Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/54

52 son of Abraham, was as ready and willing to prostitute his wife for protection for himself as was his father Abraham?

The Martian is puzzled by the word "sporting" in Genesis, XXVI, 8-11, and is informed of its meaning. A few moments after reading Genesis XIX, 1-7, he informs his would-be converter that if Lot had lived in Mars and had offered his daughters to appease the mob, the account of that incident would never have found its way into any work on morals. Moreover, he failed utterly to see how the account of Lot's daughters getting him into a drunken state, followed by a statement such as, "Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father," could ever have any moral value.

The story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel does not appeal to this infidel Martian, since he still believes that integrity and faithfulness are virtues. Yet, in his endeavor to respect the courtesy due to his host, he reaches for pencil and pad, and notes the various moral lessons he had derived thus far from the Old Testament. He wrote lust, incest, infidelity, and prostitution; arriving at the story of Dinah, Genesis XXXIV, 1-2, he wrote that in addition to those vices already listed, rape should be given a prominent place. The stories of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, Judah and Tamar, King David and his wives, the rape of Tamar by her brother Ammon, did not impress the Martian as stories for the delectation of children, since he was crude enough to hold that anything which would shock the mind of a child, could not have any moral value and would thus be automatically excluded from any religion. He, therefore, returned the volume to the Hebrew with the remark that as an adult he found the stories of De Maupassant and Balzac more interesting, even though they belonged to the same genre.