle the physician? Surely it is less often than the pestilences of old which baffled sacrifice and prayer. The cruelest laws ever devised by man have more equity and benevolence in them than the appalling and irrational jurisprudence of the Deity.

Do certain diseases as yet remain to plague man? Then it is only because religion has for the past 2000 years been the greatest obstacle in the development of cures for these diseases. Every single individual, in the past 2000 years, who has succ.u.mbed to a disease for which medical science has no cure, has died directly at the hands of religion. The obstruction which religion has placed on the development of medical science has laid at its feet the responsibility for the deaths of countless millions throughout the ages.

The religionist replies that man's mind cannot fathom the will of G.o.d.

Which is an irrational statement for it is a well established fact, and indeed, a criterion of insanity, that when the deranged are confronted with facts which are conclusive and with creations of the imagination, they cannot differentiate fact from fancy, and maintain, instead, that fancy is the real fact. The religionists are guilty of the same breach of reason. They suffer with what may be termed, "dementia religiosa."

The remarkable feature of the latter disease is its wide prevalence.

Dr. Haggard in his book, "Devils, Drugs, and Doctors," declares, "The early and Medieval Christians accepted the doctrine of the power of demons in the lives of men; they saw this power particularly in the demoniac production of diseases. They believed in miracles and especially in the miraculous healing of diseases. The demonological belief of the Christians was inherited from the doctrine of the Jews, who were believers in demons and the 'possession by the devil.' Jesus himself cured by casting out of devils. Following his example, Christians everywhere became exorcists. Jewish demonology was continued among Christian converts, and the belief in supernatural interpositions in human affairs was widely accepted. _Nothing has r.e.t.a.r.ded the growth of scientific medicine during the past 2000 years so much as the iron grip of theology in maintaining practices based on belief in this supernatural origin of disease._" The fabled curing of disease by casting out devils, and the New Testament recordings of Jesus's conviction that disease was caused by evil spirits, have had an inestimable detrimental result on the development of medical science.

The fact that Jesus believed in the demoniacal production of diseases and cured them by exorcism was deemed so important by the author of the Gospel according to Mark that he has actually recorded the Aramaic words Jesus was reported to have used in addressing his patients. In Mark V:41, Jesus is reported to have given the command "Talitha c.u.mi" to a little Jewish girl whom her parents believed dead. In Mark VII:34, Jesus is reported as uttering the magical word "Ephphatha," as he "put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue" in behalf of "one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech."

An excellent and timely ill.u.s.tration of what occurs when secular knowledge has not yet replaced ecclesiastical ignorance and bigotry, particularly in the field of medicine, is furnished by an article from one of Philadelphia's leading newspapers, _The Evening Bulletin_, of December 23, 1932. We quote it verbatim:

"Faith Healers Arrested; Two Charged with Choking to Death 5-Year-Old Girl, Linden, Texas, Dec. 23, 1932. Despite a purported confession, officers to-day continued an investigation of the death of a five-year-old girl, allegedly at the hands of two itinerant preachers who sought to 'drive out the devil' they believed responsible for her partial paralysis. Murder charges were filed against Paul Oaks and his brother, Coy Oaks, and precautions taken to prevent possible mob vengeance. Sheriff Nat Curtright said the accused men admitted they had choked the child to death in an attempt to cure her. Officers said the preachers had been conducting meetings in rural communities and had preached on the subject of faith healing. George Wilson, a neighbor, officers said, found the two men kneeling over the prostrate form of the child. They ordered him to leave, declaring he was a 'devil.' He said the child's father was in the room."

Medieval exorcism still practised in one of the leading nations of the world! In America, which prides itself on its scientific advances, towards whom the rest of the world looks for guidance in scientific discoveries and practices!

To have r.e.t.a.r.ded the growth of medicine for the past 2000 years! Think of the strides made in medicine in the past hundred years, and dwell on the comfort humanity derives from it, in contrast to the filth, misery, and pestilences of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.

Would so much progress have been possible had man still persisted in the belief that disease was due to demoniac intervention, and that the sum total of all knowledge humanly possible was contained in the Bible?