A Cityless and Countryless World
An Outline of Practical Co-Operative Individualism
Henry Olerich
[A condensed and edited version of the book
originally published by Gilmore & Olerich, Holstein, Iowa, 1893 /
CHAPTER 26 - Favorable News]
Our aid and sympathy are always with the living, for death has
satisfied, at least, all the material and mental wants of the
deceased, and these are all the wants we have any positive knowledge
of.
From historical records, and from the present practices of savages,
we find that funeral rites and processions are born in barbarous
times, and first practiced by primitive savages, and that all you have
left of them at present are only the modified remnants of former
barbarity and superstition.
The primitive savage worships his deceased ancestors; he embalms
them; he assigns them the best place at the table during the time of a
feast; he often inters his horse, his gun and a number of slaves with
him. His wife has often such a profound respect for the dead that she
often voluntarily cremates herself alive on the funeral pyre of her
deceased husband.
Thus we see at a glance that the savage has a much profounder respect
for the dead, and much less respect for the living than the more
cultivated person has, and this change gradually continues until all
our help and sympathies are with the living, for the dead can not
utilize them.
You do not at present directly bury the living in the same tomb with
the dead like the savage did and still does; but, no doubt, you often
indirectly do it. I have seen more than once, while I have been living
on earth, that a bereaved widow who was completely broken down by the
bereavement, care and attention she had given to her sick husband,
follow him for miles in a slow funeral procession during a rain or
snowstorm, and also at times when the temperature was almost
unbearably high or low. It seems to me that no highly cultivated
person, who has the well-being and happiness of his surviving
companions at heart, can form a conception that the unconscious dead
would appreciate such useless hardships from their dearest friends
even if they could know. After we had learned that all our acts and
sympathies should go with the living that the dead are unconscious and
that all organs and faculties, as far as we know and have reason to
believe, suspend their function in death we no longer could expend any
useless efforts for the supposed whims of the dead. We do all we can
for them while they live, but death ends all our physical ties.
We never wear mourning for a number of reasons. As I have said
before, no person of high culture can desire his surviving friends to
undergo any useless hardship and privation on his account; and
mourning has a tendency of increasing the burden of grief by making
the surroundings more solemn and gloomy.
Our aim should be to make the surroundings of the bereaved as
attractive, cheerful, and gay as possible. A living person of learning
and culture would desire his friends to be as happy as possible; and a
dead one, if he could know anything, would be a tyrant if he were
different.
The foregoing propositions are based upon the facts that it is in the
inherent nature of things that death must necessarily come to all.
That no amount of fretting and resistance can surmount this natural
phenomenon. That a dead person is unconscious and can not appreciate
and utilize help and sympathy. That the living should forget the
bereavement of the dead as soon as possible. That no cultivated person
desires his friends to undergo any useless hardships on his account,
for the fundamental object of all sentient beings is the enjoyment of
the greatest happiness, and mourning tends to intensify and prolong
the depressed feeling of grief, which detracts from the greater
happiness.
We have no material monuments; no memorials erected over our material
remains. We believe that the deeds we do while we live, if they
deserve remembrance, will erect a mental memorial in the minds of the
living, which will serve to perpetuate our memory until our deeds are
eclipsed by some nobler ones of posterity.
Again, when we examine your tombs we find that nearly all the great
monuments have been erected to the honor of the most unworthy and
infamous persons generals, torturers, despots and tyrants and bigots
who were instrumental in taking the lives of thousands of innocent
persons, and who have appropriated countless billions from the
earnings of the productive laborers. The principle of material
monuments is the same, whether contemplated from the colossal pyramids
of Egypt or from the humblest tombstone of a country cemetery;
costliness is the only difference.
We have seen that knowing implies two things a conscious subject to
receive the impression and an ob ject to make it. For aught we know
there may be forms of existences that have neither matter nor
gravitation, but we can not assert this as a fact, because the data of
proof and disproof are inaccessible. It is a form of existence, if it
does exist, that does not excite a sensation as an object on a
recipient subject. It is a well- known fact with us that all knowledge
must enter the mind through the channels of the senses, and when ever
and wherever we attempt to pass beyond the boundaries of the
phenomenal, we are always check mated by two alternate impossibilities
of thought.
Nearly all of your foremost thinkers are agnostics. This seems to
show that your foremost minds are following us right up in religious
beliefs and that there is but one line of progress here as well as
elsewhere.
A person who can believe that an all-powerful God finds delight and
pleasure in torturing a creature for all eternity, must have some mean
blood in his own veins, for it is very probable that the crudest
person that ever lived would get his revenge satisfied by torturing
his worst enemy for less than half an eternity. Thus, such a person
makes his God meaner, more cruel, more re vengeful than that person is
himself. The savage knows of but few natural laws, and hence he puts
nearly every thing under the immediate and arbitrary supervision of
his deities, whose anger is very easily excited. But as man becomes
more and more civilized, his deities grow less in number; they "also
become kinder and more abstract. The process of discovering laws
continues, until at last he concludes that all things are governed and
maintained by law, and that wherever men have not yet discovered the
law of a certain phenomena, their limited knowledge is at fault. Thus
gradually as the mind unfolds and the heart improves, the super
natural is step by step brought within the domain of the natural, and
the personal deities slowly become identical and at one with the Great
Fact of the universe.
"[We] claim [to] know nothing about supernaturalism, and that by
the very nature of the knowing process nothing can be known about it.
What we claim is, that there may be a personal God and there may not
be one; but if there is such a personal God, the kind, cultured can
conceive of Him only as being kind and just, having no revengeful
feelings what ever. You see [we] never revengefully punish any one;
how, then, can we think that God would; for, if we would think so, we
would make our God worse than we are ourselves.
But we also believe, if there is a conscious personal existence after
death, that things, when we get there, will be suited to that life the
same as we find them suited here to this life. We further believe that
this life, in order to make it as good and complete as possible,
requires all our efforts and talent to live up to the most wholesome
relations that are stamped in the very nature of things. There is more
about this life than we can probably ever learn; hence we have no time
to spare for gaining the favors of beings in a supposed world, of
which we know nothing definitely. The facts of the universe are the
highest known authority, and he who lives most nearly in accord with
them lives, in our opinion, the heliest life.
If God is affected by man's prayer, and if man is a free, moral
agent, as your orthodox world claims him to be, then God's action
must, to a certain extent, be determined by and dependent on the
arbitrary fancies of man s devotional exercises. This state of affairs
would, on the one hand, deprive science of all its certitude; would
sever the continuity and destroy the uniformity of nature; would
probably, by an intervention of prayer, make action which is equal to
reaction one day, only half equal to it the next day. It would also
rob God of all independent activity and make Him the sport of man s
whims and passions. But if, on the other hand, God is not affected by
prayer, prayer is worse than useless; for it involves an expenditure
of vitality which should be all utilized for useful activity, as we
have seen. Thus we see that a prayer- hearing God and a free, moral
agent can not be reconciled with the scientific world.
CONTENTS
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