METAXY: * Mark Twain's "Secret Vendetta with the Almighty"

Saturday, May 12, 2007

* Mark Twain's "Secret Vendetta with the Almighty"

Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

As an adult, he adopted the Christianity of enlightened liberalism, congenial with his burgeoning deism. He discarded heaven and hell, the immortality of the soul, and the divinity of Jesus Christ. From Thomas Paine, whom he had read in his cub pilot days, Twain imbibed the idea that religions derive their authority from spurious claims by their founders that they had received revelations from God, transmitted to posterity as incontrovertible holy writ. Bibles diminished the grandeur of the real God by straitening "him" to the narrow confines of parochial imaginations.

Mark Twain's [aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens], Secret Vendetta with the Almighty

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