Newspapers / The Fool-Killer (Pores Knob, … / March 1, 1920, edition 1 / Page 1
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T n tt o ri fi no Volume X. Boomer, North Carolina, March, 1920 Numberf3. TWO OF A KIND And now, honey, suppose we look at old Mammy Eddy's so-called "Christ ian Science" just a minute and sorter compare it with Orthodoxy's Immor-tal-Soul-ism, and see where it all leads to. One of the mam teachings of Christ ian Science, if I understand it, is that Matter does not really exist. Every thing is Mind, or Soul, or Spirit, or whatever you pleae to call it. There is no tangible substance anywhere Your body does not exist. The clothes you wear do not exist. The house you live in and the ground you walk on do not exist. All things are just a crea tion of your mind, sorter like the snakes seen by a delirium tremens ex pert, and in reality they have no ma terial existence. All that stuff is a little too tenuous aad moon-shiney for my horney-hand-ed mentality to get hold of. It sounds to me like crazy talk. Well, the old-line theology comes along and pats me on the back and says, "That's rigmVPearson! You've expressed our views on Christian Sci ence exactly. The idea of the non existence of matter is absurd. Why, if matter didn't exist we wouldn't be . here at all, and if-we were here we wouldn't know it, and if we knew it we wouldn't have any way of letting anybody else know it. Such a life as that would not be worth much." And so the orthodox brethern just rip and rant all over the place, cussing out Christian Science a heap wusser than I ever did. It makes them fight ling mad to suggest that their fine churches, their long-coated college foundered preachers, and their swell congregations do not exist. ' All these fine fixtures have cost too much real money to be ignored and brushed aside like that. Looking at it from the standard of this present life, Orthodoxy is just as doubtful as I am about how a thing can exist and at the same time not exist. The preachers will even argue that a man here in this world wouldn't be a man at all if he didn't have a literal body. Which is all good sound sense. But in the very next breath they turn right around and say that what they said couldn't be, really is, after all. They say that when a man dies and his body returns to dust his "im mortal soul" (without any material substance about it) goes off some where and lives in exactly the way that Eddyism says we are all living now. And I want to know what's the dif ference, if you please. If a man's body is just a prison in which the real man is confined for awhile, and if the immateria.1 soul can live just as well and know and enjoy just as much without the body, then what in the Tom Walker is the use for any of U3 to have bodies at all ? It looks to me like God has gone to a whole heap of unnecessary trouble to make so many bodies for people to live in if they can live just as well without them. So if you accept the Immortal Soul J theory as correct, I don't see what's' to hinder you from swallowing Christ ian Science at the same mouthful. Now throw back your head like a hen drinking water and sit right still and let that soak in awhile. POWER OF THE FUTURE The world got along without coal for thousands of years. And thought it was getting along very well, I guess. Didn't know anything about the advantages coal might be, and therefore didn't miss it. But today the world depends to a large extent on coal. Just look what a storm is raised when the coal-diggers go on a strike for a few weeks. Just look at the inconvenience to busi ness and the actual suffering among the people that results. So you see, honey-boy, that the world today is largely at the mercy of the coal supply. But Christopher Betsey! what if the coal supply should give out? As a matter of fact, it will sometime. Maybe not just yet, but the time will come. The coal supply is not inex haustable. There was just so much coalin the earth to start with, and there can never be any more made. It was formed away back in the Carbon iferous Age, millions of years ago, and was not touched until recently. But at the rate the world is using coal it can't last -forever. The time will come when the last lump will be dug and consumed. Then what? Will industry and transportation stop ? Will the people freeze ? Naw, you crazy thing. Not a bit of it. Before the coal gives out some new source of heat and power will be dis covered that will be a vast improve ment on the old smoky coal. This new source of power is likely to be the- unlocked toBt of the Atom. Men of science have been working on it for years, and one of the wisest of them recently said: "I think we are on the brink of a discovery. It may take a century, but instead of burning 1,000 tons of coal, I believe our descendants will take the same amount of energy from a few ounces of matter." That isn't a pipe-dream, even if it does sound like it. The men of sci ence really believe it is possible and that it will soon be a reality. And when you look at it from the stand point of world evolution and consider some of the things that have already been done, it isn't unreasonable at all. Startling changes are certain to come about in the world's way of liv ing, and that pretty soon. We are now almost ready to enter the Golden Age the Millennial Reign of Christ on earth and we know that the curse of "sweating for daily bread" is to be removed from the human race. And so there will be developed some power so great that all the world's work can be done with a fraction of the labor and cost it now requires. And these things are all to come about in a