s you would be done by." But all the rest of the conflicting and confusing preachment destroys the effect of the Golden Rule.
Many persons, especially those who are ignorant unthinking, will listen to queer sayings and, especially if they do not quite understand them, will lend mystical weight to what would otherwise be discarded.
Then let a thousand priests say that a thing is good and the believing people will believe it. Let a silly custom start and it will continue without reason. There are African tribes which use dung to make their hair-dress. There it would be as out of order to criticize this style as it is here to criticize the Sermon on the Mount. All because people think that if many believe a thing, it must have merit.
Now, let us consider the matter of the "interpretations" of the Sermon on the Mount and other unreasonable religious doctrines. When a thing is not reasonable, when it is not intelligent, not approved by common sense, the religious "lawyers" get busy to make it seem what it is not. They do to the utterances of a crazy man, what a sharp lawyer does to the testimony of witnesses before a jury, trying to get his crooked client acquitted. They seek to make black appear as white, they accuse the criminal's victims of bad faith and dishonesty, confusion and inability to understand the situation. They play on the jury's sympathy, emotion, and credulity. They turn them from the main point at issue and often get murderers and the most vicious criminals freed. So it is with the Sermon on the Mount. It must be interpreted. The literal wording of it makes it appear foolish, 80 the interpreters get to work to dress it up, camouflage it and make it appear like a divine inspiration. But here again common sense should be used. When a confidence man comes to us with a contract which will ruin us, and we look it over carefully and find that he is trying to defraud us, and we call it to his attention, he also tries to interpret his contract and make us believe that what it says it does not mean, that it is 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 