Mr. Dailey Hits the Centre

To the Editor of The Truth Seeker[.]
     I inclose you an answer sent to the Noblesville, Ind., Ledger, it being a shot at the target published last week.

M. A. D.     

To the Editor of The Ledger.
     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. DAILEY.