Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
II: Criticism of Morality§262 The necessity of false values. A judgment may be refuted when it is shown that it was conditioned: but the necessity of retaining it is not thereby cancelled. Reasons can no more eradicate false values than they can alter astigmatism in a man’s eyes. The need of their existence must be understood: they are the result of causes which have nothing to do with reasoning.
The editor of Charisma magazine has received a warning directly from the Invisible Wizard His Very Self! Here it is, word for word, exactly as delivered to her ears by You-know-who:
“A tsunami of perversion and all manner of wicked sin is headed toward this nation. You’ve only yet seen the rumblings of what the enemy has planned. For many in your nation have called good evil and called evil good. Many in this nation have not believed you will reap what you sow.
“You have sown iniquity—for decades—and you have taken the hand of perversion. You have walked in step with abominations rather than resisting the temptations to deny my Word and my Son. The perversion in this land will increase and increase and increase.
“There will come a day when morality is no longer merely relative but is persecuted. There will come a day when evil is considered good and good is considered evil. When that day comes, those who are hidden in the shadow of My wings will be insulated from the abominations around them.
“I will raise up the likes of Abraham and Moses to deliver the righteous out of the hand of the wicked in that day. I will shield those who run into my Name. But no longer look and no longer think that you will turn the tide by your prayers alone. These things must be so. I warn you now to fear not, but to ready your hearts. Buy your oil. Be ready for My coming.”
So, LOOK OUT!!
What the World’s contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.
True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge. Did Darrow, in the course of his dreadful bombardment of Bryan, drop a few shells, incidentally, into measurably cleaner camps? Then let the garrisons of those camps look to their defenses. They are free to shoot back. But they can’t disarm their enemy.
The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us.
H.L. Mencken
I’ve said repeatedly over the years that most Americans have far too much sense and decency to be good Christians, and the nationwide uproar over Indiana’s odious attempt to protect discrimination against gays is a good example of what I’ve been talking about. Seventy-five per cent of us might call ourselves Christians but, push come to shove, a decisive majority of us have no intention of living like it.
Yay! for us. Or, as Mark Twain so famously wrote in Letters From the Earth, “These people would not allow it. They are better than their Bible.” What we need, now, is not to “return to God,” as the Holy Men constantly urge, but to stand-up like two-legged men and shake a fist under their noses and tell them frankly that we’ll have nothing more to do with their malicious and degrading nonsense.
There are doubtless years and years of legal wrangling to go but, practically speaking, the American people have spoken and the fight for gay rights is over.
The jockeying has begun for the 2016 Republican nomination for President, and the candidates are predictably cautious; some have quietly signaled their support for Indiana’s breach of common decency, and the rest are evasive. All are wrong; the one thing that can save the Republicans in 2016 is for a man or woman to step forward and declare the Evangelical Right persona non grata, offenses against the very essence of American ideals — and unwelcome. Weeny-ish equivocations will not work; the entire American public knows now what they are, and the only Republican who will win in 2016 is the one who will say plainly that they are a sickness that must … GO!
Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
II: Criticism of Morality§261 What is the criterion of a moral action?
Its disinterestedness, and …
its universal acceptation, etc.
But this is parlour-morality. Races must be studied and observed and, in each case, the criterion must be discovered, as also the thing it expresses: a belief such as: “This particular attitude or behaviour belongs to the principal condition of our existence”. Immoral means “that which brings about ruin”. Now all societies in which these principles were discovered have met with their ruin: a few of these principles have been used and used again, because every newly established community required them; this was the case, for instance, with “Thou shalt not steal”. In ages when people could not be expected to show any marked social instinct (as, for instance, in the age of the Roman Empire) the latter was, religiously speaking, directed towards the idea of “spiritual salvation”, or, in philosophical parlance, towards “the greatest happiness”. For even the philosophers of Greece did not feel any more for their polis?
