WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 5

TWAIN, MARK

(Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

American author,

journalist, humorist

(1835-1910)

Many quotations have been attributed to Twain that came from other sources. If you find I have wrongly attributed a quotation to Twain, please leave a comment or email me at mythoughtsarefree@gmail.com. Thank you.

• “The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.” (Christian Science)

• “When I think of the number of disagreeable people that I know who have gone to a better world, I am sure hell won’t be so bad at all.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “When in doubt, tell the truth.” (Following the Equator, 1897)

• “When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “You can’t pray a lie.” (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885)

• “You want me to believe it is a judicious, a charitable God that runs this world. Why I could run it better myself.” (Clara Clemens, My Father Mark Twain)

• “Zeal and sincerity can carry a new religion further than any other missionary except fire and sword.” (Christian Science)

• "India has two million gods, and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire." (Following the Equator)

• “Alas! those good old days are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his trouble to sleep simply by getting out his blocks and mortar and building an addition to a church.”  (The Innocents Abroad)

• “A religion that comes of thought, and study, and deliberate conviction, sticks best. The revivalized convert who is scared in the direction of heaven because he sees hell yawn suddenly behind him, not only regains confidence when his scare is over, but is ashamed of himself for being scared, and often becomes more hopelessly and malignantly wicked than he was before.” (Letter San Francisco Alta California, November 15, 1868) 

• “The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it...”  (Mark Twain's Notebook)

Read more about Mark Twain & his religious skepticism at the end of:

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 1

Find more quotations at the above post and these:

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 2

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 3

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 4

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 3

TWAIN, MARK

(Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

American author,

journalist, humorist

(1835-1910)

Many quotations have been attributed to Twain that came from other sources. If you find I have wrongly attributed a quotation to Twain, please leave a comment or email me at mythoughtsarefree@gmail.com. Thank you.

• “It is simple, direct, gracefully phrased; it always sounds well --IN GOD WE TRUST. I don’t believe it would sound any better if it were true.”

• "The motto stated a lie. If this nation has ever trusted in God, that time has gone by; for nearly half a century almost its entire trust has been in the Republican party and the dollar--mainly the dollar. I recognize that I am only making an assertion and furnishing no proof; I am sorry, but this is a habit of mine; sorry also that I am not alone in it; everybody seems to have this disease." (Mark Twain in Eruption)

• [In Germany] “I went to church the first Sunday, and on Tuesday came a tax of 12 marks for church support; I have not been since. I can’t afford religious instruction at that price. Only the rich can be saved here.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “...I would like, just for five minutes to understand the plan of the Creator, if He has any.” (Clara Clemens, My Father Mark Twain)

• “Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us would not succeed.” (Following the Equator, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar)

• “Lump the whole thing! say the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo.”

• “A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.”

• [Man] “has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.” (Letters From the Earth)

• “Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion ---several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.” (The Lowest Animal)

• “Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “Many...people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters.”

• “Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-03)

• “The moral sense enables one to perceive morality ---and avoid it. The immoral sense enables one to perceive immorality and enjoy it.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.”

• “No church property is taxed and so the infidel and the atheist and the man without religion are taxed to make up the deficit in the public income thus caused.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “No man that ever lived has ever done a thing to please God ---primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” (Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894)

• “O, compassionate missionary leave China! Come home and convert these Christians.” (The United States of Lyncherdom, 1901)

• “The only gospel in any monarchy should be the Rebellion against Church and State.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “The physician’s is the highest and worthiest of all occupations, or it would be if human nature did not make superstitions and priests necessary.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter; they are an entire banquet.”  (Mark Twain in Eruption)

• “The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.” (Notebook)

• “Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes, and wishes he was certain.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the people ---that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.”

Read more about Mark Twain & his religious skepticism at the end of:

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 1.

Find more quotations at the above post and these:

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 2

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 4

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 5

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 2

TWAIN, MARK

(Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

American author,

journalist, humorist

(1835-1910)

Many quotations have been attributed to Twain that came from other sources. If you find I have wrongly attributed a quotation to Twain, please leave a comment or email me at mythoughtsarefree@gmail.com. Thank you.

• “He had no principles and was delightful company.” 

