When I (Rob) was studying journalism at the University of Minnnesota in the late 1960s, I considered H.L. Mencken one of my journalistic heroes. He was brash and outspoken in his columns in the Baltimore Sun in the early decades of the twentieth century. He was a journalist, a satirist and a cultural critic.
Menken was highly critical of religion calling it a hypocritical institution, as the above quote suggests. He opposed America’s entry in both world wars, and certainly would’ve opposed the Vietnam War if he’d been alive. Yet, he wasn’t exactly a pacifist or an isolationist. He spoke out forcefully against the smug and powerful. Truth to power could’ve best described his work.
While Menken supported scientific progress, oddly enough, he despised mathematics and physics and called mathematics a hoax. He repeated the contention often enough to make it clear he wasn’t being satirical. The guy did not like number, and in one column asked how physicists and mathematicians were going to measure infinity.
He was called a racist by his detractors. But while he did point out certain propensities he saw in some ethnic groups, he didn’t defend his own as superior – which is the mark of a racist. In 1923, at a time when a sense of white racial superiority was commonplace, he wrote an essay in 1923 entitled, “The Anglo-Saxon,” in which he argued that if there was such a thing as a pure “Anglo-Saxon” race, it was defined by its inferiority and cowardice. “The normal American of the ‘pure-blooded’ majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen.”
Mecken was impressed with the novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, because much of the book plays on the gullibility and ignorance of country folks who are swindled by con men as witnessed by Huck and Jim as they travel down the Mississippi River. Noting that such country folk are easy marks, Mecken made a cynical sounding prediction in 1920 that today sounds like prophecy. It’s definitely a synchronicity. Here it is…
My individual opinion of “religions”, per se, is that in the emergence of human on this planet, the earliest peoples had no means of understanding even the most simple events such as shifts in weather, thunder, lightning, changes of seasons, etc. So, “gods” were created to explain these “phenomena” and the humans feared and worshiped these “false gods”. With the passing of eons and with evolution, religion became more sophisticated and diverse, usually as a means of keeping order among the masses. And there were “splits” happening, as diverse as Man itself is diverse. I tend to think that there is an innate NEED in humans to possess the conviction of a Higher Power in which to defer; an Authority upon whom one may blame, curse, or love, depending upon circumstances. Christianity, especially, is a religion in which a person is freed from responsibility for one’s sins IF he or she accepts the death of Jesus as the Redeemer…IF he or she accepts that Jesus died to effect absolution of sin in the Believer. It becomes very difficult to truly KNOW that our Souls, or our individual Consciousness, is responsible for creating our experiences. It’s a huge pill to swallow, regardless of its Truth. So, blame our failings on one God or another. That’s my take on religion, wrong or right. Works for me.
Only one comment: Mathematics is NOT a “hoax”, as my work for more than four decades in the field of mathematics has PROVEN beyond any shadow of a doubt.The particular Universe in which our planet Earth spins is founded on a mathematical frequency matrix. Nuff said. But about the president? Yep!!
Yep.
Wow, talk about prescient! That quote hits the nail on the head exactly!
Well, he missed out on the small hands…as in the illustration. But he seems to have gotten the gist of it. Fortunately, an alternative inner soul of the people is now rising across the heartlands…and across the nation.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mitch-mcconnell-town-hall-obamacare_us_58acf3c9e4b0d0a6ef463755?47ny901zcspa7zaor&