s for our benefit, even when it reads against us and for him, and he, like the priests, assumes an air of being sorry for us that we do not have the intelligence to interpret the document ourselves and must depend on his superior intellect and experience.
Let any man who had not been prepared from youth to believe whatever the priest told him, read the Sermon on the Mount, and if he is a reasonable man, he will tell you that it is the ranting of a fanatic, rather than the "most divine revelation ever made to man."
Christ Healed Fewer Persons
(if any) than the
Great stress has been placed upon the so called miraculous cures and the healing of people by Christ; but all of his cures would only be a fractional part of the cures that are effected by present day doctors. One woman doctor told me that she had removed something like ten thousand cataracts from the eyes of blind people. Psychiatrists say that many of the so-called healings may be brought about by hypnotism and there are all kinds of evangelical healers touring the country who claim miracles of healing.
However, if Christ had the power to heal without medical treatment the diseases of mankind, and if God had the power to prevent illness, why could not all of this be done by one command? Any God or savior who had the power to heal all the disease and suffering of the world and failed to use that power, must be held responsible for all suffering and sickness. It wouldn't even take an ordinary man to wish to eliminate these things, if he could, by the wave of his fiend. Only a cruel and monstrous god, who would be more like a devil, could be conceived of as sitting on his throne, gleefully watching the sickness and suffering of the men he had created.
The Crucifixion was Neither
Divine Nor Heroic
One of the strong points of the leaders of the Christian religion in obtaining converts is in telling of the story of the crucifixion. According to them, Christ was crucified in fulfillment of a previous prophecy and this act was deliberately planned by God, through which Christ, God's son, was to die for the salvation of the sinners that God had created with apparently sinful desires.
Thomas Paine has pointed out that it is contrary to moral principles for one man to die for the sins of others, but that if Christ did die for the salvation of the sinners, they still sin and they still die. They still have sickness and wars and crimes. For all practical purposes Christ's death on the cross has been of no advantage to mankind.
It is plain that these ideas of the prophecy of the crucifixion and the death for the salvation of the world were later thoughts of the early founders of the Christian church, probably grown out of the tradition of the mythological story of Christ's death. Any other kind of a death, or none at all, or any other miracle would have the same effect as the crucifixion.
Of course, a supreme being with full power to do anything could just as easily have changed men so they would not be born in sin and subject to penalties for violating laws that most of them did not know of.
At any rate, the one sided story of Christ's crucifixion, told as it is in the Gospels, can easily arouse the sympathy and compassion of the average non-thinking, non-reasoning person. As told, it appears a great injustice.
Of course, there is the other side of this story. Here is a man who preached against the Scribes and the Pharisees, against the priests and the religious leaders of those times, who were virtually the rulers of the Jews. In other words, he set himself up against both the religious and the political power of his time.
Apparently he was doing more damage to the priests and rabbis than he was to the Roman rulers. Every place he went he cursed and denounced the religious leaders. It is natural that they would want to do away with such a man. They do it now in most countries and go as far as they can in America. If the crucifixion was supposed to be an event of great significance, there is no reason why it should have been executed in such a niggardly fashion. In the first p