“G.B.S." AND RELIGION

Southland Times, Issue 21896, 23 December 1932, Page 16

“G.B.S." AND RELIGION

SHAW’S LATEST BOOK. “FOOLISHNESS AND VANITY.” London, December 4. Describing himself as the “Bishop of Everywhere,” in his preface to his latest book, “The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God,” Mr G. Bernard Shaw proves, according to the newspapers, a very irreverent bishop. They predict a typhoon when the book attracts the attention of reliigous people, owing to its offensive sarcasms at the expense of the Deity and the Apostles. The girl asks a white missionary, “Where is God?” and is told “Seek and ye shall find Me.” The girl, to her utter confusion, finds several Gods, the first, a terrifying God, commanding her to kneel and worship and to sacrifice her favourite child because He has power over diseases, and storm and The girl replies, “I am not a piccaninny. Not even a grown-up ninny would believe such nonsense. Later she encounters others gods, but finally marries an Irish Socialist and bears children, who are charmingly coffee-coloured. Shaw, interpreting the parable says: ‘‘The Bible is scientifically obsolete, but in other respects remains interesting as a record of how the idea of God developed from the childish idolatary of a thundering, earthquaking, faminestriking, pestilence-launching, blinding, deafening, killing and destructively omnipotent bogey man the braver realization of a benevolent Sage, just Judge, and affectionate Father, evolving into the incorporeal Word which never becomes flesh.” Of the Apostles, Shaw says: “Sometimes the ysuggest that there was not a Christian among them. Judas alone showed a gleam of common-sense.” Decalogue “Mere Lumber.” The Bible, Mr Shaw contends, Is not suited to modem tastes, although more alive than the Parliamentary debates, and better reading than the mendacious fashionable histories. The Ten Commandments are characterized as “mere lumber.” They say no work against “those forms of robbery legalized by those robbers who uprooted the foundations of our society, and will condemn us to social decay unless we are awakened, like Russia, by a crashing collapse.” The News-Chronicle says that Mr Shaw has conceived it to be his function to shock people. This was necessary in his first campaign to destroy the banal conventionality of the British theatre, but the prescription is wrong in some cases, especially the last. It will only wound, exasperate, and antagonize those whom he wants to read his book. It is mere foolishness and vanity. '