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

WHY TORTURE IS WRONG - Part 2

See also, my original post on

Why Torture is Wrong

From Madeleine Albright’s

The Mighty and the Almighty,

p. 195-197 (2006):
“...Torture may work sometimes but usually it does not. Napoleon, no bleeding heart, observed more than two centuries ago, ‘The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile.’

“As John McCain has argued, this debate is not about what our enemies are like; it is about us. If we rationalize torture or make exceptions for special circumstances, so will everybody else. Governments that routinely abuse prisoners will point to the United States for justification. Our standing to insist on the humane treatment of Americans in foreign prisons will be diminished. America will be known as the kind of country that tortures people or that arranges for others to do so. For what purpose? To defeat the terrorists? The effect will be just the opposite. Guantánamo has presumably kept some members of the terrorist class of 2002 out of action, but at the cost of significantly enlarging the class of 2006. The detention center there should have been shut down long ago. As for Abu Ghraib, it was the biggest gift Al Qaeda’s propagandists could have received...

“...In the time since the first photos from Abu Ghraib appeared, pamphlets have circulated in Arab communities showing those shameful images along with pictures of dead Palestinians and Iraqi children... In a region of long memories, I fear these images will be fueling anti-American violence for generations to come."

Madeleine Albright

(1937- )

1st woman U.S. Secretary of State (1997-2001)

20th U.S. Ambassador to the UN (1993-1997)

JEWS BEHAVING BADLY #2 protecting abusers

In my attempt to show that being

religious is not a guarantee of moral

behavior, this post is a part of my series

of reports featuring the bad behavior

of religious people, past or present....

Look for other posts showing the

bad behavior perpetrated by members

of other religious groups.

HIGH INCIDENCE OF CHILD ABUSE IN

NEW YORK’S HASIDIC COMMUNITIES:

Joe Diangelo, 28, says that when he was seven he was taken by his father to a mikvah (bath house) to find the place packed with naked men and boys. “I was in the tub, and I had my back turned, and somebody raped me while I was in the water … I didn’t know what happened. I couldn’t make sense of it...” Diangelo never saw the man who abused him. Today, monitors are posted by the bath to prevent sexual activity, but as a child, Joe was on his own.

Joel Engelman, 24, says his abuse came at the United Talmudical Academy. He was eight when he was called to the principal’s office. When he arrived, he says, Rabbi Avrohom Reichman told him to close the door. “He motioned for me to get on his lap, and as soon as I got on the chair, he would swivel the chair from right to left, continuously. Then he would start touching me while talking to me. He would start at my shoulders and work his way down to my genitals.”

This happened frequently over two months. He told no one for more than a decade. Four years ago, he told his parents. And a year ago, when he heard that Reichman had allegedly abused several other boys, they confronted Reichman.
When the school heard about it, they gave the rabbi a lie-detector test. He failed miserably. So they told Joel, ‘This guy has to go.” But a few weeks later, a religious leader from the school approached Engelman’s mother to ask, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad was the molestation?... We found out there was no skin-to-skin contact, that it was through clothing....On a scale of 1 to 10, this was maybe a 2 or a 3, so what’s the big fuss?” The school reinstated Reichman.

Both Engleman and Diangelo were raised as strict Hasidic Jews, and both fled their upbringing for the same reason.

Four ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn have been sued or arrested for abusing boys in the past three years. That’s a tiny fraction of the actual abuse, says Hella Winston, author of Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels. She says that in researching her book, she met dozens of alleged victims who told her sexual abuse is an open secret in the Hasidic community. But the community is so insulated and the rabbis are so powerful that few dare to come forward.

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes says he has 10 active sexual abuse cases involving Orthodox Jews. He says the Jewish leaders — like Catholic bishops — try to handle these affairs internally, through a rabbinical court. "You have no business taking these cases to religious tribunals," Hynes says. "They are either civil or criminal in nature. Or both. Your obligation is to bring these allegations to us and let us conduct the investigation."

One of the problems with such abuse is that in isolated religious communities, instead of reporting the abuse to the police, it is reported to religious authorities, as was also done in the Catholic church. When it is handled by the religious community that wants to avoid bad publicity, it is usually covered up and never resolved.

For more information:

Abuse Scandal Plagues Hasdic Jews in Brooklyn
Hasidic Jews join the kiddy-fiddlers’ hall of shame
Sexual Abuse of Kids in Hasidic Jewish Community

JEWS BEHAVING BADLY #1

In my attempt to show that being religious

is not a guarantee of moral behavior,

this post is a part of my series of reports featuring the

bad behavior of religious people, past or present....

Look for other posts about the bad behavior

perpetrated by members of other religious groups.

Rabbi Morris Talansky of Long Island, NY, was charged with assaulting his dentist in an argument over fees. After the case was thrown out, the rabbi, carrying a Bible, wept and said, "I'm grateful to the Almighty and my attorney and the judge." Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced his resignation after Rabbi Talansky testified last year that he paid the politician $150,000 in cash over 15 years while Olmert was minister of trade and mayor of Jerusalem. Talansky, who was a victim of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, is currently being investigated by federal authorities, who are considering indicting him for allegedly bribing Olmert in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

David Silverman, 23, of Rockland County, NY, is accused of luring three girls, ages 14 and 15 who he met on My Space, to a porn set in a warehouse, giving them alcohol, photographing and filming the resulting orgy with two friends who are now both fugitives in Israel. By the time he was arrested, he had dismantled the porn set and erased his hard drive, but officials were able to recover his files. Silverman says he has returned to his Hasidic Jewish lifestyle and is refusing to even look at the evidence, claiming it is too offensive. Psychologists aren’t buying his claim that he cannot assist in his defense on charges of statuatory rape and child pornography because of his religious devotion. His lawyer admitted that a plea may be the best course. “A lawyer I am. A magician I am not,” he said.

Two teenaged boys claim they endured years of sexual abuse at the hand of Emanual Yegutkin, a principal of a private Jewish school in Brooklyn, NY. The boys were abused between the ages of 7 and 17. Neither boy attended Yegutkin’s school. Yegutkin also worked as a lifeguard at a summer camp and was a ‘rising star’ in the Jewish community. His arrest is the fourth in the Orthodox Brooklyn community in the past three years.

You will find more abuse in the New York Hasidic community in a future post: Jews Behaving Badly #2

Initially, I learned of all of the above stories from reports in the March 2009 issue of Freethought Today, published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

For more information on these reports:

‘Graft’ rabbi off hook in doc assault
Olmert foe listed as Madoff victim

‘Perv’ Twist, ‘Occasional’ Hasid
Hasidic Jew Charged With Rape and Child Pornography Remains in Jail
Hasid ‘rapist’ fit for trial

Teen sex rap for principal of Bensonhurst private school