The Skeptical Review Online - Print Edition

I just received my first issue of The Believers' Chronicle. The editor's article about you was quite revealing. And, are you really running from him? From the elapsed time, it would appear so. When do you plan on "chewing him up and spitting him out"? We Christians know that the Holy Spirit will win out every time.

Well, I sure would like to see how you handle his article. And, how long it will take. Because of his endorsement of TSR, please enter my free subscription. If you run from "ignorant" Christians, however, I don't know what you could possibly teach me.

(J. D. King, 110 East 4th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43201.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following response was mailed directly to J. D. King, whom I suspect from the style of the handwriting is Ms. J. D. King:

I have added your name to our mailing list to receive a free subscription to The Skeptical Review. The next issue will be mailed on January 2nd if the printer has the project finished on schedule. I send by bulk mail, so you should expect a delay of seven to ten days for delivery.

For your information, I am sending you a copy of a letter and my editorial comments on it that will be published in the March/April issue of The Skeptical Review. I thought that sending it to you would be the easiest way to respond to your accusation that I am "running" from Dennis Conley. My comments on the letter explain why after I received my first communication from ASRC, I came to suspect that it is a bogus organization that has falsified information about the size of the audience that it has. Each communication from Mr. Conley simply increases that suspicion.

When I was first contacted by Mr. Conley--well, another "editor," to be more exact--I had just retired from teaching college writing, so I naively envisioned myself having enough time on my hands to do just about anything. About this same time, one of my subscribers ran display ads in two consecutive issues of Bible Review, and this brought a flood of inquiries and subscription requests that I still haven't cleared away. In addition to this, a group of young skeptics who are heavily involved with the internet put The Skeptical Review on the worldwide web and organized a "list" for me where internet users could post arguments and rebuttals concerning biblical inerrancy issues. This also added to my workload (far more than you can imagine if you have no experience with the net). In other words, I am simply saying that I am just one person, I do *everything* involved with publishing The Skeptical Review with the exception of the actual running of the printing presses and stapling equipment that puts the papers together. This is done by a nearby publishing company. Nevertheless, all of the other activities draw heavily on my time. In addition to these duties, I write articles for an area newspaper and also a regular column for The Secular Humanist Bulletin. All of this takes time, and all of it generates a lot of mail that requires my personal attention. If you know of any solutions to my time problems, I would be glad to hear them.

Your insinuation that I am afraid of Mr. Conley is ludicrous to people who know me. I have publicly debated preachers who are reputed to be the best that their denominations have to offer. One of my opponents in a public debate was Norman Geisler, a name you will instantly recognize if you know anything at all about fundamentalist apologetics. I have proposed debates to Josh McDowell, who has refused them with silence, and I have challenged Dr. Gleason Archer to debate. I can produce a letter from him in which he refused the challenge. Just today, I discussed proposals via telephone and internet with two different fundamentalist preachers that will probably result in three public debates in 1996: one in Alabama, one in Georgia, and one in Texas. I pay all of my expenses when I participate in these debates, and I usually have two per year.

Does all of this sound as if I am "afraid" of Christians or that I "run" from them. As the attached letter from the "Mailbag" column of TSR shows, I have challenged Dennis Conley to debate publicly, but he has informed me that he doesn't debate and that, in fact, no one in his organization debates. Well, I do debate, and if I can have reasonable assurance of an audience to listen to the issues under discussion (rather than the virtual nonaudience that I suspect I would have for any articles that I may write for Conley's paper), I will gladly arrange my schedule so that I can come to Columbus, OH, to confront whomever the Christians may designate to represent their inerrancy view. Perhaps you would like to devote some of your time to make such a debate a reality.

Finally, just let me say that I have seen nothing from Conley's publication or its predecessor that even remotely resembles an argument. If I am wrong about this, please send me a copy of the article in which you think a legitimate argument was published, highlight it for me, and I will make the time to write a response to it. Isn't that about as reasonable as you could expect me to be?

As for when I intend to chew up Mr. Conley and spit him out, if Ms. King will persuade him to defend the doctrine of Bible inerrancy in public debate, I will go to Columbus, Ohio, to oppose him. That will give her the opportunity to see me chew him up and spit him out. I say this not because I think I have invincible debating talents but because I know that biblical inerrancy is impossible to defend. I think that the inevitable defeat Mr. Conley would suffer in such an encounter, if he is foolish enough to accept the challenge, could properly be called a "chewing up and spitting out."

