CREEDS AGAINST CIVILIZATION 11 WHAT I KNOW ABOUT SOME CHURCHES, AND WHY I AM AN AGNOSTIC 33 A LETTER AND THE REJOINDER 55 THE HOLY GHOST 65 HOW CAN WE "TAKE" CHRIST? 71 COLONEL ROBERT G. INGERSOLL 81 MARK TWAIN'S BEST THOUGHT 85 AN IRRELIGIOUS DISCOURSE ON RELIGION 89 DECAY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY 107 I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of woman as the Bible. --_Elizabeth Cady Stanton._ That God had to come to earth to find a mother for his son reveals the poverty of Heaven. CREEDS AGAINST CIVILIZATION Any system of religion that shocks the mind of a child can not be a true system. --_Thomas Paine._ Hell is a place invented by priests and parsons for the sake of being supported. [Illustration] CREEDS AGAINST CIVILIZATION One hundred fifty years ago, there was not a single white man in what is now Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. What is now the most flourishing part of the United States was then as little known as the country in the heart of Africa itself. It was not until Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six that Boone left his home in North Carolina to become the first settler in Kentucky; and the pioneers of Ohio did not settle that territory until twenty years later. Canada belonged to France one hundred fifty-three years ago, and Washington was a modest Virginia Colonel, and the United States was the most loyal part of the British Empire, and scarcely a speck on the political horizon indicated the struggle that in a few years was to lay the foundation of the greatest republic in the world. One hundred fifty years ago there were but four small newspapers in America; steam-engines had not been imagined; and locomotives and railroads, and telegraphs and postal cards, and friction-matches, and revolvers and percussion-caps, and breechloading-guns and Mauser rifles, and stoves and furnaces, and gas and electricity and rubber shoes, and Spaulding's glue, and sewing-machines and anthracite coal, and photographs, and kerosene-oil, free schools, and spring-beds and hair-mattresses, and lever-watches and greenbacks were unknown. The spinning-wheel was in almost every family, and clothing was spun and woven and made up in the family; and the printing-press was a cumbrous machine worked by hand. Down to Eighteen Hundred Fourteen every paper in the world was printed one side at a time, on an ordinary hand-press; and a nail, or a brick, or a knife, or a pair of shears or scissors, or a razor, or a woven pair of stockings, or an ax or a hoe or a shovel, or a lock and key, or a plate of glass of any size, was not made in what is now the United States.