9 Books Censored or Destroyed for Challenging Religion

9. Censoring Himself, for Awhile: Twain’s Autobiography

“I expose to the world only my trimmed and perfumed and carefully barbered public opinions,” wrote Mark Twain in his final years, “and conceal carefully, cautiously, wisely, my private ones.” As he evolves through his life from practicing Presbyterian to mild Deist to an increasingly sharp religious critic, Twain’s writings began to show a deepening disgust with religion.

His Autobiography was so direct that he gave instructions to suppress the more incendiary parts until 100 years after his death. The final volume was released just last year, revealing among other things his unvarnished contempt for the Christian religion:

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is—in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree—it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime—the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.

It really doesn’t get much clearer than that.

Adapted from Atheism for Dummies by Dale McGowan (Wiley, 2013).

Al-Razi portrait by Jacopo188 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Mark Twain portrait property of Mark Twain Library, Redding CT | License CC 2.0.
Darwin book cover fair use for direct review.
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