Haslingden Gazette
You deserve the hearty thanks of all Socialists for the courageous way in which you are allowing a discussion of the differences we have with Christians. Without apology, I will give your readers some reasons why we reject Christianity. We reject Christianity because it is the evangel of self-abnegation, instead of self-realisation; self-obliteration instead of self-assertion; also because it glorifies altruism, duty, humility, submission, contentment, and other slave virtues. We believe Christianity to be the cause of the decadence of the common people, and for the existence of this respectable barbarism, erroneously described as “civilisation.” Civilisation is not worth having where the wants of the individual are not satisfied. For what is civilisation if it brings not happiness? For this we reject Christianity. We reject Christianity because we think it is responsible for this pseudo-civilisation, with its corroding charity, its cant, hypocrisy, wage slavery, the sybaritic splendour of the parasites and the squalid misery of teh producer. We reject it because it is founded on a myth, built round a nonentity — like Santa Claus — who never lived, except in the imagination of hare-brained hierarchs, deluded decadents, persons suffering from hypothetical nebulosity, and a few others who are afflicted with sympathetic diarrhea. We believe Christianity to be a curse and incubus on the minds of the mutable many. For this we reject it. We repudiate Christianity and all other theorums that quail under the staunch, steadfast gaze of reason and scientific analysis. We reject it because its devotees have ever been the enemies of progress and the proletariat; because it is founded on fiction, not fact — blindfold belief, not judgement, knowledge or reason. Christianity has ever been the foe of those benefactors, liberty, learning and love. We reject it because it demoralises the minds of the demi-damned, the workers; chloroforms the conceptions of womankind, and confuses and confounds the brains of the young.
David Nicholl (Sec.), Society of Social Aristocrats and Conscious Egoists. 19 Welbeck Street, Gorton, Manchester.
[Note: we have been compelled to curtail our correspondent’s letter somewhat. – ed.]Burnley Express
D. Nicholl, “Secretary of the Social Aristocrats and Conscious Egoists,” 22 Northside Terrace, Bradford, writes explaining why Socialists reject Christianity, which, Mr. Nicholl says, is “the gospel for rainbow chasers, snobocrats, sucklings, slaves, and sychophants. So we leave it to them. We want none of it.”
