GOD, COUNTRY, AND MEDICINE
FOREWORD
One hears anon and anon of schemes of reconciliation of all the warring Christian sects, and now and then two or more on the lower levels actually make peace, or at all events, sign a truce. But it is highly improbable that this movement will ever overcome altogether the centrifugal forces that have been in operation since the day of the Apostles. There were battling factions while Paul still made his missionary journeys, as the exhortations and anathemas in his Epistles show only too plainly, and the young church was already torn by civil war in the grand manner in the Third Century. Since then it has faced schism after schism, including two that cost it large segments of Christendom. All great religions go the same way, and many that are not great at all. No theology is ever static. As refinements are introduced into it, dissent and division naturally follow. Theologians, despite the operations of the Holy Ghost upon them, remain exactly like the rest of us: they prefer their own ideas to the ideas of other men. Thus, even within the fold of Holy Church, there are endless struggles, with one side prevailing this time and some other side the next time. The theory is that the revealed truth never changes, but that is only a theory. The faithful, no doubt, are made sufficiently content when a novelty is represented to be a mere statement of what has always been believed, but that pretense cannot deceive the skeptic outside the fold, especially if he be familiar with the minutes of the Councils of Nicaea and Trent and with the proceedings anterior to the solemn pronunciamentoes of 1854 and 1870. At any time such a reform in doctrine, under whatever name it goes, may launch a new schism.
There is also, of course, a centripetal tendency: every religion, when it comes into contact with another, influences it and is influenced by it. In an earlier chapter I described some of the borrowings that early Christianity made from the other cults of the time, most of which, by its standards, were hopelessly pagan. The same thing is still going on. The American form of Catholicism has not only embraced certain purely political ideas that are excessively obnoxious to Rome; it has also picked up no little Puritanism, which is to say, Calvinism. There is already a faction of Catholic wowsers and uplifters, allied with Protestant mountebanks in the name of Social Justice. Also, there is a band of street evangelists barking the Only True Faith from soap-boxes -- some of them laymen, though by canon law expounding doctrine is the strict monopoly of the clergy. Not a few of these Catholic Billy Sundays are recent converts, with a great deal more zeal in them then knowledge, and more than once I have listened to one of them preaching unwitting heresies that made my blood run cold. Meanwhile, the High Church Episcopalians, forsaking the Order for Morning prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, turn to denaturized imitations of the Roman Mass, and the less anthropoid Methodists, as they shin up the ladder to social dignity, abandon their shouting, put candles in their tabernacles and vestments on their choirs, and even retire to what they venture to call retreats. The same process goes on everywhere. Buddhism once influenced Shinto so greatly in Japan that it almost ruined it, and a general reform became necessary. In Tibet Buddhism itself shows plain traces of Christianity, and in India, both it and Mohammedanism have responded to the proselyting zeal of the Sikhs, whose religion is but four centuries old. But all this play of influence and counter-influence is mainly on the surface. Deep down there is always an implacable antagonism. Almost everywhere in the world the other fellow's religion is as odious as his table manners. More, he tends to become odious himself, and on all counts. The slowness with which the Arab learning spread in Europe was due quite as much to religious prejudice as to simple stupidity. What Christianity has taken from Judaism it has taken grudgingly, leaving the best behind, and what Judaism has taken from Christianity, at least in America, does not go back to Jesus, but to Rotary and the Y.M.C A. secretary. These stealings seldom affect fundamentals. Every religion of any consequence teaches that all the rest are insane, immoral, and against God. It is seldom hard to prove it.
Christianity, as religions run in the world, is scarcely to be described as belonging to the first rank. It is full of vestiges of the barbaric cults that entered into it, and some of them are shocking to common sense, as to common decency. The old polytheism lingers on in the preposterous concept of the Trinity, defectively concealed by metaphysical swathings that are worse, if anything, than the idea itself. The Atonement is a reminder of blood sacrifice and the Eucharist of the pharmacology of cannibals. Judaism, in its theology, is far simpler and more plausible. So is Parseeism. A Parsee is not doomed to hell for neglecting a sacrament, like a Catholic or a Baptist, nor is the Hell ahead of him, supposing he lands there on other counts, the savage and incredible chamber of horrors that Christians fear. He believes vaguely that his soul will go marching on after death, but he doesn't believe that it will go marching on forever;soon or late, he is taught, the whole cosmos must come to an end and start all over again. Buddhism leans the same way; it rejects immortality as not only unimaginable, but also as unendurable. Confucianism evades the question as unanswerable. It teaches that the dead survive, but doesn't pretend to say how long. On the ethical side it is more rational than Christianity, and very much more humane, for its chief prophets and law-givers have not been ignorant fanatics but highly civilized men, some of them philosophers comparable to Plato or Aristotle. Even Moslemism, in this department, is superior to Christianity, if only because its ethical system forms a connected and consistent whole. In Christianity the problem of evil, a serious difficulty in all religions that pretend to be logical, is enormously complicated by the plain conflict between the ethical teaching of the Old Testament and that of the New. Is God jealous or tolerant, vengeful or forgiving, a harsh and haughty monarch or a loving father? It is possible to answer these questions any way you chose, and to find revelation to support you. Christian theologians have been trying to dispose of them for nineteen centuries, but they still afflict every believer with any capacity, however slight, for anything reasonably describable as reflection.
(Excerpts from "Treatise on the GODS" by
H.L.Mencken],NY,Doubleday,1959 Pages 282-290 Chapter V
[Religion] Its State Today)
To read Mencken or Nietsche is to be left with a void created by the possible implications of the embedded, yet dreaded truths therefound. This book is an attempt on my part to explore how to hopefully and minutely intelligently engineer the process by which that void might be filled in. Nietsche said "God is dead". Is that true? Precisely what was he talking about?