• “Heaven for climate; Hell for society.” (Mark Twain's Speeches, 1910 edition)

• “Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.” (Mark Twain, a Biography)

• “Human beings seem to be a poor invention. If they are the noblest work of God where is the ignoblest?” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God’s fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect.” (Letter to William Dean Howells, December 1977)

• “I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.” (Autobiographical dictation, November 1906)

• “I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.” (Is Shakespeare Dead?)

• “If Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be ---a Christian.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “If I can’t swear in heaven I shall not stay there.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “If man had created man he would be ashamed of his performance.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “...I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices.” (Answers to Correspondents)

• [To a Catholic convert, 1885] “I look back with the same shuddering horror upon the days when I believed I believed, as you do upon the days when you were afraid you did not believe.”

• “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.” (Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894)

• “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

• “It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• “It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either one of them.” (More Tramps Abroad)

• “It is curious ---curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage be so rare.” (Mark Twain in Eruption)

• “It is not best that we use our morals week days; it gets them out of repair for Sundays.“ (Mark Twain’s Notebook)

• "The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes...The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession- and take the credit of the correction. During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. the Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry.....There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain."  ("Bible Teaching and Religious Practice" Europe and Elsewhere)

Read more about Mark Twain & his religious skepticism at the end of:

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 1

Find more quotations at the above post and these:

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 3

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 4

WISDOM OF MARK TWAIN - Part 5

MARK TWAIN CONFERENCE - AUGUST 2009

copyright 2009 C Woods

Mark Twain ----one of my favorite religious skeptics.

The Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College (NY) holds a conference every four years. The Sixth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies will be held August 6-8, 2009 beginning with a buffet breakfast at 8:00 am Thursday and ending with breakfast on Sunday morning. If you plan to attend the entire conference, I recommend arriving on Wednesday and leaving late Sunday morning.
Those in attendance are at the forefront of Mark Twain scholarship, many the authors of books on Twain and many who are professors of Twain studies internationally. However, many attendees are independent scholars or those who are Twain aficionados. A few Twain impersonators usually show up, too. In 2005 the keynote speaker was Ron Powers. In 2001 Ken Burns previewed his Mark Twain film. The keynote speaker in 2009 will be Russell Banks.
The three-day event is filled with panel discussions and speakers presenting their papers on Mark Twain, the man and his work. There are usually two or more choices of sessions to attend during each time slot.

Some of the 2009 topics that may be of

interest to freethinkers will be:
Mark Twain, Religion, and Imperialism
Mark Twain and Robert Ingersoll: The Freethought

Connection Revisited
Mark Twain’s Lover’s Quarrel with God: Readings

in Twain, Satire, and American Religion
Mark Twain’s Reading of John Milton, Reconsidered
The War Prayer: Marking the Twain of the Sacred

and the Profane
Maturity and Irreverence
Clash of Civilizations -- Contrast of Civilizations
Huck Finn and the Fifth Commandment
Waking from this Dream of Separateness: Hinduism

and the Ending of The Mysterious Stranger

Attendance at any one session is not mandatory, so one can take a walk or a drive, read, take a nap in a dorm room, enter a private discussion of Twain with other conference participants, visit Mark Twain's study or the campus Twain musuem.
Attendees are provided with scrumptious gourmet food provided by the Elmira College chefs. Thursday evening has a wine tasting event before dinner (where one will probably receive a discount coupon for a local wine warehouse.)

Friday night will feature Russell Banks.

On Saturday, everyone heads to the hill overlooking the city for a picnic at Quarry Farm, the home of Twain's sister-in-law where the Clemens family spent summers while Sam wrote many of his most famous works.

During one time-slot, a trip to the Clemens family grave site is a choice.

After each evening's festivities have concluded, one can head for the campus tavern for lively, informal Twain discussions.
Dorm rooms are available without air-conditioning, however a new dorm with A/C will be available for the 2013 conference. If you drive to Elmira, I suggest packing a fan. (One year I spent in the dorm, it was incredibly hot, so I chose to stay in an air-conditioned motel room the next year ---when the weather turned cool. ) There are several hotels and inns close to the campus and several motels in the Horseheads area about 5 miles north of Elmira.

