The was a novel written in 1903 by a fellow named Guy Thorne, and it was a huge best-seller in the first half of the Twentieth Century. The novel was called
When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy. In it, a wealthy and powerful English Jew, Constantine Schuabe, a known adversary of Christian clergy, plots to destroy Christianity by falsely disproving the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He exploits the financial situation of English Biblical expert Sir Robert Llewelyn and coerces him to plant an inscription upon an ancient tomb entrance. This inscription, supposedly written by Joseph of Arimathea, stated that he took the body of Christ after his death and concealed it there.
Well, of course, as some might expect, the result is a terrible decline in morality in the world: people stealing from one another, fornicating in the streets, and all manner of depravity and demonstrations of man’s inhumanity to ma, until the plot is finally exposed, and everybody returns to being morally good again.
The book, in my view, is pure trash, but it seems to express something that often appears in these forums – the notion that we cannot be good without God, that without religion, morality is impossible.
So I’d like all the religious members (and I don’t care which religion) to think about this for a moment: if somehow the very basis of your religion was disproved – if Christ or Moses or Muhammad or Krishna or Vishnu or the Bab or whomever were proved not to have existed or to have been frauds – which of the following would you suddenly feel you should start doing?
- Beat your spouse
- Be unfaithful
- Give up the ties of family, and teach your children to be immoral for profit
- Steal from anyone
- Lie whenever you think you can gain by it
- Murder whom you don’t like
- Rape, and ignore others who rape
I ask this question seriously, because by asking you to consider what you might do if it were just up to you and no deity to obey, then you are telling us who you really are.