Enclosed is a letter from ASRC [American Society for Religious Concern]. I sent for a copy of their December issue of The Believers Chronicle, because I wanted to read your reply to them on, I believe, a challenge to biblical inerrancy. The attached letter states that they have not received any response from you.

I am wondering if, as they say, it's true that you have not responded to them? Is the reason you did not respond to them because this organization is not worth the effort, or you sent them a response but they said you did not just to embarrass you, as well as other skeptics that would look for your article in The Believers Chronicle?

By the way, ASRC wrote me a letter saying I wrote an interesting letter in the last issue of The Skeptical Review. What could have been so interesting in a letter that was requesting a subscription to TSR is beyond me, and I basically told ASRC so.

(Roger La Porte, 148 Freund Street, Buffalo, NY 14215.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: For reasons noted above in my reply to J. D. King's Letter, at the time Mr. La Porte received the letter from The Believers Chronicle I had not responded to anything published about me in this paper or its short-lived predecessor The Stupid Christian Chronicle. That, however, is no longer true. When I finally cleared away the backlog of subscription requests and renewals, I wrote a response to Mr. Conley's article "The Progress of Sin" and mailed it to him along with a renewal of my challenge for a public debate in Columbus, Ohio, on the issue of biblical inerrancy. What happens now is up to Mr. Conley. If he will accept my debate challenge, I think he will very definitely see that I am not "running" from him as he has alleged in his paper.

Thank you for putting out such a wonderful publication. I have used up my first year's free subscription to The Skeptical Review and am forwarding a check to continue my subscription to the new bimonthly TSR. I would also like to order a complete set of TSR back issues from Winter 1990 through the end of 1994. You indicate that 20 issues were printed during this time and their cost is $1 each. The enclosed check includes $6 for my subscription, plus $20 for the back issues. Again thank you for your time and effort in making this publication available and for increasing to a bimonthly schedule.

I enjoyed the pious stance taken by the folks at the American Society for Religious Concern in V6, #5 of TSR. The sanctimonious people at ASRC seem to think that we atheists are "literally too ignorant of the facts to even bother with intelligent interaction." Apparently they think we nonbelievers have never been exposed to the so-called *real* truth! I also like the way they believe we atheists "will fall by the wayside" when we are confronted by religious and ethical exposure.

Because of these statements, I would like to know how often atheists have deserted their beliefs to become Christians. Have any TSR readers, or ASRC readers for that matter, ever known an intelligent, well read, and committed atheist who became a devout Christian? I'm not talking about an unchurched nonbeliever; I mean an astute atheist who made a conscious decision to convert. Does anyone know of such a conversion?

Personally, I have encountered several former Christians who are now atheists. These people were not just "show up at church on Christmas and Easter" Christians; they were enlightened fundamentalists and even preachers. On the other hand, I have not yet encountered one formerly committed atheist who now considers himself a Christian. My observations and life experiences emphatically support Farrell's statement that "the dropouts will be on the Christian side."

I'll keep an eye out for the masses of broken atheists who fall to the so-called "facts and intelligent interaction" put forth by ASRC in The Stupid Christian Chronicle. Intuition tells me the more likely case will be other former Christians who ask themselves the same question I finally asked myself: How could I have been so stupid!

(Mike Ulm, 3102 Allis, Springfield, IL 62703.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Ulm raises a good question. I personally don't know a single person who was once a committed atheist but is now a Christian, but I know several atheists who were once very committed Christians. All one has to do is read the Mailbag column in TSR to see evidence of that.

I do know that it is rather commonplace for Christians, especially preachers, to claim that they were once atheists or agnostics but when they took the time to investigate the Bible, they saw such compelling evidence that it was inspired of God that they became Christians; however, I have never met a preacher that makes this claim whose reputation in the freethought movement was established before he "converted" to Christianity. Josh McDowell, for example, alleges that he was an atheist until he took the time to investigate the Bible, but I don't know of a single article or book that McDowell wrote or a single lecture he presented on the subject of atheism before his alleged conversion happened. I suspect that these claims of atheism before conversion to Christianity are exaggerations or else honest delusions of people who had no firm commitments to skepticism before becoming Christians. The closest that I can come to the name of someone who changed from atheism to Christianity is Austin Miles, the author of Don't Call Me Brother Anymore, and I don't actually know if Miles ever considered himself an atheist. He made the transition from Christian to at least skepticism (at which time he wrote the above book) and back to Christianity, but in all sincerity I have to wonder how much he was committed to freethought. I personally find it hard to understand how that any skeptic who takes the time to research biblical errancy and really become informed on the subject could possibly return to believing that it is the "inspired word of God."

