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Mr. Dailey Hits the Centre
[.]
I inclose you an answer sent to the
Noblesville, Ind., Ledger, it being a shot at the target published
last week.
M. A. D.
.
I see you are endeavoring to saddle
the assassination of President McKinley on the shoulders of Atheists
and Infidels.
In doing this you are talking a little
too soon. Just wait and see if the assassin of Mr. McKinley, before
he is executed, don’t have priest or preacher by him.
It is the height of impudence for
a believer in a supreme being to say that the cause of Anarchy and
crime is Atheism or Infidelity, when it is a well-known fact that
the most heinous crimes ever committed were perpetrated by believers
in a God and in the hand of God.
Cain believed in God, yet he slew
his brother. Old David waa [sic] a believer in God, and had a man
killed in order to get his wife (and he already had two or three).
Lot was a believer, and I suppose you are acquainted with him.
Guiteau, the assassin of Garfield,
believed in God. Hinshaw, the preacher who murdered his wife in
cold blood, and is now in prison, was a believer in God, and preached
hell and damnation to those who did not believe.
Criminal preachers are numbered by
hundreds. You can hardly pick up a paper that don’t contain an account
of preacher or Sunday-school superintendent going wrong.
Jessie James, one of the worst men
that ever lived, shot a man because he denied the existence of hell.
Every negro brute in the South that assaults women and girls is
a believer in God, and calls upon him when being slowly roasted
to death at the hands of a Christian mob.
In 1885 (if I remember right), of
the thousands and thousands of inmates of the different prisons
of the country there were only three avowed Infidels. The statistics
showed that the number being equal of Christians and Infidels, the
Christian was twenty-one times mere immoral than the Infidel. And
it is reasonable and logical that the Christian or the believer
in Christianity should be more immoral than an unbeliever, because
the believer thinks it makes no difference how he lives, but how
he dies, for the Bible says the sinner may call upon his God at
the eleventh hour and be saved.
There is this difference between a
Christian and Infidel in regard to sinning: the Christian sins on
credit and the Infidel pays cash down.
The Infidel knows that the only way
to right a wrong is by restitution. If you rob a man out of his
right, give it back to him with interest; don’t ask God to forgive
you. If you injure anybody and repair the injury, any decent God
will forgive you without asking. You can injure man, but you cannot
injure God.
Who are the believers in God? I’ll
tell you who. The slanderer, the calumniator of the dead, the perjurer,
the murderer, the robber, ruiner of young girls, the defamer, housebreaker,
horsethief, the beater of women and children, the assassin, the
low and ignorant, the scum of the earth.
Rev. Mr. Talmage said Mr. McKinley’s
assassin should have been killed on the spot, upon which some paper—I
think, the Indianapolis Sentinel—said: “It seems Anarchy exists
even in the pulpit when passion is aroused.”
There are thousands of good and noble
men and women that believe in a supreme being, but they would be
just as good and noble if they didn’t.
One of your statements I have overlooked
I want to reply to. You say: “These so-called Freethinkers are not
so much Freethinkers as fool thinkers.” And to prove this you use
the old passage from Solomon: “The fool hath said in his heart,
There is no God.”
Now, so far as being a fool is concerned,
the Atheist is on equal footing with the Christian, for Paul said,
meaning himself and other Cnristians [sic]: “We are fools for Christ’s
sake;” and the doings of some Christians I know confirm his statement.
Again, if Solomon’s judgment on fools was no better than his judgment
on matrimony I would not consider him good authority on fools.
Nothing would please me more than
to get a broadside reply to some of your statements on religious
subjects before your readers.
M. A. D.
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