By A. Philistine — October, 1900
Kanawha Falls, West Virginia: At the risk of being called a carper and a fogy, I will say that many Freethinkers do the cause of Free Thought more harm than good by their utterances, their manners or their actions. Because a person does not believe in the theology of Christians, it is not necessary nor profitable to be all the time raising the issue with those who do believe and who are probably members of the church. By ridicule and harsh utterances of those things that Christian people honestly believe, and which many Freethinkers once believed, we alienate the respect and regard that our Christian friends often have for us, and lessen the chances and likelihood of being able to get them to think and to study on the subject.
We shock and disgust them right in the start, and they will not hear or argue the question with us. Both in speech and writing I fear some of us are too intemperate and radical to be effective persuaders of men. We must be something more than Iconoclasts. It is not the whole thing to break the images, but rather to persuade people to cast aside their belief in them. Even if there is no God, no personal Supreme Being to be feared and deified, there is good which is personified in God, and so, when we make sport of God we indirectly laugh at good, anyway. We give a rude shock to those who believe in the existence of a personal Deity and so destroy our influence as teachers of truth or exposers of error.
Then, too, I think some Freethinkers, in their anxiety to show their independence, array themselves against constituted authority, the law of the land, and disregard the conventionalities and proprieties of life. Because a woman has cut loose from the superstition of the church, she is not absolved from the obligations of her sex nor of society. I am convinced that our non-orthodox women, both in intellect and morals, compare favorably with those in the church, but in their independence and disposition to disregard some of the conventionalities and proprieties of life, and by doing outer, though not necessarily wrong, things, they give the adversaries that occasion for evil speaking, and “talking about” them which the latter are always glad to have as a means of destroying their influence and Free Thought teaching.
It is necessary, therefore, for Freethinkers to be paragons of perfection in their observations of the proprieties, for they will be very closely observed by all orthodox folks, and held to a stricter account at the bar of society than those who have the cloak of Christian profession to cover up their shortcomings, and an organized orthodoxy to hold them up when their own merit and conduct would not.