As for ASRC's boasting that atheists will fall by the wayside if they dare to accept its challenge to debate in the pages of its publication The Believers Chronicle, I think that this group is in for a big surprise. I have often said to my fundamentalist debating opponents that although changes in personal beliefs are rarely seen after a debate, the long-term effects favor the side of skepticism. If an audience of a thousand people, evenly divided between Christians and skeptics, should regularly attend debates between informed representatives of the errantist and inerrantist views, the Christian side would lose far more of its people over the long run than would the skeptics.

If anyone has any statistical information on the subject Mr. Ulm has raised, I will publish it in a later issue.

Please renew my subscription to your interesting and informative paper for two more years. Along with McKinsey's periodical and his Encyclopedia, it gives good ammunition to counter the local JW's and assorted other holy-roller types. Of course, their minds are made up, but it is interesting to confuse them with facts.

(Hugo Niemi, Box 66, Birsay, SA, Canada S0L 0G0.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: The publication by McKinsey that Mr. Niemi referred to is Biblical Errancy, a monthly publication that also focuses on fallacies in the Bible inerrancy doctrine. A free sample can be obtained from Dennis McKinsey, 2500 Punderson Drive, Hilliard, OH 43026. The "encyclopedia" that Mr. Niemi mentioned is The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy written by McKinsey and published by Prometheus Books. Information about this reference book can also be obtained at the above address.

I am delighted that you will be publishing The Skeptical Review six times a year rather than just four. I certainly do appreciate the time and effort that you put into the answering of these inerrantists. They look so stupid when you get through with them....

I was "into" religion for most of my life, and then I discovered things in the bible and my church's teachings that did not make sense. Little by little, I began to read a set of books called The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and I had so much fun reading about those early freethinkers and was yet sad to see how they were treated, rejected and persecuted (even killed).

I always questioned when I would read about the life of a "thinker" and then saw that he "repented" just before he died. Could it have been that religion had such a hold on his mind or that death was such an awful thing to face that he might as well let the priest perform the "last rites"? Of course, some very intelligent people were loyal to their church, but I find that so inconsistent with reality.

(Ruth C. Riales, 1205 Forest Circle, Altamonte Springs, FL 32714-2820.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Has there ever been an atheist or freethinker who died without believers spreading tales of deathbed repentance? Such tales were told about Darwin, Ingersoll, Voltaire, and others, even though people present at the times of death denied that any such changes occurred. This is just another example of religious leaders pulling the wool over the sheep's eyes.

As for how stupid inerrantists look when we have finished with them, I regret that most of them apparently can't look stupid enough to turn them away from their absurd beliefs.

Help! During the time of my loss of faith, I learned doubt--doubt in God's existence, doubt in my own thinking, and now doubt in what I once considered to be true. Now I am tired of the unmitigated skepticism that has crept into my everyday thoughts. I seek something constructive. Therefore, I ask readers of The Skeptical Review to help a neophyte agnostic by recommending some books and authors in the following two areas.

First, I feel I need to know how to think: How can I come to reliable conclusions about things? How can I justify the methods I have used in coming to my conclusions? What presuppositions, if any, are necessary for knowledge?

Second, I want to know how language and logic are used in debate and discussion. Where and how do things go wrong in discussions? How can I go about preventing and eliminating those same problems from my own written and oral discussions?

I am looking for comprehensive works in these two areas that would normally have been used as textbooks or reference books at the undergraduate level. Please do not recommend any partisan atheistic books.

The reason I am asking the readers of The Skeptical Review for their recommendations is because they seem to have a deep and abiding concern for knowledge and truth. The problem I have is that the nontheistic community is not the only community that makes claims to knowledge and truth. Other (theistic) communities propose their own ways to "truth," so I am on a search to find reliable, justifiable methods to distinguish between the true and the false. Anything that I believe after that would be built upon that foundation. Would you please help me in my search by recommending some books and authors?

