Natural Equality & God – The Blue Grass Blade, 3/28/1909

The statement in our Declaration of Independence, and embodied in our Federal Constitution, that all men are
born with equal rights, is presumed to be applicable to natural resources, and to say so is to state a general truth.
It is much like saying that water is wet. But whether all men can really enjoy their equal rights to natural resources
is a horse of quite a different color. We do not, as a nation, recognize God in our Constitution, nor can we safely
recognize God in our politico-economic systems. Take the assertion that God is all-wise; follow it with another
that God made man, and we are confronted with the antithesis of a paradox—apparently true, really absurd.
Carry the suggestion into the field of economics, and from the premises, recognizing man as a land animal,
it must follow that whatsoever abridges man’s natural and free access to the land is not only an abrogation
of his natural rights, but an insult to Omniscience. But, if theology be true, the same all-wise God made the
tiger. It, too, is a land animal. It is also a carnivorous animal, and, following the same lines of argument from
the original premises, the tiger has a natural and inalienable right to free access to the land and to kill and
devour anything in sight, from a jackrabbit to a Methodist camp-meeting exhorter. Self-preservation is the first
and fundamental law of all things that live, from a molecule floating in a sunbeam to civilized men and to
nations of men. God must have made the tiger a flesh-eating animal. God must have given the tiger talons
and teeth, strength and speed, with which it might overtake, capture, kill, and eat its prey. Standing alone,
unaided, man is utterly helpless and powerless against the tiger. Only by reason of his ability to invent and
use weapons of offense and defense has man been able to overcome the tiger. Yet both are God-made.
What right, under the God theory, has either one to kill the other?

Imagine one of these God-creatures killing and eating the other. Imagine a Roosevelt, without any cause or
provocation, save a longing and a desire for brutal sport, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars wrung from
the pockets of American labor upon an expedition to Africa for no other purpose than to hunt and kill, to glory
in the death-agony, the butchery of some animal which his God made to inhabit the earth and reproduce its kind.
Ah, indeed, this religious business is a peculiar proposition when we thoroughly analyze it. Those who drive
by advocating it are as valuable to society as a cracked cymbal at a ten-cent circus, and about as necessary.

About the Preachers (Next Article)

It has been said that those whom the gods right dearly love are apt to die in their swaddling clothes, which, if true, puts
a mark of divine condemnation upon the paid advocates of Godism, for the majority of these wax rich and fat, live in
opulence and plenty, and are noted for a rather remarkable longevity. Preaching God and Christ and Bible requires
so little effort, so little exertion, labor, or skill, that the bodily tissue of the preachers begins to waste at a later stage
in life than with laborers, and the life of the average preacher is of longer duration than most of his fellows. As an
example, take the great ages attained by the later popes, cardinals, bishops, and the clerical profession generally.
Compare this with the life of the average laborer or the busy middle class, and a vast difference is apparent. Hence,
if the good die young, what can be said of the preacher? It is certain that they are none too good for this gross
earth, or the angels would steal them and leave us to spill a scalding sob over the evidences of their mortality.
It is customary to make an epicedium an eulogy, and if all the preachers would either quit preaching or die,
the Blade would be pleased to lay a few Kentucky field flowers upon their theological sarcophagus. But as the
majority of funeral orations and epitaphs are usually falsehoods, we prefer sticking to facts whether we deal
with the quick or the dead. Recent experiences with preachers have proven exceedingly beneficial. The popular
supposition is that men can elevate themselves to positions of leadership because of and through an inherent,
individual merit. So far as orthodoxy is concerned, this is an egregious error. Too frequently the least deserving
are placed in command. Church congregations have a remarkable habit of looking at things and doing things
the wrong way. They may not always be to blame, but in the majority of such cases they are. Take any average
community of average men and women, the classes and professions being fairly well represented, and, with
few exceptions, the preachers are the least thought of, the least respected of all. Inordinate gall and base
ingratitude appear too frequently as their greatest and most prominent characteristics. Deny Jesus and
God if you will, and nine preachers out of ten will wink the other eye; but merely insinuate that the majority
of them ought to go and braid their ears, and they will organize a boycott on you simply because they
dare not crucify. Pulpit panegyrics are now but a diseased emotionalism posing as a Succoth-Benoth
for bankrupt congregations and impecunious servants of the Lord.