About three decades before Clive Staples Lewis penned The Screwtape Letters in an effort to restore his countrymen to Christian piety, Samuel Langhorne Clemens wrote Letters from the Earth (with a similarly satirical and epistolary style) in an effort to persuade his countrymen to rethink and reject orthodox Christian faith. The story spans eleven letters written by the archangel Satan to his fellow archangels Gabriel and Michael, and provides a thoroughgoing sarcastigation of the religion and morality that humankind has invented for itself.
In the following excerpt from Letter VII, the author lampoons Biblical creationism and intelligent design while driving home an emotionally compelling atheological argument from evil:
Noah and his family were saved — if that could be called an advantage. I throw in the if for the reason that there has never been an intelligent person of the age of sixty who would consent to live his life over again. His or anyone else’s. The Family were saved, yes, but they were not comfortable, for they were full of microbes. Full to the eyebrows; fat with them, obese with them, distended like balloons. It was a disagreeable condition, but it could not be helped, because enough microbes had to be saved to supply the future races of men with desolating diseases, and there were but eight persons on board to serve as hotels for them. The microbes were by far the most important part of the Ark’s cargo, and the part the Creator was most anxious about and most infatuated with. They had to have good nourishment and pleasant accommodations. There were typhoid germs, and cholera germs, and hydrophobia germs, and lockjaw germs, and consumption germs, and black-plague germs, and some hundreds of other aristocrats, specially precious creations, golden bearers of God’s love to man, blessed gifts of the infatuated Father to his children — all of which had to be sumptuously housed and richly entertained; these were located in the choicest places the interiors of the Family could furnish: in the lungs, in the heart, in the brain, in the kidneys, in the blood, in the guts. In the guts particularly. The great intestine was the favorite resort. There they gathered, by countless billions, and worked, and fed, and squirmed, and sang hymns of praise and thanksgiving; and at night when it was quiet you could hear the soft murmur of it. The large intestine was in effect their heaven.
With antitheistic broadsides like this, it should be obvious why the book was only published several decades after the death of the author, and as it happens, some twenty years after The Screwtape Letters. (For what it’s worth, Clemens outdoes Lewis in terms of rhetorical gut-punching, if not technical flair.)
This one is a fairly quick read, and is freely available in either PDF format or as an audiobook read by John Greenman.
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[Content note: This book is not suitable for children under 13 or Social Justice Warriors. If you find it offensive, or racist, or sexist, don’t come crying to me.]
