THE VAG’S COLUMN

Grey River Argus, 25 July 1923, Page 3

THE VAG’S COLUMN

Dear Henry,— In trying to make an impression on your thinking apparatus, I have often discussod my job with men that know all about psychology and other, sciences. Many and varied are the reasons given that ypur mind is doped and will not expand until such and.such thing is removed, so that it will no longer influence you. Some of these reasons vary from birth-con-trol to a discussion on theology. The birth control” man will argue just as fiercely as the theologian that his is the right method to free humanity. In between these two, are numberless other beliefs that have their exponents, who are able to quote chapter and verse for their pet hobby. One will say the workers are too well off, and they will not move until they are harder put to it—in fact, not until they are starving. Another will say that we will do nothing with the workers until wc have bettered their conditions

so as to give environment an opportunity to get in its fine work. So the discussion goes on, and it see-ms that we cannot decide the best way to tac kle your intellect so as to make you think of your class-position. Quito re ccntly, I met a Comrade- who assured me in fierce and lurid, if not con voic-

ing, language that it was the church-?-that were keeping the people back, lir said that priests and parsons were the greatest drug-producers for the human brain. He showed me clearly that they had stood in the way of progress for centuries, and had been behind all the wars that the human race had ever fought. On my remonstrating that there were thousands of wars before the Christian era, he held that priests and parsons started at the time the first tribe was found, and we would have them with us to the end. He held that a minority of them worshipped Christ to-day, but if those had not Christ to worship, they would worshi] something else, the same as the Mahommedans, the Buddhists, the Brahmins etc. In fact, he held that the clergymen were the descendants of the medicine men of the primitive tribes and the fact of our present-day clergymen backing up wars was due to their having inherited that feeling from the de vil-danccrs, who went with the wu

riors of the tribe when they issued forth to battle: and, frothing at the mouth, worked the soldiers up to a mad frenzy. Thinking of some of the sermons we heard when the big war w on, I had to admit my friend had some grounds for his contentions. A partic ular friend of mine was a great ration anst, and everlastingly telling me that the Churches were keeping the people from coming into their own. Last week so as to remove from my mind thp las 7 shreds of a belief in God, he invited me along to hear Joe McCabe. Me Cabis a great lecturer, and had once been a priest. He left the Church because he could not conform to its teachings, and took up rationalism. 1 was assurec that he was thoroughly hopest. in b present day beliefs, so T accompanrei my friend to the lecture. Joe was ir fine form, ami. said he now represented the majority of the people of Grca* Britain. He said that there, were eight and a half million people in the City of London, and seven and a half mil lions of them did not go to any church Tn the cities of London, Paris, and Berlin, there were fourteen million people, and only two million went to church. This was counting the child ren, whom many parents sent to church although they did not believe in it themselves. Joe quoted quite a lot of figures to show that these cities were no longer Christian. I believed Joe’s figures were right, and that about only one in eight goes to church now. Coming home from the meeting, my friend asked what I thought of the lecture.

f admitted the lecture was a good on but I held it knocked the bottom out of his argument’ that it was the Churches that were keeping the people in sub-

jection! My friend had swallowed all Joe said bolus bolus, and he at once demanded “How?” I gently said that surely, he would not say that one million people were leading the other seven and a half million in London, or that two million were leading the fourteen million inhabitants of London. Berlin, and Paris by the nose? Taking Joe’s figures again, I applied them to Australia, America and New Zealand, and they still .came out that only about one in eight of the people, including children go to any church. And then I took him into the Labour Movement, and I found that the percentage of Labour members who believed in a Supreme Being was far more than one-eighth. Where, then, are the other seveneighths? If it is religion that is keeping the brains of the workers drugged, then the seven-eighths that have ceased to believe should be in the ranks of the working class movement, or a good proportion of them at anyratP. My friend hold that they would ail come in later, and said that rationalism was the first stop. I gently suggested that Pir Robert Stout, who presided over Joe’s meeting, had been a rationalist for about a quarter of a century to my knowledge; but that did not prevent him sentencing Alice Parkinson for the term of her natural life, or Harry Holland to 12 months’ hard labour for sedition. And anyhow. Hen, I’d sooner x go before a wowser judge to-morrow than a Rationalist if I wn’ nad up for being too active in the Working Class Movement! You see, Hen, it does not matter what a man believes, or what he does not believe; so long ns he believes in the capitalist system, lie does his best to crush out anything that may upset that system. And I have known instances where movements have been crushed with the most savage severity by Rationalists, and of others where awful atrocities

have been committed in the name of Christ. Even Joe McCabe’s attitude during the late war showed that, with all his boasted scientific reasoning, his brain had not evolved very far from the unthinking jingo! By his talk, it is possible to measure the universe or to measure an electron. According to science, an atom compared to a drop of water is as a boy’s marble to the earth, and the electron to the atom is as a pin-point to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Further than this electron is travelling at the rate of something like 100,000 miles a second. Joe believes science can find out all this. If they can, they should be able to measure Joe’s mind—and control same when the next war takes place, so that he may take up a logical, scientific attitude, instead of an illogical unscientific jingo one. When these scientists take up economics and give justice to the workers, and assist to stop the. present robbery, I will believe they are honest, but while they go on pandering to a system that makes for wage slavery, impoverishes those who do the world’s work, and enriches those who idle, I am going to take much they say with a grain of salt. I believe in evolution, Hen, and I think that if you keep continually using one foot to stand on the other, that foot will in time grow so large that it will be impossible to put it anywhere but down on top of 'the other one. That would mean that you would never be anything else but a wage slave. Hen, take my advice, old chap, and remove that foot off the other one, while there is yet time. THE UNDERSTUDY.