Political Cartoonist | Freethinker
The pictures in this volume appeared in The Truth Seeker during the years 1886 to 1889, and are republished at the request of the readers of that journal,who desired them in more permanent form. They are—with the exception of two or three—the work of Watson Heston, who weekly illustrates the cover pages of The Truth Seeker with designs showing the abuses of the people by the church and designs showing the puerilities of the Bible.
The Truth Seeker is published by The Truth Seeker Company for $3 a year.
There are now thirty post chaplains in the army, authorized by the act of March 2, 1849, and four regimental chaplains, one for each of the colored regiments, authorized by the act of July 28, 1866. These thirty-four officers rank as captains of infantry with pay varying from $125 to $175 per month according to length of service. But there are over one hundred army posts in the country, and consequently some of them are without chaplains.... There isn’t the shadow of a ghost of a shaving of constitutional authority for swearing in a chaplain as a United States officer. In fact, it is forbidden; for the prohibition against religious establishment is violated by such act. But some of the members of the House are pious, and of course are willing to violate not only a constitution but the rights of all other citizens to get daily religion at some one’s else expense, and the rest of the members are afraid to antagonize the churches. So the people have to pay for what about eight of every ten of the members regard as a positive nuisance. — The Truth Seeker, Feb. 1, 1890.
The Italian priests, unique in the world, are the real enemies of their country, and when Italy finds herself pledged to defend her land against invasion, the priest will be the spy of the enemy, and will excite a civil war in the country where all these ministers have left him absolute master. — Garibaldi.
The Bible has done more toward degrading woman and toward keeping her in subjection to the masculine gender than any other influence in the world. From the passage, "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee," to "Wives, submit yourself unto your own husbands as unto the Lord," woman has been made a mere slave to tyrant man, and it is only when the spirit of the Bible, in this respect, has been disregarded, that woman has assumed her true position in life, an equal of man in all respects. — D. M. Bennett.
The first typical battle-field to which I would refer is that of geography—the simplest elementary doctrine of the earth’s shape and surface. Among the legacies of thought left by the ancient world to the modern, were certain ideas of the rotundity of the earth. . . . Six hundred years pass away, and in the fourteenth century two men publicly assert the doctrine. The first of these, Peter of Abano, escapes punishment by natural death; the second, known as Cecco dAscoli, a man of seventy years, is burnt alive....
Columbus is the next warrior. The world has heard of his battles; how the bishop of Ceuta worsted him in Portugal; how at the Junta of Salamanca the theologians overwhelmed him with quotations from the Psalms, from St. Paul, and from St. Augustine. And even after Columbus was triumphant, and after his voyage had greatly strengthened the theory of the earth’s sphericity, the church, by its highest authority, was again solemnly committed to the theory of the earth’s flatness. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI issues a bull laying down a line of demarkation upon the earth as a flat disk....
But in 1519 science gains a crushing victory. Magalhaens makes his famous voyages. He proves the earth to be round, for his great expedition circumnavigates it; he proves the doctrine of the antipodes, for he sees the men of the antipodes; but even this does not end the war. Many earnest and good men oppose the doctrine for two hundred years longer. Then the French astronomers make their measurements of degrees in equatorial and polar regions, and add to other proofs that of the lengthened pendulum; when this was done, when the deductions of science were seen to be established by the simple test of measurement, beautifully, perfectly, then and then only this war of twelve centuries ended. — Prof. A. D. White.
On the first day of last May, 1879, in the hamlet of Pocasset, in the town of Sandwich, Charles E. Freeman, a conscientious Christian, a good husband, and a kind father, by direct command of God, as he said, deliberately killed his daughter, nearly four years of age, as she lay sleeping in bed; the mother of the child consenting to the horrible deed.
He held the knife suspended for some time, expecting that God would stay his hand; but, as he did not, the knife descended, and the deed was done.
On the afternoon of the next day, he called a number of his Christian brethren and neighbors together, and told them what he had done, showing them the body of his child. On being asked how he felt the next morning after the murder, he replied, "Glorious! at peace with God and all mankind."
But this was a religious murder—a murder committed by a well-meaning man, uninfluenced by hate or lust, and in obedience to the dictates of his conscience. It was a religious murder; and it is this that renders it so worthy of our consideration. It was the direct fruit of the man’s Christian creed; and only the common sense and the natural morality that we possess as human beings save us from similar deeds of horror in every town of the land.Wm. Denton’s Pocasset Tragedy.
People justify all kinds of tyranny towards children upon the ground that they are totally depraved. At the bottom of ages of cruelty lies this infamous doctrine of total depravity. Religion contemplates a child as a living crime —heir to an infinite curse — doomed to eternal fire. — Ingersoll.
It does not appear how the very traditions of learning and physical research could have survived in Europe but for the Mohammedans and the Jews. — Review of Drapers History of Intellectual Development.
We know that fragments of Greek and Roman art — a few manuscripts saved from Christian destruction, some inventions and discoveries of the Moors were the seeds of modern civilization. — Ingersoll.
Science was actually thrust into the brain of Europe at the point of Moorish bayonets. — Ingersoll.
Uncle Sam and the Priests
The Church Robbing the People
Thanksgiving
Sabbath Laws
The Children and the Church
Woman and the Church
The Church and Thomas Paine
Studies in Natural History
The Bible and Science
The Clergy and Their Flocks
Piety in Our Penitentiaries
The Lord and His Works
Prayer
The Creeds
The Christians and the Mohammedans
Two Samples of Christianity's Work.
Missionaries
The Lord's Instruments.
Bible Doctrines and Their Results
The Church and Slavery
Priests in Politics
Ireland and the Church
The Church's Idea of Civilization.
The Uses of the Cross
Unkind Reflections Upon the Church
Persecutions by the Church
Some Allegories
Heaven
Hell
Miscellaneous