Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Wednesday, March 18, 2009 9:17:07 PM
What would Mencken know of the Puritans? This is his definition of Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Re: http://townhall.com/columnists/AlanSears/2009/03/18/preying_on_prayer
Mencken’s disparagement of Puritanism is understandable because as an atheist he associated happiness as freedom from moral constraint and accountability, whereas the Puritans viewed immorality as idolatry of self and bondage to sin.
He was at the ‘Monkey Trial’ in support of the minority view. Now that macro-evolution is the dominate view, would he still support academic freedom or would he side with the new fundamentalists? The disciples of Darwin are as dogmatic as the disciples of Moses and even more intolerant. Mencken was ahead of his time in his disdain for the Christian religion…
"THE MONKEY TRIAL": A Reporter's Account by Mencken
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/menk.htm
July 14 (the third day)
The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seems to be preciously the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan. That is, locally, upon the process against the infidel Scopes, upon the so-called minds of these fundamentalists of upland Tennessee. You have but a dim notice of it who have only read it. It was not designed for reading, but for hearing. The clangtint of it was as important as the logic. It rose like a wind and ended like a flourish of bugles. The very judge on the bench, toward the end of it, began to look uneasy. But the morons in the audience, when it was over, simply hissed it.
During the whole time of its delivery the old mountebank, Bryan, sat tight-lipped and unmoved. There is, of course, no reason why it should have shaken him. He has these hillbillies locked up in his pen and he knows it. His brand is on them. He is at home among them. Since his earliest days, indeed, his chief strength has been among the folk of remote hills and forlorn and lonely farms. Now with his political aspirations all gone to pot, he turns to them for religious consolations. They understand his peculiar imbecilities. His nonsense is their ideal of sense. When he deluges them with his theologic bilge they rejoice like pilgrims disporting in the river Jordan....