(John Mehlberg, 8026 Frederick Street, St. Louis, MO 63147-1837.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: There are several books that Mr. Mehlberg might find useful. Although publishing companies sent me many textbooks about critical thinking during my teaching career, I have kept in my personal library one I thought was particularly good. Published by McGraw-Hill in 1978, Argument: a Guide to Critical Thinking by Perry Weddle may be out of print now, but I'm sure it could be located through interlibrary loan. It was written for use in freshmen writing classes, so its language and examples are easy to understand.

I posted Mr. Mehlberg's request on the internet, and Robby Berry, who is actively involved in the www.infidels.org lists, suggested that I recommend A Rulebook for Arguments by Anthony Weston. Don Morgan recommended Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric by Howard Kahane and Beyond Feeling: a Guide to Critical Thinking by Ryan Ruggerio. The latter was selected by the English department where I taught freshman composition as a textbook for the second- semester writing courses, so I am familiar with it and would also recommend it.

If Mr. Mehlberg will check these out, I'm sure he will find one or more of them to be helpful. He is to be commended for the objective attitude that was shown in his letter.

I have found many of the "From the Mailbag" letters to be beautifully written and very inspiring. The personal stories of individuals (and families) struggling to free themselves from fundamentalism or religion in general have renewed my determination to break through the formidable Watchtower wall that has imprisoned my husband's mind and life for the past seven years. Some of those letters have also helped reinvigorate the joy I felt (about a year ago) when I was liberated from the irrationality and deception of religion.

I send my sincere thanks to you for creating TSR and to the letter writers for sharing their feelings and experiences.

(Kristine Jackson, 825 129th Avenue NE, Blaine, MN 55434.)

Religion bashing is a controversial subject among humanists. For years I have felt torn. On the one hand, religion bashing seems immature and negative. One might ask when we're going to get over our oppressive indoctrination and get on with our lives. On the other hand, when I see religionists seeking to get rid of religious freedom and diversity and seeking to establish theocracy, I feel I need to protest and to fight for my right to exist. But protest and fighting get us labeled as strident troublemakers. It's common for people who protest government endorsement of religion to be driven out of town. Yet to do nothing is to invite the violations to continue and become precedent for more. There's got to be a better way. I keep thinking diplomacy is the answer.

I am asking you this because I have been impressed by the way that you seem to maintain cordial relationships with even your most strident opponents.

(Heidi Johnson, 12221 Berry Street, Wheatland, MD 20902.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Sometimes my relationships with my fundamentalist opponents are not so cordial. As I look back on those relationships that have soured, I see that it was the attitudes of my opponents that caused the rifts. By the very nature of their temperaments, fundamentalists have to believe that they are right, so when their positions don't fare so well in public debate, it isn't unusual for them to lash out in anger. On the other hand, I have been able to maintain cordial relationships with some of my opponents. Perhaps this is because I was once a fundamentalist myself and understand the way that they think, especially their need to be right, so I don't allow their inflexibility to bother me.

On the matter of whether skeptics should engage in religion bashing, I think it is very obvious where I stand on this issue. The reason for my position was stated in Ms. Johnson's letter. If we don't oppose the militant religious right, whose roots are firmly planted in biblical inerrancy, we may find some important personal freedoms being taken away from us via legislative processes controlled by this vociferous minority.

I have delayed too long in writing to thank you for your work, and for the subscription to The Skeptical Review. Enclosed is a check for $25 to pay for my first year's subscription and to renew it for the coming year. I have also included two computer disks for the ASCII files of previous issues. If there is any balance after deducting these costs, I'd appreciate if it could be applied to the rental of a debate video or two. I have no particular preference, but since I enjoy the God Squad's flailing attempts at disengaging itself from the ridiculous positions it worships, send me that which presents them at their silliest. I guess that doesn't narrow it down much.

From a recreational standpoint, I must admit I enjoy the comedic efforts of the many preachers, healers, and defenders of the dogma. Unfortunately, after the laughter subsides, as I watch or listen to them, the sobering realization sets in that their followers (believers seems too strong a word) accept their assertions, and send them money--lots of it!