I have attended the last three conferences: 1997, 2001, 2005. The conference committee is wonderful and creative. There, I have met the authors of some of the books on Mark Twain that I cherish most. After an Elmira conference, I spend most of the next four years in happy anticipation of the next one.

For more information and a registration form, go the the website:

Elmira 2009, The Sixth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies

WHY I AM AN ATHEIST: The Bible - Part 2

In WHY I AM AN ATHEIST: The Bible - Part 1, I told how my ultra-religious family read the entire Bible, a chapter every day, and how some Biblical stories triggered doubts about it being the word of God. If the Bible were the word of God, I found it so appalling that I didn’t want to worship that God.

Robert Ingersoll: “If a man really believes that God once upheld slavery; that he commanded soldiers to kill women and babes; that he believed in polygamy; that he persecuted for opinion’s sake; that he will punish forever, and that he hates an unbeliever, the effect in my judgment will be bad. It always has been bad. This belief built the dungeons of the Inquisition. This belief made the Puritan murder the Quaker.”

In the Bible, I discovered that Solomon had 1000 sexual partners. I learned that God created evil, that God lives in darkness, that David paid for his first wife with the foreskins of 200 Philistines, that God destroyed Job simply because Satan dared him to do it, that handicapped people are not allowed in church.
I found the character of God rather alarming. People worship and praise God and say he is compassionate, benevolent and loving. Yet, as a nonbeliever, I am doomed to spend all eternity suffering in hell, no matter how good I am. I couldn’t accept such a mean-spirited being.

Mark Twain: “Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.”

Then of course, when my family read the New Testament, I learned that Jesus didn’t come to send peace on earth, but came with a sword to set men against their fathers and daughters against their mothers.... and of course this contradicted the Commandments.
My family read the Christmas and Easter stories in one Gospel. A few weeks later, we read accounts in other Gospels which were somewhat different. In a home where I was expected to believe the Bible, these accounts were different enough to seem more like the stories coming from different eyewitnesses on Perry Mason than God’s truth.

I just didn’t buy into the resurrection. I thought that Jesus hadn’t really died or else the stories of the resurrection were lies. Today, with life-saving techniques, we know people can be brought back to life, but not after 3 days and not 2000 years ago.

And the immaculate conception ----well, I could imagine if I turned up pregnant and unmarried some day, trying to pull that excuse on my parents. Soon I learned that Greek gods were always sleeping with mortals and that Christians probably stole their stories from the Greeks or earlier pagan civilizations. (See comment & my response regarding the immaculate conception.)

As a preteen and a teenager, I was smart and inquisitive. I asked questions of my parents, ministers, and Sunday School teachers.
• Why are there no dinosaurs in the Bible?
• Why would a loving God order women and children to be slaughtered? How was that following the Commandment ‘The shalt not kill’?
• How could Noah fit 2 of every species on his ark ---and wouldn’t he have to take more than 2 gazelles to feed the 2 lions? And why wouldn’t Noah have left a few creatures behind, like mosquitos or cobras? And why does a different part of the Bible say he took 7 of some animals?
• Why would God order us to circumcise babies? Wouldn’t that be terribly painful, let alone unnatural? Why would God create foreskin, then want us to cut it off?
• Why can’t God prevent an earthquake, hurricane, or airplane accident from hurting/killing people?
• Why do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people?
• Why, despite hundreds of people praying for a sick parishioner at the church, did the person die anyway?
• If God can do anything, why can’t he stop suffering? And if he can’t why is he worthy of worship?
• Why do we have to wait to die to reach heaven? Doesn’t God have the power to make heaven on earth?
• Why would God order a man to sacrifice his own son or daughter?
• Why are some things that the Bible says are abominations (eating lobster , pork, or rabbit for example) no longer considered to be forbidden, but being gay is still thought, by many, to be an abomination? Lots of these rules are clearly set forth in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus, yet we ignore some and accept others. (According to the Bible, it’s OK eat locusts.)
• Why did God allow his only son to die to forgive our sins? If God can do anything, why not just forgive our sins and be done with it?
• What about Bible passages that contradict each other? How can those be the word of God?
• If only Christians could go to Heaven and everyone else went to Hell, that wasn’t exactly fair to someone who was indoctrinated into Islam from a young age, or someone who had never even heard of Christianity, was it?

