• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

• • •

Such is my ancestral religion. How it was passed on to me is a mystery. By the time I got to know them, my parents were both so woozy with Weltschmerz that they weren’t passing anything on—not the German language, not their love for German music, not the family history, nothing. Everything was all over with. They were kaput.

So I must have questioned them, finally, about what our family believed. I must have noticed that the Goldsteins and the Waleses and others proudly believed one thing or another, and I wanted a belief to be proud of, too.

How proud I became of our belief, how pigheadedly proud, even, is the most evident thing in my writing, I think. Haven’t I already attributed the breakup of my first marriage in part to my wife’s failure to share my family belief with me?

And did I not speak in this Free Thinking manner to the graduating class at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, on May 26, 1974:

“Kin Hubbard was an Indianapolis newspaper humorist. He wrote under the name of Abe Martin. My father, who was an Indianapolis architect, knew him some. Kin Hubbard had fault to find with commencement addresses. He thought that all the really important information should be spread out over four years, instead of being saved up for one big speech at the very end.

“That is an elegant joke, although nobody here seems to be hemorrhaging with laughter. That is just as well. I want us to be serious. I want us to ponder seriously about commencement addresses, to realize what it is that is withheld from students until the very end. In the fiction game, we call a marvelous thing withheld until the very end the ’snapper’ of a tale. O. Henry probably devised more snappers than any other writer in history. So what is the snapper of a college education? What is the thing colleges hire outsiders to deliver on commencement day?

“The outsider is expected to answer the questions: what is life all about, and what are new college graduates supposed to do with it now?

“This information has to be saved up until the very end for this good reason: No responsible, truth-loving teacher can answer those questions in class, or even in the privacy of his office or home. No respecter of evidence has ever found the least clue as to what life is all about, and what people should do with it.

“Oh, there have been lots of brilliant guesses. But honest, educated people have to identify them as such—as guesses. What are guesses worth? Scientifically and legally, they are not worth doodley-squat. As the saying goes: Your guess is as good as mine.

“The guesses we like best, as with so many things we like best, were taught to us in childhood—by people who loved us and wished us well. We are reluctant to criticize those guesses. It is an ultimate act of rudeness to find fault with anything which is given to us in a spirit of love. So a modern, secular education is often painful. By its very nature, it invites us to question the wisdom of the ones we love.

“Too bad.

“I have said that one guess is as good as another, but that is only roughly so. Some guesses are crueler than others—which is to say, harder on human beings, and on other animals as well. The belief that God wants heretics burned to death is a case in point. Some guesses are more suicidal than others. The belief that a true lover of God is immune to the bites of copperheads and rattlesnakes is a case in point. Some guesses are greedier and more egocentric than others. Belief in the divine right of kings and presidents is a case in point.

“Those are all discredited guesses. But it is reasonable to suppose that other bad guesses are poisoning our lives today. A good education in skepticism can help us to discover those bad guesses, and to destroy them with mockery and contempt. Most of them were made by honest, decent people who had no way of knowing what we know, or what we can find out, if we want to. We have one hell of a lot of good information about our bodies, about our planet, and the universe