Living in Central Pennsylvania, which seems to be a hotbed of fundamentalist sentiment, it is impossible not to be confronted by their message. The essence of the logic (?) I am confronted with, it seems, is to make a ridiculous and unverifiable claim in the positive, challenge someone to "prove" the equally unverifiable negative, which of course he or she can't, thereby "proving" the positive. It seems a bible-believer's best defense of the bible's contradictions is to ignore them and pose a claim in the manner I described.

Although I don't seek out discussions with fundamentalists, I also don't shy away from them. It seems that each conversation with them generally gets around to their finally admitting that god was lonely and looking for someone to love him out of the exercise of free will. That immediately begs the question. Couldn't an omnipotent, all- knowing god create a race of beings that did so without the obvious consequences that the exercise of mankind's free will has thus far engendered? Shouldn't "free will" be uncoerced?

I will close by posing a challenge to bible-believers that has yet to be answered. I make the challenge in response to their claim that morality is impossible without god. I generally answer that claim by saying that, in my own experience, the two [god and morality] are mutually exclusive. One can do what is moral or one can obey god. The challenge? Find one example of absolute morality in action in the bible. That is, show me one situation of any positive or negative behavior that is, in and of itself, right or wrong. I have found none, nor has any ever been pointed out to me. Thou certainly shall lie, murder, enslave, steal, etc., etc., etc., * if god says so.*

(Mark A Glazewski, 7309 Sandy Hollow Road, Harrisburg, PA 17112.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: I would like to add another challenge to Mr. Glazewski's. If objective (absolute) morality exists, how can anyone possibly find out what it is? This certainly can't be done by reading "God's inspired word," because there never have been two people living on the face of the earth who understood the Bible exactly alike.

Since you changed my article by editing some of my arguments out of it, I respectfully request that you not print my article. Is it not true that you have printed at least one article (or a letter) making references to the probability argument that you edited out of my article? In fact, did you not make a reference to an article from a person in Texas? Incidentally, I have never received the article from the person in Texas. Have you not printed at least one article (or a letter) that referred to at least one of the other arguments I addressed in the material you deleted from my article? If you answer "yes" to these questions, why did you edit my article in such a manner?

I have for years contended that the atheist has no objective system of ethics to guide his actions. What system do you use to determine that you can edit my article in such a manner?

I am truly sorry that you see fit to conduct yourself in this manner. For this reason I do not think I should devote any more of my time to making any replies to your paper The Skeptical Review.

(Marion R. Fox, 4004 Twisted Trail Road SE, Oklahoma City, OK 73150- 1910.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: This letter from Mr. Fox was received on Thursday, February 29, 1996, and on Saturday, March 2, the printer called to tell me that I could pick up the March/April issue of TSR in which Mr. Fox's article appeared. Obviously, he waited too long to inform me that he did not want his article to be published. There was nothing that I could do to stop it.

Mr. Fox has accused me of dishonesty, so in the July/August issue of TSR, I will publish the opening paragraphs that I omitted from his article. This will be sufficient for readers to see why I deleted them. They refer to two arguments that were discussed in my debate with Jerry Moffitt in which Fox served as Moffitt's moderator. Fox's article gave no background information concerning what either Moffitt or I had said in the debate about probabilities. He simply launched into a discussion of the differences in the probability of related and unrelated events, so what he said will be incomprehensible to those who have not seen the debate tapes. For that reason, I deleted this section of his article.

I did publish a letter from a reader who viewed the debate tapes and sent to me his comments on the absurdity of Moffitt's use of probability in the debate, but that writer gave sufficient background for his comments to be understood by people who had not seen the debate tapes. Fox, on the other hand, seems unable to express himself clearly in writing, so he has repeatedly made the mistake in his articles of giving insufficient details for his comments to be understood. In reading his articles, I often had to back up and read two or three times what he had said just to make an educated guess at what he meant. In the case of his comments about the *Moffitt-Till Debate,* Fox made the mistake of assuming that because he knows what Moffitt and I said about probability factors, his readers will too without having it explained to them. So, as everyone will see in the next issue when I publish his explanation of the difference in the probability of related and unrelated events, he at no time stated what I had said in the debate that would indicate that I don't understand the difference. How much sense is that going to make to readers who have not seen the debate?