Although some of these questions were from a naive youth, I would ask most of these same questions today. I still don’t have the answers.
I don’t remember even one answer any more enlightening than “God works in mysterious ways.” My father told me to pray and God would answer my questions, but He didn’t.

After several years of doubt, I couldn’t take the Bible seriously. Soon everything else about religion sounded absurd to me. By the time I graduated from high school I was an atheist, but I didn’t quite know it yet.

Now, I believe that the Bible is a book of fiction. I happen to love fiction and I think fiction can teach truths about life. However, I could learn most of what I need to know about life from many other books of fiction ---and without the guilt.
Most of the Bible was recorded years or even centuries after the supposed events, so I do not believe it is the word of God, but the words of men either trying to interpret what they thought was the word of God, or attempting to convince readers that they knew what God wanted.

Susan B. Anthony: “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”

Writing the Bible, decades after the events (if they actually happened) would be like my attempting to write an account of the Kennedy presidency with no written records, no TV, no audio or video tape. I lived through those years, but little of what I remember is from actual memory. Most of it is from books or film that I have read or seen many times in the years since 1963. Taking everything I can remember, I might be able to write two or three pages. Of course, like men who wrote the Bible, I might misremember or, without written, audio, or video proof, I could make up the rest.
The men who wrote the Bible had no special powers. They were humans like you and me. God didn’t guide their hands when they wrote the Bible any more than he guided my hand in writing this blog post.
Why do people believe that 2000 years ago, magical things happened that don’t happen today? But then I remind myself that many people believe in astrology, ghosts, and miracles. They think they see images of the Virgin Mary in their toast and are sure their dead parents are watching over them. I call it wishful thinking.
People think God talks to them or to religious leaders. If God talked directly to anyone, then everyone in the world who prayed for guidance would receive the exact same message and there would not be multiple religions and denominations.

Despite my having read the Bible through my teen years, I haven’t read it much since, although I do use internet Bibles to find passages on occasion. Most of the atheists I know, know the Bible much better than I do, and I know it better than most Christians.
Many Christians are taught a few nice Bible stories in Sunday school and they might listen to Biblical verses at church services, but most know little about what the Bible really says.
In a recent survey by the Pew Forum, 45% of U.S. adults seldom or never read the Bible. Surprisingly only 39% believe it is the literal word of God. A full 18% believe it was written by men and is not the word of God at all. Only 1% said living life in accordance with the Bible was necessary to be admitted to heaven.
A Gallup survey found that less than half of Americans can name the first book of the Bible (Genesis), only a third know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount (Billy Graham is a popular answer) and a quarter do not know what is celebrated at Easter (the resurrection, the foundational event of Christianity.) Sixty percent cannot name half the ten commandments; 12% think Noah was married to Joan of Arc. George Gallup, a leading Evangelical as well as a premier pollster, describes America as “a nation of biblical illiterates”.

Mark Twain: [The Bible] “is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.” (Letters From the Earth)

copyright 2009 by C. Woods

Why I Am an Atheist - Part 3 In God's Name

Look for future posts in my ongoing series of Why I am An Atheist.

FAITH - Part 3

MAHER, BILL, American comedian, TV host, author, social and political commentator (b.1956):
• “Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slave holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.” (Religulous, film)

MENCKEN, H.L., American editor, satirist (1880-1956):
• “Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

 • "A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable."

MIZNER, WILSON, (1877-1933):
• “I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH WILHELM, (1844-1900):
• “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

•"Faith means not wanting to know what is true."

ORWELL, GEORGE (Eric Athur Blair), English author (1903-1950):
• "Orthodoxy is the abillity to say two and two make five when faith requires it." (1984)

PAINE, THOMAS, English-born American patriot (1737-1809):
• “No falsehood is so fatal as that which is made an article of faith.”

• “What is it the Bible teaches us? ---rapine, cruelty, and murder. What is it the Testament teaches us? ---to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.”

RAND, AYN, Russian-born American novelist (1905-1982):
• “The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.”

TENNYSON, ALFRED LORD, English poet (1809-1892):

• “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”

TWAIN, MARK (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) American author, journalist, humorist (1835-1910):
• “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” (Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar)

VONNEGUT, KURT, American writer (1922-2007):
• “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile." (Mother Night)