The following is a guest post by OpenDiary blogger Atheist Under Ur Bed. This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Welcome back to Monday School – always the landslide winner over Sunday School in Rationalist County no matter what type of ballot is used!

Last week’s class presented Mark Twain’s penetrating analysis of the fall of Adam and Eve as related in Genesis. This week’s class will present his views on the Bible as a whole, that Bible’s God, and Jesus.

Once again, I am relying upon Allison Ensor’s aptly titled Mark Twain and the Bible (University of Kentucky Press, 1969) for my information.

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“Twain was never the kind of person who stops with saying that the Bible is being wrongly used or misinterpreted. To him the book itself deserved harsh criticism. Others might surround it with a robe of sanctity and exempt it from the close scrutiny given other books, but not Twain. Scathingly he enumerated what seemed to him its major faults.

“First, the Bible is not true. It claims to be telling the truth, and its partisans maintain that it cannot err, yet to his eye it was filled with lies. Twain regarded the fall, the flood, and many of the events of the life of Christ as falsehoods….

“The main reason Twain refused to accept the Bible as true was the miraculous quality of so many of its narratives and the fact that they could not be verified by one’s own experience. Story after story contains violations of natural law unacceptable to many modern minds. In view of the lack of supporting evidence for the Bible’s claims that the sun stood still or that Lazarus was raised from the dead, Twain concluded that the only rational position was that these events did not happen. Of course Twain doubted a good many biblical teachings which did not involve miracles. In his autobiographical dictations, for instance, he stated that according to the hearsay evidence of the Bible, God is love, justice, compassion, and forgiveness, but that all the evidence of experience indicated the opposite…. (p. 80-81)

“The Bible’s lack of originality came under Twain’s fire. According to him, ‘This Bible is built mainly out of the fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin.’

“A far more serious charge leveled by Twain against the Bible was that it had a pernicious influence on mankind. Not only had its texts condoned slavery (the curse of Canaan, Genesis 9:25) and the execution of witches (Exodus 22:18), but they had also supported unthinkable cruelties committed in the name of Christianity…. He also felt that the Bible contained a good deal of bad counsel, even in the New Testament. Incensed by reading accounts of holy men who, sometimes rather cruelly, broke all ties with family and friends, believing they were doing the will of God, he once wrote in the margin of such an account: ‘Christ had given… the most distinct and unmistakable warrant for this belief and conduct.’ And he added the comment that ‘plainly, God never knew anything about human beings or he would not have trusted the idiots with so dangerous thing as the Bible.’ Why was it dangerous? Because some people had no better sense than to do whatever it said. (P. 82-83)

“The pettiness and cruelty of the Bible God never failed to arouse Twain’s anger. That God should have been so small seemed ridiculous to him, and in an essay of 1891 he set forth his idea of the limited view of the Old Testament: ‘the Deity’s possessions consisted of a small sky freckled with mustard-seed stars, and under it a patch of landed real estate not so big as the holdings of the Tsar to-day, and all His time was taken up in trying to keep a handful of Jews in some sort of order.’ By 1906 Twain was denouncing God still more strongly for having chosen a few of the millions of people on the earth, making pets of them, and resolving ‘to keep and coddle them alone and damn all the rest.’ God was not only small in field of vision but in character as well; witness his ‘I the Lord thy God am a jealous God’ (Exodus 20:5; Deuteronomy 5:9). This, Twain asserted, was but another way of saying, ‘I the Lord thy God am a small God, and fretful about small things.’

“What outraged Twain most about the Bible God was his killing of innocent people as well as guilty. ‘I knew,’ he wrote in 1906, ‘that in Biblical times, if man committed a sin, the extermination of the whole surrounding nation – cattle and all – was likely to happen. I knew that Providence was not particular about the rest, so that He got somebody connected with the one He was after…. He is always punishing – punishing trifling misdeeds with thousandfold severity; punishing innocent children for the misdeeds of their parents; punishing unoffending populations for the misdeeds of their rulers; even descending to wreck bloody vengence upon harmless calves and lambs and sheep and bullocks as punishment for inconsequential trespasses committed by their proprietors. It [the Old Testament] is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere.’ (P. 84-85)

“It was the fire of hell that Twain most objected to in the New Testament. To him it seemed monstrously inconsistent that Jesus should present himself as ‘sweet, and gentle, merciful, forgiving’ and then invent and proclaim hell. This, he thought, made Jesus (or God, since the two were said to be the same) ‘a thousand billion times crueler than ever he was in the Old Testament… Nothing in all history… remotely approaches in atrocity the invention of Hell.’ Contrasting himself with Christ, Twain elsewhere remarked that he had known only three or four men during his lifetime whom he would like to see writhing in flames for even a year, much less forever.

“Twain’s other major point against the New Testament was that its moralities do not match the conduct of God in the Old Testament. In ‘Letters from the Earth’ he quoted eight verses from the Beatitudes, italicizing ‘Blessed are the merciful’ and ‘Blessed are the peace-makers.’ Far from praising these verses, he denounced them as ‘immense sarcasms’ and ‘ giant hypocrisies’ uttered by the same mouth which ordered the wholesale slaughter of the Midianites. The Beatitiudes, he said, should be read together with Numbers and Deuteronomy so that Christians can get ‘an all-round view of Our Father in Heaven.’ (P. 87-88)

“The fundamentalists of Twain’s day thought the teaching of Christ good, but regarded his atoning death on the cross the most significant act of his life. Twain’s voice was a dissenting one. In the first place, he professed to see nothing unique in the event: ‘For men to throw their lives away for other people’s sake is one of the commonest events in our everyday history.’ Only a few hours of pain were involved, and that was not much for one with Christ’s perspective: ‘For God to take three days on a Cross out of a life of eternal happiness and mastership of the universe is a service which the least among us would be glad to do upon the like terms.’ The whole atonement scheme seemed to Twain extremely irrational. As he explained it in his notebook: ‘If Christ was God, He is in the attitude of One whose anger against Adam has grown so uncontrollable… that nothing but a sacrifice of life can appease it, and so without noticing how illogical the act is going to be, God condemns Himself to death… and in this ingenious way wipes off that old score. It is said that the ways of God are not like ours. Let us not contest this point.’ (P. 90-91)

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