As for the "article from a person in Texas" that Fox referred to, this was actually a letter from a statistician who attended the debate and wrote a letter to Moffitt to point out his misuse of probability arguments. I received a copy of the letter, and Moffitt sent me a copy of a reply that he sent to this person. Moffitt's reply was quite brief. He said that he was not a mathematician, and so he had sent the letter to Fox, who would write a reply to it. If Fox didn't receive this letter, perhaps he will want to contact Jerry Moffitt to find out why.

At any rate, for Fox or any inerrantist to accuse me of intellectual dishonesty is ludicrous. I defy him to send me the name of a single fundamentalist publication that would give skeptics the same kind of forum that The Skeptical Review accords to believers in biblical inerrancy. We literally beg inerrantists to refute the articles we publish and to submit their articles in defense of the inerrancy doctrine.

I always look forward to receiving TSR. I live in a bible-belt region and have a fundamentalist wife and families. It is never easy not to believe. I was a "born again" Christian until the age of 25 and still describe myself as a "recovering Christian."

Do you know of any forums where former believers discuss their views and experiences of dealing with loved ones who still are believers (as opposed to the inerrancy discussions in TSR). I am looking for more general dialogue with others in similar situations: how to deal with raising children in a "mixed" marriage, etc.

(Kevin Berry, Box 16, Site 1, Route 1, Fredericton Junction, NB, Canada E0G 1T0.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: There is a site on the internet where ex- and recovering Christians discuss issues that Mr. Berry is interested in. Anyone may subscribe by sending the following message to listproc@infidels.org: "Subscribe ex-tian ." The subscriber's own name should go where is. The lists on the tamu.edu system may be moved to another server by the time this issue appears. If your subscription request is returned or receives no reply, contact me at jftill@midwest.net.

Thank you for the free issues of The Skeptical Review that I have received. Enclosed is $6 for the coming year.

I loved "God, Captain Scott O'Grady, and the Atlanta Braves." It is one of those articles I wish I'd written, and, indeed, exactly expresses my thoughts on the subject. I am another reformed fundamentalist Christian, but, unlike some imperturbable types, I'm mad as hell and having a hard time with my anger. Not only did I waste years of my life and talent on religious lies, but my self-esteem was involved in the fellowship and in various positions of authority within the church.

It's lonely out here, fellow skeptics. Are there others around the Great Falls/Helena, Montana, area who would like to meet a 59-year-old woman for discussion, sharing materials, and help me work off my anger with a hike in our beautiful mountains?

(Jane Basta, 26 Willington Lane, Cascade, MT 59421.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: I think anger is a natural stage that one goes through after realizing that he/she has been duped into devoting a big chunk of life to a lie. I recall going through that stage until finally I just shrugged it off. "Oh, well," I told myself, "at least I got to see a lot of the world and learn another language when I was working as a missionary." Still it's a shame that so many people are wasting their time and resources on a colossal falsehood. What would humanity have achieved by now if all of the people who threw their lives away on religious nonsense had devoted their time and energy to making life better?

I greatly appreciate your sending me a copy of The Skeptical Review. I want to make sure that I receive each issue. I was raised in a fundamentalist environment and eventually even graduated from Oral Roberts University. However, I did a dangerous thing a while back. I started thinking. This is not encouraged within Christianity. Eventually that thinking led me to embrace reality, not mysticism. It has cost me a lot in terms of lost friends, family members hurt, and cost me my marriage. However, it has been well worth it to live life embracing truth and not relying on hocus- pocus.

Enclosed you will find a check for $100 to cover my subscription to The Skeptical Review for however long $100 will keep it going. Just drop me a note and let me know how long I can expect to receive your wonderful publication.

(Terry Brock, 3481 Lakeside Drive, Suite 3202, Atlanta, GA 30326; e-mail, terrybrock@aol.com)

EDITOR'S NOTE: "I did a dangerous thing.... I started thinking." How many times have I heard that? I like to hear stories like Mr. Brock's, although I regret the personal difficulties that followed his abandonment of religious superstition. I wish him well.

In compliance with his request, I have entered a 16-year subscription for Mr. Brock. Others have sent checks for 5- or 10-year subscriptions, so I think it only right that I should inform everyone that I will be 63 years old by the time this issue is mailed. I just may not be around long enough for these people to get their money's worth.