The rich pray for pounds, and the poor pray for pence, beseehing the Lord upon the universal prayer-theme of "Gimme."The utter futility of prayer in objective sense for the obtaining of the subject-matter of the supplication, even of the ' Give us this day our daily bread,' which many do get and many others miserably go without, is confessed by CE., which frankly attributes all these thing to the operation of the Law of Chance:" The apparent success which so often attends superstition can mostly be accounted for by natural causes, although[ it piously adds] it would be rash to deny all supernatural intervention[e.g. in phenomena of Spiritualism.] When the object is to ascertain, or to effect in a general way, one of two possible events, the law of probabilities give an equal chance to success and failure; and success does more to support than failure would do to destroy superstition, for,on its side, there are arrayed the religious instinct, sympathy and apathy, confidence and distrust, encouragement and discouragement, and , perhaps strongest of all, the healing power of nature."[ CE.xiv,341] There, in a nutshell, is the profound psychology of the priest-instilled "religious instinct", and of the hit-or-miss" efficacy of prayer"for the conjoling of " heavenly gifts"of earthly benefits and of the eversion of the heaven-sent or devil-inflicted evils whereof suffering humanity is the sport and prey, to the utter indifference of their Celestial Pater! If the thing prayed for cometh to pass," the gods have, God has, answered our prayers; blessed be their, His, name! and the fortunate results are noised abroad. If by equal chance the prayed-for benefit is unattained, then" God knows better than we what is best for us, and the less said about the failure the better for childlike faith. When exposed to danger or death,if we escape it is ' the wonderful Providence of God", nothing being thought or said about those so curiously designated " Acts of God"which permitted or influenced the disaster; whereas, if we die or continue in suffering, then,"God's ways are not our way', the ways of God are beyond our finite understanding," et cetera of pious apologies for the silence and failure of God to help his suffering and neglected children. The fatal work of the church and priest through the Christian Era has wrought ignorance, superstition and vice: it has been and remain a supreme failure. Faith is become obsolete before fact. Christianity is proved to be a fraudulent BANKRUPT;this is its final adjudication before the bar of civilization. The Christian religion shown to be a congeries of revamped Pagan Superstitions and of Priestly lies, is not respectable for belief: every honest and self-respecting mind must repudiate it in disgust. Faith-fondly called the most precious heritage of the race, is not a thing wherefore to be proud of, it is not intelligent or of Reason. Not a flicker of intelligence is required to believe: millions of the most illiterate and ignorant of earths teeming population are the firmest in their "faith"in every form of religious superstition known to the priest of the world, the most devout believers of this or that imposture,"most assured of what of what they are most ignorant' withal. Indeed, as aptly quoted:"Unbelief is no crime that Ignorance was ever capable of being guilty of".....J.Wheless;;;;;; WE CAN ALL"DO GOOD,FOR GOOD IS GOOD TO DO!!!

Unborn Babes To Burn Forever: The damnable doctrine of Infant Damnation was one of the most terrifying and effective impostures of the Church to drive helpless victims into the fold of Christ. Infamous enough was the earlier doctrine of exclusive salvation, that the unbaptized adult, the individual outside the church was the heir to eternal damnation. But soon the terror was extended to the just-born infant, to even the fetus in its womb. St. Augustine affirmed this atrocity with all his vehemence; all the Fathers without exception dinned it eternally, as yet today. A treatise of the greatest authority, De Fide, long attributed to Augustine, but now known to be the work of Bishop St. Fulgentius[CE.vi,317.] thus states the horrid doctrine:" Be assured, and doubt not, that not only men who have attained the use of their reason, but also little children who have begun to live in their mother's womb and have there died, or who, having been just born ,have passed away from the world without the sacrement of holy baptism, administered in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, must be punished by the eternal torture of undying fire; for although they have committed no sin by their own will, they have nevertheless drawn with them the condemnation of original sin, by their carnal conception and nativity."[sec.70.] Lecky who quotes the passage, thus comment the effects as witnessed in practise throughout the Middle Ages: Nothing indeed can be more curious, nothing more deeply pathetic, than the record of the many ways by which the terror-strickened mothers attempted to evade the awful sentence of their church. Sometimes the baptismal water was sprinked upon the womb; the still-born child was baptized, in hope that the Almighty would antedate the ceremony; sometimes the mother invoked the Holy Spirit to purify by His immediate power the infant that was to be born; sometimes she recieved the Host or obtained absolution, and applied them to the benefit of her child. For the doctrine of the church had wrung the mother's heart with an agony that was too poignant for even that submissive age to bear.'[ Rationalism in Europe,i,362-364] And all this on account of an apple eaten four thousand years before they were born; willed by the Deity who had foreordained their birth and premature death,before His Holy Church could come for the Baptismal fees!..J.Wheless...