Re: Was Mark Twain
An Atheist?
Bill Garrett
This is excerpted from a much longer personal dialogue. |
August, 2000
I got the impression he thought of himself as an infidel or apostate. One of his writings has a litte story in which he asks a preacher if he believes people will really go to heaven when they die. The preacher replies, "If I had your chances, I wouldn't worry about it."
But Twain probably planted the seeds of doubt in my young mind. Too bad there's no one like him today.
Yeah, Michener died a few years ago, didn't he? Though not like Twain (who could be like Twain?), he also planted a lot of seeds of doubt in me.
But we do have guys like Krassner.
And a lot of information is being put onto records these days, a medium that wasn't around during Twain's and Ingersoll's time. Also, don't forget film and television. The record and TV poets of today would have been either writing books and pamphlets or going on lecture tours during the nineteenth century.
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