perfectly natural way. There will be no "more miracle about them when they come than there is about the phonograph or the X-Ray or any one of a thousand other pre sent day marvels. - 'CHAFF" AND "FIRE." It is the strangest thing in the world to me that people who seem to have common sense about other things can't have one bit of reason nor com mon sense about the meaning of plain scripture statements. For instance, you write a letter to one of these "eternal torment" fana tics and tell him that you had a big chaff pile that was very dry and it caught on fire and burned up. He will not doubt it for a minute. He will just naturally see with his mind's eye a picture of your chaff-pile being consumed away by the devouring flames until it is all gone. It will never once enter his mind that your chaff-pile is lying there burning and tormenting forever and that it never will be consumed nor grow any less in bulk. In that case his common sense teaches him that dry chaff BURNS UP and consumes away to a little handful of ashes when fire gets into it. But you go to that same man and r. to him Matthew 3:12, where it says that Christ will gather his wheat into the granery, but he will BURN UP THE CHAFF with unquenchable fire. Then what does your good or thodox brother do about that ? Why, bless your gizard, he seems to forget all about the lesson he learned from your chaff-pile, and he rears up on his hind legs and swears that chaff does not burn up, but that it just burns and punishes right on through enter- nity and never does get consumed. That's the land of a fool caper he will cut, and we all know there is no sense in it. The very fact that CHAFF and FIRE are used as an illustration proves that the idea which the inspir ed writer wanted to convey was the idea of COMPLETE DESTRUC TION. Everybody understood that fire would bum up chaff completely. If God had been trying to convey the idea of endless existence in torment he would not have selected for his il lustration a material that would burn up so quickly. Instead of chaff he would have said asbestos something that will not burn up at all. Building For the New Age. Side by side throughout the world today there is moving two parellel lines of activity. One is the activity of destruction. All the old order of things with which we have long been familiar is being torn down and des troyed. Looking only at that part of the performance it seems that civi lization is headed for the scrap-heap in a powerful hurry. But there is aonther side to it. There is a great work of reconstruction going on, and wherever the old out-of-date things are destroyed they will soon be re placed with something better. We are just now beginning to build for the Golden Age, but there is a great deal of tearing down yet to be done. You see the old junk just has to be gotten out of the way before the new struc ture can be built. UNLUCKY TO BE WITH GOD. The following is an extract form a patriotic oration delivered last July in a North Carolina town. The speak er, himself a war veteran, was ad dressing his surviving comrades in memory and in honor of the heroic dead. Which was all very nice and proper. But here is where he spoiled it. "Comrades, ' they are gone; they are dead; they have made the supreme sacrifice. Their bodies sleep in their tombs of clay and their souls are at rest with God, and we know not how lucky and how fortunate we are to be here today." Get that? He says those wh hav managed to stay away from God are lucky and fortunate .which is the same as saying that those whose souls are at rest with God are unlucky and un fortunate. That is a strange kind of talk. Why is it such a misfortune to be in heaven with God ? Why are those left behind in this troublesome world so much more lucky and fortunate than those who have arrived safe in glory ? That orator didn't mean to slander God, nor to insinuate that heaven wa& an undesirable community; but he simply allowed his old orthodox teach ing to run away with his common sense. If he had stopped long enough to consider how it sounded he never would have said it. But that's the kind of nonsense that the "immortal sour' teaching al ways leads to . Why will people ba such fools ? About Personal Letters. it If you have written me a personal letter and haven't received a reply, just let me remind you that there are always hundreds of such letters on my desk waiting for an answer, and many of them never get it. Goodness knows I WANT to write to every one of you, but I have so much else to do that I just can't get time. My time is all taken up with the regular mechanical work of getting out the paper, and I have mighty little chance to write let ters. Remember, this is a "one-man" business and I have to do it all. I read in a magazine a few days ago' where some big stuck-up pluto crat remarked that if he could have his way he would shoot with his own revolver any man who called himself a Bolshevist. And yet his objection to Bolshevism is based on the assump tion that the Bolshevist is guilty of the very same kind of lawless conduct that he himself would like to be guilty of- "if he could have his way." Yes. if that murderous-minded fool could 'have his way" there would be just one more Bolshevist in the world that would need shooting, and I would ad vise him to try the first shot on him self. A pretended "patriot" wh& handles that kind of talk is a hang taked sight more dangerous than the reddest "Red" that ever wore whisk ers.
The Fool-Killer (Pores Knob, N.C.)
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March 1, 1920, edition 1
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