The Creation of God - Jacob Hartmann (readict TXT) 📗

The Colossus, or brazen statue of the Sun, was placed across the mouth of the harbor of Rhodes, its legs stretched to such a distance that a large ship under sail might easily pass between them. It was seventy cubits high, or a hundred English feet; its fingers were as long as ordinary statues, and few men with both arms could grasp one of its thumbs. Scarcely sixty years had elapsed before this work of art was thrown down by an earthquake, which broke it off at the knees, in which position it remained till the conquest of Rhodes by the Saracens (A.D. 684), when it was beaten to pieces and sold to a Jew merchant, who loaded nine hundred camels with its spoils.

Anaxagoras (500 B.C.) taught that there was but one god, and that the sun was only a fiery globe and should not be worshiped. He attempted to explain eclipses and other celestial phenomena by natural causes, saying that there is no such thing as chances, these being only names for unknown laws. For this audacity and impiety, as his countrymen considered it, he and his family were doomed to perpetual banishment. “Man,” said Protagoras of Abra (430 B.C.), “is the measure of all things.… Of the Gods I know nothing, neither whether they be nor whether they be not; for there is much that stands in the way of knowledge, as well the obscurity of the matter as the shortness of human life.”

St. John begins his writings: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” But John, like many others of his time, knew nothing more than the use of words to make riddles, which he himself could not see through and no one else could understand. The man or men who first composed that part of scripture that informs us how the sun and earth were created, certainly knew nothing about it, because all that is at present known is of comparatively recent date. For many centuries, the established religion, the church, and the representatives of the theo-Christian organization, did all in their power to prevent light from penetrating their hidden benighted doings. They looked upon themselves as being all in all, knowing all in all—as having had everything worth knowing revealed to them by an agency no one else had access to. The ideas of their mysterious doings, of their mysterious Gods, are hidden from view in deep obscurity—like the temple of the Egyptian Isis, that bore the inscription: “I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil.”

The ancient writers of the scripture were full of deep, mysterious ways, and their writings of hidden meanings. Ordinary mortals were prohibited from making inquiry because the subject was considered too mysterious, and much too sacred.

Since then, many mysteries have been dissolved, or have been analyzed by the crucial test of science, and it has been discovered that there is nothing hidden except what our ignorance prevents us from knowing. We have lifted the sacred veil and looked into the temple of nature, as she is, and not as she appears. The more we search, the more we discover, the nearer we get to the truth.

There is not the slightest reason why every man, woman, and child at proper age should not be instructed in matters wherein they are immediately interested, the knowledge whereof would undoubtedly be to their benefit.

Men have lived through centuries of fable, ages of fiction, long periods of myth. The Christian God is as much of a myth as any myth that ever existed. Humanity having passed through these various mental afflictions, gone through so many bloody surgical operations, we are, as it were, approaching a condition that will soon be declared as convalescent, and this most miserable of theological nurses may at not a very remote period be dismissed.

We can say, without the slightest conscientious scruple, or fear of contradiction, with reason to sustain us and the light of science to prove the truth, that There is no God.

There never was—except such a one as men have invented, held sacred, and worshiped. There is nothing sacred except what man makes sacred, nothing holy except what man makes holy, nothing divine except what man makes divine. He makes his own God, and he religiously, piously, devoutly prays to and worships it. The more regularly he does so, the more saintly he becomes, or esteems himself.

For many thousand years the Sun was worshiped, held sacred, sacrificed to, entempled, etc. As reason and understanding increased, they forsook him as a god, dismissed him as they had dismissed many gods before him. Yet the sun was by far their greatest benefactor and best friend—more than they were aware of.

The sun is 93,000,000 miles from the earth. Supposing a railway could be built to the sun, an express train traveling day and night, at the rate of thirty miles an hour, would require 352 years to reach its destination. The light of the sun is equal to 5,563 wax candles held at a distance of one foot from the eye. The heat of the sun that we receive annually is sufficient to melt a layer of ice 180 feet thick, extending over the whole earth. Yet the sunbeam is only 1⁄300000​ part as intense as it is at the surface of the sun. Moreover, the heat and light stream off into space equally in every direction. Of this vast flood, but one twenty-three-hundred-millionth part reaches the earth.

The diameter of the sun is about 860,000 miles. Its volume is 1,300,000 times that of the earth, i.e., it would take 1,300,000 earths to make a globe the size of the sun. Its mass is 750 times that of all the planets and moons in the solar system, and 300,000 times that of the earth. Its weight may be expressed in tons thus: 1,910,278,070,000,000,000,000,000,000. The density of the sun is only about one-fourth that of the earth, or 1.41 that of water, so that the weight of a body transferred from the earth to the sun would not be increased in proportion to the comparative size of the sun. The sun rotates on his axis, like a wheel, once in about 25 days.

Our astronomers tell us that the solar heat is gradually diminishing. In time the sun will cease to shine, as the earth did long since. Newcomb says that in 5,000,000 years, at the present rate, the sun will have shrunk to half its present size, and that it cannot sustain life on the earth more than 10,000,000 years longer. Of this we may be assured, there is enough heat to support life on our globe for millions of years to come.

The sun consists of a central orb, liquid or solid, of exceeding brightness, which of itself would give a continuous spectrum, or in other words which emits all kinds of light. The sunlight is decomposed by means of the spectroscope, already alluded to, in order to discover the kind of elements it is composed of. Therefore Tyndall says: “I think we now possess knowledge sufficient to raise us to the level of one of the most remarkable generalizations of our age. It has long been supposed that the sun and planets have had a common origin and that hence the same substances are more or less common to them all. Can we detect the presence of any of our terrestrial substances in the sun?… I have said that the bright bands of a metal are characteristic of the metal; that we can without seeing the metal declare its name from the inspection of the bands. The bands are, so to speak, the voice of the metal declaring its presence.

“Professor Kirchhoff finds iron, calcium, magnesium, sodium, chromium, etc., in the sunlight spectrum. We know also the total amount of solar heat received by the earth in a year, and we can calculate the entire quantity of heat emitted by the sun in a year. Conceive a hollow sphere to surround the sun, its center the sun’s center, and its surface at the distance of the earth from the sun. The section of the earth cut by this surface is to the whole area of the hollow sphere as 1 to 2,300,000,000; hence the quantity of solar heat intercepted by the earth is only 1⁄2300000000​ of the total radiation.

“The heat emitted by the sun, if used to melt a stratum of ice applied to the sun’s surface would liquefy the ice at the rate of 2,400 feet an hour. It would boil per hour 700,000 millions of cubic miles of ice-cold water. Expressed in another form, the heat given out by the sun per hour is equal to that which would be generated by the combustion of a layer of solid coal 10 feet thick entirely surrounding the sun; hence the heat emitted in a year is equal to that which would be produced by the combustion of a layer of coal 17 miles in thickness. These are the results