Conan Doyle Assails Church; Asks New Faith
Conan Doyle Assails Church; Asks New Faith is an article published in The Chicago Tribune on 21 february 1928.
Extracts of Arthur Conan Doyle's : A Word of Warning (february 1928).
Article
LONDON, Feb. 20. — [U. P.] — In the midst of religious turmoil in England Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dropped a new bombshell today in the form of a nineteen page pamphlet, "A Word of Warning," which amounts to a recommendation that Christian churches should be scrapped for a new religion based on spiritualism. The pamphlet scathingly assails the priesthood, the sacraments, baptism, the communion, confession, and the virgin birth. Church rituals are denounced as "organized materialism" and "systematized insanity."
The creator of Sherlock Holmes adds that "religion depends upon two things — conduct and character."
"If you are the unselfish kind, then you belong to the elect," he said. "If you try hard to be bitter and narrow, no faith and no church can save you from the judgment to come."
Regarding Mary, he says: "If we wish to have an ideal of womanhood, why not be frank and call Mary the wife of Joseph and the hardworking partner of a carpenter with a large family? This is reasonable. But why in the name of sanity call her the Virgin? Are not the names of her children known?"
As for the sacrament, whose origin is "reasonable and charming," Sir Arthur declares that "human absurdity and perverseness made of the sacrament no less than that we eat, drink, and presumably digest the actual flesh and blood of God. It is folly of this sort to which I know no parallel in any barbarous religion which calls for judgment on us."
