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Mark Twain on Religion
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In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying: "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together." His prediction was accurate—Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth.
Twain's wife died in 1904 and after an appropriate time Twain allowed himself to publish some works that his wife, a de facto editor and censor throughout his life, had looked down upon. Of these works, The Mysterious Stranger, which places the presence of Satan, also known as “No. 44”, in various situations where the moral sense of humankind is absent, is perhaps the best known. This particular work was not published in Twain's lifetime.
After his death, Twain's family suppressed some of his work which was especially irreverent toward conventional religion, notably Letters from the Earth, which was not published until his daughter Clara reversed her position in 1962 in response to Soviet propaganda about the withholding. The anti-religious the Mysterious Stranger was published in 1916, though there is some scholarly debate as to whether Twain actually wrote the most familiar version of this story. Little Bessie, a story ridiculing Christianity, was first published in the 1972 collection Mark Twain's Fables of Man. Twain's funeral was at the "Old Brick" Presbyterian Church in New York. He also donated funds to build a Presbyterian Church in Nevada.
While his reputation as a popular author overshadows his contributions as a social critic, Twain held strong views on the political topics of his day. Through his wife's family, Twain had contact with many well-placed progressives. He spent the last twenty years of his life as an "outspoken anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist". He did, however, make capital investments with the aim of profiting from them, albeit with little success.
In the New York Herald, Oct. 15, 1900, he describes his transformation and political awakening, in the context of the Philippine-American War, from being "a red-hot imperialist":
"I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris [which ended the Spanish-American War], and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."
Whether you can call Mark Twain an atheist or not is debatable. His opinions and reasoning regarding religion over the years changed. He certainly held many aspects of religion in contempt. Twain, I believe, wanted to shake up the Victorian stuff-shirted religious aristocracy both here in the states and abroad. I think he reasoned the pompous views on religion expressed by clergy as unquestionable truth were self-serving and needed exposing.
There are many more famous atheists and non-believers. I will explore with you their logic and reasoning and conclusions about faith, religion, science and politics. Here is Twain's excerpt from Mysterious Stranger. It speaks volumes of the contradictions in biblical messages.
"A God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones;
Who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one;
Who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short;
Who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it;
Who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body;
Who mouths justice, and invented hell—mouths mercy, and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell;
Who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself;
Who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all;
Who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle
the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites
his poor abused slave to worship him!"
—Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, 1916
