Skip to main content

Mark Twain’s God

Mark Twain


Mark Twain had a quaint sense of humour. Someone who says things like “Go to heaven for the climate, Hell for the company” and writes stuff like Huckleberry Finn cannot but be freakishly funny. When it came to God, however, he was more incisive than humorous. Much of his writings on God were not published because he knew that even his heirs would be burnt alive if they published if “this side of 2016 AD.” He wrote that in 1906 and those writings were published before the century wore itself out with the kinds of irreverence even a Mark Twain could not imagine.

He believed in God, a heartless one whom he called The Great Criminal. Even an ordinary human being is a far more benign entity than God, according to Twain. If you came across a suffering being and you had the power to cure him of his suffering what would you do? Obviously you would cure him. You will remove all evil from the world if you have the power to do so. God is omnipotent. Then why is there so much evil, so much suffering, depravity and misery in the world which is just a “potato” in the whole vast cosmos?

“To find the one person who has no pity for [the suffering people] you must go to heaven,” wrote Twain. “To find the one person who is able to heal [the sick] and couldn’t be persuaded to do it, you must go to the same place.” God is a father-figure in Christianity which supplied Twain with his God. What kind of a father! “There is only one father cruel enough to afflict his child with horrible diseases – only one,” Twain asserted. Not all the eternities can produce another one, he went on.

Using an analogy Twain argued that the inventor of a machine is responsible for how the machine functions or malfunctions. God is responsible for man’s sins, in other words. But God’s own morality is horrendous. For example, He tells Moses to hang the leaders of both Shittim and Moab because the men of Shittim committed whoredom with the daughters of Moab. “If the people of New York should begin to commit whoredom with the daughters of New Jersey, it would be fair and right to set up a gallows in front of the city hall and hang the mayor and the sheriff and the judges and the archbishop on it,” derides Twain.  

I wonder why Mark Twain believed in a god at all. Maybe he loved to deride Him. It’s good to have someone out there on whom we can cast all the blame. Maybe Twain was not very serious about it. I don’t know. At any rate, there are places where Twain suggests that many of the supernatural things are man’s inventions. What a heaven man invented, for example!

Man invented a heaven from which he kept away the one thing he loves the most: sex. Then he included in it a whole bunch of things he usually avoids: “harp playing, endless group singing, and prayer.”

Funny people, bizarre spirituality and a cruel god. Thank you, Mark, for the concoction.



Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. G. VarkeySeptember 19, 2018 at 9:13 PM

    Hello, Mark Twain and many others are confused because the true God's calendar is a lot bigger than the human calendar (It's written in 2 Peter 3:8). That's why Jesus said "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is near" (It's written in Matthew 4:17). In one of the world cup soccer games, one team scored seven goals within the first twenty five minutes, in reality the game was over because the loosing team had no chance, but the referees could not blow the final whistle until after 90 minutes because they had a different set of rules.
    Even many people who call themselves Christians and many "Christian" leaders have been blinded by satan. Please visit christianityexplored.org to learn more.
    Varkey.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 20, 2018 at 7:55 AM

      Satan must be quite fun 😂😂😂

      Delete
    2. G. VarkeySeptember 22, 2018 at 8:03 PM

      If possible get a copy of "The Case for Christ" and "The Case for Faith" by Lee Strobel. Mr. Strobel was a former atheist. He was also an investigative journalist and a Yale Law School Graduate.
      Varkey.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
19 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Randeep the melody

Many people in this pic have made their presence in this A2Z series A phone call came from an unknown number the other day. “Is it okay to talk to you now, Sir?” The caller asked. The typical start of a conversation by an influencer. “What’s it about?” My usual response looking forward to something like: “I am so-and-so from such-and-such business firm…” And I would cut the call. But there was a surprise this time. “I am Randeep…” I recognised him instantly. His voice rang like a gentle music in my heart. Randeep was a student from the last class 12 batch of Sawan. One of my favourites. He is unforgettable. Both Maggie and I taught him at Sawan where he was a student from class 4 to 12. Nine years in a residential school create deep bonds between people, even between staff and students. Randeep was an ideal student. Good at everything yet very humble and spontaneous. He was a top sportsman and a prefect with eminent leadership. He had certain peculiar problems with academics. Ans
12 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
15 comments
Read more